"Baby Suggs grew tired, went to bed and stayed there until her big old heart quit. Except for an occasional request for color she said practically nothing - until the afternoon of the last day of her life when she got out of bed, skipped slowly to the door of the keeping room and announced to Sethe and Denver the lesson she had learned from her sixty years a slave and ten years free: that there was no bad luck in the world but white people. ‘They don’t know when to stop,’ she said, and returned to her bed, pulled up the quilt and left them to hold that thought forever."

Toni Morrison, Beloved (via theraceproblem)

(via jmjohnso)

westindians:

want to read.

searchingforknowledge:

blacksandbooks:

Orleans

Sherri L. Smith

ISBN 0399252940

First came the storms.

Then came the Fever.

And the Wall.

After a string of devastating hurricanes and a severe outbreak of Delta Fever, the Gulf Coast has been quarantined. Years later, residents of the Outer States are under the assumption that life in the Delta is all but extinct… but in reality, a new primitive society has been born.

Fen de la Guerre is living with the O-Positive blood tribe in the Delta when they are ambushed. Left with her tribe leader’s newborn, Fen is determined to get the baby to a better life over the wall before her blood becomes tainted. Fen meets Daniel, a scientist from the Outer States who has snuck into the Delta illegally. Brought together by chance, kept together by danger, Fen and Daniel navigate the wasteland of Orleans. In the end, they are each other’s last hope for survival.

Sherri L. Smith delivers an expertly crafted story about a fierce heroine whose powerful voice and firm determination will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.

SHE ALSO HAS A NEW BOOK OUT?!??!?!?!!?! SCREEECHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

(via freshmouthgoddess)

readabookson:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/ep7i9l

“From one of this country’s most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture.

The works of Rainey, Smith, and Holiday have been largely misunderstood by critics. Overlooked, Davis shows, has been the way their candor and bravado laid the groundwork for an aesthetic that allowed for the celebration of social, moral, and sexual values outside the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability. Through meticulous transcriptions of all the extant lyrics of Rainey and Smith−published here in their entirety for the first time−Davis demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to serve as a conciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory. A stunning, indispensable contribution to American history, as boldly insightful as the women Davis praises, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is a triumph.”

"Haunting … alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future… . [S]pecters or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view. The ghost, as I understand it, is not the invisible or some ineffable excess. The whole essence, if you can use that word, of a ghost is that it has a real presence and demands its due, your attention."

Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, p. xvi)

Photo Credit: Book Cover of New African Fashion by Helen Jennings. Published by Prestel Publishing, 31st October 2011, £19.99/$35.00.

Africa has long served as inspiration for high fashion designers. In the sixties, designers like Paco Rabanne and Yves Saint Laurent referenced the continent in the texture, palette, print and form of their work. The international catwalks in present day, suggest that the vast continent continues to act as a reference point for high fashion designers.

(via nok-ind)

http://libcom.org/files/Caliban%20and%20the%20Witch.pdf →

ourcatastrophe:

catsluck:

mosshunt:

Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici

“Caliban and the Witch is a history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages to the witch hunts and the rise of mechanical philosophy, Federici investigates the capitalist rationalization of social reproduction. She shows how the struggle against the rebel body and the conflict between body and mind are essential conditions for the development of labor power and self-ownership, two central principles of modern social organization…”

Someone scanned and pdf’d every page of this book.

Silvia did a seminar titled “Feminism, the Commons, Violence Against Women, & the Edu Crisis” this April at Baltimore Free School! Definitely one of the best talks I’ve been too! Y’ALL SHOULD READ THIS

whaaaaaaaaaaaat

ha, i have to read this for my independent study.

sapphrikah:

howtobenoladarling:

curlyingenue:

babylonfalling:

Full page Grove Press ad for Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon.

Ugh, I still need to read this.

counterftnoire:

On the reading list.

“1997 John H. Dunning Prize in United States History, American Historical Association

Honorable Mention, 1996 Berkshire Conference Book Prize

Kathleen Brown examines the origins of racism and slavery in British North America from the perspective of gender. Both a basic social relationship and a model for other social hierarchies, gender helped determine the construction of racial categories and the institution of slavery in Virginia. But the rise of racial slavery also transformed gender relations, including ideals of masculinity. In response to the presence of Indians, the shortage of labor, and the insecurity of social rank, Virginia’s colonial government tried to reinforce its authority by regulating the labor and sexuality of English servants and by making legal distinctions between English and African women. This practice, along with making slavery hereditary through the mother, contributed to the cultural shift whereby women of African descent assumed from lower-class English women both the burden of fieldwork and the stigma of moral corruption. Brown’s analysis extends through Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, an important juncture in consolidating the colony’s white male public culture, and into the eighteenth century. She demonstrates that, despite elite planters’ dominance, wives, children, free people of color, and enslaved men and women continued to influence the meaning of race and class in colonial Virginia.”

About the Author
Kathleen M. Brown is associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.
-UNC Press

(via karnythia)

knowhomo:

LGBTQ* Literature To Keep On Your Radar

The Bitterweed Path 

-By Thomas Hal Phillips 

Review

Originally published in 1950, The Bitterweed Path tells the story of friendship and love between two boys growing up in the cotton country of Mississippi a generation after the Civil War. A fine example of the southern literary tradition, the novel is also part of a very small body of gay literature of the period. As such, it challenges many assumptions about gay representation in the first half of the twentieth century. 

“The Bitterweed Path is lyrical, sexy, and fascinating—a haunting work of art from a time and psychological place that is illuminating to revisit in light of where the world is today.”—Howard Cruse, author of Stuck Rubber Baby ”A small gem of a homoerotic novel, written about a time and a place when gay didn’t exist, but male love did. We owe our thanks to John Howard for rediscovering it, and to Thomas Hal Phillips for writing it.”—John D’Emilio, author of Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970

(via cabell)