African American/Black History

This anthology explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future, and further informing new directions we might take in honoring and protecting the success of African Americans in the U.S.

Ralph Ellison famously characterized ensemble jazz improvisation as “antagonistic cooperation.” Both collaborative and competitive, musicians play with and against one another to create art and community. In this book, Robert G. O'Meally shows how this idea runs throughout twentieth-century African American culture to provide a new history of Black creativity and aesthetics.

This collection's fascinating spectrum of topics reveals how Seventies black cultural production anchors important contemporary debates in black feminism and other issues while spurring the black imagination to thrive amidst abject social and political conditions.

This book illuminates the figure of the Black cowboy while examining the intersection of African American film history and the western.

This book traces the history of African American poetry from its origins in the transatlantic slave trade, to present day hip-hop.

This book chronicles how even as the endemic racism in American society and its theatrical establishment forced black performers to abase themselves for white audiences' amusement, African Americans overcame those obstacles to enrich the nation's theater in countless ways.