LibGuides: Staff Picks: Black History Month & Beyond

Black History Month & Beyond

For Black History Month we are featuring items in the library collection honouring the stories, work and histories of Black writers, artists, theorists, educators and librarians. We believe in celebrating Black individuals and communities all year long. You can find these resources and many more in our library catalogue at any time. We are adding new material regularly so check back often - let us know if you have any suggestions and we can add them to our reading list.

We are adding new material regularly so check back often.

Algorithms of Oppression : How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble
Call Number: ZA4230 .N63 2018
Publication Date: 2018-02-20
Safiya Umoja Noble’s research on algorithms and bias show how online search results are far from neutral. While machines and algorithms are thought to be neutral, the reality is that the people creating algorithms are full of biases. Noble explores internet searching and how racism is embedded in the results impacting what we see and believe.
Sondra Perry: Typhoon Coming On by Sondra Perry (Artist), Hans Ulrich Obrist (foreword), Yana Peel (foreword)
Call Number: N6537 .P425 A4 2018
Publication Date: 2018-09-25
An exhibition publication for "Sondra Perry : Typhoon Coming On", held at the Serpentine Galleries-Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London, 2018. For more information on the exhibition you can watch Perry discuss the inspirations, technology and ideas behind her work in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist. The same link also shows a discussion between Sondra Perry and Cauleen Smith.
Nick Cave : Epitome by Andrew Bolton; Elvira Dyangani Ose; Nato Thompson
Call Number: N6537 .C38 A4 2014
Publication Date: 2014-09-22
I have always been so inspired and amazed by Nick Cave’s work. I had the privilege of seeing a Soundsuit in person at the Seattle Art Museum, where it was installed as part of the Lessons from the Institute of Empathy exhibition in the African art galleries. The Emily Carr University Library has two books about Nick Cave’s work, as well as an exhibition catalogue. However, it’s far more impressive to see his Soundsuits move, so I recommend watching this Art21 episode about Nick Cave and his work.
Henry Taylor : The Only Portrait I Ever Painted of my Momma was Stolen by H. Als
Call Number: N6537 .T394 A4 2018
Publication Date: 2018-10-09
"This definitive survey of over 200 of the painter's portraits and street scenes forms a personal and political portrait of society today. For three decades the iconic artist has worked his way through New York, Los Angeles, Europe, and Africa, documenting what he sees. In his circle are artists, musicians, writers, performers, as well as friends from his ten years as a psychiatric technician. It is the artist's empathetic eye that allows him to imagine his figures with authenticity and grace--not better than they are, or more glamorous--but part of a big, complicated world. Flat, brushy flows of color cast figures that often float in surreal landscapes abstracted from the barbeque in the park, or neighboring street." -- Publisher's Website
Audre Lorde by Aquino Eloisa
Call Number: Zine 0043 v.5 no.1
Publication Date: 2013
Part of Aquino Eloisa's Life and Times of Butch Dykes series, this small zine is an introduction to Audre Lorde - self-defined poet, teacher, warrior, lesbian, mother. Eloisa's similar works are also available compiled in the book The Life and Times of Butch Dykes : Portraits of Artists, Leaders, and Dreamers who Changed the World.
Dandy Lion: the Black Dandy and Street Style by Shantrelle P. Lewis
Call Number: GT6720 .L49 2017
Publication Date: 2017-05-30
This book evolved out of a 2015 exhibition by Shantrelle P. Lewis at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Dandy Lion explores the history, personalities, and evolution of the Black dandy style, demonstrating the influences which fashion can hold in a society. It includes depictions and stories of a wide-ranging selection of designers, tailors, photographers, celebrities, and everyday people. Their choices of the colours, styles, and cut of their suits become a powerful, subversive form of resistance. “[The Black dandy] defies monolithic understandings of what it is to be a man -- particularly a Black man -- through a colorful and complex dance between race, class, gender, power and style.”
Reader on Misogynoir. 1 History: fall out of Mammy, Jezebel, and Sapphire by Cassandra Press
Call Number: C2783 R426 no.1
Publication Date: 2018
This collection of essays was created by Cassandra Press, an artist-run publisher from LA. Their publications center around ethics, activism and black scholarship with the goal of keeping radical pedagogy alive. Find this in our artists' books collection.
How She Read : Poems by Chantal Gibson
Call Number: PS8613 .I2945 H69 2019
Publication Date: 2019-06-21
"How She Read is a collection of genre-blurring poems about the representation of Black women, their hearts, minds and bodies, across the Canadian cultural imagination.
Drawing from grade-school vocabulary spellers, literature, history, art, media and pop culture, Chantal Gibson’s sassy semiotics highlight the depth and duration of the imperialist ideas embedded in everyday things, from storybooks to coloured pencils, from paintings to postage stamps." -- Publisher's Website
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Call Number: E185.615 .C6335 2015
Publication Date: 2015-07-14
"For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him -- most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear. What were they afraid of? In Tremble for My Country, Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings -- moments when he discovered some new truth about our long, tangled history of race, whether through his myth-busting professors at Howard University, a trip to a Civil War battlefield with a rogue historian, a journey to Chicago's South Side to visit aging survivors of 20th century America's 'long war on black people,' or a visit with the mother of a beloved friend who was shot down by the police. In his trademark style -- a mix of lyrical personal narrative, reimagined history, essayistic argument, and reportage -- Coates provides readers a thrillingly illuminating new framework for understanding race: its history, our contemporary dilemma, and where we go from here"-- Provided by publisher.
I've Been Meaning to Tell You : A Letter to my Daughter by David Chariandy
Call Number: PS8605 .H3685 Z46 2018
Publication Date: 2018
"When a moment of quietly ignored bigotry prompted his three-year-old daughter to ask "what happened?" David Chariandy began wondering how to discuss with his children the politics of race. A decade later, in a newly heated era of both struggle and divisions, he writes a letter to his now thirteen-year-old daughter. David is the son of Black and South Asian migrants from Trinidad, and he draws upon his personal and ancestral past, including the legacies of slavery, indenture, and immigration, as well as the experiences of growing up a visible minority within the land of one's birth. In sharing with his daughter his own story, he hopes to help cultivate within her a sense of identity and responsibility that balances the painful truths of the past and present with hopeful possibilities for the future."-- from publisher.
Black Feminism Reimagined : After Intersectionality by Jennifer C. Nash
Call Number: HQ1197 .N37 2019
Publication Date: 2019-02-08
This book is also available online as an eBook.
"In Black Feminism Reimagined Jennifer C. Nash reframes black feminism's engagement with intersectionality, often celebrated as its primary intellectual and political contribution to feminist theory. Charting the institutional history and contemporary uses of intersectionality in the academy, Nash outlines how women's studies has both elevated intersectionality to the discipline's primary program-building initiative and cast intersectionality as a threat to feminism's coherence. As intersectionality has become a central feminist preoccupation, Nash argues that black feminism has been marked by a single affect--defensiveness--manifested by efforts to police intersectionality's usages and circulations. Nash contends that only by letting go of this deeply alluring protectionist stance, the desire to make property of knowledge, can black feminists reimagine intellectual production in ways that unleash black feminist theory's visionary world-making possibilities." -- Publisher's description
Do Some Great Thing : The Black Pioneers of British Columbia by Crawford Kilian
Call Number: FC3850 .B55 K55 2008
Publication Date: 2008-11-15
"Living in pre-Civil War Philadelphia, young Black activist Mifflin Gibbs was feeling disheartened from fighting the overwhelming tide of White America’s legalized racism when abolitionist Julia Griffith encouraged him to “go do some great thing.” These words helped inspire him to become a successful merchant in San Francisco, and then to seek a more just society in the new colony of Vancouver Island, where he was to become a prominent citizen and elected official." -- Harbour Publishing Website
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments : Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman
Call Number: E185.86 .H378 2019
Publication Date: 2020-01-14
"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."-- Publisher's description.
Sister Outsider : Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde; Cheryl Clarke (Foreword by)
Call Number: PS3562 .O75 S5 2007
Publication Date: 2007-08-01
'In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde’s philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published.
These landmark writings are, in Lorde’s own words, a call to “never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is . . . ”' -- Publisher's Website
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle : Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Y. Davis; Frank Barat (Editor); Cornel West (Preface by)
Call Number: JC571 .D33275 2016
Publication Date: 2016-02-09
'In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.
Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today's struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine.
Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that "Freedom is a constant struggle."' -- Publisher's Website
How We Get Free : Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Editor)
Call Number: HQ1426 .H689 2017
Publication Date: 2017-12-05
"In the last several years, Black feminism has reemerged as the analytical framework for the activist response to the oppression of trans women of color, the fight for reproductive rights, and, of course, the movement against police abuse and violence. The most visible organizations and activists connected to the Black Lives Matter movement speak openly about how Black feminism shapes their politics and strategies today. The interviews compiled in this book -- with the three authors of the Combahee River Collective Statement, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier, #BlackLivesMatter cofounder Alicia Garza, and historian and activist Barbara Ransby -- are an attempt to show how these politics remain historically vibrant and relevant to the struggles of today."
Quilt of Hope : Vancouver Artists for Black Liberation by Nanyamka (Nya) Lewis (curator); Nic Wayara (editor); Cicely Belle Blain (foreword by)
Call Number: This artists' book is currently on order/in process
Publication Date: 2021
Publication for the exhibition currently at Massy Books, Quilt of Hope includes works exploring the "role of artists in dismantling anti-Black racism". The contributors explore the role of artist as activist and changemaker. They point out how Black history has been omitted from Vancouver history, and Black artists are still underrepresented in the Vancouver art landscape.

Daniel G. Hill on Black Refugees in Ontario, 1979 (streaming audio 9 min.)
Activist Daniel Hill (1923-2003) was the first director of the Ontario Human Right Commission. He founded the Ontario Black History Society and published The Freedom Seekers: Blacks in Early Canada.

Listen to Daniel talk about the community volunteer groups that worked so hard to help black refugees arriving in Ontario on the Underground Railway in the mid-19th century, why Ontario was their main destination, the basis of the black community in Canada and the prosperous black settlement of Buxton, near Chatham, Ont.
Trivia: Father to singer songwriter Dan Hill and authors Karen Hill and Lawrence Hill.

American Experience : Freedom Riders by Stanley Nelson (written, produced and directed by)
Call Number: E185.61 .F74 2011
Publication Date: 2011
This two-hour PBS documentary examines the Freedom Riders, a group of more than 400 Black and white Americans who, for six months in 1961, traveled together to the American south via bus and train, challenging the segregated interstate travel system. These nonviolent activists endured racist attacks, mob violence, and police brutality as they rode together.
Hogan's Alley by Andrea Fatona and Cornelia Wyngaarden
Call Number: FC3850 .B6 H64 2017 DVD
Publication Date: 1993
This film documents the history of Hogan's Alley and Vancouver's Black community between 1930 and the late 1960s. It explores the lives of three Black women: Thelma Gibson-Towns, an African-Caribbean dance teacher, Pearl Brown, a well known local jazz singer, and Leah Curtis, a lesbian in her mid-forties.
Pioneers of African-American Cinema
Call Number: PN1995.9 .N4 P56 2016
Publication Date: 2016
This 5-disc DVD set includes films from the 1920's-40s which starred and were funded, written, produced, edited, and distributed by African Americans. These films were produced outside the Hollywood establishment, and demonstrated unique visual and narrative styles which were aimed at Black audiences.

O Happy Day. Directed by Charles Lofton, Frameline, 1996. (6 min.)
"O Happy Day” is a 1996 short film by Charles Lofton. Using found footage “O Happy Day” juxtaposes images of Black Panther Party demonstrations with Gay Liberation Movement protests and intertwines them all with sensual homoerotic images of black men. Punctuating the films soundtrack with a 1970 quotation from Black Panther leader Huey Newton, Lofton re-imagines an intertwining of the two movements as an expression of black queer love and power: "There's nothing to say that a homosexual cannot also be a revolutionary. Quite on the contrary, maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary..." If you missed seeing this when it was exhibited at Centre Pompidou, you can find it in the “Black Power Movement 1966-1975” Channel in the streaming database: Academic Video Online/Alexander St Video found in our Databases A-Z.

Ujamii Uhuru Schule : Community Freedom School. Directed by Don Amis, 1974. (9 min.)
Check out the work of the L.A. Rebellion held in the open access database of the UCLA Library Film and Televison Library! Ujamii Uhuru Schule (Swahili for Community Freedom School) is a portrait of an Afrocentric primary school located in South Los Angeles. Filmed in 1974, Don Amis’s 9 min documentary contains beautiful radical imagery and truths of what learning can mean outside of an inherently oppressive Eurocentric/white paradigm.

The Missing Chapter(s): Some History About Black Graphic Design, July 22, 2020 (1 hr 38 min) hosted by Vermon College of Fine Arts

Three micro lectures and a panel discussion: the Missing Chapter(s): Some History About Black Graphic Design with faculty Tasheka Arceneux-Sutton, Silas Munro and alumnx Pierre Bowins.

Pierre Bowins presents on "A Sin of Omission: Immoral Unbalance"
Silas Munro presents on "A Wounded Fire: Queerness in Black Publications From the Harlem Renaissance"
Tasheka Arceneux-Sutton presents on "Black Women in Graphic Design"

African Arts

African Arts published by the James S. Coleman African Studies Center, UCLA and MIT Press

African Arts presents original research and critical discourse on traditional, contemporary, and popular African arts and expressive cultures. This is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, published quarterly, since 1967.

Library has in print: Volume 5, No. 1, 1971 to date
Library has full text online: Volume 7 No. 1, 2007 to date

NKA Contemporary African Art

NKA Contemporary African Art published by Duke University Press

Nka focuses on publishing critical work that examines contemporary African and African Diaspora art within the modernist and postmodernist experience and therefore contributes significantly to the intellectual dialogue on world art and the discourse on internationalism and multiculturalism in the arts. Nka mainly includes scholarly articles, reviews (exhibits and books), interviews, and roundtable discussions. Published two times a year since 1994.

Library has in print: No. 22/23, 2008 to present
Library has full text online: 09/01/2002 to present (Full Text Delay: 1 year)

WARE, SYRUS MARCUS. “Ancestors, Can You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future).” Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 54, no. 2–3, Spring-Fall 2020, pp. 558–561.
Between 11 September and 8 December 2019, Syrus Marcus Ware's multi-channel video work Ancestors, Can You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future) was on view at the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto ... In this piece, written as a companion to the video installation, Ware not only meditates on the precarity of the present but also insists on the necessity for social change through an imagining of the collapse of capitalism and the radical time after with a social restructuring of forms of relations and care.

The Blue Road : A Fable of Migration by Wayde Compton (Text by); April dela Noche Milne (Illustrator)
Call Number: PN6733 .C66 B58 2019
Publication Date: 2019-10-22
Masterfully adapted from a short story by award winning poet and prose writer Wayde Compton, former ECUAD faculty.
Follow Lacuna down The Blue Road. Exiled from her home, a swamp made of ink, Lacuna makes the long journey to a mythical kingdom in hopes of finding her place in this beautifully illustrated world imagined by April dela Noche Milne, ECUAD staff and alumni.
March : Book One by John Lewis; Andrew Aydin; BookSource Staff (Compiled by)
Call Number: E840.8 .L43 A3 2013 bk.1
Publication Date: 2013-08-13
March is a three-part graphic autobiography of the late civil rights leader and Congressman John Lewis. Book One focuses primarily on Lewis' youth and his initial forays into protesting against segregation though sit-ins and student activist organization in Nashville.
March : Book Two by John Lewis; Andrew Aydin
Call Number: E840.8 .L43 A3 2015 bk.2
Publication Date: 2015-01-27
March is a three-part graphic autobiography of the late civil rights leader and Congressman John Lewis. Book Two sees the Freedom Riders bussing into the deep American South, and being confronted by mob violence and police brutality. It closes with the March on Washington on August 8th, 1963, including the I Have a Dream speech of Dr. Martin Luther King and text from John Lewis' own powerful speech from that day.
March : Book Three by John Lewis; Andrew Aydin; Nate Powell (Illustrator)
Call Number: E840.8 .L43 A3 2016 bk.3
Publication Date: 2016-08-02
March is a three-part graphic autobiography of the late civil rights leader and Congressman John Lewis. Book Three concludes the trilogy by depicting continued activism against the disenfranchisement of Black voters, including the 1963 Freedom Ballot, the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965 - including Bloody Sunday.
The Black Panther Party : A Graphic Novel History by David F. Walker; Marcus Kwame Anderson (Illustrator)
Publication Date: 2021-01-19
This Graphic Novel is currently on order/in process.

These databases feature material on Black History

Academic Video Online / Alexander Street Videos
Black History, Black Studies, Black Power Movement Channels have hundreds of videos on these topics
CBC Curio & News in Review
- February is Black History Month in Canada, which provides an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of Black Canadians and reflect on the stories, experiences and accomplishments of Canada's Black community. To mark this occasion, Curio.ca has pulled together a selection of teacher resource guides, videos and audio series that honour Black history in Canada.
National Film Board CAMPUS

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Black History Month & Beyond