Black Studies

Collection of plays addressing various aspects of the global black experience by outstanding black playwrights from Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and North and South America. Among the plays are dramas by Nobel laureates Derek Walcott and Wole Soyinka, pioneering folklorist Efua Sutherland, and two-time Pulitzer prize winner August Wilson.

Anthology of 20th century black lesbian and gay writing featuring the work of such acclaimed authors as James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Langston Hughes, E. Lynn Harris, Audre Lorde and April Sinclair. Divided into three chronological sections, this book includes author profiles and bibliographies, plus a secondary bibliography of works by poets, playwrights, performers and activists, as well as scholarly essays that set the political/cultural/historical context for black gay literature in the US.

Featuring works by over fifty African-American writers including: Terry McMillan, Clarence Major, Wanda Coleman, Ntozake Shange, John A. Wiliams, Barbara Summers, Ishmael Reed, and Al Young.

An anthology covering close to 300 years of poetic achievement in 400 important works by African-American writers, it features women as half the contributors and includes nearly 50 poems from the 1980s and 1990s.

It offers an enormous range of writers-from Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass, from Zora Neale Hurston to Ralph Ellison, and from Toni Morrison to August Wilson. It contains entries on major works (including synopses of novels), literary characters, character types, as well as general articles on poetry, fiction, drama; autobiography, slave narratives, and more.

Focusing on the work of black, diasporic writers in Canada, particularly Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, and Tessa McWatt, Blackening Canada investigates the manner in which literature can transform conceptions of nation and diaspora.

Focuses attention on a large, vibrant, yet oddly invisible community in the United States: people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean.

At the intersection of social and environmental history there has emerged a rich body of black literary response to natural and agricultural experiences, whether the legacy of enforced agricultural labor or the destruction and displacement brought about by a hurricane. In Cultivation and Catastrophe, Sonya Posmentier uncovers a vivid diasporic tradition of black environmental writing that responds to the aftermath of plantation slavery, urbanization, and free and forced migrations. While humanist discourses of African American and postcolonial studies often sustain a line between nature and culture, this book instead emphasizes the relationship between them, offering an innovative environmental history of modern black literature.