Black History Month is a time to celebrate African American history and culture. The Black History Month Theme for 2023 is “Black Resistance”. The theme describes an opposition to historically oppressive rhetoric and systemic injustice, while focusing on the unification of black people and justice in the Black community. For more information on this year's theme "Black Resistance", visit https://asalh.org/black-history-themes/.
Databases
- Academic Search Premier This link opens in a new window
- African-American History This link opens in a new window
- Black Freedom Struggle in the United States This link opens in a new window
- EBSCO eBook Collection This link opens in a new window
- Films On Demand This link opens in a new window
- History Reference Source This link opens in a new window
For more databases, visit the Databases A-Z page.
eBooks on Black Resistance
Black Lives Matter in US Schools : Race, Education, and Resistance by
Black Lives Matter in US Schools critically examines the relationship between schooling and sociocultural abolitionist movements like #BlackLivesMatter. Aligning with a long history of education scholars who have insisted on the enmeshed nature of schools and society, the book addresses the role of various forms of curricula that perpetuate anti-Blackness while simultaneously shaping Black ways of being, knowing, and doing. While its focus tends toward issues of normalized violence, Black Lives Matter in US Schools is equally concerned with possibilities for justice stemming from curricular change and affects like hope and love that are central to radical acts of resistance to oppression. Themes range from critical literacies to IQ tests, from Afro-surrealism to historiography, as the book strategically tacks between traditional forms of qualitative and quantitative research and more personal narratives. Black Lives Matter in US Schools speaks powerfully against the continued onslaught of inequities in schools and their communities, working to create space for forms of learning that are responsible to and for Black lives.
ISBN: 9781438489179Publication Date: 2022-07-01
Extravagant Abjection by
Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series 2011 Winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award presented by the Modern Language Association Challenging the conception of empowerment associated with the Black Power Movement and its political and intellectual legacies in the present, Darieck Scott contends that power can be found not only in martial resistance, but, surprisingly, where the black body has been inflicted with harm or humiliation. Theorizing the relation between blackness and abjection by foregrounding often neglected depictions of the sexual exploitation and humiliation of men in works by James Weldon Johnson, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Samuel R. Delany, Extravagant Abjection asks: If we're racialized through domination and abjection, what is the political, personal, and psychological potential in racialization-through-abjection? Using the figure of male rape as a lens through which to examine this question, Scott argues that blackness in relation to abjection endows its inheritors with a form of counter-intuitive power--indeed, what can be thought of as a revised notion of black power. This power is found at the point at which ego, identity, body, race, and nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated and compromised, without defensible boundary. Yet in Extravagant Abjection, "power" assumes an unexpected and paradoxical form. In arguing that blackness endows its inheritors with a surprising form of counter-intuitive power--as a resource for the political present--found at the very point of violation, Extravagant Abjection enriches our understanding of the construction of black male identity.
ISBN: 9780814786543Publication Date: 2010-07-01
Fight for Freedom by
Although there has been a number of studies on black resistance, very few of these have focused exclusively on such a wide range of resistance campaigns and strategies within a single volume. One of the central arguments of this study is that from as early as the sixteenth century, when Europeans attempted to systematically exploit Africans, black people have engaged in a variety of organised and sustained resistance campaigns to assert their independence and identity. This book examines some of the different strategies employed by black people in Africa and the Diaspora in response to European domination and exploitation. Drawing upon research from scholars based at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana and the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, this collection of original essays covers the academic disciplines of African and Caribbean history, literature, politics and psychology.
ISBN: 9789988647674Publication Date: 2017-10-05
Resistance Reimagined by
Looking closely at nineteenth-century texts and twentieth-century novels written by African American women about antebellum America, Resistance Reimagined highlights examples of black women's activism within a society that spoke so much of freedom but granted it so selectively. This book introduces readers to types of resistance that differ from the militancy and violence often associated with activism, and it confronts expectations about what African American literature can and should be. Regis Fox analyzes the work of authors including Anna Julia Cooper, Elizabeth Keckly, Harriet Wilson, and Sherley Anne Williams. Connected by their intellectualism, these thinkers are astutely attuned to the areas of American society that notions of liberalism and progress do not reach. The world they portray in their work is built on philosophical contradictions, legal paradoxes, and incoherent social practices that support white supremacy. Fox shows how these women use their writing to protest antiblack violence, reject superficial reform, call for major sociopolitical change, and challenge the false promises of American democracy.
ISBN: 9780813056586Publication Date: 2017-12-30
The Sovereignty of Quiet by
African American culture is often considered expressive, dramatic, and even defiant. In The Sovereignty of Quiet, Kevin Quashie explores quiet as a different kind of expressiveness, one which characterizes a person's desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, and fears. Quiet is a metaphor for the inner life, and as such, enables a more nuanced understanding of black culture. The book revisits such iconic moments as Tommie Smith and John Carlos's protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and Elizabeth Alexander's reading at the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama. Quashie also examines such landmark texts as Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, and Toni Morrison's Sula to move beyond the emphasis on resistance, and to suggest that concepts like surrender, dreaming, and waiting can remind us of the wealth of black humanity.
ISBN: 9780813553115Publication Date: 2012-07-25
These books and more can be found by searching the Library's catalog.
Black History Theme 2023: Black Resistance
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