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Double Consciousness explores the conceptual art practices of African-American artists over the past 35 years, using as its underpinning, the reflexive nature of art-making which emerged with the avant-garde of the late 1960s. The exhibition chronicles conceptual art as practice of ideas as...

Historically Canadians have considered themselves to be more or less free of racial prejudice. Although this conception has been challenged in recent years, it has not been completely dispelled. In Colour-Coded, Constance Backhouse illustrates the tenacious hold that white supremacy had on our...

This groundbreaking collection of profiles, interviews, essays and reviews on such well-known black writers and artists as Nalo Hopkinson, Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, Lawrence Hill and Edwidge Danticat constitutes a frank conversation on the significance of race in contemporary Black Canadian and...

This collection of interviews with James Baldwin covers the period 1961-1987, from the year of the publication of Nobody Knows My Names, his fourth book, to just a few weeks before his death. It includes the last formal conversation with him. Twenty-seven interviews reprinted here come...

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. Through a consideration of literary representation, public...

Black Canadian women must constantly incorporate changes to their identities to faces the challenges of living in a multicultural society. Naturally Woman: The Search for Self in Black Canadian Women's Literature examines the ways in which Black immigrant women must adapt to survive in a...

The first comparative history of African American and Black British artists, artworks, and art movements, Stick to the Skin traces the lives and works of over fifty painters, photographers, sculptors, and mixed-media, assemblage, installation, video, and performance artists working in...

Dr Yvonne Bobb-Smith explores the knowledge and history of resistance of Caribbean women in Canada, using her own journey as a personal place from which to navigate the generalised experience of settlement and adjustment in the Diaspora. I Know Who I Am investigates the stories of 45 Caribbean women...

If asked to list the greatest innovators of modern American poetry, few of us would think to include Jay-Z or Eminem in their number. And yet hip hop is the source of some of the most exciting developments in verse today. The media uproar in response to its controversial lyrical content has obscured...

On a lonely wharf a clerk in an ink-blue coat inspects bales and bales of paper that hold a poet's accumulated left-hand pages--the unwritten, the withheld, the unexpressed, the withdrawn, the restrained, the word-shard. In The Blue Clerk renowned poet Dionne Brand stages a...

A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean...

WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award "100 Notable Books of the Year," The New York Times Book Review One Book, One Philadelphia Citywide Reading Program Selection, 2021 "By some literary magic--no, it's...

How policing became the major political issue of our time Combining firsthand accounts from activists with the research of scholars and reflections from artists, Policing the Planet traces the global spread of the broken-windows policing strategy, first established in New York...

Winner of the 2002 Scotiabank Giller Prize and of the 2003 Commonwealth Writers' Prize: Best Book (Canada and the Caribbean) When an elderly Bimshire village woman calls the police to confess to a murder, the result is a shattering all-night vigil that brings...

The latest work from pioneering scholar George Elliott Clarke, Directions Home is the most comprehensive analysis of African-Canadian texts and writers to date. Building on the discoveries of his critically acclaimed Odysseys Home, Clarke passionately analyses the beautiful complexities and...

The long-awaited new work from one of Canada's leading intellectuals and poets, Black is a brilliant and fiery look at race and culture. Its genesis is Clark's time at Duke University in the late '90s; that experience unleashed political and personal outrage. This poetry is white-hot with honesty...

Mixing prose, poetry, and drama, and including the work of established writers and new voices, writing in English as well as French (in translation here), Eyeing the North Star is a varied and vibrant overview of the recent evolution of African-Canadian Literature.

Award-winning poet and scholar, George Elliott Clarke edits this pioneer collection of passionate, spiritual, earthy and liberating prose, poetry and song.. His first book of poetry, 'Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues' appeared from Pottersfield Press in 1983 and 'Whylah Falls', a second volume,...

Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature is a pioneering study of African-Canadian literary creativity, laying the groundwork for future scholarly work in the field. Based on extensive excavations of archives and texts, this challenging passage through twelve essays presents a...

In a powerful, poetic missive, award-winning author-illustrator Maxine Beneba Clarke celebrates the meaning behind the words Black Lives Matter. Little one, when we say Black Lives Matter, we're saying Black people are wonderful-strong. That we...

Essays on hip-hop feminism featuring relevant, real conversations about how race and gender politics intersect with pop culture and current events. For the Crunk Feminist Collective, their academic day jobs were lacking in conversations they actually wanted--relevant, real...

Between 1935 and 1939, the United States government paid out-of-work artists to write, act, and stage theatre as part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal job relief program. In segregated "Negro Units" set up under the FTP, African American artists took on theatre work usually reserved...

Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller Octavia E. Butler's bestselling literary science-fiction masterpiece, Kindred, now in graphic novel format. More than 35 years after its release, Kindred continues to draw in new readers with its deep exploration of the violence and...

Now for the first time, the life and work of Alvin Ailey, one of the most beloved figures in modern dance, is examined by a writer uniquely able to place him and his legacy in perspective. Jennifer Dunning, New York Times dance critic and reporter, brings her expertise, extensive...

'Every voice raised against racism chips away at its power. We can't afford to stay silent. This book is an attempt to speak'*Updated edition featuring a new afterword*The book that sparked a national conversation. Exploring everything from eradicated black history to the inextricable...

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR * MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST * "A gripping historical narrative exploring both the bounds of slavery and what it means to be truly free." --Vanity Fair Eleven-year-old George Washington...

The aftermath of the fall of Paris, 1940. Hieronymus Falk, a rising star on the cabaret scene, is arrested in a cafe and never heard from again. He is twenty years old. A German citizen. And he is black.Fifty years later, Sid, Hiero's bandmate and the only witness that day, is going back to Berlin....

A passionate, rigorous, and persuasive look at the helpful complexity of art during a time of profound cultural turmoil By turns historical, critical, and personal, this book examines the use of art--and love--as a resource amid the recent wave of shootings by American police of...

Multiculturalism is regarded as a key feature of Canada's national identity. Yet despite an increasingly diverse population, racialized Canadians are systematically excluded from full participation in society through personal and structural forms of racism and discrimination. Race and Anti...

The work of black writers, editors, publishers, and librarians is deeply embedded in the history of American print culture, from slave narratives to digital databases. While the printed word can seem democratizing, it remains that the infrastructures of print and digital culture can be as...

A CBC BOOKS MUST-READ NONFICTION BOOK FOR BLACK HISTORY MONTH Nominated for the Toronto Book Award Smartly dressed and smiling, Canada's black train porters were a familiar sight to the average passenger--yet their minority status rendered them politically invisible, second-class in...

2007 Alan Merriam Prize presented by the Society for Ethnomusicology 2007 PEN/Beyond Margins Book Award Finalist Explores how the traditions of black music are intertwined in the games black girls grow up with When we think of African American popular music,...

How She Read is a collection of genre-blurring poems about the representation of Black women, their hearts, minds and bodies, across the Canadian cultural imagination. Drawing from grade-school vocabulary spellers, literature, history, art, media and pop culture, Chantal...

African American art in the era of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers In the period of radical change that was 1963-83, young black artists at the beginning of their careers confronted difficult questions about art, politics and racial identity. How to make art that would...

Toronto has long been a place that people of colour move to in order to join queer of colour communities. Yet the city's rich history of activism by queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and racialized people (QTBIPOC) remains largely unwritten and unarchived. While QTBIPOC have a long and visible...

Discover the main features of Emancipation Day celebrations, learn about the people of African ancestry's struggle for freedom, and the victories achieved in the push for equality into the 21st century. On August 1, 1834, 800,000 enslaved Africans in the British...

"A book to treasure and share across generations." --David Chariandy, author of Brother Beatrice, a young girl of uncertain age, wakes up all alone in a tree house in the forest  How did she arrive in this cozy dwelling, stocked carefully with bookshelves and oatmeal...

Lawrence Hill's remarkable novel, Any Known Blood, amulti-generational story about a Canadian man of mixed race, was met withcritical acclaim and it marked the emergence of a powerful new voice in Canadianwriting. Now Hill, himself a child of a black father and white mother, brings usBLACK BERRY,...

Abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle--a string of slaves-- Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War and...

Censorship and book burning are still present in our lives. Lawrence Hill shares his experiences of how ignorance and the fear of ideas led a group in the Netherlands to burn the cover of his widely successful novel, The Book of Negroes, in 2011. Why do books continue to ignite such strong reactions...

Lawrence Hill spellbound readers with Someone Knows My Name (made into the television mini-series, The Book of Negroes), hailed as "transporting" (Entertainment Weekly) and "completely engrossing" (Washington Post). The Illegal is the gripping story of Keita Ali, a refugee--like the many in today...

Mahatma Grafton is a disillusioned university graduate burdened with a famous name, and suffering from the curse of his generation -- a total lack of interest in the state of the world. The son of a retired railway porter from Winnipeg, he returns home for a job as a reporter with The...

When you look out of your studio window, what do you see? I see my determination to be free in America. Faith Ringgold: A View From the Studio is a remarkable book about a world-famous Black American artist. It is an artist's artist's book--by one artist and about another--about the making of...

In these twelve essays, bell hooks digs ever deeper into the personal and political consequences of contemporary representations of race and ethnicity within a white supremacist culture.

In this captivating dialogue, hooks and West grapple with the dilemmas, contradictions, and joys of Black intellectual life. Theology, contemporary music, film, and fashion.

"A manual for fixing our culture...In writing that is elegant and penetratingly simple, [hooks] gives voice to some things we may know in our hearts but need an interpreter like her to process."--Black Issues Book Review New York Times bestselling author, acclaimed visionary...

Essays discuss homophobia, everyday feminism, the portrayal of women in films, autobiography, Black women writers, and white supremacy.

"When women get together and talk about men, the news is almost always bad news," writes bell hooks. "If the topic gets specific and the focus is on black men, the news is even worse." In this powerful new book, bell hooks arrests our attention from the first page. Her title--We Real...

From Central District Seattle to Harlem to Holly Springs, Black people have built a dynamic network of cities and towns where Black culture is maintained, created, and defended. But imagine--what if current maps of Black life are wrong? Chocolate Cities offers a refreshing and...

Judith Jamison is, in every sense, a towering  figure. Her commanding physical presence and  extraordinary technique have made her not only a  superstar of American dance and an innovator in her field,  but also an inspiration to African Americans, to  women, and to people of all origins around the ...

 The National Book Award winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society. Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America -- it is more...

 "Destined to become part of the literature of the Iraq war . . . A substantial contribution to history."--Los Angeles Times Now in paperback, The Deserter's Tale is the first memoir from a soldier who deserted from the war in Iraq, and a vivid and damning...

Challenging the myth of African Canadian leadership "in crisis," this book opens a broad vista of inquiry into the many and dynamic ways leadership practices occur in Black Canadian communities. Exploring topics including Black women's contributions to African Canadian communities, the Black...

Glenn Ligon (b1960) is one of the most significant American artists of his generation. Much of his work relates to abstract expressionism and minimalist painting, remixing formal characteristics to highlight the cultural and social histories of the time, such as the civil rights movement. The...

An annotated edition of a classic text by South Africa's first black psychologist, a collection of essays reflecting on what it meant to be black during the apartheid years Being-Black-in-the-World, one of N. Chabani Manganyi's first publications, was written in 1973 at...

The Great Black North is a contemporary remix of the story of Black Canada. Told through the intertwining tapestry of poetic forms found on the page and stage, The Great Black North presents some missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that help fit together a poetic picture of the Black Canadian...

North of the Color Line examines life in Canada for the estimated 5,000 blacks, both African Americans and West Indians, who immigrated to Canada after the end of Reconstruction in the United States. Through the experiences of black railway workers and their union, the Order of Sleeping Car...

Delving behind Canada's veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives traces the violent realities of anti-blackness from the slave ships to prisons, classrooms and beyond. Robyn Maynard provides readers with the first comprehensive account of nearly four hundred years of state...

The history of black people in the Americas and the Caribbean cannot be told without addressing powerful geographical shifts: massive forced migrations, land dispossession, and legal as well as informal structures of segregation. From the Middle Passage to the Whites Only signposts of US apartheid,...

FINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR NON-FICTION   Interrogating our ideas of race through the lens of her own multi-racial identity, critically acclaimed novelist Tessa McWatt turns her eye on herself, her body and this world in a powerful new work of non-fiction...

For researchers seeking detailed information about the black diaspora in North America, this authoritative reference provides more than 300 years of black Canadian history, from the first migration of slaves, black loyalists, and Civil War refugees to the expansive movement brought about by the...

Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend...

*FINALIST for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction* *WINNER of the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award* *WINNER of the 2020 Story Prize* *WINNER of the 2020 L.A. Times Book Prize, Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction* ...

This collection features essays on Nova Scotia-born poet, playwright and literary critic George Elliott Clarke. Instrtumental in promoting the writing of writers of African descent, Clarke's work has won awards including the Governor General's Award for poetry. He is also the recipient of seven...

The most comprehensive volume devoted to the life and work of pioneering African American artist Robert Colescott, accompanying the largest traveling exhibition of his work ever mounted. Robert Colescott (1925-2009) was a trailblazing artist, whose august career was as unique as...

Hip-hop culture began in the early 1970s as the creative and activist expressions -- graffiti writing, dee-jaying, break dancing, and rap music -- of black and Latino youth in the depressed South Bronx, and the movement has since grown into a worldwide cultural phenomenon that permeates almost...

These poems -- intrepid, obsessive, and erotic -- tell the story of a woman's attempt to overcome despair. Claudia Rankine, whose first collection was the prize-winning Nothing in Nature is Private, creates a transfixing testimonial to a woman facing her own disease. Drawing on voices from Jane...

Many Canadians know that Viola Desmond is the first Black, non-royal woman to be featured on Canadian currency. But fewer know the details of Viola Desmond's life and legacy. In 1946, Desmond was arrested for refusing to give up her seat in a whites-only section of a movie theatre in New Glasgow,...

Winner of the 2017 Robbie Robertson Dartmouth Book Award for Non-Fiction! The Miramichi Reader's best non-fiction book of 2016 In 1946, Viola Desmond was wrongfully arrested for sitting in a whites-only section of a movie theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. In 2010,...

Glyph Award winner Juliana "Jewels" Smith and illustrator Ronald Nelson have created an unflinching visual and literary tour-de-force on the most pressing issues of the day-- including gentrification, police violence, and the housing crisis--with humor and biting satire. (H)afrocentric tackles...

Illus. in full color. Cassie, who flew above New York in Tar Beach, soars into the sky once more. This time, she and her brother Be Be meet a train full of people, and Be Be joins them. But the train departs before Cassie can climb aboard. With Harriet Tubman as her guide, Cassie retraces the steps...

A comprehensive look at the lyrics, music, cultures, themes, and styles of rap music. Winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation (1995) From its beginnings in hip hop culture, the dense rhythms and aggressive lyrics of rap music have...

Fifteen years after the publication of Push, one year after the Academy Award-winning film adaptation, Sapphire gives voice to Precious's son, Abdul. In The Kid bestselling author Sapphire tells the electrifying story of Abdul Jones, the son of Push's unforgettable heroine, Precious...

Fugitive Borders explores a new archive of 19th-century autobiographical writing by black authors in North America. For that purpose, Nele Sawallisch examines four different texts written by formerly enslaved men in the 1850s that emerged in or around the historical region of Canada West (now known...

September 18, 1995, marks the 25th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix's untimely demise. To commemorate this event, the authors have revised and updated over 200 pages of Electric Gypsy, the record of Hendrix's legacy as the music world's most talented guitarist.

Elaborate costumes, intricate patterns, and striking figural forms fill the work of Yinka Shonibare, a world-renowned artist who has roots in both London and Lagos, Nigeria. Shonibare's works reflect aesthetic features of the Victorian age, while undertaking a deep exploration and interrogation of...

A survey of English and French black Canadian writing and its transnational connections from the eighteenth century to the present.

A beautifully illustrated survey of African American art of the twentieth century, including many never-before-seen works by the most important artists of the period. African American Art presents a powerful selection of paintings, sculpture, prints, and photographs by forty-three black artists who...

In October 2002, the Toronto Star ran a series of feature articles on racial profiling in which it was indicated that Toronto police routinely target young Black men when making traffic stops. The articles drew strong reactions from the community, and considerable protest from the media,...

Almost everything about Wallace, an introverted African-American transplant from Alabama, is at odds with the lakeside Midwestern university town where he is studying for a biochem degree. For reasons of self-preservation, he has kept a distance even from his own friends - some dating each other,...

Winner of the 2016 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize for an Especially Notable Book "Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's searching examination of the social, political and economic dimensions of the prevailing racial order offers important context for understanding the necessity of the...

In this volume, African Canadian novelists and poets discuss the complexities of the writing experience. Most of the writers interviewed here are humanists; i.e., they see their work as serious depictions of the human condition, admit that their works are informed by an African Canadian ontology,...

Mickalene Thomas, known for her large-scale, multi-textured, and rhinestone-encrusted paintings of domestic interiors and portraits, has also identified the photographic image as a defining touchstone for her practice. Thomas first began to photograph herself and her mother as a student at Yale-a...

ONE OF AMAZON'S BEST ART & PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS 0F 2018 AN NPR AND PITCHFORK BEST MUSIC BOOK OF 2018 PICK ONE OF TIME'S 25 BEST PHOTOBOOKS OF 2018 NEW YORK TIMES, ASSOCIATED PRESS, WALLSTREET JOURNAL, ROLLING STONE, <...

Filled with reproductions of Kehinde Wiley's bold, colorful, and monumental work, this book encompasses the artist's various series of paintings as well as his sculptural work--which boldly explore ideas about race, power, and tradition. Celebrated for his classically styled paintings that depict...

Rinaldo Walcott's groundbreaking study of black culture in Canada, Black Like Who?, caused such an uproar upon its publication in 1997 that Insomniac Press has decided to publish a second revised edition of this perennial best-seller. With its incisive readings of hip-hop, film, literature, social...

The fifteen essays collected in Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop utilize a wide variety of methodological perspectives to explore African American food expressions from slavery up through the present. The volume offers fresh insights into a growing field beginning to reach maturity. The...

Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Author Award Winner New York Times bestseller"Timely and timeless." --Jacqueline Woodson "Important and deeply moving." --John Green Acclaimed author Renee Watson offers a powerful story about a girl...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER * NATIONAL BESTSELLER * This follow-up to The Underground Railroad brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. * "One of the most gifted novelists...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * PULITZER PRIZE WINNER * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. * Now an original Amazon Prime Video series directed by...

Using an impressive array of primary and secondary materials, Robin Winks details the diverse experiences of Black immigrants to Canada, including Black slaves brought to Nova Scotia and the Canadas by Loyalists at the end of the American Revolution, Black refugees who fled to Nova Scotia...