Series: Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future

A number of Black writers have drawn inspiration from the biblical tale of the expulsion from paradise. In this deeply interdisciplinary and poetically written book, Jamall A. Calloway explores the presence of Eden and the aftermath of the Fall in works by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, and Alice Walker. In reflecting on Eden, he contends, these writers rethought...

Textual Life is a groundbreaking book that recasts the role of knowledge in the making of a colonial and postcolonial nation. It makes a case for a new literary and intellectual-historical approach to Islam in Africa. The Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864–1945) wrote History of the Blacks, a monumental history of West Africa, during a time when colonial...

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, prominent figures in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) converted to Islam and adopted new names. Poets such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Muhammad Touré, and Marvin X incorporated Islamic words and expressions, references to the Qur'an, and Arabic script, as well as symbols like the crescent star and depictions of Islamic architecture...

In the 1960s, a musical revolution took place in the industrial landscapes of Cleveland and Detroit. Disenchanted with the strictures of bebop, musicians forged a new style-free jazz-that took inspiration from a vast range of sources, including figures such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane; African and Middle Eastern music; avant-garde modernism; and the politics and aesthetics of...

Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are a crucial element of higher education in the United States. As of 2021, there were more than 100 HBCUs, with a total enrolment of approximately 300,000 students. Many of the most famed figures in African American history attended HBCUs, and the alumni of these institutions have a strong track record of upward mobility...

Rastafari is an Afrocentric social and religious movement that emerged among Afro-Jamaican communities in the 1930s and has many adherents in the Caribbean and worldwide today. This book is a groundbreaking account of Rastafari, demonstrating that it provides a normative conception of Blackness for people of African descent that resists Eurocentric and colonial ideas. Vivaldi Jean-Marie examines Rastafari's core beliefs...

In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labour, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday "folk." Many critics have perceived these representations...

Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are a crucial element of higher education in the United States. As of 2021, there were more than 100 HBCUs, with a total enrollment of approximately 300,000 students. Many of the most famed figures in African American history attended HBCUs, and the alumni of these institutions have a strong track record of upward mobility...

In the 1960s, a musical revolution took place in the industrial landscapes of Cleveland and Detroit. Disenchanted with the strictures of bebop, musicians forged a new style—free jazz—that took inspiration from a vast range of sources. These included figures such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane; African and Middle Eastern music; avant-garde modernism; and the politics and aesthetics...

Across a range of literary texts, Black writers depict taking flight to escape systems of subordination from the Middle Passage and the plantation to the present-day racialised order. While flight, air, and aviation technologies have long held out the promise of freedom, they also function as devices for constraining Black mobility. In The Black Aerial Imagination, Delali Kumavie examines how...

In 2015, students at the University of Cape Town ignited a movement that would reverberate across the globe by demanding the removal of a statue of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes. What began as a protest against a single monument became Rhodes Must Fall: a confrontation with colonial legacies at South African universities that inspired a movement at Oxford and...