From its origins in early eighteenth century slave communities to the end of the twentieth century, African-American art has made a vital contribution to the art of the United States. African-American Art provides a major reassessment of the subject, setting the art in the context of the African-American experience.

A beautifully illustrated survey of African American art of the twentieth century, drawn from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection. Presents a powerful selection of paintings, sculpture, prints, and photographs by forty-three black artists who explored the African American experience of the twentieth century.

The biggest, most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present. Across a turbulent history, from such vital centers as Harlem, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them.

Exploring how artists at midcentury addressed the social issues of their day--from Jacob Lawrence to Elizabeth Catlett, Rose Piper to Charles White. This timely book surveys the varied ways in which Black American artists responded to the political, social, and economic climate of the United States of that time.

Emerging from a matrix of Old Left, black nationalist, and bohemian ideologies and institutions, African American artists and intellectuals in the 1960s coalesced to form the Black Arts Movement, the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement. In this comprehensive analysis, James Smethurst examines the formation of the Black Arts Movement and demonstrates how it deeply influenced the production and reception of literature and art in the United States through its negotiations of the ideological climate of the Cold War, decolonization, and the civil rights movement.

In this timely work—the first book on Black country music by a Black writer—Francesca Royster uncovers the Black performers and fans, including herself, who are exploring the pleasures and possibilities of the genre.

What is the essence of black dance in America? To answer that question, Brenda Dixon Gottschild maps an unorthodox 'geography', the geography of the black dancing body, to show the central place black dance has in American culture.

Blackness, as the entertainment and sports industries well know, is a prized commodity in American pop culture. Marketed to white consumers, black culture invites whites to view themselves in a mirror of racial difference, while at the same time offering the illusory reassurance that they remain "wholly" white. Charting a rich landscape that includes classic American literature, Hollywood films, pop music, and investigative journalism,

Originating in the African-American communities of the Deep South in the late nineteenth century, the blues gave birth to jazz, R&B, rock, punk, and country. From the impassioned slide guitar of the Mississippi Delta, to the electric sounds of Chicago's street corners, to the improvised jams of blues-rock, The Blues explores the many forms this quintessentially American music has taken.

The Harlem Renaissance, the period associated with the flowering of the arts in Harlem, inaugurated a tradition of African American children's literature, for the movement's central writers made youth both their subject and audience.

This unprecedented history of Black cinema examines 100 years of Black movies--from Gone with the Wind to Blaxploitation films to Black Panther--using the struggles and triumphs of the artists, and the films themselves, as a prism to explore Black culture, civil rights, and racism in America.

Three-time Hugo Award winner N. K. Jemisin challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption that sharply examine modern society in her first collection of short fiction.

Singer. Dancer. Movie star. Activist. Queer icon. Afrofuturist. Working class heroine. Time traveler. Prophet. Feminist. Android. Dirty Computer. Janelle Monáe is all these things and more. This provocative new study explores how Monáe's work has connected different media platforms to strengthen and enhance new movements in art, theory, and politics.

A galvanizing history of how jazz and jazz musicians flourished despite rampant cultural exploitation. Jazz and Justice examines the economic, social, and political forces that shaped this music into a phenomenal US--and Black American--contribution to global arts and culture.

Macbeth in Harlem is a testament to Black artistry thriving in the face of adversity. It chronicles how even as the endemic racism in American society and its theatrical establishment forced Black performers to abase themselves for white audiences’ amusement, African Americans overcame those obstacles to enrich the nation’s theater in countless ways.

An illustrated highlight reel of more than 100 women in rap who have helped shape the genre and eschewed gender norms in the process, The Motherlode "shines a bright light on a history of overlooked female talent and breaks down the ingenuity of our current generation of stars."

Connecting the black music tradition with the black activist tradition, Party Music brings both into greater focus than ever before and reveals just how strongly the black power movement was felt on the streets of black America. Interviews reveal the never-before-heard story of the Black Panthers' R&B band the Lumpen and how five rank-and-file members performed popular music for revolutionaries.

Surveying the range of Sun Ra's extraordinary creativity, this book explores how the father of Afrofuturism brought "space music" to a planet in need of transformation, supporting the aspirations of black people in an inhospitable white world.

A weave of biography, criticism, and memoir, Shine Bright is Danyel Smith's intimate history of Black women's music as the foundational story of American pop.

Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Usher is a black, queer writer, working a day job he hates while writing his original musical: a piece about a black, queer writer, working a day job he hates while writing his original musical. Michael R. Jackson's blistering, momentous new musical follows a young artist at war with a host of demons -- not least of which, the punishing thoughts in his own head -- in an attempt to capture and understand his own strange loop.