Book Description
Here's an eminently readable reference of African-American contributions to the arts, faithfully adapted from the original one-volume encyclopedia Africana. Essays on such influential black figures as the writer and activist Amiri Baraka; singers Billie Holiday, Paul Robeson, and Lena Horne; painter Romare Bearden; filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles, and poet Maya Angelou, as well as on black cultural events throughout modern history, create a rich resource of African-American arts and letters. 50 photographs and illustrations.

About the Author
Kwame Anthony Appiah is the Laurence S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at the Center for Human Values, Princeton University. He has been Chairman of the Joint Committee on African Studies of the Social Science Research Council and President of the Society for African Philosophy in North America. He lives in Princeton. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Humanities, chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies, and Director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Here's an eminently readable reference of African-American contributions to the arts, faithfully adapted from the original one-volume encyclopedia Africana. Essays on such influential black figures as the writer and activist Amiri Baraka; singers Billie Holiday, Paul Robeson, and Lena Horne; painter Romare Bearden; filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles, and poet Maya Angelou, as well as on black cultural events throughout modern history, create a rich resource of African-American arts and letters.

50 photographs and illustrations.

Author Biography: Kwame Anthony Appiah is the Laurence S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at the Center for Human Values, Princeton University. He has been Chairman of the Joint Committee on African Studies of the Social Science Research Council and President of the Society for African Philosophy in North America. He lives in Princeton.