A breathtaking exploration of the lives of young black women in the early twentieth century. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives recreates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them—domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty—and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology. For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires.

In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman journeys along a slave route in Ghana, following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast. She retraces the history of the Atlantic slave trade from the fifteenth to the twentieth century and reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy.There were no survivors of Hartman's lineage, nor far-flung relatives in Ghana of whom she had come in search. She traveled to Ghana in search of strangers. The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger--torn from kin and country. To lose your mother is to suffer the loss of kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as a stranger. As both the offspring of slaves and an American in Africa, Hartman, too, was a stranger. Her reflections on history and memory unfold as an intimate encounter with places--a holding cell, a slave market, a walled town built to repel slave raiders--and with people: an Akan prince who granted the Portuguese permission to build the first permanent trading fort in West Africa; an adolescent boy who was kidnapped while playing; a fourteen-year-old girl who was murdered aboard a slave ship.Eloquent, thoughtful, and deeply affecting, Lose Your Mother is a powerful meditation on history, memory, and the Atlantic slave trade.

Raised in the heart of Gullah country, author Roger Pinckney provides an inside look at the history, practices and people of Gullah country, off the coast of South Carolina. On the plantations of the American South, slaves passed their African roots to their descendants in a rich and lasting oral tradition, a tradition that survives today. Prominent among Gullah culture was the belief in herbalism, spiritualism, and black magic. Meet Dr. Bug, Dr. Fly, Dr. Crow and the infamous Dr. Buzzard, professional root doctors who can administer a root to bring money, find love, or cure ailments.

Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) was a Senegalese poet and philosopher who in 1960 also became the first president of the Republic of Senegal. In African Art as Philosophy, Souleymane Bachir Diagne takes a unique approach to reading Senghor’s influential works, taking as the starting point for his analysis Henri Bergson’s idea that in order to understand philosophers one must find the initial intuition from which every aspect of their work develops. In the case of Senghor, Diagne argues that his primordial intuition is that African art is a philosophy. To further this point, Diagne looks at what Senghor called the “1889 Revolution,” and the influential writers and publications of that time—specifically, Nietzsche and Rimbaud, as well as Bergson’s Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. The 1889 Revolution, Senghor claims, is what led him to the understanding of the “Vitalism” at the core of African religions and beliefs that found expression in the arts. This book offers a distinct, incisive look at an important figure in African literature and politics that will be welcomed by scholars in African Studies and philosophy.

In Sexual Hegemony Christopher Chitty traces the 500 year history of capitalist sexual relations by excavating the class dynamics of the bourgeoisie's attempts to regulate homosexuality. Tracking the politicization of male homosexuality in Renaissance Florence, Amsterdam, Paris, and London between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and twentieth-century New York City, Chitty shows how sexuality became a crucial dimension of the accumulation of capital and a technique of bourgeois rule. Whether policing male sodomy during the Medici rule in Florence or accusing the French aristocracy of monstrous sexuality in the wake of the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie weaponized both sexual constraint and sexual freedom in order to produce and control a reliable and regimented labor class and subordinate it to civil society and the state. Only by grasping sexuality as a field of social contention and the site of class conflict, Chitty contends, can we embark on a politics that destroys sexuality as a tool and effect of power, and open a front against the forces that keep us unfree.

【漫画家、芸人、女優、VTuber…各界の著名人が絶賛!!】 【禁断・悪夢の"逆転"ファーム・スリラー待望の続編!!】 この世界では…人が動物を飼育し、美味しく食らう。 そして――"動物"も人間を飼育し、美味しく喰らう。 人か、動物か、それ以外か？ 否。 「強者が弱者の肉を食う」 それだけがこの世のルールなのだから――。 戦慄の世界観、衝撃の展開の連続、あなたに問う「命を食べる」ことの意味……。 現代の寝ぼけた倫理観に牙をむく、トラウマ必至・刺激的すぎる【逆転寓話】第２幕。 物語は……新たな領域へ。

【漫画家、芸人、女優、VTuber…各界の著名人が絶賛!!】 【禁断・悪夢の"逆転"ファーム・スリラー待望の続編!!】 この世界では…人が動物を飼育し、美味しく食らう。 そして――"動物"も人間を飼育し、美味しく喰らう。 人か、動物か、それ以外か？ 否。 「強者が弱者の肉を食う」 それだけがこの世のルールなのだから――。 戦慄の世界観、衝撃の展開の連続、あなたに問う「命を食べる」ことの意味……。 現代の寝ぼけた倫理観に牙をむく、トラウマ必至・刺激的すぎる【逆転寓話】第２幕。 物語は……新たな領域へ。

【禁断・悪夢の"逆転"ファーム・スリラー!!】 父と娘が迷い込んだのは…"動物"の姿を纏う不気味な集団の食事会。 そこでは「人間が家畜」「人肉が主菜」。 《ニンゲン農場》を営む彼らは、人ならざる動物…いや、動物ならざる…ナニカ。 親子は最悪の"おもてなし"を受けることになる――。 一方、農場の労働者である《山猫》のネロは、この村のリーダーを務める《鹿》の男・アーネストとの邂逅により、とある記憶を取り戻すが…？ 戦慄の世界観、衝撃の展開の連続、あなたに問う「命を食べる」ことの意味……。 現代の寝ぼけた倫理観に牙をむく、トラウマ必至・刺激的すぎる【逆転寓話】。

The “woman question,” this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western construction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures. Author Oyeronke Oyewumi reveals an ideology of biological determinism at the heart of Western social categories-the idea that biology provides the rationale for organizing the social world. And yet, she writes, the concept of “woman,” central to this ideology and to Western gender discourses, simply did not exist in Yorubaland, where the body was not the basis of social roles. Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed and that the subordination of women is universal. The Invention of Women demonstrates, to the contrary, that gender was not constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age. A meticulous historical and epistemological account of an African culture on its own terms, this book makes a persuasive argument for a cultural, context-dependent interpretation of social reality. It calls for a reconception of gender discourse and the categories on which such study relies. More than that, the book lays bare the hidden assumptions in the ways these different cultures think. A truly comparative sociology of an African culture and the Western tradition, it will change the way African studies and gender studies proceed.