=======================

Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!!  You need to or


review fr. the China  Post


For Helene Cooper, the White House correspondent for the New York Times and a former globe-trotting reporter with the Wall Street Journal, her childhood in the West African nation of Liberia was like a dream. This dream was to be abruptly ended, when a coup forced her and her family to leave the nation for the U.S., sending her on to a new life.
Liberia may be famous for its brutal civil war that raged during the 1990s and The early parts of this decade, until its president Charles Taylor, now on trial in the International Criminal Court for war crimes, was forced into exile. Preceding this civil war were coups and tensions, mainly between the “Congo people” and the “Country people.” The Congo people were the descendants of freed American slaves who returned to Africa with the help of Americans and formed the nation of Liberia in the early nineteenth century. Born into privilege as a member of the Congo people with illustrious ancestors, Cooper had a happy life which wasn't that far off from the average upper-middle class child in the U.S. And it was this privilege, as she later acknowledges, enjoyed by her and many other Congo people, which played a great role in fuelling resentments by the “native” Liberians.

continues here









@ youtube


event @ the smithsonian Sept.10th!

African Art Book Club: The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood
Author Helene Cooper will read from her memoir and lead discussion on Thursday, September 10 from 4:00 to 5:30pm in our lecture hall. Book signing to follow.





about the author !





==============================

========================

great images!

Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!!  You need to or
King Greenleaf Recreation Center, Y.W.C.A. Camp for Girls, 1930 Highland Beach, Md.

The Scurlock Studio and Black Washington: Picturing the Promise

details here



article about the past exhibit on Scurlock's photography .




============================
]

Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!!  You need to or

Posing Beauty: Deborah Willis



the book



more on the exhibit here



===========================

Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!!  You need to or
a little Grace in your face on thursday morning! 



Examining portraits of black people over the past two centuries, Cutting a Figure argues that these images should be viewed as a distinct category of portraiture that differs significantly from depictions of people with other racial and ethnic backgrounds. The difference, Richard Powell contends, lies in the social capital that stems directly from the black subject’s power to subvert dominant racist representations by evincing such traits as self-composure, self-adornment, and self-imagining.

information on the book here




author's webpage here

=======================

more information on the  upcoming
free  Black Photography
talk @ the smithsonian in DC here   

=====================

images & slideshow

==========================

Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!!  You need to or

Cornel West is an American philosopher, author, critic, pastor, actor, and civil rights activist. Photo by Patti Sapone/The Star-Ledger

Princeton professor, author Cornel West is 'Living and Loving Out Loud'..

Cornel West talks a lot about truth — about the need for truth-telling and being true to oneself. For 30 years, the Princeton University professor, recognized as one of the leading intellectuals of his generation, has been on a mission to tell it as he sees it. And the best-selling author and cultural commentator has never been at a loss for subjects: love, justice, politics, race, history, religion.

Now West is telling the truth about himself in an autobiography, “Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir” (Smiley Books, $25.95). The book, co-written with David Ritz, a biographer and novelist who has collaborated with musicians Marvin Gaye, B.B. King and Etta James, provides an intimate look at the 56-year-old scholar.

more info. on this book here





===========================





Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!!  You need to or
Holgate - Ian Allen/Staff Photographer


A Caribbean-based sci-fi novel may seem like a stretch of the imagination to most, but for dancer, choreographer, lecturer, singer, actor and now author, Michael Holgate, it has been a dream a long time in the making.

After years of reading the creative works of distinguished writers who have captured the hearts of readers, young and old, the young author hopes to do the same with his chilling tale titled, Night of the Indigo. Holgate has spent more than 15 years exploring the world of theatre, dance, music, film and writing. A lecturer in Caribbean folk and traditional dance, as well as edutainment theatre at the University of the West Indies, Holgate is perhaps better known for his work as the artistic director of the performing arts troupe, Ashe.

For a man that has tackled the world of the arts, Night of the Indigo is his first venture into the life of a writer. The novel follows the tale of a 15-year-old boy, Marassa, who is catapulted into a wondrous new world of natural mysticism by his need to save the life of his dying twin brother, Wico.

Originally taking place straight out of a rural Jamaican town, Marassa comes to accept his responsibility as the 'Marshal' or 'Warrior of the Light' to better be able to save the life of his brother.

review continues here

review fr. the independent ~peace
==========================




Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!!  You need to or
fr. the telegraph
Slavery is such toxic material that, even now, few British novelists tackle it. The best novel, Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger, was about the slave trade from the white perspective; the black writers Malorie Blackman and Bernardine Evaristo have both imagined an alternate world, with black people oppressing whites. Andrea Levy, who won both the Whitbread and the Orange Prize for the recently televised Small Island, confronts us with an extraordinary story set in Jamaica just before and after abolition.

continues here



the guardian



about the series small island

12.30.09

(see above @ 10.26.09 for the book)




..................................

~peace nyao

fr. the UK telegraph, a review of
Derek Walcotts's The White Egrets ~peace
=========================


Throughout Walcott’s life, the sea has symbolised many things to him – sometimes the water of inspiration, sometimes the lonely plain the poet must sail when he slips away from his community. More haunting still is the recurring idea that the sea wipes beaches clean. Rather than offering forgiveness, the sea cleanses us of sin by offering the chance to forget: it is “a sea so / deep it has lost its stuttering memory of our hates”. Now the egrets can fly “into that peace / beyond desires and beyond regrets, / after my shadow passes with all its sins / into a green thicket of oblivion”.

complete review here