Explores how five African civilizations, Yoruba, Kongo, Ejagham, Mande, and Cross River, have influenced and been portrayed in the aesthetic, social, and meta-physical traditions of black people in the United States, Cuba, Haiti, Trinidad, Mexico, Brazil, and other places in the New World.

"A richly illustrated exploration of Black culture at its most wildly imaginative and artistically ambitious, In the Black Fantastic assembles art and imagery from across the African diaspora. Embracing the mythic and the speculative, it recycles and reconfigures elements of fable, folklore, science fiction, spiritual traditions, ceremonial pageantry and the legacies of Afrofuturism. In works that span photography, painting, sculpture, cinema, graphic...

"What better way is there to preserve the human spirit of a people than through artistic expression? This book celebrates the stories of Black artists who paved the way for people of color in and out of the arts to be their true selves. Read about men and women who have broken barriers in literature and the performing and visual arts including writer Toni Morrison, jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, rapper Common, artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, actor Lupia...

"The cultural legacy of the Yoruba people of Nigeria and Benin is one of Africa's oldest and richest, extending for more than nine centuries. Among the most prized achievements of African art are the naturalistic terracotta sculptures produced for the royal Yoruba courts from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. Also renowned for their beauty and craftsmanship are Yoruba ceremonial swords, elaborate beaded crowns, wood and ivory carvings, embroidered...

"In 1934, Nancy Cunard published Negro: An Anthology, which brought together more than two hundred contributions, serving as a plea for racial justice, an expose of black oppression, and a hymn to black achievement and endurance. The anthology stands as a virtual ethnography of 1930s racial, historic, artistic, political, and economic culture. Samuel Beckett, a close friend of the flamboyant and unconventional Cunard, translated nineteen of the contributions...

"Deeply informed by jazz as music and sociality, Fumi Okiji explores black movement of thought as marked by a failure to be adequately disturbed by contradiction. The tarrying with the negative so crucial to European critical theory cannot quite account for the exorbitance characteristic of black thought. This is an orientation that allows for an oversubscription of intention, sense, and logic, against the parsimony prized by the dialectical form....

Mabby and Jago determine to defeat the Lord of Pengersick, an evil sorcerer who has filled the lives of the people of the surrounding area with misery and terror.