AAL Summer - Fall List is ready!

Greetings! Here's the schedule for our May - September discussions. NOTE: Starting in June we will switch to the 3rd Tuesday of the month, instead of the 2nd. All titles will be held at the RA desk on the 2nd floor of the library for 6 weeks prior to the discussion.



 May 14th  Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America by Tanner Colby

In this charming and surprisingly funny book, Colby  takes a fresh, honest look at race relations, showing us both how far we've come in bridging the racial divide and how far we've yet to go.  




 


June 18th  Small Island by Andrea Levy

Told in the alternating voices of its central characters, Levy examines the inner lives and struggles of Jamaican immigrants Hortense and Gilbert, and their English landlady Queenie, both before and after World War II.  

  



 July 16th  Unafraid of the Dark A Memoir by Rosemary Bray McNatt
 
Rosemary Bray traces her quest for identity as a writer, a feminist, a wife, a mother and an African American. Along the way, she imparts a visceral sense of what it meant to be poor and black in Chicago's South Side in the 1960s. A quietly affecting memoir, and a call to action.

September 17th   Sag Harbor: A Novel by  Colson Whitehead

In this deeply affectionate and fiercely funny coming-of-age novel, Colson Whitehead uses the perpetual mortification of teenage existence and the desperate quest for reinvention to describe the summer identity quest of a black prep school student in 1985.

From Slavery to Fiction: Intriguing Looks at The Peculiar Institution

It's time to start picking books for our summer and fall discussions! I am always happy to get suggestions from readers, so please, if you have an idea, post it here, on our Facebook or GoodReads page, or simply email me! The only criteria is that it be related to the African American experience, either fiction or nonfiction; and that it be widely available in standard bookstores and public libraries.

 Our February book, The Known World, deals with slavery from an unusual angle, looking at free blacks who themselves became slave owners. There are of course, hundreds of novels about the African American slave experience, but here are a few that take it in a radically different direction than the norm...

Wench, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez [AAL selection May 2011] - The uneasy friendship between four slave women who meet every year when their owner/lovers take them to a summer resort.


Lion's Blood: A Novel of Slavery and Freedom in an Alternate America, by Steven Barnes - What if the racial dynamics of slavery were reversed; if Blacks were the masters and Whites the slaves? Barnes imagines a world where European Americans are enslaved by African landowners.




Someone Knows My Name, by Lawrence Hill - The saga of Aminata, who comes to South Carolina as a slave during the American Revolution and eventually assists in the founding of the slave colony Sierra Leone.

Soulcatcher, and Other Stories by Charles Johnson - Although Middle Passage is his most famous work related to slavery, this story collection examines the many different ways slavery has corroded American humanity through the centuries.

Kindred, by Octavia Butler - The most terrifying science fiction story I've ever read: what if you were a confident, independent black woman of the 20th century who is abruptly catapulted back to the slave-owning 19th century South?





Aannnddd...this Saturday January 19th, stop by EPL to watch a remarkable film telling a unique tale aout slavery, Prince Among Slaves

African Heritage Film: Prince Among Slaves

Saturday, January 19, 2 pm, Community Meeting Room, Main Library
In 1788, a slave ship sailed from the Gambia River with hundreds of men, women and children bound in chains. Eight months later, a handful of survivors were sold in Natchez, Mississippi. One of them made an astonishing claim: he was a prince of an African kingdom larger and more developed than the newly formed United States. The true story of an African prince who endured the humiliation of slavery without losing his dignity or hope of freedom.  Narrated by Mos Def. Prince Among Slaves won the Best Documentary prize at the 2007 American Black Film Festival.

"Fierce and Nerdy": Pretty in Pink meets The Color Purple

32 Candles was an absolute treat for me, and I can't wait to read more by Ernessa T. Carter. Founder and editor of the Fierce and Nerdy blog, Ms Carter delivers a much needed kick in the pants to "chick lit" and African American romance, with a central character who is dark skinned, Southern, nerdy and considers herself ugly. Influenced by Celie in the Alice Walker classic The Color Purple, Carter takes the ugly duckling theme of popular movie romances like 16 Candles and reinterprets them for a black audience. Whereas a gorgeous bridesmaid dress and hipster music gets the guy for Molly Ringwald, learning to love her natural hair, dark skin, and superior smarts is what does it for Davie.
In a recent interview, talking about the Molly Ringwald movies that are such a touchstone for her character Davie, Carter says:

"I found that really interesting that people said they were universal after John Hughes died just because it is so outside of so many people’s experience, but at the same time I think what they really mean when they say [those films] are universal is that the fantasy of it is universal. Everybody wants to have the guy fall head-over-heels for them. They want to get the richest guy in school. That fantasy may be universal, but I don’t necessarily think the experience is universal. "


For some discussion ideas, see the Harper-Collins reading group guide to 32 Candles. See you Tuesday at 7, in our usual spot: the Small Meeting room of EPL!

Getting to Know Malcolm and Manning

Interview with Manning Marable

It's  always exciting to learn more about a topic you thought you knew well, as I am doing now with Malcolm X. I can't wait to discuss Manning Marable's perspective on Malcolm with all of you at our next meeting.

A couple of resources to help you out, or for those who want additional background on the book, or on Malcolm or on Dr. Marable's work.

Dr Marable researched and worked on the book through the Malcolm X Project at Columbia University in New York. The website is a treasure trove of primary sources, video interviews, photos, and government documents. Most of the sources cited in Marable's book are here.

For a completely different approach to Malcolm's life and work, try Malcolm X: A Research Site, edited by Abdul Alkalimat. Alkalimat is highly critical of Marable, (see his review) and writes from a decided Black Liberation perspective, but  the site does a wonderful job of pulling together essays and documents from a wide variety of historians,and political and religious figures across the spectrum, as well as recordings of Malcolm's speeches. You can even join in on the ongoing debate over the legitimacy of Marable's book.

I've pulled together a list of books either  in the EPL collection or else readily obtainable through local libraries, as well as some additional websites. Hope this is helpful, and I'll see all of you on Tuesday December 11th at 7 pm for our discussion!

Call or stop by the Library's 2nd floor desk if you still need a copy: 847-448-8620.

Civil Rights Era Fiction

Greetings AAL fans! Tomorrow night we will be talking about Betsey Brown, Ntozake's Shange's evocative portrayal of a middle class family in St Louis during the early years of the Civil Rights Movement.  If you'd like to know more about the author, check out this great article: 10 Things to Know About Ntozake Shange.


Betsey Brown is somewhat different from Shange's other work; it has a  simpler more straightforward style and vocabulary (it's often taught as a young adult novel) and a more traditional narrative than say her famous choreopoem For Colored Girls. For a comprehensive overview, take a look at the  Betsey Brown reading guide.

The civil rights movement has produced its share of famous novels, but from To Kill a Mockingbird all the way through The Help, many of the best known have been by white authors and written from a white perspective. If you're looking for the African American fiction set in this time period, try our list of civil rights fiction for black folks.

And don't forget to pick up your copy of Malcom X: A Reinvention! copies are already on hold; call the Reader's Services desk at 847-448-8620 to snag yours.

The War on Drugs...a War on African Americans

It's almost time...our next meeting is this coming Tuesday October 9th at 7:00 p.m. , and it promises to be a hot one! As we read Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, it's helpful to look at U.S. drug policy, which results in so many arrests of young African Americans. National Public Radio aired this program in January, in which  All Things Considered host Guy Raz speaks with director Eugene Jarecki about  his film The House I Live In. Michelle Alexander can be heard in the interview.

You can also hear Ms. Alexander given an impassioned address to Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, in which she outlines the major themes of her book.

One of the sources Alexander quotes is Douglas Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Although most of us know about "chain gangs" and the sharecropping system, Blackmon also highlights  a prison system designed to net as many black men as possible to provide free labor for companies and local governments across the South. As in Alexander's work, it's the intentionality that shocks, and provides the most disturbing and controversial moments in the book.

I look forward to exploring and debating Alexander and Blackmon's arguments with all of you this Tuesday!

Finding Humor in Racism: Discussing Erasure

Welcome back to AAL! Next Tuesday September 11th we'll be discussing Erasure, Percival Everett's wryly humorous take on racism in the book business. But is racism ever  funny? Or should it be?

Generations of writers and comics have found inspiration in the absurdity of human nature, and  few things are more absurd than racism. Making fun of racism has been a staple of African American theater, literature and folklore since slavery days, as attested in several recent histories of the genre.

Laughing at racism from a black perspective has served as a defense mechanism, a safety valve, and corrective to demeaning portrayals of African Americans in the larger culture. Godfrey Cambridge, Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Will Smith, David Alan Grier and Chris Rock: all use humor to deflate stereotypes about African Americans, while Grier and Rock also challenge fellow African Americans not to fall into the same patterns of sloppy stereotypical thought and behavior.

One of the most innovative current practitioners of comedic racism bashing is stand-up comedian W. Kamau Bell, whose routine, The W. Kamau Bell Curve Show: Ending Racism In About An Hour, takes on closet racism in a fresh,  TED talk style.

Click the above video, "2 Questions That You Never Ask Black People about Their Hair" for a taste. (WARNING: the language gets a bit raw.)

Poking fun at racism can defuse tension and open dialogue around an uncomfortable topic, according to anti-racism educator Damali Ayo. In her book How to Rent a Negro , Ayo claims that "all blacks have been "rented" at some time, placed in the role of token at work or in a social setting, or drafted to represent the entire race with an opinion on a current race-related topic". Her "renter's guide" satirizes this phenomenon, allowing "renters" to see themselves, laugh at themselves, and perhaps experience a little consciousness raising.

I hope our discussion of Erasure will be fun, funny and (thought) provocative. To get a copy, please call us at 847-448-8620, (mention that you plan to attend AAL!)