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In the history of American soul music, perhaps no other artist has been more overlooked than Joe Tex. During the golden age of soul music in the 1960's, Tex was not only a tremendous singer and dancer, but he wrote many hit songs, including his own four biggest hit records. This book follows his early days in Texas, his success and struggles on the road, his 25-year recording career, his life-long rivalry with James Brown, his conversion to the Muslim faith, and his triumphant return to show business. Joe Tex is one of the most dynamic and talented artists in the history of American music. Here is his story. Rare photographs and discography included.
Lance Shabazz life was the Nation of Islam. This book journey's over fifty personal years traveling thousands of miles and many dozens of interviews culminating my Decision to walk away from it all. I realized my beliefs and principles gained as a follower of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is rejected, altered, modified and the last trick our messenger warned us all to stay away from what today's so-called followers accept. Lip profession counts for naught unless carried into practice. I therefore share some of my history for the family and students of the Nation of Islam.
In February 1999 the tragic New York City police shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed street vendor from Guinea, brought into focus the existence of West African merchants in urban America. In Money Has No Smell, Paul Stoller offers us a more complete portrait of the complex lives of West African immigrants like Diallo, a portrait based on years of research Stoller conducted on the streets of New York City during the 1990s. Blending fascinating ethnographic description with incisive social analysis, Stoller shows how these savvy West African entrepreneurs have built cohesive and effective multinational trading networks, in part through selling a simulated Africa to African Americans. These and other networks set up by the traders, along with their faith as devout Muslims, help them cope with the formidable state regulations and personal challenges they face in America. As Stoller demonstrates, the stories of these West African traders illustrate and illuminate ongoing debates about globalization, the informal economy, and the changing nature of American communities.
Among the Songhay of Mali and Niger, who consider the stomach the seat of personality, learning is understood not in terms of mental activity but in bodily terms. Songhay bards study history by "eating the words of the ancestors," and sorcerers learn their art by ingesting particular substances, by testing their flesh with knives, by mastering pain and illness. In Sensuous Scholarship Paul Stoller challenges contemporary social theorists and cultural critics who—using the notion of embodiment to critique Eurocentric and phallocentric predispositions in scholarly thought—consider the body primarily as a text that can be read and analyzed. Stoller argues that this attitude is in itself Eurocentric and is particularly inappropriate for anthropologists, who often work in societies in which the notion of text, and textual interpretation, is foreign. Throughout Sensuous Scholarship Stoller argues for the importance of understanding the "sensuous epistemologies" of many non-Western societies so that we can better understand the societies themselves and what their epistemologies have to teach us about human experience in general.
A history of African American presence in the Hudson Valley region from the colonial period to the present.
New Perspectives on the Nation of Islam contributes to the ongoing dialogue about the nature and influence of the Nation of Islam (NOI), bringing fresh insights to areas that have previously been overlooked in the scholarship of Elijah Muhammad’s NOI, the Imam W.D. Mohammed community and Louis Farrakhan’s Resurrected NOI. Bringing together contributions that explore the formation, practices, and influence of the NOI, this volume problematizes the history of the movement, its theology, and relationships with other religious movements. Contributors offer a range of diverse perspectives, making connections between the ideology of the NOI and gender, dietary restrictions and foodways, the internationalization of the movement, and the civil rights movement. This book provides a state-of-the-art overview of current scholarship on the Nation of Islam, and will be relevant to scholars of American religion and history, Islamic studies, and African American Studies.
The book, although randomly organized, describes many things about the life journey of the author before, during, and after his discharge from the United States Air Force and his emphatic disapproval of the term African American to describe all black people. The author believes the term African American limits the overall progress of black people in general and that whites born in Africa, now living in the United States, can also be called African American, defeating the reasoning behind the African American Summit, where the term African American was said to be endorsed by five prominent black people against the approval and rights of black people in general.
The patriarchal structure of the Nation of Islam (NOI) promised black women the prospect of finding a provider and a protector among the organization's men, who were fiercely committed to these masculine roles. Black women's experience in the NOI, however, has largely remained on the periphery of scholarship. Here, Ula Taylor documents their struggle to escape the devaluation of black womanhood while also clinging to the empowering promises of patriarchy. Taylor shows how, despite being relegated to a lifestyle that did not encourage working outside of the home, NOI women found freedom in being able to bypass the degrading experiences connected to labor performed largely by working-class black women and in raising and educating their children in racially affirming environments. Telling the stories of women like Clara Poole (wife of Elijah Muhammad) and Burnsteen Sharrieff (secretary to W. D. Fard, founder of the Allah Temple of Islam), Taylor offers a compelling narrative that explains how their decision to join a homegrown, male-controlled Islamic movement was a complicated act of self-preservation and self-love in Jim Crow America.
A delicious and delightful narrative history of pie in America, from the colonial era through the civil rights movement and beyond. With corresponding recipes for each chapter and sidebars of quirky facts throughout, this book—winner of the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Award for Best Literary or Historical Food Writing—is an entertaining, informative, and utterly charming food history for bakers, dessert lovers, and history aficionados alike. Ultimately, the story of pie is the story of America itself, and it’s time to dig in. From the pumpkin pie gracing the Thanksgiving table to the apple pie at the Fourth of July picnic, nearly every American shares ...
Since his arrival in Detroit on July 4, 1930, W.D. Fard, known also as Wallace Fard Muhammad and over fifty other aliases, has elicited an enormous amount of curiosity. Who was this man who claimed that he was both the Messiah and the Mahdi, and who was identified as God in Person by his disciple, Elijah Muhammad, whom he reportedly appointed as his Final Messenger? The people who actually met him, and the scholars who have studied him, have suggested that he was variously an African American, an Arab from Syria, Lebanon, Algeria, Morocco or Saudi Arabia, a Jamaican, a Turk, an Afghan, an Indo-Pakistani, an Iranian, an Azeri, a white American, a Bosnian, a Mexican, a Greek or even a Jew. In ...