Diversity Reading Lists

Through paintings and poems, two scholars track Arturo Schomburg's quest to correct history. Amid the scholars, poets, authors, and artists of the Harlem Renaissance stood an Afro-Puerto Rican named Arturo Schomburg. This law clerk's life's passion was to collect books, letters, music, and art from Africa and the African diaspora and bring to light the achievements of people of African descent through the ages. When Schomburg's collection became so big it began to overflow his house, he turned to the New York Public Library, where he created and curated a collection that was the cornerstone of a new Negro Division. A century later, his groundbreaking collection, known as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, has become a beacon to scholars all over the world.

Hanif Abdurraqib digs into the group's history and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself. Abdurraqib traces the Tribe's creative career, from their early days as part of the Afrocentric rap collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. Their work is placed in the context of the broader rap landscape of the 1990s, one upended by sampling laws, a rivalry that threatened to destroy the genre, and some record labels' shift from groups to individual MCs. Throughout the narrative Abdurraqib connects the music and cultural history to their street-level impact, seeking deeper truths that are not simply heard in the head, but felt in the chest.

Ballers of the New School uses American sports culture to challenge and explore notions of race in America. Dr. Thabiti Lewis pushes back against topics such as anti-intellectualism, jingoism, and exploitation in collegiate athletics, as well as the role of sports culture in cultivating notions of masculinity. The book fearlessly critiques and challenges the notion that sports culture has altruistically functioned as a progressive pioneer of social and racial progress and offers a reexamination of the narrative of American sport as a leading contributor to racial progress by pointing to glass ceilings in areas of leadership on and off fields of play. The reconstructions as well as challenges to modern athletes that Ballers of the New School offers make it a usable book of sometimes uncomfortable, but necessary truths.

What the Eye Hears offers an authoritative account of the great American art of tap dancing. Brian Seibert, a dance critic for The New York Times, begins by exploring tap's origins as a hybrid of the jig and clog dancing and dances brought from Africa by slaves. He tracks tap's transfer to the stage through blackface minstrelsy and charts its growth as a cousin to jazz in the vaudeville circuits. Seibert chronicles tap's spread to ubiquity on Broadway and in Hollywood, analyzes its decline after World War II, and celebrates its rediscovery and reinvention by new generations of American and international performers. In the process, we discover how the history of tap dancing is central to any meaningful account of American popular culture.

Presenting paintings of some of the artist's key models and muses, I Can't See You Without Me illuminates the work of Brooklyn painter Mickalene Thomas. Culling from art history and popular culture, Thomas creates scintillating portraits that deconstruct the highly charged connections between sitter, artist, and viewer. The recurring models in Thomas' compositions, almost exclusively women of color, convey a spirit of strength and self-confidence. Across this archetypal array, it is both their contradictions and kinships that make the black female body such fertile terrain for the artist's ongoing investigations. By casting herself, her late mother, and other formidable women in her life as models, muses and collaborators, Thomas particularizes her distinctive oeuvre of portraiture. The catalog both reasserts and further contextualizes issues of identity, sexuality, and agency in Thomas' work that have only become more nuanced and palpable over time.

Gabourey Sidibe skyrocketed to international fame in 2009 when she played the leading role in Lee Daniels's Precious. In This Is Just My Face, she shares a one-of-a-kind life story. With full-throttle honesty, she recounts her Bed-Stuy/Harlem family life with a polygamous father and a gifted mother who supports her two children by singing in the subway. Sidibe tells the story of her first job as a phone sex "talker." And she shares her unconventional rise to fame as a movie star. Sidibe's memoir hits hard with insights on friendship, depression, celebrity, haters, fashion, race, and weight. Irreverent, hilarious, and untraditional, This Is Just My Face will resonate with anyone who has ever felt different, and with anyone who has ever felt inspired to make a dream come true.

From the civil rights and Black Power era of the 1960s through antiapartheid activism in the 1980s and beyond, black women have used their clothing, hair, and style not simply as a fashion statement but as a powerful tool of resistance. Whether using stiletto heels as weapons to protect against police attacks or incorporating African-themed designs into everyday wear, these fashion-forward women celebrated their identities and pushed for equality. In this thought-provoking book, Tanisha C. Ford explores how and why black women across the globe incorporated style and beauty culture into their activism. Focusing on the emergence of the "soul style" movement, Liberated Threads shows that black women's fashion choices became galvanizing symbols of gender and political liberation. Drawing from an eclectic archive, Ford offers a new way of studying how black style and Soul Power moved beyond national boundaries, sparking a global fashion phenomenon. Following celebrities, models, college students, and everyday women, Ford narrates the fascinating intertwining histories of Black Freedom and fashion,

This book offers an interdisciplinary study of hip-hop music written and performed by rappers who are out black gay men. It examines the storytelling mechanisms of gay themed lyrics, and how these form protests and become enabling tools for (black) gay men to discuss issues such as living on the down-low and HIV/AIDS. It considers how the biased promotion of feminized gay male artists/characters in the mainstream entertainment industry has rendered masculinity an exclusively male heterosexual property, providing a representational framework for men to identify with a form of "homosexual masculinity". The book makes a compelling case that it is possible for individuals, like gay rappers, to perform masculinity against masculinity, and suggest a new way of striving for gender equality.

Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures explores the evolving and exhilarating concept of Afrofuturism, a lens used to imagine a more empowering future for the Black community through music, art, and speculative fiction. Sumptuous, beautifully designed spreads feature 100 gorgeous illustrations of objects and images that reflect Black identity, agency, creativity, and hope, including: T’Challa’s suit from Black Panther, Octavia Butler’s typewriter, Uhura’s outfit from Star Trek, Sun Ra’s space harp, costumes from Broadway’s The Wiz, handwritten lyrics by Jimi Hendrix, and Janelle Monae’s ArchAndroid dress. Afrofuturism offers a framework of radical potential to envision Black liberation and alternatives to oppressive structures like white supremacy. Afrofuturism comes at a time of increasing visibility for the concept, both in scholarship and in pop culture, and is a compelling ode to the revolutionary power of Black imagination.

In the midst of boomtown Chicago, two Jewish families have suffered terrible blows. The Lehrmans, who run a small hat factory, lost their beloved son Harold in a blizzard. The Chimbrovas, who run a saloon, lost three of their boys on the SS Eastland when it sank in 1915. Each family holds out hope that one of their remaining children will rise to carry on the family business. But Benny Lehrman has no interest in making hats. His true passion is piano--especially jazz. At night he sneaks down to the South Side, slipping into predominantly black clubs to hear jazz groups play. One night he is called out and asked to sit in on a group. His playing is first-rate, and the other musicians are impressed.