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The African American Studies
Reader
Editor: Nathaniel Norment, Jr.
Durham, NC.- Carolina Academic Press,
2001, Pgs 774
Studies on the global Black experience had been pursued by black and white scholars such as Carter G. Woodson, Melville Herskovits, E. Franklin Frazier, John Hope Franklin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gunnar Myrdal, and Charles Johnston, prior to the formal establishment of Black/African American Studies programs in American colleges and universities. The Civil Rights and the Black Consciousness movement of the 1960s laid the basis for African American Studies which in turn led to a number of scholarly works on the study of the African American life, history and culture.
The African American Studies Reader is a collection of writings in Black Studies, very few of which were originally published within the last decade. The authors include: Molefi Asante, John Blassingame, Nathan Huggins, Martin Kilson, Darlene Clark Hine, James Stewart and Maulana Karenga. These African American scholars and thinkers represent a spectrum of opinions in the field. The critical dimensions of gender and sexuality (which are usually glaringly absent from Black Studies discussions and publications) are voiced by scholars/activists such as Beverly Guy-- Sheftall, Barbara Smith, Barbara Christian and Patricia Hill Collins, who vigorously critique sexism as well as racism. In one of her articles included in...