African American Language

This volume will revise the way we look at the modern populations of Latin America and North America by providing a totally new view of the history of Native-American and African-American peoples throughout the hemisphere. Africans and Native Americans explores key issues relating to the evolution of racial terminology and European colonialists' perceptions of color, analyzing the development of color classification systems and the specific evolution of key terms such as black, mulatto, and mestizo, which no longer carry their original meanings.

From the internationally acclaimed Nobel laureate comes a richly conceived novel that illuminates the full spectrum of desire. May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida - even L: All women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is both the void in, and the centre of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces - a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial.

Elegant, profound, and intoxicating—Spectral Evidence, Gregory Pardlo’s first major collection of poetry after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Digest, moves fluidly among considerations of the pro-wrestler Owen Hart; Tituba, the only Black woman to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials; MOVE, the movement and militant separatist group famous for its violent stand-offs with the Philadelphia Police Department (“flames rose like orchids . . . / blocks lay open like egg cartons”); and more.

In 2003, the book Nigger started an intense conversation about the uses and implications of that epithet. The N Word moves beyond that short, provocative book by revealing how the word has both reflected and spread the scourge of bigotry in America.

Speaking My Soul is the honest story of linguist John R. Rickford's life from his early years as the youngest of ten children in Guyana to his status as Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Stanford, of the transformation of his identity from colored or mixed race in Guyana to black in the USA, and of his work championing Black Talk and its speakers. In this engaging memoir, Rickford recalls landmark events for his racial identity.

This is the story of Dr. Geneva Smitherman, aka "Dr. G," the pioneering linguist often referred to as the "Queen of Black Language." In a series of narrative essays, Dr. G writes eloquently and powerfully about the role of language in social transformation and the academic, intellectual, linguistic, and societal debates that shaped her groundbreaking work as a Black Studies O.G. and a Womanist scholar-activist of African American Language.