Momas Baby Papa's Maybe the Secrets Out


Book Description

Look who's all grown up, and No longer green to the Game; you know... that funny little thing called life. Yup the one and only infamous, "Drip Baby to the high Heel Diva" In a ballpark of her madam Celeste No longer being looked at as a night walking eye candy for peeping toms, after hour politicians, and natives of the nation’s capital Celeste though.




Momma's Baby, Daddy's Maybe


Book Description

A tale of love, lust, and mistrust, Momma's Baby, Daddy's Maybe reveals the secrets that break homes as well as hearts. The Jacobs's siblings have done a good job of masking their secrets behind finely wrought facades, hidden agendas, and questionable paternity...until the day it all starts to unravel. Faced at last with the truth, Kennedy, Simone, and Derrick Jacobs find themselves vulnerable and exposed, determined to salvage the lives they have made for themselves. Kennedy Jacobs has it all: beauty, brains, and the confidence to match. She also has the man that sister Simone has officially declared off-limits. With sass, class, and strength to spare, Kennedy takes the world by storm—until tragedy jumps up and slaps her in the face. Simone Jacobs wants it all. She has the expensive home, the VP position at a top accounting firm, and a new man who tickles more than her fancy. But something is missing. Just when it seems that this something is within reach and her life is coming together, someone starts to tear it apart at the seams. Derrick Jacobs is a handsome Wall Street exec, a fully equipped ladies' man who can't be tied down by any woman. With charming good looks, a chiseled body, and a very healthy bank account, Derrick Jacobs can move mountains...but will his secrets cause them to crumble? Passions run high as the Jacobs try desperately to untangle themselves from a web of deceit and learn how tragedy can move toward truth and the strongest of all ties.




The Secrets of Newberry


Book Description

Two lifelong friends are about to discover the hard side of life in The Big Easy after a heinous crime is committed . . . The Secret of Newberry 1950s New Orleans couldn't be sweeter for Ivory "Bones" Arcineaux and Hampton Bynote. Friends since meeting at an illegal gambling house outside Newberry, Louisiana, they indulge themselves with all the fine women, good food, and wild nights they can handle. All seems good in N'awlins-especially for Hampton, who plans to make a clean break from riotous living after falling for the woman of his dreams, classy Magnolia Holiday. But the love of a good woman may not be enough to pull Hampton from the brink of disaster when his pal Bones murders a white city councilman during a simple robbery gone wrong. Now with the local police and FBI hot on their trails, Hampton and Bones must decide whether friendship is worth losing their freedom-and possibly their lives. "McGlothin creates a sizzling slice of life in 1947 . . . He weaves convincing historical elements into a fast-moving caper." -- Publishers Weekly on Ms. Etta's Fast House




Habeas Viscus


Book Description

Habeas Viscus focuses attention on the centrality of race to notions of the human. Alexander G. Weheliye develops a theory of "racializing assemblages," taking race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This disciplining, while not biological per se, frequently depends on anchoring political hierarchies in human flesh. The work of the black feminist scholars Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter is vital to Weheliye's argument. Particularly significant are their contributions to the intellectual project of black studies vis-à-vis racialization and the category of the human in western modernity. Wynter and Spillers configure black studies as an endeavor to disrupt the governing conception of humanity as synonymous with white, western man. Weheliye posits black feminist theories of modern humanity as useful correctives to the "bare life and biopolitics discourse" exemplified by the works of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, which, Weheliye contends, vastly underestimate the conceptual and political significance of race in constructions of the human. Habeas Viscus reveals the pressing need to make the insights of black studies and black feminism foundational to the study of modern humanity.




The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was


Book Description

Many cultures have myths about self-imitation, stories about people who pretend to be someone else pretending to be them, in effect masquerading as themselves. This great theme, in literature and in life, tells us that people put on masks to discover who they really are under the masks they usually wear, so that the mask reveals rather than conceals the self beneath the self. In this book, noted scholar of Hinduism and mythology Wendy Doniger offers a cross-cultural exploration of the theme of self-impersonation, whose widespread occurrence argues for both its literary power and its human value. The stories she considers range from ancient Indian literature through medieval European courtly literature and Shakespeare to Hollywood and Bollywood. They illuminate a basic human way of negotiating reality, illusion, identity, and authenticity, not to mention memory, amnesia, and the process of aging. Many of them involve marriage and adultery, for tales of sexual betrayal cut to the heart of the crisis of identity. These stories are extreme examples of what we common folk do, unconsciously, every day. Few of us actually put on masks that replicate our faces, but it is not uncommon for us to become travesties of ourselves, particularly as we age and change. We often slip carelessly across the permeable boundary between the un-self-conscious self-indulgence of our most idiosyncratic mannerisms and the conscious attempt to give the people who know us, personally or publicly, the version of ourselves that they expect. Myths of self-imitation open up for us the possibility of multiple selves and the infinite regress of self-discovery. Drawing on a dizzying array of tales-some fact, some fiction-The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was is a fascinating and learned trip through centuries of culture, guided by a scholar of incomparable wit and erudition.




She Has Secrets


Book Description

Women confuse, frustrate, and excite Kirk. His sexy stepmother tries seducing him. His childhood sweetheart cheats with his bully boss. In disgust, he runs to a new life. A life where he is the seducer. No woman will claim his heart again. Sex, his tormenter, is now his weapon. His singer stage presence brings a regular shower of room keys and lingerie. Kirk holds the record for bedroom calisthenics, but sometimes worries that he can’t remember their names or faces. His surrogate father agent fails his virility test with a fatal heart attack. That tilts Kirk’s world. His new agent is the mysterious, beautiful Adriana. She seduces him. He can’t tear away from her gravitational pull. This goddess comes with a past she reveals one thrill at a time. Three killers from California hunt them. They flee to Wisconsin from Las Vegas a day before Kirk’s lawyer is brutally murdered. Kirk’s stepmother has seduced an attack gorilla that will charge at her command. Will she make the killers an ally? Kirk meets a gun-happy local deputy, and a man who just beat his enemy to death for insulting his sister. They’re done running. Kirk unpacks his Glock 17.




Fascination


Book Description

Most cultural critics theorize modernity as a state of disenchanted distraction, one linked to both the rationalizing impulses of scientific and technological innovation and the kind of dispersed, fragmented attention that characterizes the experience of mass culture. Patrick Kindig’s Fascination, however, tells a different story, showing that many fin-de-siècle Americans were in fact concerned about (and intrigued by) the modern world’s ability to attract and fix attention in quasi-supernatural ways. Rather than being distracting, modern life in their view had an almost magical capacity to capture attention and overwhelm rational thought. Fascination argues that, in response to the dramatic scientific and cultural changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many American thinkers and writers came to conceive of the modern world as fundamentally fascinating. Describing such diverse phenomena as the electric generator, the movements of actresses, and ethnographic cinema as supernaturally alluring, they used the language of fascination to process and critique both popular ideologies of historical progress and the racializing logic upon which these ideologies were built. Drawing on an archive of primary texts from the fields of medicine, (para)psychology, philosophy, cultural criticism, and anthropology—as well as creative texts by Harriet Prescott Spofford, Charles Chesnutt, Theodore Dreiser, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edward S. Curtis, Robert J. Flaherty, and Djuna Barnes—Kindig reconsiders what it meant for Americans to be (and to be called) modern at the turn of the twentieth century.




Nobody Is Supposed to Know


Book Description

Since the early 2000s, the phenomenon of the “down low”—black men who have sex with men as well as women and do not identify as gay, queer, or bisexual—has exploded in news media and popular culture, from the Oprah Winfrey Show to R & B singer R. Kelly’s hip hopera Trapped in the Closet. Most down-low stories are morality tales in which black men are either predators who risk infecting their unsuspecting female partners with HIV or victims of a pathological black culture that repudiates openly gay identities. In both cases, down-low narratives depict black men as sexually dangerous, duplicitous, promiscuous, and contaminated. In Nobody Is Supposed to Know, C. Riley Snorton traces the emergence and circulation of the down low in contemporary media and popular culture to show how these portrayals reinforce troubling perceptions of black sexuality. Reworking Eve Sedgwick’s notion of the “glass closet,” Snorton advances a new theory of such representations in which black sexuality is marked by hypervisibility and confinement, spectacle and speculation. Through close readings of news, music, movies, television, and gossip blogs, Nobody Is Supposed to Know explores the contemporary genealogy, meaning, and functions of the down low. Snorton examines how the down low links blackness and queerness in the popular imagination and how the down low is just one example of how media and popular culture surveil and police black sexuality. Looking at figures such as Ma Rainey, Bishop Eddie L. Long, J. L. King, and Will Smith, he ultimately contends that down-low narratives reveal the limits of current understandings of black sexuality.




Mamas' Drama


Book Description

Based on a true story, Mamas' Drama takes place from 1929 to 2004. It shares the experiences of four generations as they move through the "mama's baby, daddy's maybe" condition, which occurs when the identity of the father is questionable. This story begins in Harriman, Tennessee when main character, Josephine Stewart, is almost 8 years old. Josephine loves and cherishes her daddy, Thomas Sr. Her Mama, Millie, reveals to her that Thomas is not her biological father, and that she is born from an extramarital affair Millie had with the mayor of the small town. This revelation turns Josephine's world upside down, and she struggles with feelings that her daddy will not love her the same. The Stewart family migrates to Columbus, Ohio in 1934. Three years later, Josephine meets and eventually marries the love of her life; an older man named George Price. Their marriage is challenged by extramarital affairs. There are nine Price children in George and Josephine's family, including children born as a result of Josephine's indiscretions. Josephine chooses to keep their fathers' identities secret. Suzette, one of her daughters, feels she is a product of her mother's indiscretions, and seeks to find the truth about her biological father. Suzette's siblings taunt her about the identity of her father, and others tell her that she is not George's child. Suzette later determines to break the generational "mama's baby, daddy's maybe" condition. She marries and has a son, Devon, who becomes a single dad while in college. Mamas' Drama is a universal story, and is realistic historical fiction at its best. Compelling and inspiring, it weaves the actions and consequences of guilt and shame. Emotions are unbridled as this poignant, yet sometimes humorous book cries out stories most people only whisper. Healing, forgiveness, love and redemption lie within these pages, and those who are directly or indirectly affected by the "mama's baby, daddy's maybe" condition can relate to the words written in this book.




Rough Notes to Erasure


Book Description

We are living through the wrack of the White Male. As the compact between social hierarchy, inherited privilege, and race (reinforced by gender and other normative categories) shows signs of buckling, his rage and resentment threaten us all. For he is a thing possessed: possessed by his own love of possession, and born to a sense that the world belongs to him and him alone. The spoils of oppression lie coiled inside him, a glut he can't digest, and murder beckons behind the respect that he conceives of as his due." A hybrid of critical essay and memoir, and Rough Notes to Erasure contributes to a growing body of work that wrestles with the tacit and embodied nature of privilege and prejudice, and it contributes not only via argument but also through style. Taking inspiration from feminist/queer poetics and what Fred Moten calls “the black avant-garde,” these rough notes address the remainder that gets lost in explicit argument, which is the flesh. Where privilege roils through history, and empire whets the appetites. But also where the world catches on its own fractalization by thought, feeling, and desire; and language recovers, for a moment or two, the power to entangle us with our mother tongue.