Ocean State Libraries

New York Times­ best-selling author Cornel West is one of America’s most provocative and admired public intellectuals. Whether in the classroom, the streets, the prisons, or the church, Dr. West’s penetrating brilliance has been a bright beacon shining through the darkness for decades.

Yet, as he points out in this new memoir, "I’ve never taken the time to focus on the inner dynamics of the dark precincts...

"In this highly engaging book, fashionista and pop culture expert Tanisha C. Ford investigates Afros and dashikis, go-go boots and hotpants of the sixties, hip hop's baggy jeans and bamboo earrings, and the #BlackLivesMatter-inspired hoodies of today. The history of these garments is deeply intertwined with Ford's story as a black girl coming of age in a Midwestern rust belt city. She experimented with the Jheri curl; discovered how wearing the wrong...

"In the tradition of Edward Said's Orientalism and Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, Afropessimism is an unparalleled account of the non-analogous experience of being Black. A seminal work that strikingly combines groundbreaking philosophy with searing flights of memoir, Afropessimism presents the tenets of an increasingly influential intellectual movement that theorizes blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Rather than interpreting...

With Crabcakes, James Alan McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Elbow Room, marks his reentry into the literary world after a twenty-year absence. McPherson revisits in Crabcakes the years since he first left Georgia as a young man, retracing memories of people and relationships in moments of startling and searing introspection. His meditations on the past - his migration from the deep South of his birth to his travels as a waiter on the...