Ames Library News

On this final Theme Thursday in Black History Month, we want to focus on revolutionary texts to help you #staywoke. Some of us have had that experience of awakening to what’s going on in the world. Whether it’s from watching a movie documenting the civil rights movement or reading about the life of Malcolm X, there comes a point in time when you might “wake up” and start reading and researching about the issues of institutional and systemic racism. These seven classic revolutionary reads listed here will give you a head start on that path.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley

Women, Race, & Class

Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community

Assata: An Autobiography

Revolutionary Suicide

Die, Nigger, Die!: A Political Autobiography

Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson

By the way, in case you weren’t sure, Merriam-Webster offers the following definition of woke. “Stay woke became a watch word in parts of the black community for those who were self-aware, questioning the dominant paradigm and striving for something better. But stay woke and woke became part of a wider discussion in 2014, immediately following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The word woke became entwined with the Black Lives Matter movement; instead of just being a word that signaled awareness of injustice or racial tension, it became a word of action. Activists were woke and called on others to stay woke. Like many other terms from black culture that have been taken into the mainstream, woke is gaining broader uses. It’s now seeing use as an adjective to refer to places where woke people commune: woke Twitter has very recently taken off as the shorthand for describing social-media activists.”

The Black Arts Movement, Black Aesthetics Movement or BAM is the artistic outgrowth of the Black Power movement that was prominent in the 1960s and early 1970s. Time magazine describes the Black Arts Movement as the “single most controversial movement in the history of African-American literature – possibly in American literature as a whole.” The movement has been seen as one of the most important times in African-American literature. It inspired black people to establish their own publishing houses, magazines, journals and art institutions. It led to the creation of African-American Studies programs within universities. The movement was triggered by the assassination of Malcolm X.Among the well-known writers who were involved with the movement are Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Maya Angelou, Hoyt W. Fuller, and Rosa Guy. Although not strictly part of the Movement, other notable African-American writers such as novelists Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed share some of its artistic and thematic concerns.

Read this text and others available in Ames to learn more about the Black Arts Movement.

The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s – Emerging from a matrix of Old Left, black nationalist, and bohemian ideologies and institutions, African American artists and intellectuals in the 1960s coalesced to form the Black Arts Movement, the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement. In this comprehensive analysis, James Smethurst examines the formation of the Black Arts Movement and demonstrates how it deeply influenced the production and reception of literature and art in the United States through its negotiations of the ideological climate of the Cold War, decolonization, and the civil rights movement. Taking a regional approach, Smethurst examines local expressions of the nascent Black Arts Movement, a movement distinctive in its geographical reach and diversity, while always keeping the frame of the larger movement in view. The Black Arts Movement, he argues, fundamentally changed American attitudes about the relationship between popular culture and “high” art and dramatically transformed the landscape of public funding for the arts.

Revolutions aren’t always political, social, or cultural. Sometimes the way we do things and the processes for accomplishing tasks are done the same way until someone comes along and revolutionizes it. Sarah Breedlove Walker, better known as Madame C. J. Walker, created a cosmetic empire by inventing a system of hair straightening. This was an important development because for generations before her revolutionary process, blacks had straightened hair on ironing boards, which endangered the scalp and face and broke the hair. She was both an inventor and an entrepreneur; she opened a shop, trained assistants, and opened a beauty school.

Eventually, she moved the operation to Indianapolis and built her first factory. By 1917, Walker employed 3,000 workers in America’s largest black-owned business and was profiting from sales of equipment and supplies and from her chain of beauty schools.

On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker was written by A’Lelia Bundles. Bundles, a journalist and great-great-granddaughter of Madam C.J. Walker, offers a lively portrait of an American businesswoman. Walker, the first freeborn child of slaves, rose from poverty to establish a successful hair-care business, became one of the wealthiest women in the U.S., and devoted herself to a life of activism and philanthropy toward race and women’s issues.

Black History Month, or National African American History Month, is an annual celebration of achievements by black Americans and a time for recognizing the central role of African Americans in U.S. history. Black History Month was first proposed by Black educators and the Black United Students at Kent State University in February 1969. The first celebration of Black History Month took place at Kent State one year later, in February 1970.

Six years later Black History Month was being celebrated all across the country in educational institutions, centers of Black culture and community centers, both great and small, when President Gerald Ford recognized Black History Month, during the celebration of the United States Bicentennial. He urged Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

This month, Theme Thursdays will focus on revolutions related to black Americans. Black Americans have a long history of participating in revolutions, from the American Revolution to the Industrial Revolution. While it hasn’t been called a “revolution,” the #BlackLivesMatter movement is a call to action and response to anti-Black racism permeating U.S. society. Black Lives Matter has a defined agenda, defined leadership structure, and strategy for getting what it wants. It’s been said that if it must choose between evolution and revolution—between working within the existing system and disrupting that system entirely—then Black Lives Matter is choosing, to an extent, revolution.

Black Lives Matter activists have organized thousands of protests, a form of activism which has a long history with black communities. Learn about protests and activism within the black community with these collections from Ames.

Black students in protest: A study of the origins of the Black student movement, by Anthony M. Orum

Pullman porters and the rise of protest politics in Black America, 1925-1945, by Beth Tompkins Bates

Schooling Jim Crow: The fight for Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School and the roots of Black protest politics, by Jay Winston Driskell Jr.

Strategies for freedom: The changing patterns of Black protest, by Bayard Rustin

Black protest: history, documents, and analyses, 1619 to the present, edited with introd. and commentary by Joanne Grant

Black protest in the sixties, edited with an introd. by August Meier and Elliott Rudwick

Black protest: Issues and tactics, by Robert C. Dick

Art is…The Permanent Revolution – this film, available through Kanopy, documents the revolutionary nature of art across the past couple hundred years.

The anger and outrage captured by graphic artists and printmakers have defined revolutions through the centuries, depicting the human condition in all its glories and struggles so powerfully that perceptions, attitudes and politics have been dramatically influenced. In art is … the permanent revolution three contemporary artists and a master printer explore how social reality and protest are conveyed in art. While the stirring works of the masters sweep by – among them graphics by Rembrandt, Goya, Daumier, Kollwitz, Dix, Grosz and Picasso – the making of an etching, a woodcut and a lithograph unfolds before our eyes as the contemporary artists join their illustrious predecessors in creating art of social engagement. Featuring Sigmund Abeles, etcher; Ann Chernow, lithographer; Paul Marcus, woodcutter; and James Reed, master printer.

Every decade spawns a musical revolution.

The ’60s birthed psychedelia, the ’70s punk, the ’80s hip-hop, the ’90s grunge, and even the aughts brought a bold new sound: Southern rap.

At the start of this century, stars from Lil Wayne to T.I. to Rick Ross restated the power, and eccentricity, of regional music, giving once isolated sounds national resonance.

Check out some of these books on musical revolutions happening around the world and throughout time.

The Sound of Innovation: Stanford and the Computer Music Revolution

How a team of musicians, engineers, computer scientists, and psychologists developed computer music as an academic field and ushered in the era of digital music.

Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil

In the year 2000, Brazil commemorated not only the passing of the century and the millennium but also the five hundred years since her discovery. To this date, then, is attached an accumulation of meaning not shared with any other country in the world. And the flood of omens let loose at this juncture is closely allied with the psychology of Brazil-a failed nation ashamed of having once been called “the country of the future.” In fact, those past expectations have today taken the form of a resignation that underlies new frustrations, but the magnitude of Brazil’s disillusionment reveals that-fortunately or not-we remain very far from a sensible realism.

Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution

Noise Uprising brings to life the moment and sounds of a cultural revolution. Between the development of electrical recording in 1925 and the outset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, the soundscape of modern times unfolded in a series of obscure recording sessions, as hundreds of unknown musicians entered makeshift studios to record the melodies and rhythms of urban streets and dancehalls. The musical styles and idioms etched onto shellac disks reverberated around the globe: among them Havana’s son, Rio’s samba, New Orleans’ jazz, Buenos Aires’ tango, Seville’s flamenco, Cairo’s tarab, Johannesburg’s marabi, Jakarta’s kroncong, and Honolulu’s hula. They triggered the first great battle over popular music and became the soundtrack to decolonization.

Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music

In the early nineties, riot grrrl exploded onto the underground music scene, inspiring girls to pick up an instrument, create fanzines, and become politically active. Rejecting both traditional gender roles and their parents’ brand of feminism, riot grrrls celebrated and deconstructed femininity. The media went into a titillated frenzy covering followers who wrote “slut” on their bodies, wore frilly dresses with combat boots, and talked openly about sexual politics.

Cairo Pop: Youth Music in Contemporary Egypt

Cairo Pop is the first book to examine the dominant popular music of Egypt, shababiyya. Scorned or ignored by scholars and older Egyptians alike, shababiyya plays incessantly in Cairo, even while Egyptian youth joined in mass protests against their government, which eventually helped oust longtime Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in early 2011. Living in Cairo at the time of the revolution, Daniel Gilman saw, and more importantly heard, the impact that popular music can have on culture and politics. Here he contributes a richly ethnographic analysis of the relationship between mass-mediated pop.

Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe

As a measure of individual and collective identity, music offers both striking metaphors and tangible data for understanding societies in transition—and nowhere is this clearer than in the recent case of the Eastern Bloc. Retuning Culture presents an extraordinary picture of this phenomenon. This pioneering set of studies traces the tumultuous and momentous shifts in the music cultures of Central and Eastern Europe from the first harbingers of change in the 1970s through the revolutionary period of 1989–90 to more recent developments.

Music and Media in the Arab World

Since the turn of the twentieth century the dramatic rise of mass media has profoundly transformed music practices in the Arab world. Music has adapted to successive forms of media dissemination – from phonograph cylinders to MP3s – each subjected to the political and economic forces of its particular era and region. Carried by mass media, the broader culture of Arab music has been thoroughly transformed as well. Simultaneously, mass mediated music has become a powerful social force. While parallel processes have unfolded worldwide, their implications in the Arabic-speaking world have thus far received little scholarly attention. This provocative volume features sixteen new essays examining these issues, especially televised music and the controversial new genre of the music video. Perceptive voices – both emerging and established – represent a wide variety of academic disciplines. Incisive essays by Egyptian critics display the textures of public Arabic discourse to an English readership. Authors address the key issues of contemporary Arab society – gender and sexuality, Islam, class, economy, power, and nation – as refracted through the culture of mediated music. Interconnected by a web of recurrent concepts, this collection transcends music to become an important resource for the study of contemporary Arab society and culture.

Scientific and technological revolutions are happening every day as we get better and better at asking questions and figuring out answers. On this Theme Thursday we think back to some pretty revolutionary discoveries in the earth sciences

Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences: From Heresy to Truth – During the twentieth century, scientists made four fundamental and surprising discoveries about the Earth: our planet is billions of years old, continents and ocean floors move, rocks as big as mountains fall from the sky, and humans are changing the climate. When first proposed, each violated long-held beliefs and quickly came to be regarded as scientific, and sometimes religious, heresy. Then, after decades of rejection, scientists reversed themselves and came to accept each theory. Today, scientists regard deep time, continental drift, meteorite impact, and anthropogenic global warming as established truths.