Black Studies Recommended Reading List

Below is the beginning of a list of Black Studies professors' picks for central texts in our discipline. It is recommended reading.

Click here to download a word file of the list.

l Our Kin by Carol Stack

Becoming Rasta: Origins of Rastafari Identity in Jamaica by Charles Price

Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins

Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric J. Robinson

Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology by E. Patrick Johnson

Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon

Black White and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture by Hortense J. Spillers

Drylongso: A Portrait of Black America by John Langston Gwaltney

Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition by Fred Moten

Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable

Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred by M. Jacqui Alexander

Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of the U.S. Antagonisms by Frank B. Wilderson III

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in 19th-Century America by Saidiya V. Hartman

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde

The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James

The Negro by W.E.B. DuBois

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation by Paul Gilroy