SHORTLISTED FOR THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF PRIZE It's 1970, and in the People's Republic of Congo a Marxist-Leninist revolution is ushering in a new age. But at the orphanage on the outskirts of Pointe-Noire where young Moses has grown up, the revolution has only strengthened the reign of Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako, the orphanage's corrupt director. So Moses escapes to Pointe-Noire, where he finds a home first with a larcenous band of Congolese Merry Men and then among the Zairian prostitutes of the Trois-Cents quarter. But the authorities won't leave Moses in peace, and intervene to chase both the Merry Men and the Trois-Cents girls out of town. All this injustice pushes poor Moses over the edge. Could he really be the Robin Hood of the Congo? Or is he just losing his marbles? Vivid, exuberant and heartwarming, Black Moses is a vital new extension of Alain Mabanckou's extraordinary, interlinked body of work dedicated to his native Congo, and confirms his status as one of our great storytellers.

“Black men could finally stand up and be men because here's Black Moses; he's the epitome of Black masculinity. Chains that once represented bondage and slavery now can be a sign of power and strength and sexuality and virility.” —Isaac Hayes Within the stoned soul picnic of Black music icons in the ’60s and ’70s, only one could bill himself without a blush as Moses, demanding liberation for Black men with his notions of life and self—Isaac Lee Hayes Jr., the beautifully sheen, shaded, and chain-spangled acolyte of cool, whose high-toned “lounge music” and proto-rap was soul’s highest order—heard on twenty-two albums and selling millions of records. Hayes’s stunning self-portraits, his obsessive pleas about love, sex, and guilt bathed in lush orchestral flights and soul-stirring bass lines, drove other soul men like Barry White to libidinous license. But Hayes, who called himself a “renegade,” was a man of many parts. While he thrived on soulful remakes of pop standards, his biggest coup was writing and producing the epic soundtrack to Shaft, memorializing the “black private dick” as a “complicated man,” as coolly mean and amoral as any white private eye. This new musical and cultural coda delivered Hayes the first Oscar ever won by a Black musician, as well as the Grammy for Best Song. Yet, few know Hayes’s remarkable achievements. In this compelling buffet of sight and sound, acclaimed music biographer Mark Ribowsky—who has authored illuminating portraits of such luminaries as Stevie Wonder, Little Richard, and Otis Redding—gallops through the many stages of Hayes’s daring and daunting life, starting with Hayes’s difficult childhood in which his mother died young and his father abandoned him. Ribowsky then takes readers through Hayes’s rise at Memphis’s legendary soul factory, Stax Records, first as a piano player on Otis Redding sessions then as a songwriter and producer teamed with David Porter. Tuned to the context of soul music history, he created crossover smashes like Sam & Dave's “Soul Man,” “Hold on I'm Comin’,” and “I Thank You,” making soul a semi-religion of Black pride, imagination, and joyful emotion. Hayes’s subsequent career as a solo artist featured studio methods and out-of-the-box ideas that paved the way for soul to occupy the top of the album charts alongside white rock albums. But his prime years ended prematurely, both as a consequence of Stax’s red ink and his own self-destructive tendencies. In the ’90s he claimed he had finally found himself, as a minion of Scientology. But Scientology would cost him the gig that had revived him—the cartoon voice of the naively cool “Chef” on South Park—after he became embroiled in controversy when South Park’s creators parodied Scientology in an episode that caused the cult’s leaders to order him to quit the show. Although Hayes was honored by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, the brouhaha came as his seemingly perfect body finally broke down. He died in 2008 at age sixty-eight, too soon for a soul titan. But if only greatness can establish permanence in the cellular structure of music, Isaac Hayes long ago qualified. His influence will last for as long as there is music to be heard. And when we hear him in that music, we will by rote say, “We can dig it.”

In the early twentieth century, Marcus Garvey sowed the seeds of a new black pride and determination. Attacked by the black intelligentsia and ridiculed by the white press, this Jamaican immigrant astonished all with his black nationalist rhetoric. In just four years, he built the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the largest and most powerful all-black organization the nation had ever seen. With hundreds of branches, throughout the United States, the UNIA represented Garvey’s greatest accomplishment and, ironically, the source of his public disgrace. Black Moses brings this controversial figure to life and recovers the significance of his life and work. “Those who are interested in the revolutionary aspects of the twentieth century in America should not miss Cronon’s book. It makes exciting reading.”—The Nation “A very readable, factual, and well-documented biography of Marcus Garvey.”—The Crisis, NAACP “In a short, swiftly moving, penetrating biography, Mr. Cronon has made the first real attempt to narrate the Garvey story. From the Jamaican's traumatic race experiences on the West Indian island to dizzy success and inglorious failure on the mainland, the major outlines are here etched with sympathy, understanding, and insight.”—Mississippi Valley Historical Review (Now the Journal of American History). “Good reading for all serious history students.”—Jet “A vivid, detailed, and sound portrait of a man and his dreams.”—Political Science Quarterly

Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman: By SARAH H. BRADFORD. [Special Illustrated Edition]

In Between Homeland and Motherland, Alvin B. Tillery Jr. considers the history of political engagement with Africa on the part of African Americans, beginning with the birth of Paul Cuffe’s back-to-Africa movement in the Federal Period to the Congressional Black Caucus’ struggle to reach consensus on the African Growth and Opportunity Act of 2000. In contrast to the prevailing view that pan-Africanism has been the dominant ideology guiding black leaders in formulating foreign policy positions toward Africa, Tillery highlights the importance of domestic politics and factors within the African American community. Employing an innovative multimethod approach that combines archival research, statistical modeling, and interviews, Tillery argues that among African American elites—activists, intellectuals, and politicians—factors internal to the community played a large role in shaping their approach to African issues, and that shaping U.S. policy toward Africa was often secondary to winning political battles in the domestic arena. At the same time, Africa and its interests were important to America’s black elite, and Tillery’s analysis reveals that many black leaders have strong attachments to the "motherland." Spanning two centuries of African American engagement with Africa, this book shows how black leaders continuously balanced national, transnational, and community impulses, whether distancing themselves from Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement, supporting the anticolonialism movements of the 1950s, or opposing South African apartheid in the 1980s.

In this provocative new book, Mark Christian Thompson addresses the startling fact that many African American intellectuals in the 1930s sympathized with fascism, seeing in its ideology a means of envisioning new modes of African American political resistance. Thompson surveys the work and thought of several authors and asserts that their sometimes positive reaction to generic European fascism, and its transformation into black fascism, is crucial to any understanding of Depression-era African American literary culture. The book considers the high regard that "Back to Africa" advocate Marcus Garvey expressed for fascist dictators and explores the common ground he shared with George Schuyler and Claude McKay, writers with whom Garvey is generally thought to be at odds. Thompson reveals how fascism informed a rejection of Marxism by McKay--as well as by Arna Bontemps, whose Drums at Dusk depicts communism as antithetical to any black revolution. A similarly authoritarian stance is examined in the work of Zora Neale Hurston, where the striving for a fascist sovereignty presents itself as highly critical of Nazism while nonetheless sharing many of its tenets. The book concludes with an investigation of Richard Wright's The Outsider and its murderous protagonist, Cross Damon, who articulates fascist drives already present, if latent, in Native Son's Bigger Thomas. Unencumbered by the historical or biblical references of the earlier work, Damon personifies the essence of black fascism. Taking on a subject generally ignored or denied in African American cultural and literary studies, Black Fascisms seeks not only to question the prominence of the Left in the political thought of a generation of writers but to change how we view African American literature in general. Encompassing political theory, cultural studies, critical theory, and historicism, the book will challenge readers in numerous fields, providing a new model for thinking about the political and transnational in African American culture and shedding new light on our understanding of fascism between the wars.