10 Books Published by Indiana University Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

In April of 1994, nearly a million Rwandans were killed in what would prove to be one of the swiftest, most terrifying killing sprees of the 20th century. In Murambi, The Book of Bones, Boubacar Boris Diop comes face to face with the chilling horror and overwhelming sadness of the tragedy. Here, the power of Diop’s acclaimed novel is available to English-speaking readers through Fiona Mc Laughlin’s crisp translation and a compelling afterword by Diop. The novel recounts the story of a Rwandan history teacher, Cornelius Uvimana, who was living and working in Djibouti at the time of the massacre. He returns to Rwanda to try to comprehend the death of his family and to write a play about the events that took place there. As the novel unfolds, Cornelius begins to understand that it is only our humanity that will save us, and that as a writer, he must bear witness to the atrocities of the genocide.

This dark and suspenseful novel tells the story of a fictitious West African country caught in the grip of civil war. The dispassionate and deadpan narrator, Asante Kroma, is a former head of Secret Services and finds himself living with the corpse of the dictator, a man who once ruled his nation with an iron fist. Through a series of flashbacks and letters penned by the dictator, N’Zo Nikiema, readers discover the role of the French shadow leader, Pierre Castaneda, whose ongoing ambition to exploit the natural resources of the country knows no limits. As these powerful men use others as pawns in a violent real-life chess match, it is the murder of six-year-old Kaveena and her mother’s quest for vengeance that brings about a surprise reckoning.

This tale of wild adventure reveals the dashed hopes of Africans living between worlds. When Moki returns to his village from France wearing designer clothes and affecting all the manners of a Frenchman, Massala-Massala, who lives the life of a humble peanut farmer after giving up his studies, begins to dream of following in Moki’s footsteps. Together, the two take wing for Paris, where Massala-Massala finds himself a part of an underworld of out-of-work undocumented immigrants. After a botched attempt to sell metro passes purchased with a stolen checkbook, he winds up in jail and is deported. Blue White Red is a novel of postcolonial Africa where young people born into poverty dream of making it big in the cities of their former colonial masters. Alain Mabanckou’s searing commentary on the lives of Africans in France is cut with the parody of African villagers who boast of a son in the country of Digol.

Charles Johnson is one of the most talented artists currently working in America. All of his novels have been widely praised and read. Middle Passage won the National Book Award and established Johnson in the tradition of Ralph Ellison, one of his idols. In 1998 he was the recipient of one of the prestigious MacArthur "Genius" awards.Though best known for his fiction, Johnson is also an accomplished essayist, reviewer, scriptwriter, and cartoonist. This collection gathers together a rich sampling of his work, including stories, speeches, cartoons, and interviews. A final section contains scholarly commentary by leading academic writers. I Call Myself an Artist provides a fascinating overview of the life work of one of America’s most important creative minds.

“In this critique of aesthetics and the politics of representation, Taylor demonstrates astonishing breadth and depth in arguing for ‘breaking the aesthetic contract’ that excludes anything that does not conform to Eurocentric notions of beauty… . it brings to black studies and cultural critique an internationalism that emphasizes the richness of forms of creative expression outside the norms set by European aesthetics. Highly recommended …” —Choice

Cultural critic Clyde Taylor exposes the concept of “art” as a tool of ethnocentricity and racial ideology. By examining various texts including The Birth of a Nation and The Cotton Club, Taylor demonstrates how rationales of “art” are used to mask personal, class, and cultural biases. Other works such as those by Toni Morrison, Chinua Achebe, and Spike Lee are scrutinized in terms of resistance to the dominant system of aesthetics.

Renowned scholar Charles Johnson’s exploration of contemporary black literature and the meaning of the black experience as expressed through the writers Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, David Bradley, and others.

Charles Johnson approaches contemporary black literature through the lens of phenomenology. Drawing on such philosophers as Heidegger, Husserl, Satre, and Dufrenne, Johnson addresses the esthetic and epistemological questions surrounding the black experience as expressed by African American authors. In exploring the works of other great writers, Being & Race enlarges our vision of what fiction’s purpose is and how it arises from our common experiences.

“The book is a gripping litany of sermon, scripture, and spirituality. It is strident and unembarrassed by its message, urgent in its delivery, somewhat daunting in the tenets it proposes, and clear in its mission.”—Black Issues Book Review

Editors Charles Johnson (whose Middle Passage won the National Book Award) and John McCluskey, Jr. have gathered the voices of 11 African-American men in this volume to tell us how they see themselves and other black males in America today. Contributors include Don Belton, Joseph W. Scott, and Peter J. Harris.

[This] critical edition of a selection of Richard B. Moore’s essays closes one more gap in the astonishing history of twentieth-century Afro-American nationalism." ?Journal of American HistoryThis first collection of Moore’s writings… [is] a welcome and important contribution to scholarship concerned with the political and intellectual history of African peoples in general and of African peoples in the Americas, in particular…. an inspiration to those who follow after to study and emulate his life and achievement." ?Journal of American Ethnic History

A serious piece of scholarship in the field of research into issues of gender in the Caribbean and to understanding the background to Caribbean literature, politics and society.

His pictures of Harlem life are as fresh today as they were when they were first set down… " —Long Beach Press-Telegraph