Recommendations based on "New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God"

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that tells the story of two sisters through their correspondence. With a new Preface by the author.

I have been womanfor a long timebeware my smileI am treacherous with old magicFilled with rage and tenderness, Audre Lorde's most acclaimed poetry collection speaks of mothers and children, female strength and vulnerability, renewal and revenge, goddesses and warriors, ancient magic and contemporary America. These are fearless assertions of identity, told with incantatory power.

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FROM: Oprah Daily, Business Insider, Marie Claire, The Seattle Times, Lit Hub, Bustle, and New York Magazine’s VultureIntroduction by New York Times bestselling author Henry Louis Gates Jr.Spanning more than 35 years of work, the first comprehensive collection of essays, criticism, and articles by the legendary author of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston, showcasing the evolution of her distinctive style as an archivist and author.“One of the greatest writers of our time.”—Toni MorrisonYou Don’t Know Us Negroes is the quintessential gathering of provocative essays from one of the world’s most celebrated writers, Zora Neale Hurston. Spanning more than three decades and penned during the backdrop of the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, Montgomery bus boycott, desegregation of the military, and school integration, Hurston’s writing articulates the beauty and authenticity of Black life as only she could. Collectively, these essays showcase the roles enslavement and Jim Crow have played in intensifying Black people’s inner lives and culture rather than destroying it. She argues that in the process of surviving, Black people re-interpreted every aspect of American culture—"modif[ying] the language, mode of food preparation, practice of medicine, and most certainly religion.”White supremacy prevents the world from seeing or completely recognizing Black people in their full humanity and Hurston made it her job to lift the veil and reveal the heart and soul of the race. These pages reflect Hurston as the controversial figure she was—someone who stated that feminism is a mirage and that the integration of schools did not necessarily improve the education of Black students. Also covered is the sensational trial of Ruby McCollum, a wealthy Black woman convicted in 1952 for killing her lover, a white doctor.Demonstrating the breadth of this revered and influential writer’s work, You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays is an invaluable chronicle of a writer’s development and a window into her world and mind.

The critically acclaimed author of In the Wake, "Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangements . . . and yet always finds a way to beauty and possibility" (Saidiya Hartman). A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages, sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature—always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life. At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author’s mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. “I learned to see in my mother’s house,” writes Sharpe. “I learned how not to see in my mother’s house . . . My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words.” Using these gifts and other ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to the page. She practices an aesthetic of "beauty as a method,” collects entries from a community of thinkers toward a “Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness,” and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a brilliant new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.

Modern Library Harlem RenaissanceWhat would happen to the race problem in America if black people turned white? Would everybody be happy? These questions and more are answered hilariously in Black No More, George S. Schuyler's satiric romp. Black No More is the story of Max Disher, a dapper black rogue of an insurance man who, through a scientific transformation process, becomes Matthew Fisher, a white man. Matt dreams up a scam that allows him to become the leader of the Knights of Nordica, a white supremacist group, as well as to marry the white woman who rejected him when he was black. Black No More is a hysterical exploration of race and all its self-serving definitions. If you can't beat them, turn into them.Ishmael Reed, one of today's top black satirists and the author of Mumbo Jumbo and Japanese by Spring, provides a spirited Introduction.The fertile artistic period now known as the Harlem Renaissance (1920- 1930) gave birth to many of the world-renowned masters of black literature and is the model for today's renaissance of black writers.

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER In the spirit of We Should All Be Feminists and How to Be an Antiracist, a poignant and sensible guide to questioning the meaning of whiteness and creating an antiracist world from the acclaimed historian and author of Twisted. Vital and empowering What White People Can Do Next teaches each of us how to be agents of change in the fight against racism and the establishment of a more just and equitable world. In this affecting and inspiring collection of essays, Emma Dabiri draws on both academic discipline and lived experience to probe the ways many of us are complacent and complicit—and can therefore combat—white supremacy. She outlines the actions we must take, including: Stop the Denial Interrogate Whiteness Abandon Guilt Redistribute Resources Realize this shit is killing you too . . .  To move forward, we must begin to evaluate our prejudices, our social systems, and the ways in which white supremacy harms us all. Illuminating and practical, What White People Can Do Next is essential for everyone who wants to go beyond their current understanding and affect real—and lasting—change.

Since the release of Do the Right Thing in 1989, Spike Lee has established himself as a cinematic icon. Lee's mostly independent films garner popular audiences while at the same time engaging in substantial political and social commentary. He is arguably the most accomplished African American filmmaker in cinematic history, and his breakthrough paved the way for the success of many other African Americans in film. In this first single-author scholarly examination of Spike Lee's oeuvre, Todd McGowan shows how Lee's films, from She's Gotta Have It through Red Hook Summer, address crucial social issues such as racism, paranoia, and economic exploitation in a formally inventive manner. McGowan argues that Lee uses excess in his films to intervene in issues of philosophy, politics, and art. McGowan contends that it is impossible to watch a Spike Lee film in the way that one watches a typical Hollywood film. By forcing observers to recognize their unconscious enjoyment of violence, paranoia, racism, sexism, and oppression, Lee's films prod spectators to see differently and to confront their own excess. In the process, his films reveal what is at stake in desire, interpersonal relations, work, and artistic creation itself.

From Denne Michele Norris and Electric Literature, a vital anthology of essays by trans and gender-nonconforming writers of color, sharing stories of joy, heartbreak, rage, and self-discovery. Featuring seventeen essays by trans people of color--spanning writers, scientists, actors, activists, and drag queens--Both/And explores what it means to live as a trans or gender nonconforming person of color today. Acclaimed authors Akwaeke Emezi, Tanaïs, and Meredith Talusan share their stories alongside activist and organizer Raquel Willis and RuPaul's Drag Race star Peppermint, as well as a host of rising literary talent. Each story is told with honesty, authenticity, and beauty. A nonbinary molecular biologist has nightmares about their estranged father transitioning. A writer revisits a casual hook-up when she discovered her womanhood. And a woman vacations with her wife in Hawaii, where she gets in touch with the fire goddess within. These stories depict real trans lives from trans points of view, at a time when these perspectives are most urgent and valuable. Inspired by Electric Literature's groundbreaking series and edited by the first Black, openly trans editor-in-chief of a major literary publication, Both/And uplifts and amplifies stories of queer joy, heartbreak, rage, and self-discovery.

With the 1981 publication of the groundbreaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa ushered in an era of Chicana lesbian writing. But while these two writers have achieved iconic status, observers of the Chicana/o experience have been slow to perceive the existence of a whole community—lesbian and straight, male as well as female—who write about the Chicana lesbian experience. To create a first full map of that community, this book explores a wide range of plays, novels, and short stories by Chicana/o authors that depict lesbian characters or lesbian desire.Catrióna Rueda Esquibel starts from the premise that Chicana/o communities, theories, and feminisms cannot be fully understood without taking account of the perspectives and experiences of Chicana lesbians. To open up these perspectives, she engages in close readings of works centered around the following themes: La Llorona, the Aztec Princess, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, girlhood friendships, rural communities and history, and Chicana activism. Her investigation broadens the community of Chicana lesbian writers well beyond Moraga and Anzaldúa, while it also demonstrates that the histories of Chicana lesbians have had to be written in works of fiction because these women have been marginalized and excluded in canonical writings on Chicano life and experience.

In her work as poet, essayist, editor, dramatist, and public intellectual, Chicana lesbian writer Cherríe Moraga has been extremely influential in current debates on culture and identity as an ongoing, open-ended process. Analyzing the "in-between" spaces in Moraga's writing where race, gender, class, and sexuality intermingle, this first book-length study of Moraga's work focuses on her writing of the body and related material practices of sex, desire, and pleasure. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano divides the book into three sections, which analyze Moraga's writing of the body, her dramaturgy in the context of both dominant and alternative Western theatrical traditions, and her writing of identities and racialized desire. Through close textual readings of Loving in the War Years, Giving Up the Ghost, Shadow of a Man, Heroes and Saints, The Last Generation, and Waiting in the Wings, Yarbro-Bejarano contributes to the development of a language to talk about sexuality as potentially empowering, the place of desire within politics, and the intricate workings of racialized desire.