Searching for Sycorax
Searching for Sycorax

Author: Kinitra D. Brooks

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 0813584647

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Searching for Sycorax highlights the unique position of Black women in horror as both characters and creators. Kinitra D. Brooks creates a racially gendered critical analysis of African diasporic women, challenging the horror genre’s historic themes and interrogating forms of literature that have often been ignored by Black feminist theory. Brooks examines the works of women across the African diaspora, from Haiti, Trinidad, and Jamaica, to England and the United States, looking at new and canonized horror texts by Nalo Hopkinson, NK Jemisin, Gloria Naylor, and Chesya Burke. These Black women fiction writers take advantage of horror’s ability to highlight U.S. white dominant cultural anxieties by using Africana folklore to revise horror’s semiotics within their own imaginary. Ultimately, Brooks compares the legacy of Shakespeare’s Sycorax (of The Tempest) to Black women writers themselves, who, deprived of mainstream access to self-articulation, nevertheless influence the trajectory of horror criticism by forcing the genre to de-centralize whiteness and maleness.

The Lemonade Reader
The Lemonade Reader

Author: Kinitra D. Brooks

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-05-24

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0429945973

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The Lemonade Reader is an interdisciplinary collection that explores the nuances of Beyoncé’s 2016 visual album, Lemonade. The essays and editorials present fresh, cutting-edge scholarship fueled by contemporary thoughts on film, material culture, religion, and black feminism. Envisioned as an educational tool to support and guide discussions of the visual album at postgraduate and undergraduate levels, The Lemonade Reader critiques Lemonade’s multiple Afrodiasporic influences, visual aesthetics, narrative arc of grief and healing, and ethnomusicological reach. The essays, written by both scholars and popular bloggers, reflects a broad yet uniquely specific black feminist investigation into constructions of race, gender, spirituality, and southern identity. The Lemonade Reader gathers a newer generation of black feminist scholars to engage in intellectual discourse and confront the emotional labor around the Lemonade phenomena. It is the premiere source for examining Lemonade, a text that will continue to have a lasting impact on black women’s studies and popular culture.

The Wednesday Wars
The Wednesday Wars

Author: Gary D. Schmidt

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0618724834

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In this Newbery Honor-winning novel, Gary D. Schmidt tells the witty and compelling story of a teenage boy who feels that fate has it in for him, during the school year 1968-68. Seventh grader Holling Hoodhood isn't happy. He is sure his new teacher, Mrs. Baker, hates his guts. Holling's domineering father is obsessed with his business image and disregards his family. Throughout the school year, Holling strives to get a handle on the Shakespeare plays Mrs. Baker assigns him to read on his own time, and to figure out the enigmatic Mrs. Baker. As the Vietnam War turns lives upside down, Holling comes to admire and respect both Shakespeare and Mrs. Baker, who have more to offer him than he imagined. And when his family is on the verge of coming apart, he also discovers his loyalty to his sister, and his ability to stand up to his father when it matters most.

Sycorax's Daughters
Sycorax's Daughters

Author: Kinitra Dechaun Brooks

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 565

ISBN-13: 9781941958445

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A 2018 Bram Stoker Award Finalist Thought-provoking, powerful, and revealing, this anthology is composed of 28 dark stories and 14 poems written by African-American women writers. The tales of what scares, threatens, and shocks them will enlighten and entertain readers. The works delve into demons and shape-shifters from "How to Speak to the Bogeyman" and "Tree of the Forest Seven Bells Turns the World Round Midnight" to far future offerings such as "The Malady of Need". These pieces cover vampires, ghosts, and mermaids, as well as the unexpected price paid by women struggling for freedom and validation in the past. Contributors include: Tiffany Austin, Tracey Baptiste, Regina N. Bradley, Patricia E. Canterbury, Crystal Connor, Joy M. Copeland, Amber Doe, Tish Jackson, Valjeanne Jeffers, Tenea D. Johnson, R. J. Joseph, A. D. Koboah Nicole Givens Kurtz, Kai Leakes, A. J. Locke, Carole McDonnell, Dana T. McKnight , LH Moore, L. Penelope, Zin E. Rocklyn , Eden Royce, Kiini Ibura Salaam, Andrea Vocab Sanderson, Nicole D. Sconiers, Cherene Sherrard, RaShell R. Smith-Spears, Sheree Renée Thomas, Lori Titus, Tanesha Nicole Tyler, Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, L. Marie Wood, K. Ceres Wright, and Deana Zhollis.

The Black Shoals
The Black Shoals

Author: Tiffany Lethabo King

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2019-09-27

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1478005688

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In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal—an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea—as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, shifting, and contentious ways. These interactions, which often foreground Black and Native discourses of conquest and critiques of humanism, offer alternative insights into understanding how slavery, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous genocide structure white supremacy. Among texts and topics, King examines eighteenth-century British mappings of humanness, Nativeness, and Blackness; Black feminist depictions of Black and Native erotics; Black fungibility as a critique of discourses of labor exploitation; and Black art that rewrites conceptions of the human. In outlining the convergences and disjunctions between Black and Native thought and aesthetics, King identifies the potential to create new epistemologies, lines of critical inquiry, and creative practices.

Freedom Time
Freedom Time

Author: Anthony Reed

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2014-12

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1421415208

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"In Freedom Time, Anthony Reed reclaims the power of black experimental poetry and prose by arguing that if literature fundamentally serves the human need for freedom in expression, then readers and critics must see it as something other than a reflection of the politics of social protest and identity formation. Prior to the successful campaigns against Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. and colonization in the Caribbean, literary politics seemed much more obviously interventionist. As more African Americans and Afro-Caribbean writers gained access to formal political power, more writing emerged whose political concerns went beyond improving racial representation, appealing for social recognition, raising consciousness, or commenting on the political disillusion and fragmentation of the post-segregation and post-colonial moments. Through formal innovation and abstraction, writers increasingly pushed the limits of representation and expression in order to extend the limits of thought and literary possibility. Reed offers a theoretical account of this new "black experimental writing," which is at once a literary historical development, and a concept with which to analyze the ways writing engages race and the possibilities of expression. One of his key interventions is arguing that form drives the politics literature, not vice-versa. Through extended analyses of works by N. H. Pritchard, NourbeSe Philip, Kamau Brathwaite, Claudia Rankine, Douglas Kearney, Harryette Mullen, Suzan-Lori Parks and Nathaniel Mackey, Freedom Time draws out the political implication of their innovative approaches to literary aesthetics"--

Hag-Seed
Hag-Seed

Author: Margaret Atwood

Publisher: Hogarth

Published: 2016-10-11

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 0804141304

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The beloved author of The Handmaid’s Tale reimagines Shakespeare’s final, great play, The Tempest, in a gripping and emotionally rich novel of passion and revenge. “A marvel of gorgeous yet economical prose, in the service of a story that’s utterly heartbreaking yet pierced by humor, with a plot that retains considerable subtlety even as the original’s back story falls neatly into place.”—The New York Times Book Review Felix is at the top of his game as artistic director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. Now he’s staging aTempest like no other: not only will it boost his reputation, but it will also heal emotional wounds. Or that was the plan. Instead, after an act of unforeseen treachery, Felix is living in exile in a backwoods hovel, haunted by memories of his beloved lost daughter, Miranda. And also brewing revenge, which, after twelve years, arrives in the shape of a theatre course at a nearby prison. Margaret Atwood’s novel take on Shakespeare’s play of enchantment, retribution, and second chances leads us on an interactive, illusion-ridden journey filled with new surprises and wonders of its own. Praise for Hag-Seed “What makes the book thrilling, and hugely pleasurable, is how closely Atwood hews to Shakespeare even as she casts her own potent charms, rap-composition included. . . . Part Shakespeare, part Atwood, Hag-Seed is a most delicate monster—and that’s ‘delicate’ in the 17th-century sense. It’s delightful.”—Boston Globe “Atwood has designed an ingenious doubling of the plot of The Tempest: Felix, the usurped director, finds himself cast by circumstances as a real-life version of Prospero, the usurped Duke. If you know the play well, these echoes grow stronger when Felix decides to exact his revenge by conjuring up a new version of The Tempest designed to overwhelm his enemies.”—Washington Post “A funny and heartwarming tale of revenge and redemption . . . Hag-Seed is a remarkable contribution to the canon.”—Bustle

Caliban and the Witch
Caliban and the Witch

Author: Silvia Federici

Publisher: Autonomedia

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1570270597

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"Women, the body and primitive accumulation"--Cover.

Black Witches and Queer Ghosts
Black Witches and Queer Ghosts

Author: Camille S. Alexander

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2024-04-16

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1666926760

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This book is a collection of 13 essays centering on supernatural serials such as television programs, video games, anime, and manga, featuring teen protagonists and marketed to teen audiences. These essays provide discussions of characters in teen supernatural serials who disrupt white, cisgender social narratives, and addresses possible ways that the on-screen depictions of these characters, who may be POC or LGBTQIA+, can lead to additional discussions of more accurate representations of the Other in the media. This collection explores depictions of characters of color and/or LGBTQ characters in teen supernatural serials who were/are marginalized and examines the possible issues that these depictions can raise on a social level and, possibly, a developmental level for audience members who belong to these communities. The essays included in this collection thoroughly examine these characters and their narratives while providing nuanced examinations of how the media chooses to represent teens of color and LGBTQIA+ teens.

Staging Habla de Negros
Staging Habla de Negros

Author: Nicholas R. Jones

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2019-05-01

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 0271083921

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In this volume, Nicholas R. Jones analyzes white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater from the 1500s through the 1700s, when the performance of Africanized Castilian, commonly referred to as habla de negros (black speech), was in vogue. Focusing on Spanish Golden Age theater and performative poetry from authors such as Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Rueda, and Rodrigo de Reinosa, Jones makes a strong case for revising the belief, long held by literary critics and linguists, that white appropriations and representations of habla de negros language are “racist buffoonery” or stereotype. Instead, Jones shows black characters who laugh, sing, and shout, ultimately combating the violent desire of white supremacy. By placing early modern Iberia in conversation with discourses on African diaspora studies, Jones showcases how black Africans and their descendants who built communities in early modern Spain were rendered legible in performative literary texts. Accessibly written and theoretically sophisticated, Jones’s groundbreaking study elucidates the ways that habla de negros animated black Africans’ agency, empowered their resistance, and highlighted their African cultural retentions. This must-read book on identity building, performance, and race will captivate audiences across disciplines.