Crushing (Work in Progress.)

Judith E. Vida

Presented at IFPE, 26^th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference “Vulnerability and Its Discontents”, Sheraton Society Hill Hotel, Philadelphia, PA, November 7, 2015.

Updated version current to August 31, 2016.

Note to Reader:  The following essay and its bibliographic materials, both in the body of the essay and in The List that follows, do not follow standard APA formatting. References pertaining to this essay are included as footnotes. The List could be considered to be an Appendix, or a separate entity altogether.

Backstory.

The death of my aged mother in February 2008 informed presentations to IFPE in both 2008 and 2009. The earlier one had begun as an essay for the catalog of an art exhibition that opened up a space around her passing like a freshly dug grave.[1] During that fateful presidential campaign summer of 2008, I read Barack Obama’s memoir, which must have played a part in my being drawn to certain other books. Late one hot afternoon, I stumbled upon a fictional dialogue between the slave Sally Hemings and her niece and owner Martha Jefferson Randolph, which takes place shortly after the death of Thomas Jefferson, who was both Martha’s father and the father of Sally Hemings’s seven children (Chase-Riboud, 1979/2009). In that stinging interchange, I recognized that my relationship with my mother had been one of enslavement. A lifetime of bewildered, bewildering emotion and experience made disturbing new sense. Looking back over the books to which I was drawn in the year that followed my mother’s death, I could see that “the stumble” was no accident but uncannily, unconsciously, driven. That fateful fictional interchange impelled me to write “’Didn’t You Ever Love Me?’” and I presented it to IFPE a few months later.

Introduction.

The period that followed my presentation of “’Didn’t You Ever Love Me?’” to IFPE in 2009 was shock-like for me, eventually succeeded by what is best described as an activation: driven to go on reading, straining to unblock my ears and unhood my eyes, timidly risking engagement.  (I have been like this for more than 8 years now.)

What was I doing? I had no words for this for a very long time, especially when asked, “What is this for?”  Eventually, in self-defense and self-soothing, I said to myself, “Well, I can make a list.” To the core references from “’Didn’t You Ever Love Me?’” I added the books I had started to collect and read, which were now spilling from shelves freed up when my younger son’s books were moved to a different location.  Later I thought about books from before the summer of 2008 that could be considered as anticipation or foreshadowing. I entered them separately, labeled as “before.”

At this moment the list reaches beyond 160 entries, still growing. This is a work in progress, although “process” is the better word. What makes it so hard to name is that from the beginning I saw no dimensions, no limits, no pre-conceived shape or content, no duration, and no destination. No definable purpose. I am driven to wander in a boundless territory that once did but no longer frightens me. That alone may propel the drive. The shocked awareness of my own emotional enslavement was the ticket of entry to this other level of apperception. Mere empathy seems too shallow a word. Perhaps rending the veil of otherness is closer to the mark, and locating otherness also in myself. The Veil of Color was W.E.B. Du Bois’ word for an unbridgeable chasm.[2] This project is my personal effort to dismantle a socially and politically constructed invisibility of which I have been as unwitting a perpetrator as a bystander. One consequence of this pursuit is that I have begun to see the ghosts – the negated, the refused, the denied, the brutalized, the annihilated, the abused, the demonized and dehumanized – the tormented souls who cannot rest until they can be seen and named and mourned.

And, just as I discovered at age 50 that my personal “received history” was a lie, I now see that a history omitting a single unquestioned subjectivity is also deceitful, whether  personal narrative or the grand narrative governing the national mythology. The United States of America is a nation of immigrants. There are no happy immigration stories; homelands are not left because life there is good. This holds as much for those who choose to leave as for those who are kidnapped [“kidnapped” being another obscure point of reference to my personal story].  And for those usurped by another entity’s triumphal, conquering, colonizing narrative, it is devastating. On a larger stage that mirrors the personal microcosm, too many in this country ignore or actively refuse tickets of entry into their own scarred and traumatizing, fractured and fracturing, drowned and drowning accumulating actuality. The tickets remain in Will Call. What will it take to pull down the barricades of unseeing, unknowing, unfeeling historical precedent?

In the fall of 2015, I was preparing to conduct for candidates at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles a new session of the seminar inspired by The Autobiographical Dialogue, that itself has emerged from many years of collaboration between Gersh Molad and myself. A paragraph in the foundational paper we wrote about this process[3] caught my eye. This paragraph, first written 13 years ago, turns out to be a message sent to myself in an unforeseeable future:

Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel (1988) commented that, “to write means for the poet[4] to crush the wall behind which something that ‘was always there’ hides (Bauman, 2000, p. 79).”[5]  “Crushing” is very much like what “traveling” is in postmodern language: a complex meeting of the known and unknown. It is a de-centering of oneself, going away not only from home places but also from identity-bound self-integrations and self-disarrays. It is to be away from actual home and longed for shelter, being in perpetual exile. It is having many homelands and language-universals, refusing integration, and at the same time and to a certain extent, being in and on one’s own (self, room, place), exercising responsibility and hospitability for self, and others. Crushing as a creative act of understanding echoes simultaneously hope and dread. There is a great hope of finding something and of reconstituting oneself, and a great fear of not only not finding but also losing oneself on the way.

“Crushing.” That’s it. That’s what “this” is.

Someone from Michigan said recently, on the phone, “A new book has just come out about Detroit. Here I am, 68 years old, and I know nothing about Detroit. It is just shocking how unaware we can be of what is around us.”

“Yes,” I said, thinking also of this.

Afterword.

During the lunch break on the day of presentation, I walked 0.2 mi from the hotel to the corner of Front and Market Streets, which a historical placard identifies as the original location of the London Coffee House, wherein the human cargo of slaving ships docked at Penn’s Landing nearby was evaluated for sale. Five of us did so, to discover, to paraphrase Sally Mann (2015, p. 410), whether we strangers, coming upon it, centuries later, can sense the sad, lost, horrific echo of the place. It is there.

Acknowledgments.

I am grateful to those whose active contributions enrich this list and my life: Stuart Spence, Louise Steinman and the Los Angeles Public Library ALOUD series, Erin Christovale, Kenturah Davis, James Holloway, Patrick Henry Johnson, Andy Robert, Savannah Wood, Suné Woods, James Fugate & Thomas Hamilton at Eso-Won Bookstore, The Nation, Katherine Schwarzenbach, Veronica Abney, Michelle Papillion, Marlene Picard, Kemp Powers and Jason Delane, Johanna Cuevas, Susan Burland, Karol Marshall, Joel Miller, The Road Theatre of North Hollywood, CA, and others who prefer to remain anonymous.

The List so far, updated to August 31, 2016.

Boldface indicates original bibliography of “ ’Didn’t You Ever Love Me?’ ”

*indicates read, beyond browsing.

Books.

*Abani, Chris (2010). There Are No Names for Red. Paintings by Percival Everett. Los Angeles:Red Hen Press.

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (2003/2012). Purple Hibiscus. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books.

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (2006/2014). Half of a Yellow Sun. London: Fourth Estate.

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (2010). The Thing Around Your Neck. New York: Anchor Books.

*Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (2013). Americanah. New York, Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf.

Akpam, Uwem (2008/2009). Say You’re One of Them. New York, Boston, London: Back Bay Books, Little, Brown and Company.

*Alexander, Elizabeth (2015). The Light of the World: a memoir. New York, Boston: Grand Central Publishing.

*Alexander, Michelle (2010/2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New foreword by Cornel West. New York: The New Press.

Allen, Danielle (2014). Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. New York/London: Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Allen, Jeffrey Renard (2014). Song of the Shank. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.

Anderson, Devery S. (2015). Emmett Till: the Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement. Forward by Julian Bond. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

*Asante, M K (2013. Buck: A Memoir. New York: Spiegel & Grau.

*Ashe, Bert (2015). Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles. Chicago: Bolden.

Baldwin, James (1962/1993). The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage Books.

Ball, Edward (1998/2001). Slaves in the Family. New York: Ballantine Books.

Banks, Ralph Richard (2011). Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone. New York: Dutton.

Baptist, Edward E. (2014). The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.  New York: Basic Books.

Bay. Mia, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, & Barbara D. Savage, eds. Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

*Beatty, Paul (1994). Joker, Joker, Deuce. New York: Penguin Books.

*Beatty, Paul (1996). The White Boy Shuffle. New York: Picador.

*Beatty, Paul (2001). Tuff. New York: Anchor Books.

*Beatty, Paul, ed. (2006). hokum: an anthology of aftrican-american humor. New York and London:

Bloomsbury Publishing.

*Beatty, Paul (2008)). Slumberland. New York, Berlin, London: Bloomsbury.

*Beatty, Paul (2015). The Sellout. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Beckert, Sven (2014/2015). Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Vintage Books.

Benjamin, Rich (2009). Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America.  New York: Hyperion.

Bessire, Mark H.C. ed. (2002). William Pope.L. The Friendliest Black Artist in America.

Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press.

*Bisson, Terry (1988/2009). Fire on the Mountain. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

Blackmon, Douglas A. (2009). Slavery By Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books.

*Blow, Charles M. (2014). Fire Shut Up in My Bones: A Memoir. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Boggs, Grace Lee (1998).  Living for Change: An Autobiography.  Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Booker, Cory (2016). United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and dvncing the Common Good. New York: Ballantine Books.

*Bradford, Mark (2015). Scorched Earth. Connie Butler, ed. With contributions by Mark Bradford, Ann Philbin, Connie Butler, Douglas Crimp, Marlon T. Riggs, José Esteban Muñoz, Hamza Walker, Bryant Keith Alexander, Benjamin Ashley, Alessandra Raengo, Jamillah James. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Mark Bradford:Scorched Earth, organized and presented by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, June 21-September 20, 2015. Munich, London, New York: Prestel.

**Bradley, David (1981/1990). The Chaneysville Incident. New York: Harper Perennial.

Breen, Patrick H. (2015). The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Brown, William Wells (2014). Clotel & Other Writings. Ezra Greenspan, ed. New York: The

Library of America

*Cather, Willa (1940/2010). Sapphira and the Slave Girl.  New York: Vintage.

*Chase-Riboud, Barbara (1979/2009). Sally Hemings (a novel, with a new afterword by the author). Chicago: Chicago Review Press, Inc.

*Chase-Riboud, Barbara (1994). The President’s Daughter (a novel). New York: Ballantine Books.

*Chase-Riboud, Barbara (2013). The Malcolm X Steles. Carlos Basualdo, ed. With contributions by Carlos Basualdo, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Ellen Handler Spitz, John Vick. New Haven and London: Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press.

Cherki, Alice (2000/2006). Frantz Fanon: A Portrait. Translated from the French by Nadia Bernard. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

*Christovale, Erin and Amir George (2015).Black Radical Imagination. Los Angeles, CA:

Dominica.

*Coates, Ta-Nehisi (2009). The Beautiful Struggle (a memoir). New York: Spiegel & Grau.

*Coates, Ta-Nehisi (2015).Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau.

*Coetzee, J.M. (1990/1998). Age of Iron. New York: Penguin Books.

Cone, James H. (1991/2012). Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

*Copeland, Misty (2013). Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina. New York: Touchstone.

*Daáood, Kamau (2005). The Language of Saxophones. Selected Poems. San Francisco: City Lights.

*Davis, David Brion (1966/1988). The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

*Davis, David Brion (1975/1999). The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770-1823. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

*Davis, David Brion (2014). The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. New York: Alfred Knopf.

*DeGruy, Joy (2005). Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. Portland, OR: Joy DeGruy Publications Inc. (Originally published by Uptone Press.)

 Diaspora Diaries: An Educator’s Guide to MoCADA Artists (2009).  Régine Romain, Ed. New York: Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Inc.

Douglass, Frederick (1845/2013). Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, An American slave, Written by himself. San Bernardino, CA: Newcastle Group.

*Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903/2003). The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Modern Library Edition.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne (2014). An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press.

*Ellison, Ralph (1952/1995). Invisible Man. New York: Vintage (Random House, Inc.).

Eltis, David & David Richardson (2010). Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Foreward by David Brion Davis, Afterword by David W. Blight. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

English, Darby (2007). How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press.

Everett, Percival (2015). Half an Inch of Water: Stories.  Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press.

Exum, Cynthia E. and Maty Guiza-Leimert (2012). Images of America: Leimert Park. With a foreword by Walter H. Leimert, III. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing.

Fairbanks, Daniel J. (2015). Everyone Is African: How Science Explodes the Myth of Race.  New York: Prometheus Books.

*Fanon, Frantz (1952/2008). Black Skin, White Masks. Translated from the French by Richard Philcox. Foreword by Kwame Anthony Appiah. New york: Grove Press.

Fanon, Frantz (1961/2004). The Wretched of the Earth. Translated from the French by Richard Philcox. Foreword by Homi K. Bhabha. Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: Grove Press.

Fanon, Frantz (1964/1967). Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays. Translated from the French by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press.

Faulkner, William (1936/1986/1990). Absalom, Absalom! (The corrected text) New York: Vintage Books.

Faulkner, William (1932/2012). Light in August. (The Corrected Text). New York: The Modern Library.

*Faust, Drew Gilpin (2008). This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Faye, Sanderia (2015). Mourner’s Bench. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press.

*Fields, Karen E. and Barbara J. Fields (2012). Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. London, New York: Verso.

Fields, Mamie Garvin (1983). Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir. With Karen Fields. New York: The Free Press.

*Flournoy, Angela (2015). The Turner House.  Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

*Foner, Eric (1988/2014). Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (Updated Edition). New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, New Delhi, Auckland: Harper Perennial Classics, HarperCollins Publishers.

Foner, Eric (2015). Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad.  New York and London, W. W. Norton & Co.

*Frazier, LaToya Ruby (2015). The Notion of Family. Photographs by LaToya Ruby Frazier, essays by Dennis C. Dickerson, Laura Wexler, interview by Dawoud Bey. New York: aperture.

Giovanni, Nikki (2013). Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid. New York: HarperCollins.

Glick, Jeremy Matthew (2016). The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution.  New York and London: New York University Press.

*Gordimer, Nadine (1979). Burger’s Daughter. New York: Penguin Books.

*Gordon-Reed, Annette (2008). The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co.

*Gordon-Reed, Annette (1997). Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press.

Greenspan, Ezra (2014. William Wells Brown: An African-American Life. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co.

Gregory, Dick, with Robert Lipsyte (1964/1973). Nigger: An Autobiography. New York: Pocket Books.

*Gyasi, Yaa (2016). Homegoing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Hall, Donald, with Dock Ellis (1976/1989).  Dock Ellis: In the Country of Baseball. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo: Fireside (Simon & Schuster).

Hayes, Terrance (2010). Lighthead.  New York: Penguin Poets.

Hayes, Terrance (2015). How to be Drawn. New York: Penguin Poets.

*Henderson, George L. (1998). “South of the North, North of the South: Spatial Practice in David Bradley’s The Changeysville Incident” in Keep Your Head to the Sky: Interpreting African American Home Ground, edited by Grey Gundaker, with the assistance of Tynes Cowan, Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, pp. 113-143 with notes pp. 304-309.

Hill, Anita (2011). Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home. Boston: Beacon Press.

*Hill, Lawrence (2007/2015). The Book of Negroes (Someone Knows My Name). New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co.

Hobbs, Allyson (2014). A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press.

James, Marlon (2014.). A Brief History of Seven Killings. New York: Riverhead Books.

Jefferson, Margo (2015). Negroloand: A Memoir. New York: Pantheon Books.

Isenberg, Nancy (2016). White Trash: The 400-Year Old Untold History of Class in America. New York: Viking.

Jess, Tyehimba (2005). leadbelly. The National Poetry Series, selected by Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Amherst, MA: Verve Press.

Jess, Tyehimba (2016). OLIO. Seattle and New York: Wave Books.

Johnson, Robert Lee (2012). Images of America: Compton. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing.

Johnson, Walter (1999). Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market.  Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press.

Johnson, Walter (2013). River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom.  Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Jones, Kellie ((2011). EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art. With contributions by Amiri Baraka, Hettie Jones, Lisa Jones, and Guthrie P. Ramsay, Jr. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Jordan, Winthrop D. (1968/2012). White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550 1812. Second edition, with new forwards by Christopher Leslie Brown and Peter H. Wood. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

*Keene, John (1995). Annotations. New York: New Directions.

*Keene, John (2015).Counternarratives. New York: New Directions.

Kelley, Robin D. G. (2002). Freedom Dreams: the Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press.

Kendi, Ibram X. (2016). Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York: Nation Books.

Kennedy, Randall (2013. For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law.  New York: Pantheon Books.

*Lanier, Shannon and Jane Feldman (2000/2002). Jefferson’s Children: the Story of One American Family. Introduction by Lucian K. Truscott IV; historical essays by Annette Gordon-Reed and Beverly Gray. New York: Random House.

Lawrence, Jacob (1994). Thirty Years of Prints (1963-1993). A Catalogue Raisonné. Essay by Patricia Hills. Peter Nesbit, ed. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press.

Lawrence, Jacob (2015). Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series. Exhibition catalog with essays by Leah Dickerman, Elsa Smithgall, and notes by Jodi Roberts; The Migration Series Poetry Suite, Introduction by Elizabeth Alexander, Poems by Yusef Komunyakaa, Crystal Williams, Nikky Finney, Terrance Hayes, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Tyehimba Jess, Rita Dove, Natasha Trethewey, Patricia Spears Jones, Kevin Young. New York and Washington DC: The Museum of Modern Art and The Phillips Collection.

*Lee, Harper (2015). Go Set a Watchman. New York: Harper Collins.

Lewis, David Levering (1993/2000/2009). W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography. Condensed and updated edition of original 2 volume set (1993. 2000). New York: Henry Holt and Company.

*Lewis, John, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell (2013). March: Book One. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions.

*Lewis, John, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell (2015). March: Book Two. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions.

*Lewis, John, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell (2016). March: Book Three. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions.

Lindqvist, Sven (2014). The Dead Do Not Die: “Exterminate All the Brutes” and Terra Nullius. Introduction by Adam Hochschild. New York and London: The New Press.

*Locke, Attica (2009). Black Water Rising. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, New Delhi, Auckland: Harper Perennial.

*Locke, Attica (2012). The Cutting Season. New York: Harper Collins.

Locke, Attica (2015). Pleasantville. New York: HarperCollins.

*Mc Bride, James (1996/2006). The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother. New York: Riverhead Books.

*Mc Bride, James (2013). The Good Lord Bird. New York: Riverhead Books.

McBride, James (2016). Kill ‘Em and Leavr: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul. New York: Spiegel & Grau.

*Malan, Rian (1990). My Traitor’s Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience. New York: Grove Press.

*Malan, Rian (2012). The Lion Sleeps Tonight and Other Stories of Africa. New York: Grove Press.

*Mann, Sally (2015). Hold Still. A Memoir with Photographs. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

*Marable, Manning (2011). Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. New York: Penguin Group (USA)

Markusen, Bruce (2009). The Team That Changed Baseball: Roberto Clemente and the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates.  Yardley, PA: Westholme.

*Martin, Valerie (2004). Property. New York: Vintage Books.

*Menand, Louis (2001). The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Millward, Jessica (2015). Finding Charity’s Folks: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland. Athens GA and London: University of Georgia Press.

*Monk Kidd, Sue (2014). The Invention of Wings. New York: Viking.

*Morrison, Toni (2008). A Mercy. New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf.

*Morrison, Toni (2012). Home. New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf.

Morrison, Toni (2015). God Help the Child. New York & Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf.

Mullane, Deirdre, ed. & intro. (1993). Crossing the Danger Water: Three Hundred Years of African American Writing. New York: Anchor Books.

*Murray, Albert (1974/1998). Train Whistle Guitar. New York: Vintage International.

*Murray, Albert (1991). The Spyglass Tree. New York: Pantheon Books.

Murray, Albert (1995). The Seven League Boots. New York: Pantheon Books.

Murray, Albert (1997). Conversations with Albert Murray. Edited  by Roberta S. Maguire. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Murray, Albert (2005). The Magic Keys. New York: Pantheon.

Murray, Albert (2016). Murray Talks Music: Albert Murrat on Jazz and Blues. Edited by Paul Devlin, Foreward by Gary Giddins, Afterword by Greg Thomas. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press.

Naylor, Gloria (1988/1993). Mama Day. New York: Vintage Contemporaries.

Northrup, Solomon (1853/2013). Twelve Years A Slave: The Autobiography of Solomon Northrup. Edited, Introduction, Chapter Notes, and Historical Context by Sue Lyles Eakin. Eakin Films & Publishing.

*Onuora, Emy (2015). Pitch Black. The Story of Black British Footballers. London: Biteback Publishing Ltd.

Painter, Nell Irvin (2002). Southern History Across the Color Line. Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press.

*Painter, Nell Irvin (2010). The History of White People. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Co.

*Pierce, Wendell with Rod Dreher (2015). The Wind in the Reeds: A Storm, a Play, and the City That Would Not Be Broken. New York: Riverhead Books.

Pippin, Horace (1993). I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin. Judith Stein, ed. With contributions by Judith E. Stein, Cornel West, Judith Wilson, Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Richard J. Powell, Mark F. Bockrath and Barbara A. Buckley, Anne Monahan. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in association with Universe Publishing.

*Pope.L,William (2013). Black People are Cropped. With essays by Helen Molesworth and Iain Kerr. Zurich: JRP/Ringier.

Popkin, Jeremy D. (2007). Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

*Powell, Kevin (2015). The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy’s Journey Into Manhood.  New York: Atria Books.

*Powers, Kemp (2004). The Shooting: a Memoir.  New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press.

Press, Eyal (2012). Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times.  New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

*Rankine, Claudia (2014). CITIZEN: An American Lyric. Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press.

Rasmussen, Daniel (2011). American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt.  New York: Harper Collins.

Rees, Paul (2014). The Three Degrees. The Men Who Changed British Football Forever. London: Constable.

Reiss, Tom (2012). The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo.  New York: Crown Publishers.

*Roberts, Randy and Johnny Smith (2016).  Blood Brothers: the Fatal Friendship between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X.  New York: Basic Books.

Rosengarten, Theodore (1974/2000). All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw. Chicago: University of Chicago Press/New York: Vintage Books, Random House, Inc.

*Ross, Fran (1974/2015). Oreo. New York: New Directions.

Ross, Michael A. (2015). The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Race, Law, and Justice in the Reconstruction Era.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

*Rush, Norman (1986/1992). Whites. New York: Vintage Books.

*Rush, Norman (1991/1992). Mating. New York: Vintage Books.

*Rush, Norman (2003/2004). Mortals. New York: Vintage Books.

*Rushdy, Ashraf H.A. (2015). “Reflections on Indexing My Lynching Book,” in Best American Essays 2015, ed. Ariel Levy & Robert Abwan. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, pp. 172-184.

*Sanders, Eli (2016). While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man’s Descent into Madness. New York: Viking.

Sandweiss, Martha A. (2009). Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line. New York: The Penguin Group (USA).

Selz, Peter (1999). Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sculptor. With additional essay by  Anthony  F. Janson. New York: Abrams.

Senna, Danzy (1998). Caucasia. New York: Riverhead Books.

*Senna, Danzy (2009). Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Sharfstein, Daniel J. (2011). The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: The Penguin Press.

Skloot, Rebecca (2010/2011). The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Broadway Books.

*Smith, Tracy K. (2015), Ordinary Light: A Memoir. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Stanford, Karin L. and the Institute for Arts and Media, California State University, Northridge (2010). Images of America: African-Americans in Los Angeles. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing.

Stauffer, John, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier (2015). Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American. New York & London: Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Stevenson, Bryan (2014). Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. New Ork: Spiegel & Grau.

Stout, William (2013). Legends of the Blues. New York: Abrams ComicArts.

Sublette, Ned & Constance (2015). The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry.  Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books.

Sue, Derald Wing (2010). Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Sue, Derald Wing (2015).  Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Thompson, Clifford (2009). Signifying Nothing. New York & Bloomington: iUniverse, Inc,

Thompson, Clifford (2013). Love For Sale, and Other Essays. Pittsburgh: Autumn House Press.

Thompson, Clifford (2015). Twin of Blackness, a memoir. Pittsburgh: Autumn House Press.

Thompson, Heather Ann (2016). Blood in the Water: the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.  New York: Pantheon Books.

Tipton-Martin, Toni (2015). The Jemima Coda: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

*Unsworth, Barry (1992).  Sacred Hunger.  New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co.

*Vida – Spence, Judith (2008). “What’s Missing?” in Aspects of Mel’s Hole: Artists Respond to a Paranormal Land Event Occurring in Radiospace, curated by Doug Harvey.  Santa Ana, CA: Grand Central Press, pp. 29-35.

*Vida, Judith (2009). “What’s Missing?” (revised for presentation to IFPE Nineteenth Annual Interdisciplinary Conference Encounters and Escapes: Danger and Desire in the Analytic Connection, November 21-23, 2008, Boston, Massachusetts). www.ifpe.org : Other/Wise, Vol 2 Fall.

*Vida, Judith (2010). “Didn’t You Ever Love Me?” (Seventeen Bitter Fragments and an Afterword). Presented to IFPE 20^th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference Daring to Speak: Languages Spoken and Unspoken, November 6-8, Seattle, Washington. www.ifpe.org : Other/Wise, Vol 3, Spring.

Walker, Clarence B. (2010). Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press.

Walvin, James (2011). The ZONG: a Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

*Ward, Jesmyn (2011). Salvage the Bones. New york, London, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury

Ward, Jesmyn (2013). Men We Reaped. New York, London, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury.

Warren, Wendy (2016). New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America. New York, London: Livwright Publishing Corporation.

*Whitehead, Colson (2016). The Underground Railroad. New York: Doubleday.

Wilderson, Frank B. III (2008). Incognegro: a memoir of exile and apartheid. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

*Wilkerson, Isabel (2010/2011). The Warmth of Distant Suns: the Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Vintage Books.

Wilmore, Larry (2009/2015). I’d Rather We Got Casinos And Other Black Thoughts. New York & Boston: Hachette Books.

Wilson, August  (2007). The August Wilson Century Cycle (Ten Plays). Series Introduction by John Lahr. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Includes Gem of the Ocean (1904), Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1911), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1927), The Piano Lesson (1936), Seven Guitars (1948), Fences (1957), Two Trains Running (1969), Jitney (1977), King Hedley II (1985), Radio Golf (1997).

Wise, Tim (2012). Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

Wise, Tim (208/2011). White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son. Berkeley, California: Soft Skull Press.

Woodson, Carter G., ed (1926/2013). The Mind of the Negro As Reflected in Letters During the Crisis 1800-1860. Introduction to the Dover Edition by Bob Blaisdell. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc.

Woodson, Jacqueline (2014). brown girl dreaming. New York: The Penguin Group.

Wright, Michelle M. (2004). Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Wright, Michelle M. (2015). Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.

Wright, Richard (1940/1991/2014). Native Son. The restored text as established by the Library of America. New York: HarperCollins, First Olive Edition.

Wright, Richard (1945/1991/1993). Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth.  The restored text as established by the Library of America. New York: HarperCollins, Perennial Edition.

Wright, Richard (1954/1956/1957/2008). black power: Three Books from Exile: Black Power, The Color Curtain, and White Man, Listen!  With an introduction by Cornel West.  New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

Young, Kevin (2012). The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press.

Young, Kevin (2015). The Book of Hours: poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

*Young, Kevin (2016). Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

 

Other Media.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi (2015). “The Black Family in the Age of Incarceration,” The Atlantic, October, pp. 60-84.

*Rose, Jacqueline (2015). “The Bantu in the Bathroom: Jacqueline Rose on the trial of Oscar Pistorius.” London Review of Books, 19 November 2015, pp. 3-10.

*Benjamin, Rich (2015). TED talk. http://www.ted.com/talks/rich_benjamin_my_road_trip_through_the_whitest_towns_in_america#t-306014

*The Black Radical Imagination (2013). Film/video collection of shorts curated by Erin Christovale and Amir George, screened at REDCAT, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, Los Angeles, CA, October 7, 2013.

*The Black Radical Imagination II (2014). Film/video collection of shorts curated by Erin Christovale and Amir George, screened at REDCAT, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, Los Angeles, CA, November 10, 2014.

*The Book of Negroes. 2015. Television mini-series.

*Breuer, Lee and Bob Telson, conceived and adapted, and music. The Gospel at Colonus. Performed at Nate Holden Performing Arts Center, Los Angeles, CA. Andi Chapman, Director. October 4, 2015.

*Brown, Camille A. & Dancers (2015). BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play. Directed and choreographed by Camille A. Brown in collaboration with the women of CABD (Beatrice Capote, Catherine Foster, Fana Fraser, Mora-Amina Parker, Yusha-Marie Sorzano and Camille A Brown), perfomed at REDCAT, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, Los Angeles CA, December 6, 2015.

*Daáood, Kamau (1997). Leimert Park. An album of poetry and music.  Simi Valley, CA: MAMA Foundation.

*Daáood, Kamau, et al (2016). An evening of poetry and music, World Stage, Leimert Park, August 26, 2016.

*Davis, Kenturah (2015). Double Self-Portrait (Sonder…).

*Davis, Kenturah (2016). Untitled. (Portrait of Erin Christovale: I Live in Infinity).

*Gaines, Charles (2015). Librettos: Manuel de Falla/Stokely Carmichael Printed ink stained paper and lightjet print on acrylic. 12 Diptychs, each 36″ H x 27″ W x 3″ D (91.44 cm H x 68.58 cm W x 7.62 cm D) each; 36″ H x 56″ W x 3″ D (91.44 cm H x 142.24 cm W x 7.62 cm D) overall.

*Gunderson, Lauren. I and You. A Play. Performed at The Fountain Theatre, Los Angeles, CA. Robin Larsen, Director (2015).

*The Jackie Robinson Story, 2016. Two-part television documentary for PBS by Ric Burns.

*Jefferson in Paris. 1994. Film, 139 minutes.

*John Adams. 2008. Television mini-series, seven episodes.

*Johnson, Patrick Henry (2010?). (painting).

*Jones, Bill T. (2004). Dancing to The Promised Land. DVD

*Key & Peele (2012-2015). Television series. Comedy Central. (Began following in 2015.)

*Klos, Yashua (2015). Once You Could Fly. 68 x 68 inches. Paper constructions of oil based ink on wood block prints.

*Lamar, Kendrick (2015). Pimp Your Butterfly. Audio CD.

 *The Nightly Show, with Larry Wilmore (2015-August 18, 2016). Television series. Comedy Central.

 *McCraney, Tarell Alvin. The Brothers Size (a part of The Brother/Sister Plays). A Play. Performed at The Fountain Theatre, Los Angeles, CA. Shirley Jo Finney, Director (2014).

*Nelson, Stanley, et al (2016). The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. Documentary film shown on PBS’ “Independent Lens” series, February 16, 2016.

*Parks, Suzan-Lori (2016). Father Comes Home From the War (Parts 1, 2, & 3). A Play. Performed at Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, CA, Jo Bonney, Director.

*Powers, Kemp. One Night in Miami. A Play. Performed at Rogue Machine Theatre at Theater/Theatre, Los Angeles California. Carl Cofield, Director (2012).

*Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric, adapted for the stage by Stephen Sachs. A Play. Performed at The Fountain Theatre, Los Angeles, CA, Shirley Jo Finney, Director (2015.)

*Robert, Andy (2014). Dream Deferred. Slate, Skittles. Dimensions: 12” x 12” x 2”

*Robert, Andy (2015). Radio Haiti Haiti Internaitonal. 48 x 60 inches. Oil on canvas.

*Robert, Andy (2016). Little Man.

*Ross, Randy (2016). 92 Grove Street. A play. Staged reading at Vision Theatre, Leimert Park, August 27, 2016.

*Sally Hemings: An American Scandal. 2000. Television mini-series, 173 minutes.

*Simoncic, Steven (2014-2016). Broken Fences. A Play. Performed at The Road Theatre, North Hollywood, CA. Andre Barron, Director.

*Straight Outta Compton (2015). Film.

*Strother, Devin Troy (2012). A Black Yoko Ono in ‘Bitch I’m Getting Naked’.  12” x 16” x 1”

*Strother, Devin Troy (2015).  Triangle shaped nigga on a painted pedestal with a slice of abstraction. 48.25 x 12 x 14.75 inches. Autobody paint and acrylic on aluminum.

*Twelve Years a Slave, (2013). Film. Academy Award Best Picture 2013.

*Underground (2016). Television series. WGN

*Walker, Andre D. (2015) 3 photographs.

*Woods, Suné (2015). Traveling in the Light. 59” x 57”.

*Wright, Craig. The Unseen. A Play. Performed at The Road Theatre,

North Hollywood, California, Craig Wright, Director (2009).

 

Before (collected earlier).

*Abani, Chris (2000). Kalakuta Republic. London: Saqi Books.

Abani, Chris (2003). Daphne’s Lot. Los Angeles: Red Hen Press.

*Abani, Chris (2004). Graceland. New York: Picador.

Abani, Chris (2004). Dog Woman. Los Angeles: Red Hen Press.

*Abani, Chris (2006). Becoming Abigail.  New York: Akashic Books.

Abani, Chris (2006). Hands Washing Water. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press.

*Abani, Chris (2007). Song For Night. New York: Akashic Books.

Abani, Chris (2007).  The Virgin of Flames. New York: Penguin.

*Achebe, Chinua (1958/1994). Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor Books.

*Achebe, Chinua (1960/1994). No Longer at Ease. New York: Anchor Books.

Achebe, Chinua (1972/1991). Girls at War and Other Stories. New York : Anchor Books.

*Achebe, Chinua (1987). Anthills of the Savannah. New York: Anchor Books.

*Achebe, Chinua (2001). Home and Exile. New York: Anchor Books.

*Angelou, Maya (1970/1971). I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Bantam.

*Austen, Jane ( 1814/1962).. Mansfield Park. In The Works of Jane Austen. London: Allen Wingate Limited, pp. 347-558.

Baldwin, James (1957/1963). Giovanni”s Room. London: Transworld Publishers.

*Coetzee, J.M. (1987). Foe. New York: Penguin Books.

*Coetzee, J.M. (1999/2000). Disgrace.  New York: Penguin Books.

Cohen, Robert Carl (2008). Black Crusader: A Biography of Robert Franklin Williams. Radical Books: www.radicalbooks.com

*Coles, Robert (1968). Children of Crisis. New York: Dell.

Comas-Díaz, Lillian & Beverly Greene (1994). Women of Color: Integrating Ethnic and Gender Identities in Psychotherapy. New York & London: The Guilford Press.

Crouch, Stanley (2004). the artificial white man: essays on authenticity. New York: BasicCivitas Books.

Dyson, Michael Eric (1996). Between God and Gangsta Rap. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

*Foner, Eric (2002/2003). Who Owns History?  New York: Hill And Wang.

*Gordimer, Nadine (1981). July’s People. New York: Penguin Books.

Hinojosa, Maria (1995). Crews: Gang Members Talk to Maria Hinojosa. Photographs by German Perez. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace & Co.

*Howe, Fanny (2003). The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.

*Liebow, Elliott (1967.) Tally’s Corner: A Study of Streetcorner Men.

McKay, Claude ((2004). Complete Poems. Edited and with Introduction by William J. Maxwell. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

*Obama, Barack (1995/2004). Dreams from My Father. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Osofsky, Gilbert (1968). Harlem: the Making of a Ghetto. Negro New York, 1890-1930. New York: Harper & Row.

*Rawles, Nancy (2005). My Jim. New York: Crown Press.

Rose, Arnold (1948/1964). The Negro In America: The Condensed Version of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. New York: Harper & Row.

Schulz, David A. (1969). Coming Up Black: Patterns of Ghetto Socialization. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Sullivan, Shannon (2006). Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Woods, Donald and Mike Bostock (1988). Apartheid: A Graphic Guide. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

*Zinn, Howard (1980/2001). A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present. New York: Harper Collins.

Judith E. Vida may be contacted at: Jvida@spence.net

[1] Mel’s Hole: Artists Respond to a Paranormal Land Event Occurring in Radiospace (2008). Curated by Doug Harvey at Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana, California.

[2] Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903/2003). The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Modern Library Edition.

[3] “The Autobiographical Dialogue in the Dialogue Between Analysts: Introductory Notes on the Use of Relational and Intersubjective Perspectives in Conference Space,” by Gershon J. Molad and Judith E. Vida. In Relational and Intersubjective Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, J. Mills, Ed. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc., 2005. Footnotes inadvertently omitted in publication. Original 2002 version with footnotes available by request from the authors.

[4] Kundera quotes this quatrain by Jan Skacel: “Poets don’t invent poems/The poem is somewhere behind/It’s been there a long, long time/The poet merely discovers it (p. 115).” In Kundera, M. (1988) The Art of the Novel, L. Asher, Trans., New York: Harper & Row.

[5] This is Bauman’s own translation. In Bauman, Z. (2000) On Writing. Theory, Culture & Society, 17: 79-90.  In Linda Asher’s translation of this passage from the French (New York: Harper & Row, p. 115) “crushing” becomes “breaking,” a far less suggestive rendering.