After being snatched from her Manhattan comfort zone and thrusted into the unfamiliarity of Baltimore City; endearing, elegant and enterprising, Mackenzie Daye excited about life and the anticipations of the future. With her radiant smile and uber confidence, she walks in any space and commands attention, respect, and admiration. Aside from the constant battle to live outside of her parent's shadow, she never had to fight for anything. She'd been given every and anything that she had asked...

The iridescent Mackenzie finds herself completely submerged in a sea of uncertainty. Faced with the harsh and heartbreaking reality that she could lose both of her parents; she begins to try to find a way to make it. The journey that she embarks on is reputable. She learns the importance of honoring your mother and father.Tranquil and ever so humble Borne morphs into a savage Hulk. With his newfound role in the "family business," Gunner's upcoming trial and his upcoming graduation,...

Uncle Tom’s cab, a remarkable novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, was revolutionary in 1852 for his passionate allegation of slavery and for the presentation of Tom, “man of humanity”, as the first black hero of American narrative. Tagged as racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking, controversial and powerful job.

This work expands the scope of Morrison’s project to examine the ways and means of memory in the preservation of belief systems passed down from the earliest civilizations (both the Classical Greek and the Ancient Egyptian) as a challenge to the sterility of modernity. Moreover, this research explores the author’s specific use of Foucauldian theory as a vehicle for her narrative, which reclaims the very origins of civilization’s primal concerns with life, procreation and regeneration, spri...

Octavia Butler's premature and sudden death in 2006 has been very widely lamented, unhappily confirming her influence as a vital African-American and female pioneer in SF. Xenogenesis (retitled Lilith's Brood in 2000) is one of Butler's most important works, and comprises the novels Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989). The Notes cover Octavia Butler's life and work; the background and structure of the trilogy; (Black) SF in relation to race and gender; the tradition of dy...

Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, reads the speech she delivered in Stockholm, Sweden, at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2014Toni Morrison and Literary Tradition explores Toni Morrison's construction of alternative and oppositional narratives of history and places her work as central to the imagining and re-imagining of American and diasporic identities. Covering the Nobel Prize-winning author's novels (up to Home), as well as her essays, dramatic works and short stories, this book situates Morrison's writings within both African-Am...

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick examines the ways Zora Neale Hurston circumvented the constraints of the white publishing world and a predominantly white readership to critique white culture and its effects on the black community. A number of critics have concluded that Hurston simply capitulated to external demands, writing stories white people wanted to hear. Susan Edwards Meisenhelder, however, argues that Hurston’s response to her situation is much more sophistica...

"A meticulously researched, highly informed, carefully argued, and very accessible account of American socialism, socialists, and socialistic thinking, from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s . . . challenges the intellectual and political legacy of Werner Sombart's Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?, whose spirit still hovers over animated discussions about the 'failures' of socialism in the United States."---James A. Miller, George Washington Unive...

African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature and Being is the nexus to scholarship on manifestations of Africanisms in black art and culture, particularly the scant critical works focusing on African metaphysical retentions. This study examines New World African spirituality as a syncretic dynamic of spiritual retentions and transformations that have played prominently in the literary imagination of black women writers. Beginning with the poe...

Toni Morrison, the only living American Nobel laureate in literature, published her first novel in 1970. In the ensuing forty plus years, Morrison’s work has become synonymous with the most significant literary art and intellectual engagements of our time. The publication of Home (May 2012), as well as her 2011 play Desdemona affirm the range and acuity of Morrison’s imagination. Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing enables audiences/readers, critics, and students to review Morrison’...

The Harlem Renaissance was a watershed moment for racial uplift, poetic innovation, sexual liberation, and female empowerment. Aphrodite’s Daughters introduces us to three amazing women who were at the forefront of all these developments, poetic iconoclasts who pioneered new and candidly erotic forms of female self-expression.Maureen Honey paints a vivid portrait of three African American women—Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery—who came from ve...