African Art

The short giraffe and his great friend, the rhino, are in search of much-needed food. When they realize that the tall acacia trees have plenty of juicy green foliage, they decide to ask the magic medicine man for some help to reach the leaves. Off they go, imagining all the way how the magic might accomplish their wish. However, when the magic meal is made for the pair, only one of the animals is in time to eat it. What happens next changes their lives forever.

Maya Angelou, one of the best-loved authors of our time, shares the wisdom of a remarkable life in this best-selling spiritual classic. This is Maya Angelou talking from the heart, down to earth and real, but also inspiring. This is a book to be treasured, a book about being in all ways a woman, about living well, about the power of the word, and about the power of spirituality to move and shape your life. Passionate, lively, and lyrical, Maya Angelou’s latest unforgettable work offers a gem of truth in every minute.

Bob Marley was a reggae superstar who is considered to be one of the most influential musicians of all time. Born in rural Jamaica, this musician and songwriter began his career with his band, The Wailing Wailers, in 1963. The Wailers went on to spread the gospel of reggae music around the globe. Bob's distinctive style and dedication to his Rastafari beliefs became a rallying cry for the poor and disenfranchised the world over and led to a hugely successful solo career.

In this startling group memoir, four friends - Black and White, gay and straight, immigrant and American-born - use Toni Morrison’s novels as a springboard for intimate and revealing conversations about the problems of everyday racism and living whole in times of uncertainty. Tackling everything from first love and Soul Train to police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, the authors take up what it means to read challenging literature collaboratively and to learn in public as an act of individual reckoning and social resistance.

In the early '80s, the music industry wrote off hip-hop as a passing fad. Few could or would have predicted that the improvised raps and raw beats busting out of New York City's urban underclass would one day become a multimillion-dollar business and one of music's most lucrative genres. Among those few were two visionaries: Russell Simmons, a young black man from Hollis, Queens, and Rick Rubin, a Jewish kid from Long Island.

Dancer, award-winning choreographer, show producer, stand-up comedienne, TV/film actress, and author, Norma Miller shares her touching historical memoir of Harlem's legendary Savoy Ballroom and the phenomenal music and dance craze that "spread the power of Swing across the world like Wildfire". It was a time when the music was Swing, and Harlem was king.

Gregory Pardlo's father was a brilliant and charismatic man - a leading labor organizer who presided over a happy suburban family of four. But when he loses his job following the famous air traffic controllers' strike of 1981, he succumbs to addiction and exhausts the family's money on more and more ostentatious whims. In the face of this troubling model and disillusioned presence in the household, young Gregory rebels.

From the storied ache of mbube harmonies of the ‘40s to the electronic boom of kwaito and the amapiano and house explosion of the ‘00s, this book explores vignettes taken from across South Africa’s popular music history. There are moments in time where music can be a mighty weapon in the fight for freedom. Disguised in a danceable hook or shouted for the world to hear, artists have used songs to deliver important truths and bring listeners together in the face of a segregated reality.

In Fantasies of Nina Simone, Jordan Alexander Stein examines the space between our collective and individual fantasies about Simone the performer, civil rights activist, and icon, and her own fantasies about herself. Stein outlines how Simone gave voice to personal fantasies through releasing dozens of covers of her white male contemporaries.

Tess Chakkalakal gives listeners the first comprehensive biography of Charles W. Chesnutt. A complex and talented man, Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland to parents who were considered "mixed race." Though light-skinned, Chesnutt remained a member of the black community throughout his life. He studied among students at the State Colored Normal School who were formerly enslaved. He became a teacher in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction. His life in the South of those years, the issue of race, and how he himself identified as Black informed much of his later writing.

The figure of the horse, at once earthly and transcendent, represented the contradictions of freedom and captivity that enabled young Octavia to develop her nuanced sense of voice and place. Drawing on previously unknown archival research, this volume illustrates how Butler's development as a writer was tied to her extraordinary resourcefulness and self-awareness growing up as an awkward, bookish Black girl in segregated, Cold War Pasadena.

In Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams, Donald Bogle tells - for the first time - the story of a place both mythic and real: Black Hollywood. Spanning 60 years, this deliciously entertaining history uncovers the audacious manner in which many Blacks made a place for themselves in an industry that originally had no place for them. Through interviews and the personal recollections of Hollywood luminaries, Bogle pieces together a remarkable history that remains largely obscure to this day.

This unprecedented history of Black cinema examines 100 years of Black movies - from Gone with the Wind to Blaxploitation films to Black Panther - using the struggles and triumphs of the artists, and the films themselves, as a prism to explore Black culture, civil rights, and racism in America. From the acclaimed author of The Butler and Showdown.

John Edgar Wideman’s “slaveroad” is a palimpsest of physical, social, and psychological terrain, the great expanse to which he writes in this groundbreaking work that unsettles the boundaries of memoir, history, and fiction. The slaveroad begins with the Atlantic Ocean, across which enslaved Africans were carried, but the term comes to encompass the journeys and experiences of Black Americans since then and the many insidious ways that slavery separates, wounds, and persists.

This enlightening book reframes the history of hip-hop—and this time, women are given credit for all their trailblazing achievements that have left an undeniable impact on music. First Things First, hip-hop is not just the music, and women have played a big role in shaping the way it looks today. First Things First takes listeners on a journey through some notable firsts by women in hip-hop history and their importance.

How nature came to be is the basis of African folklore. From a greedy baboon, a vain crocodile, and a clever jackal, African animals are often the characters used to convey the message of human characteristics, their pitfalls, and their triumphs. And unlike stories in other parts of the world, the ending is not always happy. In fact, some African fables are downright gruesome! It was from this point that I wanted to adapt some of Africa’s best-loved stories into tales that could delight a very young audience.

Even as our world has suffered through successive upheavals, Jesse McCarthy contends, "something was happening in the world of culture: a surging and unprecedented visibility at every level of Black art making". Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? reckons with this resurgence, arguing for the central role of art and intellectual culture in an age of widening inequality and moral crisis. McCarthy reinvigorates the essay form as a space not only for argument but for experimental writing that mixes and chops the old ways into new ones.

A comprehensive biographical and critical reading of the works of American poet and memoirist Maya Angelou (1928-2014). Linda Wagner-Martin covers all six of Angelou's autobiographies, as well as her essay and poetry collections, while also exploring Angelou's life as an African American in the United States, her career as stage and film performer, her thoughtful participation in the Civil Rights actions of the 1960s, and her travels abroad in Egypt, Africa, and Europe.

At the peak of the civil rights movement, Lydia Abarca was the first ballerina in a Black ballet company to grace the cover of Dance magazine. Alongside founding members Shelia Rohan and Gayle McKinney-Griffith and first-generation dancers Karlya Shelton and Marcia Sells, Abarca invited a bright light to shine on Black professional classical dancers. Grit, determination, and exquisite artistry propelled these swans of Harlem to dizzying heights as they performed around the world for audiences that included celebrities, dignitaries, and royalty.

A major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) 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 "poet laureate of his race" hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a "caged bird" that sings.