Happy Birthday, W. E. B. Du Bois.
NYU Press celebrates the life of the legendary author, activist and historian whose words and brilliance still inspires and scholarship today, and lives through, and in, some of the titles below:
“Brilliant in its dramatic sweep and analytic nuance, Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific is a bold examination of the intersections between African American and Asian American cultural production as they emerge from competing imperialist discourses. Schleitwiler’s approach is groundbreaking, synthesizing a remarkable range of texts to provide unexpected and evocative conclusions.”
—Helen Jun, author of Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoli
“The Sonic Color Line will open up new vistas for thinking about sound, race, and identity, and for understanding how racism is enforced through both sounding and listening. Painstakingly researched and written with verve, Stoever’s book will shape the way scholars of American and African American culture and history think about sound, even when our primary texts, like photographs and literary works, are seemingly silent.”
—Gayle Wald, author of It’s Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television
Articulates the role black theatricality played in the radical energy of the sixties by looking broadly at performances found in music, theater, film, and everyday life—from American singer and pianist Nina Simone, Ghanaian playwrights Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, Afro-German actor Günther Kaufmann, to California-based performer Sylvester. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left eloquently explores how shared signs of racial legacy and resistance politics are articulated with regional distinction.
“Forging A Laboring Race is an important and imaginative contribution to the history of race and labor in the Progressive Era. It is also a brisk, powerful, and re-orienting critique of the very notion of ‘the black worker’ as a discrete category of experience. This notion was produced by myriad think tanks, self-professed social scientists, and busy-bodied state agencies, and it had real consequences for the men and women who arrived in the urban North in the first Great Migration. It persists to this day.”
—Matthew Pratt Guterl, Brown University
“By centering radical black women, Want to Start a Revolution? shatters the artificial boundaries separating civil rights, black power, and feminist ideologies and movements, generating an expanded history of black radicalism and conveying the centrality of African-American women to the black freedom struggle and social justice movements more broadly. This collection will undoubtedly inspire an outpouring of much-needed new scholarship, adding to our collective knowledge and offering new frameworks for grappling with this history.”
—Emilye Crosby, author of A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi
Drawing on psychoanalysis, memory studies, and feminist and queer theory, Levy-Hussen examines how works by Toni Morrison, David Bradley, Octavia Butler, Charles Johnson, and others represent and mediate social injury and collective grief. Moving beyond the question of whether literature must heal or abandon historical wounds, Levy-Hussen proposes new ways on how to read African American literature now.
“But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its being and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois
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