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Rather than avoiding \"negative\" images of black motherhood, such as welfare queens, teen mothers, and \"baby mamas,\" \u003ci\u003eMama's Gun\u003c\/i\u003e centralizes these dispossessed figures and renames them as the Young Mother, the Blues Mama, the Surrogate, Big Mama, and the Mothership.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Taking inspiration from African American fiction, historical accounts of black life, Afrofuturism, and black popular culture in music and on screen, David turns her attention to Sapphire's \u003ci\u003ePush,\u003c\/i\u003e Octavia Butler's \u003ci\u003eDawn,\u003c\/i\u003e and Suzan-Lori Parks's \u003ci\u003eGetting Mother's\u003c\/i\u003e Body as well as the performance art of Erykah Badu and the films of Tyler Perry. She draws out the implications of black maternal figures in these texts who balk at tradition and are far from \"ideal.\" David's study shows how representations of blackness are deeply embedded in the neoliberal language of contemporary American politics and how black writers and performers resist such mainstream ideologies with their own transgressive black maternal figures.\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50364036645137,"sku":"CIN0814253695G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52405535211793,"sku":"NLS9780814253694","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0814253695.jpg?v=1750946470"},{"product_id":"queer-limit-of-black-memory-book-matt-richardson-9780814212226","title":"The Queer Limit of Black Memory","description":"\u003ci\u003eThe Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution\u003c\/i\u003e identifies a new archive of Black women's literature that has heretofore been on the margins of literary scholarship and African diaspora cultural criticism. It argues that Black lesbian texts celebrate both the strategies of resistance used by queer Black subjects and the spaces for grieving the loss of queer Black subjects that dominant histories of the African diasporas often forget. Matt Richardson has gathered an understudied archive of texts by LaShonda Barnett, S. Diane Adamz-Bogus, Dionne Brand, Sharon Bridgforth, Laurinda D. Brown, Jewelle Gomez, Jackie Kay, and Cherry Muhanji in order to relocate the queerness of Black diasporic vernacular traditions, including drag or gender performance, blues, jazz, and West African spiritual and religious practices. Richardson argues that the vernacular includes queer epistemologies, or methods for accessing and exploring the realities of Black queer experience that other alternative archives and spaces of commemoration do not explore. \u003ci\u003eThe Queer Limit of Black Memory\u003c\/i\u003e brings together several theorists whose work is vital within Black studies-Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, and Orlando Patterson-in service of queer readings of Black subjectivity.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50369559920913,"sku":"CIN0814212220VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0814212220.jpg?v=1750946465"},{"product_id":"secrecy-magic-and-the-one-act-plays-of-harlem-renaissance-women-writers-book-taylor-hagood-9780814255087","title":"Secrecy, Magic, and the One-Act Plays of Harlem Renaissance Women Writers","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003ci\u003eSecrecy, Magic, and the One-Act Plays of Harlem Renaissance Women Writers\u003c\/i\u003e seeks to rescue the plays of eight black women, Marita Bonner, Mary P. Burrill, Thelma Duncan, Shirley   Graham, Zora Neale Hurston, Georgia Douglas Johnson, May Miller, and Eulalie Spence, from obscurity. This volume is the first book-length treatment to address these plays and their authors exclusively rather than as part of a discussion of other African American playwrights from different eras. It is also one of the few to carry out an extensive discussion of secrecy's role in both literary representation and social interaction.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Exploring secrecy from the standpoints of poststructuralist language theory and game theory as well as dramatic performance, Taylor Hagood argues that the secret--a thing visible for its very invisibility--is a fundamental cog in the machinery of society, employed as a tool for both oppression and subversion. The many facets of secrecy have been particularly salient in African American culture, informing everything from the Underground Railroad to the subtle coding of Signifying. Most devastatingly, people on both sides of the color line are caught within a web of secrecy that is the result of centuries of distrust, doubt, and fear, a fact that is powerfully manifest not only in these one-act plays but in the reader's\/spectator's interactions with them.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50431813320977,"sku":"CIN0814255086VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008211517713,"sku":"NIN9780814255087","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52536569692433,"sku":"NLS9780814255087","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0814255086.jpg?v=1750979764"},{"product_id":"queer-limit-of-black-memory-book-matt-richardson-9780814252901","title":"The Queer Limit of Black Memory","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003ci\u003eThe Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution\u003c\/i\u003e identifies a new archive of Black women's literature that has heretofore been on the margins of literary scholarship and African diaspora cultural criticism. It argues that Black lesbian texts celebrate both the strategies of resistance used by queer Black subjects and the spaces for grieving the loss of queer Black subjects that dominant histories of the African diasporas often forget. Matt Richardson has gathered an understudied archive of texts by LaShonda Barnett, S. Diane Adamz-Bogus, Dionne Brand, Sharon Bridgforth, Laurinda D. Brown, Jewelle Gomez, Jackie Kay, and Cherry Muhanji in order to relocate the queerness of Black diasporic vernacular traditions, including drag or gender performance, blues, jazz, and West African spiritual and religious practices.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Richardson argues that the vernacular includes queer epistemologies, or methods for accessing and exploring the realities of Black queer experience that other alternative archives and spaces of commemoration do not explore. \u003ci\u003eThe Queer Limit of Black Memory\u003c\/i\u003e brings together several theorists whose work is vital within Black studies--Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, and Orlando Patterson--in service of queer readings of Black subjectivity.\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008117866769,"sku":"NIN9780814252901","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":51326002757905,"sku":"CIN0814252907A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52592586850577,"sku":"NLS9780814252901","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0814252907.jpg?v=1751076467"},{"product_id":"staging-black-fugitivity-book-mccormick-9780814255445","title":"Staging Black Fugitivity","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003ci\u003eStaging Black Fugitivity\u003c\/i\u003e asks: How does drama constitute an important site for ongoing conversations about slavery's resonance and its legacies? To answer this question, Stacie Selmon McCormick charts the historical turn toward slavery in black drama that began in the last quarter of the twentieth century. This movement, spearheaded by August Wilson and Suzan-Lori Parks, has been largely under-theorized, yet it participates in and advances the neo-slave narrative genre--with contemporary black dramas enhancing the neo-slave narrative's capacity to represent the visual, corporal, and affective dimensions of the black body and slavery as an institution.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e McCormick traces the innovative ways that artists render slavery for present-day audiences. The dramas assembled in this book approach slavery from myriad perspectives--afrofuturist, feminist, and queer--in order to produce new imaginaries that offer more complex depictions of black experience. Through subverting notions of time, race, gender, and familiar histories of slavery themselves, the dramas under discussion produce \u003ci\u003eperformances of fugitivity\u003c\/i\u003e--subversive, radical, and experimental performances of black artistic and political freedom at the site of slavery.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008263651601,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008267157777,"sku":"NIN9780814255445","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52662916907281,"sku":"NLS9780814255445","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0814255442.jpg?v=1750882796"},{"product_id":"contemporary-black-women-filmmakers-and-the-art-of-resistance-book-christina-n-baker-9780814254998","title":"Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance","description":"\u003cdiv\u003eChristina N. Baker's \u003ci\u003eContemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance\u003c\/i\u003e is the first book-length analysis of representations of Black femaleness in the feature films of Black women filmmakers. These filmmakers resist dominant ideologies about Black womanhood, deliberately and creatively reconstructing meanings of Blackness that draw from their personal experiences and create new symbolic meaning of Black femaleness within mainstream culture. Addressing social issues such as the exploitation of Black women in the entertainment industry, the impact of mass incarceration on Black women, political activism, and violence, these films also engage with personal issues as complex as love, motherhood, and sexual identity. Baker argues that their counter-hegemonic representations have the potential to transform the narratives surrounding Black femaleness. At the intersection of Black feminism and womanism, Baker develops a \"womanist artistic standpoint\" theory, drawing from the work of Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Kimberlé Crenshaw.\u003cbr\u003e Analyzing the cultural texts of filmmakers such as Ava DuVernay, Tanya Hamilton, Kasi Lemmons, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and Dee Rees--and including interviews she conducted with three of the filmmakers--Baker emphasizes the importance of applying an intersectional perspective that centers on the shared experiences of Black women and the role of film as a form of artistic expression and a tool of social resistance.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008327713041,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008330891537,"sku":"NIN9780814254998","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51725838188817,"sku":"GOR009871784","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52585360949521,"sku":"NLS9780814254998","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0814254993.jpg?v=1750882795"},{"product_id":"black-dragon-book-zachary-f-price-9780814258132","title":"Black Dragon","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008424542481,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008427458833,"sku":"NIN9780814258132","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52585228337425,"sku":"NLS9780814258132","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0814258131.jpg?v=1750946476"},{"product_id":"prisons-race-and-masculinity-in-twentieth-century-u-s-literature-and-film-book-ph-d-peter-caster-9780814252284","title":"Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Film","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn Prisons, Race, and Masculinity, Peter Caster demonstrates the centrality of imprisonment in American culture, illustrating how incarceration, an institution inseparable from race, has shaped and continues to shape U.S. history and literature in the starkest expression of what W. E. B. 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Offering new interpretations of familiar works by William Faulkner, Eldridge Cleaver, and Norman Mailer, Caster also engages recent films such as American History X, The Hurricane, and The Farm: Life Inside Angola Prison alongside prison history chronicled in the transcripts of the American Correctional Association. 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Black masculinity embodies a set of contradictions, including an often mistaken threat of violence, the belief in its legitimacy, and the rhetorical union of truth and fiction surrounding slavery, segregation, resistance, and self-determination.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51202623439121,"sku":"NIN9780814252277","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52336272638225,"sku":"NLS9780814252277","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0814252273.jpg?v=1751139066"},{"product_id":"when-the-devil-knocks-book-rene-craft-9780814252109","title":"When the Devil Knocks","description":"\u003cdiv\u003eDespite its long history of encounters with colonialism, slavery, and neocolonialism, Panama continues to be an under-researched site of African Diaspora identity, culture, and performance. 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In \u003ci\u003eWhen the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in Twentieth-Century Panama,\u003c\/i\u003e Alexander Craft draws on over a decade of critical ethnographic research to argue that Congo traditions tell the story of \u003ci\u003ecimarronaje\u003c\/i\u003e, charting self-liberated Africans' triumph over enslavement, their parody of the Spanish Crown and Catholic Church, their central values of communalism and self-determination, and their hard-won victories toward national inclusion and belonging\u003ci\u003e.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eWhen the Devil Knocks\u003c\/i\u003e analyzes the Congo tradition as a dynamic cultural, ritual, and identity performance that tells an important story about a Black cultural past while continuing to create itself in a Black cultural present. 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Green turns to twentieth- and recent twenty-first-century representations of the Middle Passage created by African-descended artists and writers. Examining how these writers and performers revised and reimagined the Middle Passage in their work, Green argues that they recognized it as a historical and geographical site of trauma as well as a symbol for a place of understanding and change. Their work represents the legacy African captives left for resisting \"social death\" (the idea that Black life does not matter), but it also highlights strong resistance to that social death (the idea that it does matter). \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Exploring the presence of water and its impact on African descendants,\u003ci\u003eReimagining the Middle Passage\u003c\/i\u003eoffers fresh analyses of Alex Haley's\u003ci\u003eRoots\u003c\/i\u003eand the television adaptations; the history of flooding in Black communities in literature such as Jesmyn Ward's\u003ci\u003eSalvage the Bones\u003c\/i\u003eand Paule Marshall's\u003ci\u003ePraisesong for the Widow\u003c\/i\u003e, in blues songs, and in television shows such as\u003ci\u003eTreme\u003c\/i\u003e; and stories of resistance found in myths associated with Marie Laveau and flying Africans. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52116379304209,"sku":"NLS9780814254714","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780814254714.jpg?v=1776939733"},{"product_id":"conjuring-freedom-book-johari-jabir-9780814253946","title":"Conjuring Freedom","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003ci\u003eConjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War's \"Gospel Army\" \u003c\/i\u003eanalyzes the songs of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment of Black soldiers who met nightly in the performance of the ring shout. In this study, acknowledging the importance of conjure as a religious, political, and epistemological practice, Johari Jabir demonstrates how the musical performance allowed troop members to embody new identities in relation to national citizenship, militarism, and masculinity in more inclusive ways. Jabir also establishes how these musical practices of the regiment persisted long after the Civil War in Black culture, resisting, for instance, the paternalism and co-optive state antiracism of the film \u003ci\u003eGlory, \u003c\/i\u003eand the assumption that Blacks need to be deracinated to be full citizens.\u003cbr\u003e  Reflecting the structure of the ring shout--the counterclockwise song, dance, drum, and story in African American history and culture--\u003ci\u003eConjuring Freedom \u003c\/i\u003eoffers three new concepts to cultural studies in order to describe the practices, techniques, and implications of the troop's performance: (1) Black Communal Conservatories, borrowing from Robert Farris Thompson's \"invisible academies\" to describe the structural but spontaneous quality of black music-making, (2) Listening Hermeneutics, which accounts for the generative and material affects of sound on meaning-making, and (3) Sonic Politics, which points to the political implications of music's use in contemporary representations of race and history.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52131804709137,"sku":"NLS9780814253946","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780814253946.jpg?v=1757512736"},{"product_id":"love-and-abolition-book-alison-rose-reed-9780814215067","title":"Love and Abolition","description":"\u003cdiv\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eLove and Abolition\u003c\/i\u003e, Alison Rose Reed traces how the social life of Black queer performance from the 1960s to the present animates the unfinished work of abolition. She grounds social justice-oriented reading and activist practices specifically in the movement to abolish the prison industrial complex, with far-reaching implications for how we understand affective response as a mobilizing force for revolutionary change. Reed identifies abolition literature as an emergent field of inquiry that emphasizes social relationships in the ongoing struggle to dismantle systems of coercion, criminalization, and control. Focusing on love as an affective modality and organizing tool rooted in the Black radical tradition's insistence on collective sociality amidst unrelenting state violence, Reed provides fresh readings of visionaries such as James Baldwin, Ntozake Shange, Sharon Bridgforth, and vanessa german. 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