Product Description: Since the Black women's literary renaissance ended nearly three decades ago, a profitable and expansive market of self-help books, inspirational literature, family-friendly plays, and films marketed to black women has emerged. Through messages of hope and responsibility, the writers of these texts develop templates that tap into legacies of literacy as activism, preaching techniques, and narrative formulas to teach strategies for overcoming personal traumas or dilemmas and resuming one's quality of life...read more

Black Women in Sequence takes readers on a search for women of African descent in comics subculture. From the 1971 appearance of the Skywald Publications character "the Butterfly" - the first Black female superheroine in a comic book - to contemporary comic books, graphic novels, film, manga, and video gaming, a growing number of Black women are becoming producers, viewers, and subjects of sequential art.As the first detailed investigation of Black women's participation in comic art, Black Women in Sequence examines the representation, production, and transnational circulation of women of African descent in the sequential art world. In this groundbreaking study, which includes interviews with artists and writers, Deborah Whaley suggests that the treatment of the Black female subject in sequential art says much about the place of people of African descent in national ideology in the United States and abroad.For more information visit the author's website: http://www.deborahelizabethwhaley.com/#!black-women-in-sequence/c65q

Haunted by representations of black women that resist the reality of the body's vulnerability, Kimberly Juanita Brown traces slavery's afterlife in black women's literary and visual cultural productions. Brown draws on black feminist theory, visual culture studies, literary criticism, and critical race theory to explore contemporary visual and literary representations of black women's bodies that embrace and foreground the body's vulnerability and slavery's inherent violence. She shows how writers such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Jamaica Kincaid, along with visual artists Carrie Mae Weems and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, highlight the scarred and broken bodies of black women by repeating, passing down, and making visible the residues of slavery's existence and cruelty. Their work not only provides a corrective to those who refuse to acknowledge that vulnerability, but empowers black women to create their own subjectivities. In The Repeating Body, Brown returns black women to the center of discourses of slavery, thereby providing the means with which to more fully understand slavery's history and its penetrating reach into modern American life.  

Product Description: Argues that Paule Marshall’s work collectively constitutes a multigenerational saga of the African diaspora across centuries and continents. From Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) to The Fisher King (2000), Paule Marshall’s novels, novellas, and short stories include a rich cast of unforgettable men, women, and children who forge spiritual as well as emotional and geographical paths toward their ancestors...read more

Presents a survey of six novels, a short story, and a book of criticism by Toni Morrison, describing the characters, themes, and settings of her works, including her portrayal of African American characters and experiences.

Ever since Bessie Smith’s powerful voice conspired with the “race records” industry to make her a star in the 1920s, African American writers have memorialized the sounds and theorized the politics of black women’s singing. In Black Resonance, Emily J. Lordi analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin.Focusing on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s, Black Resonance reveals a musical-literary tradition in which singers and writers, faced with similar challenges and harboring similar aims, developed comparable expressive techniques. Drawing together such seemingly disparate works as Bessie Smith’s blues and Richard Wright’s neglected film of Native Son, Mahalia Jackson’s gospel music and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice. In the process, Lordi demonstrates that popular female singers are not passive muses with raw, natural, or ineffable talent. Rather, they are experimental artists who innovate black expressive possibilities right alongside their literary peers.The first study of black music and literature to centralize the music of black women, Black Resonance offers new ways of reading and hearing some of the twentieth century’s most beloved and challenging voices.

Product Description: In Women’s Work, Courtney Thorsson reconsiders the gender, genre, and geography of African American nationalism as she explores the aesthetic history of African American writing by women. Building on and departing from the Black Arts Movement, the literary fiction of such writers as Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison employs a cultural nationalism―practiced by their characters as "women's work"―that defines a distinct contemporary literary movement, demanding attention to the continued relevance of nation in post–Black Arts writing...read more

Product Description: Witches, Goddesses and Angry Spirits: The Politics of Spiritual Liberation in African Diaspora Women’s Fiction explores African diaspora religious practices as vehicles for Africana women’s spiritual transformation, using representative fictions by three contemporary writers of the African Americas who compose fresh models of female spirituality: Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) by Haitian American novelist Edwidge Danticat; Paradise (1998) by African American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison; and I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1992) by Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé...read more

Product Description: Discusses women's issues in Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes were Watching God," including whether or not the book's protagonist is a feminist heroine, the place of romantic love in the novel, and Hurston's own political views.

Product Description: When Black runway models began throwing phones and VH1’s «Divas Live» riveted viewers, a new paradigm for Black women had fully evolved in the form of the Black Diva. Tracing the trajectory of the Diva figure from the Italian castrati to Ntozake Shange’s Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter suggests a way around staid and fixed stereotypes about Black womanhood...read more

Product Description: Great literature resonates with us not only because of well-developed characters and plots, but also because it often reflects important social themes; these books explore a work of literature through the lens of the major issue reflected in it...read more

Provides travel tips and cultural information about Bermuda, and recommendations for dining and lodging

Since 1984, Canadian writers have achieved great international visibility and success in the fields of science fiction and fantasy with the publication of popular works by Guy Gavriel Kay, Timothy Finlay, William Gibson, and Margaret Atwood. This book surveys the history of Canadian science fiction and fantasy in English and French since 1839. Ketterer first discusses the factors that initially inhibited the writing of science fiction and fantasy, and the qualities, themes, and imagistic or audioloical biases that distinguish Canadian writing in the genre. He then identifies a canon of books that--on the basic of historical interest, literary merit, or both--deserve to be better known.

Provides travel tips and cultural information about Bermuda, and recommendations for dining and lodging