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Delving into a century of genre films that by turns utilized, caricatured, exploited, sidelined, and finally embraced them, HORROR NOIRE traces a secret history of Black Americans in Hollywood through their connection to the horror genre. Adapting executive producer Robin Means Coleman’s seminal book, HORROR NOIRE will present the living and the dead, using new and archival interviews from scholars and creators; the voices who survived the genre’s past trends, to those shaping its future.
Includes interviews with Ernest R. Dickerson, Meosha Bean, Ashlee Blackwell and Robin R. Means Coleman.
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For many Black girls raised in the suburbs, the experiences of going to school, playing on the playground, and living day-to-day life can be uniquely alienating. BLACK GIRL IN SUBURBIA looks at the suburbs of America from the perspective of women of color. Filmmaker Melissa Lowery shares her own childhood memories of navigating racial expectations both subtle and overt-including questions like, "Hey, I just saw a Black guy walking down the street; is that your cousin?"
Through conversations with her own daughters, with teachers and scholars who are experts in the personal impacts of growing up a person of color in a predominately white place, this film explores the conflicts that many Black girls in homogeneous hometowns have in relating to both white and Black communities. BLACK GIRL IN SUBURBIA is a great discussion starter for Freshman orientation week and can be used in a wide variety of educational settings including classes in sociology, race relations, African American Studies, Women's Studies, and American Studies.
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This documentary sheds valuable light on all aspects of Lorraine Hansberry's play, A Raisin in the Sun, including the daunting challenge of securing investment and a venue for this production about a working class Black family, the casting process, artistic debates and finally its public reception.
The film features interviews with the play’s original cast members, Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Louis Gossett, Jr. and Glynn Turman, director Lloyd Richards, producer Phil Rose, supporter Harry Belafonte as well as writer Amiri Baraka along with excerpts from the 1961 Hollywood movie.
Official Selection at the Toronto International Film Festival. Winner of the John O’Connor Award from the American Historical Association.
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Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that’s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has previously explored in his work. The film takes place in the hilltops of Burundi, where a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region's natural resources – and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry.
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"The groundbreaking novel by one of the most important twentieth-century American writers--now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Giovanni's Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni. With sharp, probing insight, James Baldwin's classic narrative delves into the mystery of love and tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart. Introduction by Colm Toibin"-- Provided by publisher.
"A hardcover edition of James Baldwin's classic novel, with a new introduction by Colm Toibin"-- Provided by publisher.
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"Hafizah Augustus Geter disrupts the myths of America's origins and contemporary America through her experiences as the queer Nigerian-born daughter of a Muslim Nigerian woman and a Black American man from a Southern Baptist family in Jim Crow Alabama. A unique combination of gripping memoir and Afrofuturist thought, The Black Period follows Hafizah on a journey that tells her at every turn she's not worthy. At the same time, she manages to sidestep shame, confront disability, embrace forgiveness, and emerge from the erasures America imposes to exist proudly and unabashedly as herself. Penetrative and heartening, The Black Period captures a world brimming with potential, art, music, hope, and love despite the lasting effects of white supremacy"-- Provided by publisher.
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""As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not. In this book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people--including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others--she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity"-- Provided by the publisher.
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Born on a plantation but set apart from the others by her mother's position as a medicine woman, a young slave is forced to leave home at eighteen and unexpectedly finds herself in an infamously cruel jail.
Born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Brown was promised her freedom on her eighteenth birthday. Instead she finds herself thrust into the bowels of slavery at the infamous Devil's Half-Acre, a jail where slaves are broken, tortured, and sold every day. Forced to become the mistress of the brutal man who owns the jail, Pheby's survival lies in outwitting him-- even if it means making the ultimate sacrifice. -- adapted from jacket
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With profound compassion and lyricism, Morisseau brings us a powerful play that delves into the urgent issue of the ?school-to-prison? pipeline that ensnares people of color. Issues of class, race, parenting, and education in America are brought to the frontlines, as we are left to question the systematic structures that ultimately trap underserved communities.
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Home is a new house with a loving husband in 1970s California that is suddenly transformed into the frightening world of the antebellum South. Dana, a young black writer, can't explain how she is transported across time and space to a plantation in Maryland. But she does quickly understand why: to deal with the troubles of Rufus, a conflicted white slaveholder - and her progenitor. Her survival, her very existence, depends on it. This searing graphic-novel adaptation of Octavia E. Butler's science fiction classic is a powerfully moving, unflinching look at the violent, disturbing effects of slavery on the people it chained together, both black and white - and made kindred in the deepest sense of the word
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Technicolor explores the relationship between race and technology, especially the technologies of everyday life. Through case studies of Indian H-1B visa workers, Detroit techno music, the Chicano interneta and more Technicolor seeks to catalogue and understand the ways people of color actually use technology and to rupture entrenched stereotypes.
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In Cultural Codes: Makings of a Black Music Philosophy, William C. Banfield engages the reader in a conversation about the aesthetics and meanings that inform this critical component of our social consciousness." "By providing a focused examination of the historical development of Black music artistry, Banfield formulates a useable philosophy tied to how such music is made, shaped, and functions. In so doing, he explores Black music culture from three angles: history, education, and the creative work of the musicians who have moved the art forward.
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This volume contains many of the writings of Bayard Rustin a foundational civil rights leader and openly-gay African American activist. At times an mentor, a colleague, and controversial ally of civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rustin's five decade long career in activism is chronicled in this collection, spanning topics such as Ghandi's philosophy of protest, the anti-war movement, the influence of white supremacy in government, AIDS, and the assassination of Malcolm X and other civil rights leaders, Time on Two Crosses is an overview of a remarkable man.
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The first novel in the African Immortals series, My Soul to Keep follows Jessica as her life is turned inside out by the realization that her husband is part of an Ethiopian immortality cult and over 400 years old. Jessica finds herself trapped between the cult, which seeks to kill her and her family, and her husband's own goal to secure eternal life for his family at a horrible cost.
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A memoir by the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement explains the movement's position of love, humanity, and justice, challenging perspectives that have negatively labeled the movement's activists while calling for essential political changes.
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A defining work in feminist history and theory, Ain't I a woman examines the history and impact of sexism on black women, the continuing impact of slavery on black womanhood, racism within traditional feminist movements, and redefines the role of black women in social justice.
