Valerie Smith

From Sojourner Truth to Patricia J. Williams, Black feminists have recognized the mutual dependence of race and gender. Author Valerie Smith explores the myriad ways race and gender shape lives and social practices, not to deny the validity of black women's experience, but to resist deploying a uniform model of black women's lives.

Black Feminist Readings

Not Just Race, Not Just Gender

Contains biographical and critical essays on the work of important African American writers.

African American Writers: James Baldwin to Gayl Jones

The essays collected here, written by leading critics of Toni Morrison's work, exemplify the fresh theoretical and cultural perspectives that have been brought to bear on African-American texts in general and on Song of Solomon in particular. They reveal the complexities of a deceptively straightforward novel and spark renewed interest in this pivotal text by one of the most gifted authors this nation has produced.

New Essays on Song of Solomon

Tom Finkelpearl

In an increasingly globalized cultural landscape, artists are often asked to represent their "home" country. But what if identifying home is a complex matter? The Queens Museum of Art organized the exhibition Generation 1.5 with this sort of ambiguity of origin in mind. With a title taking its name from the Korean-American phrase describing people who moved to a new country between the ages of 12 and 18, Generation 1.5 featured eight artists who made this transition--Ellen Harvey, Pablo Helguera, Emily Jacir, Lee Mingwei, Shirin Neshat, Seher Shah, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Nari Ward. This volume examines Generation 1.5 and the featured artists through interviews and essays that address cultural representation, cosmopolitanism, personal expression, alienation, the pain of transition, immigration, exile, and the complexity and limitations of identity politics. With essays and interviews by Man Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai, Pulitzer Prize finalist Suketu Mehta plus noted sociologists, artists, writers and curators.

Generation 1.5

African American Writers: June Jordan to Richard Wright

Michael Bigelow Dixon

Diane King Vann

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Henry Louis Gates (Jr.)

Provides a survey of African American literature, from 140 writers, covering three centuries.

The Norton Anthology of African American Literature

A prolifically creative artistic polymath, American artist Amy Sillman (b. 1955) works in drawing, zines, iPhone videos, installation, collaboration, teaching, and curating, but painting has remained always at the very heart of her practice. This comprehensive monograph covers two decades of production, from the late-1990s to the present. Valerie Smith's text reveals Sillman's uniquely time-based approach to painting, influenced and inflected as much by filmmakers and musicians and the processes of her other chosen disciplines as by strictly art-historical forebears. Sillman's works perform an intensive cognitive and gestural interrogation of her chosen materials: discovering, undoing, and reforming trains of painterly thought, often over long periods of time and across large numbers of linked works. Sillman's painting emerges as a radically expressive force: a pointedly self-reflexive practice that reformulates contemporary painting as an ever-evolving continuum and never simply a finished work.

Amy Sillman

This compelling study explores the inextricable links between the Nobel laureate’s aesthetic practice and her political vision, through an analysis of the key texts as well as her lesser-studied works, books for children, and most recent novels. Offers provocative new insights and a refreshingly original contribution to the scholarship of one of the most important contemporary American writers Analyzes the celebrated fiction of Morrison in relation to her critical writing about the process of reading and writing literature, the relationship between readers and writers, and the cultural contributions of African-American literature Features extended analyses of Morrison’s lesser-known works, most recent novels, and books for children as well as the key texts

Writing the Moral Imagination

Toni Morrison

Sonsbeek 93

It is by telling the stories of their lives that black writers--from the authors of nineteenth-century slave narratives to contemporary novelists--affirm and legitimize their psychological autonomy. So Valerie Smith argues in this perceptive exploration of the relationship between autobiography and fiction in Afro-American writing. Smith sees the processes of plot construction and characterization as providing these narrators with a measure of authority unknown in their lives. Focusing on autobiographies by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs and the fiction of James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, she demonstrates the ways in which the act of narrating constitutes an act of self-fashioning that must be understood in the context of the Afro-American experience. Hers is a fertile investigation, attuned to the differences in male and female sensibilities, and attentive to the importance of oral traditions.

Self-discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative

When you're scared to sleep in your room and you feel a sense of dreaded doom; take a deep breath and count to ten, then read this book to find your zen. Inside you'll find a neat little trick, that works so well you'll think it's magic. It gives you the power to make scary feelings stop. And it all starts with . . . a karate chop! In Karate Chop Fear! we meet a young girl who is scared to sleep in her room. In her own words, she tells the story of how she uses tapping to release her fear and fall asleep. Studies show that Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), or tapping, is successful in both calming the nervous system and releasing negative emotions in children and adults, as well as allowing the subconscious to accept positive affirmations. Perfect for children, parents, guardians and teachers to both teach and learn a free technique to calm the nervous system, release negative emotions, and gain self-acceptance. Valerie Smith, a personal-development and self-help connoisseur, writes fun, colorful, joyful stories featuring easy-to-digest and entertaining life lessons covering topics such as releasing negative emotions and self-appreciation via Emotional Freedom Technique, the beauty of difference and equality, the power of choice, and love as an infinite resource.

Karate Chop Fear!

The essays in this collection provide a variety of perspectives on black representation and questions of racial authenticity in mainstream as well as African American independent cinema. This volume includes seminal essays on racial stereotypes, trenchant critiques of that discourse, original essays on important directors such as Haile Gerima and Charles Burnett, and an insightful discussion of black, gay and lesbian film and video. The contributors include Donald Bogle, Thomas Cripps, Jane Gaines, Nathan Grant, Stuart Hall, Tommy L. Lott, Wahneema Lubiano, Mike Murashige, Valerie Smith, James Snead, and David Van Leer. Valerie Smith is a professor of English at UCLA. She is the author of Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative and editor of New Essays on Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon." A volume in the Depth of Field Series, edited by Charles Affron, Mirella Jona Affron, and Robert Lyons.

Issues in Film and Video

Representing Blackness

Cornelia H. Butler

Helen Anne Molesworth

Abigail Solomon-Godeau

Vancouver Art Gallery

Catherine Lord

Peggy Phelan

National Museum of Women in the Arts (U.S.)

Nelly Richard

Jenni Sorkin

Judith Russi Kirshner

Institute for Contemporary Art (New York, N.Y.)

Marsha Meskimmon

Richard Meyer (umetnostni zgodovinar.)

Accompanied by critical essays and analysis, a groundbreaking collection of art produced by women artists during the 1970s reveals the influence of the feminist revolution on art in works by Judy Chicago, Louise Bourgeois, Susan Hiller, Yoko Ono, Hannah Wilke, Faith Ringgold, Cindy Sherman, Joan Semmel, Miriam Shapiro, Lucy Lippard, and many others.

Art and the Feminist Revolution

WACK!

Adrienne Brown

Race and Real Estate brings together new work by architects, sociologists, legal scholars, and literary critics that qualifies and complicates traditional narratives of race, property, and citizenship in the United States. Rather than simply rehearsing the standard account of how blacks were historically excluded from homeownership, the authors of these essays explore how the raced history of property affects understandings of home and citizenship. While the narrative of race and real estate in America has usually been relayed in terms of institutional subjugation, dispossession, and forced segregation, the essays collected in this volume acknowledge the validity of these histories while presenting new perspectives on this story.

Race and Real Estate

Emory Elliot

The essays in this volume, first published in 1995, present a range of theoretical and cultural perspectives on Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.

From the nineteenth century articulations of Sojourner Truth to contemporary thinkers like Patricia J. Williams, Black feminists have always recognized the mutual dependence of race and gender. Detailing these connections, Not Just Race, Not Just Gender explores the myriad ways race and gender shape lives and social practices. Resisting essentialist tendencies, Valerie Smith identifies black feminist theorizing as a strategy of reading rather than located in a particular subjective experience. Her intent is not to deny the validity of black women's lived experience, but rather to resist deploying a uniform model of black women's lives that actually undermines the power of black feminist thought. Whether reading race or gender in the Central Park jogger case or in contemporary media, like Livin' Large, Smith displays critical rigor that promises to change the way we think about race and gender.

Valerie Smith

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