The Black Interior
The Black Interior

Author: Elizabeth Alexander

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13:

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With a poet's precision and an intellectually adventurous spirit, Elizabeth Alexander explores a wide spectrum of contemporary African American artistic life through literature, paintings, popular media, and films, and discusses its place in current culture. In The Black Interior, she examines the vital roles of such heavyweight literary figures as Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and Rita Dove, as well as lesser known, yet vibrant, new creative voices. She offers a reconsideration of "afro-outré" painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, the concept of "race-pride" in Jet magazine, and her take on Denzel Washington's career as a complex black male icon in a post-affirmative action era. Also available is Alexander's much heralded essay on Rodney King, Emmett Till, and the collective memory of racial violence. Alexander, who has been a professor at the University of Chicago and Smith College, and recently at Yale University, has taught and lectured on African American art and culture across the country and abroad for nearly two decades. In The Black Interior, she directs her scrupulous poet's eye to the urgent cultural issues of the day. This lively collection is a crucial volume for understanding current thinking on race, art, and culture in America.

Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life
Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life

Author: Christopher Freeburg

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2017-09-12

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 0813940338

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Christopher Freeburg’s Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life offers a crucial new reading of a neglected aspect of African American literature and art across the long twentieth century. Rejecting the idea that the most dehumanizing of black experiences, such as lynching or other racial violence, have completely robbed victims of their personhood, Freeburg rethinks what it means to be a person in the works of black artists. This book advances the idea that individual persons always retain the ability to withhold, express, or change their ideas, and this concept has profound implications for long-held assumptions about the relationship between black interior life and black collective political interests. Examining an array of seminal black texts—from Ida B. Wells’s antilynching pamphlets to works by Richard Wright, Nina Simone, and Toni Morrison—Freeburg demonstrates that the personhood represented by these writers unsettles rather than automatically strengthens black subjects’ relationships to political movements such as racial uplift, civil rights, and black nationalism. He shows how black artists illuminate the challenges of racial collectivity while stressing the vital stakes of individual personhood. In his challenge to current African Americanist criticism, Freeburg makes a striking contribution to our understanding of African American literature and culture.

The Global Interior
The Global Interior

Author: Megan Black

Publisher:

Published: 2022-02-15

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 9780674271197

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Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize Winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Prize Winner of the W. Turrentine Jackson Award Winner of the British Association of American Studies Prize "Extraordinary...Deftly rearranges the last century and a half of American history in fresh and useful ways." --Los Angeles Review of Books "Offers unprecedented insights into the depth and staying power of American exceptionalism...as generations of policymakers sought to extend the reach of U.S. power globally while emphatically denying that the United States was an empire." --Penny Von Eschen, author of Satchmo Blows Up the World "A smart, original, and ambitious book. Black demonstrates that the Interior Department has had a far larger, more invasive, and more consequential role in the world than one would expect." --Brian DeLay, author of War of a Thousand Deserts When one thinks of the story of American power, the Department of the Interior rarely comes to mind. Yet it turns out that a government agency best known for managing natural resources and operating national parks has constantly supported and projected America's imperial aspirations. Megan Black's pathbreaking book brings to light the surprising role the U.S. Department of the Interior has played in pursuing minerals around the world--in Indigenous lands, foreign nations, the oceans, and even outer space. Black shows how the department touted its credentials as an innocuous environmental-management organization while quietly satisfying America's insatiable demand for raw materials. As presidents trumpeted the value of self-determination, this almost invisible outreach gave the country many of the benefits of empire without the burden of a heavy footprint. Under the guise of sharing expertise with the underdeveloped world, Interior scouted tin sources in Bolivia and led lithium surveys in Afghanistan. Today, it promotes offshore drilling and even manages a satellite that prospects for Earth's resources from outer space.

Interior Chinatown
Interior Chinatown

Author: Charles Yu

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2020-11-17

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0307948471

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes "one of the funniest books of the year.... A delicious, ambitious Hollywood satire" (The Washington Post). A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play. Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it? After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration—Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.

Mapping the Interior
Mapping the Interior

Author: Stephen Graham Jones

Publisher: Tordotcom

Published: 2017-06-20

Total Pages: 72

ISBN-13: 0765395096

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"Brilliant." —The New York Times Mapping the Interior is a horrifying, inward-looking novella from Stephen Graham Jones that Paul Tremblay calls "emotionally raw, disturbing, creepy, and brilliant." Blackfeet author Stephen Graham Jones brings readers a spine-tingling Native American horror novella. Walking through his own house at night, a fifteen-year-old thinks he sees another person stepping through a doorway. Instead of the people who could be there, his mother or his brother, the figure reminds him of his long-gone father, who died mysteriously before his family left the reservation. When he follows it he discovers his house is bigger and deeper than he knew. The house is the kind of wrong place where you can lose yourself and find things you'd rather not have. Over the course of a few nights, the boy tries to map out his house in an effort that puts his little brother in the worst danger, and puts him in the position to save them . . . at terrible cost. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Thief in the Interior
Thief in the Interior

Author: Phillip B. Williams

Publisher: Alice James Books

Published: 2016-01-18

Total Pages: 101

ISBN-13: 1938584317

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"This gorgeous debut is a 'debut' in chronology only. . . . Need is everywhere—in the unforgiving images, in lines so delicate they seem to break apart in the hands, and in the reader who will enter these poems and never want to leave."—Adrian Matejka Phillip B. Williams investigates the dangers of desire, balancing narratives of addiction, murders, and hate crimes with passionate, uncompromising depth. Formal poems entrenched in urban landscapes crack open dialogues of racism and homophobia rampant in our culture. Multitudinous voices explore one's ability to harm and be harmed, which uniquely juxtaposes the capacity to revel in both experiences. From "Agenda": I. While two women kissed in their house I watched a jury hide bullets in a Black boy's body, all rigor mortis and bass line. I landed in Chicago, a lead box. The airport showed CNN and a Black mother could not be heard over gate changes, bistro jazz. Subtitles gathered and faded like gossip while I made my mouth vacant in my hometown. I carried a fever of insufferable noise that skin, illuminated by a hoodie, held close, a forced kin. Phillip B. Williams has authored two chapbooks: Bruised Gospels (Arts in Bloom Inc.) and Burn (YesYes Books). A Cave Canem graduate, he received scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. His work appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Poetry, the Southern Review, West Branch , and others. Phillip received his MFA in Writing as a Chancellor's Graduate Fellow at the Washington University in St. Louis. He is the poetry editor of Vinyl Poetry.

The Black Notebooks
The Black Notebooks

Author: Toi Derricotte

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 9780393319019

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An extraordinary and courageous account of race--as seen through the eyes of a light-skinned black woman and a respected American poet.

AphroChic
AphroChic

Author: Jeanine Hays

Publisher: Clarkson Potter

Published: 2022-11-15

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0593234014

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A powerful, visually stunning celebration of Black homeownership, featuring inspiring homes and family histories of notable Black Americans—including chef Alexander Smalls and actor Danielle Brooks. “The most important design book of our time.”—Stacey Lindsay, design editor, Camille Styles Jeanine Hays and Bryan Mason invite you into the intimate spaces of actors and musicians, the creative studios of artists and curators, the “boss” homes of entrepreneurs and executives, “off-the-beaten-path” homes that defy the stereotypes of urban living, and places filled with pieces handed down from generations past. Tour the creative and culturally infused Washington, DC, rowhouse of author Jason Reynolds. Take in the bursts of color and layers of memory that fill the Harlem Renaissance–inspired interior of renowned chef Alexander Smalls. And get inspired by the design of actor Danielle Brooks and her husband Dennis Gelin’s Brooklyn townhome, where Haitian heritage and South Carolina roots meet. Showcasing the amazing diversity of the Black experience through striking interiors, stories of family and community, and histories exploring the obstacles Black homeowners have faced for generations, this groundbreaking book honors the journey, recognizes the struggle, and celebrates the joy that is the Black family home.

Black Icons in Herstory
Black Icons in Herstory

Author: Darian Symoné Harvin

Publisher: Chronicle Chroma

Published: 2022-06

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 9781797216997

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Black Icons in Herstory features bold, colorfully illustrated portraits of 50 of the most admired women in the fields of music, film, literature, politics, human rights, and more. This second book in our Icons series focuses exclusively on remarkable Black women, celebrating their achievements, legacy, and continued inspiration. From Harriet Tubman to Kamala Harris; from Nina Simone to Beyoncé; from Michelle Obama to Amanda Gorman; this curated list of role models is significant. Each striking portrait illustrated by Monica Ahanonu is accompanied by a biography of each woman, highlighting her contributions to our culture and her lasting influence on herstory.