Through her ethnographical studies, Zora Neale Hurston became one of the first Black filmmakers in history. She created several films documenting everyday rural Black life in the American South, making her arguably the first Black female documentarian. These 16mm films were shot in Florida between 1927-1929 and South Carolina in 1940, and are considered one of the earliest efforts to incorporate film into anthropological study. She also captured several audio recordings of renditions of Black American folk music. In 1941, Paramount Pictures hired Hurston as a story consultant, though little is known about the work she produced during her time at the film production company. Though many of her pioneering efforts are not always attributed to her, it is undeniable that Zora played a major influence in the development of filmmaking as both an art form and a tool for research.
Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995) was a civil rights activist, writer, teacher, and filmmaker. Known for her contributions to African American literature, Bambara celebrated black identity through depictions of its traditions, customs, and folklore. Representative of the African American and women writers who were political activists during the 1960’s and 1970’s, she produced literature that employs a unique voice and style to address social concerns. - Salem Press Biographical Encyclopedia
Gorilla, My Love
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Fifteen unforgettable short stories from an essential author of African American fiction gives us compelling portraits of a wide range of unforgettable characters, from sassy children to cunning old men, from uptown New York to rural North Carolina. "Bambara grabs you by the throat ... she dazzles, she charms." --Chicago Daily News A young girl suffers her first betrayal. A widow flirts with an elderly blind man against the wishes of her grown-up children. A neighborhood loan shark teaches a white social worker a lesson in responsibility. And there is more. Sharing the world of Toni Cade Bambara's "straight-up fiction" is a stunning experience.
Those Bones Are Not My Child
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Those Bones Are Not My Child is a staggering achievement, a major work of American fiction: the novel that Toni Cade Bambara was working on at the time of her death in 1995 -- a story that puts us at the center of the nightmare of the Atlanta child murders. It was called "The City Too Busy To Hate," but two decades ago more than forty black children were murdered there with grim determination, their bodies found -- in ditches, on riverbanks -- strangled, beaten, and sexually assaulted. Bambara was living in Atlanta at the time, and Those Bones Are Not My Child is the result of twelve years of first-hand research, as she delved into the murders and the world in which they occurred. Evoking the culture of the late 1970s and early '80s with a keen eye -- the Iranian hostage crisis, disco, Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver -- Those Bones Are Not My Child powerfully dramatizes the story of one black family surviving on the margins of a seemingly prosperous city. On Sunday morning, July 20, 1980, Marzala Rawls Spencer awakens to find that her teenage son has gone missing, even as the Atlanta child abductions are beginning to be reported. As she and her estranged husband frantically search for their son, the story moves with authority through the full spectrum of Atlanta's political, social, and cultural life, illuminating the vexing issues of race and class that bedevil the city. Suspenseful, richly dramatic, profoundly affecting, Those Bones Are Not My Child explores the complex relationships within one family in dire crisis. And as Toni Morrison, who edited Bambara's manuscript, has observed, it is also "the narrative revelation of a major Southern city of the '80s, a revelation of what clogs the bloodstream of 'The City Too Busy to Hate.' "
Julie Dash (1952-) is a filmmaker, music video and commercial director, author and website creator. Dash’s first feature — Daughters of the Dust (1991) — was the first film by an African American woman to receive a general theatrical release in the United States; the Library of Congress named it to the National Film Registry in 2004. Dash returned to the film’s characters and their Gullah milieu in her novel of the same title, published in 1999. - UCLA Library
Daughters of the Dust
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Julie Dash wrote and directed Daughters of the Dust, the first nationally distributed African American feature film to come out of America.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1950-) is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has published numerous books and produced and hosted an array of documentary films about Black history. - PBS
The Black Church
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The instant New York Times bestseller and companion book to the PBS series. "Absolutely brilliant . . . A necessary and moving work." --Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again "Engaging. . . . In Gates's telling, the Black church shines bright even as the nation itself moves uncertainly through the gloaming, seeking justice on earth--as it is in heaven." --Jon Meacham, New York Times Book Review From the New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road and The Black Box, and one of our most important voices on the African American experience, comes a powerful new history of the Black church as a foundation of Black life and a driving force in the larger freedom struggle in America. For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, residentially segregated West Virginia town, the church was a center of gravity--an intimate place where voices rose up in song and neighbors gathered to celebrate life's blessings and offer comfort amid its trials and tribulations. In this tender and expansive reckoning with the meaning of the Black Church in America, Gates takes us on a journey spanning more than five centuries, from the intersection of Christianity and the transatlantic slave trade to today's political landscape. At road's end, and after Gates's distinctive meditation on the churches of his childhood, we emerge with a new understanding of the importance of African American religion to the larger national narrative--as a center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as a magnet for political mobilization, as an incubator of musical and oratorical talent that would transform the culture, and as a crucible for working through the Black community's most critical personal and social issues. In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black Church has always been more than a sanctuary. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meetinghouses were subject to surveillance and destruction. Long after slavery's formal eradication, church burnings and bombings by anti-Black racists continued, a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the African American struggle for equality. The past often isn't even past--Dylann Roof committed his slaughter in the Mother Emanuel AME Church 193 years after it was first burned down by white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, following a thwarted slave rebellion. But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the heart of the Black political struggle, and it has produced many of the Black community's most notable leaders. At the same time, some churches and denominations have eschewed political engagement and exemplified practices of exclusion and intolerance that have caused polarization and pain. Those tensions remain today, as a rising generation demands freedom and dignity for all within and beyond their communities, regardless of race, sex, or gender. Still, as a source of faith and refuge, spiritual sustenance and struggle against society's darkest forces, the Black Church has been central, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.
Tradition and the Black Atlantic
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Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'sTradition and the Black Atlantic is both a vibrant romp down the rabbit hole of cultural studies and an examination of the discipline's roots and role in contemporary thought. In this conversational tour through the halls of theory, Gates leaps from Richard Wright to Spike Lee, from Pat Buchanan to Frantz Fanon, and ultimately to the source of anticolonialist thought: the unlikely figure of Edmund Burke. ThroughoutTradition and the Black Atlantic, Gates shows that the culture wars have presented us with a surfeit of either/ors--tradition versus modernity; Eurocentrism versus Afrocentricism. Pointing us away from these facile dichotomies, Gates deftly combines rigorous scholarship with humor, looking back to the roots of cultural studies in order to map out its future course.
Zora Neale Hurston
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"Zora Neale Hurston is a literary legend. One of the leading forces of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston was also one of the most widely acclaimed Black authors in America from the mid twenties to the mid forties. She faded into obscurity in the subsequent decades, but literary figures and scholars in the 1970s revived her work and introduced a whole generation to her brilliance. Today she is the most widely taught Black woman writer in the canon of American literature." "Born in the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida, of which her father was mayor, Hurston was intensely proud. She became the first Black student at Barnard College, where she earned a bachelor's degree in anthropology. She conducted significant research, interviews, and fieldwork relating to Black cultures of the United States and the Caribbean." "In her writings, instead of bemoaning the frustrations of the Black experience, Hurston chose to celebrate the many cultures of her people as well as the richness of their verbal expressions. Although Hurston died poor and forgotten in 1960, the visibility of the feminist movement and the interest of women writers such as Alice Walker - who was responsible for providing a headstone for Hurston's unmarked grave in 1974 - were instrumental in reestablishing Hurston's place in African-American literature." "Hurston's life and work are revealed through the reviews and essays contained in Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah have chosen reviews of her works from such important publications of her days as The Crisis, New Masses, New Republic, the New York Herald Tribune, The New York Times Book Review, Opportunity, and Saturday Review of Literature. Hurston's first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), earned comments ranging from "most vital" to "a disappointment," although the reviewers consistently praised her use of dialect and language. This unique collection includes reviews of Mules and Men (1935), the first collection of African-American folklore published by an African American. Their Eyes Were Watching God, her 1973 novel that addressed a woman's desire for independence and individuality, was favorably reviewed by Alain Locke, the first Black Rhodes scholar and one of Hurston's professors at Howard University, and unfavorably reviewed by Richard Wright, who testily complained that the book was addressed to a white audience. The autobiographical Dust Tracks On a Road (1942) was received favorably, with comments on Hurston's "gutsy language." Reviews of Seraph on the Suwanne, Hurston's 1948 novel featuring primarily white characters, are also included, as well as those of earlier works such as Tell My Horses and Moses, Man of the Mountain." "The essays presented here were published between 1982 and 1992 by academics, authors, and critics. They provide discussions and analysis, at greater length, of such factors as Hurston's language, characters, voice, and her ability to reflect the reality of Black women's lives."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
