In Stay Black and Die, I. Augustus Durham examines melancholy and genius in black culture, letters, and media from the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment. Drawing on psychoanalysis, affect theory, and black studies, Durham explores the black mother as both a lost object and a found subject often obscured when constituting a cultural legacy of genius across history. He analyzes the works of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Marvin Gaye, Octavia E. Butler, and Kendrick Lamar to show how black cultural practices and aesthetics abstract and reveal the lost mother through performance. Whether attributing Douglass’s intellect to his matrilineage, reading Gaye’s falsetto singing voice as a move to interpolate black female vocality, or examining the women in Ellison’s life who encouraged his aesthetic interests, Durham demonstrates that melancholy becomes the catalyst for genius and genius in turn is a signifier of the maternal. Using psychoanalysis to develop a theory of racial melancholy while “playing” with affect theory to investigate racial aesthetics, Durham theorizes the role of the feminine, especially the black maternal, in the production of black masculinist genius.

I. Augustus Durham examines melancholy and genius in black culture, letters, popular music, and media from the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment.

In Ontological Terror Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaphysical nothing. This nothingness serves as a destabilizing presence and force as well as that which whiteness defines itself against. Thus, the function of blackness as giving form to nothing presents a terrifying problem for whites: they need blacks to affirm their existence, even as they despise the nothingness they represent. By pointing out how all humanism is based on investing blackness with nonbeing—a logic which reproduces antiblack violence and precludes any realization of equality, justice, and recognition for blacks—Warren urges the removal of the human from its metaphysical pedestal and the exploration of ways of existing that are not predicated on a grounding in being.

Water Graves considers representations of lives lost to water in contemporary poetry, fiction, theory, mixed-media art, video production, and underwater sculptures. From sunken slave ships to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Valérie Loichot investigates the lack of official funeral rites in the Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico, waters that constitute both early and contemporary sites of loss for the enslaved, the migrant, the refugee, and the destitute. Unritual, or the privation of ritual, Loichot argues, is a state more absolute than desecration. Desecration implies a previous sacred observance--a temple, a grave, a ceremony. Unritual, by contrast, denies the sacred from the beginning. In coastal Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Miami, Haiti, Martinique, Cancun, and Trinidad and Tobago, the artists and writers featured in Water Graves—an eclectic cast that includes Beyoncé, Radcliffe Bailey, Edwidge Danticat, Édouard Glissant, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jason deCaires Taylor, Édouard Duval-Carrié, Natasha Trethewey, and Kara Walker, among others—are an archipelago connected by a history of the slave trade and environmental vulnerability. In addition to figuring death by drowning in the unritual—whether in the context of the aftermath of slavery or of ecological and human-made catastrophes—their aesthetic creations serve as memorials, dirges, tombstones, and even material supports for the regrowth of life underwater.

This fascinating bibliography of source materials clearly demonstrates the significant roles blacks have played in the history and culture of Canada from its beginnings as well as their 400-year fight for equity and justice. Organized by area of endeavor and by province, the source materials detailed here reveal that blacks in Canada have created a rich, diverse, and complex legacy. This volume lists resources that point to blacks' history as soldiers, prospectors, educators, cowboys, homesteaders, entertainers, legislators, athletes, artists, servants, and writers. The most comprehensive bibliography about blacks in Canada that has been published, it is well organized to facilitate locating specific topics or people spanning black history. Also included are newspapers and videos that add their own unique contribution. Academicians, researchers, students, and interested lay people will find an organized compilation of a vast number of primary and secondary sources about blacks in Canada.

The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek offers a synoptic overview of Star Trek, its history, its influence, and the scholarly response to the franchise, as well as possibilities for further study. This volume aims to bridge the fields of science fiction and (trans)media studies, bringing together the many ways in which Star Trek franchising, fandom, storytelling, politics, history, and society have been represented. Seeking to propel further scholarly engagement, this Handbook offers new critical insights into the vast range of Star Trek texts, narrative strategies, audience responses, and theoretical themes and issues. This compilation includes both established and emerging scholars to foster a spirit of communal, trans-generational growth in the field and to present diversity to a traditional realm of science fiction studies.

This book is based on collections passed through generations from my mother, Bea, my grandmother, Honey and my great-great grandmother, Maah. It shares Maahs journey from the Upcountry of Abbeville, South Carolina to the Lowcountry of Charleston and the sayings and food that fed their lives. My family loved to cook and share their meals with others and this book incorporates Honey Beas familys recipes for simple meals from days gone by and their sayings, and stories for wisdom along with the Gullah Geechie heritage. At the end, I want to encourage you to research, preserve, write and publish your own familys story.

Marketing headline: What is The Purpose?Understanding is The Purpose, that without it you can't really say you Know The Purpose. Understanding Him is the Spirit You Live in given to Me only via Him of Himself. For Life, like Understanding is given you by Grace and not of Works. Now if I ask you "What is the Purpose"? You can't just say"Understanding,"forWhat is, or better than that,Who is,that do you truly..., Understand? LIFE TRUTH Yah - Weh WAY John out in 14:4-9 I Kings (3:7) 3rd To truly know if you've found the"Way"can only be found in the pronunciation of His Name, for theWayinand theWehoutis how you know it is theTruthin your breath.., ofLife. Psalms 150:6

A New York Times Notable Book: A novel spanning two decades in the lives of an African American family as their upstate New York steel town slowly decays. Set just outside Buffalo, New York, during the 1960s and ’70s, All-Bright Court paints a portrait of the Taylor family—starting with hopeful dreams as Samuel Taylor and his wife, Mary Kate, migrate from the South looking for better opportunities and a place to raise a family, and continuing through the decline of the steel industry as they, their five children, and their neighbors on All-Bright Court struggle with both new challenges and old prejudices. “In a clear, quiet but powerful prose reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, the author draws the gaudily painted, rundown bungalows of All-Bright Court and peoples it convincingly. . . . The working conditions in the steel mills and the politics of the union hall are well rendered, but it is in the details of family life that the novel comes alive.” —Kirkus Reviews “Porter has mapped a rich fictional world. . . . This is a powerful and affecting debut.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “An honest portrayal of folks who learned that the dream of economic freedom wasn’t waiting for them ‘up north.’” —Terry McMillan, New York Times–bestselling author of I Almost Forgot About You