An Autoethnography of African American Motherhood by
This is the first full-length explicitly identified autoethnographic text on African American motherhood. It shows the lived experiences of Black motherhood, when mothering is shaped by race, gender, and class, and mothers must navigate not only their own, but also their children's positions in society. Ferdinand takes an intimate look at her mothering strategies spanning ten years (from 2007 to 2017), preparing her daughter to traverse a racist and sexist society. It is a multi-generational text that blends the author's experience with that of her own mother, grandmother, and her daughter, to engage in a larger discussion of African American/Black mother/womanhood. It is grounded within Black Feminist Theory, which centers the experiences of Black women within the domains of intersecting oppressions. It is from a very personal position that Ferdinand provides a glimpse into the minutiae of mothering that reveal the everyday intricacies of Black women as mothers. It highlights specific strategies Black mothers use to combat discrimination and oppression, from teaching their children about the n-word to choosing positive representations of Black identity in movies, books, dolls, daycares, elementary schools, and even extra-curricular activities. It shows the impact that stereotypical manifestations of Black femininity have on Black women's experience of motherhood, and how this affects Black women and girls' understanding of themselves, especially their skin color, body shape, and hair texture. As an interdisciplinary text, this book will be reading for academics and students in a broad range of fields, including Education, African American Studies, Communication Studies, Women Studies, Psychology and Health Studies. It is also a handbook of lived experience for Black mothers, grandmothers, and daughters, and for all mothers, grandmothers, and daughters irrespective of color.
Black LGBT Health in the United States by
Black LGBT Health in the United States: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation focuses on the mental, physical, and spiritual aspects of health, and considers both risk and resiliency factors for the Black LGBT population. Contributors to this collection intimately understand the associations between health and intersectional anti-Black racism, heterosexism, homonegativity, biphobia, transphobia, and social class. This collection fills a gap in current scholarship by providing information about an array of health issues like cancer, juvenile incarceration, and depression that affect all subpopulations of Black LGBT people, especially Black bisexual-identified women, Black bisexual-identified men, and Black transgender men. This book is recommended for readers interested in psychology, health, gender studies, race studies, social work, and sociology.
Black Men's Studies by
Black Men's Studies offers an approach to understanding the lives and the self determination of men of African descent in the U.S. context. It not only frames their experiences, it also explores the multidimensional approaches to advancing the lives of Black men. Particular attention is given to placing Black men in their own unique historical, cultural, and socio-political contexts.
Continually Working by
Continually Working tells the stories of Black working women who resisted employment inequality in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from the 1940s to the 1970s. The book explores the job-related activism of Black Midwestern working women and uncovers the political and intellectual strategies they used to critique and resist employment discrimination, dismantle unjust structures, and transform their lives and the lives of those in their community. Moten emphasizes the ways in which Black women transformed the urban landscape by simultaneously occupying spaces from which they had been historically excluded and creating their own spaces. Black women refused to be marginalized within the historically white and middle‑class Milwaukee Young Women's Christian Association (MYWCA), an association whose mission centered on supporting women in urban areas. Black women forged interracial relationships within this organization and made it, not without much conflict and struggle, one of the most socially progressive organizations in the city. When Black women could not integrate historically white institutions, they created their own. They established financial and educational institutions, such as Pressley School of Beauty Culture, which beautician Mattie Pressley DeWese opened in 1946 as a result of segregation in the beauty training industry. This school served economic, educational, and community development purposes as well as created economic opportunities for Black women. Historically and contemporarily, Milwaukee has been and is still known as one of the most segregated cities in the nation. Black women have always contested urban inequality, by making space for themselves and others on the margins. In so doing, they have transformed both the urban landscape and urban history.
One of the Children by
Gay black men, a thriving subculture of the black and gay communities, are doubly marginalized. Along with other black men, they are typically portrayed in the media and literature as "street corner men"--unemployed drifters, absentee fathers, substance abusers. In the larger gay community, they are an invisible minority. One of the Children, the first formal cultural study of gay black men in Harlem, not only illuminates this segment of America's gay population but presents a far richer, more diverse portrait of black men's lives than is commonly perceived. Based on two years' intensive research--during which the author lived in Harlem's gay community--including extensive interviews with fifty-seven community members, this book depicts gay black men's lives in all their social, economic, and cultural complexity. William Hawkeswood takes us from the street into the homes and lives of his subjects. He describes the elaborate network of friends, called "family," that supports these men emotionally and financially, and the community's two-tiered economic structure, comprising gay men and "boys," or hustlers. Hawkeswood also explores what it means for these men to be both gay and black. In the process, he makes the surprising discovery that while the AIDS virus looms all around them, it has not yet significantly affected the community of gay blacks who choose their sexual partners exclusively from among Harlem's other gay black men.
The Other Evangelicals by
What's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear "evangelical"? For many, the answer is "white," "patriarchal," "conservative," or "fundamentalist"--but as Isaac B. Sharp reveals, the "big tent" of evangelicalism has historically been much bigger than we've been led to believe. In The Other Evangelicals, Sharp brings to light the stories of those twentieth-century evangelicals who didn't fit the mold, including Black, feminist, progressive, and gay Christians. Though the binary of fundamentalist evangelicals and modernist mainline Protestants is taken for granted today, Sharp demonstrates that fundamentalists and modernists battled over the title of "evangelical" in post-World War II America. In fact, many ideologies characteristic of evangelicalism today, such as "biblical womanhood" and political conservatism, arose only in reaction to the popularity of evangelical feminism and progressivism. Eventually, history was written by the "winners"--the Billy Grahams of American religion--while the "losers" were expelled from the movement via the establishment of institutions such as the National Association of Evangelicals. Carefully researched and deftly written, The Other Evangelicals offers a breath of fresh air for scholars seeking a more inclusive history of religion in America.
Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet by
Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet promotes the importance of intergenerational Black dialogue as a collaborative spirit-making across race, genders, sexualities, and cultures to bridge time and space. The authors enter this dialogue in a crisis moment: a crisis moment at the confluence of a pandemic, the national political transition of leadership in the United States, the necessary rise of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color activism--in the face of the continued murders of unarmed Black and queer people by police. And as each author mourns the loss of loved ones who have left us through illness, the contiguity of time, or murder, we all hold tight to each other and to memory as an act of keeping them alive in our hearts and actions, remembrance as an act of resistance so that the circle will be unbroken. But they also come together in the spirit of hope, the hope that bleeds the borders between generations of Black teacher-artist-scholars, the hope that we find in each other's joy and laughter, and the hope that comes when we hear both stories of struggle and strife and stories of celebration and smile that lead to possibilities and potentialities of our collective being and becoming--as a people. So, the authors offer stories of witness, resistance, and gettin' ovah, stories that serve as a road map from Black history and heritage to a Black futurity that is mythic and imagined but that can also be actualized and embodied, now. This book will be of interest to scholars, students, and activists in a wide range of disciplines across the social sciences and performance studies.
Mouths of Rain by
Winner, Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Anthology Winner, Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, Publishing Triangle Awards A Ms. magazine, Refinery29, and Lambda Literary Most Anticipated Read of 2021 A groundbreaking collection tracing the history of intellectual thought by Black Lesbian writers, in the tradition of The New Press's perennial seller Words of Fire African American lesbian writers and theorists have made extraordinary contributions to feminist theory, activism, and writing. Mouths of Rain, the companion anthology to Beverly Guy-Sheftall's classic Words of Fire, traces the long history of intellectual thought produced by Black Lesbian writers, spanning the nineteenth century through the twenty-first century. Using "Black Lesbian" as a capacious signifier, Mouths of Rain includes writing by Black women who have shared intimate and loving relationships with other women, as well as Black women who see bonding as mutual, Black women who have self-identified as lesbian, Black women who have written about Black Lesbians, and Black women who theorize about and see the word lesbian as a political descriptor that disrupts and critiques capitalism, heterosexism, and heteropatriarchy. Taking its title from a poem by Audre Lorde, Mouths of Rain addresses pervasive issues such as misogynoir and anti-blackness while also attending to love, romance, "coming out," and the erotic.
