Anti-Racist Reading Lists
George Floyd's murder by police officers has sparked protests across the country while renewing conversations about racial injustice. In our department, that conversation has included a request from an undergraduate English major for faculty to compile and share a list of recommended works that shed light on our moment and center Black voices.
Below we offer some selections from the book lists we use in our literature graduate program to help equip PhD students to study and teach race and ethnicity in US literature. We also include recommendations from English faculty grouped by genre.
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A Note About This List and List Like This:
Because such lists have proliferated recently all over the web, we want to identify ours as an expression of the faculty members who make up our English department and, as such, likely to change as our colleagues contribute materials.
If you are interested in the larger debate about the value of these kinds of reading lists, one bracing place to start is Northwestern University English and African American studies Professor Lauren Jackson’s column in New York magazine, where she argues that “For such a list to do good, something keener than ‘anti-racism’ must be sought.”
As for the differences among our recommendations below, you’ll note that the department’s graduate exam lists cover a field. Some faculty recommendations privilege the centering of Black voices. Others recommend readings that focus on specific topics including public protest, rebellion, and/or policing in our era and in the past.
This web page is not a syllabus, for it is not accompanied with teaching. That matters, because the books UC Davis English faculty recommend may challenge their readers to break down often widely-held worldviews. As a result, they can be hard to read on one’s own. Many of these books have been and will again be taught in our classrooms, and we hope that our students will encounter them there.
As faculty who believe that reading such books as those listed below is a learned (and teachable!) skill, we look forward to engaging in classroom discussion with our students about how to read and what to do with these materials. For now, though, we recommend them.
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Without further ado, here are some recommendations:
---For those seeking scholarly background, we commend two recent books by our own faculty: Racial Worldmaking by Mark Jerng, which considers how and when racial description becomes racism, and The Black Middle Ages by Matthew Vernon, which delves into the question of how the literature we study serves both racist and anti-racist endeavors.
---Here are five books from the UC Davis English Literature Graduate Program Race and Ethnicity Studies list (the complete list appears at the bottom of this page):
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider (1984)
Williams, Patricia. The Alchemy of Race and Rights (1991)
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark (1992)
Cornel West, Race Matters (1993)
---Here are six books from the UC Davis English Literature Graduate Program US Literature Readings lists:
McKay, Claude. Harlem Shadows (1922)
Toomer, Jean. Cane (1923)
Hughes, Langston, and Zora Neale Hurston. The Mule Bone (1930)
Mackey, Nathaniel. Eroding Witness (1987)
Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower (1993)
Smith, Anna Deveare. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994)
---Here are recommendations submitted by UC Davis English Department faculty members, grouped by genre.
--------Novels and Short Fiction:
Acevedo, Elizabeth. The Poet X (2018)
Baldwin, James. "Sonny's Blues" (1957)
Chesnutt, Charles. The Marrow of Tradition (1901)
Delany, Martin. Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859)
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man (1952)
Gaines, Ernest J. A Lesson Before Dying (1993)
Himes, Chester. A Rage in Harlem (1957)
Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Lippard, George. The Killers (1849)
Melville, Herman. Benito Cereno (1855)
Morrison, Toni. Sula (1973)
Mosely, Walter. Little Scarlet (2004)
Okorafor, Nnedi. Akata Witch (2011) (young adult)
Thomas, Piri. Down These Mean Streets (1967)
Twain, Mark. Puddn'head Wilson (1895)
Webb, Frank J. The Garies and Their Friends (1857)
Wright, Richard. Native Son (1940)
--------Collections of Poetry:
Laviera, Tato. Bencidición: The Complete Poetry of Tato Laviera (2014)
Perdomo, Willie. Smoking Lovely (2004)
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen (2014)
--------Non-fiction and Memoir:
Chambers, Veronica. Mama's Girl (1997)
Turner, Nat (T.R. Gray). The Confession of Nat Turner (1831)
Wideman, John. Brothers and Keepers (1984)
--------Anthologies and Criticism:
Dzidzienyo and Oboler, eds. Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos (2005)
Jiménez Román and Flores, eds. The Afro-Latino Reader: History and Culture in the United States (2010)
Redpath, James, ed. Echoes of Harper's Ferry (1860)
The complete UC Davis English Graduate Program list in Race and Ethnicity Studies
Anzaldúa, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Arendt, Hannah, “Reflections on Little Rock” or “stateless persons” from Origins of Totalitarianism
Balibar, Etienne and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities
Carby, Hazel, Reconstructing Womanhood
Chin, Frank, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake”
Christian, Barbara, “The Race for Theory”
Comparative Racialization, ed. Shu-Mei Shih, special issue of PMLA 123.5
Crenshaw, Kimberlé, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color”
Du Bois, W.E.B., The Souls of Black Folk
Edwards, Brent Hayes, The Practice of Diaspora
Espiritu, Yến Lê, Asian American Panethnicity
Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks
Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended.”
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing, and Difference
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference”
Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic
Goldberg, David Theo, The Threat of Race
Hall, Stuart, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” “New Ethnicities,” “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity”
Harris, Cheryl, “Whiteness as Property”
Hartman, Saidiya, Scenes of Subjection and “Venus”
Hegel, G.W.F., “Lordship and Bondage” from Phenomenology of Spirit
James, C.L.R., Black Jacobins or Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways
Lorde, Audre, Sister Outsider
Lott, Eric, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
Lowe, Lisa, Immigrant Acts and “The Intimacies of Four Continents”
Lye, Colleen, America’s Asia
Moraga, Cherríe and Gloria Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back
Morrison, Toni, Playing in the Dark
Ngai, Mae, Impossible Subjects
Omi, Michael and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s
Park, Robert, “The Nature of Race Relations.”
Postone, Moishe, Anti-Semitism and National Socialism.
Roediger, David, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.
Saldívar, José David, The Dialectics of Our America
Saldívar, Ramón, Chicano Narrative or The Borderlands of America
Smith, Barbara, “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism”
Spillers, Hortense, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”
Weaver, Womack, and Allen, American Indian Literary Nationalism.
Cornel West, Race Matters
Williams, Patricia, The Alchemy of Race and Rights