Representations and coverage of S&M have become quite common nowadays, whether we see them in the fashion industry, commercials, the news, on television, film, the internet, and so on. But in the population at large and in the academic community, too, it is still persistently stigmatized. This marginalization, along with its ambivalently persecuted status, is a result, significantly, of a nineteenth century legacy. This legacy begins with Kraftt-Ebing’s designation of sadomasochism, along ...

A new edition published on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Baldwin’s death, including a new introduction by an important contemporary writerSince its original publication in 1955, this first nonfiction collection of essays by James Baldwin remains an American classic. His impassioned essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written.“A straight-from-the-shoulder writer, wr...

An illuminating study of Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel with special attention to its film versions. From its first publication in 1955 Nabokov's Lolita has been denounced as immoral filth, hailed as a moral masterpiece, and both praised and damned for stylistic excess. In this fresh appraisal John Lennard provides convenient overviews of Nabokov's life and of the novel (including both Kubrick's and Lyne's film-adaptations), before considering Lolita as pornography, as lepidoptery,...

“The Origin of Others combines Toni Morrison’s accustomed eloquence with meaning for our times as citizens of the world.” —Nell Irvin Painter, New RepublicAmerica’s foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Other...

What are the conditions needed for our nation to bridge cultural and racial divides? By "writing beyond race," noted cultural critic bell hooks models the constructive ways scholars, activists, and readers can challenge and change systems of domination.In the spirit of previous classics like Outlaw Culture and Reel to Real, this new collection of compelling essays interrogates contemporary cultural notions of race, gender, and class. From the films Precious

Drawing on both her roots in Kentucky and her adventures with Manhattan Coop boards, Where We Stand is a successful black woman's reflection--personal, straight forward, and rigorously honest--on how our dilemmas of class and race are intertwined, and how we can find ways to think beyond them.

Drawing from and expanding on the themes of Michelle Alexander’s acclaimed best-seller, The New Jim Crow, this in-depth guide provides a launching pad for groups wishing to engage in deep, meaningful dialogue about race, racism, and structural inequality in the age of mass incarceration. The Study Guide and Call to Action spans the entirety of The New Jim Crow, engaging the critical questions of how we managed to create, nearly overnight, a penal system unprecedented in world history, and ...

'Poetry, always foremost of the arts in traditional Africa, has continued to compete for primacy against the newer forms of prose fiction and theatre drama.' This wonderfully comprehensive anthology of African poetry has been expanded to include ninety-nine poets from twenty-seven countries, thirty-one of whom appear for the first time. Equally wide-ranging is the content of the poetry itself: war songs and political protests jostle with poems about human love, African nature and the surpr...

This collective biography of four jazz musicians from Brooklyn, Ghana, and South Africa demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered the politics and culture of both continents.

How FBI surveillance influenced African American writingFew institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover's white-bread Federal Bureau of Investigation. But behind the scenes the FBI's hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Drawing on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, F.B. Eyes exposes the Bureau’s intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, pl...

South Africa is still the major-player in African diplomacy, its military resources far outstripping those of other nations on the continent. It also has traditionally taken the lead role in Africa's united negotiations with other power blocs. Yet the recent consensus has been that South Africa's diplomacy over the last decades has been a disappointing failure - from appearing to back the controversial Mugabe regime to accusations that it is failing to utilize its position to encourage Chi...

A 2008 cover of The New Yorker featured a much-discussed Black Power parody of Michelle and Barack Obama. The image put a spotlight on how easy it is to flatten the Black Power movement as we imagine new types of blackness. Margo Natalie Crawford argues that we have misread the Black Arts Movement's call for blackness. We have failed to see the movement's anticipation of the "new black" and "post-black." Black Post-Blackness compares the black avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s Bl...