Brooklyn College Library LibGuides Home: Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities 2023-24: Hess Scholar-in-Residence: Paul Ortiz

About Paul Ortiz

Paul Ortiz, Brooklyn College’s 2023-24 Hess Scholar-in-Residence, is Professor of History and Director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida.

He is the author of several books including, African American and Latinx History of the United States (2018) and Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (2005); co-editor of People Power: History, Organizing and Larry Goodwyn’s Democratic Vision in the Twenty-First Century (2021); and Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South (2014).

Ortiz’s An African American and Latinx History of the United States, was identified by Bustle as one of “Ten Books About Race to Read Instead of Asking a Person of Color to Explain Things to You.” Fortune Magazine listed it as one of the “10 books on American history that actually reflect the United States.”

He has published essays in The American Historical Review, Latino Studies, Cultural Dynamics, The Oral History Review, Kalfou, Florida Historical Quarterly, and many other journals. He has been interviewed by Agencia De Noticias Del Estado Mexicano, ARD German Radio and Television, Newsweek, Telemundo, The New Yorker, MoneyGeek, The Guardian, Washington Post, BBC, Hong Kong Daily Apple, The New York Times, and other media on the histories of social movements and immigration among other topics.

Prof. Ortiz is a former president of the Oral History Association. The Society of American Archivists bestowed its Diversity Award on the UF’s Proctor Oral History Program for its “relentless pursuit of community knowledge, local voices, and academic transformation has created a monumental program that has impacted the lives of countless people in Florida and across the nation.” The Doris Duke Charitable Trust noted that the program’s “social justice research methodologies are the focus of scholars and oral history programs across the globe.”

Prof. Ortiz is a PEN-award winning writer and a National Archives Distinguished Fellow in Latinx History. Paul was a consultant and featured narrator for Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s The Black Church: This is Our Story. This Is Our Song, which premiered on PBS in 2021. He is a consultant and featured narrator for John Leguizamo’s American Historia docuseries on Latino history that will air on PBS in 2024 with the permission of the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild.

Prof. Ortiz is a third-generation military veteran and a first-generation college graduate. He served with the 82nd Airborne Division and 7th Special Forces Group in Central America where he worked in multiple combat zones. He received the US Armed Forces’ Humanitarian Service Medal for meritorious action in the wake of the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz stratovolcano in 1985.

Prof. Ortiz received his PhD in history from Duke University in 2000. He earned his BA from the Evergreen State College in 1990 and his Associate of Arts degree from Olympic College in 1988. His pathway to academia included working as an organizer with the United Farm Workers, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee and many other unions and community organizations.

In 2013, Paul Ortiz received the César E. Chávez Action and Commitment Award, from the Florida Education Association, AFL-CIO for “Outstanding leadership through engaging in activities which dignify workers and by making notable contributions to the labor movement & demonstrating resilience in organizing workers, especially those who have been traditionally disadvantaged.” Prof. Ortiz a is past president of the United Faculty of Florida-UF (FEA-AFL-CIO), the union that represents tenured and non-tenure track faculty at UF.

Books by Paul Ortiz

An African American and Latinx History of the United States by Paul Ortiz
Publication Date: 2018
An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights. Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like "manifest destiny" and "Jacksonian democracy," and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism. Drawing on rich narratives and primary source documents, Ortiz links racial segregation in the Southwest and the rise and violent fall of a powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the twentieth century, to May 1, 2006, known as International Workers' Day, when migrant laborers-Chicana/os, Afrocubanos, and immigrants from every continent on earth-united in resistance on the first "Day Without Immigrants." As African American civil rights activists fought Jim Crow laws and Mexican labor organizers warred against the suffocating grip of capitalism, Black and Spanish-language newspapers, abolitionists, and Latin American revolutionaries coalesced around movements built between people from the United States and people from Central America and the Caribbean. In stark contrast to the resurgence of "America First" rhetoric, Black and Latinx intellectuals and organizers today have historically urged the United States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the Americas. Incisive and timely, this bottom-up history, told from the interconnected vantage points of Latinx and African Americans, reveals the radically different ways that people of the diaspora have addressed issues still plaguing the United States today, and it offers a way forward in the continued struggle for universal civil rights.
People Power: History, Organizing and Larry Goodwyn’s Democratic Vision in the Twenty-First Century by Wesley C. Hogan (Editor); Paul Ortiz (Editor)
Publication Date: 2021
Featuring contributions from leading scholar-activists, People Power demonstrates how the lessons of history can inform the building of new social justice movements today. This volume is inspired by the pathbreaking life and work of writer, activist, and historian Lawrence Goodwyn. As a radical Texas journalist and a political organizer, Goodwyn participated in historic changes ushered in by grassroots activism in the 1950s and 1960s. Professor and cofounder of the Oral History Program at Duke University, Goodwyn wrote about movements built by Latino farm workers, Polish trade unionists, civil rights activists, and others who challenged the status quo. The essays in this volume examine Goodwyn's influence in political and social movements, his approaches to teaching and writing, and his insights into the long history behind contemporary activism. People Power will generate deep discussions about the potential of democracy amid the multiple crises of our time. What motivates ordinary people to move from kitchen table conversations to civic engagement? What do the chronicles of past social movements tell us about how to confront the real blocks of racism and the idea that Americans are somehow exceptional? Contributors provide key experiential knowledge that will help today's scholars and community organizers address these pressing questions.
Remembering Jim Crow by William H. Chafe (Editor, Preface by); Raymond Gavins (Editor); Robert Korstad (Editor)
Call Number: E185.61 .R4 2001
Publication Date: 2014
This "viscerally powerful compilation of firsthand accounts of the Jim Crow era" won the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Carey McWilliams Award (Publisher's Weekly, starred review). Based on interviews collected by the Behind the Veil Project at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, this remarkable book presents for the first time the most extensive oral history ever compiled of African American life under segregation. Men and women from all walks of life tell how their most ordinary activities were subjected to profound and unrelenting racial oppression. Yet Remembering Jim Crow is also a testament to how black southerners fought back against systemic racism--building churches and schools, raising children, running businesses, and struggling for respect in a society that denied them the most basic rights. The result is a powerful story of individual and community survival.
Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 by Paul Ortiz
Publication Date: 2005
In this penetrating examination of African American politics and culture, Paul Ortiz throws a powerful light on the struggle of black Floridians to create the first statewide civil rights movement against Jim Crow. Concentrating on the period between the end of slavery and the election of 1920, Emancipation Betrayed vividly demonstrates that the decades leading up to the historic voter registration drive of 1919-20 were marked by intense battles during which African Americans struck for higher wages, took up arms to prevent lynching, forged independent political alliances, boycotted segregated streetcars, and created a democratic historical memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Contrary to previous claims that African Americans made few strides toward building an effective civil rights movement during this period, Ortiz documents how black Floridians formed mutual aid organizations--secret societies, women's clubs, labor unions, and churches--to bolster dignity and survival in the harsh climate of Florida, which had the highest lynching rate of any state in the union. African Americans called on these institutions to build a statewide movement to regain the right to vote after World War I. African American women played a decisive role in the campaign as they mobilized in the months leading up to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. The 1920 contest culminated in the bloodiest Election Day in modern American history, when white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan violently, and with state sanction, prevented African Americans from voting. Ortiz's eloquent interpretation of the many ways that black Floridians fought to expand the meaning of freedom beyond formal equality and his broader consideration of how people resist oppression and create new social movements illuminate a strategic era of United States history and reveal how the legacy of legal segregation continues to play itself out to this day.
African American Studies by Jacob U'Mofe Gordon (Editor); Paul Ortiz (Editor)
Call Number: E184.7 .A314 2021
Publication Date: 2022
African American Studies: 50 Years at the University of Florida provides an impactful overview of African American Studies; documents the research of Black faculty at UF; examines how African American Studies encourages community engagement and service; contains testimonies from community elders; and includes reflections by and about prominent UF alumni such as Judge Stephan Mickle and Dr. David Horne.

Articles & Additional Works by Paul Ortiz

Report of the Presidential Task Force on African American and Native American History and the University of Florida
University of Florida (April 2022)

Arizona's New Laws: An Attempt to Secure Cheap Labor?
in Truthout (June 2010)

Memories of Revolution
in Cultural Dynamics, Vol. 31, Issue 4 (September 2019)

Roundtable on Jill Lepore's These Truths: A History of the United States
in American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 5 (December 2020)

Oral History, Democracy, and the Power of Memory
in African American Studies: 50 Years at the University of Florida, ed., Jacob Gordon and Paul Ortiz (2021)

C.L.R. James's Visionary Legacy
in Against the Current (January/February 2012)

Black History in Florida
Washington Post Interview with Paul Ortiz and Jonathan Capehart (August 2, 2023)

Can't Ban Us Day of Action
in Black History Teach-Ins in Florida and Beyond, Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (February 25, 2023)

Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida

Making History Matter: Teaching Comparative African American and Latina/o Histories in an Age of Neoliberal Crisis
in Kalfou (Spring 2016)

Challenging Racism Series
The Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida (2022-23)

Nazis on Campus: A Union and Community Responds
by Susan Hegeman and Paul Ortiz
in Thought & Culture: The NEA Higher Education Journal (Summer 2018)

Related Books

Our History Has Always Been Contraband by Colin Kaepernick (Editor); Robin D. G. Kelley (Editor); Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Editor)
Publication Date: 2023
"The centuries-long attack on Black history represents a strike against our very worth, brilliance, and value. We're ready to fight back. And when we fight, we win." --Colin Kaepernick Since its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it. Our History Has Always Been Contraband was born out of an urgent need to respond to the latest threat: efforts to remove content from an AP African American Studies course being piloted in high schools across the United States. Edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Our History Has Always Been Contraband brings together canonical texts and authors in Black Studies, including those excised from or not included in the AP curriculum. Featuring writings by: David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Angela Y. Davis, Robert Allen, Barbara Smith, Toni Cade Bambara, bell hooks, Barbara Christian, Patricia Hill Collins, Cathy J. Cohen, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Saidiya Hartman, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and many others. Our History Has Always Been Contraband excerpts readings that cut across and between literature, political theory, law, psychology, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, queer and feminist theory, and history. This volume also includes original essays by editors Kaepernick, Kelley, and Taylor, elucidating how we got here, and pieces by Brea Baker, Marlon Williams-Clark, and Roderick A. Ferguson detailing how we can fight back. To read Our History Has Always Been Contraband is to be an outlaw for liberation. These writings illuminate the ways we can collectively work toward freedom for all--through abolition, feminism, racial justice, economic empowerment, self-determination, desegregation, decolonization, reparations, queer liberation, cultural and artistic expression, and beyond.
Puerto Rican Studies in the City University of New York by María Pérez y González (Editor); Virginia Sánchez Korrol (Editor)
Call Number: F1970.8 .P85x 2021
ISBN: 1945662492
Publication Date: 2021-09-30
"Authored by leading scholars in the field of Puerto Rican and Latinx Studies, this volume is an important milestone in documenting the power of collective consciousness and action to create change in and access to higher education for all peoples. The book features a comprehensive fifty-year trajectory in the field of Puerto Rican Studies (PRS) at the City University of New York in a series of critical essays on scholarship, the social sciences, bilingual education, media, and its counterparts beyond CUNY, in addition to retrospectives from founders of the field, current professors, and alumni. The student founders of PRS, its pioneering faculty and groundbreaking interdisciplinary focus on the intersectionalities of race, culture, gender, power, and class, elucidate a contentious path to forging an anti-racist and decolonial pedagogy. The critical analysis in the scholarship found in this volume assesses the current status of Puerto Rican Studies in continuing to meet its academic mission, challenges and opportunities, and points to future directions in the 21st century."

Related Reports & Articles

Report of a Special Committee: Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida's Public Higher Education System
American Association of University Professors
December 2023

Additional Books Recommended by Paul Ortiz

A Nation of Women: an Early Feminist Speaks Out/Mi Opinion by Luisa Capetillo; Félix Matos Rodríguez (Editor, Introduction by); Alan West-Duran (Translator)
Publication Date: 2005
Luisa Capetillo is best known in popular culture as the first woman to wear men's trousers. The splash of recognition following her arrest and acquittal for her choice of clothing in 1915, today overshadows her significant contributions to the women's movement and the anarchist labor movements, both in her native Puerto Rico and in the migrant labor belt that stretched along the Eastern United States, from Tampa to New York. This volume combines a facsimile of the original Spanish edition with a new English translation of Capetillo's landmark Mi opinion sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer, originally published in Spanish in 1911. Mi opinion is considered by many to be the first feminist treatise in Puerto Rico and one of the first in Latin America and the Caribbean. In concise prose, Capetillo advocates a worker's and women. Her essays challenge big business in favor of socialism, and she calls for legalizing divorce and the acceptance of "free love" in relationships between men and women. Her writing also covers a swath of other topics, veering into passages concerning sexuality, mental and physical health, hygiene, spirituality, and nutrition. At once a sharp critique and a celebration of the gathering fervor of world politics, Capetillo views both her native Puerto Rico and the world outside, providing a sense of the workers movement and the condition of women at the turn of the century. Capetillo embraces the humanistic thinking of the early twentieth century and envisions a world in which economic and social structures can be broken down, allowing both the worker and the woman to be free.
Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life by Emma Mashinini; Gay Seidman (Introduction by); Nomalizo Leah Tutu (Foreword by)
Publication Date: 1991
Emma Mashinini was Secretary of one of South Africa's biggest trade unions when she was arrested without charge and detained for six months, often in solitary confinement. This powerful and compelling autobiography of Mashinini relates the moving story of her life under apartheid from her childhood in Sophiatown, her first marriage and divorce, motherhood, and her work in a textile factory that eventually lead her to the trade union.
Ybor City by Sarah McNamara
Publication Date: 2023
Decades before Miami became Havana USA, a wave of leftist, radical, working-class women and men from prerevolutionary Cuba crossed the Florida Straits, made Ybor City the global capital of the Cuban cigar industry, and established the foundation of latinidad in the Sunshine State. Located on the eastern edge of Tampa, Ybor City was a neighborhood of cigar workers and Caribbean revolutionaries who sought refuge against the shifting tides of international political turmoil during the early half of the twentieth century. Historian Sarah McNamara tells the story of immigrant and U.S.-born Latinas/os who organized strikes, marched against fascism, and criticized U.S. foreign policy. While many members of the immigrant generation maintained their dedication to progressive ideals for years to come, those who came of age in the wake of World War II distanced themselves from leftist politics amidst the Red Scare and the wrecking ball of urban renewal. This portrait of the political shifts that defined Ybor City highlights the underexplored role of women's leadership within movements for social and economic justice as it illustrates how people, places, and politics become who and what they are.
Holding the Line by Barbara Kingsolver
Call Number: HD5325.M73 1983 .M675 1989
Publication Date: 2012
Holding the Line, Barbara Kingsolver's first non-fiction book, is the story of women's lives transformed by an a signal event. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, it is part oral history and part social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment which occurs when people work together as a community. Like Kingsolver's award-winning novels, Holding the Line is a beautifully written book grounded on the strength of its characters. Hundreds of families held the line in the 1983 strike against Phelps Dodge Copper in Arizona. After more than a year the strikers lost their union certification, but the battle permanently altered the social order in these small, predominantly Hispanic mining towns. At the time the strike began, many women said they couldn't leave the house without their husband's permission. Yet, when injunctions barred union men from picketing, their wives and daughters turned out for the daily picket lines. When the strike dragged on and men left to seek jobs elsewhere, women continued to picket, organize support, and defend their rights even when the towns were occupied by the National Guard. "Nothing can ever be the same as it was before," said Diane McCormick of the Morenci Miners Women's Auxiliary. "Look at us. At the beginning of this strike, we were just a bunch of ladies."
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
Call Number: PS3554 .I259 B75 2007
Publication Date: 2007
Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read, Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukú--the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim. Díaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Díaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.
The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat
Call Number: PS3554 .A5815 F37 1999a
Publication Date: 2003
In a 1930s Dominican Republic village, the scream of a woman in labor rings out like the shot heard around Hispaniola. Every detail of the birth scene--the balance of power between the middle-aged Seora and her Haitian maid, the babies' skin color, not to mention which child is to survive--reverberates throughout Edwidge Danticat's Farming of Bones. In fact, rather than a celebration of fecundity, the unexpected double delivery gels into a metaphor for the military-sponsored mass murder of Haitian emigrants. As the Seora's doctor explains: "Many of us start out as twins in the belly and do away with the other." But Danticat's powerful second novel is far from a currently modish victimization saga, and can hold its own with such modern classics as One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Color Purple. Its watchful narrator, the Seora's shy Haitian housemaid, describes herself as "one of those sea stones that sucks its colors inside and loses its translucence once it's taken out into the sun." An astute observer of human character, Amabelle Dsir is also a conduit for the author's tart, poetic prose. Her lover, Sebastian, has "arms as wide as one of my bare thighs," while the Seora's complicit officer husband is "still shorter than the average man, even in his military boots." The orphaned Amabelle comes to assume almost messianic proportions, but she is entirely fictional, as is the town of Alegra where the tale begins. The genocide and exodus, however, are factual. Indeed, the atrocities committed by Dominican president Rafael Trujillo's army back in 1937 rival those of Duvalier's Touton Macoutes. History has rendered Trujillo's carnage much less visible than Duvalier's, but no less painful. As Amabelle's father once told her, "Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of." Thanks to Danticat's stellar novel, the world will now know.
The Piano Lesson by August Wilson
Call Number: PS3573 .I45677 P54 1990
Publication Date: 1990
Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, this modern American classic is about family, and the legacy of slavery in America. August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences. In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned perhaps his most haunting and dramatic work. At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won possession, has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles's Pittsburgh home. When Boy Willie, Berniece's exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash he needs to stake his future. But Berniece refuses to sell, clinging to the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy. This dilemma is the real "piano lesson," reminding us that blacks are often deprived both of the symbols of their past and of opportunity in the present.
Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya; Luis Urrea (Editor)
Call Number: PS3551.N27 R83 2022
Publication Date: 2022
A writer powerfully attuned to the land and history of his native New Mexico, Rudolfo Anaya (1937 2020) is one of the giants of Latino literature. Over the course of a remarkable and acclaimed literary career, Anaya redefined the American experience for generations of readers. Collected here are his 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima, the 1979 novel Tortuga, and the 1992 novel Alburquerque, the winner of a PEN West Fiction Award.
Moby Dick by Herman. Melville
Call Number: PS2384 .M6 2002
Publication Date: 1999
This sesquicentennial Norton Critical Edition is uniquely valuable as the most up-to-date and comprehensive documentary source for study of Moby-Dick.
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Call Number: PS3572 .O5 S4 2009
ISBN: 9780385333849
Publication Date: 1999
Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world's great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber's son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming "unstuck in time." An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut's writing--the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit--that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut's portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era's uncertainties.
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Call Number: PS3563 .O8749 B433 2004
Publication Date: 2004
A spellbinding novel that transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. With a new afterword by the author. This "brutally powerful, mesmerizing story" (People) is an unflinching look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Call Number: PS3511 .A86 A6766 1990
Publication Date: 1991
Family drama and the legacy of slavery haunt this epic tale of an enigmatic stranger in Jefferson, Mississippi--from one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century. Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner's epic tale of Thomas Sutpen, a man who comes to the South in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him."
Black Marxism by Cedric J. Robinson
Call Number: HX56 .R6x 1983
Publication Date: 2005
In this ambitious work, first published in 1983, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand Black people's history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of Black people and Black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of Blacks on western continents, Robinson argues, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this. To illustrate his argument, Robinson traces the emergence of Marxist ideology in Europe, the resistance by blacks in historically oppressive environments, and the influence of both of these traditions on such important twentieth-century black radical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright.
Memoria del Fuego by Eduardo Galeano
Call Number: F1408.27 .G34 1982
Publication Date: 1982-1986
Historias de grandeza y de debilidad, de astucia y de traición, de inocencia y de dignidad forman parte de nuestra gran historia, de todo eso que hizo de nosotros casi 400 millones de desposeídos.
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney; Angela Davis (Introduction by)
Call Number: HC800 .R62 2018
ISBN: 9781788731188
Publication Date: 2018
The classic work of political, economic, and historical analysis, powerfully introduced by Angela Davis In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has not only informed decades of scholarship and activism, it remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.
Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano; Isabel Allende (Foreword by)
Call Number: HC125 .G25313 1979
Publication Date: 1997
The classic survey of Latin America's social and cultural history, with a new introduction by Isabel Allende Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx. Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe. Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano fuses scientific analysis with the passions of a plundered and suffering people. An immense gathering of materials is framed with a vigorous style that never falters in its command of themes. All readers interested in great historical, economic, political, and social writing will find a singular analytical achievement, and an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably. This classic is now further honored by Isabel Allende's inspiring introduction. Universally recognized as one of the most important writers of our time, Allende once again contributes her talents to literature, to political principles, and to enlightenment.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Call Number: PS3515 .U789 T5 2006
Publication Date: 2013
One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years--due largely to initial audiences' rejection of its strong Black female protagonist--Hurston's classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Call Number: E185.61 .B195 1993
Publication Date: 1992
The book that galvanized the nation, gave voice to the emerging civil rights movemen tin the 1960s--and still lights the way to understanding race in America today. * At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document from the iconic author of If Beale Street Could Talk and Go Tell It on the Mountain. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle ... all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of literature.
Price of The Ticket (includes "The Devil Finds Work") by James Baldwin
Call Number: PS3552 .A45 P7 1985
Publication Date: 1985-09-15
This collection brings together every important piece of nonfiction written by the eminent writer between 1948 and 1985--including The Fire Next Time and The Devil Finds Work.