Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Space, Transforming Culture

A sweeping, multidisciplinary study that analyzes and identifies some of the main lineaments of the Central African cultural legacy in the Caribbean. This long-awaited study is based on more than three decades of research and analysis. Scholars will be fascinated with the transatlantic comparative data. The author identifies Central African cultural forms in those areas settled in Africa by the Koongo, Mbundu, and Ovimbunde. (The modern-day locations of these three ethnic groups are present-day Congo, Zaire and Angola.) The book illuminates Caribbean thought and practice by comparison with Central African worldview and custom. The work is based on extensive primary and secondary sources, oral interviews, letters and diaries, folktales, proverbs and songs. In its multidisciplinary approach and depth, it highlights the debate concerning the origin and transformation of cultural forms in the Caribbean against a larger background of African culture, economy, colonialism, slavery, emancipation and independence. With its Central African focus, the book is a pioneering perspective on Caribbean cultural forms. A noted linguist, the author uses her knowledge of the most functional languages of the region, Spanish, English and French, to access creole languages, which gives the study a truly pan-Caribbean breadth. The book appeals to all interested in African diaspora studies, African and Caribbean history, linguistics and cultural anthropology. Central Africa in the Caribbean includes numerous maps, illustrations, and musical scores.



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Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes

Super Black places the appearance of black superheroes alongside broad and sweeping cultural trends in American politics and pop culture, which reveals how black superheroes are not disposable pop products, but rather a fascinating racial phenomenon through which futuristic expressions and fantastic visions of black racial identity and symbolic political meaning are presented. Adilifu Nama sees the value—and finds new avenues for exploring racial identity—in black superheroes who are often dismissed as sidekicks, imitators of established white heroes, or are accused of having no role outside of blaxploitation film contexts.

Nama examines seminal black comic book superheroes such as Black Panther, Black Lightning, Storm, Luke Cage, Blade, the Falcon, Nubia, and others, some of whom also appear on the small and large screens, as well as how the imaginary black superhero has come to life in the image of President Barack Obama. Super Black explores how black superheroes are a powerful source of racial meaning, narrative, and imagination in American society that express a myriad of racial assumptions, political perspectives, and fantastic (re)imaginings of black identity. The book also demonstrates how these figures overtly represent or implicitly signify social discourse and accepted wisdom concerning notions of racial reciprocity, equality, forgiveness, and ultimately, racial justice.



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Chris Rock: Comedian and Actor (Black Americans of Achievement)

Each title features: - In Their Own Words boxes offering selected quotations from the subject - Did You Know? boxes that highlight fascinating facts about each person - Chronology, suggestions for further reading, and a listing of related Web sites. - A final chapter that delves into the legacy of the subject's thoughts and deeds for new generations of black Americans.



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One Righteous Man: Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York

When Samuel Battle broke the color line as New York City’s first African American cop in the second decade of the twentieth century, he had to fear his racist colleagues as much as criminals. He had to be three times better than his white peers, and many times more resilient. His life was threatened. He was displayed like a circus animal. Yet, fearlessly claiming his rights, he prevailed in a four-decade odyssey that is both the story of one man’s courageous dedication to racial progress and a harbinger of the divisions between police and the people they serve that plague twenty-first-century America.

By dint of brains, brawn, and an outsized personality, Battle rode the forward wave of African American history in New York. He circulated among renowned turn-of-the-century entertainers and writers. He weathered threatening hostility as a founding citizen of black Harlem. He served as “godfather” to the regiment of black soldiers that won glory in World War I as the “Hellfighters of Harlem.” He befriended sports stars like Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, and Sugar Ray Robinson, and he bonded with legendary tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Along the way, he mentored an equally smart, equally tough young man in a still more brutal fight to integrate the New York Fire Department.

At the close of his career, Battle looked back proudly on the against-all-odd journey taken by a man who came of age as the son of former slaves in the South. He had navigated the corruption of Tammany Hall, the treachery of gangsters like Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz, the anything-goes era of Prohibition, the devastation of the Depression, and the race riots that erupted in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. By then he was a trusted aide to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and a friend to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Realizing that his story was the story of race in New York across the first half of the century, Battle commissioned a biography to be written by none other than Langston Hughes, the preeminent voice of the Harlem Renaissance. But their eighty-thousand-word collaboration failed to find a publisher, and has remained unpublished since. Using Hughes’s manuscript, which is quoted liberally throughout this book, as well as his own archival research and interviews with survivors, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Arthur Browne has created an important and compelling social history of New York, revealed a fascinating episode in the life of Langston Hughes, and delivered the riveting life and times of a remarkable and unjustly forgotten man, setting Samuel Battle where he belongs in the pantheon of American civil rights pioneers.



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Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism

Performing Blackness offers a challenging interpretation of black cultural expression since the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Exploring drama, music, poetry, sermons, and criticism, Benston offers an exciting meditation on modern black performance's role in realising African-American aspirations for autonomy and authority.
Artists covered include:
* John Coltrane
* Ntozake Shange
* Ed Bullins
* Amiri Baraka
* Adrienne Kennedy
* Michael Harper.
Performing Blackness is an exciting contribution to the ongoing debate about the vitality and importance of black culture.



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Voodoo Child: The Illustrated Legend of Jimi Hendrix (Penguin Studio Books)

Often cited as one of the most innovative and influential rock musicians, guitar legend Jimi Hendrix had a short and turbulent life, succumbing early, as did many other rock icons of his generation, to pressures generated by the conflicts between their creative visions and the economic imperatives of the music industry. He died of an overdose in 1970 at the age of 27. This collaborative tribute to Hendrix, described by one of its creators as "not so much outright biography as speculative fantasy," explores the excitement and the pitfalls of rock stardom sympathetically and perceptively.



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