Let Nobody Turn Us Around: An African American Anthology - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0742560570 ISBN 13: 9780742560574

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009

Synopsis

This anthology of black writers traces the evolution of African-American perspectives throughout American history, from the early years of slavery to the end of the twentieth century. The essays, manifestos, interviews, and documents assembled here, contextualized with critical commentaries from Marable and Mullings, introduce the reader to the character and important controversies of each period of black history. The selections represent a broad spectrum of ideology. Conservative, radical, nationalistic, and integrationist approaches can be found in almost every period, yet there have been striking shifts in the evolution of social thought and activism. The editors judiciously illustrate how both continuity and change affected the African-American community in terms of its internal divisions, class structure, migration, social problems, leadership, and protest movements. They also show how gender, spirituality, literature, music, and connections to Africa and the Caribbean played a prominent role in black life and history.

About this title

About the Authors

Molefi Kete Asante is Professor of Africology at Temple University, USA.

James Baldwin is a writer and theatre maker. Credits include: Wendy: a Peter Pan Story, Afraid to Ask, Innocentville (the egg, Theatre Royal Bath), ...if we've never been to the Moon?, Return of the Unknown, Lemn Sissay's Warrior Poets (The Marlowe), Match Fit (the Old Vic), Meet the Meat (Barbican) and Doctors (BBC Drama shadow scheme). James is Artistic Director of Toucan Theatre; productions include The Naughty Fox and Getting There (with deafinitely theatre and Oxford Playhouse). Awards include: The Walter Tull Playwriting Prize, The Lilian Baylis Award for Theatrical Excellence and multiple Koestler Awards for radio dramas created in prisons. James is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a trustee of the Old Fire Station, Oxford. James' play Peter Panic was published by Oberon, now Bloomsbury Publishing.

bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952, was an American author who used lowercase as both an homage to her maternal great-grandmother and an attempt to keep readers’ focus where it belonged: on her work. When she died in 2021, hooks left behind a lifetime of thought that was decades ahead of its time. In the heyday of feminism, when the movement claimed to represent all women equally, hooks revealed in Ain’t I a Woman―written when she was only nineteen―how the specific life experiences of Black women were being marginalized.


She never lost this pioneering spirit, bringing it to bear on more than thirty books of literary criticism, children’s fiction, poetry, and autobiography, including Killing Rage: Ending Racism, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, Where We Stand: Class Matters, Communion: The Female Search for Love and the New York Times bestseller All About Love: New Visions.


A professor of English, African and Afro-American studies, American literature, and women’s studies, hooks taught at USC, Yale, among other institutions, including Berea College in her home state of Kentucky, where the bell hooks center was established to honor her work. Winner of the American Book Award in 1991 for Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, a 2000 nominee for the NAACP’s Image Award, a 2018 inductee into Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame, and one of Time’s 100 Women of the Year in 2020, hooks left her mark in every field she entered.

Langston Hughes (1902-67) was born in Joplin, Missouri, was educated at Lincoln University, and lived for most of his life in New York City. He is best known as a poet, but he also wrote novels, biography, history, plays, and children's books. Among his works are two volumes of memoirs, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander, and two collections of Simple stories, The Best of Simple and The Return of Simple.

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was a prolific writer and legendary civil rights activist who produced several novels, a pioneering work of cultural history, the first major anthology of black poetry, and numerous treatises on race relations. He served as U.S. consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua and as secretary of the NAACP.

Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0742560570
• ISBN 13: 9780742560574
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 708
• Editor: Marable Manning, Mullings Leith