Black Feminism and Traumatic Legacies in Contemporary African American Literature

Download Black Feminism and Traumatic Legacies in Contemporary African American Literature PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1666921394
Total Pages : 159 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (669 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Black Feminism and Traumatic Legacies in Contemporary African American Literature by : Apryl Lewis

Download or read book Black Feminism and Traumatic Legacies in Contemporary African American Literature written by Apryl Lewis and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-01-09 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Feminism and Traumatic Legacies in Contemporary African American Literature expands on a literary tradition where Black writers articulate the impact of slavery's legacy over time. Along with Black Feminist studies, this book demonstrates how trauma studies can transcend Eurocentric roots by encompassing traumatic experiences of other cultures through intersectionality.

Reading Contemporary African American Literature

Download Reading Contemporary African American Literature PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 0739188798
Total Pages : 141 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (391 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Reading Contemporary African American Literature by : Beauty Bragg

Download or read book Reading Contemporary African American Literature written by Beauty Bragg and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-11-12 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading Contemporary African American Literature focuses on the subject of contemporary African American popular fiction by women. Bragg’s study addresses why such work should be the subject of scholarly examination, describes the events and attitudes which account for the critical neglect of this body of work, and models a critical approach to such narratives that demonstrates the distinctive ways in which this literature captures the complexities of post-civil rights era black experiences. In making her arguments regarding the value of popular writing, Bragg argues that black women’s popular fiction foregrounds gender in ways that are frequently missing from other modes of narrative production. They exhibit a responsiveness and timeliness to the shifting social terrain which is reflected in the rapidly shifting styles and themes which characterize popular fiction. In doing so, they extend the historical function of African American literature by continuing to engage the black body as a symbol of political meaning in the social context of the United States. In popular literature Beauty Bragg locates a space from which black women engage a variety of public discourses.

Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives

Download Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1666909653
Total Pages : 131 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (669 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives by : Kristina S. Gibby

Download or read book Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives written by Kristina S. Gibby and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-12-06 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives: Female Ghosts in Contemporary US and Caribbean Fiction examines four novels by Erna Brodber, Zoé Valdés, Sandra Cisneros, and Maryse Condé. In this unique comparative analysis, Kristina S. Gibby explores the significance of female ghosts—specifically maternal figures, who haunt female narrators, inspiring them to transcribe the dead’s obfuscated (hi)stories and recover their family memory. The author argues that these female ghosts subvert historiographic power structures through a matrilineal succession of knowledge via oral traditions of storytelling, inevitably broadening historical consciousness and asserting the value of fiction in the face of historical rupture. Gibby contends that in form and content, these novels disrupt patriarchal and Western expectations of time and epistemology. They favor cyclical temporality (highlighted by the spirits’ uncanny return), which underscores relational understanding and challenges the exclusive and limiting constraints of linear time. This book makes important contributions to inter-American literary criticism with its narrow focus on female authors who confront the horrors of history through maternal spirits.

Masculinity Under Construction

Download Masculinity Under Construction PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1793615306
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (936 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Masculinity Under Construction by : LaToya Jefferson-James

Download or read book Masculinity Under Construction written by LaToya Jefferson-James and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masculinity Under Construction: Literary Re-Presentations of Black Masculinity in the African Diaspora analyzes Black male identity as constructed by Black male authors. In each chapter, Dr. Jefferson-James discusses a different "construction" or definition of masculine identity produced by men of African descent on the continent of Africa, in the Caribbean, and in North America. Combing through the works of James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe, Ralph Ellison, George Lamming, and other pan-African authors, Masculinity Under Construction argues for the importance of analyzing the historical context that contributed to the formation of Black male identity. Additionally, Dr. Jefferson-James draws a relationship between Black feminists and writers, such as Anna Julia Cooper and her contemporaries, and these works of literature viewed as primarily about Black masculinity.

New Criticism and Pedagogical Directions for Contemporary Black Women Writers

Download New Criticism and Pedagogical Directions for Contemporary Black Women Writers PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 9781793606709
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (67 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis New Criticism and Pedagogical Directions for Contemporary Black Women Writers by : LaToya Jefferson-James

Download or read book New Criticism and Pedagogical Directions for Contemporary Black Women Writers written by LaToya Jefferson-James and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2022 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Criticism and Pedagogical Directions for Contemporary Black Women Writers spans the contemporary era into the AfroFuture. It begins with Ann Petry, who has been forcibly mashed into masculinized critical paradigms, and ends by introducing audiences to Black speculative and Science Fiction writers.

The Jazz Trope

Download The Jazz Trope PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Scarecrow Press
ISBN 13 : 9780810861268
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (612 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Jazz Trope by : Alfonso Wilson Hawkins

Download or read book The Jazz Trope written by Alfonso Wilson Hawkins and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Jazz Trope takes a look at the African American lifestyle through the lens of jazz, blues, and spirituals. Through the pioneering efforts of Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, Houston Baker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, and other notable scholars who have related jazz, spirituals, and blues to African American life and culture, The Jazz Trope offers an opportunity to add scholarship to the perception of African American identity as a creative attempt to survive a unique history and struggle. Transcending structure and the perimeters that it limits, African American musical statements were produced out of a human need to be free. Using jazz as a metaphor for escaping slavery, jazz can be seen as a creative attempt to exceed restriction through the act of improvisation; jazz takes a known melody and changes it to create a personal identity. The literary genre of African American life reflects this melding of musical milieu. It tells through tropes of the folktale, novel, self-script, slave narrative, myth, and legend a unique American experience and history. This book also explores motives and schemes that were hidden behind musical codes, illustrating that jazz (interrelated with its foundation in blues and spirituals) existed as a pre-musical statement and, then, manifested as it is more popularly known: as a musical statement. The Jazz Trope allows students to grasp the jazz song structure within this work and liken it to the tropes that it emits: a true American identity.

Existentialist Thought in African American Literature before 1940

Download Existentialist Thought in African American Literature before 1940 PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 1498514812
Total Pages : 111 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (985 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Existentialist Thought in African American Literature before 1940 by : Melvin G. Hill

Download or read book Existentialist Thought in African American Literature before 1940 written by Melvin G. Hill and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-12-07 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Existentialist Thought in African American Literature Before 1940 is the first collection of its kind to break new ground in arguing that long before its classification by Jean-Paul Sartre, African American literature embodied existentialist thought. To make its case, this daring book dissects eight notable texts: Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I A Woman (1861), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl (1861), Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). It explores and addresses a wide range of complex philosophical concepts such as: authenticity, potentiality-for-authentic living, bad faith, and existentialism from the Christian point of view. The use of interdisciplinary studies such as gender studies, queer studies, Christian ethics, mixed-race studies, and existentialism, allows the authors within this book to lend unique perspectives in examining selected African American literary works.

African Heartbeat

Download African Heartbeat PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 0761870075
Total Pages : 105 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (618 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis African Heartbeat by : Nancy Ann Watanabe

Download or read book African Heartbeat written by Nancy Ann Watanabe and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-01-30 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book critically examines classic works of literature and film to suggest ways in which study of fictional characters, cultural themes, and vivid imagery helps us to grapple with, understand, and find resolutions for, problems that seriously concern Americans, including uniformed officers and public officials, as well as the general populace in today’s turbulent times. Chapter 1 analyzes Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State to support the author’s theory that contemporary police violence against young African-American men is a result of “persistence of vision” whereby the powerful Fugitive Slave Laws of the American Civil War era exert a continuing influence upon the minds of law enforcement officers and almost all African Americans. Chapter 2 “Zora Neale Hurston: Africa Transported to America” discusses Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God to reveal the West African Vodun cosmological theology that informs and determines the lifelong trajectory of macho male protagonist John Buddy Pearson and feminist female protagonist Janie Mae Crawford in their quests for love and spiritual fulfillment. She suggests the Civil War disrupted a theological affinity shared by African Americans with Christian Americans, a kinship at the heart of Hurston’s oeuvre. Chapter 3 reveals the West African origin of the theological design in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo: A Novel of Mexico and in short fiction works by several contemporary Mexican writers while also investigating the impact, in particular the toll in human suffering, of violent confrontations taking place along the border shared by Mexico and the U.S. Her critical analysis highlights the stream of consciousness narrative technique, which probes the depths of human agony exacted by violations of international boundaries. She demonstrates Shakespeare’s influence. Moreover, as a specialist in Comparative and English Literature, she contributes to Shakespeare scholarship on Hamlet, Prince of Denmark unprecedented insight into the meaning and significance of King Hamlet’s ghost, expanding traditional Christian perspectives and providing historical and textual explications that encompass West African Vodun cosmology. Dr. Watanabe diagnoses Hamlet’s madness as a funky aspect of Shakespeare’s knowledge of “voodoo.”

Writing for Inclusion

Download Writing for Inclusion PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1683930983
Total Pages : 175 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (839 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Writing for Inclusion by : Karen Ruth Kornweibel

Download or read book Writing for Inclusion written by Karen Ruth Kornweibel and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-09-15 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing for Inclusion is a study of some of the ways the idea of national identity developed in the nineteenth century in two neighboring nations, Cuba and The United States. The book examines symbolic, narrative, and sociological commonalities in the writings of four Afro-Cuban and African American writers: Juan Francisco Manzano and Frederick Douglass, fugitive slaves during mid-century; and Martín Morúa Delgado and Charles W. Chesnutt from the post-slavery period. All four share sensitivity to their imperfect inclusion as full citizens, engage in an examination of the process of racialization that hinders them in seeking such inclusion, and contest their definition as non-citizens. Works discussed include the slave narratives of Manzano and Douglass, Manzano’s poetry and play Zafira, andDouglass’s oratory and novella The Heroic Slave. Also considered, within the context provided by Manzano and Douglass, are Morúa and Chesnutt’s non-fiction writings about race and nation as well as their second-generation “tragic mulata” novels Sofía and The House Behind the Cedars. Based on an examination of the works of these four authors, Writing for Inclusion provides a detailed examination of examples of self-emancipation, the authors’ symbolic use of language, their expression of social anxieties or irony within the quest for recognition, and their arguments for an inclusive vision of national identity beyond the quagmires of race. By focusing on the process of racialization and ideas of race and national identity in a comparative context, the study seeks to highlight the artificial and contested nature of both terms and suggest new ways to interrogate them in our present day.

African American Literature of the Twenty-First Century and the Black Arts

Download African American Literature of the Twenty-First Century and the Black Arts PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 9781793614629
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (146 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis African American Literature of the Twenty-First Century and the Black Arts by : Stephen Casmier

Download or read book African American Literature of the Twenty-First Century and the Black Arts written by Stephen Casmier and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2023-03-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The six novels that John Edgar Wideman wrote from 1987 to 2017 enable reassessment of the quarantining of the Black Arts movement by African American literary history. These works transform the novel into a charm or functional tool of the black arts, taking writing beyond the act of written representation.

Depictions of Home in African American Literature

Download Depictions of Home in African American Literature PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1793649642
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (936 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Depictions of Home in African American Literature by : Trudier Harris

Download or read book Depictions of Home in African American Literature written by Trudier Harris and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Depictions of Home in African American Literature, Trudier Harris analyzes fictional homespaces in African American literature from those set in the time of slavery to modern urban configurations of the homespace. She argues that African American writers often inadvertently create and follow a tradition of portraying dysfunctional and physically or emotionally violent homespaces. Harris explores the roles race and religion play in the creation of homespaces and how geography, space, and character all influence these spaces. Although many characters in African American literature crave safe, happy homespaces and frequently carry such images with them through their mental or physical migrations, few characters experience the formation of healthy homespaces by the end of their journeys. Harris studies the historical, cultural, and literary portrayals of the home in works from well-known authors such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and August Wilson as well as lesser-studied authors such as Daniel Black, A.J. Verdelle, Margaret Walker, and Dorothy West.

Africana Critical Theory

Download Africana Critical Theory PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 0739128868
Total Pages : 453 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (391 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Africana Critical Theory by : Reiland Rabaka

Download or read book Africana Critical Theory written by Reiland Rabaka and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on and going far beyond W.E.B. Du Bois and the Problems of the Twenty-First Century and Du Bois's Dialectics, Reiland Rabaka's Africana Critical Theory innovatively identifies and analyzes continental and diasporan African contributions to classical and contemporary critical theory. This book represents a climatic critical theoretical clincher that cogently demonstrates how Du Bois's rarely discussed dialectical thought, interdisciplinarity, intellectual history-making radical political activism, and world-historical multiple liberation movement leadership helped to inaugurate a distinct Africana tradition of critical theory. With chapters on W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Negritude (Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor), Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, Africana Critical Theory endeavors to accessibly offer contemporary critical theorists an intellectual archaeology of the Africana tradition of critical theory and a much-needed dialectical deconstruction and reconstruction of black radical politics. These six seminal figures' collective thought and texts clearly cuts across several disciplines and, therefore, closes the chasm between Africana Studies and critical theory, constantly demanding that intellectuals not simply think deep thoughts, develop new theories, and theoretically support radical politics, but be and constantly become political activists, social organizers and cultural workers - that is, folk the Italian critical theorist Antonio Gramsci referred to as 'organic intellectuals.' In this sense, then, the series of studies gathered in Africana Critical Theory contribute not only to African Studies, African American Studies, Caribbean Studies, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, but also to contemporary critical theoretical discourse across an amazingly wide-range of 'traditional' disciplines, and radical political activism outside of (and, in many instances, absolutely against) Europe's ivory towers and the absurdities of the American academy.

Overlapping Inequalities in the Welfare State

Download Overlapping Inequalities in the Welfare State PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3031522273
Total Pages : 387 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (315 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Overlapping Inequalities in the Welfare State by : Başak Akkan

Download or read book Overlapping Inequalities in the Welfare State written by Başak Akkan and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Queer in Black and White

Download Queer in Black and White PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253221099
Total Pages : 153 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (532 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Queer in Black and White by : Stefanie K. Dunning

Download or read book Queer in Black and White written by Stefanie K. Dunning and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-12 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes representative works of African American fiction, film, and music in which interracial desire appears in the context of same sex desire. In close readings of these "texts," Stefanie K. Dunning explores the ways in which the interracial intersects with queerness, blackness, whiteness, class, and black national identity. She shows that representations of interracial desire do not follow the logic of racial exclusion. Instead they are metaphorical and anti-biological. Rather than diluting race, interracial desire makes race visible. By invoking the interracial, black gay and lesbian artists can remake our conception of blackness.

The Twenty-first Century African American Novel and the Critique of Whiteness in Everyday Life

Download The Twenty-first Century African American Novel and the Critique of Whiteness in Everyday Life PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 149853483X
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (985 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Twenty-first Century African American Novel and the Critique of Whiteness in Everyday Life by : E. Lâle Demirtürk

Download or read book The Twenty-first Century African American Novel and the Critique of Whiteness in Everyday Life written by E. Lâle Demirtürk and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-05-25 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the post-9/11 African American novels, developing a new critical discourse on everyday discursive practices of whiteness. The critique of everyday life in the racial context of post-9/11 American society is important in considering diverse forms of the lived experiences and subjectivities of black people in the novels. They help us see that African American representations of the city have political significance in that the “neo-urban novel” explores the possibility of a black dialogic communication to build a transformative social change. Since the real power of Whiteness lies in its discursive power, the book reveals the urgency to understand not only how whiteness works in everyday life in American society. But it also explores how to cultivate new possibilities of configuring and performing Blackness differently, as a response to the post-9/11 configurations of the culture of fear, to produce new ways of interactional social relations that can eventually open up the space of critical awareness for white people to work against rather than reinforce discursive practices of White supremacy in everyday life. This book explores how the multiple subjectivities and transformative acts of blackness can offer ways of subverting the discursive power of the white embodied practices. What defines post-9/11 America as a nation that is consumed by the fear of racialized terrorists is its roots in the fear of (‘uncontrollable’) Blackness as excess and ominous threat in the domestic terrain through which the ideology of White supremacy has constructed for governing through Whiteness. African-American urban novels published in the twenty-first century respond to the discursive power of normative Whiteness that regulates black bodies, selves and lives. This book demonstrates how black people contest white dominant social spaces as sites of black criminality and exclusion in an attempt to re-signify them as the sites of black transformative change through personal and grassroots activism through their performativity of Blackness as an agential identity formation in their interpersonal urban social encounters with white people. Hence, the vulnerable spaces of Whiteness in interracial urban encounters, as it pervasively addresses those moments of transformative change, enacted by Black characters, in the face of the discursive practices of whiteness in the everyday life. These novels celebrate multifarious representations of black individuals, who are capable of using their agency to subvert White discursive power, in finding ways in their personal and grassroots activism to transform the culture of fear that locates Blackness as such in an attempt to make a difference in the American society at large.

Against Epistemic Apartheid

Download Against Epistemic Apartheid PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 0739145991
Total Pages : 442 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (391 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Against Epistemic Apartheid by : Reiland Rabaka

Download or read book Against Epistemic Apartheid written by Reiland Rabaka and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2010-05-10 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this intellectual history-making volume, multiple award-winning W. E. B. Du Bois scholar Reiland Rabaka offers the first book-length treatment of Du Bois's seminal sociological discourse: from Du Bois as inventor of the sociology of race to Du Bois as the first sociologist of American religion; from Du Bois as a pioneer of urban and rural sociology to Du Bois as innovator of the sociology of gender and inaugurator of intersectional sociology; and, finally, from Du Bois as groundbreaking sociologist of education and critical criminologist to Du Bois as dialectical critic of the disciplinary decadence of sociology and the American academy. Against Epistemic Apartheid brings new and intensive archival research into critical dialogue with the watershed work of classical and contemporary, male and female, black and white, national and international sociologists and critical social theorists' Du Bois studies. Against Epistemic Apartheid offers an accessible introduction to Du Bois's major contributions to sociology and, therefore, will be of interest to scholars and students not only in sociology, but also African American studies, American studies, cultural studies, critical race studies, gender studies, and postcolonial studies, as well as scholars and students in 'traditional' disciplines such as history, philosophy, political science, economics, education, and religion.

Toni Morrison

Download Toni Morrison PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 161148491X
Total Pages : 389 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (114 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Toni Morrison by : Carmen Gillespie

Download or read book Toni Morrison written by Carmen Gillespie and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toni Morrison, the only living American Nobel laureate in literature, published her first novel in 1970. In the ensuing forty plus years, Morrison's work has become synonymous with the most significant literary art and intellectual engagements of our time. The publication of Home (May 2012), as well as her 2011 play Desdemona affirm the range and acuity of Morrison's imagination. Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing enables audiences/readers, critics, and students to review Morrison's cultural and literary impacts and to consider the import, and influence of her legacies in her multiple roles as writer, editor, publisher, reader, scholar, artist, and teacher over the last four decades. Some of the highlights of the collection include contributions from many of the major scholars of Morrison's canon: as well as art pieces, music, photographs and commentary from poets, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez; novelist, A.J. Verdelle; playwright, Lydia Diamond; composer, Richard Danielpour; photographer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; the first published interview with Morrison's friends from Howard University, Florence Ladd and Mary Wilburn; and commentary from President Barack Obama. What distinguishes this book from the many other publications that engage Morrison's work is that the collection is not exclusively a work of critical interpretation or reference. This is the first publication to contextualize and to consider the interdisciplinary, artistic, and intellectual impacts of Toni Morrison using the formal fluidity and dynamism that characterize her work. This book adopts Morrison's metaphor as articulated in her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Beloved. The narrative describes the clearing as "a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what. . . . In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees." Morrison's Clearing is a complicated and dynamic space. Like the intricacies of Morrison's intellectual and artistic voyages, the Clearing is both verdant and deadly, a sanctuary and a prison. Morrison's vision invites consideration of these complexities and confronts these most basic human conundrums with courage, resolve and grace. This collection attempts to reproduce the character and spirit of this metaphorical terrain.