Afro-Netizen

Book segregation

In a recent article published in The Wall Street Journal, writer Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg talks about the business of segregating books -- specifically Black books.

Here's a sneak peek:

"You face a double-edged sword," says Mr. Massey, 33 years old. "I'm black and I'm published by a black imprint, so I'm automatically slotted in African-American fiction." That helps black readers to find his books easily and has underpinned his career. At the same time, he says, the placement "limits my sales."

The article goes on . . .

As a practical matter, segregating books by race and culture makes it less likely that black writers will hit the national best-seller lists -- whites make up a majority of book buyers -- limiting their chances of earning bigger paychecks. Nadine Aldred, who writes as Millenia Black, says that writer Jennifer Weiner might not have become a best-selling author if her books had been sold exclusively in a Jewish-American section. Ms. Weiner, whose books include "Good in Bed" and "Little Earthquakes," agrees. "If my books were perceived as Jewish 'chick lit,' there would be a narrower appeal," she says.

Definitely an article well worth reading.

You can read the full article here.

(N.B. This link will be automatically deactivated by WSJ in 7 days or December 14, 2006.)

Changing the Rules in Africa

By Charlayne Hunter-Gault
Oxford University Press

I’m a journalist, not a poll-taker, however, over the past month, while touring the country to talk about my book New News Out of Africa, I’ve been conducting an informal, highly un-scientific survey about how much Americans know about Africa. I know that the majority of the people I talk to are already interested in Africa because they have turned out for my readings in bookstores, churches, theaters and private homes, or they have called in to the radio talk shows where I’ve been a guest. My survey has sampled a wide cross section of Americans: young, old, black, white and brown, immigrants from all parts of the world, including Africa, as well as native born. Many of them feel a spiritual or emotional connection to this faraway continent; many have an historical connection, too, their fore-parents having been brought here as slaves in chains during the Middle Passage.

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The Island affair

Richard Wright's last novel, thought to be a roman à clef about African-American exiles in Paris, was never published. James Campbell uncovers the real story behind the controversial manuscript

The Guardian

In the spring of 1988, I went to Paris to meet Ellen Wright, the widow of the American novelist Richard Wright, at her home in the heart of St-Germain des Prés. The purpose of the visit was to discuss James Baldwin, about whom I was writing a book and with whom Richard Wright had had a fractious, father-and-son relationship.

The Wrights had moved from New York to Paris in 1947, and Baldwin, 14 years Wright's junior, arrived the following year. Whereas Wright was the author of several outstanding books, including the novel Native Son and the memoir Black Boy, the story of his gruelling Mississippi childhood, Baldwin was practically unpublished.

One of the first things he turned his mind to, on settling in Paris, was an essay ostensibly about Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin, which ended by attacking the continuation of "protest" fiction in contemporary black literature. The prime example of the sterility cited by Baldwin was Native Son. Wright never forgave him.

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Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop

By Imani Perry

At once the most lucrative, popular, and culturally oppositional musical force in the United States, hip hop demands the kind of interpretation Imani Perry provides here—criticism engaged with this vibrant musical form on its own terms.

A scholar and a fan, Perry considers the art, politics, and culture of hip hop through an analysis of song lyrics, the words of the prophets of the hood. Recognizing prevailing characterizations of hip hop, or rap, as a transnational musical form, Perry advances a powerful argument that hip hop is first and foremost black American music. At the same time, she contends that many studies have shortchanged the aesthetic value of rap by attributing much of its form and content primarily to socioeconomic factors. Her innovative analysis revels in the artistry of hip hop, revealing it as an art of innovation, not deprivation.

Perry offers detailed readings of the lyrics of many hip hop artists, including Ice Cube, Public Enemy, De La Soul, KRS-One, Outkast, Sean “Puffy” Combs, Tupac Shakur, Lil’ Kim, Biggie Smalls, Nas, Method Man, Lauryn Hill, and Foxy Brown. She focuses on the cultural foundations of the music and on the form and narrative features of the songs—the call and response, the reliance on the break, the use of metaphor, and the recurring figures of the trickster and the outlaw. Perry also provides complex
considerations of hip hop’s association with crime, violence, and misogyny.

To read more, click here.

To buy this book, click here.

By Zakia Munirah Carter
Africana.com

Brothers in Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII's Forgotten Heroes
By Kareem Abdul-Jabar and Anthony Walton
(Broadway, 320 pages, $24.95)

Yes, that Kareem Abdul-Jabar. The multiple NBA MVP winner and living legend has penned a fascinating account of the men of the 761st Battalion, the all-black tank battalion known as "The Black Panthers," in World War II who saw 183 consecutive days of war combat on the frontlines whereas most American units fought on the front for one to two weeks before being rotated back. Told in third person narration, the book is enhanced by the first hand accounts relayed to Jabar by his mentor and friend Leonard "Smitty" Smith, the actual loader on the tank crew and interviews with the 70 surviving members of the battalion and family members. With detail and careful research, Jabar and Walton offer up yet another example of the heroism of black men in the military and their significant roles in WWII in particular, including the liberation of thirty towns and villages and a concentration camp in Germany.

Click here to learn more.

Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land

Democracy Now!
DemocracyNow.org

Longtime human rights activist and TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson joins us in our firehouse studios to talk about U.S. foreign policy in Africa and the Caribbean, why he refused an honorary degree from Georgetown after the CIA's George Tenet spoke there and his latest book "Quitting America" which explains why he left the U.S. to live in St. Kitts-Nevis.

As we have pointed out before on the program, in his state of the union address last month, President Bush did not mention the word Africa once during the entire speech. In last year's address, Bush's most prominent mention of Africa was the accusation that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger - an allegation that later turned out to be entirely baseless.

Today we are going to take an extensive look at Bush's policies toward Africa, African-Americans and the Caribbean with one of the most well-known critics of US foreign policy toward these areas of the world: Randall Robinson.

He is a longtime human rights activist who founded the organization TransAfrica in 1977 to address U.S. policy toward Africa and the Caribbean. Among his most well-known campaigns was against the apartheid regime in South Africa and US support for it. In 1994, Robinson made national headlines as he staged a 27-day hunger strike to protest US actions in Haiti. He is one of the people most credited with bringing the issue of reparations for slavery into the mainstream with his book "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks."

Last year he once declined an honorary degree from Georgetown University because George Tenet, the director of the CIA and an ardent supporter of the invasion of Iraq, had been invited the day before to speak at one of Georgetown's graduation exercises. Three weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Robinson officially "quit" the US and moved to St. Kitts-Nevis, the small Caribbean island nation where his wife was born. He has just written a new book explaining why he left. It is called "Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man From His Native Land."

Click here for a transcript of the interview with Randall Robinson.

Were Jesus and the ancient Semites Black?

"This book attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years."

--author, Jared Diamond.

In Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and UCLA professor of geography and physiology states:

“We instinctively associate Semitic peoples with the Near East. However, . . . Semitic languages really form only one of six or more branches of a much larger language family, Afro-asiatic, all of whose other branches (and other 222 surviving languages) are confined to Africa.

Even the Semitic family subfamily itself is mainly African, 12 of its 19 surviving languages being confined to Ethiopia. This suggests that Afroasiatic languages arose in Africa, and that only one branch of them spread to the Near East. Hence, it may have been Africa that gave birth to the languages spoken by the authors of the Old and New Testaments and the Koran, the moral pillars of Western civilization.”

What do you think?

An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America

Author Henry Wiencek has just released his newest book, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America. Mr. Wiencek written other books on different subject as well as an interesting article in 2001 on his alma mater Yale's complicity in the slave trade entitled "Yale and the Price of Slavery".

Interested in applying for Afro-Netizen's free book giveaway? If so, click here!

Time on Two Crosses

The Organizer of the Civil Rights Movement
By MICHAEL ANDERSON
November 9, 2003

Bayard Rustin became famous for working behind the scenes. This paradox of his celebrity was, to a large degree, inherent in the role he chose to play in the history of his time. From the end of the Great Depression to his death in 1987, at the age of 75, Rustin was the ''master strategist of social change,'' as the historian John D'Emilio writes in his biography, ''Lost Prophet.'' The tactics of public protest that became familiar in the 1960's -- marches on Washington, Freedom Rides, sit-ins, passive resistance, civil disobedience -- were pioneered and refined by Rustin two decades earlier. Indeed, through his decisive influence on Martin Luther King Jr., whom he instructed in the philosophy and tactics of Gandhian nonviolence, Rustin created the model for the social movements of post-World War II America -- civil rights, antiwar, gay liberation, feminist. ''He resurrected mass peaceful protest from the graveyard in which cold war anti-Communism had buried it,'' D'Emilio writes, ''and made it once again a vibrant expression of citizen rights in a free society.''

On four continents, he was esteemed for his mastery of nuts and bolts: ''precisely the number of toilets that would be needed . . . how many doctors, how many first-aid stations, what people should bring with them to eat in their lunches.'' Rustin played major roles in two defining social protests: the Aldermaston march in England in 1958, in which 10,000 people demonstrated against nuclear weapons, and, most famously, the March on Washington in 1963, in which a quarter-million people (more than double the anticipated turn-out and including fully 1 percent of the country's black population) turned out, evidence of a national consensus in support of black rights. The result of eight frantic and exhilarating weeks of work, in which, as D'Emilio writes, Rustin ''had to build an organization out of nothing,'' the March on Washington epitomized why Newsweek called him ''a genius at organization.''

To read the rest of this book review, please click here.

"Negro President": Thomas Jefferson and the Slave Power

November 6, 2003

Volume 50, Number 17 · November 6, 2003
The New York Review of Books

Feature

"The Negro President": Thomas Jefferson and the Slave Power
By Garry Wills

I have admired Jefferson all my life, and still do. His labors to guarantee freedom of religion would in themselves be enough to insure his place in my private pantheon. But there is much else I revere in him. A quarter of a century ago, I published a book praising him as an Enlightenment philosopher. A year ago, I published a book praising him as an artist. Along the way I have written articles that looked at different aspects of his life.[1] But I have only now devoted an entire book to one deadly part of his legacy —the protection and extension of slavery through the three-fifths clause in the Constitution.

To read the rest of this review, please click here.