Here are 100 books that Black Popular Culture fans have personally recommended if you like
Black Popular Culture.
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I’m Black, and I’m a horror movie fan, two things that, per the well-worn trope that “the Black guy dies first,” don’t seem to go together. However, I’ve been able to use the treatment that Black characters have received in horror to explore the ways in which Black people have been marginalized in Hollywood, placed into specific roles in which they served as expendable, ancillary characters rather than stars. While things have improved dramatically in recent years, that makes it all the more important to not forget how much Black progress there has been in film, because those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
While the Bogle and Cripps books were written during the 1970s Blaxploitation era, this one emerged during the next great Black film movement, the “urban cinema” era of the 1990s, triggered by movies like Do the Right Thing and Boyz n the Hood.
Particularly influential for my book is the chapter “Slaves, Monsters, and Others,” which touches upon the racialized metaphors and allegories in horror, fantasy, and science fiction.
Even if you don’t agree with its assertions, the book provides fascinating food for thought.
From D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation to Spike Lee's Malcolm X, Ed Guerrero argues, the commercial film industry reflects white domination of American society. Written with the energy and conviction generated by the new black film wave, Framing Blackness traces an ongoing epic-African Americans protesting screen images of blacks as criminals, servants, comics, athletes, and sidekicks.
These images persist despite blacks' irrepressible demands for emancipated images and a role in the industry. Although starkly racist portrayals of blacks in early films have gradually been replaced by more appealing characterizations, the legacy of the plantation genre lives on in…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I am a scholar of African Diaspora cultural studies, which means I spend a lot of time analyzing texts in various forms: books, art, film, music, and even laws and legal documents. The cultural texts I study were produced by people. I am passionate about Black popular culture, because it dismantles some of the enduring divisions between academic institutions and the people who live beyond their walls. It is a field of study that is always in flux, especially now with twenty-first-century advances that position popular culture as almost always at our fingertips.
I am recommending this book because it took me back to Wallace and Dent’s Black Popular Culture when I was struggling to understand why my doctoral program frowned upon interdisciplinarity. This book helped me understand why I was not interested in just writing literary criticism. It gave me methodological tools and language to articulate why the research I wanted to do matters. Importantly, it also gave me a definition of the term “post-soul” that during the early 2000s was bandied about but rarely defined. I love this book because Neal was the first scholar I encountered who unapologetically claimed to be a scholar of Black popular culture.
In Soul Babies, Mark Anthony Neal explains the complexities and contradictions of black life and culture after the end of the Civil Rights era. He traces the emergence of what he calls a "post-soul aesthetic," a transformation of values that marked a profound change in African American thought and experience. Lively and provocative, Soul Babies offers a valuable new way of thinking about black popular culture and the legacy of the sixties.
I am a scholar of African Diaspora cultural studies, which means I spend a lot of time analyzing texts in various forms: books, art, film, music, and even laws and legal documents. The cultural texts I study were produced by people. I am passionate about Black popular culture, because it dismantles some of the enduring divisions between academic institutions and the people who live beyond their walls. It is a field of study that is always in flux, especially now with twenty-first-century advances that position popular culture as almost always at our fingertips.
I am recommending this book because I fell in love with the way duCille weaves cultural critique and personal experience in one of her earlier books, Skin Trade. The invention of streaming services has made televisual representation more accessible, which can be both good and bad. I love how this book demonstrates the way in which culture informs the lived experience and the way in which lived experiences can shape culture. And duCille is an excellent storyteller.
From early sitcoms such as I Love Lucy to contemporary prime-time dramas like Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, African Americans on television have too often been asked to portray tired stereotypes of blacks as villains, vixens, victims, and disposable minorities. In Technicolored black feminist critic Ann duCille combines cultural critique with personal reflections on growing up with the new medium of TV to examine how televisual representations of African Americans have changed over the last sixty years. Whether explaining how watching Shirley Temple led her to question her own self-worth or how televisual representation functions as a…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I am a scholar of African Diaspora cultural studies, which means I spend a lot of time analyzing texts in various forms: books, art, film, music, and even laws and legal documents. The cultural texts I study were produced by people. I am passionate about Black popular culture, because it dismantles some of the enduring divisions between academic institutions and the people who live beyond their walls. It is a field of study that is always in flux, especially now with twenty-first-century advances that position popular culture as almost always at our fingertips.
This book focuses mostly on literary criticism, but I chose it because of the theoretical work Alexander does in defining “the black interior.” The concept of the black interior unpacks the ways in which Black bodies and blackness have been devalued and dehumanized. This book and its theoretical underpinnings insist upon recoupling the “human” with blackness. I love how the book challenges viewing and spectatorship and calls upon readers to recognize black life and creativity beyond stereotypes that guide the limited imaginations of the dominant culture that relentlessly misrepresents and maligns blackness.
Legendary poet Elizabeth Alexander turns her finely-honed sensibilities to the subject of blackness and the interior world of the modern African-American. Intelligent, perceptive and keenly observed, this collection of essays traces a thoughtful path through music, poetry and the outstanding social issues of the last 200 years to synthesise a remarkable picture of the modern African-American psyche. From Langston Hughes to the Rodney King video, Alexander leads her reader effortlessly over the complex terrain of art and politics to a new vision of the black interior.
I love getting lost in books because I get to experience more adventures than I could possibly fit into one lifetime. Books invite the exploration of limitless possibilities—for everyone. When a book can fire my imagination, make me feel a connection, or just make me think deeply—that’s magic, whether it was meant to be fiction or not. I want to write books that do that for others. For this list specifically, I wanted to pick books that encourage girls to embrace the notions that they are allowed to dream really big dreams, that the goals they set for themselves are worth pursuing, and that we all deserve room to be our authentic selves.
I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but the cover is indeed what got me! I immediately wished someone had captured an image of me looking amazing and strong like the girl featured. I mean, how cool to have a picture that really reflects oneself, so unlike the stiff and awkwardly posed school pics that decorated my home growing up. Her stance and expression just spoke to me and I immediately loved that this book celebrated her strength and presence. And not just hers! Many, many girls of various ages and backgrounds are photographed doing something that makes them feel good or strong or real. This book is a catalog of photos and words that celebrate girls being their authentic selves. I want that for all the little girls, and all the little girls who have grown up too.
Inspired by the popular photo project of the same title that went viral in the spring of 2015, Strong Is the New Pretty is a photo-driven book comprised of 100 high-quality black-and-white and color images (with minimal text) of fierce and joyful girls--a celebration of what it means to be strong (whether athletic, bookish, brainy, brave, loyal, or courageous). The photographs champion the message that girls are perfect in their imperfection; beautiful in their chaotic, authentic lives; and empowered by their strength instead of their looks. They are messy. They are loud. Wild. Full of life. Adventurous. Silly. Funny. Strong.
As an author, I like to write stories about interpersonal relationships that straddle the line between humor and heartbreak. Similarly, as a reader I am always drawn to stories that make me think about the choices we make and the ripple effects they cause, what ifs, and roads not taken. I love quirky, interesting characters in everyday settings turned extraordinary. I have struggled as so many of us have in these last few years to find the positivity and the levity. These are a few of my favorite recent reads that I found un-put-downable that left me feeling hopeful and helped me find that light in the darkness.
This book is in a similar vein as Oona finds herself time jumping within her own life, suddenly living it out of sequence as she jumps to a different period in time with each birthday, forcing her to look within and realize what is important and worth holding on to and worth fighting for. I am a sucker for books where characters get the opportunity to experience alternate versions of their personal realities, and I could not put this one down. I’m all about my characters understanding that the choices they make create their ultimate realities. The ultimate messages about the importance of love and family and the choices we make really resonated with me.
"With its countless epiphanies and surprises, Oona proves difficult to put down." ―USA Today
"By turns tragic and triumphant, heartbreakingly poignant and joyful, this is ultimately an uplifting and redemptive read." ―The Guardian
A remarkably inventive novel that explores what it means to live a life fully in the moment, even if those moments are out of order.
It’s New Year’s Eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her. At the stroke of midnight she will turn nineteen, and the year ahead promises to be one of consequence.…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
I’m a professor of modern European history. But before that, my first loves were Star Wars, heavy metal, and comic books. When I started my degree, it only made sense to combine my love of popular culture with my academic interest in the Soviet Bloc states. Cultural history and the history of everyday life, examining the world through cars, comics, film, food, music, or whatever, provide us with a lens through which to see how people understood themselves and came to terms with the society around them, and for my work, to understand how those living under dictatorship resisted and carved out their own niche within a police state.
Weaving together the influence of film, television, sport, and punk rock, Horten’s book describes how Western media or, specifically, how the East German population’s desire for Western media and consumer culture and the regime’s efforts to satisfy those desires contributed to the peaceful revolution in 1989.
Despite assumptions that the socialist dictatorship in East Germany was omnipresent, this book, like many others about everyday life under communism, undermines that notion. Horten shows the regime locked in a downward spiral. Faced with economic crises and increasingly unable to afford domestic television and film production, the regime turned to Western imports.
This fed the people’s desire for Western media while increasing that appetite and exposing the regime’s weaknesses in the process.
The fall of the Berlin Wall is typically understood as the culmination of political-economic trends that fatally weakened the East German state. Meanwhile, comparatively little attention has been paid to the cultural dimension of these dramatic events, particularly the role played by Western mass media and consumer culture. With a focus on the 1970s and 1980s, Don't Need No Thought Control explores the dynamic interplay of popular unrest, intensifying economic crises, and cultural policies under Erich Honecker. It shows how the widespread influence of (and public demands for) Western cultural products forced GDR leaders into a series of grudging accommodations…
My name is Daniel Robert McClure, and I am an Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas. I teach U.S., African diaspora, and world history, and I specialize in cultural and economic history. I was originally drawn to “information” and “knowledge” because they form the ties between culture and economics, and I have been teaching history through “information” for about a decade. In 2024, I was finally able to teach a graduate course, “The Origins of the Knowledge Society,” out of which came the “5 books.”
This book tells the tech-business story of algorithms and data exhaust and the companies who have implemented the dystopian future prophesized by Boorstin, Toffler, Postman, and others. While the book is large, Zuboff’s writing draws you into a world you know and, paradoxically, don’t know.
The work is the final stop of our story about information and knowledge, its chaotic meandering through amusing images and the shock of the future.
'Everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital self-defense.' -- Naomi Klein, Author of No Logo, the Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything and No is Not Enough
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control us.
The heady optimism of the Internet's early days is gone. Technologies that were meant to liberate us have deepened inequality and stoked divisions. Tech companies gather our information online and sell…
I've always been fascinated by the ways religion reconciles contradiction. Both of my parents were public school teachers in the panhandle of Florida, and I now work at a public university in Texas, yet the culture in which I was raised, of white evangelicalism, supported economic policies of neoliberalism that defunded public life. My interest in American religion is motivated by the question of why we participate in systems that harm us. This is an economic question, but sufficient answers must address the power of religion to shape what we see as morally good and bad. These books all do that.
If you want to understand how corporations and not churches became the most powerful institutions of moral influence in America, capable of taking away an employee's personal choice outside the workplace and denying their access to healthcare based on the owners’ biblical beliefs, legally protected by the U.S. government as a religious freedom, then you need to read this book.
What are you drawn to like, to watch, or even to binge? What are you free to consume, and what do you become through consumption? These questions of desire and value, Kathryn Lofton argues, are at bottom religious questions. Whether or not you have been inside of a cathedral, a temple, or a seminary, you live in the frame of religion. In eleven essays exploring soap and office cubicles, Britney Spears and the Kardashians, corporate culture and Goldman Sachs, Lofton shows the conceptual levers of religion in thinking about social modes of encounter, use, and longing. Wherever we see people…
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
My interests as a historian involve examining how Americans organize to
change policy or politics through affiliations beyond political parties
and, by extension, thinking about how culture is made and supported
through institutions and businesses. These messy networks and
relationships ultimately define how we relate to one another in the U.S.
Indie music scenes are one way to trace all of these relationships,
from federal policy governing radio stations and what goes out over the
airwaves to the contours of local music scenes, to the business of
record labels, to ordinary DJs and music fans trying to access
information and new sounds that they love.
Alice Echols is not only a renowned historian of the post–World War II era, exploring gender, politics, and pop culture, but she is also a former club DJ herself. She brings those experiences to her resurrection of the much-reviled disco scenes of the 1970s, which, before they became corporate big business, were the site of contests over the voices of American culture.
But more than that, Echols reveals how disco was an underground phenomenon, one whose origins are somehow more hidden than punk’s, and connects transnationally across oceans and across U.S. communities that reveal a complicated map of U.S. culture that defies common tropes.
More than a chronicle of disco’s rise and fall, Hot Stuff instead explores “shifts in identity and representation and the debates they triggered,” as well as reveals the dynamics between underground and commercial that would roil college radio. On top of it all, Echols’s engaging writing…
In the 1970s, as the disco tsunami engulfed America, the question, "Do you wanna dance?" became divisive, even explosive. What about this music made it such hot stuff? In her incisive history, Alice Echols reveals the ways in which disco transformed popular music, propelling it into new sonic territory and influencing rap, techno, and trance. This account probes the complex relationship between disco and the era's major movements: gay liberation, feminism, and the black freedom struggle. You won't say "disco sucks" again as disco pumps back to life in this pulsating look at the culture and politics that gave rise…
