Gullah Girl in the Bayou


Book Description

In the Mississippi bayou, trouble has gone unchecked for years. Lakisha, a young girl from the Gullah lands, is joined by her friend, Jolan and dog, Aza as they travel to the troubled tribe of Ulis as representatives of The Library. But the journey isn’t easy—especially when Lakisha and Jolan are separated and captured by dueling tribes. Alone in the Lu’hu territory, Lakisha must now attempt to mend the Lu’hu and Ulis peace that has been crumbling for decades. On the other side, Jolan is brought to Ulis and explains what happened to their Librarian. With good intentions, Jolan is coerced into a nefarious plan that he believes will help bring Lakisha back. The leaders of the two tribes strive for peace during the Harvest Festival, but a storm is brewing uneasy and causing tension among the warriors. To protect a divided region from exploding with decades-old hurts and simmering grievances, they must find a way to deliver peace to warring nation. Can Lakisha prevent a bloody battle while emotions are at an all time high?




Expanding the Black Film Canon


Book Description

If the sheer diversity of recent hits from Twelve Years a Slave and Moonlight to Get Out, Black Panther, and BlackkKlansman tells us anything, it might be that there's no such thing as "black film" per se. This book is especially timely, then, in expanding our idea of what black films are and, going back to the 1960s, showing us new and interesting ways to understand them. When critics and scholars write about films from the Blaxploitation movement—such as Cotton Comes to Harlem, Shaft, Superfly, and Cleopatra Jones—they emphasize their importance as films made for black audiences. Consequently, Lisa Doris Alexander points out, a film like the highly popular, Oscar-nominated Blazing Saddles—costarring and co-written by Richard Pryor—is generally left out of the discussion because it doesn't fit the profile of what a black film of the period should be. This is the kind of categorical thinking that Alexander seeks to broaden, looking at films from the 60s to the present day in the context of their time. Applying insights from black feminist thought and critical race theory to one film per decade, she analyzes what each can tell us about the status of black people and race relations in the United States at the time of its release. By teasing out the importance of certain films excluded from the black film canon, Alexander hopes to expand that canon to include films typically relegated to the category of popular entertainment—and to show how these offer more nuanced representations of black characters even as they confront, negate, or parody the controlling images that have defined black filmic characters for decades.




Beyond the Black Lady


Book Description

In this book, Lisa B. Thompson explores the representation of black middle-class female sexuality by African American women authors in narrative literature, drama, film, and popular culture, showing how these depictions reclaim black female agency and illustrate the difficulties black women confront in asserting sexual agency in the public sphere. Thompson broadens the discourse around black female sexuality by offering an alternate reading of the overly determined racial and sexual script that casts the middle class "black lady" as the bastion of African American propriety. Drawing on the work of black feminist theorists, she examines symptomatic autobiographies, novels, plays, and key episodes in contemporary American popular culture, including works by Anita Hill, Judith Alexa Jackson, P. J. Gibson, Julie Dash, Kasi Lemmons, Jill Nelson, Lorene Cary, and Andrea Lee.




Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess


Book Description

"Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess is a literary and cultural history of the Gullah Geechee Coast, a four-state area that is one of only a handful of places that can truly be said to be the "cradle of Black culture" in the United States. An African American ethnic group who predominantly live in the lowcountry region of South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida within the coastal plain and the Sea Islands, the Gullah people have preserved a significant influence of Africanisms because of their unique geographic isolation. This book seeks to fill a significant cultural gap in Gullah history. While there is a veritable industry of books on literary Charleston and on the lowcountry-along with a plenitude of Gullah-inspired studies in history, anthropology, linguistics, folklore, and religion- there has never been a comprehensive study of the region's literary influence, particularly in the years of the Great Migration and the Harlem (and Charleston) Renaissance. By giving voice to artists and culture makers on both sides of the color line, uncovering buried histories, and revealing secret cross-racial connections amid official practices of Jim Crow, Kendra Y. Hamilton sheds new light on an incomplete cultural history. A labor of love by a Charleston insider, the book imparts a lively and accessible overview of its subject in a manner that will satisfy the book lover and the scholar"--




Home in the Morning


Book Description

A Southern family confronts the tumult of the 1960s, and the secrets that bind its members together, in a novel by a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Jackson Sassaport is a man who often finds himself in the middle. Whether torn between Stella, his beloved and opinionated Yankee wife, and Katherine Marie, the African American girl who first stole his teenage heart; or between standing up for his beliefs and acquiescing to his prominent Jewish family’s imperative to not stand out in the segregated South, Jackson learns to balance the secrets and deceptions of those around him. But one fateful night in 1960 will make the man in the middle reconsider his obligations to propriety and family, and will start a chain of events that will change his life and the lives of those around him forever. Home in the Morning follows Jackson’s journey from his childhood as a coddled son of the Old South to his struggle as a young man eager to find his place in the civil rights movement while protecting his family. Flashing back between his adult life as a successful lawyer and his youth, Mary Glickman’s riveting novel traces the ways that race and prejudice, family and love intertwine to shape our lives. This ebook features rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.




Marching to Zion


Book Description

A family of Eastern European refugees finds a home in racially charged St. Louis in this sweeping historical novel from a National Jewish Book Award finalist. In 1916, Mags Preacher arrives in the big city of St. Louis, fresh from the piney woods, hoping to learn the beauty trade. Instead, she winds up with a job at Fishbein’s Funeral Home, run by an émigré who came to America to flee the pogroms of Russia. Mags knows nothing about Jews except that they killed the Lord Jesus Christ, but by the time her boss saves her life during the race riots in East St. Louis, all her perceptions have changed. Marching to Zion is the story of Mags and of Mr. Fishbein, but it’s also the story of Fishbein’s daughter, Minerva, a beautiful redhead with an air of danger about her, and Magnus Bailey, Fishbein’s charismatic business partner and Mags’s first friend in town. When Magnus falls for Minerva’s willful spirit, he’ll learn just how dangerous she can be for a black man in America. Readers of Mary Glickman’s One More River will celebrate the return of Aurora Mae Stanton, who joins a cast of vibrant new characters in a tale that stretches from East St. Louis, Missouri, to Memphis, Tennessee, from World War I to the Great Depression. Hailed as “a powerful reminder of the discrimination and unspeakable hardships African Americans suffered,” Marching to Zion is a gripping love story, a fascinating angle on history, and a compelling meditation on justice and fate (Jewish Book Council).




By the Rivers of Babylon


Book Description

On a sultry South Carolina island, sunlight teases out the darkest secrets of the heart, in this novel from the author of An Undisturbed Peace. Joe and Abigail Becker, a Jewish couple from Boston, have inherited a house on Sweetgrass Island in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. Though they feel like fish out of water, the couple is excited to give the South a try—and maybe even find it a place to finally call home. Their Boston friends are convinced they won’t last the summer. But the South works its magic on the Beckers, holding them fast to misty marsh, farmlands, and grand oaks, the sweet twang of banjos and the blues. Even the locals have put aside their usual mistrust of transplants. Joe is convinced that has more to do with Abigail’s beauty than with his dubious charms—especially in the case of Billy Euston. A celebrated pit master and womanizer, Billy is transfixed with Abigail at first sight. And though Joe is used to his lovely wife’s effect on men, he misjudges their playful flirtations—a tragic mistake that will tear through the island like a hurricane, leaving the broken and the battered in its wake . . . Praise for Mary Glickman “Mary Glickman is a wonder.” —Pat Conroy, New York Times–bestselling author of Prince of Tides “Mary Glickman gives us a nuanced image of our twentieth-century selves, our society woven into stunning art.” —Carolivia Herron, author of Nappy Hair and Thereafter Johnnie “Religion isn’t the only thing that stirs Glickman to fervor: she writes in a high-drama, no-holds-barred style when it comes to romance . . . [An] entertaining novel about sins of the flesh and the redemptive power of belief.” —Publishers Weekly on Marching to Zion




An Undisturbed Peace


Book Description

Hailed as “the finest depiction of the infamous Trail of Tears,” this unflinching novel sheds light on a tragic history (Pat Conroy). As the tribes of the South make the grueling journey across the Mississippi River, a trio of disparate characters is united by a “far-reaching story of love, courage, and honor” (Booklist). Greensborough, North Carolina, 1828. Abrahan Bento Sassaporta Naggar has traveled to America from the filthy streets of East London in search of a better life. But Abe’s visions of a privileged apprenticeship in the Sassaporta Brothers’ empire are soon replaced with the grim reality of indentured servitude. Some fifty miles west, Dark Water of the Mountains, the daughter of a powerful Cherokee chief, leads a life of irreverent solitude. Twenty years ago, she renounced her family’s plans for her to marry a wealthy white man—a decision that soon proves fateful. And in Georgia, a black slave named Jacob has resigned himself to a life of loss and injustice in a Cherokee city of refuge for criminals. From the author of Marching to Zion and One More River comes a sweeping novel of American history. As their stories converge in the shameful machinations of history, three outsiders will bear witness to the horrors known as Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act—just as they also discover the possibility for hope. See why Library Journal raves, “This absorbing and vivid portrait of 19th-century America will attract serious historical fiction fans.”




Recognitions


Book Description

This volume offers a critical exploration of the many ways in which transcodification acts at the intersection of literature, art, history, and social and cultural artifacts to foster instances of recognition in the US. Recognition covers a wealth of meanings: from the mere acknowledgement of existence, validity or legality, or appreciation of something as valuable, to the identification of something as known or familiar. Accordingly, this volume deals with different struggles for recognition. One focus of the volume is the assessment of artistic achievement in relation to a so-called original, with essays concerned with cultural codes and with the role that translation, adaptation, and cross-cultural encounters have played in US artistic and literary productions. A second, parallel, strand focuses on the fight for political and social inclusion, or on the dynamics beneath the recognition of group and gender identities, to explore how activism and artistic/literary productions challenge received identity boundaries and accepted social and cultural hierarchies. Bringing together recognition and transcodification/transculturality, the book deconstructs crystalized and codified categories and celebrates the crossing of boundaries.




Bress 'n' Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-Generation Farmer


Book Description

More than 100 heirloom recipes from a dynamic chef and farmer working the lands of his great-great-great grandfather. From Hot Buttermilk Biscuits and Sweet Potato Pie to Salmon Cakes on Pepper Rice and Gullah Fish Stew, Gullah Geechee food is an essential cuisine of American history. It is the culinary representation of the ocean, rivers, and rich fertile loam in and around the coastal South. From the Carolinas to Georgia and Florida, this is where descendants of enslaved Africans came together to make extraordinary food, speaking the African Creole language called Gullah Geechee. In this groundbreaking and beautiful cookbook, Matthew Raiford pays homage to this cuisine that nurtured his family for seven generations. In 2010, Raiford’s Nana handed over the deed to the family farm to him and his sister, and Raiford rose to the occasion, nurturing the farm that his great-great-great grandfather, a freed slave, purchased in 1874. In this collection of heritage and updated recipes, he traces a history of community and family brought together by food.