Chronicling Stankonia

Chronicling Stankonia
Author: Regina Bradley
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 137
Release: 2021-01-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469661977

This vibrant book pulses with the beats of a new American South, probing the ways music, literature, and film have remixed southern identities for a post–civil rights generation. For scholar and critic Regina N. Bradley, Outkast's work is the touchstone, a blend of funk, gospel, and hip-hop developed in conjunction with the work of other culture creators—including T.I., Kiese Laymon, and Jesmyn Ward. This work, Bradley argues, helps define new cultural possibilities for black southerners who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s and have used hip-hop culture to buffer themselves from the historical narratives and expectations of the civil rights era. Andre 3000, Big Boi, and a wider community of creators emerge as founding theoreticians of the hip-hop South, framing a larger question of how the region fits into not only hip-hop culture but also contemporary American society as a whole. Chronicling Stankonia reflects the ways that culture, race, and southernness intersect in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Although part of southern hip-hop culture remains attached to the past, Bradley demonstrates how younger southerners use the music to embrace the possibility of multiple Souths, multiple narratives, and multiple points of entry to contemporary southern black identity.

Immaterial Archives

Immaterial Archives
Author: Jenny Sharpe
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2020-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810141590

In this innovative study, Jenny Sharpe moves beyond the idea of art and literature as an alternative archive to the historical records of slavery and its aftermath. Immaterial Archives explores instead the intangible phenomena of affects, spirits, and dreams that Caribbean artists and writers introduce into existing archives. Through the works of Frantz Zéphirin, Edouard Duval-Carrié, M. NourbeSe Philip, Erna Brodber, and Kamau Brathwaite, Immaterial Archives examines silences as black female spaces, Afro-Creole sacred worlds as diasporic cartographies, and the imaginative conjoining of spirits with industrial technologies as disruptions of enlightened modernity.

Hip-Hop Architecture

Hip-Hop Architecture
Author: Sekou Cooke
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2021-03-25
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1350116173

“This book is not for you. It is not for architectural academic elites. It is not for those who have gentrified our neighborhoods, overly intellectualized the profession, and ignored all contemporary Black theory within the discipline. You have made architecture a symbol of exclusion, oppression, and domination rather than expression, aspiration, and inspiration. This book is not for conformists-Black, White, or other.” As architecture grapples with its own racist legacy, Hip-Hop Architecture outlines a powerful new manifesto-the voice of the underrepresented, marginalized, and voiceless within the discipline. Exploring the production of spaces, buildings, and urban environments that embody the creative energies in hip-hop, it is a newly expanding design philosophy which sees architecture as a distinct part of hip-hop's cultural expression, and which uses hip-hop as a lens through which to provoke new architectural ideas. Examining the present and the future of Hip-Hop Architecture, the book also explores its historical antecedents and its theory, placing it in a wider context both within architecture and within Black and African American movements. Throughout, the work is illustrated with inspirational case studies of architectural projects and creative practices, and interspersed with interludes and interviews with key architects, designers, and academics in the field. This is a vital and provocative work that will appeal to architects, designers, students, theorists, and anyone interested in a fresh view of architecture, design, race and culture. Includes Foreword by Michael Eric Dyson.

Passing Strange

Passing Strange
Author: Martha A. Sandweiss
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2009
Genre: African American women
ISBN: 9781594202001

"Clarence King is a hero of nineteenth-century western history. Brilliant scientist and witty conversationalist, bestselling author and architect of the great surveys that mapped the West after the Civil War, King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent Newport family: for thirteen years he lived a double life--as the celebrated white Clarence King and as a black Pullman porter and steelworker. Unable to marry the black woman he loved, the fair-haired, blue-eyed King passed as a Negro, revealing his secret to his wife Ada only on his deathbed. Historian Martha Sandweiss is the first writer to uncover the life that King tried so hard to conceal. She reveals the complexity of a man who, while publicly espousing a personal dream of a uniquely American amalgam of white and black, hid his love for his wife and their five biracial children"--Publisher description

The Politics of Black Joy

The Politics of Black Joy
Author: Lindsey Stewart
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2021-09-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0810144123

During the antebellum period, slave owners weaponized southern Black joy to argue for enslavement, propagating images of “happy darkies.” In contrast, abolitionists wielded sorrow by emphasizing racial oppression. Both arguments were so effective that a political uneasiness on the subject still lingers. In The Politics of Black Joy, Lindsey Stewart wades into these uncomfortable waters by analyzing Zora Neale Hurston’s uses of the concept of Black southern joy. Stewart develops Hurston’s contributions to political theory and philosophy of race by introducing the politics of joy as a refusal of neo-abolitionism, a political tradition that reduces southern Black life to tragedy or social death. To develop the politics of joy, Stewart draws upon Zora Neale Hurston’s essays, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, and figures across several disciplines including Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Saidiya Hartman, Imani Perry, Eddie Glaude, and Audra Simpson. The politics of joy offers insights that are crucial for forming needed new paths in our current moment. For those interested in examining popular conceptions of Black political agency at the intersection of geography, gender, class, and Black spirituality, The Politics of Black Joy is essential reading.

Why Music Matters

Why Music Matters
Author: David Hesmondhalgh
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2013-06-26
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1118535812

Listen to David Hesmondhalgh discuss the arguments at the core of 'Why Music Matters' with Laurie Taylor on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed here: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03q9q2n/Thinking_Allowed_Why_Music_Matters_Bhangra_and_Belonging/ In what ways might music enrich the lives of people and of societies? What prevents it from doing so? Why Music Matters explores the role of music in our lives, and investigates the social and political significance of music in modern societies. First book of its kind to explore music through a variety of theories and approaches and unite these theories using one authoritative voice Combines a broad yet theoretically sophisticated approach to music and society with real clarity and accessibility A historically and sociologically informed understanding of music in relation to questions of social power and inequality By drawing on both popular and academic talk about a range of musical forms and practices, readers will engage with a wide musical terrain and a wealth of case studies

Penny

Penny
Author: Karl Stevens
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2021-05-04
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1452184178

This colorful graphic novel features the philosophical and existential musings of a cat named Penny. Told through a collection of stories, Penny: A Graphic Memoir wanders through her colorful imagination as she recalls her humble beginnings on the streets of New York and waxes poetic about the realities of her sheltered life living in an apartment with her owners. Filled with ennui, angst, and vivid dreams, Penny proves that being a cat is more profound than we once thought. A unique blend of high art and humor, Penny: A Graphic Memoir perfectly portrays one cat's struggles between her animal instincts, her philosophical reflections, and the lush creature comforts of a life with human servants. • DISTINCTIVE, BEAUTIFUL, AND FUNNY: Reading like a highbrow Garfield, this unique dose of sardonic wit and cat content combines humor and storytelling with Karl Stevens' very realistic illustration style. Fresh and imaginative, this graphic novel feels familiar and accessible, featuring one of the world's most beloved animals. • IMPRESSIVE AND DECORATED AUTHOR: Karl Stevens has written four graphic novels, and his comics have appeared regularly in the New Yorker, Village Voice, and Boston Phoenix. His work has been well received all around, and The Lodger was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. • UNIQUE GIFT FOR CAT LOVERS: For cat lovers who have all the classic cat humor books, this is something new that's both unique but familiar, combining a new voice with stunning artwork in a fresh format. For anyone who wonders what their cat is thinking, this book is pitch-perfect, and the gorgeous artwork and package make it a delightful present.

Chained in Silence

Chained in Silence
Author: Talitha L. LeFlouria
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2015-04-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469622483

In 1868, the state of Georgia began to make its rapidly growing population of prisoners available for hire. The resulting convict leasing system ensnared not only men but also African American women, who were forced to labor in camps and factories to make profits for private investors. In this vivid work of history, Talitha L. LeFlouria draws from a rich array of primary sources to piece together the stories of these women, recounting what they endured in Georgia's prison system and what their labor accomplished. LeFlouria argues that African American women's presence within the convict lease and chain-gang systems of Georgia helped to modernize the South by creating a new and dynamic set of skills for black women. At the same time, female inmates struggled to resist physical and sexual exploitation and to preserve their human dignity within a hostile climate of terror. This revealing history redefines the social context of black women's lives and labor in the New South and allows their stories to be told for the first time.

Critical Excess

Critical Excess
Author: J. Griffith Rollefson
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2021-06-07
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0472054872

Jay-Z and Kanye West's death dance for capitalism

Long Division

Long Division
Author: Kiese Laymon
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2021-06-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1982174838

Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Fiction From Kiese Laymon, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Heavy, comes a “funny, astute, searching” (The Wall Street Journal) debut novel about Black teenagers that is a satirical exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in post-Katrina Mississippi. Written in a voice that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared. Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson—but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985-version of City, along with his friend and love interest, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called...Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these items with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan. City’s two stories ultimately converge in the work shed behind his grandmother’s house, where he discovers the key to Baize’s disappearance. Brilliantly “skewering the disingenuous masquerade of institutional racism” (Publishers Weekly), this dreamlike “smart, funny, and sharp” (Jesmyn Ward), novel shows the work that young Black Americans must do, while living under the shadow of a history “that they only gropingly understand and must try to fill in for themselves” (The Wall Street Journal).