We know how busy you are and making it over to the library to see our latest displays is not always possible. So we welcome you to Ely Library Virtual Displays! Browse our latest displays below or check out past ones from our dropdown menu above! See something that interests you? Click the item title to view it in the catalogue. For digitally available items, enter your WSU credentials and enjoy! For physical items, you can place a hold in our catalogue and pick it up at your convenience!
This year, Constitution Day is celebrating Banned Books and Free Speech!
And is there a better way to than starting celebrate Banned Books Week early?! We think not. So check out our Banned Books Week display featuring Banned in Mass!
Think it can't happen here? Think again. "According to the American Library Association, Massachusetts saw 45 attempts to censor books and other library resources in 2022 — the fourth highest number of any state. That number is even higher, according to the Massachusetts Library Association's own survey, which reported 78 formal and informal challenges to books and programming last year." -WGBH
Many items in this year's display, specially marked, have been banned or challenged in libraries and schools across Massachusetts. You can scan the QR codes on these items to learn more about censorship in our state and across the country and its effect on everyone, especially marginalized communities.
Join us in the fight to Let Freedom Read!
Learn more about Constitution Day/Week activities and share your thoughts on censorship and book bans.
by Iris Gottlieb
Seeing Gender is an of-the-moment investigation into how we express and understand the complexities of gender today. Deeply researched and fully illustrated, this book demystifies an intensely personal--yet universal--facet of humanity. Illustrating a different concept on each spread, queer author and artist Iris Gottlieb touches on history, science, sociology, and her own experience. This book is an essential tool for understanding and contributing to a necessary cultural conversation, bringing clarity and reassurance to the sometimes confusing process of navigating ones' identity. Whether LGBTQ+, cisgender, or nonbinary, Seeing Gender is a must-read for intelligent, curious, want-to-be woke people who care about how we see and talk about gender and sexuality in the 21st century.
by Marianne Celano, Marietta Collins, & Ann Hazzard
and illustrated by Jennifer Zivoin
After discussing the police shooting of a local Black man with their families, Emma and Josh know how to treat a new student who looks and speaks differently than his classmates. Includes an extensive Note to Parents and Caregivers that provides general guidance about addressing racism with children, child-friendly vocabulary definitions, conversation guides, and a link to additional online resources for parents and teachers.
by Alex Gino
When people look at Melissa, they think they see a boy named George. But she knows she's not a boy. She knows she's a girl.
Melissa thinks she’ll have to keep this a secret forever. Then her teacher announces that their class play is going to be Charlotte's Web. Melissa really, really, REALLY wants to play Charlotte. But the teacher says she can't even try out for the part... because she's a boy.
With the help of her best friend, Kelly, Melissa comes up with a plan. Not just so she can be Charlotte -- but so everyone can know who she is, once and for all.
by Susan Kuklin
Author and photographer Susan Kuklin met and interviewed six transgender or gender-neutral young adults and used her considerable skills to represent them thoughtfully and respectfully before, during, and after their personal acknowledgment of gender preference. Portraits, family photographs, and candid images grace the pages, augmenting the emotional and physical journey each youth has taken. Each honest discussion and disclosure, whether joyful or heartbreaking, is completely different from the other because of family dynamics, living situations, gender, and the transition these teens make in recognition of their true selves.
by Margaret Atwood
In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian future, environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. The result is the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women. Offred is one of these, a Handmaid bound to produce children for one of Gilead’s commanders. Deprived of her husband, her child, her freedom, and even her own name, Offred clings to her memories and her will to survive. At once a scathing satire, an ominous warning, and a tour de force of narrative suspense, The Handmaid’s Tale is a modern classic.
by Shelby Criswell
Follow the daily life of one queer artist from Texas as they introduce us to the lives of ten extraordinary people. The author shares their life as a genderqueer person, living in the American South, revealing their own personal struggle for acceptance and how they were inspired by these historical LGBTQIA+ people to live their own truth. Featuring biographies of Mary Jones, We'wha, Magnus Hirschfeld, Dr. Pauli Murray, Wilmer 'Little Axe' M. Broadnax, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Carlett Brown, Nancy Cardenas, Ifti Nasim, and Simon Nkoli.
by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
Every summer, Rose goes with her mom and dad to a lake house in Awago Beach. It's their getaway, their refuge. Rosie's friend Windy is always there, too, like the little sister she never had. But this summer is different. Rose's mom and dad won't stop fighting, and when Rose and Windy seek a distraction from the drama, they find themselves with a whole new set of problems. One of the local teens - just a couple of years older than Rose and Windy - is caught up in something bad. . . Something life threatening.
It's a summer of secrets, and sorrow, and growing up, and it's a good thing Rose and Windy have each other.
This One Summer is a tremendously exciting new teen graphic novel from two creators with true literary clout. Cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, the team behind Skim, have collaborated on this gorgeous, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful story about a girl on the cusp of childhood - a story of renewal and revelation.
by George M. Johnson
In a series of personal essays, journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.
by Laurie Halse Anderson
and illustrated by Emily Carroll
"Speak up for yourself―we want to know what you have to say." From the first moment of her freshman year at Merryweather High, Melinda knows this is a big fat lie, part of the nonsense of high school. She is friendless―an outcast―because she busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops, so now nobody will talk to her, let alone listen to her. Through her work on an art project, she is finally able to face what really happened that night: She was raped by an upperclassman, a guy who still attends Merryweather and is still a threat to her. With powerful illustrations by Emily Carroll, Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak: the Graphic Novel comes alive for new audiences and fans of the classic novel.
by Alice Walker
A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early-twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence. Through a series of letters spanning nearly thirty years, first from Celie to God, then from the sisters to each other, the novel draws readers into a rich and memorable portrayal of Black women—their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery.
Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, The Color Purple breaks the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, and carries readers on an epic and spirit-affirming journey toward transformation, redemption, and love.
by Maia Kobabe
In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears.
Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity—what it means and how to think about it—for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.
by Mike Curato
I know I’m not gay. Gay boys like other boys. I hate boys. They’re mean, and scary, and they’re always destroying something or saying something dumb or both.
I hate that word. Gay. It makes me feel . . . unsafe.
It's the summer between middle school and high school, and Aiden Navarro is away at camp. Everyone's going through changes―but for Aiden, the stakes feel higher. As he navigates friendships, deals with bullies, and spends time with Elias (a boy he can't stop thinking about), he finds himself on a path of self-discovery and acceptance.
by Ashley Hope Pérez
"This is East Texas, and there's lines. Lines you cross, lines you don't cross. That clear?" New London, TX. 1937. Naomi Vargas is Mexican American. Wash Fuller is Black. These teens know the town's divisive racism better than anyone. But sometimes the attraction between two people is so powerful it breaks through even the most entrenched color lines. And the consequences can be explosive.
Naomi and Wash dare to defy the rules, and the New London school explosion serves as a ticking time bomb in the background. Can their love survive both prejudice and tragedy?
Race, romance, and family converge in this riveting novel that transplants Romeo and Juliet to a bitterly segregated Texas town. Includes a fascinating author's note detailing the process of research and writing about voices that have largely been excluded from historical accounts.
by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely
A bag of chips. That’s all sixteen-year-old Rashad is looking for at the corner bodega. What he finds instead is a fist-happy cop, Paul Galluzzo, who mistakes Rashad for a shoplifter, mistakes Rashad’s pleadings that he’s stolen nothing for belligerence, mistakes Rashad’s resistance to leave the bodega as resisting arrest, mistakes Rashad’s every flinch at every punch the cop throws as further resistance and refusal to STAY STILL as ordered. But how can you stay still when someone is pounding your face into the concrete pavement?
There were witnesses: Quinn Collins—a varsity basketball player and Rashad’s classmate who has been raised by Paul since his own father died in Afghanistan—and a video camera. Soon the beating is all over the news and Paul is getting threatened with accusations of prejudice and racial brutality. Quinn refuses to believe that the man who has basically been his savior could possibly be guilty. But then Rashad is absent. And absent again. And again. And the basketball team—half of whom are Rashad’s best friends—start to take sides. As does the school. And the town. Simmering tensions threaten to explode as Rashad and Quinn are forced to face decisions and consequences they had never considered before.
Written in tandem by two award-winning authors, this four-starred reviews tour de force shares the alternating perspectives of Rashad and Quinn as the complications from that single violent moment, the type taken from the headlines, unfold and reverberate to highlight an unwelcome truth.
by Angie Thomas
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed.
Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr.
But what Starr does—or does not—say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.
by Jessica Herthel & Jazz Jennings
From the time she was two years old, Jazz knew that she had a girl's brain in a boy's body. She loved pink and dressing up as a mermaid and didn't feel like herself in boys' clothing. This confused her family, until they took her to a doctor who said that Jazz was transgender and that she was born that way. Jazz's story is based on her real-life experience and she tells it in a simple, clear way that will be appreciated by picture book readers, their parents, and teachers.
by Victoria Jamieson
For most of her twelve years, Astrid has done everything with her best friend Nicole. But after Astrid falls in love with roller derby and signs up for derby camp, Nicole decides to go to dance camp instead. And so begins the most difficult summer of Astrid's life as she struggles to keep up with the older girls at camp, hang on to the friend she feels slipping away, and cautiously embark on a new friendship. As the end of summer nears and her first roller derby bout (and junior high!) draws closer, Astrid realizes that maybe she is strong enough to handle the bout, a lost friendship, and middle school . . . in short, strong enough to be a roller girl.
In this graphic novel debut that earned a Newbery Honor and five-starred reviews, real-life derby girl Victoria Jamieson has created an inspiring coming-of-age story about friendship, perseverance, and girl power!
by David Levithan
The based-on-true-events story of Harry and Craig, two 17-year-olds who are no longer a couple yet are about to take part in a 32-hour marathon of kissing to set a new Guinness World Record -- all of which is narrated by a Greek Chorus of the generation of gay men lost to AIDS. While the two increasingly dehydrated and sleep-deprived boys are locking lips, they become a focal point in the lives of other teen boys dealing with languishing long-term relationships, coming out, navigating gender identity, and falling deeper into the digital rabbit hole of gay hookup sites -- all while the kissing former couple tries to figure out their own feelings for each other.
by Sherman Alexie
Bestselling author Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.
Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author's own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by Ellen Forney that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live.
by Jay Asher
Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a strange package with his name on it lying on his porch. Inside he discovers several cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker—his classmate and crush—who committed suicide two weeks earlier. Hannah's voice tells him that there are thirteen reasons why she decided to end her life. Clay is one of them. If he listens, he'll find out why.
Clay spends the night crisscrossing his town with Hannah as his guide. He becomes a firsthand witness to Hannah's pain, and as he follows Hannah’s recorded words throughout his town, what he discovers changes his life forever.
Need to talk? Call 1-800-273-TALK (8255) anytime if you are in the United States. It’s free and confidential.
Find more resources at 13reasonswhy.info.
Find out how you can help someone in crisis at bethe1to.com.
by Toni Morrison
Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
by Toni Morrison
In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence. This remarkable reimagining of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning reveals the history of racist ideas in America, and inspires hope for an antiracist future. It takes you on a race journey from then to now, shows you why we feel how we feel, and why the poison of racism lingers. It also proves that while racist ideas have always been easy to fabricate and distribute, they can also be discredited.
Through a gripping, fast-paced, and energizing narrative written by beloved award-winner Jason Reynolds, this book shines a light on the many insidious forms of racist ideas--and on ways readers can identify and stamp out racist thoughts in their daily lives.
by Baruti K. Kafele
How do you ensure that no student is invisible in your classroom? How do you make the distinction between equity as the vehicle versus equity as the goal for each of your students? What measures do you take to ensure that you are growing as a culturally relevant practitioner? Can your students, particularly your Black students, articulate, beyond emotional reactions, the injustices that surround them?
The foregoing are not trick questions. Rather, they are those that best-selling author Baruti K. Kafele poses and on which he suggests you deeply reflect as a teacher of Black students. The Equity & Social Justice Education 50 will help you understand the importance of having an equity mindset when teaching students generally and when teaching Black students in particular. It defines social justice education and sheds light on the issues and challenges that Black people face, as well as the successes they've achieved, providing you with a pathway to infusing social justice education into your lesson plans. And along the way, Kafele reveals personal experiences from his distant and recent pasts to highlight how important it is that your Black students see themselves in all aspects of education every day.
You, the teacher, play a critical role in your students' success. The questions that Kafele asks in this book will help enhance your own understanding of race, systemic racism, and racial justice and guide you in developing strategies and lessons that speak to Black students in ways that truly support their achievement.
by Robie H. Harris
Provides accurate, lucid, and unbiased answers to almost every conceivable question on sex, including birth control and AIDS, that children may ask. Two cartoon characters, a bird and a bee have, often humorous, questions of their own.
by Robie H. Harris
Uses bird and bee cartoon characters to present straightforward explanations of topics related to sexual development, love, reproduction, adoption, sexually transmitted diseases, and more.
by Cory Silverberg
A comic book for kids that includes children and families of all makeups, orientations, and gender identities, Sex Is a Funny Word is an essential resource about bodies, gender, and sexuality for children ages 8 to 10 as well as their parents and caregivers. Much more than the "facts of life" or “the birds and the bees," Sex Is a Funny Word opens up conversations between young people and their caregivers in a way that allows adults to convey their values and beliefs while providing information about boundaries, safety, and joy.
by Lisa Hanawalt
Hot Dog Taste Test serves up Lisa Hanawalt's devastatingly funny comics, saliva-stimulating art, and deliciously screwball lists as she skewers the pomposities of foodie subculture. From the James Beard Award-winning cartoonist and production designer/producer of Bojack Horseman, Hot Dog Taste Test dishes out five-star laughs as Hanawalt keenly muses on pop culture, relationships, and the animal in all of us.
by Christopher Moore
San Francisco, 1947. Bartender Sammy “Two Toes” Tiffin and the rest of the Cookie’s Coffee Irregulars—a ragtag bunch of working mugs last seen in Noir—are on the hustle: they’re trying to open a driving school; shanghai an abusive Swedish stevedore; get Mable, the local madam, and her girls to a Christmas party at the State Hospital without alerting the overzealous head of the S.F.P.D. vice squad; all while Sammy’s girlfriend, Stilton (a.k.a. the Cheese), and her “Wendy the Welder” gal pals are using their wartime shipbuilding skills on a secret project that might be attracting the attention of some government Men in Black. And, oh yeah, someone is murdering the city’s drag kings and club owner Jimmy Vasco is sure she’s next on the list and wants Sammy to find the killer.
Meanwhile, Eddie “Moo Shoes” Shu has been summoned by his Uncle Ho to help save his opium den from Squid Kid Tang, a vicious gangster who is determined to retrieve a priceless relic: an ancient statue of the powerful Rain Dragon that Ho stole from one of the fighting tongs forty years earlier. And if Eddie blows it, he just might call down the wrath of that powerful magical creature on all of Fog City.
by Stephen Chbosky
The critically acclaimed debut novel from Stephen Chbosky, Perks follows observant “wallflower” Charlie as he charts a course through the strange world between adolescence and adulthood. First dates, family drama, and new friends. Sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Devastating loss, young love, and life on the fringes. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it, Charlie must learn to navigate those wild and poignant roller-coaster days known as growing up.
by Mark Haddon
Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother.
by Sapphire
Precious Jones, an illiterate sixteen-year-old, has up until now been invisible to the father who rapes her and the mother who batters her and to the authorities who dismiss her as just one more of Harlem's casualties. But when Precious, pregnant with a second child by her father, meets a determined and radical teacher, we follow her on a journey of education and enlightenment as she learns not only how to write about her life, but how to make it truly her own for the first time.
by Raina Telgemeier
Callie loves theater. And while she would totally try out for her middle school's production of Moon over Mississippi, she can't really sing. Instead she's the set designer for the drama department's stage crew, and this year she's determined to create a set worthy of Broadway on a middle-school budget. But how can she, when she doesn't know much about carpentry, ticket sales are down, and the crew members are having trouble working together? Not to mention the onstage AND offstage drama that occurs once the actors are chosen. And when two cute brothers enter the picture, things get even crazier!
by Anastasia Higginbotham
A white child sees a news report of a white police officer shooting and killing a person with brown skin who had their hands up. "We don't see color," the child's mother says, but the child senses a deeper truth. An afternoon in the library uncovers the reality of white supremacy in America. The child connects to the opportunity and their responsibility to dismantle white supremacy - for the sake of their own liberation out of ignorance and injustice. --Provided by author's website
by Jonathan Evison
For Mike Muñoz, life has been a whole lot of waiting for something to happen. Not too many years out of high school and still doing menial work--and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew--he’s smart enough to know that he’s got to be the one to shake things up if he’s ever going to change his life. But how? He’s not qualified for much of anything. He has no particular talents, although he is stellar at handling a lawn mower and wielding clipping shears. But now that career seems to be behind him. So what’s next for Mike Muñoz?
Funny, biting, sweet, and ultimately inspiring novel, bestselling author Jonathan Evison's coming-of-age novel evokes the lives of working class people with compassion and honesty.
by Marjane Satrapi
Originally published to wide critical acclaim in France, where it elicited comparisons to Art Spiegelman's Maus, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's wise, funny, and heartbreaking memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah's regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iran's last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country. Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran: of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life and of the enormous toll repressive regimes exact on the individual spirit. Marjane's child's-eye-view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a stunning reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, through laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love.
by John Steinbeck
Tells a story about the strange relationship of two migrant workers who are able to realize their dreams of an easy life until one of them succumbs to his weakness for soft, helpless creatures and strangles a farmer's wife.
by Gayle E. Pitman
In a wildly whimsical, validating, and exuberant reflection of the LGBTQ+ community, This Day In June welcomes readers to experience a pride celebration and share in a day when we are all united. Also included is a Note to Parents and Other Caregivers with information on how to talk to children about sexual orientation and gender identity in age-appropriate ways as well as a Reading Guide chock-full of facts about LGBTQ+ history and culture.
by Daniel Haack
A prince and a knight in shining armor find true love in each other's embrace after fighting a dragon together.
by Juno Dawson
There's a long-running joke that, after coming out as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or intersex person, you should receive a membership card and instruction manual. This is that instruction manual. You're welcome. Inside this revised and updated edition, you'll find the answers to all the questions you ever wanted to ask: from sex to politics, hooking up to stereotypes, coming out and more. This candid, funny, and uncensored exploration of sexuality and what it's like to grow up LGBTQIA+ also includes real stories from people across the gender and sexual spectrums, not to mention hilarious illustrations.
volumes 1-3
by
When two soldiers from opposite sides of a never-ending galactic war fall in love, they risk everything to bring a fragile new life into a dangerous old universe. From New York Times bestselling writer Brian K. Vaughan (Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina) and critically acclaimed artist Fiona Staples (Mystery Society, North 40), Saga is the sweeping tale of one young family fighting to find their place in the worlds. Fantasy and science fiction are wed like never before in this sexy, subversive drama for adults.
by Justin Richardson & Peter Parnell
and illustrated by Henry Cole
At the penguin house at the Central Park Zoo, two penguins named Roy and Silo were a little bit different from the others. But their desire for a family was the same. And with the help of a kindly zookeeper, Roy and Silo get the chance to welcome a baby penguin of their very own.
by Dara Horn
A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living.
Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture―and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks―Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present.
Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life―trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study―to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past―making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.
by Rainbow Rowell
Set over the course of one school year in 1986, this is the story of two star-crossed misfits-smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try. When Eleanor meets Park, you'll remember your own first love-and just how hard it pulled you under.
by Gabrielle Stanley Blair
Why abortion is a men's issue. By focusing on the role men play in unwanted pregnancy, Ejaculate Responsibly gets us out of the destructive loop centered on issues like when life begins and the injustice of legislating women's bodies and presents a powerfully fair and effective way out of the abortion impasse. Highly readable, funny, and unflinching, the book's 28 arguments walk readers through the basics of fertility (men are 50 times more fertile than women). The unfair burden placed on women when it comes to preventing pregnancy (90% of the birth control market is for women). The wrongheaded stigmas around birth control for men (condoms make sex less pleasurable, vasectomies are scary and emasculating). And the harsh reality that men, who are fertile 100% of the time, take so little responsibility for preventing pregnancy. In a post-Roe world, this kind of negligence--an irresponsible ejaculation--is tragically wrong.
by Khaled Hosseini
An epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the atrocities of the present. The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption, and it is also about the power of fathers over sons-their love, their sacrifices, their lies.
by Jeannette Walls
Journalist Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary and their four children lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family. When the money ran out, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town Rex had tried to escape. As the dysfunction escalated, the children had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they found the resources and will to leave home. Yet Walls describes her parents with deep affection in this tale of unconditional love in a family that, despite its profound flaws, gave her the fiery determination to carve out a successful life.
by John Green
Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words—and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet François Rabelais called the “Great Perhaps.” Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young, who will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps.
Looking for Alaska brilliantly chronicles the indelible impact one life can have on another. A modern classic, this stunning debut marked #1 bestselling author John Green’s arrival as a groundbreaking new voice in contemporary fiction.
by Robert Cormier
A high school freshman discovers the devastating consequences of refusing to join in the school's annual fund raising drive and arousing the wrath of the school bullies.
by Elizabeth Acevedo
Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking.
But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about.
With Mami’s determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school’s slam poetry club, she doesn’t know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can’t stop thinking about performing her poems.
Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent.
by Aldous Huxley
Huxley's profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order—all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. “A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine” (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history’s keenest observers of human nature and civilization.
Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as a thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature. Written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New World likewise speaks to a 21st-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites.
by Harper Lee
One of the most cherished stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father—a crusading local lawyer—risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.
by Stephenie Meyer
Isabella Swan's move to Forks, a small, perpetually rainy town in Washington, could have been the most boring move she ever made. But once she meets the mysterious and alluring Edward Cullen, Isabella's life takes a thrilling and terrifying turn.
Up until now, Edward has managed to keep his vampire identity a secret in the small community he lives in, but now nobody is safe, especially Isabella, the person Edward holds most dear. The lovers find themselves balanced precariously on the point of a knife -- between desire and danger.
Deeply romantic and extraordinarily suspenseful, Twilight captures the struggle between defying our instincts and satisfying our desires. This is a love story with bite.
by J.D. Salinger
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caufield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.
by Abigail Shrier
Argues gender dysphoria is a cultural phenomenon rather than an actual condition needing medical treatment. The author offers advice to parents of girls and young women who come out as transgender--who she argues are in thrall to trans YouTube stars and gender-affirming educators and therapists pushing life-changing interventions that are medically unnecessary and can cause permanent infertility--and suggests ways they can protect their children from irreversible damage.
-- Inside jacket flap:"The 'trans' epidemic sweeping teenage girls. Until just a few years ago, gender dysphoria -- severe discomfort in one's biological sex -- was vanishingly rare. It was typically found in less than .01 percent of the population, emerged in early childhood, and afflicted males almost exclusively. But today whole groups of female friends in colleges, high schools, and even middle schools across the country are coming out as 'transgender.' These are girls who had never experienced any discomfort in their biological sex until they heard a coming-out story from a speaker at a school assembly or discovered the internet community of trans 'influencers.' Unsuspecting parents are awakening to find their daughters in thrall to hip trans YouTube stars and 'gender-affirming' educators and therapists who push life-changing interventions on young girls -- including medically unnecessary double mastectomies and puberty blockers that can cause permanent infertility. Abigail Shrier, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, has dug deep into the trans epidemic, talking to the girls, their agonized parents, and the counselors and the doctors who enable gender transitions, as well as to 'detransitioners' - young women who bitterly regret what they have done to themselves. Coming out as transgender immediately boosts these girls' social status, Shrier finds, but once they take the first steps of transition, it is not easy to walk back. She offers urgently needed advice about how parents can protect their daughters. A generation of girls is at risk. Abigail Shrier's essential book will help you understand what the trans craze is and how you can inoculate your child against it - or how to retrieve her from this dangerous path.
Help us defeat censorship! All the books in this display have been banned or challenged since 2001. Most are from the last decade of top ten most challenged lists. Not only is this issue not going away, bans and challenges are increasing exponentially every year! It is up to us to fight for fREADom!
To learn more about books that have been banned/challenged, check out the American Library Association's Banned & Challenged Books.
Visit Banned Books Week to learn more about getting involved.
Celebrate Black History by learning more about this year's theme, Black Resistance, and the ways in which "Black people have sought . . . to nurture and protect Black lives, and for autonomy of their physical and intellectual bodies through armed resistance, voluntary emigration, nonviolence, education, literature, sports, media, and legislation/politics."
And check out our display of online resources featuring Black Resistance through memoirs, art, literature, essays, music, and so much more.
You can also find much more in our catalogue, databases, and online journals. For help researching this theme or other Black History topics, contact our Reference Desk at 413-572-5234 or askus@westfield.ma.edu.
edited by Akinyele Umoja, Karin L. Stanford, and Jasmin A. Young
by Garrett Felber
Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. In this bold new political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. In doing so, he reveals a multifaceted freedom struggle that focused as much on policing and prisons as on school desegregation and voting rights. The book examines efforts to build broad-based grassroots coalitions among liberals, radicals, and nationalists to oppose the carceral state and struggle for local Black self-determination. It captures the ambiguous place of the Nation of Islam specifically, and Black nationalist organizing more broadly, during an era which has come to be defined by nonviolent resistance, desegregation campaigns, and racial liberalism.
By provocatively documenting the interplay between law enforcement and Muslim communities, Felber decisively shows how state repression and Muslim organizing laid the groundwork for the modern carceral state and the contemporary prison abolition movement which opposes it. Exhaustively researched, the book illuminates new sites and forms of political struggle as Muslims prayed under surveillance in prison yards and used courtroom political theater to put the state on trial. This history captures familiar figures in new ways--Malcolm X the courtroom lawyer and A. Philip Randolph the Harlem coalition builder--while highlighting the forgotten organizing of rank-and-file activists in prisons such as Martin Sostre. This definitive account is an urgent reminder that Islamophobia, state surveillance, and police violence have deep roots in the state repression of Black communities during the mid-20th century.
edited by Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell
by Funké Aladejebi
In post–World War II Canada, black women’s positions within the teaching profession served as sites of struggle and conflict as the nation worked to address the needs of its diversifying population. From their entry into teachers’ college through their careers in the classroom and administration, black women educators encountered systemic racism and gender barriers at every step. So they worked to change the system. Using oral narratives to tell the story of black access and education in Ontario between the 1940s and the 1980s, Schooling the System provides textured insight into how issues of race, gender, class, geographic origin, and training shaped women’s distinct experiences within the profession. By valuing women’s voices and lived experiences, Funké Aladejebi illustrates that black women, as a diverse group, made vital contributions to the creation and development of anti-racist education in Canada. As cultural mediators within Ontario school systems, these women circumvented subtle and overt forms of racial and social exclusion to create resistive teaching methods that centred black knowledges and traditions. Within their wider communities and activist circles, they fought to change entrenched ideas about what Canadian citizenship should look like. As schools continue to grapple with creating diverse educational programs for all Canadians, Schooling the System is a timely excavation of the meaningful contributions of black women educators who helped create equitable policies and practices in schools and communities.
by Monica M. White
In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort.
Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.
by Benjamin Rex LaPoe II and Victoria L. LaPoe
Resistance Advocacy as News: Digital Black Press Covers the Tea Party examines the Black and mainstream press’s digital interpretations of the Tea Party during President Barack Obama’s first term. The Tea Party narrative and the white ideologies disseminated by conservative groups was, and continues to be, an intricate story for journalists to tell. This book tracks coverage of the Tea Party from the modern group’s beginning in early February of 2009 until two weeks after the 2012 general presidential election in November. While many mainstream journalists either fail to recognize, or ignore all together, the racial component that the Tea Party poses to Black solidarity, this book shows that Black reporters working for the Black press absolutely recognize the racial component and provide more thorough discussions than their mainstream counterparts. Historically, the Black press has existed to fill holes of misrepresentation in the mainstream press; to that end, this book addresses questions surrounding the ongoing necessity of the Black press and whether our society is “postracial,” combining a quantitative analysis of implicit racial frames with a qualitative analysis of resonant myth, and providing empirical evidence that Black people still struggle to have their voices heard in the mainstream press.
by Yasuhiro Katagiri
In Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace, Yasuhiro Katagiri offers the first scholarly work to illuminate an important but largely unstudied aspect of U.S. civil rights history -- the collaborative and mutually beneficial relationship between professional anti-Communists in the North and segregationist politicians in the South.
In 1954, the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Soon after -- while the political demise of U.S. senator Joseph R. McCarthy unfolded -- northern anti-Communists looked to the South as a promising new territory in which they could expand their support base and continue their cause. Southern segregationists embraced the assistance, and the methods, of these Yankee collaborators, and utilized the "northern messiahs" in executing a massive resistance to the Supreme Court's desegregation decrees and the civil rights movement in general. Southern white leadership framed black southerners' crusades for social justice and human dignity as a foreign scheme directed by nefarious outside agitators, "race-mixers," and, worse, outright subversives and card-carrying Communists.
Based on years of extensive archival research, Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace explains how a southern version of McCarthyism became part of the opposition to the civil rights movement in the South, an analysis that leads us to a deeper understanding and appreciation for what the freedom movement -- and those who struggled for equality -- fought to overcome.
by Celeste-Marie Bernier
Across the centuries, the acts and arts of black heroism have inspired a provocative, experimental, and self-reflexive intellectual, political, and aesthetic tradition. In Characters of Blood, Celeste-Marie Bernier illuminates the ways in which six iconic men and women―Toussaint Louverture, Nathaniel Turner, Sengbe Pieh, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman―challenged the dominant conceptualizations of their histories and played a key role in the construction of an alternative visual and textual archive.
While these figures have survived as symbolic touchstones, Bernier contends that scholars have yet to do justice to their complex bodies of work or their multifaceted lives. Adopting a comparative and transatlantic approach to her subjects’ remarkable life stories, the author analyzes a wealth of creative work―from literature, drama, and art to public monuments, religious tracts, and historical narratives―to show how it represents enslaved heroism throughout the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. In mapping this black diasporic tradition of resistance, Bernier intends not only to reveal the limitations and distortions on record but also to complicate the definitions of black heroism that have been restricted by ideological boundaries between heroic and anti-heroic sites and sights of struggle.
by Pamela E. Brooks
In the mid-1950s, as many developing nations sought independence from colonial rule, black women in the American South and in South Africa launched parallel campaigns to end racial injustice within their respective communities. Just as the dignified obstinacy of Mrs. Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, the 20,000 South African women who marched in Pretoria a year later to protest the pass laws signaled a new wave of resistance to the system of apartheid. In both places women who had previously been consigned to subordinate roles brought fresh leadership to the struggle for political freedom and social equality. In this book, Pamela E. Brooks tells their story, documenting the extraordinary achievements of otherwise ordinary women.In comparing the experiences of black women activists in two different parts of the African diaspora, Brooks draws heavily on oral histories that provide clear, and often painful, insight into their backgrounds, their motives, their hopes, and their fears. We learn how black women from all walks of life―domestic and factory workers, householders, teachers, union organizers, churchwomen, clubwomen, rural and urban dwellers alike―had to overcome their class differences and work through the often difficult gender relations within their families and communities. Yet eventually they came together to forge their own political organizations, such as the Women's Political Council and the Federation of South African Women, or joined organizations of women and men, such as the Montgomery Improvement Association and the African National Congress, to advance the common agenda of black liberation.By tracing the dual rise of political consciousness and activism among the black women of the U.S. South and South Africa, Brooks not only illuminates patterns that have long been overlooked but places that shared history within the context of a larger global struggle to bring an end to the vestiges of European colonialism.
by John Peffer
Black South African artists have typically had their work labeled "African art" or "township art," qualifiers that, when contrasted with simply "modernist art," have been used to marginalize their work both in South Africa and internationally.
In Art and the End of Apartheid, John Peffer considers in-depth the work of black South African artists in the decades leading up to the end of apartheid in 1994. Peffer examines painting and graphic art, photography, avant-garde and performance art, and popular and protest art through artist collectives, such as the Thupelo Art Project and the Medu Art Ensemble, and individuals such as Durant Sihlali and Santu Mofokeng. He shows how South African artists imagined what "postapartheid" could mean during the time of apartheid, even as they struggled with immediate issues of censorship, militancy, street violence and torture, and, more broadly, the problem of self-representation and the social role of art.
In defiance of the racial polarization that surrounded them, Peffer describes how South African artists created "grey areas," nonracialized spaces and hybrid art forms in which both black and white South Africans collaborated. Beyond the boundaries of apartheid, these artists forged connections at home and abroad that modeled a future, more democratic society.
by Shannen L. Hill
“When you say, ‘Black is Beautiful,’ what in fact you are saying . . . is: Man, you are okay as you are; begin to look upon yourself as a human being.” With such statements, Stephen Biko became the voice of Black Consciousness. And with Biko’s brutal death in the custody of the South African police, he became a martyr, an enduring symbol of the horrors of apartheid. Through the lens of visual culture, Biko’s Ghost reveals how the man and the ideology he promoted have profoundly influenced liberation politics and race discourse—in South Africa and around the globe—ever since.
Tracing the linked histories of Black Consciousness and its most famous proponent, Biko’s Ghost explores the concepts of unity, ancestry, and action that lie at the heart of the ideology and the man. It challenges the dominant historical view of Black Consciousness as ineffectual or racially exclusive, suppressed on the one side by the apartheid regime and on the other by the African National Congress.
Engaging theories of trauma and representation, and icon and ideology, Shannen L. Hill considers the martyred Biko as an embattled icon, his image portrayals assuming different shapes and political meanings in different hands. So, too, does she illuminate how Black Consciousness worked behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, a decade of heightened popular unrest and state censorship. She shows how—in streams of imagery that continue to multiply nearly forty years on—Biko’s visage and the ongoing life of Black Consciousness served as instruments through which artists could combat the abuses of apartheid and unsettle the “rainbow nation” that followed.
by Lakeyta M. Bonnette
edited by Charity Marsh and Mark V. Campbell
We Still Here maps the edges of hip-hop culture and makes sense of the rich and diverse ways people create and engage with hip-hop music within Canadian borders. Contributors to the collection explore the power of institutions, mainstream hegemonies, and the processes of historical formation in the evolution of hip-hop culture. Throughout, the volume foregrounds the generative issues of gender, identity, and power, in particular in relation to the Black diaspora and Indigenous cultures. The contributions of artists in the scene are front and centre in this collection, exposing the distinct inner mechanics of Canadian hip hop from a variety of perspectives. By amplifying rarely heard voices within hip-hop culture, We Still Here argues for its power to disrupt national formations and highlights the people and communities who make hip hop happen.
edited by Julia S. Jordan-Zachery and Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd
This book explores how Diasporic Black women engage in politics, highlighting three dimensions―citizenship, power, and justice―that are foundational to intersectionality theory and politics as developed by Black women and other women of color. By extending beyond particular time periods, locations, and singular definitions of politics, Black Women in Politics sets itself apart in the field of women’s and gender studies in three ways: by focusing on contemporary Black politics not only in the United States, but also the African Diaspora; by showcasing politics along a broad trajectory, including social movements, formal politics, public policy, media studies, and epistemology; and by including a multidisciplinary range of scholars, with a strong concentration of work by political scientists, a group whose work is often excluded or limited in edited collections. The final result expands our repertoire of methodological tools and concepts for discussing and assessing Black women’s lives, the conditions under which they live, their labor, and the politics they enact to improve their circumstances.
by Sarah-Jane Mathieu
North of the Color Line examines life in Canada for the estimated 5,000 blacks, both African Americans and West Indians, who immigrated to Canada after the end of Reconstruction in the United States. Through the experiences of black railway workers and their union, the Order of Sleeping Car Porters, Sarah-Jane Mathieu connects social, political, labor, immigration, and black diaspora history during the Jim Crow era.
By World War I, sleeping car portering had become the exclusive province of black men. White railwaymen protested the presence of the black workers and insisted on a segregated workforce. Using the firsthand accounts of former sleeping car porters, Mathieu shows that porters often found themselves leading racial uplift organizations, galvanizing their communities, and becoming the bedrock of civil rights activism.
Examining the spread of segregation laws and practices in Canada, whose citizens often imagined themselves as devoid of racism, Mathieu historicizes Canadian racial attitudes, and explores how black migrants brought their own sensibilities about race to Canada, participating in and changing political discourse there.
by Jacqueline Jenkinson
The riots that broke out in various British port cities in 1919 were a dramatic manifestation of a wave of global unrest that affected Britain, parts of its empire, continental Europe and North America during and in the wake of the First World War. During the riots, crowds of white working-class people targeted black workers, their families and black-owned businesses and property. One of the chief sources of violent confrontation in the run-down port areas was the 'colour' bar implemented by the sailors' trades unions campaigning to keep black, Arab, and Asian sailors off British ships in a time of increasing job competition. Black 1919 sets out the economic and social causes of the riots and their impact on Britain's relationship with its empire and its colonial subjects. The riots are also considered within the wider context of rioting elsewhere on the fringes of the Atlantic world as black people came in increased numbers into urban and metropolitan settings where they competed with working-class white people for jobs and housing during and after the First World War. The book details the events of the port riots in Britain, with chapters devoted to assessing the motivations and make-up of the rioting crowds, examining police procedures during the riots, considering the court cases that followed, and looking at the longer-term consequences for the black British workers and their families. Black 1919 is a stark and timely reminder of the violent racist conflict that emerged after the First World War and the shockwaves that reverberated around the Empire.
by A. Sivanandan
A collection of A Sivanandan's writings which looks at the history of black struggles against British racism from the 1940s to the uprisings of Brixton and Toxteth in the 1980s. Sivanandan's influence extends well beyond the limits of formal acknowledgement. His ideas and writings have been consistently quoted, copied, and plagiarised. He was both an intellectual and an activist; his work has made a profound impact on the political life of Britain from the 1970s to the 2010s. This collection of his writings ranges widely - over the history of black struggles against British racism from the 1940s to the uprisings of Brixton and Toxleth in 1981; the Black Panthers; immigration and race policies of British governments; and `the liberation of the black intellectual', including essays on individuals such as James Baldwin, Angela Davis and Paul Robeson.
by Elizabeth Reich
Militant Visions examines how, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the cinematic figure of the black soldier helped change the ways American moviegoers saw black men, for the first time presenting African Americans as vital and integrated members of the nation. In the process, Elizabeth Reich reveals how the image of the proud and powerful African American serviceman was crafted by an unexpected alliance of government propagandists, civil rights activists, and black filmmakers. Contextualizing the figure in a genealogy of black radicalism and internationalism, Reich shows the evolving images of black soldiers to be inherently transnational ones, shaped by the displacements of diaspora, Third World revolutionary philosophy, and a legacy of black artistry and performance.
Offering a nuanced reading of a figure that was simultaneously conservative and radical, Reich considers how the cinematic black soldier lent a human face to ongoing debates about racial integration, black internationalism, and American militarism. Militant Visions thus not only presents a new history of how American cinema represented race, but also demonstrates how film images helped to make history, shaping the progress of the civil rights movement itself.
by Tara T. Green
In Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song, Tara T. Green turns to twentieth- and recent twenty-first-century representations of the Middle Passage created by African-descended artists and writers. Examining how these writers and performers revised and reimagined the Middle Passage in their work, Green argues that they recognized it as a historical and geographical site of trauma as well as a symbol for a place of understanding and change. Their work represents the legacy African captives left for resisting “social death” (the idea that Black life does not matter), but it also highlights strong resistance to that social death (the idea that it does matter).
Exploring the presence of water and its impact on African descendants, Reimagining the Middle Passage offers fresh analyses of Alex Haley’s Roots and the television adaptations; the history of flooding in Black communities in literature such as Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and Paule Marshall’s Praise song for the Widow, in blues songs, and in television shows such as Treme; and stories of resistance found in myths associated with Marie Laveau and flying Africans.
by Christina N. Baker
Christina N. Baker’s Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance is the first book-length analysis of representations of Black femaleness in the feature films of Black women filmmakers. These filmmakers resist dominant ideologies about Black womanhood, deliberately and creatively reconstructing meanings of Blackness that draw from their personal experiences and create new symbolic meaning of Black femaleness within mainstream culture. Addressing social issues such as the exploitation of Black women in the entertainment industry, the impact of mass incarceration on Black women, political activism, and violence, these films also engage with personal issues as complex as love, motherhood, and sexual identity. Baker argues that their counter-hegemonic representations have the potential to transform the narratives surrounding Black femaleness. At the intersection of Black feminism and womanism, Baker develops a “womanist artistic standpoint” theory, drawing from the work of Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Kimberlé Crenshaw.
Analyzing the cultural texts of filmmakers such as Ava DuVernay, Tanya Hamilton, Kasi Lemmons, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and Dee Rees—and including interviews she conducted with three of the filmmakers—Baker emphasizes the importance of applying an intersectional perspective that centers on the shared experiences of Black women and the role of film as a form of artistic expression and a tool of social resistance.
edited by Akwugo Emejulu and Francesca Sobande
This book brings together activists, artists, and scholars of color to show how Black feminism and Afrofeminism are being practiced in Europe today, exploring their differing social positions in various countries, and exploring the ways in which they organize and mobilize to imagine a Black feminist Europe.
Deeply aware that they are constructed as “others” living in a racialized and hierarchical continent, the contributors explore gender, class, sexuality, and legal status to show that they are both invisible—presumed to be absent from and irrelevant to European societies—and hyper-visible, assumed to be passive and sexualized, angry and irrational.
In imagining a future outside the neocolonial frames and practices of contemporary Europe, this book explores a variety of critical spaces including motherhood and the home, friendships and intimate relationships, activism and community, and literature, dance, and film.
edited and with an introduction by Félix Germain and Silyane Larcher
by Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel
Black women living in the French empire played a key role in the decolonial movements of the mid-twentieth century. Thinkers and activists, these women lived lives of commitment and risk that landed them in war zones and concentration camps and saw them declared enemies of the state. Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel mines published writings and untapped archives to reveal the anticolonialist endeavors of seven women. Though often overlooked today, Suzanne Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Eugénie Éboué-Tell, Jane Vialle, Andrée Blouin, Aoua Kéita, and Eslanda Robeson took part in a forceful transnational movement. Their activism and thought challenged France's imperial system by shaping forms of citizenship that encouraged multiple cultural and racial identities. Expanding the possibilities of belonging beyond national and even Francophone borders, these women imagined new pan-African and pan-Caribbean identities informed by black feminist intellectual frameworks and practices. The visions they articulated also shifted the idea of citizenship itself, replacing a single form of collective identity and political participation with an expansive plurality of forms of belonging.
by Riché Richardson
edited by Mary E. Frederickson and Delores M. Walters
Inspired by the searing story of Margaret Garner, the escaped slave who in 1856 slit her daughter's throat rather than have her forced back into slavery, the essays in this collection focus on historical and contemporary examples of slavery and women's resistance to oppression from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Each chapter uses Garner's example--the real-life narrative behind Toni Morrison's Beloved and the opera Margaret Garner--as a thematic foundation for an interdisciplinary conversation about gendered resistance in locations including Brazil, Yemen, India, and the United States.
Contributors are Nailah Randall Bellinger, Olivia Cousins, Mary E. Frederickson, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, Carolyn Mazloomi, Cathy McDaniels-Wilson, Catherine Roma, Huda Seif, S. Pearl Sharp, Raquel Luciana de Souza, Jolene Smith, Veta Tucker, Delores M. Walters, Diana Williams, and Kristine Yohe.
by Kevin Quashie
African American culture is often considered expressive, dramatic, and even defiant. In The Sovereignty of Quiet, Kevin Quashie explores quiet as a different kind of expressiveness, one which characterizes a person’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, and fears. Quiet is a metaphor for the inner life, and as such, enables a more nuanced understanding of black culture.
The book revisits such iconic moments as Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and Elizabeth Alexander’s reading at the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama. Quashie also examines such landmark texts as Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Toni Morrison’s Sula to move beyond the emphasis on resistance, and to suggest that concepts like surrender, dreaming, and waiting can remind us of the wealth of black humanity.
by J. Todd Moye
In the middle of the Mississippi Delta lies rural, black-majority Sunflower County. J. Todd Moye examines the social histories of civil rights and white resistance movements in Sunflower, tracing the development of organizing strategies in separate racial communities over four decades.
Sunflower County was home to both James Eastland, one of the most powerful reactionaries in the U.S. Senate in the twentieth century, and Fannie Lou Hamer, the freedom-fighting sharecropper who rose to national prominence as head of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Sunflower was the birthplace of the Citizens' Council, the white South's pre-eminent anti-civil rights organization, but it was also a hotbed of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) organizing and a fountainhead of freedom culture.
Using extensive oral history interviews and archival research, Moye situates the struggle for democracy in Sunflower County within the context of national developments in the civil rights movement. Arguing that the civil rights movement cannot be understood as a national monolith, Moye reframes it as the accumulation of thousands of local movements, each with specific goals and strategies. By continuing the analysis into the 1980s, Let the People Decide pushes the boundaries of conventional periodization, recognizing the full extent of the civil rights movement.
by Karen Anderson
The desegregation crisis in Little Rock is a landmark of American history: on September 4, 1957, after the Supreme Court struck down racial segregation in public schools, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called up the National Guard to surround Little Rock Central High School, preventing black students from going in. On September 25, 1957, nine black students, escorted by federal troops, gained entrance. With grace and depth, Little Rock provides fresh perspectives on the individuals, especially the activists and policymakers, involved in these dramatic events. Looking at a wide variety of evidence and sources, Karen Anderson examines American racial politics in relation to changes in youth culture, sexuality, gender relations, and economics, and she locates the conflicts of Little Rock within the larger political and historical context.
Anderson considers how white groups at the time, including middle class women and the working class, shaped American race and class relations. She documents white women's political mobilizations and, exploring political resentments, sexual fears, and religious affiliations, illuminates the reasons behind segregationists' missteps and blunders. Anderson explains how the business elite in Little Rock retained power in the face of opposition, and identifies the moral failures of business leaders and moderates who sought the appearance of federal compliance rather than actual racial justice, leaving behind a legacy of white flight, poor urban schools, and institutional racism.
Probing the conflicts of school desegregation in the mid-century South, Little Rock casts new light on connections between social inequality and the culture wars of modern America.
by Traci C. West
In Wounds of the Spirit, Traci West employs first person accounts - from slave narratives to contemporary interviews to Tina Turner's autobiography - to document a historical legacy of violence against black women in the United States. West, a black feminist Christian ethicist, situates spiritual matters within a discussion of the psycho-social impact of intimate assault against African American women.
Distinctive for its treatment of the role of the church in response to violence against African American women, the book identifies specific social mechanisms which contribute to the reproduction of intimate violence. West insists that cultural beliefs as well as institutional practices must be altered if we are to combat the reproduction of violence, and suggests methods of resistance which can be utilized by victim-survivors, those in the helping professions, and the church.
Interrogating the dynamics of black women's experiences of emotional and spiritual trauma through the diverse disciplines of psychology, sociology, and theology, this important work will be of interest and practical use to those in women's studies, African American studies, Christian ethics, feminist and womanist theology, women's health, family counseling, and pastoral care.
by T.V. Reed
The Art of Protest, first published in 2006, was hailed as an “essential” introduction to progressive social movements in the United States and praised for its “fluid writing style” and “well-informed and insightful” contribution (Choice Magazine). Now thoroughly revised and updated, this new edition of T. V. Reed’s acclaimed work offers engaging accounts of ten key progressive movements in postwar America, from the African American struggle for civil rights beginning in the 1950s to Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter in the twenty-first century.
Reed focuses on the artistic activities of these movements as a lively way to frame progressive social change and its cultural legacies: civil rights freedom songs, the street drama of the Black Panthers, revolutionary murals of the Chicano movement, poetry in women’s movements, the American Indian Movement’s use of film and video, anti-apartheid rock music, ACT UP’s visual art, digital arts in #Occupy, Black Lives Matter rap videos, and more.
Through the kaleidoscopic lens of artistic expression, Reed reveals how activism profoundly shapes popular cultural forms. For students and scholars of social change and those seeking to counter reactionary efforts to turn back the clock on social equality and justice, the new edition of The Art of Protest will be both informative and inspiring.
by Rosalind Hampton
The presence and experiences of Black people at elite universities have been largely underrepresented and erased from institutional histories. This book engages with a collection of these experiences that span half a century and reflect differences in class, gender, and national identifications among Black scholars. By mapping Black people’s experiences of studying and teaching at McGill University, this book reveals how the "whiteness" of the university both includes and exceeds the racial identities of students and professors. It highlights the specific functions of Blackness and of anti-Blackness within society in general and within the institution of higher education in particular, demonstrating how structures and practices of the university reproduce interlocking systems of oppression that uphold racial capitalism, reproduce colonial relations, and promote settler nationalism. Critically engaging the work of Black learners, academics, organizers, and activists within this dynamic political context, this book underscores the importance of Black Studies across North America.
by Eddie R. Cole
The remarkable history of how college presidents shaped the struggle for racial equality.
Some of America’s most pressing civil rights issues―desegregation, equal educational and employment opportunities, housing discrimination, and free speech―have been closely intertwined with higher education institutions. Although it is commonly known that college students and other activists, as well as politicians, actively participated in the fight for and against civil rights in the middle decades of the twentieth century, historical accounts have not adequately focused on the roles that the nation’s college presidents played in the debates concerning racism. Based on archival research conducted at a range of colleges and universities across the United States, The Campus Color Line sheds light on the important place of college presidents in the struggle for racial parity.
Focusing on the period between 1948 and 1968, Eddie Cole shows how college presidents, during a time of violence and unrest, strategically, yet often silently, initiated and shaped racial policies and practices inside and outside of the educational sphere. With courage and hope, as well as malice and cruelty, college presidents positioned themselves―sometimes precariously―amid conflicting interests and demands. Black college presidents challenged racist policies as their students demonstrated in the streets against segregation, while presidents of major universities lobbied for urban renewal programs that displaced Black communities near campus. Some presidents amended campus speech practices to accommodate white supremacist speakers, even as other academic leaders developed the nation’s first affirmative action programs in higher education.
The Campus Color Line illuminates how the legacy of academic leaders’ actions continues to influence the unfinished struggle for Black freedom and racial equity in education and beyond.
by Cedric J. Robinson & edited by H.L.T. Quan
Cedric J. Robinson is one of the doyens of Black Studies and a pioneer in study of the Black Radical Tradition. His works have been essential texts, deconstructing racial capitalism and inspiring insurgent movements from Ferguson, Missouri to the West Bank. For the first time, Robinson's essays come together, spanning over four decades and reflective of his diverse interests in the interconnections between culture and politics, radical social theory, and classic and modern political philosophy.
Themes explored include Africa and Black internationalism, World politics, race and US Foreign Policy, representations of blackness in popular culture, and reflections on popular resistance to racial capitalism, white supremacy and more. Essays here include:
*The Black Detective and American Memory
*Slavery and the Platonic Origins of Anti-Democracy
*Africa: In Hock to History and the Banks
*Blaxploitation and the Misrepresentation of Liberalism
*The Mulatta on Film
*Race, Capitalism, and Anti-democracy
*The Killing in Ferguson
and much more. Accompanied by an introduction by H. L. T. Quan and a foreword by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, this collection, which includes previously unpublished materials, extends the many contributions by a giant in Black radical thought.
by Christopher Curry
After the American Revolution, enslaved and free blacks who had been loyal to the British cause arrived in the Bahamas, drawn by British promises of liberty and land. Freedom and Resistance shows how Black Loyalists struggled to find freedom, clashing with white loyalists who tried either to bind them to illegal indentured contracts or to enslave them. Despite these challenges, Black Loyalists made significant contributions to Bahamian society. They advanced ideas of civil liberty through political activism and armed resistance, built churches and schools that became the foundations of self-reliant black communities, and participated in the emerging market economy. Christopher Curry highlights the complex ways in which Black Loyalists transplanted and re-inscribed traditions from colonial America into new host societies and in doing so dynamically refashioned their identities and institutions. By comparing the experiences of these Bahamians to those of other Black Loyalist communities in Jamaica and Nova Scotia, he adds a new global dimension to the freedom struggle that spread from the American Revolution.
by Nicholas Clements
Between 1825 and 1831 close to 200 Britons and 1000 Aborigines died violently in Tasmania’s Black War. It was by far the most intense frontier conflict in Australia’s history, yet many Australians know little about it. The Black War takes a unique approach to this historic event, looking chiefly at the experiences and attitudes of those who took part in the conflict. By contrasting the perspectives of colonists and Aborigines, Nicholas Clements takes a deeply human look at the events that led to the shocking violence and tragedy of the war, detailing raw personal accounts that shed light on the tribes, families and individuals involved as they struggled to survive in their turbulent world. The Black War presents a compelling and challenging view of our early contact history, the legacy of which reverberates strongly to the present day.
edited by Celeste-Marie Bernier and Hannah Durkin
The purpose of this book is to excavate and recover a wealth of under-examined artworks and research materials directly to interrogate, debate, and analyse the tangled skeins undergirding visual representations of transatlantic slavery across the Black diaspora. Living and working on both sides of the Atlantic, as these scholars, curators, and practitioners demonstrate, African diasporic artists adopt radical and revisionist practices by which to confront the difficult aesthetic and political realities surrounding the social and cultural legacies let alone national and mythical memories of Transatlantic Slavery and the international Slave Trade. Adopting a comparative perspective, this book investigates the diverse body of works produced by black artists as these contributors come to grips with the ways in which their neglected and repeatedly unexamined similarities and differences bear witness to the existence of an African diasporic visual arts tradition. As in-depth investigations into the diverse resistance strategies at work within these artists' vast bodies of work testify, theirs is an ongoing fight for the right to art for art's sake as they challenge mainstream tendencies towards examining their works solely for their sociological and political dimensions. This book adopts a cross-cultural perspective to draw together artists, curators, academics, and public researchers in order to provide an interdisciplinary examination into the eclectic and experimental oeuvre produced by black artists working within the United States, the United Kingdom, and across the African diaspora. The overall aim of this book is to re-examine complex yet under-researched theoretical paradigms vis-à-vis the patterns of influence and cross-cultural exchange across both America and a black diasporic visual arts tradition, a vastly neglected field of study.
by
Inside the Invisible provides the first examination of the work of Turner Prize-winning Black British artist and curator Professor Lubaina Himid, CBE. This comprehensive volume breaks new ground by theorizing her development of an alternative visual and textual language within which to do justice to the hidden histories and untold stories of Black women, children, and men bought and sold into transatlantic slavery. For Himid, the act of forgetting within official sites of memory is indivisible from the art of remembering within an African diasporic art historical tradition. She interrogates the widespread distortion and even wholesale erasure of Black bodies and souls subjected to dehumanizing stereotypes and grotesque caricatures within western imaginaries and dominant iconographic traditions over the centuries. Creating bodies of work in which she comes to grips with the physical and psychological realities of iconic and anonymous African diasporic individuals as living, breathing human beings rather than as objectified types, she bears witness not only to tragedy but to triumph. A researcher, historian, and storyteller as well as an artist, she succeeds in seeing "inside the invisible" regarding untold narratives of Black agency and artistry by mining national archives, listening to oral stories, acknowledging art-making traditions, and revisiting autobiographical testimonies.
by Jennifer Lynn Stoever
Race is a visual phenomenon, the ability to see “difference.” At least that is what conventional wisdom has lead us to believe. Yet, The Sonic Color Line argues that American ideologies of white supremacy are just as dependent on what we hear—voices, musical taste, volume—as they are on skin color or hair texture. Reinforcing compelling new ideas about the relationship between race and sound with meticulous historical research, Jennifer Lynn Stoever helps us to better understand how sound and listening not only register the racial politics of our world, but actively produce them. Through analysis of the historical traces of sounds of African American performers, Stoever reveals a host of racialized aural representations operating at the level of the unseen—the sonic color line—and exposes the racialized listening practices she figures as “the listening ear.”
Using an innovative multimedia archive spanning 100 years of American history (1845-1945) and several artistic genres—the slave narrative, opera, the novel, so-called “dialect stories,” folk and blues, early sound cinema, and radio drama—The Sonic Color Line explores how black thinkers conceived the cultural politics of listening at work during slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. By amplifying Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, Charles Chesnutt, The Fisk Jubilee Singers, Ann Petry, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Lena Horne as agents and theorists of sound, Stoever provides a new perspective on key canonical works in African American literary history. In the process, she radically revises the established historiography of sound studies. The Sonic Color Line sounds out how Americans have created, heard, and resisted “race,” so that we may hear our contemporary world differently.
by Fred Moten
In his controversial essay on white jazz musician Burton Greene, Amiri Baraka asserted that jazz was exclusively an African American art form and explicitly fused the idea of a black aesthetic with radical political traditions of the African diaspora. In the Break is an extended riff on “The Burton Greene Affair,” exploring the tangled relationship between black avant-garde in music and literature in the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of a distinct form of black cultural nationalism, and the complex engagement with and disavowal of homoeroticism that bridges the two. Fred Moten focuses in particular on the brilliant improvisatory jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and others, arguing that all black performance—culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself—is improvisation.
For Moten, improvisation provides a unique epistemological standpoint from which to investigate the provocative connections between black aesthetics and Western philosophy. He engages in a strenuous critical analysis of Western philosophy (Heidegger, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) through the prism of radical black thought and culture. As the critical, lyrical, and disruptive performance of the human, Moten’s concept of blackness also brings such figures as Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx, Cecil Taylor and Samuel R. Delany, Billie Holiday and William Shakespeare into conversation with each other.
Stylistically brilliant and challenging, much like the music he writes about, Moten’s wide-ranging discussion embraces a variety of disciplines—semiotics, deconstruction, genre theory, social history, and psychoanalysis—to understand the politicized sexuality, particularly homoeroticism, underpinning black radicalism. In the Break is the inaugural volume in Moten’s ambitious intellectual project-to establish an aesthetic genealogy of the black radical tradition
by Carole Anne Taylor
Carole Anne Taylor explores the network of cultural relations that links tragic and comic theory to views of what can or cannot be known or felt and what can or cannot be done. Reconceiving tragic and comic resistance through readings of works by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara, and South African-born Bessie Head, she demonstrates how these writers elaborate the interconnections between a comedy that affirms wholesome normalcy in the face of terror and a tragedy that finds something terribly wrong in the social order itself. Paradoxically, she contends, these works place the highest value not on texts, reading, and writing, but on actual relationship and social action.
Looking backward, Taylor next does a "recursive reading" of some problematic works by William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, and Zora Neale Hurston that have often been considered precursors of the "postmodern." Reading these earlier authors under the influence of contemporary texts and current theory explains modern artfulness or its lack, even when representations of the terrible and the funny offer conflicted relations to power and conflicted sites for readerly response.
Taylor argues that the ellipsis of certain tragic and comic modes, particularly in theories of how and when the modern becomes the postmodern, corresponds to the repression of intercultural dialogue on a broader scale. Throughout, she makes a strong case that the tragedy and comedy of resistance should lie at the heart of theories of a critical (post)modernity—and can illuminate the connections between how to read and how to live in the world.
