Open Books Open Minds - PYM: A Novel by Mat Johnson

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination -- what she calls the "Africanist presence" in American literature.

Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, this groundbreaking study uncovers a unique system of interpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World. Gates uses this critical framework to examine several major works of African-American literature, including Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

The distinguished American civil rights leader, W. E. B. Du Bois first published these fiery essays, sketches, and poems individually nearly 80 years ago in the Atlantic, the Journal of Race Development, and other periodicals. This volume has long inspired readers with its militant cry for social, political, and economic reforms for black Americans.Link to E-Book online in Project Gutenberg

To Be Suddenly White explores the troubled relationship between literary passing and literary realism, the dominant aesthetic motivation behind the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century ethnic texts considered in this study. Steven J. Belluscio uses the passing narrative to provide insight into how the representation of ethnic and racial subjectivity served, in part, to counter dominant narratives of difference. White offers new readings of traditional passing narratives from the African American literary tradition, such as James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man ,Nella Larsen's Passing, and George Schuyler's Black No More.

Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the new labor history pioneeredby E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, David Roediger's widely acclaimedbook provides an original study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. This, he argues, cannot be explained simply with reference to economic advantage; rather, white working-class racism is underpinned by a complex series of psychological and ideological mechanisms that reinforce racial stereotypes, and thus help to forge the identities of white workers in opposition to Blacks. Link to E-Book online

For centuries, Whiteness has been the invisible norm in the West, a transparent, yet ubiquitous frame of reference so pervasive that most Whites consider themselves absolved from race matters. In recent years activists, scholars, and writers have been challenging this cultural and political monolith by investigating Whiteness in its many manifestations. Yet, once it is rendered visible, Whiteness proves to be perilous and paradoxical: we single out Whiteness to expose its status as an unexamined center, yet the more we single it out, the more attention we invariably draw to it, once again at the expense of marginalized cultures. Organized into sections on white politics, white culture, white bodies, and white theory, this anthology collects much of the most important work on Whiteness to date. Such writers as David Roediger, Eric Lott, E. Ann Kaplan, Fred Pfeil, Amitava Kumar, and Henry A. Giroux serve up what is, in essence, a second generation of writing on Whiteness, moving past acknowledgment of its heretofore invisible nature, to in-depth analysis of its resilience and alleged disintegration. Taking on film, literature, music, militias, even Rush Limbaugh, Whiteness: A Critical Reader is a crucial contribution to discussions of race, politics, and culture in the U.S. today.

When and why did 'white people' start calling themselves 'white'? When and why did 'white slavery' become a paradox, and then a euphemism for prostitution? To answer such questions, Taylor begins with the auction of a 'white' slave in the first African American novel, William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853), and contrasts Brown's basic assumptions about race, slavery, and sexuality with treatment of those issues in scenes of slave marketing in English Renaissance drama. From accounts of Columbus and other early European voyagers to popular English plays two centuries later, Taylor traces a paradigm shift in attitudes toward white men, and analyzes the emergence of new models of sexuality and pornography in an 'imperial backwash' that affected whites as much as blacks. Moving between the English Renaissance and the 'American Renaissance' of the 1850s, this original and provocative book recovers the lost interracial history of the birth of whiteness.

The powerful evocation of a childhood in Harlem that helped to galvanize the early days of the civil rights movement examines the deep consequences of racial injustice to both the individual and the body politic.