Stanford University Press Blog

Black History Month Recommended Reading

 

In celebration of Black History Month, SUP is pleased to offer this list of recommended reading. These titles span across sociology, personal accounts, history, anthropology, law, human rights, and education.

 

Black Privilege: Modern Middle-Class Blacks with Credentials and Cash to Spend »

CASSI PITTMAN CLAYTOR

"A rich and nuanced portrait of the black middle class. Pittman Claytor's insightful analysis should be read widely by college students and wider audiences, for it skillfully and beautifully mobilizes the sociological imagination to make the familiar and taken-for-granted visible."

—Michèle Lamont, co-author of Getting Respect

 

New York City has the largest population of black Americans out of any metropolitan area in the United States. It is home to a steadily rising number of socio-economically privileged blacks. In Black Privilege Cassi Pittman Claytor examines how this economically advantaged group experiences privilege, having credentials that grant them access to elite spaces and resources with which they can purchase luxuries, while still confronting persistent anti-black bias and racial stigma.

Drawing on the everyday experiences of black middle-class individuals, Pittman Claytor offers vivid accounts of their consumer experiences and cultural flexibility in the places where they live, work, and play. Whether it is the majority white Wall Street firm where they're employed, or the majority black Baptist church where they worship, questions of class and racial identity are equally on their minds. They navigate divergent social worlds that demand, at times, middle-class sensibilities, pedigree, and cultural acumen; and at other times pride in and connection with other blacks.

 

The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans  »

ANJALI VATS

"Anjali Vats delivers a damning polemic on the racist scripts and tropes that have animated American intellectual property law and rhetoric, shaping understandings of citizenship and structures of national feeling in three distinct eras of racial political economy. The Color of Creatorship is destined to be a touchstone and lightning rod in critical race legal theory for years to come."

—Rosemary J. Coombe, author of The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation and the Law

Little Heart-Shaped Pills

The fiction of love potions and the reality of neurotechnology.

BRIAN D. EARP and JULIAN SAVULESCU

Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

To celebrate Valentine's Day SUP is throwing a flash sale for Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships » by Brian D. Earp and Julian Savulescu! Save 50% on Love Drugs with Discount Code Love50 at Checkout. We're pleased to present this excerpt from Chapter 4 of the book.

 

If you’ve been alive sometime in the last thousand years, you will be familiar with the idea of a love potion—a magical liquid that when quaffed or applied makes a person fall passionately in love. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a love potion is introduced as a weapon in the marital war between the fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania. To humiliate Titania, Oberon drizzles juice distilled from a “love-in-idleness” flower on to her eyelids as she sleeps, causing her to “madly dote” upon the first creature she sees—the donkey-headed Bottom. The flower’s magical juice also causes a tumult for the play’s mortal lovers; administered by the mischievous Puck, it makes Lysander and Demetrius both fall in love with the formerly spurned Helena, much to the dismay of Hermia, who was in the process of eloping with Lysander.

After many chases through the enchanted wood, all is set to rights, as this is after all a comedy. In Wagner’s opera, Tristan und Isolde, a love potion is substituted for a death potion to avoid the demise of the romantic leads—but not until Act 3, as this is Wagner.

In both stories love potions force characters to assume emotions that are not their own. In many popular depictions, the effects of a love potion are often undesirable, even if the person deliberately seeks it out. Consider the 1960s chart-topper “Love Potion No. 9” by the legendary songwriting duo Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. In this song, the narrator, a self-described “flop with chicks,” visits Madame Ruth, who doses him with a black, turpentine-smelling potion brewed up in her kitchen sink. He’s suddenly disoriented and starts impulsively smooching everything and everyone he sees. This includes, as you might remember, a police officer who subsequently smashes his precious “little bottle.” Presumably, none of this improved the narrator’s luck with “chicks.”