Unlike any text to date, this revolutionary study surveys Black research and literature to determine the processes formal education uses to dehumanize Black students. This is a socio-historical analysis of the Black Flame trilogy (BFT), W. E. B. Du Bois's unparalleled, thirty-year study of Atlanta, Georgia from Black Reconstruction (1860 - 1880) to 1956. W.E.B. Du Bois is one of the most prescient sociologists of the twentieth century in his research of Black people in America. These ground-breaking novels establish racialization, colonization, and globalization as processes that continue to...

Rastafari Reasoning and the RastaWoman: Gender Constructions in the Shaping of Rastafari Livity examines the complex ways that gender and race shaped a liberation movement propelled by the Caribbean evolution of an African spiritual ethos. Jeanne Christensen proposes that Rastafari represents the most recent reworking of this spiritual ethos, referred to as African religiosity. The book contributes a new perspective to the literature on Rastafari, and through a historical lens, corrects the predominant static view of Rastafari women. In certain Rastafari manifestations, a growing livity...

By examining Amilcar Cabral's theories and praxes, as well as several of the antecedents and major influences on the evolution of his radical politics and critical social theory, Concepts of Cabralism: Amilcar Cabral and Africana Critical Theory simultaneously reintroduces, chronicles, and analyzes several of the core characteristics of the Africana tradition of critical theory. Reiland Rabaka's primary preoccupation is with Cabral's theoretical and political legacies--that is to say, with the ways in which he constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed theory and the aims, objectives, and...

Facing South to Africa is a bold synthesis of the ideas that have made Afrocentric theorists the leading voices of the African renaissance. Written from the vantage point of the philosophical and political discourse that emerged over the past twenty-five years, this is a highly readable and accessible introduction to African social and cultural criticism. Molefi Kete Asante engages in the practice of critical thinking by raising fundamental questions about how Africans view themselves and the world. Tackling the themes of culture, education, social sciences, the university, politics, African...

Dialogues Across Diasporas focuses on the shared historical legacies of members of the Africana and Latina diasporas, and the cultural impact of the African diaspora in the Americas. This book seeks to emphasize connections rather than divisions among different migratory ethnic communities via a reconfiguration of borders and ethnic identities. This collection of essays has three major goals: first, to foreground shared themes and strategies in the literary productions of women of Africana and Latina/o descent; second, to highlight the importance of the arts for community activism within...

Black Muslims and the Law: Civil Liberties From Elijah Muhammad to Muhammad Ali examines the Nation of Islam's quest for civil liberties as what might arguably be called the inaugural and first sustained challenge to the suppression of religious freedom in African American legal history. Borrowing insights from A. Leon Higgonbotham Jr.'s classic works on American slavery jurisprudence, Black Muslims and the Law reveals the Nation of Islam's strategic efforts to engage governmental officials from a position of power, and suggests the federal executive, congressmen, judges, lawyers, law...

The Negritude Movement provides readers with not only an intellectual history of the Negritude Movement but also its prehistory (W.E.B. Du Bois, the New Negro Movement, and the Harlem Renaissance) and its posthistory (Frantz Fanon and the evolution of Fanonism). By viewing Negritude as an "insurgent idea" (to invoke this book's intentionally incendiary subtitle), as opposed to merely a form of poetics and aesthetics, The Negritude Movement explores Negritude as a "traveling theory" (a la Edward Said's concept) that consistently crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean in the twentieth century: from...

By examining Amilcar Cabral's theories and praxes, as well as several of the antecedents and major influences on the evolution of his radical politics and critical social theory, Concepts of Cabralism: Amilcar Cabral and Africana Critical Theory simultaneously reintroduces, chronicles, and analyzes several of the core characteristics of the Africana tradition of critical theory. Reiland Rabaka's primary preoccupation is with Cabral's theoretical and political legacies--that is to say, with the ways in which he constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed theory and the aims, objectives, and...

This book traces W.E.B. Du Bois's fictionalization of history in his five major works of fiction and in his debut short story The Souls of Black Folk through a thematic framework of cosmopolitanism. In texts like The Negro and Black Folk: Then and Now, Du Bois argues that the human race originated from a single source, a claim authenticated by anthropologists and the Human Genome Project. This book breaks new ground by demonstrating the fashion in which the variants of cosmopolitanism become a profound theme in Du Bois's contribution to fiction. In general, cosmopolitanism claims that people...

Although traditional academic circles rarely celebrate the work of African or African American thinkers because performers and political figures were more acceptable to narrating histories, this work projects the ideas of several writers with the confidence that Africology, the Afrocentric study of African phenomena, represents an oasis of innovation in progressive venues. The book brings together some of the most discussed theorists and intellectuals in the field of Africology (Africana Studies) for the purpose of sparking further debate, critical interpretations and extensions, and to...