Author: Louis Chude-Sokei
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 1328841588
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 243
Book Description
A gutting, gorgeous memoir of a pan-African childhood that tracks the author's migrations from the short-lived African nation known as Biafra, to Jamaica, to Los Angeles' harshest streets
Floating in a Most Peculiar Way
Author: Louis Chude-Sokei
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 1328841588
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 243
Book Description
A gutting, gorgeous memoir of a pan-African childhood that tracks the author's migrations from the short-lived African nation known as Biafra, to Jamaica, to Los Angeles' harshest streets
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 1328841588
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 243
Book Description
A gutting, gorgeous memoir of a pan-African childhood that tracks the author's migrations from the short-lived African nation known as Biafra, to Jamaica, to Los Angeles' harshest streets
Floating in a Most Peculiar Way
Author: Louis Chude-Sokei
Publisher: Mariner Books
ISBN: 9780358639701
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
The astonishing journey of a bright, utterly displaced boy, from the short-lived African nation of Biafra, to Jamaica, to the harshest streets of Los Angeles--a searing memoir that adds fascinating depth to the coming-to-America story The first time Chude-Sokei realizes that he is "first son of the first son" of a renowned leader of the bygone African nation is in Uncle Daddy and Big Auntie's strict religious household in Jamaica, where he lives with other abandoned children. A visiting African has just fallen to his knees to shake him by the shoulders: "Is this the boy? Is this him?" Chude-Sokei's immersion in the politics of race and belonging across the landscape of the African diaspora takes a turn when his traumatized mother, who has her own extraordinary history as the onetime "Jackie O of Biafra," finally sends for him to come live with her. In Inglewood, Los Angeles, on the eve of gangsta rap and the LA riots, it's as if he's fallen to Earth. In this world, anything alien--definitely Chude-Sokei's secret obsession with science fiction and David Bowie--is a danger, and his yearning to become a Black American gets deeply, sometimes absurdly, complicated. Ultimately, it is a boisterous pan-African family of honorary aunts, uncles, and cousins that becomes his secret society, teaching him the redemptive skill of navigating not just Blackness, but Blacknesses, in his America.
Publisher: Mariner Books
ISBN: 9780358639701
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
The astonishing journey of a bright, utterly displaced boy, from the short-lived African nation of Biafra, to Jamaica, to the harshest streets of Los Angeles--a searing memoir that adds fascinating depth to the coming-to-America story The first time Chude-Sokei realizes that he is "first son of the first son" of a renowned leader of the bygone African nation is in Uncle Daddy and Big Auntie's strict religious household in Jamaica, where he lives with other abandoned children. A visiting African has just fallen to his knees to shake him by the shoulders: "Is this the boy? Is this him?" Chude-Sokei's immersion in the politics of race and belonging across the landscape of the African diaspora takes a turn when his traumatized mother, who has her own extraordinary history as the onetime "Jackie O of Biafra," finally sends for him to come live with her. In Inglewood, Los Angeles, on the eve of gangsta rap and the LA riots, it's as if he's fallen to Earth. In this world, anything alien--definitely Chude-Sokei's secret obsession with science fiction and David Bowie--is a danger, and his yearning to become a Black American gets deeply, sometimes absurdly, complicated. Ultimately, it is a boisterous pan-African family of honorary aunts, uncles, and cousins that becomes his secret society, teaching him the redemptive skill of navigating not just Blackness, but Blacknesses, in his America.
I Am a Girl from Africa
Author: Elizabeth Nyamayaro
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982113014
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
"The inspiring journey of a girl from Africa whose near-death experience sparked a dream that changed the world"--
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982113014
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
"The inspiring journey of a girl from Africa whose near-death experience sparked a dream that changed the world"--
The Last "Darky"
Author: Louis Chude-Sokei
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822387069
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
The Last “Darky” establishes Bert Williams, the comedian of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, as central to the development of a global black modernism centered in Harlem’s Renaissance. Before integrating Broadway in 1910 via a controversial stint with the Ziegfeld Follies, Williams was already an international icon. Yet his name has faded into near obscurity, his extraordinary accomplishments forgotten largely because he performed in blackface. Louis Chude-Sokei contends that Williams’s blackface was not a display of internalized racism nor a submission to the expectations of the moment. It was an appropriation and exploration of the contradictory and potentially liberating power of racial stereotypes. Chude-Sokei makes the crucial argument that Williams’s minstrelsy negotiated the place of black immigrants in the cultural hotbed of New York City and was replicated throughout the African diaspora, from the Caribbean to Africa itself. Williams was born in the Bahamas. When performing the “darky,” he was actually masquerading as an African American. This black-on-black minstrelsy thus challenged emergent racial constructions equating “black” with African American and marginalizing the many diasporic blacks in New York. It also dramatized the practice of passing for African American common among non-American blacks in an African American–dominated Harlem. Exploring the thought of figures such as Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Claude McKay, Chude-Sokei situates black-on-black minstrelsy at the center of burgeoning modernist discourses of assimilation, separatism, race militancy, carnival, and internationalism. While these discourses were engaged with the question of representing the “Negro” in the context of white racism, through black-on-black minstrelsy they were also deployed against the growing international influence of African American culture and politics in the twentieth century.
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822387069
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
The Last “Darky” establishes Bert Williams, the comedian of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, as central to the development of a global black modernism centered in Harlem’s Renaissance. Before integrating Broadway in 1910 via a controversial stint with the Ziegfeld Follies, Williams was already an international icon. Yet his name has faded into near obscurity, his extraordinary accomplishments forgotten largely because he performed in blackface. Louis Chude-Sokei contends that Williams’s blackface was not a display of internalized racism nor a submission to the expectations of the moment. It was an appropriation and exploration of the contradictory and potentially liberating power of racial stereotypes. Chude-Sokei makes the crucial argument that Williams’s minstrelsy negotiated the place of black immigrants in the cultural hotbed of New York City and was replicated throughout the African diaspora, from the Caribbean to Africa itself. Williams was born in the Bahamas. When performing the “darky,” he was actually masquerading as an African American. This black-on-black minstrelsy thus challenged emergent racial constructions equating “black” with African American and marginalizing the many diasporic blacks in New York. It also dramatized the practice of passing for African American common among non-American blacks in an African American–dominated Harlem. Exploring the thought of figures such as Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Claude McKay, Chude-Sokei situates black-on-black minstrelsy at the center of burgeoning modernist discourses of assimilation, separatism, race militancy, carnival, and internationalism. While these discourses were engaged with the question of representing the “Negro” in the context of white racism, through black-on-black minstrelsy they were also deployed against the growing international influence of African American culture and politics in the twentieth century.
Summary of Louis Chude-Sokei's Floating In A Most Peculiar Way
Author: Everest Media,
Publisher: Everest Media LLC
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 29
Book Description
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 My mother and father were from a country that had disappeared. The murder of our country was a crime they would never forgive because they had been partly responsible for its invention. We were not exiles because nobody owed us anything. We were immigrants because in my mother’s day, the term implied that we were needed in whatever country we ended up in. #2 I was born in Jamaica in 1967, just after the war was declared on Biafra. I didn’t remember the war or leaving Biafra, but I did remember the first time I heard the word Biafra.
Publisher: Everest Media LLC
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 29
Book Description
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 My mother and father were from a country that had disappeared. The murder of our country was a crime they would never forgive because they had been partly responsible for its invention. We were not exiles because nobody owed us anything. We were immigrants because in my mother’s day, the term implied that we were needed in whatever country we ended up in. #2 I was born in Jamaica in 1967, just after the war was declared on Biafra. I didn’t remember the war or leaving Biafra, but I did remember the first time I heard the word Biafra.
The Sound of Culture
Author: Louis Chude-Sokei
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 081957578X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
The Sound of Culture explores the histories of race and technology in a world made by slavery, colonialism, and industrialization. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and moving through to the twenty-first, the book argues for the dependent nature of those histories. Looking at American, British, and Caribbean literature, it distills a diverse range of subject matter: minstrelsy, Victorian science fiction, cybertheory, and artificial intelligence. All of these facets, according to Louis Chude-Sokei, are part of a history in which music has been central to the equation that links blacks and machines. As Chude-Sokei shows, science fiction itself has roots in racial anxieties and he traces those anxieties across two centuries and a range of writers and thinkers—from Samuel Butler, Herman Melville, and Edgar Rice Burroughs to Sigmund Freud, William Gibson, and Donna Haraway, to Norbert Weiner, Sylvia Wynter, and Samuel R. Delany.
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 081957578X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
The Sound of Culture explores the histories of race and technology in a world made by slavery, colonialism, and industrialization. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and moving through to the twenty-first, the book argues for the dependent nature of those histories. Looking at American, British, and Caribbean literature, it distills a diverse range of subject matter: minstrelsy, Victorian science fiction, cybertheory, and artificial intelligence. All of these facets, according to Louis Chude-Sokei, are part of a history in which music has been central to the equation that links blacks and machines. As Chude-Sokei shows, science fiction itself has roots in racial anxieties and he traces those anxieties across two centuries and a range of writers and thinkers—from Samuel Butler, Herman Melville, and Edgar Rice Burroughs to Sigmund Freud, William Gibson, and Donna Haraway, to Norbert Weiner, Sylvia Wynter, and Samuel R. Delany.
The Arsonists' City
Author: Hala Alyan
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 035812655X
Category : Domestic fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 467
Book Description
"The Arsonists' City delivers all the pleasures of a good old-fashioned saga, but in Alyan's hands, one family's tale becomes the story of a nation--Lebanon and Syria, yes, but also the United States. It's the kind of book we are lucky to have."--Rumaan Alam A rich family story, a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East, and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home The Nasr family is spread across the globe--Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they've always had their ancestral home in Beirut--a constant touchstone--and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. But following his father's recent death, Idris, the family's new patriarch, has decided to sell. The decision brings the family to Beirut, where everyone unites against Idris in a fight to save the house. They all have secrets--lost loves, bitter jealousies, abandoned passions, deep-set shame--that distance has helped smother. But in a city smoldering with the legacy of war, an ongoing flow of refugees, religious tension, and political protest, those secrets ignite, imperiling the fragile ties that hold this family together. In a novel teeming with wisdom, warmth, and characters born of remarkable human insight, award-winning author Hala Alyan shows us again that "fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us" (NPR).
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 035812655X
Category : Domestic fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 467
Book Description
"The Arsonists' City delivers all the pleasures of a good old-fashioned saga, but in Alyan's hands, one family's tale becomes the story of a nation--Lebanon and Syria, yes, but also the United States. It's the kind of book we are lucky to have."--Rumaan Alam A rich family story, a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East, and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home The Nasr family is spread across the globe--Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they've always had their ancestral home in Beirut--a constant touchstone--and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. But following his father's recent death, Idris, the family's new patriarch, has decided to sell. The decision brings the family to Beirut, where everyone unites against Idris in a fight to save the house. They all have secrets--lost loves, bitter jealousies, abandoned passions, deep-set shame--that distance has helped smother. But in a city smoldering with the legacy of war, an ongoing flow of refugees, religious tension, and political protest, those secrets ignite, imperiling the fragile ties that hold this family together. In a novel teeming with wisdom, warmth, and characters born of remarkable human insight, award-winning author Hala Alyan shows us again that "fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us" (NPR).
Houseboy
Author: Ferdinand Oyono
Publisher: Heinemann
ISBN: 9780435905323
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 132
Book Description
Written in the form of a diary, kept by the Cameroonian houseboy Toundi, this book looks at Toundi's innocence and his awe of the white world of his masters.
Publisher: Heinemann
ISBN: 9780435905323
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 132
Book Description
Written in the form of a diary, kept by the Cameroonian houseboy Toundi, this book looks at Toundi's innocence and his awe of the white world of his masters.
Punch Me Up to the Gods
Author: Brian Broome
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 0358439108
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 277
Book Description
Playful, poignant and wholly original, this coming-of-age memoir about Blackness, masculinity and addiction follows the author, a poet and screenwriter, as he recounts his experiences, revealing a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. --
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 0358439108
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 277
Book Description
Playful, poignant and wholly original, this coming-of-age memoir about Blackness, masculinity and addiction follows the author, a poet and screenwriter, as he recounts his experiences, revealing a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. --
All of This
Author: Rebecca Woolf
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063052695
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Book Description
“Beautifully written, complex, provocative, painful, genuine...an unforgettable memoir.”—ROXANE GAY “Wonderfully lyrical and uncomfortably honest in a way that is so rare, yet so needed.”—JENNY LAWSON “Disturbing and profound, this intimate book also reveals the sometimes-labyrinthine nature of the bonds that unite people in love...A provocative and memorable work.”—Kirkus Reviews After years of struggling in a tumultuous marriage, writer Rebecca Woolf was finally ready to leave her husband. Two weeks after telling him she wanted a divorce, he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Four months later, at the age of forty-four, he died. In All of This, Woolf chronicles the months before her husband’s death—and her rebirth after he was gone. With rigorous honesty and incredible awareness, she reflects on the end of her marriage: how her husband’s illness finally gave her the space to make peace with his humanity and her own. Stunning, compelling, and brilliantly nuanced, All of This is one woman’s story of embracing the complexities of grief without shame—as a mother, a widow, and a sexual being—and emerging on the other side of a relationship with gratitude and relief.
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063052695
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Book Description
“Beautifully written, complex, provocative, painful, genuine...an unforgettable memoir.”—ROXANE GAY “Wonderfully lyrical and uncomfortably honest in a way that is so rare, yet so needed.”—JENNY LAWSON “Disturbing and profound, this intimate book also reveals the sometimes-labyrinthine nature of the bonds that unite people in love...A provocative and memorable work.”—Kirkus Reviews After years of struggling in a tumultuous marriage, writer Rebecca Woolf was finally ready to leave her husband. Two weeks after telling him she wanted a divorce, he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Four months later, at the age of forty-four, he died. In All of This, Woolf chronicles the months before her husband’s death—and her rebirth after he was gone. With rigorous honesty and incredible awareness, she reflects on the end of her marriage: how her husband’s illness finally gave her the space to make peace with his humanity and her own. Stunning, compelling, and brilliantly nuanced, All of This is one woman’s story of embracing the complexities of grief without shame—as a mother, a widow, and a sexual being—and emerging on the other side of a relationship with gratitude and relief.