An ambitious genre-crossing exploration of Black speculative imagination, The Dark Delight of Being Strange combines fiction, historical accounts, and philosophical prose to unveil the extraordinary and the surreal in everyday Black life. In a series of stories and essays, James B. Haile, III, traces how Black speculative fiction responds to enslavement, racism, colonialism, and capitalism and how it reveals a life beyond social and political alienation. He reenvisions Black technologies of freedom through Henry Box Brown’s famed escape from slavery in a wooden crate, fashions an anticolonial “hollow earth theory” from the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, and considers the octopus and its ability to camouflage itself as a model for Black survival strategies, among others. Looking at Black life through the lens of speculative fiction, this book transports readers to alternative worlds and spaces while remaining squarely rooted in present-day struggles. In so doing, it rethinks historical and contemporary Black experiences as well as figures such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Dumas, and Toni Morrison. Offering new ways to grasp the meanings and implications of Black freedom, The Dark Delight of Being Strange invites us to reimagine history and memory, time and space, our identities and ourselves.

Traces the evolution of Afro-American poetry, highlighting individual poets up to the time of the Harlem Renaissance.

A gift that celebrates being yourself, in your own unique way. Do you ever feel different? A little weird, a little wacky? It’s time to own it, because, as Meryl Streep proclaimed, “what makes you different or weird, that’s your strength.” In this inspiring collection, singers, poets, actors, activists, comedians, designers, athletes, and philosophers share wise and pithy reflections on what it’s like to march to the beat of a different drummer. Every statement is a powerful, positive reminder that to live successfully is to be completely unapologetically you. “We are not what other people say we are. We are who we know ourselves to be, and we are what we love. That’s OK.” —Laverne Cox “All the colors I am inside have not been invented yet.” —Shel Silverstein “I am different, not less” —Temple Grandin “The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.” —Jhumpa Lahiri “Self-censorship is insulting to the self. Timidity is a hopeless way forward.” —Ai Weiwei

Containing more than three hundred poems, including nearly a hundred previously unpublished works, this unique collection showcases the intellectual range of Claude McKay (1889-1948), the Jamaican-born poet and novelist whose life and work were marked by restless travel and steadfast social protest. McKay's first poems were composed in rural Jamaican creole and launched his lifelong commitment to representing everyday black culture from the bottom up. Migrating to New York, he reinvigorated the English sonnet and helped spark the Harlem Renaissance with poems such as "If We Must Die." After coming under scrutiny for his communism, he traveled throughout Europe and North Africa for twelve years and returned to Harlem in 1934, having denounced Stalin's Soviet Union. By then, McKay's pristine "violent sonnets" were giving way to confessional lyrics informed by his newfound Catholicism. McKay's verse eludes easy definition, yet this complete anthology, vividly introduced and carefully annotated by William J. Maxwell, acquaints readers with the full transnational evolution of a major voice in twentieth-century poetry.

This remarkable Pan-African collection of quotes from Black people in Africa and throughout the Diaspora reminds us of the strength and power of the men and women who, in years past, fought for their liberty, their rights and their dignity and those of their people. In a time when racism and fascism are on the rise around the world, these powerful and inspirational quotes serve as a reminder of the struggles and triumphs of the past, of Caribbean, North American and African people, singers, activists, writers, abolitionists, poets, who faced oppression and injustice with steadfast courage and gave no quarter. Now, when heroes and sheroes are needed once again, we hear the voices of the past, sounding their clarion call through the ages. A must-have for the African-American,Caribbean and African history buff or for anyone who wants an introduction to those who shaped Black thought and were in the forefront of the civil rights, Pan-African, Negritude and many other movements over the last three centuries!

Another book of quotations? Indeed there are numerous excellent extant anthologies of quotations, but these tend to be very broad, with a bias toward classical and well-known authors; those works which document the contributions of Black authors have tended to focus on African-Americans, considerable as their output is. Undeniable recognition of this prevalence is reflected in the title of the present volume which pays homage to W. E. B. Du Bois? classic work and in the preponderance of entries from American sources. Nevertheless, effort has been made to cast a wider net to capture under-represented and unfamiliar voices. Khemetic texts preserved in papyri and stelae are the earliest literature to have survived, followed by the writings of North African Romans and Ethiopian philosophers and clerics, and the lately recovered Timbuktu manuscripts from their repositories in the desert sands of Mali. The Transatlantic slave experience gave rise to the slave narratives and abolitionist literature from both sides of the Atlantic, which remained predominant right up to the 20th century. Post-Emancipation under colonial rule and white domination, Black poetry and prose emerged, adhering to prevailing standards, evidenced typically in the work of Phillis Wheatley and the sonnets of Claude McKay. With the Civil Rights and Black Power movements would come iconoclastic expressions of protest and identity. There is a sizeable body of literature by Black authors from Africa and the diaspora who speak to universal values and eternal verities. This anthology of their work focuses on the inner life, on personal development and self-actualization. 3000 quotations have been selected to inspire, enlightenand encourage; they have been arranged in 200 psycho-spiritual categories and in chronological order. The resulting timeline of thought in itself is useful and instructive as it demonstrates very clearly the evolution of consciousness evident in the contemporary thinking on particular subjects. Like its predecessor, Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing, this volume contains a full biographical index and bibliographical references. Much of the material is anthologized here for the first time.