Prior to the 1960s, when African Americans had little access to formal political power, black popular culture was commonly seen as a means of forging community and effecting political change. But as Richard Iton shows in this provocative and insightful volume, despite the changes brought about by the civil rights movement, and contrary to the wishes of those committed to narrower conceptions of politics, black artists have continued to play a significant role in the making and maintenance of critical social spaces. Iton offers an original portrait of the relationship between popular culture and institutionalized politics tracing the connections between artists such as Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Pryor, Bob Marley, and Erykah Badu and those individuals working in the protest, electoral, and policy making arenas. With an emphasis on questions of class, gender and sexuality-and diaspora and coloniality-the author also illustrates how creative artists destabilize modern notions of the proper location of politics, and politics itself. Ranging from theater to film, and comedy to literature and contemporary music, In Search of the Black Fantastic is an engaging and sophisticated examination of how black popular culture has challenged our understandings of the aesthetic and its relationship to politics.

Today, no matter where you are in the world, you can turn on a radio and hear the echoes and influences of Chicago house music. Do You Remember House? tells a comprehensive story of the emergence, and contemporary memorialization of house in Chicago, tracing the development of Chicago house music culture from its beginnings in the late '70s to the present. Based on expansive research in archives and his extensive conversations with the makers of house in Chicago's parks, clubs, museums, and dance studios, author Micah Salkind argues that the remediation and adaptation of house music by crossover communities in its first decade shaped the ways that Chicago producers, DJs, dancers, and promoters today re-remember and mobilize the genre as an archive of collectivity and congregation. The book's engagement with musical, kinesthetic, and visual aspects of house music culture builds from a tradition of queer of color critique. As such, Do You Remember House? considers house music's liberatory potential in terms of its genre-defiant repertoire in motion. Ultimately, the book argues that even as house music culture has been appropriated and exploited, the music's porosity and flexibility have allowed it to remain what pioneering Chicago DJ Craig Cannon calls a "musical Stonewall" for queers and people of color in the Windy City and around the world.

Explores how the NBA moved to govern black players and the expression of blackness after the “Palace Brawl” of 2004.

Musicologists and performance studies scholars reach across their disciplines to examine the role of performance in musical culture

A collection of now classic literary work by black gay male writers.

Cultural Writing. Poetry. Fiction. Essays. African American Studies. Gay and Lesbian Studies. VOICES RISING is a collection of literary works by gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people of African descent. Edited by G. Winston James and fellow members of the Other Countries Collective of New York City, VOICES RISING features some of the best black LGBT writing of the past ten years, including work by Samiya Bashir, Cheryl Boyce Taylor, Sharon Bridgforth, Cheryl Clarke, Samuel R. Delany, Alexis De Veaux, R. Erica Doyle, Thomas Glave, Jewelle Gomez, D. Rubin Green, Duriel E. Harris, Imani Henry, Cary Alan Johnson, John Keene, Renita Martin, Bruce Morrow, Jcherry Muhanji, Letta Neely, Robert Penn, Colin Robinson, Shaw Stewart Ruff, Reginald Shepherd, Pamela Sneed, Storme Webber, Tim'm T. West, Marvin K. White, Malik M.L. Williams, Bil Wright and more.