Exhibits

From 30 Americans to Angry White Boy, from Bamboozled to The Boondocks, from Chappelle's Show to The Colored Museum, this collection of twenty-one essays takes an interdisciplinary look at the flowering of satire and its influence in defining new roles in black identity. As a mode of expression for a generation of writers, comedians, cartoonists, musicians, filmmakers, and visual/conceptual artists, satire enables collective questioning of many of the fundamental presumptions about black identity in the wake of the civil rights movement. Whether taking place in popular and controversial television shows, in a provocative series of short internet films, in prize-winning novels and plays, in comic strips, or in conceptual hip-hop albums, this satirical impulse has found a receptive audience both within and outside the black community. Such works have been variously called "post-black," "post-soul," and examples of a "New Black Aesthetic." Whatever the label, this collection bears witness to a noteworthy shift regarding the ways in which African American satirists feel constrained by conventional obligations when treating issues of racial identity, historical memory, and material representation of blackness. Among the artists examined in this collection are Paul Beatty, Dave Chappelle, Trey Ellis, Percival Everett, Donald Glover (a.k.a. Childish Gambino), Spike Lee, Aaron McGruder, Lynn Nottage, ZZ Packer, Suzan Lori-Parks, Mickalene Thomas, Touré, Kara Walker, and George C. Wolfe. The essays intentionally seek out interconnections among various forms of artistic expression. Contributors look at the ways in which contemporary African American satire engages in a broad ranging critique that exposes fraudulent, outdated, absurd, or otherwise damaging mindsets and behaviors both within and outside the African American community.

Amid the widespread spin and skewed analysis that is commonplace to media and politics alike, the need for less filtered information and more raw facts is more pressing than ever. Black Stats, a compact and useful guide, skips over the assumptions, suppositions and hypotheses about trends and patterns in American society and offers up-to-date figures on black life in the United States today.

From antebellum slavery to the twenty-first century, African American funeral directors have orchestrated funerals or "homegoing" ceremonies with dignity and pageantry. As entrepreneurs in a largely segregated trade, they were among the few black individuals in any community who were economically independent and not beholden to the local white power structure. Most important, their financial freedom gave them the ability to support the struggle for civil rights and, indeed, to serve the living as well as bury the dead. During the Jim Crow era, black funeral directors relied on racial segregation to secure their foothold in America's capitalist marketplace. With the dawning of the civil rights age, these entrepreneurs were drawn into the movement to integrate American society, but were also uncertain how racial integration would affect their business success. From the beginning, this tension between personal gain and community service shaped the history of African American funeral directing. For African Americans, death was never simply the end of life, and funerals were not just places to mourn. In the "hush harbors" of the slave quarters, African Americans first used funerals to bury their dead and to plan a path to freedom. Similarly, throughout the long-and often violent-struggle for racial equality in the twentieth century, funeral directors aided the cause by honoring the dead while supporting the living. To Serve the Living offers a fascinating history of how African American funeral directors have been integral to the fight for freedom.

Jazz emerged during the political and social upheaval of world war, communist revolution, Red Scares, and the Black Migration. The tumult bred disagreements about the cultural significance of jazz that concerned both its African American roots and its international appeal. The questions about what was new or even radical about the music initiated debates that writers recapitulated for decades. Jazz Internationalism offers a bold reconsideration of jazz's influence in Afro-modernist literature. Ranging from the New Negro Renaissance through the social movements of the 1960s, John Lowney articulates nothing less than a new history of Afro-modernist jazz writing. Jazz added immeasurably to the vocabulary for discussing radical internationalism and black modernism in leftist African American literature. Lowney examines how Claude McKay, Ann Petry, Langston Hughes, and many other writers employed jazz as both a critical social discourse and mode of artistic expression to explore the possibilities--and challenges--of black internationalism. The result is an expansive understanding of jazz writing sure to spur new debates.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * NAMED ONE OF TIME'S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE * PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST * ONE OF OPRAH'S "BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH" * NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT   Hailed by Toni Morrison as "required reading," a bold and personal literary exploration of America's racial history by "the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race" (Rolling Stone)   NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN * NAMED ONE OF PASTE'S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE * NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review * O: The Oprah Magazine * The Washington Post * People * Entertainment Weekly * Vogue * Los Angeles Times * San Francisco Chronicle * Chicago Tribune * New York * Newsday * Library Journal * Publishers Weekly   In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men--bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates's attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son--and readers--the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children's lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.