First proposed by Black educators and the Black United Students at Kent State University in 1969, Black History Month, celebrated annually in February in the US, is an opportunity to celebrate Black voices, achievements, and to reflect on the central role of African Americans throughout US history. 91桃色 is proud to publish books that engage with serious issues and ideas relating to Black experiences.
Kara Walker is renowned for her bold examinations of the dynamics of power and the exploitation of race and sexuality through her profound work that has appeared in exhibitions around the world. She has created monumental sculptures, including A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014), for the former Domino Sugar refinery in Brooklyn, and Fons Americanus (2019) for Tate Modern鈥檚 Turbine Hall. This beautifully designed book documents the creation of Walker鈥檚 major new commission, Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) (2024), at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
In the summer of 1964, the turmoil of the civil rights movement reached its peak in Mississippi, with activists across the political spectrum claiming that God was on their side in the struggle over racial justice. This was the summer when violence against blacks increased at an alarming rate and when the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi resulted in national media attention. Charles Marsh takes us back to this place and time, when the lives of activists on all sides of the civil rights issue converged and their images of God clashed.
The American Revolution brought about violent and unpredictable social changes throughout the new nation, particularly in the South. Sylvia Frey reveals how slave resistance gave rise to a Black liberation movement that was central to the revolutionary struggle in the southern colonies, and how Black resistance persisted after the war as a struggle for cultural power that manifested itself in the establishment of separate Black churches with distinctive ritual patterns and moral values. She examines how white Southerners responded to Black resistance amid their own fight for independence from the British, and how they reacted to new movements by African Americans in the postwar period. With an incisive foreword by Manisha Sinha, Water from the Rock shows how the upheavals of war created opportunities for a quiet revolution that laid the foundations for the modern civil rights movement in America.
Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World. What they saw was a racially stratified country that reflected not the ideals of a modern republic but rather the remnants of feudalism. American Dark Age reveals how defenders of racial hierarchy embraced America鈥檚 resemblance to medieval Europe and tells the stories of the abolitionists who exposed it as a glaring blemish on the national conscience.
Racism continues to infuse Congress鈥檚 daily practice of lawmaking and shape who obtains congressional employment. In this timely and provocative book, James Jones reveals how and why many who work in Congress call it the 鈥淟ast Plantation.鈥� He shows that even as the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s and antidiscrimination laws were implemented across the nation, Congress remained exempt from federal workplace protections for decades. These exemptions institutionalized inequality in the congressional workplace well into the twenty-first century.
Bill Traylor (ca. 1853鈥�1949) came to art-making on his own and found his creative voice without guidance; today he is remembered as a renowned American artist. Traylor was born into slavery on an Alabama plantation, and his experiences spanned multiple worlds鈥攂lack and white, rural and urban, old and new鈥攁s well as the crucibles that indelibly shaped America鈥攖he Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration. Between Worlds presents an unparalleled look at the work of this enigmatic and dazzling artist, who blended common imagery with arcane symbolism, narration with abstraction, and personal vision with the beliefs and folkways of his time.
One of the most important artists of the late twentieth century, Jean-Michel Basquiat explored the interplay of words and images throughout his career as a celebrated painter with an instantly recognizable style. In his paintings, notebooks, and interviews, he showed himself to be a powerful and creative writer and speaker as well as image-maker. Basquiat-isms is a collection of essential quotations from this godfather of urban culture. In these brief, compelling, and memorable selections, taken from his interviews as well as his visual and written works, Basquiat writes and speaks about culture, his artistic persona, the art world, artistic influence, race, urban life, and many other subjects.
Abloh-isms is a collection of essential quotations from American fashion designer, DJ, and stylist Virgil Abloh, who was a major creative figure in the worlds of pop culture and art. Abloh began his career as Kanye West鈥檚 creative director before founding the luxury streetwear label Off-White and becoming artistic director for Louis Vuitton, making Abloh the first American of African descent to hold that title at a French fashion house. Defying categorization, Abloh鈥檚 work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums and galleries, most notably in a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Gathered from interviews and other sources, this selection of compelling and memorable quotations from the designer reveals his thoughts on a wide range of subjects, including creativity, passion, innovation, race, and what it means to be an artist of his generation.
When #BlackLivesMatter emerged in 2013, it animated the most consequential Black-led mobilization since the civil rights and Black power era. Today, the hashtag turned rallying cry is but one expression of a radical reorientation toward Black politics, protest, and political thought. To Build a Black Future examines the spirit and significance of this insurgency, offering a revelatory account of a new political culture鈥攔esponsive to pain, suffused with joy, and premised on care鈥攅merging from the centuries-long arc of Black rebellion, a tradition that traces back to the Black slave.
In Impermanent Blackness, Korey Garibaldi explores interracial collaborations in American commercial publishing鈥攁uthors, agents, and publishers who forged partnerships across racial lines鈥攆rom the 1910s to the 1960s. Garibaldi shows how aspiring and established Black authors and editors worked closely with white interlocutors to achieve publishing success, often challenging stereotypes and advancing racial pluralism in the process.
A major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872鈥�1906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation. In this definitive biography, the first full-scale life of Dunbar in half a century, Gene Andrew Jarrett offers a revelatory account of a writer whose Gilded Age celebrity as the 鈥減oet laureate of his race鈥� hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a 鈥渃aged bird鈥� that sings.
In the post鈥揷ivil rights era, wide-ranging groups have made civil rights claims that echo those made by Black civil rights activists of the 1960s, from people with disabilities to women鈥檚 rights activists and LGBTQ coalitions. Increasingly since the 1980s, white, right-wing social movements, from family values coalitions to the alt-right, now claim the collective memory of civil rights to portray themselves as the newly oppressed minorities. The Struggle for the People鈥檚 King reveals how, as these powerful groups remake collective memory toward competing political ends, they generate offshoots of remembrance that distort history and threaten the very foundations of multicultural democracy.
Could the African American political tradition save American democracy? African Americans have had every reason to reject America鈥檚 democratic experiment. Yet African American activists, intellectuals, and artists who have sought to transform the United States into a racially just society have put forward some of the most original and powerful ideas about how to make America live up to its democratic ideals. In The Darkened Light of Faith, Melvin Rogers provides a bold new account of African American political thought through the works and lives of individuals who built this vital tradition鈥攁 tradition that is urgently needed today.
Before Modernism examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, produced the conditions for the invention of modern American poetry. Through inspired readings of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters, George Moses Horton, Ann Plato, James Monroe Whitfield, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper鈥攁s well as the poetry of neglected but once popular White poets William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow鈥擵irginia Jackson demonstrates how Black poets inspired the direction that American poetics has taken for the past two centuries.
Some of America鈥檚 most pressing civil rights issues鈥攄esegregation, equal educational and employment opportunities, housing discrimination, and free speech鈥攈ave been closely intertwined with higher education institutions. Although it is commonly known that college students and other activists, as well as politicians, actively participated in the fight for and against civil rights in the middle decades of the twentieth century, historical accounts have not adequately focused on the roles that the nation鈥檚 college presidents played in the debates concerning racism. Based on archival research conducted at a range of colleges and universities across the United States, The Campus Color Line sheds light on the important place of college presidents in the struggle for racial parity.
In democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can鈥檛 always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally. Propped up by white supremacy, whites (as a group) are accustomed to winning; they have generally been able to exercise political rule without having to accept sharing it. Black citizens, on the other hand, are expected to be political heroes whose civic suffering enables progress toward racial justice. In this book, Juliet Hooker, a leading thinker on democracy and race, argues that the two most important forces driving racial politics in the United States today are Black grief and white grievance.
Also of Interest
Black Americans are by far the most unified racial group in American electoral politics, with 80 to 90 percent identifying as Democrats鈥攁 surprising figure given that nearly a third now also identify as ideologically conservative, up from less than 10 percent in the 1970s. Why has ideological change failed to push more Black Americans into the Republican Party? Steadfast Democrats answers this question with a pathbreaking new theory that foregrounds the specificity of the Black American experience and illuminates social pressure as the key element of Black Americans鈥� unwavering support for the Democratic Party.