This anthology interrogates two salient concepts in studying the black experience. Ushered in with the age of New World encounters, modernity emerged as brutal, complex and multiple, from its very definition to its manifestations. Equally challenging is blackness, which is forever dangling between the range of uplifting articulations and insidious degradation. The essays confront the conflicting confluences of these two terms. Questioning Euro-centric and 'mainstream' American interpretations, they reveal the diverse meanings of modernities and blackness from an equally diverse set of milieus of the black experience. Interdisciplinary and wide-ranging in thematic and epochal scope, they use theoretical and empirical studies to demonstrate that, indeed, blackness is relevant for understanding modernities and vice versa.

This anthology interrogates two salient concepts in studying the black experience. Ushered in with the age of New World encounters, modernity emerged as brutal and complex, from its very definition to its manifestations. Equally challenging is blackness, which is forever dangling between the range of uplifting articulations and insidious degradation. The essays in Western Fictions address the conflicting confluences of these two terms. Questioning Eurocentric and mainstream American interpretations, they reveal the diverse meanings of modernities and blackness from a wide range of milieus of the black experience. Interdisciplinary and wide-ranging in thematic and epochal scope, they use theoretical and empirical studies of a range of subjects to demonstrate that, indeed, blackness is relevant for understanding modernities and vice versa.

Les arrels del realisme màgic en els escrits de Borges i altres autors d'Amèrica Llatina han estat àmpliament reconeguts i ben documentades produint una sèrie d'estudis crítics, molts dels quals figuren en la bibliografia d'aquest treball. Dins d'aquest marc, aquest llibre presenta als lectors una varietat d'escriptores de grups ètnics, conegudes i menys conegudes, i les col·loca en un context literari en el que es tracten tant a nivell individual com a escriptores així com a nivell col·lectiu com a part d'un moviment artístic més ampli. Aquest llibre és el resultat del treball realitzat a les universitats de Sheffield i la de València i representa una valuosa investigació i una important contribució als estudis literaris.

During the 20th-century, Spaniards and African-Americans shared significant cultural memories forged by the profound impact that various artistic and historical events had on each other. Addressing three crucial periods (the Harlem Renaissance and Jazz Age, the Spanish Civil War, and Franco's dictatorship), this collection of essays explores the transnational bond and the intercultural exchanges between these two communities, using race as a fundamental critical category. The study of travelogues, memoirs, documentaries, interviews, press coverage, comics, literary works, music, and performances by iconic figures such as Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna, as well as the experiences of ordinary individuals such as African American nurse Salaria Kea, invite an examination of the ambiguities and paradoxes that underlie this relationship: among them, the questionable and, at times, surprising racial representations of blacks in Spanish avant-garde texts and in the press during the years of Franco’s dictatorship; African Americans very unique view of the Spanish Civil War in light of their racial identity; and the oscillation between fascination and anxiety when these two communities look at each other.

This study contextualizes magical realism within current debates and theories of postcoloniality and examines the fiction of three of its West African pioneers: Syl Cheney-Coker of Sierra Leone, Ben Okri of Nigeria and Kojo Laing of Ghana. Brenda Cooper explores the distinct elements of the genre in a West African context, and in relation to: * a range of global expressions of magical realism, from the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez to that of Salman Rushdie * wider contemporary trends in African writing, with particular attention to how the realism of authors such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka has been connected with nationalist agendas. This is a fascinating and important work for all those working on African literature, magical realism, or postcoloniality.

Do historians “write their biographies” with the subjects they choose to address in their research? In this collection, editors Alan M. Kraut and David A. Gerber compiled eleven original essays by historians whose own ethnic backgrounds shaped the choices they have made about their own research and writing as scholars. These authors, historians of American immigration and ethnicity, revisited family and personal experiences and reflect on how their lives helped shape their later scholarly pursuits, at times inspiring specific questions they asked of the nation’s immigrant past. They address issues of diversity, multiculturalism, and assimilation in academia, in the discipline of history, and in society at large. Most have been pioneers not only in their respective fields, but also in representing their ethnic group within American academia. Some of the women in the group were in the vanguard of gender diversity in the discipline of history as well as on the faculties of the institutions where they have taught. The authors in this collection represent a wide array of backgrounds, spanning Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. What they have in common is their passionate engagement with the making of social and personal identities and with finding a voice to explain their personal stories in public terms. Contributors: Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp, John Bodnar, María C. García, David A. Gerber, Violet M. Showers Johnson, Alan M. Kraut, Timothy J. Meagher, Deborah Dash Moore, Dominic A. Pacyga, Barbara M. Posadas, Eileen H. Tamura, Virginia Yans, Judy Yung

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone) NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

· This book is the first to focus upon Blaxploitation horror films, and the first to link these films with both mainstream horror films and classic Gothic novels and stories. · This book provides readers with innovative and thought-provoking analyses of Blaxploitation horror films, conventional horror films, and major works of Gothic fiction. · It considers how Blaxploitation horror films of the 1970s addressed issues of deep concern to their contemporary audiences, including not only racism and the Black Power movement, but also women’s and gay rights, the status of the African American family, the role of religion, and relations between the community and the police.

The concept of “gender” has recently become one of the symbols of what many consider “a clash of civilizations” between the West and Muslim countries. Recent events highlight how gender issues are emblematic of the basic traits of a country's culture, and thus constitute some of the elements allowing for the construction of dividing lines between cultures, arbitrarily distinguishing between the “evolved” and “backward” ones, therefore with the aim to establish demarcation lines between “Us” and the “Others”. The existential condition of migration leads to formation of multiple and diasporic identities, de- territorialized and reassembled at the individual level. In this scenario the integration of migrants is the result of a two-way process, in which rely significantly the social representations that migrants are being built on the population and of the host society (before and after the arrival) and intangible resources (cognitive and relational) experienced by migrants. Gender studies usually employing a constructionist perspective have seldom dealt with the issue of migration by analysing the experiences of the migrants themselves. The few studies have highlighted how migrants' gender and sexuality underline the persistence of a model of domination and alteration typical of the colonial era, emphasizing the social identity allocation mechanisms used by Western societies that follow essentialist visions of migrants' ethnic and sexual identity, that is, of a social status considered as inferior and undesirable. There are several theoretical and methodological challenges calling for a perspective that takes into account the interconnection between gender, sexuality and migration. Studies on sexuality have now taken two roads, often strongly polarized and non-communicating between them: on the one hand, also because of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, appeared a new generation of surveys on sexual behaviour of Western (and others) populations and on the changes in sexual behaviour along the main socio-economic and cultural fractures. On the other, a research trend on sexuality (New Sexuality Studies) has developed with mixed purposes, both analytical and critical-emancipatory ones. This branch, which focuses almost exclusively on the study of minority sexual subcultures, portrayed sexuality mostly through the lens of power and regarded with suspicion any attempt to develop a systematic and methodologically documented analysis of sexuality. The book will have repercussions on the progress of knowledge from a macro dimension represented by the growth and the transformation of migration flows across the Mediterranean to Europe to meso dimension of social representations of gender and sexuality that the migrant builds himself and the population of the host society; finally, the micro dimension through the analysis of case studies. From these problems, the book aims to initiate a transdisciplinary reflection on such issues and sexuality, in part by reducing the clear vacuum in scientific research taking shape as an experimental laboratory of new research perspectives because we recognize, critically, how the methods of the social sciences do not simply reproduce the phenomena under study, but also contribute - a greater or lesser degree - to their construction. And at the same time making an issue of sex, sexuality and the multiple identifications of gender of and in migration, involving migratory experiences both on the side of leaving a country and on that of arriving to another.