Lockstep and Dance: Images of Black Men in Popular Culture examines popular culture's reliance on long-standing stereotypes of black men as animalistic, hypersexual, dangerous criminals, whose bodies, dress, actions, attitudes, and language both repel and attract white audiences. Author Linda G. Tucker studies this trope in the images of well-known African American men in four cultural venues: contemporary literature, black-focused films, sports commentary, and rap music. Through rigorous analysis, the book argues that American popular culture's representations of black men preserve racial hierarchies that imprison blacks both intellectually and physically. Of equal importance are the ways in which black men battle against, respond to, and become implicated in the production and circulation of these images. Tucker cites examples ranging from Michael Jordan's underwear commercials and the popular Barbershop movies to the career of rapper Tupac Shakur and John Edgar Wideman's memoir Brothers and Keepers. Lockstep and Dance tracks the continuity between historical images of African American men, the peculiar constitution of whites' anxieties about black men, and black men's tolerance of and resistance to the reproduction of such images. The legacy of these stereotypes is still apparent in contemporary advertising, film, music, and professional basketball. Lockstep and Dance argues persuasively that these cultural images reinforce the idea of black men as prisoners of American justice and of their own minds but also shows how black men struggle against this imprisonment.

With Speech Is My Hammer, Max Hunter draws on memoir and his own biography to call his readers to reimagine the meaning and power in literacy. Defining literacy as a “spectrum of skills, abilities, attainments, and performances,” Hunter focuses on dispelling “literacy myths” and discussing how Black male artists, entertainers, professors, and writers have described their own “literacy narratives” in self-conscious, ambivalent terms. Beginning with Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage My Freedom, W. E. B. Dubois’s Soul of Black Folks, and Langston Hughes’s Harlem Renaissance–memoir The Big Sea, Hunter conducts a literary inquiry that unearths their double-consciousness and literacy ambivalence. He moves on to reveal that for many contemporary Black men the arc of ambivalence rises even higher and becomes more complex, following the civil rights and the Black Power movements, and then sweeping sharply upward once again during the War on Drugs. Hunter provides rich illustrations and probing theses that complicate our commonsense reflections on their concealed angst regarding Black authenticity, respectability politics, and masculinity. Speech Is My Hammer moves the reader beyond considering literacy in normative terms to perceive its potential to facilitate transformative conversations among Black males.

Norman traces a neo-segregation narrative tradition--one that developed in tandem with neo-slave narratives--by which writers return to a moment of stark de jure segregation to address contemporary concerns about national identity and the persistence of racial divides.

Gretchen and Norm Helm were married for eight years when Norm was struck by a car while crossing the street and suffered a massive head injury. Everything in their lives changed at this moment. Norm, who was the pastor of a church in Westborough, Ma. had to give up his job and his profession. Gretchen also had to give up her profession as a therapist as they needed to leave the town they had called home for ten years in order for the new minister to establish himself without the former minister and his wife sharing the spotlight. They began a new life in New Mexico but had to deal with the effects of Norm's traumatic brain injury. Norm's short-term memory was gone, and over the years Norm had to endure many other losses. Then, seventeen years after his accident, Norm was diagnosed with dementia and subsequently entered an assisted living facility. While going through some things that Norm had written to Gretchen over the years, she found a lovely note that Norm had written to her on the occasion of their nineteenth wedding anniversary. He wrote, "My dear Gretchen, Nobody has ever been more a part of me and my life than you have been and are; nor have I ever known anybody as well and as deeply as I know you. We are not one: we are a pair...We dance freely, improvising as we spin around this floor of life...So just hold me, and we'll dance another nineteen years. I love you, Norm." Jack Kornfield wrote: " At the end of our life our questions are simple: Did I live fully? Did I love well?" Gretchen and Norm have lived fully, and they have loved well.

Gestures of Music Theater explores examples of Song and Dance as performative gestures that entertain and affect audiences. The chapters interact to reveal the complex energies of performativity. In experiencing these energies, music theatre is revealed as a dynamic accretion of active, complex and dialogical experiences.

This book consists of a range of essays written by historians and literary critics which examine the historical construction of Southern masculinities, rich and poor, white and black, in a variety of contexts, from slavery in the antebellum period, through the struggle for Civil Rights, right up to the recent South. Building on the rich historiography of gender and culture in the South undertaken in recent years, this volume aims to highlight the important role Southern conceptions of masculinity have played in the lives of Southern men, and to reflect on how masculinity has intersected with class, race and power to structure the social relationships between blacks and whites throughout the history of the South. The volume highlights the multifaceted nature of Southern masculinities, demonstrating the changing ways black and white masculinities have been both imagined and practised over the years, while also emphasizing that conceptions of black and white masculinity in the American South rarely seem to be divorced from wider questions of class, race and power.

This early work on dancing is a fascinating read for any dance enthusiast or historian, and contains much information that is still useful and practical today. Contents Include: Dedication; Author's Preface; Introduction; The History of Latin-American Dancing in this Country; List of Abbreviations Used; the Rumba; The Samba; The Paso Doble; The Jive (Swing); The Blues Jive; The Congo; Examination Work; Latin-American Dances for Class Teaching; The Training of Medallists in the Latin-American Dancers; Music for Latin-American Dances; The Character of the Latin-American Dances and How to Obtain It; Postscript; and Index. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.