Product Description: Challenging monolithic approaches to culture and literacy, this book looks at the roots of African-American reading and writing from the perspective of vernacular activities and creolization. It shows that African-Americans, while readily mastering the conventions and canons of Euro-America, also drew on knowledge of their own to make an oppositional repertoire of signs and meanings...read more

Complemented by more than 170 superlative illustrations and reproductions, this vivid look at African-American vernacular art celebrates the work of twenty-seven self-taught artists whose artistry captures the social, cultural, and spiritual experiences of African Americans in America's South.

Product Description: A native of Nashville and the son of former slaves, William Edmondson (1872 - 1951) was the first African American artist to be featured in a solo show at New York's Museum of Modern Art (1937). For this exhibition MoMA director Alfred Barr remarked, "Usually the naïve artist works in the easier medium of painting...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The concept of African American home ground knits together diverse aspects of the American landscape, from elite suburbs and tower apartments to the old homeplaces of the countryside, to the tabletop array of family photos beside the bed of a housebound elder...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)