Every once in awhile I laugh at at the fact that the streams for The Help always go up whenever the Black community gains national/international attention. Like instead of actually educating yourself you want to watch…The Help? A movie based off a book by a white woman😭😭😭

African American Literature Suggestions from NMU English Department

The English Department at Northern Michigan University has prepared this list of several dozen suggested readings in African American literature, with some materials also addressing Native American history and culture. The first section contains books that will help provide a context for the Black Lives Matter movement. It includes books that will help readers examine their own privilege and act more effectively for the greater good. Following that list is another featuring many African American authors and books. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it does provide readers a place to start. Almost all of these books are readily available in bookstores and public and university libraries.

Northern Michigan University’s English Department offers at least one course on African American literature every semester, at least one course on Native American literature every semester, and at least one additional course on non-western world literatures every semester. Department faculty also incorporate diverse material in many other courses. For more information, contact the department at [email protected]. Nonfiction, primarily addressing current events, along with some classic texts: Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, editors. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy. This classic collection of scholarly articles, essays, and interviews explores the links between social inequalities and unequal distribution of environmental risk. Attention is focused on the US context, but authors also consider global impacts. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. A clear-eyed explication of how mass incarceration has created a new racial caste system obscured by the ideology of color-blindness. Essential reading for understanding our criminal justice system in relation to the histories of slavery and segregation. Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. A very well-written but disturbing and direct analysis of the history of structural and institutionalized racism in the United States. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Anzaldua writes about the complexity of life on multiple borders, both literal (the border between the US/Mexico) and conceptual (the borders among languages, sexual identity, and gender). Anzaldua also crosses generic borders, moving among essay, story, history, and poetry. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. A classic indictment of white supremacy expressed in a searing, prophetic voice that is, simply, unmatched. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me. A combination of personal narrative in the form of the author’s letter to his son, historical analysis, and contemporary reportage. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? In this succinct and carefully researched book, Davis exposes the racist and sexist underpinnings of the American prison system. This is a must-read for folks new to conversations about prison (and police) abolition. Robin DiAngelo, What Does It Mean To Be White? The author facilitates white people unpacking their biases around race, privilege, and oppression through a variety of methods and extensive research. Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarshnha, editors. Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories From the Transformative Justice Movement. The book attempts to solve problems of violence at a grassroots level in minority communities, without relying on punishment, incarceration, or policing. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. The most well-known narrative written by one of the most well-known and accomplished enslaved persons in the United States. First published in 1845 when Douglass was approximately 28 years old. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk. Collection of essays in which Dubois famously prophesied that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Henry Louis Gates, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. Must reading, a beautifully written, scholarly, and accessible discussion of American history from Reconstruction to the beginnings of the Jim Crow era. Saidiya Hartman, Lose your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. In an attempt to locate relatives in Ghana, the author journeyed along the route her ancestors would have taken as they became enslaved in the United States. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation. A collection of essays that analyze how white supremacy is systemically maintained through, among other activities, popular culture. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Narrative of a woman who escaped slavery by hiding in an attic for seven years. This book offers unique insights into the sexually predatory behavior of slave masters. Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. A detailed history not only of racist events in American history, but of the racist thinking that permitted and continues to permit these events. This excellent and readable book traces this thinking from the colonial period through the presidency of Barack Obama. Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life Any of LaDuke's works belong on this list. This particular text explores the stories of several Indigenous communities as they struggle with environmental and cultural degradation. An incredible resource. Kiese Laymon, Heavy: An American Memoir. An intense book that questions American myths of individual success written by a man who is able to situate his own life within a much larger whole. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color This foundational text brings together work by writers, scholars, and activists such as Audre Lorde, Chrystos, Barbara Smith, Norma Alarcon, Nellie Wong, and many others. The book has been called a manifesto and a call to action and remains just as important and relevant as when it was published nearly 40 years ago. Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard. An invaluable collection of essays and speeches from the only black woman to win a Nobel Prize in literature. Throughout her oeuvre, Morrison calls us to take "personal responsibility for alleviating social harm," an ethic she identified with Martin Luther King. Ersula J. Ore, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity. Ore scrutinizes the history of lynching in America and contemporary manifestations of lynching, drawing upon the murder of Trayvon Martin and other contemporary manifestations of police brutality. Drawing upon newspapers, official records, and memoirs, as well as critical race theory, Ore outlines the connections between what was said and written, the material practices of lynching in the past, and the forms these rhetorics and practices assume now. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric. A description and discussion of racial aggression and micro-aggression in contemporary America. The book was selected for NMU’s Diversity Common Reader Program in 2016. Layla F. Saad, Me and White Supremacy. The author facilitates white people in unpacking their biases around race, privilege, and oppression, while also helping them understand key critical social justice terminology. Maya Schenwar, Joe Macaré, Alana Yu-lan Price, editors. Who do you Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States. The essays examine "police violence against black, brown, indigenous and other marginalized communities, miscarriages of justice, and failures of token accountability and reform measures." What are alternative measures to keep marginalized communities safe? Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal? The authors, in very easy to read and engaging language, facilitate readers in understanding the ---isms (racism, sexism, ableism etc.) and how they intersect, helping readers see their positionality and how privilege and oppression work to perpetuate the status quo. Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. An analysis of America’s criminal justice system by the lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative. While upsetting, the book is also hopeful. Wendy S. Walters, Multiply / Divide: On the American Real and Surreal. In this collection of essays, Walters analyzes the racial psyche of several major American cities, emphasizing the ways bias can endanger entire communities. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery. Autobiography of the founder of Tuskegee Institute. Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid. From the surgical experiments performed on enslaved black women to the contemporary recruitment of prison populations for medical research, Washington illuminates how American medicine has been--and continues to be shaped--by anti-black racism. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Autobiography of civil rights leader that traces his evolution as a thinker, speaker, and writer.

If you would like to enhance your knowledge of the rich tradition of African American literature, here are several of the most popular books and authors within that tradition, focused especially on the 20thand 21st centuries. Novels and Short Stories James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man Nella Larsen, Passing Nella Larsen, Quicksand Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison, Beloved Richard Wright, Native Son Drama Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf August Wilson, Fences August Wilson, The Piano Lesson Poetry A good place to begin is an anthology, The Vintage Book of African American Poetry, edited by Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton. It includes work by poets from the 18th century to the present, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Countee Cullen, Rita Dove, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, Yusef Komunyakaa, Claude McKay, Phillis Wheatley, and many others. Here are some more recent collections: Reginald Dwayne Betts, Felon Wanda Coleman, Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Age of Phillis Tyehimba Jess, Olio Jamaal May, The Big Book of Exit Strategies Danez Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead

What are your favorite non-fiction and fiction books?

yay i love book talk! i set a goal to read at least 100 books this year so i’m especially pumped to talk about bookssss

my all-time favorite fiction book is the sea, the sea by iris murdoch. it’s....heavy but that’s how i like my fiction. margaret atwood is one of my favorite authors so everything i’ve read by her is great. the earthseed series by octavia butler is amazing.

as for nonfiction, i read a lot of social justice-y and activist-y books, especially focused around policing/prison, so keep that in mind if that’s not your thing. The Revolution Starts at Home (an anthology) and Conflict is Not Abuse (by Sarah Schulman) are both related to community justice/healing and are great. literally anything by angela davis is *chef kiss emoji*. if you’re more into the memoir side of nonfiction, joan didion’s blue nights and the year of magical thinking are good (and sad!).

that’s just off the top of my head! (if anybody wants to friend me on goodreads, lmk! i track all my booky stuff there pretty religiously.)

September 21, 2020

I didn’t get to the second half of the post I wanted to write yesterday, so I’ll try to tackle it now. I’m happy with what distract me, though; my roommate and I got into a pretty interesting discussion of Polish phonology, as nerdy as that sounds. He’s Polish and we’re both half-Linguistics majors, so it’s at least explicable, but it still sounds funny even to me as I wrote that sentence! 

To get right to it, I’m going to meet with my professor of Early African American Literature on Wednesday morning over Zoom. She wants to get to know us as well as answer any questions we might have about the course, things we’ve done so far, and things we’re going to do. Here’s what I’ve thought about mentioning to her so far:

We listened to Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize speech in my Intro to Literary Studies class, and it had a similar, sermon-like quality that reminded me of MLK’s “The Drum Major Instinct” that we had listened to in Early African American Literature a few days prior.

Individually, I’ve been reading more Black authors because of the current social climate regarding the Black Lives Matter movement. I brought with me to college James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Notes of a Native Son, as well as Angela Davis’ Women, Race & Class, all three of which I’ve finished. I don’t think I read them critically, though. It was more of a “these are the important texts I’ve heard people recommend, I should read them for the sake of reading them” situation. So, I want to revisit them, and I’d love her perspectives or some guiding questions as I revisit them. 

The Angela Davis book in particular I wanted to mention because it gives a pretty thorough overview of the confluence of the gender, racial, and class equality/justice movements, and she talks about lots of figures whose work is on the syllabus for this class. Again, I think I should re-read it to get a better idea of what they stood for, but that actually leads me into my next question.

I’m interested in my professor’s style of reading. I’ve had an internal debate for a while about how I should read these books that I know have had a profound impact on the world, but I can’t see which pros outweigh the cons of any one method. 

The first would be to just read it straight through, no notes, not necessarily breaking it into chunks so you have time to reflect on it. The bonus is you can get through books quickly, but the downside is you might miss out on a lot of the significance and meaning of it. I feel like it’s the most appropriate way to read novels, but it’s not suitable for non-fiction and essays like I’ve been reading.

The second is to read less at a time, breaking it into manageable pieces so you have time to reflect on what you’ve understood as well as what you haven’t. But, still no notes. This one is a nice middle ground because it doesn’t necessarily disrupt the reading experience with jotting down notes, but you still build in time to engage with it. The downside, which is even more severe in the last method, is that it takes longer. I generally like what I’m reading, so forcing myself to take it slow and let it sit overnight can be anathema. 

The last method is to read in smaller chunks again, and either annotate or take notes as you go. I personally hate annotation, I like my books to look clean so I can re-read them easily, loan them to friends, that kind of thing. But, I could use a notebook or post it notes to jot down my thoughts as I go. This one, I theorize, would be best to actually understand what you’re reading; it’s almost a metacognitive strategy to probe your mind as you’re taking in information to see what connections you make. The downside is, it’s very labor-intensive, so reading for fun would turn more into reading for interest, which is still good but is, necessarily, different. Now that I consider it, though, I don’t think that the smaller sections would bother me then, because I’ve put in the effort to understand it as I go along. I would probably stop when I get tired, and at that point I wouldn’t want to keep going, anyways.

An alternative approach would be to read everything through once, at the pace I want, with no notes, just to get an impression and feel the cadence of the author that I’d miss going analytically. That being said, once I’ve finished it once, I would go through again with a fine-tooth comb and then do the analysis, so I get the best of both worlds. The very clear downside with this one is, I have to read everything twice, and the second time will take a significant amount of time. With longer books, the idea of reading it twice alone makes me irritable. I suppose I could do this method by chapter or section, so that I can still feel the energy of the book but I don’t have to read it start to finish twice. 

The last debate I want to settle about reading is the age-old question, should I read two books at once? I did that a lot as a kid, I think with the Percy Jackson series and whatever else I could get my hands on, but now my personality has changed so that I can’t imagine reading two books at once, unless it’s for school. I know some people like to read a serious book and a fun book at the same time, which makes sense to me, but I still have a hard time wrapping my head around how I would keep everything straight!

The James Baldwin essays I’ve read, as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, introduced me to the concept that race is totally arbitrary. Yes, people have different skin tones, physical features, cultures, and customs, but the broad classifications of “white” and “black” are totally made up. Baldwin and Coates call white people some variant of “people who believe they are white,” and I thought that was a very interesting point. I did an exercise in a high school diversity club once where we were asked to write five things that described us on a balloon. When we went around, all of the Black Americans in the room, as well as some Black Caribbean and African boarding students, had written “Black” as one of their descriptors, most Jewish kids had written “Jewish” for themselves, but not a single white kid identified themself by the color of their skin. The point my teacher wanted to make was that race doesn’t actually matter unless it’s been used against you. To relate it to this Early African American Literature course, I’ve been surprised by how little Marrant, Lee, Terry, and Hammon openly discussed race. It could have been a business decision, they might not have been published if they had written openly and aggressively about race. But I also wonder, and it’s the Christian perspective of the sermon pieces and the anti-Native American perspective of the other two that make me think this, if the black and white distinction wasn’t as strong yet. I know that American slavery was already in effect, and had been for more than a century, so I can’t imagine that this was the case, but I’m curious about that. I imagine Angela Davis might say that the distinction hadn’t been made yet because there was no economic (read, capitalist) reason for it: there was no threat to the existing power structure from free Black Americans as long as the Native Americans and non-Christians were bigger outcasts. But, I have no clue if that’s an accurate analysis, or even if Davis would agree with the words I just put in her mouth. 

The last possible point of conversation is that I have signed up for the book club my professor is leading, where we’ll read Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. I joined because I’ve always wanted to try out a book club, and the book sounds like it will fit with my current goal of reading stories that, essentially, my parents would never touch. I don’t know how the club works, so I could ask that, and I'm also interested in hearing why they chose this novel out of the whole, wide world of literature. 

Now that I’ve written way too much, I don’t think I’ll try to pare down into a plan of what to talk about. I’ve developed my ideas by writing this, so hopefully when I join the Zoom call and say hi, the conversation will flow naturally and I’ll never be at a loss for words.