The University of Notre Dame Press is celebrating Black History Month throughout February and has put together a collection of insightful books in African American studies and African American intellectual history for you! Take a moment to learn more about the resilience and rich history of Black voices and to immerse yourself in trials, tribulations, and triumphs.
Nannie Helen Burroughs:
A Documentary Portrait of an Early Civil Rights Pioneer, 1900–1959
by Nannie Helen Burroughs
edited by Kelisha B. Graves
Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879–1961) was an African American intellectual who was also a female activist and educator. Burroughs rubbed elbows with such African American historical icons as W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Mary McLeod Bethune, and these interactions represent much of the existing, easily available literature on Burroughs’s life. Nannie Helen Burroughs aims to spark a conversation surrounding Burroughs’s life and work by making available her own tracts on God, sin, the intersections of church and society, black womanhood, education, and social justice.
“Kelisha Graves’s Nannie Helen Burroughs makes a valuable contribution to the field of black intellectual thought by providing a different analytical framework for those scholars studying African American women activists against Jim Crow’s oppression and for civil rights for all people.” —Linda D. Tomlinson, Fayetteville State University
William Still:
The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia
by William C. Kashatus
William Still is the first major biography of the free black abolitionist William Still. Based in Philadelphia, Still built a reputation as a courageous leader, writer, philanthropist, and guide for fugitive enslaved people when he coordinated the Eastern Line of the Underground Railroad. Unique to this book is an accessible and detailed database of the 995 fugitives Still helped escape from the South to the North and Canada between 1853 and 1861. This book will provides an opportunity to find new information about the runaway enslaved people Still assisted while challenging preconceived notions of the Underground Railroad.
“William C. Kashatus’s William Still is a double tribute to the heroism of this fascinating man as well as to that of the many freedom-seekers who made the journey out of the house of bondage and of those who aided them.” —Christopher A. McAuley, author of The Spirit vs. the Souls
Freedom Readers:
The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy
by Dennis Looney
In Freedom Readers, Dennis Looney follows the African American reception of Dante Alighieri through from the 1820s to the present. In particular, he demonstrates how the African American rewritings of Dante suggest that the Divine Comedy is itself a kind of slave narrative that uses the medieval author to comment on struggles like segregation, migration, and integration. Looney urges readers to contemplate the Divine Comedy with the African American rewritings in mind to interpret the medieval work in a new light and deepen our understanding of African American culture.
“. . . Rigorously researched and also engagingly readable, Freedom Readers offers a new angle of seeing African American literature that enriches our appreciation of its complexity and beauty. Demonstrating persuasively the continuing relevance of Dante, this important study of African American anti-imperial readings of his life and works opens up valuable new lines of comparative literary investigation.” —M. Giulia Fabi, University of Ferrara
The Spirit vs. the Souls:
Max Weber, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Politics of Scholarship
by Christopher A. McAuley
McAuley explores the intersection of two prominent scholars, Max Weber (1864–1920) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), in The Spirit vs. the Souls. Drawing on their correspondence from 1904 to 1906 and close readings of key texts by the two scholars, the book examines for the first time the ideas that Weber and Du Bois shared on topics such as sociological investigation, race, empire, unfree labor, capitalism, and socialism.
“Conceptually intriguing and rigorously documented, Christopher McAuley’s astute observations on the rival notions of Weber and Du Bois—and the broader politics of thinking about race—should be measured as an outstanding contribution to African American intellectual history.” —Patrick B. Miller, Northeastern Illinois University
Stepmotherland
by Darrel Alejandro Holnes
Stepmotherland, Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s first full-length collection, is filled with poems that chronicle and question identity, family, and allegiance. This Central American love song is in constant motion as it takes us on a lyrical and sometimes narrative journey from Panamá to the USA and beyond. Holnes explores common themes, like the pursuit of a new home. through an often overlooked perspective. Stepmotherland creates a new legacy focused on reverence for the past and dives into the central desire of immigrants and natives born alike: the desire for a better life.
“Stepmotherland is the brilliant and vertiginous movement of a soul from the state of innocence to experience and a remarkable and groundbreaking collection. No one who reads these stunning poems is likely to remain unmoved or unchanged by them.” —Lorna Goodison, author of Supplying Salt and Light and former Poet Laureate of Jamaica
Walls:
Essays, 1985-1990
by Kenneth A. McClane
The death of Paul, Kenneth McClane’s brother, changed everything in his life. Walls is a collection of autobiographical essays and a deeply moving meditation on relationships. Through his powerful writing, McClane details his experiences with losing a brother, as one of two first Black students to attend America’s oldest private school, his journey in creative writing, and more.
“Walls reminds us of the differences that set us apart, dividing our world into good kids and troublemakers, winners and losers, the beautiful and the damned. The anodyne for exile in these essays is McClane’s common but by no means commonplace lexicon, at once evocative and spare, that leads us to painful but honest connection and the luminous possibility of empathy.” —William L. Andrews, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Color:
Essays on Race, Family, and History
by Kenneth A. McClane
Color is a chronicle of the Black middle class in America. With the use of interconnected essays, Kenneth McClane continues his autobiographical account begun in Walls. In poetic prose, McClane sets a poignant narrative of racial progress as witnessed by his family throughout the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. Color follows McClane as he shares about their experiences being the first Blacks to integrate into all white institutions and the role his family played in the civil rights movement.
“Kenneth McClane’s voice is unique in American letters: pragmatic; contemplative; intriguingly moody; at times unabashedly and movingly sentimental . . . Color is a wonderful book of beautifully written, understated essays by an important writer who has steadily contributed to American letters.” —Elizabeth Alexander, Yale University
Intellectual Imagination:
Knowledge and Aesthetics in North Atlantic and African Philosophy
by Omedi Ochieng
Omedi Ochieng’s Intellectual Imagination unfolds a sweeping vision of the form, meaning, and values of intellectual practice. The book breaks new ground in offering a comprehensive vision of the intellectual vocation. Ochieng unfolds a multidimensional and capacious theory of knowledge and aesthetics. In a critique of the oppositional binaries that now reign in the modern and postmodern academy—binaries that pit fact versus value, science versus the humanities, knowledge versus aesthetics—Ochieng argues for the inextricable intertwinement of reason, interpretation, and the imagination.
“Intellectuals study a range of objects, organisms, and phenomena. However, they hardly study their own practice of intellection. In this book, Omedi Ochieng offers an enthralling dissection of the intellectual imagination. He invites us to take the turn of radical practice of intellectual life. The book is a journey into the future of global philosophy. Playing the role of an excellent tour guide, Ochieng makes the journey easy as he provides the conceptual tools to navigate difficult terrains.” —Uchenna Okeja, Rhodes University