Mixed Race Studies

They Come in All Colors, A Novel

Atria Books (an imprint of Simon and Schuster)
2018-05-29
336 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781501172328
eBook ISBN: 9781501172342
Paperback ISBN: 9781501172335 (April 2019)

Malcolm Hansen

Malcolm Hansen arrives on the scene as a bold new literary voice with his stunning debut novel. Alternating between the Deep South and New York City during the 1960s and early ’70s, They Come in All Colors follows a biracial teenage boy who finds his new life in the big city disrupted by childhood memories of the summer when racial tensions in his hometown reached a tipping point.

It’s 1968 when fourteen-year-old Huey Fairchild begins high school at Claremont Prep, one of New York City’s most prestigious boys’ schools. His mother had uprooted her family from their small hometown of Akersburg, Georgia, a few years earlier, leaving behind Huey’s white father and the racial unrest that ran deeper than the Chattahoochee River.

But for our sharp-tongued protagonist, forgetting the past is easier said than done. At Claremont, where the only other nonwhite person is the janitor, Huey quickly realizes that racism can lurk beneath even the nicest school uniform. After a momentary slip of his temper, Huey finds himself on academic probation and facing legal charges. With his promising school career in limbo, he begins examining his current predicament at Claremont through the lens of his childhood memories of growing up in Akersburg during the Civil Rights Movement—and the chilling moments leading up to his and his mother’s flight north.

With Huey’s head-shaking antics fueling this coming-of-age narrative, the story triumphs as a tender and honest exploration of race, identity, family, and homeland.

Small Country

Hogarth (an imprint of Penguin Random House UK)
2018-06-07
92 Pages
144mm x 222mm x 21mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781784741594
eBook ISBN: 9781473547957

Gaël Faye, Sarah Ardizzone (Translator)

Burundi, 1992. For ten-year-old Gabriel, life in his comfortable expat neighbourhood of Bujumbura with his French father, Rwandan mother and little sister, Ana, is something close to paradise. These are happy, carefree days spent with his friends sneaking cigarettes and stealing mangoes, swimming in the river and riding bikes in the streets they have turned into their kingdom. But dark clouds are gathering over this small country, and soon their peaceful idyll will shatter when Burundi and neighbouring Rwanda are brutally hit by war and genocide.

A haunting and luminous novel of extraordinary power, Small Country describes a devastating end of innocence as seen through the eyes of a young child caught in the maelstrom of history. It is a stirring tribute not only to a time of tragedy, but also to the bright days that came before it.

American Son: A Novel

W. W. Norton & Company
May 2001
256 pages
5.6 × 8.3 in
Paperback ISBN 978-0-393-32154-8

Brian Ascalon Roley

A powerful novel about ethnically fluid California, and the corrosive relationship between two Filipino brothers.

Told with a hard-edged purity that brings to mind Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson, American Son is the story of two Filipino brothers adrift in contemporary California. The older brother, Tomas, fashions himself into a Mexican gangster and breeds pricey attack dogs, which he trains in German and sells to Hollywood celebrities. The narrator is younger brother Gabe, who tries to avoid the tar pit of Tomas’s waywardness, yet moves ever closer to embracing it. Their mother, who moved to America to escape the caste system of Manila and is now divorced from their American father, struggles to keep her sons in line while working two dead-end jobs. When Gabe runs away, he brings shame and unforeseen consequences to the family. Full of the ache of being caught in a violent and alienating world, American Son is a debut novel that captures the underbelly of the modern immigrant experience.

26a

Vintage
2006-03-02
240 Pages
129mm x 198mm x 15mm
170g
Paperback ISBN: 9780099479048
eBook ISBN: 9781409079620

Diana Evans

• Winner of the Orange Award for New Writers
• Winner of the deciBel Writer of the Year Award
• Shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award
• Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award
• Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Best First Book Award
• Shortlisted for the Times/Southbank Show Breakthrough Award
• Recipient of a Betty Trask Award
• Longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Identical twins, Georgia and Bessi, live in the loft of 26 Waifer Avenue. It is a place of beanbags, nectarines and secrets, and visitors must always knock before entering. Down below there is not such harmony. Their Nigerian mother puts cayenne pepper on her Yorkshire pudding and has mysterious ways of dealing with homesickness; their father angrily roams the streets of Neasden, prey to the demons of his Derbyshire upbringing. Forced to create their own identities, the Hunter children build a separate universe. Older sister Bel discovers sex, high heels and organic hairdressing, the twins prepare for a flapjack empire, and baby sister Kemy learns to moonwalk for Michael Jackson. It is when the reality comes knocking that the fantasies of childhood start to give way. How will Georgia and Bessi cope in a world of separateness and solitude, and which of them will be stronger?

The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo

Corgi Childrens
2015-07-02
288 Pages
129mm x 198mm x 18mm
202g
Paperback ISBN: 9780552557634
eBook ISBN: 9781448197583

Catherine Johnson

Shortlisted for the YA Book Prize 2016, this is a very curious tale indeed . . .

Out of the blue arrives an exotic young woman from a foreign land. Fearless and strong, ‘Princess’ Caraboo rises above the suspicions of the wealthy family who take her in.

But who is the real Caraboo?

In a world where it seems everyone is playing a role, could she be an ordinary girl with a tragic past? Is she a confidence trickster? Or is she the princess everyone wants her to be?

This the tale of the ultimate historical hustle, steeped in delectable romance. Whoever Caraboo turns out to be, she will steal your heart . . .

The Escape; Or, A Leap for Freedom

University of Tennessee Press
2001-03-21 (Originally published in 1858)
112 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1572331051

William Wells Brown (1814-1884)

Edited by:

John Ernest, Judge Hugh M. Morris Professor of English
University of New Hampshire

A well-known nineteenth-century abolitionist and former slave, William Wells Brown was a prolific writer and lecturer who captivated audiences with readings of his drama The Escape; or, a Leap for Freedom (1858). The first published play by an African American writer, The Escape explored the complexities of American culture at a time when tensions between North and South were about to explode into the Civil War. This new volume presents the first-edition text of Brown’s play and features an extensive introduction that establishes the work’s continuing significance.

The Escape centers on the attempted sexual violation of a slave and involves many characters of mixed race, through which Brown commented on such themes as moral decay, white racism, and black self-determination. Rich in action and faithful in dialect, it raises issues relating not only to race but also to gender by including concepts of black and white masculinity and the culture of southern white and enslaved women. It portrays a world in which slavery provided a convenient means of distinguishing between the white North and the white South, allowing northerners to express moral sentiments without recognizing or addressing the racial prejudice pervasive among whites in both regions.

John Ernest’s introductory essay balances the play’s historical and literary contexts, including information on Brown and his career, as well as on slavery, abolitionism, and sectional politics. It also discusses the legends and realities of the Underground Railroad, examines the role of antebellum performance art—including blackface minstrelsy and stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—in the construction of race and national identity, and provides an introduction to theories of identity as performance.

A century and a half after its initial appearance, The Escape remains essential reading for students of African American literature. Ernest’s keen analysis of this classic play will enrich readers’ appreciation of both the drama itself and the era in which it appeared.

The Poet X

HarperTeen
2018-03-06
368 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780062662804
E-book ISBN: 9780062662828

Elizabeth Acevedo

Fans of Jacqueline Woodson, Meg Medina, and Jason Reynolds will fall hard for this astonishing #ownvoices novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet, about an Afro-Latina heroine who tells her story with blazing words and powerful truth.

Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking.

But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about.

With Mami’s determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school’s slam poetry club, she doesn’t know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can’t stop thinking about performing her poems.

Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent.

A Long Way from Home, A novel

Knopf
2018-02-27
336 pages
6-1/4 x 9-1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 9780525520177
eBook ISBN: 9780525520184

Peter Carey

The two-time Booker Prize-winning author now gives us a wildly exuberant, wily new novel that circumnavigates 1954 Australia, revealing as much about the country/continent as it does about three audacious individuals who take part in the infamous 10,000-mile race, the Redex Trial.

Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in southeastern Australia. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the ancient continent, over roads no car will ever quite survive. With them is their lanky, fair-haired navigator, Willie Bachhuber, a quiz show champion and failed schoolteacher who calls the turns and creeks crossings on a map that will remove them, without warning, from the white Australia they all know so well. This is a thrilling high-speed story that starts in one way, and then takes you someplace else. It is often funny, more so as the world gets stranger, and always a page-turner even as you learn a history these characters never knew themselves.

Set in the 1950s, this is a world every American will recognize: black, white, who we are, how we got here, and what we did to each other along the way.

A Long Way from Home is Peter Carey’s late-style masterpiece.

Iola Leroy or, Shadows Uplifted

Broadview Press
2018-02-28
352 pages
5½” x 8½”
Hardcover ISBN: 9781554813858 / 1554813859
(Originally published in 1892)

Frances E. W. Harper (1825-1911)

Edited by:

Koritha Mitchell, Associate Professor of English
Ohio State University

Frances Harper’s fourth novel follows the life of the beautiful, light-skinned Iola Leroy to tell the story of black families in slavery, during the Civil War, and after Emancipation. Iola Leroy adopts and adapts three genres that commanded significant audiences in the nineteenth century: the sentimental romance, the slave narrative, and plantation fiction. Written by the foremost black woman activist of the nineteenth century, the novel sheds light on the movements for abolition, public education, and voting rights through a compelling narrative.

This edition engages the latest research on Harper’s life and work and offers ways to teach these major moments in United States history by centering the experiences of African Americans. The appendices provide primary documents that help readers do what they are seldom encouraged to do: consider the experiences and perspectives of people who are not white. The Introduction traces Harper’s biography and the changing critical perspectives on the novel.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: A Brief Chronology
• A Note on the Text
• Iola Leroy; Or, Shadows Uplifted
• Appendix A: Slavery, Civil War and Emancipation, Reconstruction and Its Demise
  1. From the Fugitive Slave Act (1850)
  2. United States Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, the Dred Scott Decision (1857)
  3. From the First Confiscation Act (1861)
  4. From the Second Confiscation Act (1862)
  5. The Emancipation Proclamation (1863)
  6. From the Freedmen’s Bureau Act (1865)
  7. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865)
  8. From the Fourteenth Amendment (1868)
  9. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870)
  10. The Compromise of 1877
  11. From United States Supreme Court Justice Billings Brown, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
• Appendix B: Not White? Then You Can’t Be Equal
  1. From Abraham Lincoln, Address on Colonization to a Deputation of Negroes (1862)
  2. From Frances Harper, “Mrs. Frances E. Watkins Harper on the War and the President’s Colonization Scheme,” Christian Recorder (27 September 1862)
  3. From Michigan Supreme Court Justice James Campbell, The People v. Dean (1866)
• Appendix C: Black Families in Slavery and Freedom
  1. From Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
  2. Dictated letters between enslaved husbands and wives while separated by their owners
  3. From “Arrest of Fugitive Slaves,” Cincinnati Gazette (29 January 1856)
  4. Frances Harper, “The Slave Mother: A Tale of Ohio” 1857)
  5. Testimony about enslaved men and women who fled slavery to join the Union effort and often planned to return to help family members escape (1863)
  6. Letter from a black soldier to his children (1864)
  7. Letter from a black soldier to the owner of one of his daughters (1864)
  8. Newspaper Notices in Hopes of Finding Lost Loved Ones after Emancipation (1866–93)
• Appendix D: Education in Slavery and Freedom
  1. From the South Carolina Negro Act (1740)
  2. Account about an enslaved woman who ran a midnight school (1881)
  3. Account of teaching/learning in secret during slavery (1902)
  4. An account of finding the spark for learning while enslaved (1885)
  5. Accounts of the consequences of learning to read and write
  6. Account of black soldiers wanting education
  7. Account of recently emancipated people’s eagerness to learn
  8. Testimony on Ku Klux Klan preventing school attendance after Emancipation (1872)
• Appendix E: Preventing Freedom Even after Emancipation
  1. Laws constraining black girls and boys via apprenticeship and African Americans of every age via vagrancy statutes (1865)
  2. Testimony about Ku Klux Klan raping black women whose husbands/fathers voted (1871)
  3. From Henry W. Grady, “The Race Problem in the South” (1889)
  4. From Ida B. Wells, The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895)
• Appendix F: Black Women’s Activism
  1. From Frances Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together” (1866)
  2. Frances Harper, “Aunt Chloe’s Politics” (1872)
  3. From Frances Harper, “Colored Women of America,” Englishwoman’s Review (15 January 1878)
  4. From Frances Harper, “The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the ColoredWoman,” African Methodist Episcopal Church Review (1888)
  5. From Frances Harper, “Enlightened Motherhood: An Address … Before the Brooklyn Literary Society” (15 November 1892)
  6. From Fannie Barrier Williams, “The Intellectual Progress of The Colored Women of the United States Since the Emancipation Proclamation” (1893)
• Appendix G: Being Black and a Woman: Aesthetics and Reception
  1. William J. Watkins, “The Reformer,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper (7 April 1854)
  2. Grace Greenwood, Impressions of Harper as a Speaker (1866)
  3. From Anna Julia Cooper, “The Status of Woman in America” (1892)
  4. Reviews of Iola Leroy
     1. “Publications Reviewed,” Christian Recorder (12 January 1893)
     2. From “Review 1,” Independent (5 January 1893)
     3. Richmond Planet (21 January 1893)
     4. From “Recent Fiction,” The Nation (23 February 1893)
     5. From “Our Book List,” A.M.E. Church Review (April 1893)
     6. “Book Review,” Friends’ Review; a Religious, Literary and Miscellaneous Journal (22 June 1893)
     7. Review of Reviews (January 1895)
     8. From “Recent Fiction,” Independent (29 October 1896)
     9. From Edward Elmore Brock, “Brock’s Literary Leaves,” Freeman (Indianapolis) (14 August 1897)
     10. [W.E.B. Du Bois,] “Writers,” Crisis (April 1911)
• Works Cited and Select Bibliography

Incognegro: Renaissance #1

Dark Horse Comics
2018-02-07
32 pages
b&w, Miniseries
UPC: 7 61568 00235 5 00111

Writer: Mat Johnson
Artist: Warren Pleece
Editor: Karen Berger

After a black writer is found dead at a scandalous interracial party in 1920s New York, Harlem’s cub reporter Zane Pinchback is the only one determined to solve the murder. Zane must go ”incognegro” for the first time–using his light appearance to pass as a white man–to find the true killer, in this prequel miniseries to the critically acclaimed Vertigo graphic novel, now available in a special new 10th Anniversary Edition.

With a cryptic manuscript as his only clue, and a mysterious and beautiful woman as the murder’s only witness, Zane finds himself on the hunt through the dark and dangerous streets of ”roaring twenties” Harlem in search for justice.

A page-turning thriller of racial divide, Incognegro: Renaissance explores segregation, secrets, and self-image as our race-bending protagonist penetrates a world where he feels stranger than ever before.