Imani Perry

Race Critical Theories brings together many of the key contributors to critical theorizing about race and racism over the past twenty years. Each previously published text is accompanied by a fresh statement - in most cases written by the authors themselves - regarding the political context, implications and effects of the original contribution....

From a star theoretical physicist, a journey into the world of particle physics and the cosmos — and a call for a more just practice of science.In The Disordered Cosmos, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shares her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theo...

Miss Jane Pittman. She is one of the most unforgettable heroines in American fiction, a woman whose life has come to symbolize the struggle for freedom, dignity, and justice. Ernest J. Gaines’s now-classic novel—written as an autobiography—spans one hundred years of Miss Jane’s remarkable life, from her childhood as a slave on a Louisiana plantatio...

In The Meaning of Soul, Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of this famously elusive concept. In the 1960s, Lordi argues, soul came to signify a cultural belief in black resilience, which was enacted through musical practices—inventive cover versions, falsetto vocals, ad-libs, and false endings. Through these soul techniques, artists such a...

A prize-winning poet argues that blackness acts as the caesura between human and nonhuman, man and animal.Throughout US history, black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. Being Property Once Myself delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapte...

Sullivan spent ten years unearthing the little-known early decades of the NAACP’s activism, telling startling stories of personal bravery, legal brilliance, and political maneuvering by the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Charles Houston, Ella Baker, Thurgood Marshall, and Roy Wilkins—as well as a h...

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen disc...

One man’s thrilling journey through an enchanted world to find his wife, who has disappeared after seemingly committing an unforgiveable act of violence, from the award-winning author of the The Devil in Silver and Big Machine.Apollo Kagwa has had strange dreams that have haunted him since childhood. An antiquarian book dealer with a business calle...

In the mid-1950s, Septima Poinsette Clark (1898-1987), a former public school teacher, developed a citizenship training program that enabled thousands of African Americans to register to vote and then to link the power of the ballot to concrete strategies for individual and communal empowerment. In this vibrantly written biography, Katherine Charro...

Septima Clarke played one of the most essential, but little-recognized roles in the Civil Rights Movement. Born in 1898 in Charleston, South Carolina, she was a public school teacher until 1956, when she was dismissed for refusing to disavow her membership in the National Association for the advancement of Colored People. Subsequently, she worked f...