Finalist, 2019 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies A profound intellectual engagement with Afrofuturism and the philosophical questions of space and time Queer Times, Black Futures considers the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation as they have persisted in and through racial capitalism. Kara Keeling explores how the speculative fictions of cinema, music, and literature that center Black existence provide scenarios wherein we might imagine alternative worlds, queer and otherwise. In doing so, Keeling offers a sustained meditation on contemporary investments in futurity, speculation, and technology, paying particular attention to their significance to queer and Black freedom. Keeling reads selected works, such as Sun Ra’s 1972 film Space is the Place and the 2005 film The Aggressives, to juxtapose the Afrofuturist tradition of speculative imagination with the similar “speculations” of corporate and financial institutions. In connecting a queer, cinematic reordering of time with the new possibilities technology offers, Keeling thinks with and through a vibrant conception of the imagination as a gateway to queer times and Black futures, and the previously unimagined spaces that they can conjure.

“An inspiring and riveting tale.” —Patrik Henry Bass, Senior Editor, Essence After a career of many firsts, journalist Gerald Boyd became the first black managing editor of the New York Times. But the dream ended abruptly with Boyd's forced resignation in the wake of scandal over Jayson Blair, a reporter who had plagiarized and fabricated news stories. A rare inside view of power and behind-the-scenes politics at the nation's premier newspaper, My Times in Black and White is the inspirational tale of a man who rose from urban poverty to the top of his field, struggling against whitedominated media, tearing down racial barriers, and all the while documenting the most extraordinary events of the latter twentieth century.

Contributors to this special issue use crisis as a framework to explore historical and present-day Black temporalities. Considering how moments of emergency shift and redefine one's relationship to time and temporality--particularly in the material, psychic, and emotional lives of Black people--the authors examine the resulting paradoxical aspects of time. They argue that crisis demands response while revealing no clear course of action and holds its victims in states of suspension and expectation. The authors use 2020 as a point of departure, in which "pandemic time" emerged as an experience of time's seemingly simultaneous expansion and compression: the slow time of monotony, the racing time of anxiety, and the cyclical time of mourning. The essays cover racial capitalism as it exists through stolen land (dispossession of Native sovereignty), stolen life (African enslavement), and stolen time; the temporal differences between the lived experience of Black flesh and the Black body; and the significance of time to the production of Black ontology and the field of Black studies. Contributors. Badia Ahad, Margo Natalie Crawford, Eve Dunbar, Julius B. Fleming, Tao Leigh Goffe, Habiba Ibrahim, Shaun Myers, Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard, Sarah Stefana Smith, Frederick C. Staidum Jr.

A newly revised modern manual of manners and etiquette that has become an African American classic. Unlike the more traditional etiquette books that many African Americans may find stodgy, off-putting, and culturally alien, The New Basic Black is for real people who live real lives—and it addresses many of the issues of a growing black middle class. Straightforward, user-friendly, and illustrated with line drawings, The New Basic Black includes all the information any well-mannered person would want to know about the social rites of passage (marriage, birth, christening, death), the corporate workplace (standard work issues and the more delicate issue of race and its impact on a work environment), various occasions (having guests or being a guest at a summer home, etc.), and everyday rules and rituals that make living in hectic times a little easier. The revised edition of The New Basic Black also contains the intricacies of Internet etiquette, tips for travel in the post-9/11 age, and a wealth of other invaluable information that will make life more comfortable. For singles and families alike, The New Basic Black takes the mystery out of conventional etiquette and will arm the reader with confidence in any situation.

William Monroe Trotter (1872– 1934), though still virtually unknown to the wider public, was an unlikely American hero. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized black working- class citizens to wield their political power despite the violent racism of post- Reconstruction America. For more than thirty years, the Harvard-educated Trotter edited and published the Guardian, a weekly Boston newspaper that was read across the nation. Defining himself against the gradualist politics of Booker T. Washington and the elitism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Trotter advocated for a radical vision of black liberation that prefigured leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. Synthesizing years of archival research, historian Kerri Greenidge renders the drama of turn- of- the- century America and reclaims Trotter as a seminal figure, whose prophetic, yet ultimately tragic, life offers a link between the vision of Frederick Douglass and black radicalism in the modern era.

Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.

“A literary experience unlike any I’ve had in recent memory . . . a blueprint for this moment and the next, for where Black folks have been and where they might be going.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) What does it mean to be Black and alive right now? Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham have brought together this collection of work—images, photos, essays, memes, dialogues, recipes, tweets, poetry, and more—to tell the story of the radical, imaginative, provocative, and gorgeous world that Black creators are bringing forth today. The book presents a succession of startling and beautiful pieces that generate an entrancing rhythm: Readers will go from conversations with activists and academics to memes and Instagram posts, from powerful essays to dazzling paintings and insightful infographics. In answering the question of what it means to be Black and alive, Black Futures opens a prismatic vision of possibility for every reader.