Viewing turn-of-the-century African American history through the lens of cinema, Envisioning Freedom examines the forgotten history of early black film exhibition during the era of mass migration and Jim Crow. By embracing the new medium of moving pictures at the turn of the twentieth century, black Americans forged a collective—if fraught—culture of freedom. In Cara Caddoo’s perspective-changing study, African Americans emerge as pioneers of cinema from the 1890s to the 1920s. Across the South and Midwest, moving pictures presented in churches, lodges, and schools raised money and created shared social experiences for black urban communities. As migrants moved northward, bound for Chicago and New York, cinema moved with them. Along these routes, ministers and reformers, preaching messages of racial uplift, used moving pictures as an enticement to attract followers. But as it gained popularity, black cinema also became controversial. Facing a losing competition with movie houses, once-supportive ministers denounced the evils of the “colored theater.” Onscreen images sparked arguments over black identity and the meaning of freedom. In 1910, when boxing champion Jack Johnson became the world’s first black movie star, representation in film vaulted to the center of black concerns about racial progress. Black leaders demanded self-representation and an end to cinematic mischaracterizations which, they charged, violated the civil rights of African Americans. In 1915, these ideas both led to the creation of an industry that produced “race films” by and for black audiences and sparked the first mass black protest movement of the twentieth century.

What freedom looked like for black Americans in the Civil War era

Booklist Editors’ Choice WINNER of the Russell Freedman Award for Non-Fiction for a Better World Knowledge is power. The secret is this. Knowledge, applied at the right time and place, is more than power. It’s magic. That’s what the Black Panther Party did. They called up this magic and launched a revolution. In the beginning, it was a story like any other. It could have been yours and it could have been mine. But once it got going, it became more than any one person could have imagined. This is the story of Huey and Bobby. Eldridge and Kathleen. Elaine and Fred and Ericka. This is the story of the committed party members. Their supporters and allies. The Free Breakfast Program and the Ten Point Program. It’s about Black nationalism, Black radicalism, about Black people in America. From the authors of the acclaimed book, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, and introducing new talent Jetta Grace Martin, comes the story of the Panthers for younger readers—meticulously researched, thrillingly told, and filled with incredible photographs throughout. P R A I S E ★ “A passionate, honest, and intimate look into an important time in civil rights history.” —Booklist (starred) ★ “Impeccable writing and stellar design make this title highly recommended.” —School Library Journal (starred) “Detailed, thoroughly researched...A valuable addition to the history of African American resistance.” —Kirkus

America today faces a world more complicated than ever before, but our politicians have failed to envision a foreign policy that addresses our greatest threats. Ethical Realism shows how the United States can successfully combine genuine morality with tough and practical common sense. By outlining core principles and a set of concrete proposals for tackling the terrorist threat and contend with Iran, Russia, the Middle East, and China, Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman show us how to strengthen our security, pursue our national interests, and restore American leadership in the world.

In the world neoliberalism has made, the pervasiveness of injustice and the scale of inequality can be so overwhelming that meaningful resistance seems impossible. Disorienting Neoliberalism argues that combatting the injustices of today's global economy begins with reorienting our way of seeing so that we can act more effectively. Within political theory, standard approaches to global justice envision ideal institutions, but provide little guidance for people responding to today's most urgent problems. Meanwhile, empirical and historical research explains how neoliberalism achieved political and intellectual hegemony, but not how we can imagine its replacement. Disorienting Neoliberalism argues that people can and should become disposed to solidarity with each other once they see global injustices as a limit on their own freedom. Benjamin L. McKean reorients us by taking us inside the global supply chains that assemble clothes, electronics, and other goods, revealing the tension between neoliberal theories of freedom and the hierarchical, coercive reality of their operations. In this new approach to global justice, he explains how neoliberal institutions and ideas constrain the freedom of people throughout the supply chain from worker to consumer. Rather than a linked set of private market exchanges, supply chains are political entities that seek to govern the rest of us. Where neoliberal institutions train us to see each other as competitors, McKean provides a new orientation to the global economy in which we can see each other as partners in resisting a shared obstacle to freedom and thus be called to collective action. Drawing from a wide range of thinkers, from Hegel and John Rawls to W. E. B. Du Bois and Iris Marion Young, Disorienting Neoliberalism shows how political action today can be meaningful and promote justice, moving beyond the pity and resentment global inequality often provokes to a new politics of solidarity.

Scholars examine the activist efforts of Black Americans in Memphis in a series of essays ranging from the Reconstruction era to the twenty-first century. In An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee, eminent and rising scholars present a multidisciplinary examination of African American activism in Memphis from the dawn of emancipation to the twenty-first century. Together, they investigate episodes such as the 1940 “Reign of Terror” when Black Memphians experienced a prolonged campaign of harassment, mass arrests, and violence at the hands of police. They also examine topics including the relationship between the labor and civil rights movements, the fight for economic advancement in Black communities, and the impact of music on the city’s culture. Covering subjects as diverse as politics, sports, music, activism, and religion, An Unseen Light illuminates Memphis’s place in the long history of the struggle for African American freedom and human dignity. Praise for Unseen Light “From the aftermath of the post-Civil War race massacre to continuous violence, murder, and bitter confrontations into the twenty-first century, contributors illuminate An Unseen Light on those Black Memphians forging lives nonetheless, through negotiation, protest, music, accommodation, prayer, faith and sometimes sheer stubbornness . . . . Scholars intellectually and personally invested in the city as a site of family and community, and career, bring an unequivocal depth of understanding and richness about place and belonging that textures the pages with life, from the church pews, the music studios, or the myriad of social or political organizations, to the land itself, adding more layers to underscore how black lives have mattered in the historical grassroots building of the nation. This is thoughtful and beautiful work.” —Françoise Hamlin, author of Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle After World War II “This rich collection covers a broad range of topics pertaining to the African American freedom struggle in Memphis, Tennessee. One of its greatest strengths is the breadth of the essays, which span a long period from the end of the Civil War to the twenty-first century. An Unseen Light is a valuable addition to civil rights scholarship.” —Cynthia Griggs Fleming, author of Yes We Did?: From King's Dream to Obama's Promise “The collection did an excellent job in explaining the inner workings of Memphis . . . . The works highlighted the past actions, organizing and insurgency which created the dynamics of racism, classism, social, and political power seen in modern Memphis. I recommend this collection to those interested in the shaping of a large southern city. I also recommend to new and lifelong Memphians to provide a blueprint of the historical legacy of Memphis and how this legacy continues to impact the lives of African Americans.” —Tennessee Libraries

To be free is to escape all limitations and obstacles&—or so we think at first. But if we probe further, we discover that freedom embraces its own necessities, a set of conditions without which it could not exist. Freedom's Embrace explores these necessities of freedom. J. Melvin Woody surveys competing conceptions of freedom and traces debates about the nature and reality of freedom to confusions about knowledge, humanity, and nature that are rooted in some of the most fundamental assumptions of modern Western thought. The preemption of freedom as an exclusively human privilege with all nature relegated to mechanical necessity is a fatal error that renders both humanity and nature equally unintelligible. What distinguishes human beings from other animals is not freedom but the use of symbols, which vastly extends the range of available options and enables us to envision freedom as an ideal by which customary institutions and norms may be judged and transformed. By carefully surveying its necessary conditions and limitations, Woody reconciles the salient competing conceptions of freedom and weaves them together into a richer and broader theory that resolves old controversies and opens the way toward an ethics of freedom that can meet the challenges of relativism and nihilism that arise from recognizing the historicity and malleability of culture.

In 1989, the first drug-treatment court was established in Florida, inaugurating an era of state-supervised rehabilitation. Such courts have frequently been seen as a humane alternative to incarceration and the war on drugs. Enforcing Freedom offers an ethnographic account of drug courts and mandatory treatment centers as a system of coercion, demonstrating how the state uses notions of rehabilitation as a means of social regulation. Situating drug courts in a long line of state projects of race and class control, Kerwin Kaye details the ways in which the violence of the state is framed as beneficial for those subjected to it. He explores how courts decide whether to release or incarcerate participants using nominally colorblind criteria that draw on racialized imagery. Rehabilitation is defined as preparation for low-wage labor and the destruction of community ties with “bad influences,” a process that turns participants against one another. At the same time, Kaye points toward the complex ways in which participants negotiate state control in relation to other forms of constraint in their lives, sometimes embracing the state’s salutary violence as a means of countering their impoverishment. Simultaneously sensitive to ethnographic detail and theoretical implications, Enforcing Freedom offers a critical perspective on the punitive side of criminal-justice reform and points toward alternative paths forward.

'One of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation' OLIVIA LAING What can freedom really mean? In this invigorating, essential book, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience or talk about the concept in ways that are responsive to our divided world. Drawing on pop culture, theory and the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, she follows freedom - with all its complexities - through four realms: art, sex, drugs and climate. On Freedom offers a bold new perspective on the challenging times in which we live. 'Tremendously energising' Guardian 'This provocative meditation...shows Nelson at her most original and brilliant' New York Times 'Nelson is such a friend to her reader, such brilliant company... Exhilarating' Literary Review * A New York Times Notable Book * * A Guardian and TLS 'Books of 2021' Pick *

In these pages, we meet Newton, Maxwell, and Marx as we have never seen them before, as champions of a scientific vision that leads to intellectual freedom and human emancipation. We see Newton, the last of the alchemists, creating a visionary physics that was intended as a direct refutation of the dead mechanism of Cartesian philosophy. We see Maxwell striving to free the human intellect from the dogmatism of the Newtonian physics of his day, the champion of a new democratic science as exemplified by the work of Michael Faraday. We are astonished to meet Marx, the ultimate libertarian, envisioning a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle, a society that could be attained through a rational understanding deliberately constructed to emulate Newton s physics. Simpson points toward a vision of science, common to these three thinkers, as a powerful means of attaining human freedom? material, intellectual, and even spiritual."