Synopses & Reviews
Unprecedented in scope and approach, this collection explores debates about the signal issues of the black experience in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. Over 160 primary writings, essays, speeches, petitions, editorials, newspaper and journal articles, manifestos, political cartoons, poems, and fiction map the controversies surrounding emigration and migration, black nationalism and separatism, violent and nonviolent protest, black women's rights, the existence of a black aesthetic, the role of religion in the civil rights struggle, and affirmative action, among other key debates.
Synopsis
Unprecedented in scope and approach, this primary-text reader offers a fresh and flexible framework for exploring signal issues of the black experience in the United States. With voices ranging from Phillis Wheatley in the late eighteenth century to Barack Obama in the twenty-first, presents multiple perspectives on key controversies that probe the fundamental relationship between race and democracy.
Synopsis
Class-tested by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his groundbreaking course, is an innovative core reader for African American Studies.
About the Author
Henry Louis Gates Jr.(Ph.D. Cambridge) is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, at Harvard University. He is the author of Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism; Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars; Colored People: A Memoir; The Future of Race(with Cornel West); Wonders of the African World; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man; and America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans. He is general editor (with the late Nellie Y. McKay) of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature; editor-in-chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center (online); editor of The African-American Century(with Cornel West); Encarta Africana(with Kwame Anthony Appiah); and The Bondwoman’s Narrativeby Hannah Craft; African American National Biography(with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham) and The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin(with Hollis Robbins). For PBS, Professor Gates has written and produced several documentaries, among them African American Lives, series 1 and 2, and America Behind the Color Line.Jennifer Burton(Ph.D. Harvard) is currently a visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego, where she has taught courses on the debates within African American studies. In addition to teaching at UCSD, she has taught at the University of San Diego and Harvard University. Along with Henry Louis Gates Jr., Burton edited the 31-volume series African-American Women Writers, 1910-1940, and was the volume editor for The Prize Plays and Other One-Acts: Zora Neale Hurston, Eulalie Spence, Marita Bonner, and Others. She also contributed to The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, and Great American Women. Her essays, fiction, and plays have appeared in publications from the Buffalo Newsto the Southeast Review. She has been a DuBois Fellow, a Mellon Fellow, and a Henry Luce Scholar.