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The University of Michigan Press is excited to recognize its list of titles that help further our historical and contemporary understandings of Black culture, community, and experiences within the United States and abroad. We want to take this time to acknowledge the work our authors have done to increase awareness of these subjects, promote new ways of thinking, and continue to push the boundaries of how we think about race.

While this reading list is not comprehensive of all our authors and books, we encourage you to explore more titles under our African American Studies and African Studies lists. Follow us on Twitter, @UofMPress, to see more additions to this list throughout the month of February.

Upcoming and Featured Titles

For the Culture edited by Lakeyta M. Bonnette-Bailey and Adolphus G. Belk, Jr.

Examines the relationship between social justice, Hip-Hop culture, and resistance

Drawing from diverse approaches and methods, the contributors in this volume demonstrate that rap music can positively influence political behavior and fight to change social injustices, and then zoom in on artists whose work has accomplished these ends. The volume explores topics including education and pedagogy; the Black Lives Matter movement; the politics of crime, punishment, and mass incarceration; electoral politics; gender and sexuality; and the global struggle for social justice.

Hip-Hop is much more than a musical genre or cultural form: Hip-Hop is a resistance mechanism.

Sampling and Remixing Blackness in Hip-hop Theater and Performance by Nicole Hodges Persley

Explores expressions of Blackness in Hip-Hop performance by non-African American artists

Sampling and Remixing Blackness is a timely and accessible book that examines the social ramifications of cultural borrowing and personal adaptation of Hip-hop culture by non-Black and non-African American Black artists in theater and performance. In a cultural moment where Hip-hop theater hits such as Hamilton offer glimpses of Black popular culture to non-Black people through musical soundtracks, GIFs, popular Hip-hop music, language, clothing, singing styles and embodied performance, people around the world are adopting a Blackness that is at once connected to African American culture--and assumed and shed by artists and consumers as they please. As Black people around the world live a racial identity that is not shed, in a cultural moment of social unrest against anti-blackness, this book asks how such engagements with Hip-hop in performance can be both dangerous and a space for finding cultural allies.

Bad Boys by Ann Arnett Ferguson

The classic ethnography on how implicit bias impacts black male students’ identities

“When Ann Ferguson published Bad Boys in 2000, it marked a watershed moment in educational research. The book’s insights on the role of schools in constructing, negotiating, and pathologizing Black masculinity were immediately recognized as a towering intellectual achievement. Twenty years later, as the academy and broader public finally begins to seriously engage the ‘school to prison pipeline’ discourse that Ferguson helped to advance and complicate, we still have much to learn from this theoretically rigorous and methodologically rich text. With a compelling new afterword and a brilliant new bibliographic essay, this new edition of Bad Boys is as urgent, relevant, and generative as the original was two decades ago. Anyone interested in the educational lives of Black boys owes an intellectual debt to Ann Ferguson. This book is a reminder of how large that debt is.” — Marc Lamont Hill, Temple University

Award-Winning Titles

i used to love to dream by A. D. Carson

2021 PROSE Awards Subject Category Winner

“i used to love to dream” is a mixtap/e/ssay that performs hip-hop scholarship using sampled and live instrumentation; repurposed music, film, and news clips; and original rap lyrics. As a genre, the mixtap/e/ssay brings together the mixtape—a self-produced or independently released album issued free of charge to gain publicity—and the personal and scholarly essays. Using the local to ask questions about the global, “i used to love to dream” highlights outlooks on Black life generally, and Black manhood in particular, in the United States. You can listen to Carson's work on Fulcrum, for free! Find it at: https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/m900nw52n

Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers by Cedric R. Tolliver

A 2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers recovers the history of the writers, artists, and intellectuals of the African diaspora who, witnessing a transition to an American-dominated capitalist world-system during the Cold War, offered searing critiques of burgeoning U. S. hegemony. Cedric R. Tolliver traces this history through an analysis of signal events and texts where African diaspora literary culture intersects with the wider cultural Cold War, from the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists organized by Francophone intellectuals in September 1956 to the reverberations among African American writers and activists to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. Among Tolliver’s subjects are Caribbean writers Jacques Stephen Alexis, George Lamming, and Aimé Césaire, the black press writing of Alice Childress and Langston Hughes, and the ordeal of Paul Robeson, among other topics.

Popular Backlist Titles

Butch Queens Up in Pumps by Marlon M. Bailey

20 years after ‘Paris Is Burning’, a rare look at Ballroom culture—from the inside

Butch Queens Up in Pumps examines Ballroom culture, in which inner-city LGBT individuals dress, dance, and vogue to compete for prizes and trophies. Participants are affiliated with a house, an alternative family structure typically named after haute couture designers and providing support to this diverse community. Marlon M. Bailey’s rich first-person performance ethnography of the Ballroom scene in Detroit examines Ballroom as a queer cultural formation that upsets dominant notions of gender, sexuality, kinship, and community. This book is available to Michigan residents, free to read, through the ReadMichigan initiative. Start reading here.

Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist by Nancy Goldstein

The biography of a pioneering woman artist and the characters she created

"In the first book devoted to Ormes, Goldstein not only recounts with enthusiasm the trailblazing cartoonist's remarkable story . . . but also keenly analyzes Ormes's influential cartoons and the role black newspapers played in the struggle for racial equality. With a generous selection of Ormes's forward-looking cartoons resurrected for the first time, this is one exciting and significant book. Viva Jackie Ormes."
—Booklist

Idlewild by Ronald J. Stephens

An in-depth study of an important African American resort town and the intersections among race, class, tourism, entertainment, and historic preservation in the United States

In 1912, white land developers founded Idlewild, an African American resort community in western Michigan. Over the following decades, the town became one of the country’s foremost vacation destinations for the black middle class, during its peak drawing tens of thousands of visitors annually and hosting the era’s premier entertainers, such as The Four Tops, Della Reese, Brook Benton, and George Kirby. Meticulously researched and unearthing never-before-seen historical material, Ronald J. Stephens’s book examines the rapid rise and decline of this pivotal landmark in African American and leisure history, in the process exploring intersections among race, class, tourism, entertainment, and historic preservation in the United States. This book is available to Michigan residents, free to read, through the ReadMichigan initiative. Start reading here.

Join us for our Meet the Author Event, Feb 23, 2022 07:00 PM ET, with Dr. Ronald J. Stephens! Professor of African American Studies at Purdue University, Dr. Stephens is a leading Idlewild scholar and has contributed to numerous programs on the resort, including Ted Talbert's award-winning documentary Idlewild: A Place in the Sun, an edition of Tony Brown’s Journal, and an NPR production.

Register for the event at: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/5916436530557/WN_m5eW-TRZRYCR5HTqswK9hg