An incisive reflection on black electoral politics, disenfranchisement, and the lasting legacy of the civil rights movement—now with a brand-new essay on the Covid-19 pandemic, reparations, and the 2020 George Floyd protests. Blackballed is Darryl Pinckney’s meditation on a century and a half of participation by blacks in US electoral politics. In this combination of memoir, historical narrative, and contemporary political and social analysis, he investigates the struggle for black voting rights from Reconstruction through the civil rights movement to Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns. Drawing on the work of scholars, the memoirs of civil rights workers, and the speeches and writings of black leaders like Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Young and John Lewis, Pinckney traces the disagreements among blacks about the best strategies for achieving equality in American society as well as the ways in which they gradually came to create the Democratic voting bloc that contributed to the election of the first black president. Interspersed through the narrative are Pinckney’s own memories of growing up during the civil rights era and the reactions of his parents to the changes taking place in American society. He concludes with an examination of ongoing efforts by Republicans to suppress the black vote, with particular attention to the Supreme Court’s recent decision striking down part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Also included here is Pinckney’s essay “What Black Means Now,” on the history of the black middle class, stereotypes about blacks and crime, and contemporary debates about “post-blackness,” as well as a new essay, “Buck Moon in Harlem,” which reflects on Juneteenth and the ongoing fight for racial justice, and offers a glimpse of New York City amid the Covid-19 pandemic and the protests following the killing of George Floyd.

This book advances the view that concentrated black power is the backbone of the Democratic Party and, as such, black empowerment represents the last hope for the US both domestically and internationally. Through analyses of secondary data, historical archives, and a variety of political and economic statistical indicators, it examines the relationship between black empowerment and America's global stature across its history, exploring the socio-historical context in which obstacles to black empowerment have occurred and the strategies that have been adopted across time for its realization. An examination of what Black political, legal, economic and cultural power looks like, The Fight for Black Empowerment in the USA makes an urgent call for the up-lift and empowerment of the black population, without which the nation faces irreversible political and economic dysfunction domestically, and a loss of its status as a global superpower. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in racial and ethnic inequalities and contemporary American society.

High Cotton is an extraordinarily rich account of the dreams and inner turmoils of a new generation of the black upper middle class, capturing the essence of a part of American society that has mostly been ignored in literature. The novel's protagonist journeys from his childhood home in the midwest to college, a stint in New York publishing, and Europe, yet the issue of his "blackness" remains at the heart of his being.

An intoxicating, provocative novel of appetite, identity, and self-construction, Darryl Pinckney's Black Deutschland tells the story of an outsider, trapped between a painful past and a tenebrous future, in Europe's brightest and darkest city. Jed—young, gay, black, out of rehab and out of prospects in his hometown of Chicago—flees to the city of his fantasies, a museum of modernism and decadence: Berlin. The paradise that tyranny created, the subsidized city isolated behind the Berlin Wall, is where he's chosen to become the figure that he so admires, the black American expatriate. Newly sober and nostalgic for the Weimar days of Isherwood and Auden, Jed arrives to chase boys and to escape from what it means to be a black male in America. But history, both personal and political, can't be avoided with time or distance. Whether it's the judgment of the cousin he grew up with and her husband's bourgeois German family, the lure of white wine in a down-and-out bar, a gang of racists looking for a brawl, or the ravaged visage of Rock Hudson flashing behind the face of every white boy he desperately longs for, the past never stays past even in faraway Berlin. In the age of Reagan and AIDS in a city on the verge of tearing down its walls, he clambers toward some semblance of adulthood amid the outcasts and expats, intellectuals and artists, queers and misfits. And, on occasion, the city keeps its Isherwood promises and the boy he kisses, incredibly, kisses him back.

Elizabeth Hardwick was one of America’s great postwar women of letters, celebrated as a novelist and as an essayist. Until now, however, her slim but remarkable achievement as a writer of short stories has remained largely hidden, with her work tucked away in the pages of the periodicals—such asPartisan Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books—in which it originally appeared. This first collection of Hardwick’s short fiction reveals her brilliance as a stylist and as an observer of contemporary life. A young woman returns from New York to her childhood Kentucky home and discovers the world of difference within her. A girl’s boyfriend is not quite good enough, his “silvery eyes, light and cool, revealing nothing except pure possibility, like a coin in hand.” A magazine editor’s life falls strangely to pieces after she loses both her husband and her job. Individual lives and the life of New York, the setting or backdrop for most of these stories, are strikingly and memorably depicted in Hardwick’s beautiful and razor-sharp prose.

National Book Award Finalist From the dazzlingly original Pulitzer Prize-winning poet hailed for her “extraordinary range and ambition” (The New York Times Book Review): a quietly potent memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. The youngest of five children, Tracy K. Smith was raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But just as Tracy is about to leave home for college, her mother is diagnosed with cancer, a condition she accepts as part of God’s plan. Ordinary Light is the story of a young woman struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America. In lucid, clear prose, Smith interrogates her childhood in suburban California, her first collision with independence at Harvard, and her Alabama-born parents’ recollections of their own youth in the Civil Rights era. These dizzying juxtapositions—of her family’s past, her own comfortable present, and the promise of her future—will in due course compel Tracy to act on her passions for love and “ecstatic possibility,” and her desire to become a writer. Shot through with exquisite lyricism, wry humor, and an acute awareness of the beauty of everyday life, Ordinary Light is a gorgeous kaleidoscope of self and family, one that skillfully combines a child’s and teenager’s perceptions with adult retrospection. Here is a universal story of being and becoming, a classic portrait of the ways we find and lose ourselves amid the places we call home.

Elections A to Z is a highly respected legacy title that has long been a staple in the CQ Press reference list. It provides readers with ready reference insight into how campaigns and elections, the hallmark of any democracy, are conducted in the United States. The new fifth edition has been redesigned and updated with new entries covering the vital current elections topics that readers want to know about, especially given the focus on elections over the past year, and the resulting threat to American democracy. Entries range from short definitions of terms such as "at-large" and "front-runner" to in-depth essays exploring vital aspects of campaigns and elections, such as the right to vote, turnout trends, and the history, evolution, and current state of House, Senate, presidential, and some state-level elections. As with the prior edition, coverage will continue to entail the stages in the campaign process and the general election; the roles of political consultants, the media, and political parties; debates around term limits, majority-minority districts, and campaign finance; amendments, legislation, and court cases that have shaped electoral, campaign, and voting matters; voter turnout and voting rights in the United States; and highlights of presidential elections throughout U.S. history. Since the last edition published in 2012, there are many pertinent topics and events to explore from recent years, especially surrounding the 2020 elections. New to this edition will be entries discussing social media and communication, political and racial gerrymandering, districting and disenfranchisement, absentee and mail-in voting, new and revised state-by-state election and voter laws, foreign interference and misinformation campaigns, election-related violence, and minority and diverse group candidates and voter participation. Additionally, the book will address recent SCOTUS decisions that have impacted election law, including Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Inc. (2013), Shelby County, Alabama, v. Holder, Attorney General (2013), McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (2014), Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (2015), Harris v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (2016), Husted, Ohio Secretary of State v. A. Philip Randolph Institute (2018), Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky (2018), Gill v. Whitford (2018), Abbott, Governor of Texas v. Perez (2018), Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill (2019), Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), Colorado Department of State v. Baca (2020), Chiafalo v. Washington (2020), and Texas v. Pennsylvania (2020). The proposed update to Elections A to Z will reflect these changes as it captures an undergraduate-level audience that understands the basics of campaigns and elections but is seeking an understanding of related topics, trends, and current events.