"The moment just before Radar Radmanovic is born, all of the hospital's electricity mysteriously fails. The delivery takes place in total darkness. Lights back on, the staff sees a healthy baby boy-with pitch-black skin-born to the stunned white parents. No one understands the uncanny electrical event or the unexpected skin color. "A childbirth is an explosion," the ancient physician says by way of explanation. "Some shrapnel is inevitable, isn't...

"A beautiful love letter to Black joy, as a source of self-preservation and survival as well as a form of resistance"--

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. A Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, he was renowned as an essayist and as the author of many books, among them Karl Marx, Four Essays on Liberty, Russian Thinkers, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, and from Princeton, Concepts and Categories, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of...

"The African diaspora - a direct result of the transatlantic slave trade and Western colonialism - has generated a wide array of artistic achievements, from blues and reggae, to the paintings of the pioneering African American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner and video creations of contemporary hip-hop artists. This book concentrates on how these works, often created during times of major social upheaval and transformation, use black culture both as a subject...

"Is there such a thing as contemporary art history? The contemporary, after all--as much as we may want to consider it otherwise--is being made history as it happens. By what means do we examine this moving target? These questions lie at the center of Jane Blocker's Becoming Past. The important point is not whether there is--or should be--contemporary art history, Blocker argues, but how. Focusing on a significant aspect of current art practice, in...

Describes how artist Marcel Duchamp turned a toilet into a famous work of art.