Here are 100 books that Soul Babies fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a scholar of African Diaspora cultural studies, which means I spend a lot of time analyzing texts in various forms: books, art, film, music, and even laws and legal documents. The cultural texts I study were produced by people. I am passionate about Black popular culture, because it dismantles some of the enduring divisions between academic institutions and the people who live beyond their walls. It is a field of study that is always in flux, especially now with twenty-first-century advances that position popular culture as almost always at our fingertips.
I am recommending this book, because it is the first edited volume, and, really, the first academic book to directly engage black popular culture as a field of study. It was avant-garde. It gave a name to cultural productions that, at that time, during my first semester of graduate school in 1997, I had no idea had a collective name. I love this book, because I encountered it simultaneously to learning concepts like “high” and “low” art. The book, in my opinion, made a compelling argument for why the popular, the folk, the vernacular, and so-called “low” art matters.
I’m Black, and I’m a horror movie fan, two things that, per the well-worn trope that “the Black guy dies first,” don’t seem to go together. However, I’ve been able to use the treatment that Black characters have received in horror to explore the ways in which Black people have been marginalized in Hollywood, placed into specific roles in which they served as expendable, ancillary characters rather than stars. While things have improved dramatically in recent years, that makes it all the more important to not forget how much Black progress there has been in film, because those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
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.
From D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation to Spike Lee's Malcolm X, Ed Guerrero argues, the commercial film industry reflects white domination of American society. Written with the energy and conviction generated by the new black film wave, Framing Blackness traces an ongoing epic-African Americans protesting screen images of blacks as criminals, servants, comics, athletes, and sidekicks.
These images persist despite blacks' irrepressible demands for emancipated images and a role in the industry. Although starkly racist portrayals of blacks in early films have gradually been replaced by more appealing characterizations, the legacy of the plantation genre lives on in…
I am a scholar of African Diaspora cultural studies, which means I spend a lot of time analyzing texts in various forms: books, art, film, music, and even laws and legal documents. The cultural texts I study were produced by people. I am passionate about Black popular culture, because it dismantles some of the enduring divisions between academic institutions and the people who live beyond their walls. It is a field of study that is always in flux, especially now with twenty-first-century advances that position popular culture as almost always at our fingertips.
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.
From early sitcoms such as I Love Lucy to contemporary prime-time dramas like Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, African Americans on television have too often been asked to portray tired stereotypes of blacks as villains, vixens, victims, and disposable minorities. In Technicolored black feminist critic Ann duCille combines cultural critique with personal reflections on growing up with the new medium of TV to examine how televisual representations of African Americans have changed over the last sixty years. Whether explaining how watching Shirley Temple led her to question her own self-worth or how televisual representation functions as a…
I am a scholar of African Diaspora cultural studies, which means I spend a lot of time analyzing texts in various forms: books, art, film, music, and even laws and legal documents. The cultural texts I study were produced by people. I am passionate about Black popular culture, because it dismantles some of the enduring divisions between academic institutions and the people who live beyond their walls. It is a field of study that is always in flux, especially now with twenty-first-century advances that position popular culture as almost always at our fingertips.
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.
Legendary poet Elizabeth Alexander turns her finely-honed sensibilities to the subject of blackness and the interior world of the modern African-American. Intelligent, perceptive and keenly observed, this collection of essays traces a thoughtful path through music, poetry and the outstanding social issues of the last 200 years to synthesise a remarkable picture of the modern African-American psyche. From Langston Hughes to the Rodney King video, Alexander leads her reader effortlessly over the complex terrain of art and politics to a new vision of the black interior.
As Iago says in Shakespeare’s Othello, “I am nothing if not critical,” and regardless of what he meant, it applies to me - my intelligence works best at scrutinizing things for their significance. I studied science, worked in the financial sector, read fiction, watched cinema, and developed a sense of the interconnectedness of things. If the connections existed, I thought, there could be no one way of approaching anything; all intellectual paths were valid and the only criterion of value was that it must be intelligent. My book tries to stick to this since a writer may hold any opinions, but he or she must show intelligence.
Theatre is an area that interests me although more as literature than as performance. Bentley's criticism in this book has been one of my role models since my college days because of the unsparing way in which he writes about the most celebrated figures in the field while being deeply sensitive to society, culture, and politics.
I have myself tried to cultivate his kind of approach as a critic of cinema and literature, and perhaps more than the other writers cited, echoes of his style may (hopefully) be found in my book, where I have tried to be as honest and eclectic.
As Iago says in Shakespeare’s Othello, “I am nothing if not critical,” and regardless of what he meant, it applies to me - my intelligence works best at scrutinizing things for their significance. I studied science, worked in the financial sector, read fiction, watched cinema, and developed a sense of the interconnectedness of things. If the connections existed, I thought, there could be no one way of approaching anything; all intellectual paths were valid and the only criterion of value was that it must be intelligent. My book tries to stick to this since a writer may hold any opinions, but he or she must show intelligence.
An aspect of contemporary criticism I deeply despise is the inability of critics to take independent views of their subjects and be misled by matters like publicity and awards. Criticism is good for the arts but not necessarily for commercial interests and my own approach has been to provoke, even at the risk of becoming unpopular.
Epstein is a less-known writer and critic (in relation to the others) but he is witty and audacious in critiquing the most celebrated writers. The title of his book is provocative since it suggests that prejudices are natural but wanted as long as they are justified though argument, which is my preferred way of expressing myself.
In this collection of essays, the author of "The Middle of My Tether" considers the various influences upon writing in the recent past that have systematically lessened its glory
I am Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University. I have written widely in the areas of social and cultural history, the sociology of art and culture, and media and communication studies. Recent projects have involved books on song and music in the workplace, popular culture, cultural studies, advertising and racism, and blackface minstrelsy. I co-wrote Media and the Management of Change with Emily Keightley, the last volume in a trilogy on media and memory and the interaction of memory and imagination.
This is one of the best critical surveys of the relationship between memory and history I have encountered. Geoffrey Cubitt is concerned with memory as both personal and social, along with the various dynamics between them. The book is interdisciplinary in conception and operation, exploring how history and memory inform one another in complementary and contradictory ways, and how both cross and re-cross varying scales of past/present relations. Regardless of whether readers approach this book from the perspective of memory or history, they will find it a comprehensive assessment of their complex interaction.
In recent years, 'memory' has become a central, though also a controversial, concept in historical studies - a term that denotes both a new and distinctive field of study and a fresh way of conceptualizing history as a field of inquiry more generally.
This book, which is aimed both at specialists and at students, provides historians with an accessible and stimulating introduction to debates and theories about memory, and to the range of approaches that have been taken to the study of it in history and other disciplines
Contributing in a wide-ranging way to debate on some of the central…
Of all my university courses, the one that had the greatest impact on me was called "Informal Logic." Accurate, but misleadingly dry and academic. One of the assignments in that course—and the one I remember most, of all my university assignments—was to prepare a "Crapbook": a collection of ten bits of crap—ads, arguments, whatever—that were full of crap (essentially, incorrect reasoning/logical fallacies). I loved it. So when, twenty years later, I was hired by a small university to teach Critical Thinking …
Most people are led through life by their feelings. Feelings are fine, they enrich our lives, but as the sole guide for making decisions, they fall short. Ruggiero, a huge name in critical thinking, starts from this point, the point of being led by our feelings. And that alone makes this a very good guide to critical thinking.
This succinct, interdisciplinary introduction to critical thinking successfully dares students to question their own assumptions and to enlarge their thinking through the analysis of the most common problems associated with everyday reasoning. The text offers a unique and effective organization: Part I explains the fundamental concepts; Part II describes the most common barriers to critical thinking; Part III offers strategies for overcoming those barriers.
I’ve been a philosopher before I knew what philosophers were: asking questions to challenge the starting points for conversations. My biggest pet peeve has always been people who were sure they entirely understood something. While scientists conduct science to help learn about the world, philosophers of science like me study science to try to figure out how it works, why (and when) it’s successful, and how it relates to human concerns and society. Humans ultimately invent science, and I think it’s fascinating to consider how its features relate to our interests and foibles and how it’s so successful at producing knowledge and practical abilities.
This book takes what seems to be an incredibly basic feature of the world—temperature—and shows how a tremendous amount of scientific ingenuity and choices made over two centuries contributed to defining and measuring temperatures.
Showing how concepts taken for granted today emerged over time and could have been different helps reveal how little of what we know comes from direct observation.
What is temperature, and how can we measure it correctly? These may seem like simple questions, but the most renowned scientists struggled with them throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. In Inventing Temperature, Chang examines how scientists first created thermometers; how they measured temperature beyond the reach of standard thermometers; and how they managed to assess the reliability and accuracy of these instruments without a circular reliance on the instruments themselves.
In a discussion that brings together the history of science with the philosophy of science, Chang presents the simple yet challenging epistemic and technical questions about these instruments, and…
I've been interested in children’s lives for as long as I can remember. I think my own childhood experiences provoked my curiosity about the world as observed and perceived by children. My own childhood was affected by globalization in the broadest sense. When I was a child, my family moved to the United States from Iran. I grew up in Utah where I encountered a different way of life than the one I left behind. The shift from one culture to another was thrilling and scary. The encounter with a new world and a different culture has taught me important lessons about children’s creativity, strength, and curiosity as well as their fears, insecurities, and vulnerabilities.
I believe this book serves as a solid foundation for the scholarly discussions surrounding the changing paradigms of childhood throughout history and the world. I find its examinations of many different times and places fascinating. This volume explores the cultural creation of concepts of childhood and the ways they have developed and evolved as the world has become more connected, something I can relate to my own childhood experiences.
Now in its fourth edition, Childhood in World History covers the major developments in the history of childhood from the classical civilizations to the present and explores how agricultural and industrial economies have shaped the experiences of children.
Through comparative analysis, Peter N. Stearns facilitates a cross-cultural and transnational understanding of attitudes toward the role of children in society, and how "models" of childhood have developed throughout history. He addresses the tension between regional and social/gender differences, on the one hand, and factors that encouraged greater convergence, including the experience of globalization. The book also deals with regional patterns as…
