From the Book - First edition.
I. Learning how to listen. Ladies sing Miles --
When Malindy sings: a meditation on Black women's vocality --
Returning to Lady Day: a reflection on two decades "In search of Billie Holiday" --
Songs of experience: Odetta --
Quiet, stillness, and longing to be free: the ethereal soul of Syreeta Wright, Minnie Riperton, and Deniece Williams --
II. Look where your hands are now. Wrestling till dawn: on becoming an intellectual in the age of Toni Morrison --
Albert Raboteau: an appreciation (drawn from remarks on the occasion of his retirement from Princeton University, April 26, 2013) --
Minnie's sacrifice: Frances Watkins Harper's narrative of citizenship --
Zora Neale Hurston's radical individualism --
Hunting communists and Negroes in Ann Petry's The Narrows --
"It takes two people to confirm the truth": the jazz fiction of Sherley Anne Williams and Toni Cade Bambara --
Learning how to listen: Ntozake Shange's work as aesthetic primer --
Remaking the everday: the interior worlds of Kathleen Collins's fiction and film --
A place of freedom: Gayl Jones's Brazilian epic --
III. Treating the serpent's sting. Textual healing: claiming Black women's bodies, the erotic, and resistance in contemporary novels of slavery --
"Ironies of the saint": Malcolm X, Black women, and the price of protection --
Conflict and chorus: reconsidering Toni Cade's The black woman: an anthology --
The the mothers may soar and the daughters may know their names: a retrospective of Black feminist literary criticism --
At last. . .? Michelle Obama, Beyoncé, race, and history --
IV. On crisis and possibility. On the routh anniverary of September 11 --
Human rights and the Katria evacuees --
DNC day 2: will America accept first lady Michelle? --
Loving Billie Holiday doesn't mean Black girls aren't suffering: a response to Joshua DuBois and my brother's keeper --
Teaching African American literature during COVID-19 --
Banning Toni Morrison's books doesn't protect kids, it just sanitizes racism --
Ancient histories and new worlds: Allison Janae Hamilton.