African Studies

A sacred feminine initiation of self-love and soul care rituals, tools, and exercises.Spiritual teacher, intuitive coach, and award-winning author Abiola Abrams invites you to activate African goddess magic to transmute your fears and limiting beliefs so that you can create more happiness...

Upon her brother's death, missionary Rose Sayer and Charles Allnutt, disreputable skipper of the African Queen, become allies as, marooned in German Central Africa during World War I, they fight their old launch downriver 'to strike a blow for England'.

Read by the author. Transform your life when you discover the essence of true masculinity and become the right kind of man for every challenge that lies ahead. Men are lost and in crisis. In a world full of misinformation and broken relationships, they are unsure of the true meaning of manhood...

In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal - an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea - as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, shifting, and contentious ways.

Examines the Oldawan, the Ancient Soul of Africa, and its correlation with what modern psychologists have defined as the collective unconscious Draws on archaeology, DNA research, history, and depth psychology to reveal how the biological and spiritual roots of religion and science came...

Scholars of US and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. Vincent Woodard takes the enslaved person's claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the starvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part of the slaveholder, and further draws attention to the ways in which Blacks experienced their consumption as a fundamentally homoerotic occurrence.

What is feminism? In this short, accessible primer, Bell Hooks explores the nature of feminism and its positive promise to eliminate sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. With her characteristic clarity and directness, Hooks encourages readers to see how feminism can touch and change their lives - to see that feminism is for everybody.

At once a powerful evocation of his early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice to both the individual and the body politic, James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil rights movement with this eloquent manifesto. The Fire Next Time stands as one of the essential works of our literature.

Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in 20th-century literature. In this charged collection of 15 essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope.

In The Black Boom, Jason L. Riley—acclaimed Wall Street Journal columnist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute—digs into the data and concludes that the economic lives of black people improved significantly under policies put into place during the Trump administration.

Searching for Serafim is a layered exploration of the life of Vancouver's first lifeguard, Serafim “Joe” Fortes. A Trinidad native who arrived on the shores of Canada in 1885, Fortes was heralded as a hero in Vancouver for saving dozens of people from drowning, and his funeral drew the largest crowd ever recorded in the city's history. Since his passing, Fortes has been commemorated with a Canada Post-issued stamp and local buildings named in his honour. Yet, little has been discussed about how he navigated an openly white supremacist society as an Afro Latino man.

Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a genre-defying collection of essays that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. His is a meditation on delight that takes a clear-eyed view of the complexities, even the terrors, in his life, including living in America as a Black man; the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture; the loss of those he loves.

Few modern voices have had as profound an impact on the black identity and critical race theory as Frantz Fanon, and Black Skin, White Masks represents some of his most important work. Fanon's masterwork is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of listeners. A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world.

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” writes Du Bois, in one of the most prophetic works in all of American literature. First published in 1903, this collection of 15 essays dared to describe the racism that prevailed at that time in America—and to demand an end to it. Du Bois’ writing draws on his early experiences, from teaching in the hills of Tennessee, to the death of his infant son, to his historic break with the conciliatory position of Booker T. Washington.

This memoir written by writer, orator, and former slave Frederick Douglass describes, in gripping detail, the circumstances of his upbringing, his brutal treatment at the hands of slave-owners, and his narrow escape from Maryland to freedom. Written in 1845, this narrative is one of the most famous works of American literature and provided fuel for the abolitionist movement that began in the early 19th century.

From its founding in 1966 to contemporary attempts to censure its history and revise its significance, the Black Panther party has aroused fear, hope, pride, vilification, and government-sponsored oppression. This is the first and only collection of the most vital, representative writings of the party. Here are Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, David Hilliard, and Fred Hampton; Kathleen Cleaver and other Panther women; the party's court battles and acquittals; its positions on black separatism, the power structure, the police, violence, education, and more.

In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the "N" word. Perfectly positioned to bridge the gap between people of color and white Americans struggling with race complexities, Oluo answers the questions listeners don't dare ask and explains the concepts that continue to elude everyday Americans.

Writer John Howard Griffin (1920-1980) decided to perform an experiment in order to learn from the inside out how one race could withstand the second class citizenship imposed on it by another race. Through medication, he dyed his skin dark and left his family and home in Texas to find out.

Fifty-five years ago, in 1964, an incredibly honest and revealing memoir by one of the America's best-loved comedians and activists, Dick Gregory, was published. With a shocking title and breathtaking writing, Dick Gregory defined a genre and changed the way race was discussed in America.

Africa has been known as "the cradle of mankind", and its recoverable history stretches back to the Pharaohs. But the idea of studying African history is itself new, and the authors show why it is still contested and controversial. This VSI, the first concise work of its kind, will prove essential for anyone interested in the African continent and the diversity of human history.