Examines common monster tropes in Black American horror fiction, arguing that they represent specific ideologies of American anti-Blackness and inspire tactics for combatting real-life anti-Blackness.

Provides an overview of ways that utopian thinking has shaped American culture, focusing on the need to remake imperial USA.

What do we mean when we say that a text is relevant to a young person or to a group of young people? And how might a reimagining of relevance, shaped through the voices of young men of color, enhance literacy teaching and learning? Based on case studies of six young Black, Latino, and South Asian men and their reading experiences, this book reconceptualizes the term relevance as it applies to and is applied within literacy education (middle school through college). The author reveals how four dimensions of relevance—Identity, Spatiality, Temporality, and Ideology—can guide educators in supporting the reading and meaning-making experiences of students in ways that honor the complexities of their lives and enhance their criticality. Sciurba frames relevance from a student-centered perspective as conditions that are practically, socially, and/or conceptually applicable to one’s life. Readers can use this book to disrupt problematic enactments of relevance in literacy spaces that are rooted in assumptions about who young people are, culturally or otherwise, as well as how they think and maneuver through their complex worlds. Book Features: Provides a nuanced understanding of relevance in literacy education in order to successfully enact culturally relevant pedagogy.Draws on scholarly literature from a broad range of fields, including sociology, cultural studies, literary studies, and physical science studies. Showcases what a nondeficit approach to working with Black, Latino, South Asian, and other young people of color can look like in educational contexts.Examines data from longitudinal qualitative studies with six students and young men of color that took place across 10 years beginning in a New York City middle school.

From King Kong to Candyman, the boundary-pushing genre of the horror film has always been a site for provocative explorations of race in American popular culture. In Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from 1890's to Present, Robin R. Means Coleman traces the history of notable characterizations of blackness in horror cinema, and examines key levels of black participation on screen and behind the camera. She argues that horror offers a representational space for black people to challenge the more negative, or racist, images seen in other media outlets, and to portray greater diversity within the concept of blackness itself. Horror Noire presents a unique social history of blacks in America through changing images in horror films. Throughout the text, the reader is encouraged to unpack the genre’s racialized imagery, as well as the narratives that make up popular culture’s commentary on race. Offering a comprehensive chronological survey of the genre, this book addresses a full range of black horror films, including mainstream Hollywood fare, as well as art-house films, Blaxploitation films, direct-to-DVD films, and the emerging U.S./hip-hop culture-inspired Nigerian "Nollywood" Black horror films. Horror Noire is, thus, essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how fears and anxieties about race and race relations are made manifest, and often challenged, on the silver screen.

For all the scholarship devoted to Mary Shelley's English novel Frankenstein, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to its role in American culture, and virtually none to its racial resonances in the United States. In Black Frankenstein, Elizabeth Young identifies and interprets the figure of a black American Frankenstein monster as it appears with surprising frequency throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. culture, in fiction, film, essays, oratory, painting, and other media, and in works by both whites and African Americans. Black Frankenstein stories, Young argues, effect four kinds of racial critique: they humanize the slave; they explain, if not justify, black violence; they condemn the slaveowner; and they expose the instability of white power. The black Frankenstein's monster has served as a powerful metaphor for reinforcing racial hierarchy—and as an even more powerful metaphor for shaping anti-racist critique. Illuminating the power of parody and reappropriation, Black Frankenstein tells the story of a metaphor that continues to matter to literature, culture, aesthetics, and politics.

From King Kong to Candyman, the boundary-pushing genre of horror film has always been a site for provocative explorations of race in American popular culture. This book offers a comprehensive chronological survey of Black horror from the 1890s to present day. In this second edition, Robin R. Means Coleman expands upon the history of notable characterizations of Blackness in horror cinema, with new chapters spanning the 1960s, 2000s, and 2010s to the present, and examines key levels of Black participation on screen and behind the camera. The book addresses a full range of Black horror films, including mainstream Hollywood fare, art-house films, Blaxploitation films, and U.S. hip-hop culture-inspired Nollywood films. This new edition also explores the resurgence of the Black horror genre in the last decade, examining the success of Jordan Peele’s films Get Out (2017) and Us (2019), smaller independent films such as The House Invictus (2018), and Nia DaCosta’s sequel to Candyman (2021). Means Coleman argues that horror offers a unique representational space for Black people to challenge negative or racist portrayals, and to portray greater diversity within the concept of Blackness itself. This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how fears and anxieties about race and race relations are made manifest, and often challenged, on the silver screen.

When the last descendant of the Frankenstein family loses her only son to a police shooting, she turns to science for her own justice...putting her on a crash course with her family's original monster and his quest to eliminate humanity. An intense, unflinching story exploring the legacies of love, loss, and vengeance placed firmly in the tense atmosphere and current events of the modern-day United States.