As Black History Month draws to a close, DiverseEducation.com commemorates it with a three-part book review series. The titles are African-American-themed culture and history books that readers can appreciate for their own reading pleasure, for courses or for special seminars and discussions. Consider these titles:
Affect and Power: Essays on Sex, Slavery, Race, and Religion, by David J. Libby $42.50, (list price $50), University of Mississippi Press, ISBN 9781934110331, pp. 240.
This is an anthology of essays by former students of Winthrop D. Jordan, a historian and author of White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812, to honor his legacy of writing and teaching. He taught about the complexities of sex, slavery, race and religion in American culture in his 40-year career at the University of California and the University of Mississippi.
African American Writers: Portraits and Visions, by Lynda Koolish, $38.25, (list price $45) University of Mississippi Press, ISBN 1578062586, pp. 132.
The author spent 30 years photographing African-American authors representing a vast spectrum of literature and genres. The volume gathers 60 of her black-and-white portraits of authors. Her subjects include playwrights, poets, novelists, critics, scholars, short story writers, oral storytellers and memoirists. A brief biography of each author accompanies the portraits, making it an invaluable reference tool. According to the publisher, this is the first book devoted exclusively to photographic portraits of African-American writers since the writer and patron Carl Van Vechten’s work photographing Harlem Renaissance writers in the 1920s and 1930s. Koolish’s book was chosen by the American Library Association as one of the top 35 books from university presses in 2001.
Africans and Seminoles: From Removal to Emancipation, by Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr. $18.70 (List price $22), ISBN 9781578063604, University of Mississippi Press, pp. 296.
This is a new edition from the University of Mississippi Press of a book documenting the interrelationship of two racial cultures in the antebellum of Florida and Oklahoma. Seminoles held slaves, but their system was unlike that of other slaveholders, and the Seminoles often clashed with bounty hunters over ownership claims and even over who was free and who was not. Tensions mounted during the Second Seminole War, when many Blacks united with Seminoles fighting against the United States. Blacks and Seminoles were later transported to Oklahoma together as part of the federal government’s “removal” project. The fortunes of the two groups remained intertwined, but their relationships were conflicted as others sought to re-enslave or control free Blacks. After the Civil War, many Blacks were adopted into the Seminole nation. In a preface to this edition, the author explains the controversy over their role, which continues today.
