The Marketplace, Barack Obama, and African-American Culture

The election of Barack Obama to the United States presidency represents more than one man’s personal political victory. It also in part represents the triumph of the cultural values, diverse spirituality, and enduring legacies of a people who survived centuries of slavery to emerge as a globally influential and celebrated community.

Stocks in products exploring and documenting African-American culture have ebbed and flowed since the 1920s-1940s Harlem Renaissance which helped generate and coincided with America’s famous Jazz Age. Interest surged forward again during the 1960s Black Arts Movement and yet again with the more recent boom in Afrocentric literature, in both traditional publishing houses and among independent authors turned publishers, from the 1990s to the present.

The impact tends to be a cross-industry one that enhances the quality, productivity, and profitability of different institutions. Universities, high schools, museums, libraries, the film industry, and Internet-based companies all continuously benefit from African-American culture’s thriving vitality (who doesn’t know what hip hop is?) and it therefore makes sense to become as informed about it as possible.

The groundbreaking Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Facts on File, ISBN 0816045399) is a book that made history of its own when it became the first encyclopedic volume on the celebrated movement that gave birth to modern African-American culture. It won the prestigious Choice Academic Title Award and Best History Book Award for its treatment of an era that not only gave us such outstanding authors as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston; and leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois, but laid the foundation for the success of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, and, arguably, the forthcoming historic presidential inauguration. The era also provided such lasting legacies as jazz music, gospel music, the blues, rap, and other staples of African-American culture that have since gone on to influence world culture.

There is no better time than now to invest in the legacies of a triumphant culture, and one of the better ways to do that is by investing in Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. For more on the celebrated volume, please click or paste the following link: http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewwork.asp?AuthorID=25279&id=13370

by Aberjhani

The American Poet Who Went Home Again