100 books like Black Popular Culture

While the Bogle and Cripps books were written during the 1970s Blaxploitation era, this one emerged during the next great Black film movement, the “urban cinema” era of the 1990s, triggered by movies like Do the Right Thing and Boyz n the Hood.

Particularly influential for my book is the chapter “Slaves, Monsters, and Others,” which touches upon the racialized metaphors and allegories in horror, fantasy, and science fiction.

Even if you don’t agree with its assertions, the book provides fascinating food for thought.

I am recommending this book because it took me back to Wallace and Dent’s Black Popular Culture when I was struggling to understand why my doctoral program frowned upon interdisciplinarity. This book helped me understand why I was not interested in just writing literary criticism. It gave me methodological tools and language to articulate why the research I wanted to do matters. Importantly, it also gave me a definition of the term “post-soul” that during the early 2000s was bandied about but rarely defined. I love this book because Neal was the first scholar I encountered who unapologetically claimed to be a scholar of Black popular culture.

I am recommending this book because I fell in love with the way duCille weaves cultural critique and personal experience in one of her earlier books, Skin Trade. The invention of streaming services has made televisual representation more accessible, which can be both good and bad. I love how this book demonstrates the way in which culture informs the lived experience and the way in which lived experiences can shape culture. And duCille is an excellent storyteller.

This book focuses mostly on literary criticism, but I chose it because of the theoretical work Alexander does in defining “the black interior.” The concept of the black interior unpacks the ways in which Black bodies and blackness have been devalued and dehumanized. This book and its theoretical underpinnings insist upon recoupling the “human” with blackness. I love how the book challenges viewing and spectatorship and calls upon readers to recognize black life and creativity beyond stereotypes that guide the limited imaginations of the dominant culture that relentlessly misrepresents and maligns blackness.

I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but the cover is indeed what got me! I immediately wished someone had captured an image of me looking amazing and strong like the girl featured. I mean, how cool to have a picture that really reflects oneself, so unlike the stiff and awkwardly posed school pics that decorated my home growing up. Her stance and expression just spoke to me and I immediately loved that this book celebrated her strength and presence.  And not just hers! Many, many girls of various ages and backgrounds are photographed doing something that makes them feel good or strong or real. This book is a catalog of photos and words that celebrate girls being their authentic selves. I want that for all the little girls, and all the little girls who have grown up too. 

This book is in a similar vein as Oona finds herself time jumping within her own life, suddenly living it out of sequence as she jumps to a different period in time with each birthday, forcing her to look within and realize what is important and worth holding on to and worth fighting for. I am a sucker for books where characters get the opportunity to experience alternate versions of their personal realities, and I could not put this one down. I’m all about my characters understanding that the choices they make create their ultimate realities. The ultimate messages about the importance of love and family and the choices we make really resonated with me.

I’m starting this list with one of my favorite YA mysteries, This book is written in the form of police transcripts, the narrative is certainly unique, and I was hooked! I couldn’t put this book down and had no idea what happened to popular Maylee.

With sharp twists and complex backstories, these characters jumped off the page with their mysterious connections to the missing Maylee. Is Maylee dead? And who is responsible for her disappearance? I raced through this book to find out the answers! 

This is Victorian London, a city of dynamic growth, extreme class divisions, obsessions with public sexual danger and pathology, growing anxiety in the face of so much that is unknown and uncertain, and moralizing campaigns for reform. Not least, and the book ends with this story, this is the city of Jack the Ripper. Sometimes Walkowitz is densely analytical, for she is skillful as both storyteller and theorist. In both genres, the experience of modernity is central, as are questions about the body and the self, ethnicity, class, and morality. The city that emerges, in all its dread and delight, is a story that inspires us to think about other cities, other streets, other scandals, and other modernities, including our own.

This book is packed with the history of Chinese warrior heroines and spies. From Hua Mulan to Soong Ching-ling, the book resonates with connections across the centuries, as well as modern differences.

All too often the fate of these brave and outstanding women was to die for their cause, a theme that I think is so important for many heroines in history. Edwards is adept at identifying how her heroines challenge and defy their position in society. She also reveals the gendered position that heroines occupy as fighters, and in particular, the challenge that it poses to women’s transnational traditional place as gendered feminine carers and life-givers. 

In 2018, I visited one of the most unusual exhibitions I’d ever been to. Hosted by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, ‘Spellbound’ examined how magical thinking has been practiced over the centuries.

From mummified cats to lovers’ rings, the displays were dazzling. Every time I open the accompanying book, with its remarkable photographs and illustrations, I’m transported back to this extraordinary, baffling world.