Bøker i Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies-serien

The first book-length study of Frank Yerby's life and work. The collection explores a myriad of topics, including his connections to the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances; readership and reception; representations of masculinity and patriotism; film adaptations; and engagement with race, identity, and religion.

Post-Blackness. Post-Soul. Post-Black Art. New Blackness. Cameron Leader-Picone suggests that this proliferation of terms, along with the renewed focus on questioning the relationship between individual black artists and the larger black community, indicates the arrival of novel forms of black identity and black art.

The personal account of a community and a lawyer united to battle one of the most recalcitrant bastions of resistance to civil rights

This is the first study to consider the substantial body of African American writing that critiques whiteness as social construction and racial identity. Arguing against the prevailing approach to these texts, Veronica T. Watson identifies this body of literature as an African American intellectual and literary tradition that she names "the literature of white estrangement".

The Second Great Migration, the movement of African Americans between the South and the North that began in the early 1940s and tapered off in the late 1960s, transformed America. Over seven years, Lisa Krissoff Boehm gathered oral histories with women migrants and their children. In extended excerpts from the oral histories, this book offers a unique window into African American women's history.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the Popular Front produced a significant era in African American literary radicalism. While scholars have long associated the black radicalism of the Popular Front with the literary left and the working class, Christin Marie Taylor considers how black radicalism influenced southern fiction about black workers.

Born in 1893, Emmanuel Taylor Gordon (1893-1971) became an internationally famous singer in the 1920s at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Despite his fame, Taylor Gordon has been all but forgotten. Michael Johnson illuminates Gordon's personal history and his cultural importance to the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance.

Through speeches, photographs, media coverage, and campaign materials, William H. Lawson examines the rhetoric and methods of the Mississippi Freedom Vote. Lawson looks at the vote itself rather than the already much-studied events surrounding it, an emphasis new in scholarship.

Describes how the social and political movements that grew out of the Depression facilitated the left turn of several African American artists and writers. The formation of a black cultural front is examined by looking at the works of poet Langston Hughes, novelist Chester Himes, and cartoonist Ollie Harrington.

Reevaluates Charles Chesnutt's deft manipulation of the "passing" theme to expand understanding of the author's fiction and nonfiction. Nine contributors apply a variety of theories to add richness to readings of Chesnutt's works. Together the essays provide convincing evidence that "passing" is an intricate, essential part of Chesnutt's writing, and that it appears in all the genres he wielded.

History is made and remade by the availability of new documents, sources, and interpretations. Can Anything Beat White? contributes a great deal to this process. The experiences of the James family as documented in their letters challenge both representations of black people at the turn of the century as well as our contemporary sense of black Americans.

Reevaluates Charles Chesnutt's deft manipulation of the "passing" theme to expand understanding of the author's fiction and nonfiction. Nine contributors apply a variety of theories to add richness to readings of Chesnutt's works. Together the essays provide convincing evidence that "passing" is an intricate, essential part of Chesnutt's writing, and that it appears in all the genres he wielded.

Raymond Pace Alexander was a prominent black attorney in Philadelphia and a distinguished member of the National Bar Association. Yet his legacy to the civil rights struggle has received little national recognition. Alexander was a major contributor to the northern civil rights struggle and was committed to improving the status of black lawyers. This volume examines his life and work.

Recovers the work of early African American authors and editors such as Elisha Weaver who have been left off maps drawn by historians and literary critics. Individual chapters restore to consideration black literary locations in antebellum St. Louis, antebellum Indiana, Reconstruction-era San Francisco, and several sites tied to the Philadelphia-based Recorder during and after the Civil War.

Using the slave narratives of Henry Bibb and Frederick Douglass, as well as the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Walter Mosley, and Barack Obama, Ronda C. Henry Anthony examines how women's bodies are used in African American literature to fund the production of black masculine ideality and power.

Examines the historical and political context of acclaimed African American actor Paul Robeson's three portrayals of Shakespeare's Othello in the United Kingdom and the United States. All three of the productions, when considered together, provide an intriguing glimpse into Robeson's artistry as well as his political activism.

Percival Everett (b. 1956) writes novels, short stories, poetry, and essays, and is one of the most prolific, acclaimed, yet under-examined African American writers working today. In this volume, scholars engage all of his creative production. These essays examine issues of identity, authenticity, and semiotics, in addition to postmodernism and African American and American literary traditions.