Black Cool : One Thousand Streams of Blackness ISBN: 9781593764722 Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / Catapult Digital rights:Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time Subjects: Literature; History;
Despite the slenderness of this collection of essays on the zen of cool by several influential cultural visionaries, Walker (Black, White and Jewish) knows how to approach a fashionable theme from all angles. After an informed foreword by historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., the various commentaries on the fundamentals and potential of this African-American cultural export domestically and globally are written by such trendsetters as writer Mat Johnson, performing artist Staceyann Chin, critic Dream Hampton, photographer Dawoud Bey, writer Veronica Chambers, essayist Miles Marshall Lewis, critic Margo Jefferson, fashion maven Michaela Angela Davis, and educator-activist bell hooks. Three of the standouts are Chamber's "Hunger," Chin's "Authenticity," and hooks's "Forever," where elements of the personal give meaning to the topic and touch the reader in a significant way. While Hampton discusses "Audacity" as mastering fear and Bey explains "Swagger" as "a way to reclaim and celebrate viscerally an aspect of self that has historically eroded," Lewis pays tribute in "Always Evoking" to the sound sorcerer Miles Davis, a musician of the cool sound whose constant mode was change. Walker and her band of scribes are in top form, giving a rich, varied picture of Black cool style at its most frosty. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Rebecca Walker has contributed to the global conversation about race, gender, power, and the evolution of the human family for three decades. Since graduating from Yale, she has authored and edited seven bestselling books on subjects ranging from intergenerational feminism and multiracial identity to Black Cool and ambivalent motherhood, and written dozens of articles on topics as varied as Barack Obama's masculinity, the work of visual artist Ana Mendieta, and the changing configuration of the American family.
Walker has won many awards, including the Women Who Could Be President Award from the League of Women Voters, was named by Time magazine as one of the most influential leaders of her generation, and continues to teach her masterclass, "The Art of Memoir," at gorgeous and inspiring places around the world.
