Showing results for "Science Studies" in African American Studies

What is feminism? In this short, accessible primer, Bell Hooks explores the nature of feminism and its positive promise to eliminate sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. With her characteristic clarity and directness, Hooks encourages readers to see how feminism can touch and change their lives - to see that feminism is for everybody.

Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a genre-defying collection of essays that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. His is a meditation on delight that takes a clear-eyed view of the complexities, even the terrors, in his life, including living in America as a Black man; the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture; the loss of those he loves.

For a brief moment in the summer of 1900, Robert Charles was arguably the most infamous Black man in the United States. After an altercation with police on a New Orleans street, Charles killed two police officers and fled. During a manhunt that extended for days, violent White mobs roamed the city, assaulting African Americans and killing at least half a dozen. When authorities located Charles, he held off a crowd of thousands for hours before being shot to death.

Run a Google search for “black girls” - what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls”, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities.

When Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center was first published in 1984, it was welcomed and praised by feminist thinkers who wanted a new vision. Even so, individual audiences frequently found the theory unsettling or provocative. Today, the blueprint for feminist movement presented in this audiobook remains as provocative and relevant as ever. Written in hooks's characteristic direct style, Feminist Theory embodies the hope that feminists can find a common language to spread the word and create a mass, global feminist movement.

The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of 1967. The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of Earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are "different" must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. The tale follows Lobey's mythic quest for his lost love, Friza. In luminous and hallucinated language, it explores what new myths might emerge from the detritus of the human world....

In Left of Karl Marx, Carole Boyce Davies assesses the activism, writing, and legacy of Claudia Jones (1915-1964), a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist, and feminist. Jones is buried in London's Highgate Cemetery, to the left of Karl Marx - a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting given how Jones expanded Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism.

Daphne A. Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women on stage and in the recording studio. How is it possible, she asks, that iconic artists such as Aretha Franklin and Beyonce exist simultaneously at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry? Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective on these acclaimed figures—a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women concerned with the work of their musical peers.

News for All the People reveals how racial segregation distorted the information Americans received from the mainstream media. It unearths numerous examples of how publishers and broadcasters actually fomented racial violence and discrimination through their coverage. And it chronicles the influence federal media policies exerted in such conflicts. It depicts the struggle of Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American journalists who fought to create a vibrant yet little-known alternative, democratic press.

Pearl K. Ford Dowe argues that ambition for Black women cannot be measured only by political candidacies and ascents of the political chain of power. Black women are uniquely positioned within their communities to influence politics and public policy, which stems from unique variables of socialization, gender and racial identity, and marginalization that shape the political attitudes of Black women. Thus, Dowe asserts that Black women's political ambition often manifests outside formal politics, in activism and community building, a process that is linked to a wider radical vision.

In 1964, Nina Simone sat at a piano in New York's Carnegie Hall to play what she called a "show tune". Simone, and her song, became icons of the civil rights movement. But her confrontational style was not the only path taken by black women entertainers. In How It Feels to Be Free, Ruth Feldstein examines celebrated black women performers, illuminating the risks they took, their roles at home and abroad, and the ways that they raised the issue of gender amid their demands for black liberation.

C. P. Ellis grew up in the poor white section of Durham, North Carolina, and as a young man joined the Ku Klux Klan. Ann Atwater, a single mother from the poor black part of town, quit her job as a household domestic to join the civil rights fight. During the 1960s, as the country struggled with the explosive issue of race, Atwater and Ellis met on opposite sides of the public school integration issue. Their encounters were charged with hatred and suspicion.

In an awesome meeting of minds, cultural theorists Stuart Hall and bell hooks met for a series of wide-ranging conversations on what Hall sums up as "life, love, death, sex." From the trivial to the profound, across boundaries of age, sexualities and genders, hooks and Hall dissect topics and themes of continual contemporary relevance, including feminism, home and homecoming, class, black masculinity, family, politics, relationships, and teaching.

Best-selling author and acclaimed linguist John McWhorter argues that an illiberal neoracism, disguised as antiracism, is hurting Black communities and weakening the social fabric. In Woke Racism, McWhorter reveals the workings of this new religion, from the original sin of 'white privilege' and the weaponisation of cancel culture to ban heretics, to the evangelical fervour of the 'woke mob'.

After fighting a protracted legal battle, James Meredith broke the color barrier in 1962 as the first African American student at the University of Mississippi. The riot that followed his arrival on campus seriously wounded scores of U.S. marshals and killed two civilians; more casualties than any other clash of the civil rights era. To restore order, the Kennedy administration dispatched thousands of soldiers to Oxford. In The Price of Defiance, Charles Eagles shows that the stunning eruption of violence resulted from the "closed society's" long defiance of the civil rights movement and federal law.

Many black strategies of daily resistance have been obscured—until now. Race rebels, argues Kelley, have created strategies of resistance, movements, and entire subcultures. Here, for the first time, everyday race rebels are given the historiographical attention they deserve, from the Jim Crow era to the present.

At a time when popular solutions to the educational plight of poor children of color are imposed from the outside, the acclaimed Algebra Project and its founder, Robert Moses, offer a vision of school reform based in the power of communities. Founded on the belief that math-science literacy is a prerequisite for full citizenship in society, the Project works with entire communities—parents, teachers, and especially students—to create a culture of literacy around algebra, a crucial stepping-stone to college math and opportunity.

The police murders of two Black men, Philando Castile and George Floyd, frame this searing exploration of the historical and fictional narratives that white America tells itself to justify and maintain white supremacy. From the country's founding through the summer of Black Lives Matter in 2020, David Mura unmasks how white stories about race attempt to erase the brutality of the past and underpin systemic racism in the present.

In Frontline Bodies, Nicolas Martin-Breteau argues that sports are not—and have never been—purely about entertainment for Black Americans. Instead, beginning in the 1890s during Reconstruction, Black Americans proactively used athletics as a tactic to fight racial oppression. Martin-Breteau considers the work of Edwin B. Henderson, a prominent Black physical educator, civil rights activist, and historian of Black sports.

This groundbreaking and highly acclaimed work examines the two most influential African American leaders of the twentieth century. While Martin Luther King, Jr., saw America as "essentially a dream . . . as yet unfulfilled," Malcolm X viewed America as a realized nightmare. James Cone cuts through superficial assessments of King and Malcolm as polar opposites to reveal two men whose visions are complementary and moving toward convergence.