Black Studies

Scattered and Fugitive Things

During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American life. At a time when dominant institutions cast doubt on the value or even the idea of Black history, these bibliophiles, scrapbookers, and librarians created an enduring set of African diasporic archives. In building these institutions and amassing abundant archival material, they also reshaped Black public culture, animating inquiry into the nature and meaning of Black history. Scattered and Fugitive Things tells the stories of these Black collectors, traveling from the parlors of the urban north to HBCU reading rooms and branch libraries in the Jim Crow south.

Black Lives Matter

This multifaceted reference work surveys the history, development, leadership, and priorities of Black Lives Matter (BLM), including the group's efforts to raise public awareness of police violence in communities of color. Beginning with the infamous incidents of police brutality that spurred the creation and growth of BLM, this book goes on to profile leading and influential activists and organizations, such as the NAACP, movement co-founder Alicia Garza, and civil rights activist and athlete Colin Kaepernick. Readers will gain an understanding of important organizational priorities, as well as criticisms of and controversies surrounding the group.

Foremother Love

Dana Murphy examines the importance of eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley as a foundational figure for Black feminist criticism. Murphy establishes Phillis (as she refers to her) as a writer who wrote in response to and in conversation with other creators as well as a critic who was invested in sharing, explaining, and evaluating her own and others' work and contexts. Indeed, Phillis played a key role in the development of what Murphy calls "foremother love"--the Black feminist depiction of the love of an unrelated feminist ancestor as a legitimate relation for the practice of inheritance, mourning, liberation, and friendship. Drawing on the work of Barbara Christian, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and others, Murphy shows that Black feminist criticism becomes a transhistorical theorization when read in conjunction with Phillis's labor and vision.

Black Hopes/Black Woes

Black Hopes/Black Woes begins by delving into the contrasting mindsets of postbellum African Americans and their twenty-first-century counterparts, aiming to elucidate the shift from early Black optimism to present-day Black pessimism. It then focuses on the rationale behind Afro-pessimism, a contemporary school of thought with an inconspicuous yet potent influence on mainstream culture.

Decoloniality in the Break of Global Blackness

This book, contextualized by the violence of globalization, investigates the fungible, fugitive, and untenable experiences of Black being and time through a decolonial poethics of global*Blackness. In so doing it introduces innovative readings of coloniality/decoloniality by threading its meaning and movement through the "problem" of Blackness. It argues that global*Blackness is the complexly entangled other side of decoloniality, as movement, method, and poethics for radical new worlds. The essays explore this through inter/transdisciplinary, creative, and decolonial standpoints, whether from prison abolitionist demands to Afrofuturist imaginaries, or by seeing through Black mirrors.

Black Surrealist: the legend of Ted Joans

Black Surrealist. Poet. Collage artist. Jazz trumpeter. Painter. Member of the Beat Generation. Life-long wanderer. Pan-Africanist. Black Power agitator. Author of his own "poem-life." Ted Joans (1928-2003) was all of these things, and yet none of these labels adequately capture the beauty and complexity of his life and work. The proportions of Ted Joans's life are legendary. Born in Cairo, Illinois in 1928, as a young man he distinguished himself as a Surrealist painter. In the early 1950s, he moved to New York's Greenwich Village, where he opened the first Black-owned art gallery in the city, developed new styles of painting, and began reading his poetry in coffeehouses just as the Beat Generation was coalescing. A well-known raconteur and bon vivant on the Village scene, he threw elaborate parties (art events that prefigured the Happenings of the later 1950s), exhibited his "jazz action" paintings, and published poetry and collage books to acclaim.

The Algorithmic Age of Personality: African literature and cancel culture

As the affordances of authorship and reading practices on social media become deeply mediated by algorithmic curation, they encourage closer attention to the author's personality as fundamental to literary production. The Algorithmic Age of Personality: African Literature and Cancel Culture challenges any lingering utopianism in the role of digital media in African cultural productions by exploring how algorithms engender a culture of outrage, conflict, and personality-driven and ego battles that distract from aesthetic and ethical evaluations of literary texts. In Yékú's careful attention to how contemporary African literary practices are significantly marked by the extractivist and affective logics of social media algorithms, he articulates the current state of debating in the critical universe of African literature and connects this to the phenomenon of "cancel culture."

White Screens, Black Dance: race and masculinity in the United States at midcentury

White Screens, Black Dance analyzes the film and television dances of male screen stars in the United States during the mid-twentieth century. Unpacking the complex physical and visual codes performed by four case studies--the Nicholas Brothers, Gene Kelly, Elvis Presley, and Sammy Davis, Jr.--it argues that each employs Black (Africanist) dance and movement vocabularies in distinct ways, all using them to construct shifting models of masculinity over the course of their careers. In so doing, this book theorizes a practice of appropriation called blackbodying, whereby non-Black performers use Black dance and movement styles without using blackface makeup.

Black Chronicles: photography, race and difference in Victorian Britain

These striking studio portraits, curated and brought together following ten years of research championed by Autograph, constitute the most comprehensive collection of nineteenth-century photography depicting the Black subject in the Victorian era, including some of the earliest known images of Black people photographed in Britain. The historically marginalized lives of both ordinary and prominent Black figures of African, Afro-Caribbean, South Asian, and mixed heritage are seen through a prism of curatorial advocacy and experimental scholarly assemblage. Black Chronicles features high quality reproductions of plate negatives, cartes de visite, and cabinet cards, many of which were buried deep in various private and public archives including the Hulton Archive's remarkable London Stereoscopic Company collection, unseen for decades. These photographs are linked with imperial and colonial narratives through newly commissioned essays and rare lecture transcripts, in-conversation and text interventions.

The Human in Bits: graphical computers, black abstractions

In The Human in Bits, Kris Cohen examines black abstractionist painting to demonstrate how race and computation are intimately entangled with the personal computer's graphic user interface. He shows how the personal computer and the graphical field of its screen meant to transform the human by transforming what environments humans were to labor in. It also provided the means for whiteness to tie itself to notions of colorblind meritocracy. Cohen focuses on the post-1960s experiments of black abstractionists Alma Thomas, Jack Whitten, Charles Gaines, and Julie Mehretu, who developed a nonrepresentational approach to blackness that was oriented more toward constraint than human expression.

The Routledge Companion to Race in Early Modern Artistic, Material, and Visual Production

This companion analyzes, frames, and provokes race in insightful ways that center non-white communities' artistic and visual expression in the early modern period, rather than presenting the bias of European artistic and visual depictions of the colonization, enslavement, and subordination of People of Color. The organization of the book moves chronologically, taking a conceptual and thematic framework. This collection provides a spectrum of object-ased case studies of artistic production--bjects and object-ypes--rom six continents between the 1400s and 1800s. Contributions take an art historical approach characterized by a close analysis of form, function, and meaning, with a particular focus on questions of cross-ultural dialog and provenance.

From Hackney with love : an intimate history of gentrification

Examining some of the most contested issues facing the borough today – including housing and regeneration, politics, class, race, education, youth violence, culture and gender identity – Yeboah amplifies the voices of Hackney’s new, existing and former communities and explores the relationship between gentrification and feelings of belonging and loss. From Hackney, With Love is both a unique love letter to one of the most vibrant parts of London and a warning that its very existence is in jeopardy.

My Country, Africa: autobiography of the black pasionaria

"We who have been colonized can never forget" Andrée Blouin--once called the most dangerous woman in Africa--played a leading role in the struggles for decolonization that shook the continent in the 1950s and '60s, advising the postcolonial leaders of Algeria, both Congos, Ivory Coast, Mali, Guinea, and Ghana. In this autobiography, Blouin retraces her remarkable journey as an African revolutionary. Born in French Equatorial Africa and abandoned at the age of three, she endured years of neglect and abuse in a colonial orphanage, which she escaped after being forced by nuns into an arranged marriage at fifteen. She later became radicalized by the death of her two-year-old son, who was denied malaria medication by French officials because he was one-quarter African. In Guinea, where Blouin was active in Sékou Touré's campaign for independence, she came into contact with leaders of the liberation movement in the Belgian Congo. Blouin witnessed the Congolese tragedy up close as an adviser to Patrice Lumumba, whose arrest and assassination she narrates in unforgettable detail.

Rise Up: esistance, revolution, abolition

Drawing on new research, centring Black voices and perspectives, and celebrating Black Cambridge history, Rise Up focuses on the period from 1750 to 1850, when Britain became the world's first industrialised nation and one of history's largest empires. At the same time, Britain played a central role in the Atlantic slave trade, trafficking more captive African people than any other European power. Millions were forcibly abducted and transported to work on British-owned plantations in the Caribbean and Americas. In Britain, Black and white anti-slaverygroups and individuals campaigned for abolition. Despite opposition, laws were gradually enacted to abolish the slave trade in 1807, and enslavement in 1833. However, other exploitative systems including apprenticeship and indentured labour took their place. Financial compensation was awarded to former enslavers while the formerly enslaved received nothing. This is the story of the fight to end Atlantic slavery, its aftermath and ongoing legacies.

Sounds of Black Switzerland: blackness, music, and unthought voices

Writing as a scholar, composer, and musician, Jessie Cox foregrounds the experience of Black Swiss through sound and music in his first book, Sounds of Black Switzerland. Cox, himself Black Swiss, affirms the value of Black life through sound while critiquing anti-Blackness as a cause of erasure, silence, and limitation. He examines Swiss Nigerian composer Charles Uzor's pieces for George Floyd, work by Black Swiss musicians such as DJ Maïté Chénière, clarinetist Jérémie Jolo, and rapper Nativ, as well as his own musical collaborations with the Lucerne Festival. In these analyses, Cox tackles the particularities of anti-Blackness in Switzerland, creating a practice of listening beyond what can be directly heard to explore the radical potential of Black thought and experience in a nation often claimed to be race-free.

Freeing Black Girls: a Black feminist bible on racism and revolutionary mothering

In Freeing Black Girls, Tamura Lomax offers an insurgent feminist love letter to Black girls, women, mothers, and othermothers. Exploring what it means to mother Black children in the twenty-first century, Lomax shares her journey from her traditionalist Black girlhood to finding the path to revolutionary Black motherhood. Along the way, she shows how all Black people are endangered by white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal dominance and emphasizes the power of looking and talking back.

Queering Black Churches: dismantling heteronormativity in African American congregations

Queering Black Churches provides a systematic approach for dismantling heteronormativity within African American congregations. Using the lenses of practical theology, ecclesiology, Queer theology, and gender studies, Brandon Thomas Crowley examines the heteronormative histories, theologies, morals, values, and structures of Black churches and how their longstanding assumptions can be challenged. Drawing on the experiences of several historically Black churches that became open and affirming (ONA), Queering Black Churches explores how historically Black churches have queered their congregations.

Creating Educational Justice: learning from Black home educators

A thoughtful, research-based discussion of Black homeschool experiences as models for educational improvement in K-12 public education. In Creating Educational Justice, Cheryl Fields-Smith upholds the decisions of Black parents to homeschool their children as acts of empowerment, resistance, and educational justice. The work spotlights the various motivations of Black families to home educate, bringing attention to key issues facing K-12 public schooling in the United States.

Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of SouthAtlantic Slavery

From the bustling ports of Lisbon to the coastal inlets of the Bight of Benin to the vibrant waterways of Bahia, Black mariners were integral to every space of the commercial South Atlantic. Navigating this kaleidoscopic world required a remarkable cosmopolitanism--the chameleonlike ability to adapt to new surroundings by developing sophisticated medicinal, linguistic, and navigational knowledge. Mary E. Hicks shows how Portuguese slaving ship captains harnessed and exploited this hybridity to expand their own traffic in human bondage. At the same time, she reveals how enslaved and free Black mariners capitalized on their shipboard positions and cosmopolitan expertise to participate in small-scale commodity trading on the very coasts where they themselves had been traded as commodities, reshaping societies and cultures on both sides of the Atlantic.

Black Earth Rising: colonialism and climate change in contemporary art

A vibrant contemporary art anthology that explores the complex ties between race, climate crisis and colonialism by 100 leading artists of African diasporic, Latin American and Native American identity. Black Earth Rising presents works by artists of African diasporic, Latin American and Native American identity that address vital questions of land, presence, climate crisis, and social and environmental justice against the historical backdrop of European settlement of the New World. Supported by an exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art curated by the author, this timely publication invites us to trace and make the connections between race, the climate crisis and colonialism. Works by 100 contemporary artists are presented in three thematic sections.

Acts of Art in Greenwich Village

A first-ever look at a network of Black visual artists in New York City's Manhattan and downtown art worlds in the 1960s and 1970s. This comprehensive account of the six-year history of Acts of Art, a gallery founded by and for Black artists in Greenwich Village in 1969, includes a complete exhibition record, biographies of the gallery's key artists, and entries on important group exhibitions and events. This first in-depth look at Acts of Art, and its role within communities of Black artists in New York City highlights the artists most closely tied to the gallery and its co-founder Nigel Jackson, from the early shows of Benny Andrews and James Denmark to the surveys of Lois Mailou Jones and Hale Woodruff. In addition to an introductory essay and complete exhibition history, the volume includes artists' biographies and entries on important group exhibitions and events.

Rethinking Black German Studies

This volume assesses where the field of Black German Studies is now by exploring the nuances of how the past - colonial, Weimar, National Socialist, post- 1945, and post-Wende - informs the present and future of Black German Studies; how present generations of Black Germans look to those of the past for direction and empowerment; how discourses shift due to the diversification of power structures and the questioning of identity-based categories; and how Black Germans affirm their agency and cultural identity through cultural productions that engender both counter-discourses and counter-narratives.

Black Lives in Britain : a survey, 1830-1940

People of African descent in the British Isles have been widely overlooked in both British social history and the history of Black people. Located in country towns as well as large cities, their contributions spanned diverse roles and professions. Black individuals participated in political and imperial reform as well as in groups that supported fellow Black communities. Many migrated to Africa, Australia, Jamaica, or New Zealand. Drawing from contemporary newspapers, historical archives, the writings of descendants and veterans, school and government files, and memoirs, this book offers an in-depth study of the role of Black people in British history. It examines how people of African descent were affected by cultural snobbery, racism, and imperialism, and sheds light on the many other aspects of the varied lives of Black people in Britain from 1830 to 1940.

Hidden in Blackness: being black and being an immigrant in U.S. schools and colleges

This timely book offers a transdisciplinary approach for understanding and improving the educational experiences of Black immigrants. Hidden in Blackness analyzes the experiences, perspectives, and development of Black immigrant students, while also complicating how race, ethnicity, nativity, and nationality are understood across the P-20 education landscape. The authors unpack how Blackness and anti-Black racism in the United States can foster Black immigrants becoming hidden in Blackness in schools and education research--meaning their Black identity is homogenized into a U.S. construction of Blackness while their ethnicity, nationality, and nativity go unacknowledged or is weaponized to subjugate other people of Color. The book culminates by offering the Black Diasporic Illumination (BDI) framework with recommendations for supporting these students with a positive sense of self and abilities in the face of racial realities.

The Sisterhood : How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture

One Sunday afternoon in February 1977, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and several other Black women writers met at June Jordan's Brooklyn apartment to eat gumbo, drink champagne, and talk about their work. Calling themselves "The Sisterhood," the group--which also came to include Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Margo Jefferson, and others--would get together once a month over the next two years, creating a vital space for Black women to discuss literature and liberation. The Sisterhood tells the story of how this remarkable community transformed American writing and cultural institutions. Drawing on original interviews with Sisterhood members as well as correspondence, meeting minutes, and readings of their works, Courtney Thorsson explores the group's everyday collaboration and profound legacy.

The Black Campus Movement : a history of Black student activism

Based on records from more than three hundred colleges and universities, this authoritative study is essential to understanding modern American higher education. In this second edition, Dr. Kendi reminds us that the antiracist higher education that the students in these pages fought for has yet to be achieved. Referring to this book as "foundational" to his antiracist research and thought, Kendi challenges us to see the parallels between then and now, and to embody the cause anew.

Ornamental Blackness

Exploring the role the decorative arts played in the representation of Black people in European visual and material culture   This revelatory look at European decorative arts addresses the long-ignored implications of the depiction of Black bodies on luxury objects from the Baroque period through the nineteenth century. Adrienne L. Childs traces the complex history of the vogue for representing the Black body as an ornamental motif throughout spaces of wealth and refinement. Objects such as furniture, porcelain, clocks, silver, light fixtures, and more conveyed the taste for exoticism and portrayed the laboring Black body in the guise of décor.

Prose to the People: a celebration of Black bookstores

A stunning visual homage to Black bookstores, featuring a selection of shops around the country alongside essays that celebrate the history, community, activism, and culture these spaces embody, with an original foreword by Nikki Giovanni. Black literature is perhaps the most powerful, polarizing force in the modern American zeitgeist. Today--as Black novels draw authoritarian ire, as Black memoirs shape public debates, as Black polemics inspire protest petitions--it's more important than ever to highlight the places that center these stories: Black bookstores. 

Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean

Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: Critical Research and Perspectives employs an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to examine Black cisgender women's social, cultural, economic, and political experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean. It presents critical empirical research emphasizing Black women's innovative, theoretical, and methodological approaches to activism and class-based gendered racism and Black politics. While there are a few single-authored books focused on Black women in Latin American and Caribbean, the vast majority of the scholarship on Black women in Latin America and the Caribbean has been published as theses, dissertations, articles, and book chapters. 

The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film

Since the release of Jordan Peele's Academy Award-winning horror hit Get Out (2017), interest in Black horror films has erupted. This renewed intrigue in stories about Black life, history, culture, or "Blackness" has taken two forms. First, the history and politics of race have been centered in the horror genre. Second, Black horror has become an increasingly visible topic in mainstream discourses with scholars, critics, and fans contending that Black horror is seeing its so-called renaissance. 

Black Freedom and Education in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

In this book, Raquel Otheguy argues that Afro-descended teachers and activists were central to the development of a national education systemin Cuba. Tracing the emergence of a Black Cuban educational tradition whose hallmarks were at the forefront of transatlantic educational currents, Otheguy examines how this movement pushed the island's public school system to be more accessible to children and adults of all races, genders, and classes. Otheguy describes Afro-Cuban education before public schools were officially desegregated in 1894, from the maestras amigas--Black and mulata women who taught in their homes--to teachers in the schools of mutual-aid societies for people of color. 

Black Power, Jewish Politics: reinventing the alliance in the 1960s

Black Power, Jewish Politics charts the transformation of American Jewish political culture from the Cold War liberal consensus of the early postwar years to the rise and influence of Black Power-inspired ethnic nationalism. It shows how, in a period best known for the rise of antisemitism in some parts of the Black community and the breakdown of the alliance between white Jews and Black Americans, Black Power activists enabled Jewish activists to devise a new Judeo-centered political agenda--including the emancipation of Soviet Jews, the rise of Jewish Day Schools, the revitalization of worship services with gender-inclusive liturgy, and the birth of a new form of American Zionism. 

Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold (1930-2024) was an American painter, mixed media sculptor, teacher, author and intersectional activist. Her art works explore themes of family, race, class and gender. She is best known for her series of paintings entitled ‘The American People Series’ of the 1960s and her intricate quilts of the 1980s that highlight the experiences of African Americans during the last century.  She has written numerous children’s books about growing up black in America.  She was an advocate of black representation in the Arts, and in 1988 she co-founded the Coast-to-Coast National Women’s Artists of Color Projects which exhibited works of African American female artists across America until 1996. 

Books and articles
Faith Ringgold in ProQuest One Literature

Faith Ringgold: tell it like it is (BBC4)
Artist Elyse Pignolet on Artist Faith Ringgold (film)

Image: Andi Wong

Benjamin Zephaniah

Benjamin Zephaniah (1958-2023) was a British writer, poet, actor, academic, and activist. He was included in The Times list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008. Zephaniah has said that his mission was to fight the dead image of poetry in academia, and to "take [it] everywhere" to people who do not read books, turning poetry readings into concert-like performances. Zephaniah was a prolific cultural commentator, as much at home making documentaries on topics of relevance to the Black diaspora as appearing on TV quiz shows or as a panelist on the BBC's topical debate show, Question Time.

Books and articles
Benjamin Zephaniah in ProQuest One Literature

Benjamin Zephaniah: to do wid me (film)
A picture of Birmingham, by Benjamin Zephaniah (BBC4)
Treasures of the British Library (Sky Arts)
The South Bank Show: Benjamin Zephaniah (Sky Arts)
Standing Firm: Football’s Windrush Story (ITV London)
The life and rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah (BBC Radio 4 Extra)
Caribbean Domino Club (BBC Radio 4 Extra)
Music Life: Benjamin Zephaniah and Novelist: Is there a place for politics in music? (BBC World Service)

Image: Guy Evans

Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler (1947-2006) was a pioneering writer of science fiction. As one of the first African American and female science fiction writers, Butler wrote novels that concerned themes of injustice towards African Americans, global warming, women’s rights, and political disparity. Her work envisaged an alternate future that foresaw many aspects of life today, from big pharma to Trumpism. She won numerous prestigious awards for her writing and as a pioneer in science fiction, she opened up the genre to many other African American and female writers.

Books and articles
Octavia Butler in ProQuest One Literature

Octavia Butler and the utopian alien (film)
Octavia Butler and utopian hybridity (film)
Afterwords: Octavia E. Butler (BBC Radio 3)
Free Thinking (BBC Radio 3)

Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde (1934 – 1992) was an American writer, feminist, womanist, librarian, and civil rights activist. She was a self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," who "dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia." Her visits to Berlin in the 1980s were a catalyst for Black German women to speak out and make themselves more visible in German society.

Books and articles

Audre Lorde (Untold: authors that changed America) (film)
A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (film)
The Edge of Eachother's Battles: the Vision of Audre Lorde (film)
Free Thinking (BBC Radio 3)
Great Lives (BBC Radio 4)

Image: K. Kendall

Kimberlé Crenshaw

Kimberlé Crenshaw (1959-) is an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory and gender issues. Crenshaw is known for the introduction and development of intersectional theory, the study of how overlapping or intersecting social identities, particularly minority identities, relate to systems and structures of oppression, domination, or discrimination.Her work further expands to also include intersectional feminism, which examines the overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination that women face due to their ethnicity, sexuality, and economic background.

Books and articles

Woman’s Hour: Kimberlé Crenshaw and Intersectionality at 30 (BBC Radio 4)
Woman's Hour: why feminism can’t ignore race (BBC Radio 4)

bell hooks

bell hooks (1952 - 2021) is the pen name used by the American public intellectual, author and activist Gloria Jean Watkins. Her work covers a range of issues and genres including, but not limited to; gender, race/racism, class, sexual politics, spirituality, love, education and pedagogy, cultural criticism, poetry, and children’s fiction.

Books and articles

bell hooks: Cultural Criticism & Transformation (film)

Image: Alex Lozupone

Nikki Giovanni

Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr.(1943-2024) was an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the world's most well-known African-American poets, her work covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. Giovanni gained initial fame in the late 1960s as part of the Black Arts Movement. Influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement of the period, her early work provides a strong, militant African-American perspective, leading one writer to dub her the "Poet of the Black Revolution".

Books and articles

Nikki Giovanni interviews Lena Horne (film)
Nikki Giovanni: Lecture at ASU (film)

Stuart Hall

Stuart Henry McPhail Hall FBA (1932 – 2014) was a Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologist, cultural theorist, and political activist. Hall was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.

Books and articles

Stuart Hall: Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life (film)
Stuart Hall: Representation & the Media (film)
Stuart Hall: The Origins of Cultural Studies (film) 
Stuart Hall: Race - the Floating Signifier (film)
Personally Speaking: Stuart Hall's Work in Cultural Studies (film, 16 episodes)
The Last Interview: Stuart Hall on the Politics of Cultural Studies (film)
Cosmopolitanism - Conversation with Stuart Hall (film)
Hall's encoding/decoding model for media analysis (film)
Free Thinking (BBC Radio 3)
Unforgettable: Professor Stuart Hall and Isaac Julien (BBC Radio 4)

Image: Open University

W.E.B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868 – 1963) was an American sociologist, socialist, historian and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. He was the most important Black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century.

Books and articles

W.E.B. Du Bois in ProQuest Black Studies

W.E.B. Du Bois: a Biography in Four Voices (film)
Du Bois & Race Conflict (film)

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Akroma-Ampim Kusi Anthony Appiah FRSL (1954-) is a philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose interests include political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history.

Books and articles

The Reith Lectures: Country (BBC Radio 4)
The Reith Lectures: Creed (BBC Radio 4)
The Reith Lectures: Colour (BBC Radio 4)
The Reith Lectures: Culture (BBC Radio 4)

Image: barberbonanza

Zethu Matebeni

Zethu Matebeni is a sociologist, activist, writer, documentary film maker. She has published on queer issues, sexuality, gender, race, HIV and AIDS, African film, cinema and photography. She is an active member of the Black Academic Caucus, a collective of black academics based at the University of Cape Town.

Books and articles

Frantz Fanon

Frantz Omar Fanon (1925 – 1961), also known as Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, was a French West Indian psychiatrist and political philosopher from the French colony of Martinique. His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism.

Books and articles

Frantz Fanon, His Life, His Struggle, His Work (film)
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (film)
Fanon hier, aujourd'hui (film)
Les Damnés de la Terre (film)
Great Lives (BBC Radio 4)

Angela Davis

Angela Yvonne Davis (1944-) is an American political activist, philosopher, academic, scholar, and author. She emerged as the leader of Communist Party USA in the 1960s and had close ties to the Black Panther Party. She has advocated for the abolishment of prisons and the prison-industrial complex. In the early 1970s she became a symbol of the struggle for Black liberation, anticapitalism and feminism. She has taught the history of consciousness, critical theory and feminist studies for five decades.

Books and articles

Angela Davis in ProQuest Black Studies

Angela Davis: interview from jail (film)
Tony Brown's journal: Angela Davis (film)
Angela Davis: resisting the system (film)
Our Friend Angela Davis (film)
The Frost Interview (BBC 2, 1974)

Carter Godwin Woodson

Carter Godwin Woodson (1875 – 1950) was an American historian, author, journalist, and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He was one of the first scholars to study the history of the African diaspora, including African-American history.

Books and articles

Eddie Chambers

Eddie Chambers (born 1960) is a British contemporary art historian, curator, and artist. As a student he co-founded the BLK Art Group, a groundbreaking association of Black British art students, and in 1989 he set up the African and Asian Visual Artists' Archive (AAVAA), which was the first research and reference facility in the country for documenting British-based Black visual artists.

Books and articles

Eddie Chambers: an interview (film)
Free Thinking: The Influence of the British Black Art Movement (BBC Radio 3)

Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston (1891 – 1960) was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays. She also wrote fiction about contemporary issues in the Black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. 

Books and articles

Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun (film)
Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space (film)

Paul Gilroy

Professor Paul Gilroy is one of the foremost theorists of race and racism in the world today. Author of foundational and highly influential books such as There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Against Race (2000), Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) and Darker Than Blue (2010) alongside numerous key articles, essays and critical interventions, Gilroy’s is a unique voice that speaks to the centrality and tenacity of racialized thought and representational practices in the modern world. 

Books and articles

Free Thinking (BBC Radio 3)

Kobena Mercer

Kobena Mercer (born 1960) is a British art historian and writer on contemporary art and visual culture. Much of Mercer's writing has focused on the work and cultural context of black British artists, including monographs for Keith Piper, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Hew Locke – as well as on contemporary and modern art of the African Diaspora more widely.

Books and articles

Toni Morrison

Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (1931 – 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Morrison became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. Her works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience.

Books and articles

Toni Morrison in ProQuest One Literature

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (film)
Sheer Good Fortune - Celebrating Toni Morrison (film)
Toni Morrison, in In Black and White: Six Profiles of African American Authors (film)
Toni Morrison: Black Matters (film)
The Foreigner's Home: Toni Morrison at the Louvre (film)
Imagine: Toni Morrison Remembers (BBC4)
Front Row: Toni Morrison Special (BBC Radio 4)

Ekow Eshun

Ekow Eshun (1968-) is a Ghanaian-British writer, editor and curator. He is Chairman of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, overseeing London's most significant public art programme. He writes for the Guardian, Independent on Sunday, and the Observer and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4 arts shows. His memoir, Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa (2005) explores issues of race and identity. In 2016, he curated a group exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, London exploring the identity of the black dandy, Made You Look: Dandyism and Black Masculinity.

Books and articles

Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes (1901 – 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the Negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue." In addition to poetry, Hughes wrote plays and short stories. He also published several nonfiction works. From 1942 to 1962, as the civil rights movement was gaining traction, he wrote an in-depth weekly column in a leading black newspaper, The Chicago Defender.

Books and articles

Langston Hughes in ProQuest One Literature

Hughes' Dream Harlem: Langston Hughes, Harlem's Poet Laureate (film)
Langston Hughes: The Dream Keeper (film)
Mother to Son by Langston Hughes: The Recital and Analysis (Digital Theatre+)
I, Too by Langston Hughes: The Recital and Analysis (Digital Theatre+)
Harlem by Langston Hughes: The Recital and Analysis (Digital Theatre+)
Dreams by Langston Hughes: The Recital and Analysis (Digital Theatre+)
Langston Hughes: Performance "The Weary Blues" with Jazz Accompaniment (film)
Sunday Feature: Langston Hughes at the Third (BBC Radio 3)

Kara Walker

Kara Elizabeth Walker (1969-) is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, print-maker, installation artist, filmmaker, and professor who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Walker is regarded as among the most prominent and acclaimed Black American artists working today.

Books and articles