reading in black and white
- Categories
- Book/Boek
- Creator
- Holloway, Karla F.C.
- Publish Year
- 2006
- Shelfmark
- VS 54 2006
- Thesaurus
- romans, etniciteit, schrijvers, kinderen, gevangenissen
- Description
- In BookMarks Holloway explores the public side of reading and specifically how books and booklists form a public image of African Americans. Holloway reflects on the ways that her parents guided her reading when she was young and her memories of reading to her children. She takes us on a personal journey that considers the histories of reading in children's rooms, prison libraries, and 'Negro' libraries of the early twentieth century, and that finally reveals how her identity as a scholar, a parent, and an African American woman has been subject to judgments that public cultures make about race and our habits of reading. .Holloway calls our attention to a remarkable trend of many prominent African American writers--including Maya Angelou, W.E.B. Du Bois, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Malcolm X, and Zora Neale Hurston. Their autobiographies and memoirs are consistently marked with booklists--records of their own habits of reading. She examines these lists, along with the trends of selection in Oprah Winfrey's popular book club, raising the questions: What does it mean for prominent African Americans to associate themselves with European learning and culture? How do books by black authors fare in the inevitable hierarchy of a booklist?