"Luke Cage" Guide to Black American Culture
Reading lists and music used and referenced in the Netflix superhero series, "Luke Cage."
Black American Literture
This section cites references made in the first season of Luke Cage to Black American literary figures and their works. It is based on Tara Betts' excellent article, "The Luke Cage Syllabus: A Breakdown of All the Black Literature Featured in Netflix’s Luke Cage."
Columns are sorted by fiction and non-fiction.
Black Fiction in "Luke Cage"
James Baldwin
Quintessential playwright, essayist and novelist.
Go Tell It on the Mountain by Call Number: PS3552.A45G62 1995ISBN: 9780345806543Publication Date: 2013-09-12
Zora Neale Hurston
was a novelist and anthropologist whose work chronicled African American life in the early 20th century.
The Complete Stories by
A new collection of short stories spanning the career of one of the most important African American women writers of the century. Hurston is the bestselling author of Their Eyes Were Watching God which sold more than 415,000 copies. Most of these collected stories have previously appeared only in magazines.
Call Number: PS3515.U789A6 1995ISBN: 0060167327Publication Date: 1995-03-01
Donald Goines
Notable writer of urban fiction. Also wrote under the pseudonym, Al C. Clark.
Crime Partners by ISBN: 9780870679865Publication Date: 2007-05-01
Richard Price
Screenwriter and novelist known for such works as "Lush Life" and "The Whites" (written under the pseudonym Harry Brandt).
Chester Himes
Wrote noir novels, most notably the Harlem series. Himes did most of his later writing as an expatriate in France, where he died in 1984.
Cotton Comes to Harlem by Call Number: PS3515.I713C6 1965aISBN: 9780394759999Publication Date: 1988-11-28
Black Literature (Non-Fiction) from "Luke Cage"
James Baldwin
Social critique and essays.
Notes of a Native Son by Call Number: E185.61.B2 1984ISBN: 9780807006238Publication Date: 2012-11-20
The Cross of Redemption by
The Cross of Redemption is a revelation by an American literary master: a gathering of essays, articles, polemics, reviews, and interviews that have never before appeared in book form. nbsp; James Baldwin was one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century, renowned for his fierce engagement with issues haunting our common history. In The Cross of Redemption we have Baldwin discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of American religious fundamentalism; the black church in America; the trials and tribulations of black nationalism; anti-Semitism; the blues and boxing; Russian literary masters; and the role of the writer in our society. nbsp; Prophetic and bracing, The Cross of Redemption is a welcome and important addition to the works of a cosmopolitan and canonical American writer who still has much to teach us about race, democracy, and personal and national identity. As Michael Ondaatje has remarked, "If van Gogh was our nineteenth-century artist-saint, Baldwin [was] our twentieth-century one."
Call Number: PS3552.A45C76 2011ISBN: 9780307275967Publication Date: 2011-09-06
I Am Not Your Negro by
Master documentary filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using Baldwin's original words and a flood of rich archival material. A journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter.
Call Number: Dana Media 958Publication Date: 2017
Zora Neale Hurston
was a novelist and anthropologist whose work chronicled African American life in the early 20th century.
Hurston - Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings by Call Number: GR55.H86A3 1995ISBN: 0940450844Publication Date: 1995-02-01
Every Tongue Got to Confess C by
"Imagine the situations in which these speech acts occur. Recall a front stoop, juke joint, funeral, wedding, barbershop, kitchen: the music, noise, communal energy, and release. Dream. Participate the way you do when you allow a song to transport you, all kinds of songs, from hip-hop rap to Bach to Monk, each bearing its different history of sounds and silences." -- From the Foreword by John Edgar Wideman African-American folklore was Zora Neale Hurston's first love. Collected in the late 1920s, Every Tongue Got to Confess is the third volume of folk-tales from the celebrated author of Their Eyes Were Watching God. It is published here for the first time. These hilarious, bittersweet, often saucy folk-tales -- some of which date back to the Civil War -- provide a fascinating, verdant slice of African-American life in the rural South at the turn of the twentieth century. Arranged according to subject -- from God Tales, Preacher Tales, and Devil Tales to Heaven Tales, White-Folk Tales, and Mistaken Identity Tales -- they reveal attitudes about slavery, faith, race relations, family, and romance that have been passed on for generations. They capture the heart and soul of the vital, independent, and creative community that so inspired Zora Neale Hurston. In the foreword, author John Edgar Wideman discusses the impact of Hurston's pioneering effort to preserve the African-American oral tradition and shows readers how to read these folk tales in the historical and literary context that has -- and has not -- changed over the years. And in the introduction, Hurston scholar Carla Kaplan explains how these folk-tales were collected, lost, and found, and examines their profound significance today. In Every Tongue Got to Confess, Zora Neale Hurston records, with uncanny precision, the voices of ordinary people and pays tribute to the richness of Black vernacular -- its crisp self-awareness, singular wit, and improvisational wordplay. These folk-tales reflect the joys and sorrows of the African-American experience, celebrate the redemptive power of storytelling, and showcase the continuous presence in America of an Africanized language that flourishes to this day.
Call Number: GR111.A47H83 2001ISBN: 0060188936Publication Date: 2001-11-27
Langston Hughes
One of the most important literary figures in U.S. history, Hughes wrote about black life in the U.S.. He won the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in 1935.
The Voice of Langston Hughes
Audio recording of the poet reading a selection of 21 of his works (prose and poetry) for the Smithsonian Folkways recordings in the 1950s. Access the recording online by clicking on the link that says, "Full text available from Alexander Street Press Smithsonian global sound for libraries."
The Weary Blues by
Nearly ninety years after its first publication, this celebratory edition of The Weary Blues reminds us of the stunning achievement of Langston Hughes, who was just twenty-four at its first appearance. Beginning with the opening "Proem" (prologue poem)--"I am a Negro: / Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa"--Hughes spoke directly, intimately, and powerfully of the experiences of African Americans at a time when their voices were newly being heard in our literature. As the legendary Carl Van Vechten wrote in a brief introduction to the original 1926 edition, "His cabaret songs throb with the true jazz rhythm; his sea-pieces ache with a calm, melancholy lyricism; he cries bitterly from the heart of his race . . . Always, however, his stanzas are subjective, personal," and, he concludes, they are the expression of "an essentially sensitive and subtly illusive nature." That illusive nature darts among these early lines and begins to reveal itself, with precocious confidence and clarity. In a new introduction to the work, the poet and editor Kevin Young suggests that Hughes from this very first moment is "celebrating, critiquing, and completing the American dream," and that he manages to take Walt Whitman's American "I" and write himself into it. We find here not only such classics as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and the great twentieth-century anthem that begins "I, too, sing America," but also the poet's shorter lyrics and fancies, which dream just as deeply. "Bring me all of your / Heart melodies," the young Hughes offers, "That I may wrap them / In a blue cloud-cloth / Away from the too-rough fingers / Of the world."
Call Number: PS3515.U274A6 2015ISBN: 9780385352970Publication Date: 2015-02-10
As Seen in the Show
Invisible Man by
Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a black man's journey through contemporary America. Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity--powerfully imagined and written with a savage, wryly humorous gusto.--Atlantic.
Call Number: PS3555.L625I5 1990ISBN: 0679723137Publication Date: 1989-04-23
Little Green (not in Rutgers Collection) by
Not in the Rutgers Library Collection:
In Little Green, Walter Mosley's acclaimed detective Easy Rawlins returns from the brink of death to investigate the dark side of that haven for Los Angeles hippies, the Sunset Strip. He's soon back in top form, cruising the gloriously psychedelic mean streets of L.A. with his murderous sidekick, Mouse. They've been hired to look for a young black man, Evander "Little Green" Noon, who disappeared during an acid trip. Fueled by an elixir called Gator's Blood, Easy experiences a physical, spiritual, and emotional resurrection, but peace and love soon give way to murder and mayhem.
ISBN: 0307949788Publication Date: 2014-01-28
