Books you should take into account

Right now I'm reading these two books about different subjects but related to African-American culture, of course. The first one deals with poetry and drama. The second was written by bell hooks (it's not my mistake, she doesn't write capital letters), a black feminist.

• The Black American Writer. Volume II: poetry and drama. Edited by C.W.E. Bigsby. Penguin Books.

The Black American Writer is a two-volume collection of essays on the Negro literary Achievement. Its purpose is to examine the black community's major talents, to assess the difficulties facing the black writer, and to analyze the problems of criticism in a field fraught with social, cultural, and political prejudice. The essays are by both black and white writers, and considerable space is devoted to the controversy over the white man's motives and qualifications as a critic of black letters.
[...]
Poetry and the drama are the subjects of Volume II, which begins with Jean-Paul Sartre's seminal study "Black Orpheus." Among the major figures whose work is discussed are Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Ossie Davis, and LeRoi Jones.

• Black Looks. Race and representation. By bell hooks. South End Press.

From Publishers Weekly

This latest collection from hooks ( Yearning ) contains a dozen recent essays on the representation of the African American experience, an area in which, she argues convincingly, little progress has been made. The author draws more effectively on her own experiences and sense of identity than do most other writers in the critical theory arena. Her gaze often falls on the ostensible recuperation of blackness into advertising, fashion and pop culture. She denounces white radicals' appropriation of an African American Other that revels in the oneness of a "primitive" people with nature. As she points out, the next step in that process is the commodification of the "primitive" by consumer culture. In other essays hooks offers brilliant analyses of the Hill-Thomas hearings and of Madonna, forcing readers to confront issues of race and representation that fans of the Material Girl would probably rather ignore and revealing the underlying reactionary bent of her music and videos. Equally striking is hooks's linkage of feminism and gay and lesbian liberation to black liberation, with a resulting rejection of a narrow and facile nationalism. Imbued with hooks's theoretical rigor, intellectual integrity, breadth of knowledge and passion, this book is a necessary read for anyone concerned with race in America.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.