Colored Amazons

Colored Amazons
Author: Kali N. Gross
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2006-06-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822337997

For the state, black female crime and its representations effectively galvanized and justified a host of urban reform initiatives that reaffirmed white, middle-class authority."--Jacket.

A Black Philadelphia Reader

A Black Philadelphia Reader
Author: Louis J. Parascandola
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2024-06-11
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0271098260

The relationship between the City of Brotherly Love and its Black residents has been complicated from the city’s founding through the present day. A Black Philadelphia Reader traces this complex history in the words of Black writers who were native to, lived in, or had significant connections to the city. Featuring the works of famous authors—including W. E. B. Du Bois, Harriet Jacobs, Sonia Sanchez and John Edgar Wideman—alongside lesser-known voices, this reader is an immersive and enriching composite portrait of the Black experience in Philadelphia. Through fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, readers witness episodes of racial prejudice and gender inequality in areas like public health, housing, education, policing, criminal justice, and public transportation. And yet amid these myriad challenges, the writers convey an enduring faith, a love of family and community, and a hope that Philadelphia will fulfill its promises to its Black citizens. Thoughtfully introduced and accompanied by notes that contextualize the works and aid readers’ comprehension, this book will appeal to a wide audience of Philadelphians and other readers interested in American, African American, and urban studies.

Talk with You Like a Woman

Talk with You Like a Woman
Author: Cheryl D. Hicks
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2010
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807834246

With this book, Cheryl Hicks brings to light the voices and viewpoints of black working-class women, especially southern migrants, who were the subjects of urban and penal reform in early twentieth-century New York. Hicks compares the ideals of racial upl

A Taste for Brown Sugar

A Taste for Brown Sugar
Author: Mireille Miller-Young
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2014-12-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822375915

A Taste for Brown Sugar boldly takes on representations of black women's sexuality in the porn industry. It is based on Mireille Miller-Young's extensive archival research and her interviews with dozens of women who have worked in the adult entertainment industry since the 1980s. The women share their thoughts about desire and eroticism, black women's sexuality and representation, and ambition and the need to make ends meet. Miller-Young documents their interventions into the complicated history of black women's sexuality, looking at individual choices, however small—a costume, a gesture, an improvised line—as small acts of resistance, of what she calls "illicit eroticism." Building on the work of other black feminist theorists, and contributing to the field of sex work studies, she seeks to expand discussion of black women's sexuality to include their eroticism and desires, as well as their participation and representation in the adult entertainment industry. Miller-Young wants the voices of black women sex workers heard, and the decisions they make, albeit often within material and industrial constraints, recognized as their own.

Vengeance Feminism

Vengeance Feminism
Author: Kali Gross
Publisher: Seal Press
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2024-09-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1541603478

From an award-winning historian, an alternative model of feminism driven by the legacy of Black women who took justice into their own hands So often failed by the state, demeaned by racism and sexism, and denied respectable means of redress, Black women have nevertheless patiently resisted myriad injustices. Yet history shows an alternative path. It involved razors, pistols, hatchets, and blackjacks, and playacting for courts and reporters—whatever it took to beat the system. In a world where Black women are castigated and caricatured for being angry, Vengeance Feminism tells the story of those who leaned into their fury, crafting a different kind of ideology that scratched and stabbed and sometimes even succeeded. Vengeance Feminism is about the Black women who hit back—not always figuratively, and not necessarily nobly either. Weaving together historical narrative with Black feminist analysis, Gross illuminates the stories of Black women who fought for their dignity on their own terms, from the nineteenth-century “badger thieves” who robbed men on the streets of Philadelphia to victims of intimate partner violence who defended their honor and bodily autonomy with deadly force. Reckoning with women who lied, robbed, and cheated a racist, misogynistic world, Vengeance Feminism grapples with the volatile power of violence in pursuit of racial and gender justice.

Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso

Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso
Author: Kali N. Gross
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2018
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0190860014

The narrative of the discovery of a hacked up body outside of Philadelphia leads to a police investigation and trial of a woman and man, which sheds light on post-Reconstruction America, the history of African Americans, illicit sex, and domestic violence.

Life in a Black Community

Life in a Black Community
Author: Hannah Jopling
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2015-06-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 073918346X

Life in a Black Community: Striving for Equal Citizenship in Annapolis, Maryland, 1902-1952 tells the story of a struggle over what it meant to be a citizen of a democracy. For blacks, membership in a democracy meant full and equal participation in the life of the town. For most whites, it meant the full participation of only its white citizens, based on the presumption that their black neighbors were less than equal citizens and had to be kept down. All the dramas of the Jim Crow era—lynching, the KKK, and disenfranchisement, but also black boycotts, petitioning for redress of grievances, lawsuits, and political activism—occurred in Annapolis. As they were challenging white prejudice and discrimination, tenacious black citizens advanced themselves and enriched their own world of churches, shops, clubs, and bars. It took grit for black families to survive. As they pressed on, life slowly improved—for some. Life in a Black Community recounts the tactics blacks used to gain equal rights, details the methods whites employed to deny or curtail their rights, and explores a range of survival and advancement strategies used by black families.

The Early Image of Black Baseball

The Early Image of Black Baseball
Author: James E. Brunson III
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2009-09-12
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0786454253

This volume examines early black baseball as it was represented in the artwork and written accounts of the popular press. From contemporary postbellum articles, illustrations, photographs and woodcuts, a unique image of the black athlete emerges, one that was not always positive but was nonetheless central in understanding the evolving black image in American culture. Chapters cover press depictions of championship games, specific teams and athletes, and the fans and culture surrounding black baseball.

U.S. Women's History

U.S. Women's History
Author: Leslie Brown
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2017-01-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813575850

In the 1970s, feminist slogans proclaimed “Sisterhood is powerful,” and women’s historians searched through the historical archives to recover stories of solidarity and sisterhood. However, as feminist scholars have started taking a more intersectional approach—acknowledging that no woman is simply defined by her gender and that affiliations like race, class, and sexual identity are often equally powerful—women’s historians have begun to offer more varied and nuanced narratives. The ten original essays in U.S. Women's History represent a cross-section of current research in the field. Including work from both emerging and established scholars, this collection employs innovative approaches to study both the causes that have united American women and the conflicts that have divided them. Some essays uncover little-known aspects of women’s history, while others offer a fresh take on familiar events and figures, from Rosa Parks to Take Back the Night marches. Spanning the antebellum era to the present day, these essays vividly convey the long histories and ongoing relevance of topics ranging from women’s immigration to incarceration, from acts of cross-dressing to the activism of feminist mothers. This volume thus not only untangles the threads of the sisterhood mythos, it weaves them into a multi-textured and multi-hued tapestry that reflects the breadth and diversity of U.S. women’s history.

Prison Life Writing

Prison Life Writing
Author: Simon Rolston
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2021-06-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1771125187

Prison Life Writing is the first full-length study of one of the most controversial genres in American literature. By exploring the complicated relationship between life writing and institutional power, this book reveals the overlooked aesthetic innovations of incarcerated people and the surprising literary roots of the U.S. prison system. Simon Rolston observes that the autobiographical work of incarcerated people is based on a conversion narrative, a story arc that underpins the concept of prison rehabilitation and that sometimes serves the interests of the prison system, rather than those on the inside. Yet many imprisoned people rework the conversion narrative the way they repurpose other objects in prison. Like a radio motor retooled into a tattoo gun, the conversion narrative has been redefined by some authors for subversive purposes, including questioning the ostensible emancipatory role of prison writing, critiquing white supremacy, and broadly reimagining autobiographical discourse. An interdisciplinary work that brings life writing scholarship into conversation with prison studies and law and literature studies, Prison Life Writing theorizes how life writing works in prison, explains literature’s complicated entanglements with institutional power, and demonstrates the political and aesthetic innovations of one of America’s most fascinating literary genres.