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      • Trusted Partner
        Political science & theory
        June 2017

        Race and the Obama administration

        Substance, symbols and hope

        by Andra Gillespie

        The election of Barack Obama marked a critical point in American political and social history. Did the historic election of a black president actually change the status of blacks in the United States? Did these changes (or lack thereof) inform blacks' perceptions of the President? This book explores these questions by comparing Obama's promotion of substantive and symbolic initiatives for blacks to efforts by the two previous presidential administrations. By employing a comparative analysis, the reader can judge whether Obama did more or less to promote black interests than his predecessors. Taking a more empirical approach to judging Barack Obama, this book hopes to contribute to current debates about the significance of the first African American presidency. It takes care to make distinctions between Obama's substantive and symbolic accomplishments and to explore the significance of both.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2013

        South Asians and the shaping of Britain, 1870–1950

        A sourcebook

        by Edited by Ruvani Ranasinha

        This sourcebook offers alternative ways of conceiving of the making of modern Britain. It intervenes in contemporary debates about Britain's heritage by illuminating the remarkable, yet still overlooked, impact that South Asians had on shaping the nature of British culture, politics and national identity during the period 1870-1950. The first anthology of primary material interdisciplinary study of the history of the South Asian presence in Britain over the period, it selects a wide range of official and non-official archival sources. and identifies four key areas of South Asian impact - minority rights, war, culture and reception, and representation. The current relevance of South Asian engagement is underscored, projecting contemporary national concerns back into the past. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2013

        South Asians and the shaping of Britain, 1870–1950

        A sourcebook

        by Edited by Ruvani Ranasinha

        This invaluable sourcebook intervenes in contemporary debates about Britain's heritage by illuminating the remarkable, yet still overlooked, impact that South Asians had on shaping the nature of British culture, politics and national identity during the period 1870-1950. The first anthology of primary material interdisciplinary devoted to the study of the history of the South Asian presence in Britain over the period, it selects a wide range of official and non-official archival sources. It identifies four key areas of South Asian impact - minority rights, war, culture and reception, and representation. Highlighting the current relevance of South Asian engagement, it projects contemporary national concerns back into the past and offers alternative ways of conceiving of the making of modern Britain. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2020

        Race and the Obama Administration

        Substance, symbols, and hope

        by Andra Gillespie

        The election of Barack Obama marked a critical point in American political and social history. Did the historic election of a black president actually change the status of blacks in the United States? Did these changes (or lack thereof) inform blacks' perceptions of the President? This book explores these questions by comparing Obama's promotion of substantive and symbolic initiatives for blacks to efforts by the two previous presidential administrations. By employing a comparative analysis, the reader can judge whether Obama did more or less to promote black interests than his predecessors. Taking a more empirical approach to judging Barack Obama, this book hopes to contribute to current debates about the significance of the first African American presidency. It takes care to make distinctions between Obama's substantive and symbolic accomplishments and to explore the significance of both.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2022

        James Baldwin Review

        Volume 8

        by Douglas Field, Justin Joyce, Dwight McBride

        James Baldwin Review (JBR) is an annual journal that brings together a wide array of peer-reviewed critical and creative work on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin. In addition to these cutting-edge contributions, each issue contains a review of recent Baldwin scholarship and an award-winning graduate student essay. James Baldwin Review publishes essays that invigorate scholarship on James Baldwin; catalyze explorations of the literary, political, and cultural influence of Baldwin's writing and political activism; and deepen our understanding and appreciation of this complex and luminary figure.

      • General & world history

        In Search of York

        The Slave Who Went to the Pacific With Lewis & Clark: Revised Edition

        by Robert B Betts

        The sole African American member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, William Clark's enigmatic body servant York has inspired numerous myths about his character and exploits. He was supposed to be a man of superb physique and stamina, and some believed that he clowned and womanised his way across the continent and made no significant contributions to the outcome of the Expedition. More often than not, reputable historians have assumed that these myths surrounding him were reliable portrayals of the first black man to reach the Pacific Ocean. IN SEARCH OF YORK removes many of the fallacies surrounding York and pinpoints the important role he played in the success of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Betts exposes the impact of racial prejudice on historical interpretation. Neither the hero that a few romantic chroniclers have drawn nor the buffoon of many accounts tainted with racism, Betts' York emerges as a believable human being touching both the heights and depths of the world he lived in.

      • Social & cultural history

        We Shall Independent Be

        African American Place-Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States

        by Angel David Nieves (Editor) , Leslie M. Alexander (Editor)

        With twenty chapters from leading scholars in African American history, urban studies, architecture, women's studies, American studies, and city planning, "We Shall Independent Be" illuminates African Americans' efforts to claim space in American society despite often hostile resistance. As these essays attest, Black self-determination was central to the methods African Americans employed in their quest to establish a sense of permanence and place in the United States. Contributors define space to include physical, social, and intellectual sites throughout the Northern and Southern regions of the United States, ranging from urban milieus to the suburbs and even to swamps and forests. They explore under-represented locations such as burial grounds, courtrooms, schools, and churches. Moreover, contributors demonstrate how Black consciousness and ideology challenged key concepts of American democracy -- such as freedom, justice, citizenship, and equality -- establishing African American space in social and intellectual areas. Ultimately, "We Shall Independent Be" recovers the voices of African American men and women from the antebellum United States through the present and chronicles their quest to assert their right to a place in American society. By identifying, examining, and telling the stories of contested sites, this volume demonstrates the power of African American self-definition and agency in the process of staking a physical and ideological claim to public space.

      • History

        African Americans on the Western Frontier

        by Monroe Lee Billington (Editor), Roger D. Hardaway (Editor)

        During the last half of the nineteenth century, several thousand African Americans moved to the American western frontier. Before the Civil War, some went west to California as slaves of gold miners and to Utah as slaves of Mormons. Later, free black men joined the U.S. Army and served in frontier outposts while others were hired on as cowboys on western ranches and cattle trails. Once Reconstruction ended in the South, discrimination and segregation caused more African Americans to seek better opportunities elsewhere where prejudice was less evident. The significant role played by African Americans in the settlement and development of the West has largely been ignored and neglected until now. African Americans on the Western Frontierremedies that historic neglect with fifteen essays that explore the contributions that African American men and women made to the western frontier-as miners, homesteaders, town builders, entrepreneurs, and as ordinary, civic-minded citizens. This rich and diverse story of the African American western experience during the frontier era is for scholars and students of western history as well as anyone interested in African American history, and is an important work for all Americans to read.

      • Military history

        Recasting Race after World War II

        Germans and African Americans in American-Occupied Germany

        by Timothy L Schroer

        Explores the re-negotiation of race by Germans and African American GIs in post-World War II Germany. Schroer dissects the ways in which notions of blackness and whiteness became especially problematic in interactions between Germans and American soldiers serving as part of the victorious occupying army at the end of the war. The segregation of US Army forces fed a growing debate in America about whether a Jim Crow army could truly be a democratising force in post-war Germany. Schroer follows the evolution of that debate and examines the ways in which post-war conditions necessitated re-examination of race relations. He reveals how anxiety about interracial relationships between African American men and German women united white American soldiers and the German populace. He also traces the importation and influence of African American jazz music in Germany, illuminating the subtle ways in which occupied Germany represented a crucible in which to recast the meaning of race in a post-Holocaust world.

      • African history
        January 2013

        Black Egyptians

        The African Origins of Ancient Egypt

        by Segun Magbagbeola

      • Children's & YA
        2011

        Brave Music of a Distant Drum

        by Manu Herbstein

        Brave Music of a Distant Drum by Manu Herbstein Published by Red Deer Press, Canada and Techmate, Ghana From the back cover: Ama is a slave. She is old and dying and has an incredible story to tell. It is about violence and heartache, but it is also a story of courage, hope, determination, and ultimately, love.  Since Ama is blind, she cannot write down her story for future generations. Instead, she summons the son from whom she has been long separated.  At first he thinks she's old and tiresome. But as Ama's astonishing journey unfolds in her own words, his world changes forever, until he can never see it with the same eyes again. Nor will those who read Ama's story.

      • Popular culture
        November 2010

        Ebony Roots, Northern Soil

        Perspectives on Blackness in Canada

        by Editor(s): Charmaine A. Nelson

        Ebony Roots, Northern Soil is a powerful and timely collection of critical essays exploring the experiences, histories and cultural engagements of black Canadians. Drawing from postcolonial, critical race and black feminist theory, this innovative anthology brings together an extraordinary set of well-recognized and new scholars engaging in the critical debates about the cultural politics of identity and issues of cultural access, representation, production and reception. Emerging from a national conference in 2005, the book records, critiques and yet transcends this groundbreaking event. Drawn from a range of disciplines including Art History, Communication Studies, Cultural Studies, Education, English, History and Sociology, the chapters examine black contributions to and participation within the realms of popular music, television and film, the art world, museums, academia and social activism. In the process, the burning issues of access to cultural capital, the practice of multiculturalism, definitions of black Canadianness and the state of Black Canadian Studies are dissected. Attentive to issues of sexuality and gender as well as race, the book also explores and challenges the dominance of black Americanness in Canada, especially in its incarnation as hip hop. Acknowledging a differently constituted and heterogeneous black Canadianness, it contemplates the possibility of an identity in dialogue with, and yet distinct from, dominant ideals of African-Americanness. Ebony Roots also explores the deficit in Black Canadian Studies across the nation’s universities, drawing a line between the neglect of black Canadian populations, histories and experiences in general and the resulting lack of an academic disciplinary infrastructure. Poignant blends of the personal and the political, the chapters are both scholarly in their critical insights and rigour and daring in their honesty. Ebony Roots defiantly foregrounds the often-disavowed issues of institutional racism against blacks in Canadian academia, education and cultural institutions as well as the injurious effects of everyday racism. In so doing, the book challenges the myth of Canada as a racially benevolent and tolerant state, the ‘great white north’ free from racism and the legacy of colonialism. Instead the very definitions of Canada and black Canadianness are unpacked and explored. Ebony Roots is a necessary history lesson, a contemporary cultural debate and a call to action. It is a momentous and overdue contribution to Black Canadian Studies and a must read for academics, students and the general public alike.

      • Black & Asian studies

        suddenly we

        by Shockley, Evie

        In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious "we." How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley's poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth. perched i am black, comely,a girl on the cusp of desire.my dangling toes take the restthe rest of my body refuses. spine upright,my pose proposes anticipation. i poisein copper-colored tension, intent onmanifesting my soul in the discouraging world. under the rough eyes of others, i stiffen. if i must be hard, it will be as a tree, alivewith change. inside me, a love of beauty riseslike sap, sprouts from my scalpand stretches forth. i send out my song, an ariablue and feathered, and grow toward it,choirs bare, but soon to bud. i amblack and becoming.         —after Alison Saar's Blue Bird

      • Black & Asian studies

        suddenly we

        by Shockley, Evie

        In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious "we." How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley's poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth. perched i am black, comely,a girl on the cusp of desire.my dangling toes take the restthe rest of my body refuses. spine upright,my pose proposes anticipation. i poisein copper-colored tension, intent onmanifesting my soul in the discouraging world. under the rough eyes of others, i stiffen. if i must be hard, it will be as a tree, alivewith change. inside me, a love of beauty riseslike sap, sprouts from my scalpand stretches forth. i send out my song, an ariablue and feathered, and grow toward it,choirs bare, but soon to bud. i amblack and becoming.         —after Alison Saar's Blue Bird

      • Folk & traditional music

        Other

        British and Irish Poetry Since 1970

        by Richard, Caddel

      • Economics

        The Vietnamese Novel in French

        A Literary Response to Colonialism

        by Jack A. Yeager

      • Black & Asian studies
        August 2015

        Movie Migrations

        Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema

        by Chung, Hye Seung and David S.

        This timely new study reveals that, though South Korean popular culture might be enjoying new prominence on the global stage, the nation’s film industry has long been a hub for creative appropriations across national borders. Movie Migrations explores how Korean filmmakers have put a unique spin on familiar genres, while influencing world cinema from Hollywood to Bollywood.

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