Blank Darkness


Book Description

"Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French is a brilliant and altogether convincing analysis of the way in which Western writers, from Homer to the twentieth century have . . . imposed their language of desire on the least-known part of the world and have called it 'Africa.' There are excellent readings here of writers ranging from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sade, and Céline to Conrad and Yambo Ouologuem, but even more impressive and important than these individual readings is Mr. Miller's wide-ranging, incisive, and exact analysis of 'Africanist' discourse, what it has been and what it has meant in the literature of the Western world."—James Olney, Louisiana State University




Whiteness


Book Description

An anthology of white culture




Black France


Book Description

"[W]ithout a doubt one of the most important studies so far completed on literature in French grounded in the experiences of migrants of sub-Saharan African origin." —Alec Hargreaves, Florida State University France has always hosted a rich and vibrant black presence within its borders. But recent violent events have raised questions about France's treatment of ethnic minorities. Challenging the identity politics that have set immigrants against the mainstream, Black France explores how black expressive culture has been reformulated as global culture in the multicultural and multinational spaces of France. Thomas brings forward questions such as—Why is France a privileged site of civilization? Who is French? Who is an immigrant? Who controls the networks of production? Black France poses an urgently needed reassessment of the French colonial legacy.




Things of Darkness


Book Description

The "Ethiope," the "tawny Tartar," the "woman blackamoore," and "knotty Africanisms"—allusions to blackness abound in Renaissance texts. Kim F. Hall's eagerly awaited book is the first to view these evocations of blackness in the contexts of sexual politics, imperialism, and slavery in early modern England. Her work reveals the vital link between England's expansion into realms of difference and otherness—through exploration and colonialism-and the highly charged ideas of race and gender which emerged. How, Hall asks, did new connections between race and gender figure in Renaissance ideas about the proper roles of men and women? What effect did real racial and cultural difference have on the literary portrayal of blackness? And how did the interrelationship of tropes of race and gender contribute to a modern conception of individual identity? Hall mines a wealth of sources for answers to these questions: travel literature from Sir John Mandeville's Travels to Leo Africanus's History and Description of Africa; lyric poetry and plays, from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest to Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness; works by Emilia Lanyer, Philip Sidney, John Webster, and Lady Mary Wroth; and the visual and decorative arts. Concentrating on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Hall shows how race, sexuality, economics, and nationalism contributed to the formation of a modern ( white, male) identity in English culture. The volume includes a useful appendix of not readily accessible Renaissance poems on blackness.




Black Students in Imperial Britain


Book Description

This book caters for the demand in new black histories by rediscovering several little-known Black people’s experiences in late-Victorian Britain. It centres on The African Institute of Colwyn Bay, or ‘Congo House’, at which almost 90 children and young adults from Africa and its diaspora were enrolled to train as missionaries between 1889 and 1911. Burroughs finds that, though their encounters in Britain were shaped by the racism and paternalism of the late-nineteenth-century civilising mission, the students were not simply the objects of British charity. They were also agents in a culture of evangelical humanitarianism. Some were fully absorbed in the civilising mission, becoming leading missionaries. Others adapted their experiences to new ends, participating in networks of pan-Africanism that questioned race prejudice and colonialism. In their negotiations of the challenges and opportunities at the heart of the empire, the students of Congo House reveal how the global currents of black history shaped the localised cultures of Victorian philanthropy. From racism to pan-Africanism, this study sheds new light on key issues in black British history.




Playing in the Dark


Book Description

An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.




The Dark Fantastic


Book Description

Reveals the diversity crisis in children's and young adult media as not only a lack of representation, but a lack of imagination Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children’s publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter. The Dark Fantastic is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC’s Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world. In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, “we dark girls deserve more, because we are more.”




Light for the Artist


Book Description

Intermediate and advanced art students receive a broad vocabulary of effects with this in-depth study of light. Diagrams and paintings illustrate applications of principles to figure, still life, and landscape paintings.




Black Venus


Book Description

Black Venus is a feminist study of the representations of black women in the literary, cultural, and scientific imagination of nineteenth-century France. Employing psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, and the critical race theory articulated in the works of Frantz Fanon and Toni Morrison, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting argues that black women historically invoked both desire and primal fear in French men. By inspiring repulsion, attraction, and anxiety, they gave rise in the nineteenth-century French male imagination to the primitive narrative of Black Venus. The book opens with an exploration of scientific discourse on black females, using Sarah Bartmann, the so-called Hottentot Venus, and natural scientist Georges Cuvier as points of departure. To further show how the image of a savage was projected onto the bodies of black women, Sharpley-Whiting moves into popular culture with an analysis of an 1814 vaudeville caricature of Bartmann, then shifts onto the terrain of canonical French literature and colonial cinema, exploring the representation of black women by Baudelaire, Balzac, Zola, Maupassant, and Loti. After venturing into twentieth-century film with an analysis of Josephine Baker’s popular Princesse Tam Tam, the study concludes with a discussion of how black Francophone women writers and activists countered stereotypical representations of black female bodies during this period. A first-time translation of the vaudeville show The Hottentot Venus, or Hatred of Frenchwomen supplements this critique of the French male gaze of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both intellectually rigorous and culturally intriguing, this study will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature, feminist and gender studies, black studies, and cultural studies.




Black God's Kiss


Book Description

Meet “the first lady of sword-and-sorcery, Jirel of Joiry . . . in all her ferocious mailed glory and defiance” in these classic tales from a sci-fi pioneer (Tor.com). Originally published in the legendary magazine Weird Tales in 1934, C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry is fantasy’s first true strong female protagonist, as well as one of the most striking and memorable characters to come out of the golden age of science fiction and fantasy. Published alongside landmark stories by H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, the six classic stories included in this volume prove that C. L. Moore’s Jirel is a rival to Conan the Barbarian and Elric of Melniboné, making Black God’s Kiss an essential addition to any fantasy library. “I was looking for tales of dire conflict, hot-blooded honor and impetuosity, leadership and courage—all the qualities that my culture told me were reserved for males . . . what a joy it was to run across Jirel, who at some levels of my soul I longed desperately to be.” —Suzy McKee Charnas, Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author