Social Science : African-American Studies

In African-American Servitude and Historical Imaginings Margaret Jordan initiates a new way of looking at the African American presence in American literature. Twentieth-century retrospective fiction is the site for this compelling investigation about how African American servants and slaves have enormous utility as cultural artifacts, objects to be acted upon, agents in place, or agents provocateurs. Jordan argues that those who even those seemingly innocuous, infrequently visible, or silent servants are vehicles through which history, culture and social values and practices are cultivated and perpetuated, challenged and destabllized. Jordan demonstrates how African American servants and servitude are strategically deployed and engaged in ways which encourage a rethinking of the past. She examines the ideological underpinnings of retrospective fiction by writers who are clearly social theorists and philosophers. Jordan contends that they do not read or misread history, they imagine history as meditations on social realties and reconstruct the past as a way to confront the present. more...

Price: $59.95

Examines literature by African, Native, and Jewish American novelists at the beginning of the twentieth century, a period of radical dislocation from homelands for these three ethnic groups as well as the period when such voices established themselves as central figures in the American literary canon. more...

Price: $65.00

Colonial Mexico was home to the largest population of free and slave Africans in the New World. Africans in Colonial Mexico explores how they learned to make their way in a culture of Spanish and Roman Catholic absolutism by using the legal institutions of church and state to create a semblance of cultural autonomy. From secular and ecclesiastical court records, Bennett reconstructs the lives of slave and free blacks, their regulation by the government and the Church, the impact of the Inquisition, their legal status in marriage, and their rights and obligations as Christian subjects. more...

Price: $18.35

A profoundly courageous and insightful memoir, An American Story documents the events that have shaped journalist Debra Dickerson's conscience. The daughter of former sharecroppers, Dickerson never imagined she would emerge from her squalid St. more...

Price: $9.95

In At Home in Diaspora, Wendy W. Walters investigates the work of Chester Himes, Michelle Cliff, and other twentieth-century black international writers who have lived in and written from countries they do not call home. Walters suggests that in the absence of a recoverable land of origin, the idea of diaspora comes to represent a home that is not singular or exclusionary. more...

Price: $60.00