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Books by Richard Wright
Richard Wright: Early Works /
Black Boy /
Native Son /
Uncle Tom's Children /
12 Million Black Voices /
Richard Wright: Later Works
The Outsider /
Pagan
Spain /
Black Power /
White Man Listen! /
The Color Curtain /
Savage Holiday /
The Long Dream
Eight Men: Short Stories /
Haiku /
American Hunger /
Lawd Today! /
A Father’s Law
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The
Death Bound Subject
Richard Wright's
Archaeology of Death
By Abdul R.
JanMohamed
During the 1940s, in response to the charge
that his writing was filled with violence, Richard Wright replied
that the manner came from the matter, that the "relationship
of the American Negro to the American scene [was] essentially
violent," and that he could deny neither the violence he had
witnessed nor his own existence as a product of racial violence.
Abdul R. Jan Mohamed provides extraordinary
insight into Wright's position in this first study to explain the
fundamental ideological and political function of the threat of
lynching in Wright's work and thought. JanMohamed argues that
Wright's oeuvre is s systematic and thorough investigation of what
he calls the death-bound-subject, the subject who is formed from
infancy onward by the imminent threat of death.
Jan Mohamed shows that with each successive
work, Wright delved further into the question of how living under
a constant menace of physical violence affected his protagonists
and how they might "free" themselves by overcoming their
fear of death and redeploying death as the ground for their
struggle. The
Death-Bound-Subject is a stunning reevaluation of the work of
a major twentieth century American writer, but it is also much
more. In demonstrating how deeply the threat of death is involved
in the formation of black subjectivity, JanMohamed develops a
methodology for understanding the presence of the
death-bound-subject in African American literature from the
earlier slave narratives forward.—Publisher,
Duke University Press
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This is a
path-breaking, imaginative, comprehensive, indeed magisterial,
analysis of the ways in which death functions in the construction
of black subjectivities in Richard Wright's fiction,
autobiographies, and journalism. It both expands our understanding
of Wright's achievement and models a way in which the spectre of
violence, lynching, and death may be seen to shadow and shape a
trajectory of African American cultural production.—Valerie Smith, author of Not
Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings
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Abdul JanMohamed
reworks the concept of "social death" to read Richard
Wright in comprehensive and provocative ways. At the same time, he
offers a new account of slavery, rewriting Hegel and
psychoanalysis along the way to rethink "lordship and
bondage" as the "death contract" and to discern the
precise and various ways in which autonomy and freedom are
asserted. This book is enormously impressive in its sweep, its
detailed consideration of Wright's corpus, its theoretical
ambitions, and the new and compelling paradigm it offers for
rethinking slavery, death, and resistance.—Judith Butler, Maxine Elliott
Professor at the University of California, Berkeley
Abdul R. JanMohamed is Professor of
English at the University of California, Berkeley. he is the
author of Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in
Colonial Africa and a coeditor of The Nature and Context of
Minority Discourse
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We
Flew Over the Bridge
The Memoirs of
Faith Ringgold
In
We Flew Over
the Bridge one of the country's preeminent African
American artists and award-winning children's book
authors shares the fascinating story of her life.
Faith Ringgold was born in Harlem in 1930. Her
artworks—startling
"story quilts," politically charged paintings and
more—hang
in the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and other
major museums around the world. Her children's
books, including the Caldecott Honor Book Tar Beach,
have sold hundred of thousands of copies. but
Ringgold's path to success has not been easy. in
this gorgeously illustrated memoir, she looks back
and shares the story of her struggles, growth, and
triumphs.Ringgold recollects
how she had to surmount a wall of prejudices as she worked to
refine her artistic vision and raise a family. At the same time,
the story she tells is one of warm family memories and sustaining
friendships, community involvement, and hope for the future.—Publisher
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Faith Ringgold was born in Harlem in 1930, She
began painting more than forty years ago, and has exhibited in
museums in the United States, Europe, South America, Asia, Africa,
and the Middle East. In addition to Tar Beach, the children's
books she has written and illustrated include Aunt Harriet's
Underground Railroad in the Sky, If a Bus Could Talk: The
Story of Rosa Parks, and My Dream of Martin Luther King.
Ringgold has received more than seventy-five awards,
fellowships, citations, and honors, including seventeen honorary
doctorates. She lives in Englewood, new Jersey.—Faith
Ringgold
Faculty
at The Visual
Arts Department of UCSD
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Faith
Ringgold: Paints Crown Heights /
Faith
Ringgold: Quilting as an Art Form /
Faith Ringgold, artist
World-renowned artist and
writer Faith Ringgold discusses her evolution as an artist and
the influence her mother had on her art in this 1998 interview
for State of the Arts. Ringgold's exhibit, The French Connection
at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York is presented.
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Tar Beach (Ringgold) /
Aunt
Harriet's Underground Railroad in the
Sky (Ringgold)
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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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Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
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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
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
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posted 12 June 2005
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