As main man LeVar Burton can attest, you can go twice as high if you take a look, it’s in a book. Reading, though an essential skill to anyone outside politics, […]
Category: African American Studies
Backlist Bop: Only Pam Grier can save us
This lively study unpacks the intersecting racial, sexual, and gender politics underlying the representations of racialized bodies, masculinities, and femininities in early 1970s black action films, with particular focus on […]
Backlist Bop: Black power in its many forms
Despite the growing scholarly interest in the civil rights movement, to date there has been no comprehensive examination of the Black Power movement. Black Power in the Belly of the […]
Funk the Power, Funk the Erotic
“We have just witnessed a spectacular demonstration of the failures of a national, political imagination. Many of us feel devastated, afraid, and confused. There is no better time than this […]
Release Party: The Loyal West, by Matthew E. Stanley
A free region deeply influenced by southern mores, the Lower Middle West represented a true cultural and political median in Civil War–era America. Here grew a Unionism steeped in the […]
Sa-lute: Another award for “Funk the Erotic”
Awards season continues with one of our already-lauded books receiving another prize. L. H. Stallings‘s Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures has won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award, […]
Release Party: May Irwin, by Sharon Ammen
May Irwin reigned as America’s queen of comedy and song from the 1880s through the 1920s. A genuine pop culture phenomenon, Irwin conquered the legitimate stage, composed song lyrics, and […]
Separating families for enslavement
Excerpted from Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage, by Sowande’ M. Mustakeem The nature of slavery inflicted permanent scars as traders moved purchased captives off […]
Guest post: “Making America great again with Octavia Butler,” by Gerry Canavan
Today’s post is by Gerry Canavan, author of the new UIP book Octavia E. Butler. Canavan is an assistant professor of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature at Marquette University, specializing in science […]
Octavia Butler and a new direction
Octavia Butler accomplished many near-impossibles. She succeeded as a woman in science fiction. She succeeded as an African American woman in science fiction. She also broke out of the genre’s […]
Awards: Daisy Turner’s Kin
This week, we received word that Jane C. Beck’s acclaimed book Daisy Turner’s Kin: An African American Family Saga, won two awards: the 2016 Chicago Folklore Prize and the 2016 Wayland […]
Release Party: Slavery at Sea
The new UIP release Slavery at Sea examines the infamous Middle Passage in a new light. Sowande’ Mustakeem reveals for the first time how slavery took critical shape at sea. Expanding the gaze […]