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Books by Acklyn Lynch
Nightmare Overhanging Darkly: Essays on
Black Culture and Resistance /
Blueprint for Change
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The Beautiful
Struggle
A Father, Two Sons, and Unlikely Road to Manhood
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Reviewed by Acklyn Lynch
This is a very
moving autobiographical statement . . . a father-son
exchange which is both contemporary and complex . . .
the struggle is beautiful because it ends at the right
place with integrity and love . . . a blues experience .
. . deep in its pathos . . . but easy like a Sunday
morning . . .
It is interesting
that both father and son remained perched on the
precipice of chaotic dissonance . . . perhaps, they are
reflected as standing at the water’s edge . . . as one
aspect of the legendary historic journey . . . the
question remains . . . where will it take them?
This book has its
roots in Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Claude
Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land and George
Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin . . . Even
Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father manifests a
certain relevancy to this youthful voice
. . . The
generation speaks . . . and engages us in a new
discourse . . . granted that the world has changed
fundamentally from the 20th Century, the construction of
a young man’s life and its relationship to the father’s
journey must be seriously examined . . .
Ta-Nehisi Coates
invoked his Africanity by immersing himself in Djembe
rhythms . . . but his authenticity emerges out of a
“spoken-word” and “hip hop” consciousness rooted in the
reality of poverty and oppression . . .
While glittering in
the illusion of consumption and crass materialism . . .
He is attuned to the style, vocabulary and language of
his generation . . . but this blues sensibility
evidenced in earlier poets and writers like Amiri
Baraka, Larry Neal, Ted Joans, Sonia Sanchez, Toni
Morrison, John Oliver Killens, Kalamu ya Salaam, Alice
Walker, etc. . . . , remain decidedly engrained in the
richness of his work . . . Furthermore, he has found
contemporary compatriots in Sunni Patterson, Taalam Acey
and Chuck D . . .
Ta-Nehisi is deeply
respectful of his parents and their commitment to family
. . . community as well as historic legacy . . . he
preserves the deep intelligence . . . profound patience
and uncompromising discipline, which are essential
characteristics in the socialization process of young
adults in metropolitan America . . . There can be no
compromise in the discipline which is important in the
shaping of character, courage and integrity . . .
One’s will to
succeed . . . to achieve or to pursue excellence must
remain the direct pathway to any accomplishment . . .
there can be no short-cuts to tomorrow . . . no slipping
and sliding . . . shucking and jiving . . . because
urban life in America can be brutally short for young
Black men . . . This book, therefore, remains a
testament to that spirit of resistance, which manifests
itself . . . not only in a commitment to the Black
Panther Party or to the nationalistic urgency for the
awakening of an African consciousness among young people
at Nation House . . . but also a transformative voice
which can be discovered in literature, history, dance,
music, painting, sculpture, film, etc. .. . as we
attempt to reshape visions of our people’s struggle
beyond the shackles of yesterday’s deficits and
tomorrow’s challenges . . .
Ta-Nehisi Coates’
The Beautiful Struggle has provided us with the clarity
between illusion and reality as he recognizes his
parents’ exemplary role in confronting the issues on
tomorrow’s battleground . . . It opens the space for an
intense intergenerational dialogue . . .
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Dr. Acklyn Lynch, Former Chair and
Professor, Department of Africana
Studies—Over the course of his
quarter-century tenure at UMBC, Acklyn Lynch
taught each class offered by the Africana
studies department at least once.
Considered an expert on African American
political thought, philosophy, popular
culture, and Caribbean history and politics,
Lynch is the author of two books:
Nightmare Overhanging Darkly: Essays on
Black Culture and Resistance, and
Blueprint for Change.
UMBC |
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More About This Book
An exceptional father-son story
about the reality that tests us, the myths that sustain
us, and the love that saves us.
Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a
Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an
old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free
love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company in
his basement dedicated to telling the true history of
African civilization. Most of all, he was a wily
tactician whose mission was to carry his sons across the
shoals of inner-city adolescence—and through the
collapsing civilization of Baltimore in the Age of
Crack—and into the safe arms of Howard University, where
he worked so his children could attend for free.
Among his brood of seven, his main challenges were Ta-Nehisi,
spacey and sensitive and almost comically miscalibrated
for his environment, and Big Bill, charismatic and
all-too-ready for the challenges of the streets. The
Beautiful Struggle follows their divergent paths through
this turbulent period, and their father’s steadfast
efforts—assisted by mothers, teachers, and a body of
myths, histories, and rituals conjured from the past to
meet the needs of a troubled present—to keep them whole
in a world that seemed bent on their destruction.
With a remarkable ability to reimagine both the lost
world of his father’s generation and the terrors and
wonders of his own youth, Coates offers readers a small
and beautiful epic about boys trying to become men in
black America and beyond.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates is
a former staff writer at The Village Voice and
Time and has contributed to The New York Times
Magazine, The Atlantic, O, and
numerous other publications. He lives in New York City.
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America's Great
Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a
sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi
for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin
was falsely accused of stealing a white
man's turkeys and was almost beaten to
death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling,
a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem
after learning of the grove owners'
plans to give him a "necktie party" (a
lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
made his trek from Louisiana to
California in 1953, embittered by "the
absurdity that he was doing surgery for
the United States Army and couldn't
operate in his own home town." Anchored
to these three stories is Pulitzer
Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson's
magnificent, extensively researched
study of the "great migration," the
exodus of six million black Southerners
out of the terror of Jim Crow to an
"uncertain existence" in the North and
Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates
sociological and historical studies into
the novelistic narratives of Gladney,
Starling, and Pershing settling in new
lands, building anew, and often finding
that they have not left racism behind.
The drama, poignancy, and romance of a
classic immigrant saga pervade this
book, hold the reader in its grasp, and
resonate long after the reading is done.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted
30 June 2008
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