Conversations with the most distinguished black thinkers of our times, including Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, Wole Soyinka and Michelle Obama, on race, decolonisation, systemic inequalities, and the climate crisis. WITH A FOREWORD FROM BERNARDINE EVARISTO In a series of incisive and intimate encounters Sarah Ladipo Manyika introduces some of the most distinguished Black thinkers of our times, including Nobel Laureates Toni Morrison and Wole Soyinka, and civic leaders first lady Michelle Obama and Senator Cory Booker. She searches for truth with poet Claudia Rankine and historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. She discusses race and gender with South African filmmaker Xoliswa Sithole and American actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith. She interrogates the world around us with pioneering publisher Margaret Busby, parliamentarian Lord Michael Hastings and civil rights activist Pastor Evan Mawarire - who dared to take on President Robert Mugabe and has lived to tell the tale. We also meet the living embodiment of the many threads, ideas and histories in this book through the profile of her fabulous 102-year-old friend, Mrs Willard Harris. In journeys that book-end the collection, Sarah Ladipo Manyika reflects on her own experience of being seen as 'oyinbo' in Nigeria, African in England, Arab in France, coloured in Southern Africa and Black in America, while feeling the least Black and most human among her fellow travellers, explorers all, against the sharp white relief of the South Pole.
Two sisters take care of themselves when their mother decides to become an actress When their stage-struck mother joins a summer theater group and leaves home for a few weeks, Jenny and Mary convince their dad that they can take care of themselves. Surprisingly, things are actually working out all right, even if the girls tend to bicker. When a production company comes to town, Mary and everyone else is dying to get a role in the movie. But it’s Jenny who lands the big part. Mary and her friends are furious—especially at Jenny’s nonchalance over getting it. Will Jenny’s new job end up ruining the girls’ summer of freedom?
With a powerful introduction by Ross Gay and a moving afterword by Sidney Clifton, this special anniversary edition of The Book of Light offers new meditations and insights on one of the most beloved voices of the 20th century. Though The Book of Light opens with thirty-nine names for light, we soon learn the most meaningful name is Lucille—daughter, mother, proud Black woman. Known for her ability to convey multitudes in few words, Clifton writes into the shadows—her father’s violations, a Black neighborhood bombed, death, loss—all while illuminating the full spectrum of human emotion: grief and celebration, anger and joy, empowerment and so much grace. A meeting place of myth and the Divine, The Book of Light exists “between starshine and clay” as Clifton’s personas allow us to bear the world’s weight with Atlas and witness conversations between Lucifer and God. While names and dates mark this text as a social commentary responding to her time, it is haunting how easily this collection serves as a political palimpsest of today. We leave these poems inspired—Clifton shows us Superman is not our hero. Our hero is the Black female narrator who decides to live. And what a life she creates! “Won’t you celebrate with me?”
The first accessible reader on magic’s generative relationship with contemporary art practice. From the hexing of presidents to a renewed interest in herbalism and atavistic forms of self-care, magic has furnished the contemporary imagination with mysterious and often disorienting bodies of arcane thought and practice. This volume brings together writings by artists, magicians, historians, and theorists that illuminate the vibrant correspondences animating contemporary art’s varied encounters with magical culture, inspiring a reconsideration of the relationship between the symbolic and the pragmatic. Dispensing with simple narratives of reenchantment, Magic illustrates the intricate ways in which we have to some extent always been captivated by the allure of the numinous. It demonstrates how magical culture’s tendencies toward secrecy, occlusion, and encryption might provide contemporary artists with strategies of remedial communality, a renewed faith in the invocational power of personal testimony, and a poetics of practice that could boldly question our political circumstances, from the crisis of climate collapse to the strictures of socially sanctioned techniques of medical and psychiatric care. Tracing its various emergences through the shadows of modernity, the circuitries of ritual media, and declarations of psychic self-defence, Magic deciphers the evolution of a “magical-critical” thinking that productively complicates, contradicts and expands the boundaries of our increasingly weird present.
A poignant sequence of poems traces the evolution of a divorce while exploring themes of love, sex, sorrow, memory and freedom as reflected by everyday familiarities and the poignancy of former lovers parting, in a collection by the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of The Dead and the Living.