News, announcements, updates, and happenings in the UVA Library

University and Library personnel and construction workers and contractors gathered yesterday for a "topping-out ceremony" for the library renovation. The topping-out is when the last beam is placed atop a structure, and is a traditional milestone in a major construction project.

The beam was signed by Library staff, UVA facilities personnel, construction workers, and others involved in the project. Chris Rhodes, Skanska senior project manager; John Unsworth, the University librarian and dean of libraries at UVA; and Mark Stanis, director of construction for UVA, delivered remarks thanking the tradespeople involved. The remarks were translated into Spanish for the benefit of all by carpenter Alex Alverez.

The topping-out ceremony symbolically marks the transition in construction away from the exterior of the building and into a new phase as the structure is "closed up" and the interior work begins. The renovation/construction project, slated to be finished in the fall of 2023, will completely refurbish the historic envelope of the building and add new collections, research, and study space.

Read more and view photos of the topping-out ceremony from UVA Today.

Recommended by Sherri Brown, Research Librarian for English and Digital Humanities

“Antiquities” by Cynthia Ozick (Knopf, 2021)

Cynthia Ozick provides the reader with much to ponder in this compact novel. Readers get a glimpse into the thoughts of Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie through the guise of his attempt at writing a memoir. In some ways, Petrie’s attitude and escapades as he attempts to record a moment from his childhood at the Temple Academy for Boys in New York calls to mind a character befitting Donald Petrie’s 1993 film “Grumpy Old Men” or John Madden’s “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” (2011). However, Lloyd Petrie is not a loveable character but an anti-Semite who fluctuates between his own self-aggrandizement and self-doubt. The novel questions the authenticity of memory, the significance of memoir, and the adoration of objects, all while Petrie reflects on a secret infatuation with an outcast among outcasts. One reading only scratches the surface of the treasure embedded in these pages.

“Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self” by Rebecca Walker (Riverhead Books, 2001)

Rebecca Walker is the daughter of famed novelist Alice Walker and civil rights lawyer Melvyn R. Leventhal. Her memoir captures the searingly harsh adolescent experience of growing up in the U.S., her childhood made particularly challenging by her multiracial heritage. Walker shares her struggle with finding her identity while feeling ever the outsider. A book that highlights both pain and resilience, this account delves into feelings of not being Black enough, not being white enough, and not being Jewish enough. While this was written more than twenty years ago, it still reflects the state of a nation that is uncomfortable with race and religion and the children who must learn to live with that discord.

“The History of Love” by Nicole Krauss (WW Norton, 2005)

I first read this book more than ten years ago and gave it three stars out of five on Goodreads. But I picked it up again this past winter, and wow, it really spoke to me this time around! This novel is written in several narrative voices. The chapters narrated by Jewish Polish American immigrant Leo Gursky alone make the book a must read. Leo is nearing the end of his life (or so he believes), and the way he sees the world and relates to it is alternately shocking, funny, sad, and touching. His loneliness is palpable — “All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen.” This is a book to be read slowly and contemplated to be truly enjoyed. I’m glad I came back to it. 

Recommended by Ashley Hosbach, Education and Social Science Research Librarian

“Burning Girls and Other Stories” by Veronica Schanoes (Tordotcom, 2021)

“When we came to America, we brought anger and socialism and hunger. We also brought our demons.”

“Burning Girls” reclaims the fairy tale genre, viewed here through a Jewish feminist lens that subverts the Grimm brothers’ anti-Semitic tropes. Gripping and dark, Veronica Schanoes’ collection of short stories explores witchcraft, demons, and vengeance, a narrative driven by the fears and hopes of immigrants fleeing their home countries for a better life. However, Schanoes ultimately reveals that the true horrors are not the creatures lurking in the shadows, but instead are the sins of capitalism, the false promise of the “American Dream,” anti-Semitism, and the overwhelming cruelty of humanity.

Recommended by Eyal Handelsman Katz, English Ph.D. candidate at UVA

Handelsman Katz’s dissertation explores parental figures and their ties to feminist and ethnic movements and discourses in 20th and 21st century multiethnic American prose. In collaboration with the UVA Religion, Race & Democracy Lab, he recently produced a short documentary, Słabe Jajko, about his grandmother’s memories of the Holocaust.

“Bread Givers” by Anzia Yezierska (Doubleday, Page & Company, 1925)

When Anzia Yezierska’s family emigrated to the United States from the Polish part of Russia in the 1880s, they Americanized their name, calling themselves the Mayers, with Anzia becoming Hattie Mayer. Yezierska would become a celebrated author in the early 20th century, penning among other novels “Bread Givers” (1925), her most famous work. The novel is a coming-of-age story that follows Sara Smolinsky as she struggles against her caricature of a father and sets out to succeed on her own terms. While the narrative bears the expected tropes of early 20th century feminist writing that often links female independence with whiteness and Americanization, there is more to Yezierska and the novel than meets the eye. How do we reconcile Sara’s attempt to Americanize herself with the author’s resolve to market herself as an ethnic writer under her birth name? Modern readers will also appreciate some of the ways in which the novel predates familiar tropes in rom-coms of the 1990s. Yezierska herself found brief success in Hollywood before becoming ultimately frustrated by its shallowness and alienation.

“The Promised Land” by Mary Antin (Houghton Mifflin, 1912)

Mary Antin, like Anzia Yezierska, was a Russian Jewish immigrant who moved to the Lower East Side and contributed to a wave of early feminist Jewish writing. “The Promised Land” (1912) was a celebrated and controversial memoir in which she traced her experiences as an immigrant and her embrace of U.S. culture. Antin’s text serves as a key to understanding contemporary issues in Jewish culture: Her vision of Jewish heritage in racial (rather than strictly religious) terms. How do Jews identify themselves, or should they? The question provoked widespread debate in Jewish communities throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which is clear in Antin’s memoir. Crucially, as with Yezierska, Antin offers an intersectional answer: she asks not just what does it mean to be Jewish American, but what does it mean to be a Jewish American woman?

“The Collected Stories” by Grace Paley (Farrar Staus Giroux, 1994)

Grace Paley’s “The Collected Stories” includes three of her excellent story collections: “The Little Disturbances of Man” (1959), “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” (1974), and “Later in the Same Day” (1985). In reading these stories, we see the evolution of one of the 20th century’s most talented prose writers. From the youthful energy of her early work (particularly “The Loudest Voice,” wherein a young Jewish girl is given the starring role in her school’s nativity play) to the charmingly adolescent and poignantly existential second collection (including “The Long Distance Runner,” in which a young mother hides herself in her old family home, adopted by its new inhabitants) to her more political later work (such as “Listening,” where she offers a form of activism based on the power of small gestures we can do for each other), one cannot help but be seduced by Paley’s verve, gentleness, and humor.

“The Shawl” by Cynthia Ozick (1980). Printed in book format by Knopf, 1989.

Theodor Adorno famously stated that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” How can one write anything that aims to represent such atrocities? In other words, can or should the Holocaust be represented? Many authors have taken various approaches to writing about the Holocaust, from the purely factual to the comic and beyond. Cynthia Ozick’s famous short story, “The Shawl,” seeks to represent the Shoah not through fact, but through feeling. A deeply visceral story, “The Shawl” follows Rosa, a mother trying against all odds to survive the concentration camps, with Ozick’s magical realism serving as a way to navigate a reality so awful and tragic that it seems as if it could only be unreal (an approach not without detractors). Please check out Ozick’s sequel “Rosa,” which follows some of the characters as they attempt to live on in the aftermath of unshakeable trauma.

“Days of Awe” by Achy Obejas (Ballantine Books, 2001)

When someone told Achy Obejas that her surname suggested that she had Jewish ancestry, she was motivated to dig deep into her family history. Her discoveries led her to write “Days of Awe” (2001), which, while not autobiographical, allowed her to reflect on the history of what are known as “crypto-Jews” (Jews who secretly adhere to Judaism while outwardly professing another faith, especially Sephardic Jews who faced forced conversion in Spain). “Days of Awe” follows Alejandra, a Cuban American woman who, in her travels back to Cuba, uncovers her father’s secret Jewish heritage. Through Alejandra’s plight as a lesbian woman navigating what it means to be a Jewish Cuban immigrant in the United States, Obejas offers us a complex commentary on the very notion of ethnicity.

Recommended by Hannah Jane LeDuff, UVA alum

Hannah Jane LeDuff earned her Master’s degree in English with a concentration in World Religion and World Literature in 2021. She is currently an editor for a committee of the Mississippi Legislature.

“The Book of Separation: A Memoir” by Tova Mirvis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018)

Tova Mirvis’s memoir details her own journey of leaving her Orthodox Jewish marriage and community to explore the unmapped terrain of a world outside of the religion and tradition in which she was raised. This memoir inspires readers to live their lives true to themselves without the fetters of the expectations of others.

Also recommended by Hannah Jane:

• “A Letter to Harvey Milk: Short Stories” by Lesléa Newman (University of Wisconsin Press, Terrace Books, 2004)
• “The Ladies Auxiliary” by Tova Mirvis (WW Norton, 1999)
• And for children: “Welcoming Elijah: A Passover Tale with a Tail” by Lesléa Newman (Charlesbridge, 2020)

Researchers can direct queries about Jewish American literature to Sherri Brown and research questions regarding Jewish Studies to Miguel Valladares-Llata, Librarian for Romance Languages and Latin American Studies, whose subject specialties include French, German, Jewish Studies, Latin American Studies, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.

May is Asian American and Pacific American Heritage Month! Celebrate by reading literature, poetry, and more by Asian American and Pacific Island artists. Here’s a list prepared by Undergraduate Student Success Librarian Haley Gillilan to get you started.

POETRY

“Night Sky with Exit Wounds” by Ocean Vuong

This critically acclaimed and award-winning poetry collection by Vietnamese American author Ocean Vuong is centered around diaspora, queer love, and the author’s relationship with his mother. As a poet, Vuong is careful and thoughtful, and very focused on craft and form.

His novel, “On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous,” is a semi-autobiographical work in which a son writes a letter to his mother. Vuong also recently released a new poetry collection, “Time Is A Mother.“

READ BEFORE YOU WATCH

“Pachinko” by Min Jin Lee

“Pachinko” is a saga that spans decades, following four generations of a Korean family as they navigate migration, exile, and shifting power dynamics. This beautiful story asking timeless questions about home, identity, and culture is perfect for anyone who loves historical dramas. It has recently been adapted into a miniseries for Apple TV+, featuring award winning actress Youn Yuh-Jung and popular K-drama actor Lee Min-Ho.

MEMOIR

“Another Appalachia: Coming Up Indian and Queer in a Mountain Place” by Neema Avashia

This book of personal essays follows the experiences of an Indian woman who grew up queer in West Virginia. Avashia’s work is about a very small and close-knit community that exists in a place that seems unlikely and attempts to reconcile nostalgia with the realities of her upbringing. For those seeking a unique and moving portrait of the Appalachian region, this book is for you.

MYSTERY COMEDY

“Dial A For Aunties” by Jesse Q. Sutanto

I have heard this book described as a “Crazy Rich Asians” meets “Weekend at Bernies,” and I don’t think a description could possibly be more accurate. “Dial A For Aunties” will take you on a rollercoaster that never stops twisting. When Meddy Chan accidentally kills her blind date, her nosy Aunties spring to the rescue. Things get more complicated when the body is accidentally shipped to the billionaire island resort where Meddy and her family are supposed to be working at a wedding that weekend. Can they dispose of the body, pull off the wedding, and dodge Meddy’s college ex-boyfriend all at the same time? Find out in this hilarious, page-turning adventure.

HISTORY

“Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People” by Helen Zia

For those hoping to learn more about the history of Asian Americans and Asian American activism, this book is a great place to start. The author, Helen Zia, is an important activist and journalist who, when she started speaking out about the murder of Vincent Chin in 1982, energized and coalesced Detroit’s Asian American community. It became a key moment in the larger Asian American movement.

SHORT STORIES

“In the Country” by Mia Alvar

Thanks to Romance Languages and Latin American Studies Librarian Miguel A Valldares- Llata for this contribution.

This first book written by Mia Alvar won multiple awards as soon as it was released in 2016. Its nine short stories evoke not only a past in the Philippines but the personal evolution, nostalgia, struggle, and conflict involved in reaching a new world in New York and Bahrain. It is a book overflowing with family, miracles, girls, legends, and especially Kontrabida (villains, although I prefer the translation as antihero). Written in English and sprinkled with Tagalog (the national language of the Philippines), it shows the desire to conquer a new world from a woman’s vantage point.

GRAPHIC NOVEL

“Boxers & Saints” by Gene Luen Yang

Gene Luen Yang is one of my favorite graphic novelists. “Boxers & Saints” is among his best. These companion volumes tell the story of the Boxer Rebellion through the eyes of the characters Little Bao and Vibiana. Although they are on different sides of the struggle, their narratives mirror each other and their internal journeys weave together. For those seeking some historical fiction but with an approachable, illustrated style, Yang’s work is not to be missed.

LITERARY

“The Swimmers” by Julie Otsuka

“The Swimmers” is the newest release from critically acclaimed writer Julie Otsuka. Among her accolades, she has received the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Experimental in form and craft, “The Swimmers” is about what happens to a group of recreational swimmers when a crack appears at the bottom of their pool, and about a woman named Alice.

 

April is Arab American Heritage Month and UVA Librarians are celebrating by putting together some resources to help you explore literature, film, and poetry created by Arab Americans! Amy Hunsaker, Librarian for Music and Performing Arts, prepared the following list. Please direct research queries involving Arab American experiences, histories, and lives to Phil McEldowney, Librarian for Middle East and South Asia Studies.

Want to explore Arab American literature but don’t know where to start? UVA Library holds a substantial collection of Arab American fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Here are some books to get you started.

“Modern Arab American Fiction: A Reader’s Guide” by Steven Salaita

A guide for people with little experience in this genre and who want to learn more about the writing traditions of Arab American fiction. The book provides an introduction to and critical examination of many works by notable Arab American writers, while exploring the cultural background of the writers’ countries of heritage — Lebanon, North Africa, Palestine, Iraq, and more. Short stories and poetry are provided in full with commentary for notable full-length novels.

 

“The Other Americans” by Laila Lalami

Lalami has published notable works, including “The Moor’s Account,” which won multiple awards and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. The Other Americans is her latest novel, a murder mystery which cleverly uses multiple first-person perspectives to explore the relationships of within the Moroccan American Guerraoui family that finds itself at odds with its rural Southern California neighbors.

 

 

“The Beauty of Your Face” by Sahar Mustafah

Trigger warning: vivid description of a school shooting.

A radicalized shooter has attacked a Muslim girl’s school where the daughter of Palestinian immigrants serves as principal. As the horror unfolds in the present, the author takes the reader to the past, showing the principal as a young Muslim girl in America, struggling to stay true to her family and heritage while fitting into an often belligerent American culture. These flashbacks prepare the reader for the protagonist’s dramatic confrontation with the shooter as she struggles to understand why he would commit this horrible crime.

“Out of Place: A Memoir” by Edward Said

A reading list of Arab American authors would be incomplete without a work by intellectual scholar and leading advocate for Palestinian rights, Edward Said, who is known for his groundbreaking works “Orientalism” and “Culture and Imperialism.” In his memoir, Said explores his “otherness” as a person living in exile in various countries throughout his life, and lays bare the plight of Palestinian refugees who were ousted from their homeland regardless of wealth or stature. While Said’s intellectual works are lofty academic discourses, his memoir looks inward as he reflects on his own remarkable life.

Looking for more?

If you are looking for a more comprehensive list of literature to explore, The National Endowment for the Humanities maintains Muslim Journeys, a virtual bookshelf that focuses on Muslim culture and literature as part of their Bridging Cultures Bookshelf.

Additionally, BackStory, a podcast series supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Virginia Humanities, provides an in-depth look at America’s relationship with Islam in a variety of segments produced in 2015.

And finally, check out the Ottoman History Podcast created by UVA History professor Chris Gratien, which sustains and supports academic discussion about Turkey and the Middle East.

The movement to extend voting rights to African American men after the Civil War was immediately accompanied by a push to expand the goal to include women. However, it would take both Black and white women over half a century more of struggle to finally secure the right to vote with passage of the 19th Amendment. The Black Women’s Suffrage resource explores the twin burden faced by Black women in the suffragist movement who not only fought against gender bias that denied women the right to vote, but against racism which denied people of color even the most basic of human rights. It was a fight for civil rights, a fight against lynching, and often a fight against the racism directed at them from within the Suffrage Movement itself.

Black Women’s Suffrage draws together primary resources from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions, providing documentation on women such as Mary Church Terrell and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, whose critical role at the forefront of the campaign for women’s rights are too often forgotten.

You can search the database in a variety of ways; and the links will lead you to multiple primary documents of the era.

Timeline

Follow events from the founding of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 through 2013 when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key component of the Voting Rights Act. See racial fault lines develop within the movement early on, as when Elizabeth Cady Stanton used racist language to object to the extension of the franchise to Black men and not to women. In 1865 she wrote, “In fact, it is better to be the slave of an educated white man, than of a degraded, ignorant Black one.”

Key Figures

Learn how Charlotte Vandine Forten and her three daughters helped found the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, the first biracial organization of female abolitionists in the United States. Learn also how in the 1960s civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer overcame being fired from her job and having shots fired into the house where she was staying to register to vote in Mississippi. For her continued activism, Hamer was arrested and severely beaten, suffering injuries from which she never fully recovered.

Collections

Study featured historical collections such as the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Papers, including the autobiography, diaries, articles, speeches, accounts, newspaper clippings, and photographs of the teacher, journalist, and anti-lynching activist. Wells-Barnett was born enslaved in 1862 and was educated at Shaw University (now Rust College) and Fisk University. As a student in 1884, she fiercely resisted being put off a train for refusing to comply with Jim Crow seating and won a small settlement. In 1892, when three of her acquaintances who worked in a successful Black-owned grocery were lynched, Wells-Barnett’s investigations found that not only were accusations against victims always false, lynching was essentially a tool used to preserve white supremacy and restrict upward mobility of African Americans. She believed that enfranchisement was key to ending lynching and winning civil rights and was a passionate proponent of Black women’s suffrage. In 2020, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize special citation “[f]or her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.”

Other primary source sets from the Digital Public Library of America cover topics such as:

• The American Abolitionist Movement
• Ida B. Wells and Anti-Lynching Activism
• Women’s Suffrage: Campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment
• Fannie Lou Hamer and the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi
• The Black Power Movement
• The Equal Rights Amendment

You can find this and other resources on women’s history in the Library’s A-Z Databases list!

March is Women’s History Month! A time for commemorating the achievements and contributions of women throughout history. Growing out of the first International Women’s Day on March 8, 1911, Women’s History Month was established when the National Women’s History Project successfully petitioned Congress in 1987 to designate March as a month to raise awareness of the full scope of often-overlooked women’s history. If you would like to dig more into women’s history, the Library has an abundance of resources to explore.

Library resources

• Browse Library holdings on women and gender in Virgo.
• Visit Library research guides to Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Primary Sources about Women and find links to many resources on women’s history.
• Watch streaming Video available from the Films on Demand collection.

Book titles of interest in the Library include:

"Wake: The Hidden History of Women-led Slave Revolts" by Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez

(on reserve in Clemons Library)

A graphic novel illuminating the experiences of two historical Black women rebels on the slave ship The Unity. Carefully tracing centuries-old historical evidence and imaginatively reconstructing likely scenarios where the record is silent, the book is a transformative and transporting work. It brings to three-dimensional life Adono and Alele and their pasts as women warriors, illustrating the humanity of the enslaved, the reality of their lived experiences, and the complexity of the history that has been, till now, so thoroughly erased.

"A Black Women's History of the United States" by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross

From the first African women to set foot on land that later became the United States to African American women of today, the authors have foregrounded history that is more often pushed into the shadows by white patriarchy. “A Black Women’s History of the United States” reaches far beyond a single narrative to showcase enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law.

"New Women in the Old West: From Settlers to Suffragists, an Untold American Story" by Winifred Gallagher

(available in e-book format)

Little-known history of the first women who fought for and won the right to vote in the United States, and did so decades before the passage of the 19th amendment. Even as they helped dispossess Native and Hispanic people, these persistent women created homes on weather-wracked prairies and built communities out of boom towns and muddy mining camps while playing a vital, unrecognized role in forging America’s Suffragist movement.

 

"The Secret History of Wonder Woman" by Jill Lepore.

A cultural history of DC comics superhero Wonder Woman traces her creation and enduring popularity, drawing on interviews and archival research to reveal the pivotal role of feminism in shaping her seven-decade story. Created by psychologist and writer William Moulton Marston in 1941, Wonder Woman was born amid a spirit of empowerment among working women during World War II, inspired by Marston's own unconventional relationship with two powerful women in his life.

 

Technological innovation, the concentration of vast wealth in few hands, government corruption, anti-immigrant hysteria, and progressive proposals to combat social and economic disparities: These may seem like items pulled from today’s headlines, but they entered America’s consciousness more than a century ago in an era that took its name from Mark Twain’s satiric novel of greed and corruption, “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today” (1873). Now you can find primary sources (business, legal, and personal papers) documenting the rise of American modernity in The Gilded Age and Progressive Era located in the Library’s A-Z Databases list.

Learn about the high-rise transformation of American cityscapes in the papers of the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White. Learn about personal and business dealings of the rich in the papers of John Jacob Astor and John D. Rockefeller as they built family dynasties from successes in real estate and oil. Learn the extent of government corruption in the papers of Chauncey Mitchell Depew, lawyer for Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York Central Railroad, who bought his way into the United States Senate by favoring corporate interests. Learn how in the 1890s countervailing forces of progressive reform moved the nation’s economy from laissez-faire capitalism to regulation of monopolies and turned exploited immigrants into organized labor.

Although past histories have concentrated on the two percent of American households that controlled more than a third of the nation’s wealth, the database uncovers details about the bottom 40% who had no wealth at all, including African Americans left behind when workplace reform became a concern for the welfare of white workers only.

The daybooks of William O’Gorman, Overseer of the Poor in Newtown (now Elmhurst) in the New York borough of Queens, reveal how the poor fared while the rich played. Accounts and activities include descriptions of visits to formerly enslaved African Americans and immigrants in need, and the circumstances and history of individual cases.

A scrapbook in the McKim, Mead & White papers shows the harm perpetrated on Native people in the name of uplift. A clipped article on The Ramona Industrial School for Apache Girls in Santa Fe boasts of bringing “genuine Apaches” from three hundred miles away and transforming them from “unkempt girls in moccasins, buckskins, blankets and paint into eager pupils who are dressed and can read, count, write, draw, sing, sew and work like American white girls in our own home …” The goal was to train the girls “to become skilled cooks and housekeepers … in American households.”

Documents are tagged with at least one theme to help guide your study. Key themes include:

• Architecture
• Art and Literature
• Business
• Charity and Philanthropy
• Industry
• International Affairs
• Labor Movement
• Leisure and Entertainment
• Material Culture
• Politics and Corruption
• Poverty and Inequality
• Protests and Strikes
• Reform
• Society and Events
• Urban Development

This month’s post comes to us from Katrina Spencer, Librarian for African American and African Studies.

It’s February and again we gather a variety of content from the UVA Library to feature and present to you. The aim of Black History Month is to celebrate the contributions that African Americans have made in the United States. In this post, we share some streaming content that was made by and about African Americans, and also titles that represent some broader areas of the African diaspora. Places visited in the real and fictionalized filmic tales below include New York City, Philadelphia, Nigeria, Kenya, France, Portugal, Cape Verde, and Spain, demonstrating several, but not all, of the worldwide geographies Black people occupy. Themes include the representation of Black people(s) in art and media; enduring character archetypes like the mammy; fertility; same-sex relationships in conservative, heteropatriarchal societies; coming of age; searching for one’s roots; and breaking away from a toxic parent.

See a listing of streaming video portals at UVA. You can also contact Research Librarian Miguel Valladares Llata for more on Latin America and the Caribbean, and Video Librarian Leigh Rockey to learn more about the Library’s streaming content. Can’t get enough? Two film-based resources that exist beyond UVA include the Black Film Archive and A Guide to Essential, Underrated, and Flat-Out Extraordinary Films by Black Women Directors.

“Kehinde Wiley: An Economy of Grace,” 2014

Platform: Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)

Twenty first century painter Kehinde Wiley is in his comfort zone painting the Black male form superimposed on his trademark background of vibrant, colorful florals. In this documentary, the audience follows his departure from habit as he prepares to paint Black women recruited from a shopping district in Brooklyn. The short film tracks his project from its conception, to planning, to execution, culminating with a triumphant showing of his portraits hung in a New York gallery. It is a pleasure to see the models re-envision themselves, taken from the urban concrete to the lush and regal imaginings of the canvas. I’d recommend this work to any art history major and/or anyone intending to work in a museum.

“The Watermelon Woman,” Cheryl Dunye, 1996

Platform: Kanopy

 Early 1990s filmmaker Cheryl Dunye explores the “Mammy” trope threaded through early 20th century cinematic works. In this film, her fictional job at a video rental store in Philadelphia positions her well for this research. Her quest, however, takes her on an unanticipated journey in which she encounters frosty information workers, interracial relationships, and homophobia. Despite, or perhaps because of its many competing narratives, unresolved conflicts, and blurry storylines of fiction and non-fiction, this documentary-style work won best feature film in the 1996 Berlin International Film Festival. I’d recommend “The Watermelon Woman” to anyone interested in the history of cinema led by directors from the LGBTQ community.

“Bell Hooks: Cultural Criticism and Transformation,” Sut Jhally, 1997

Platform: Kanopy

Consider this documentary work a primer on one of the most revered and prolific cultural critics of the 20th century, bell hooks, whose earthly journey came to an end, December 15, 2021. A feminist scholar and university professor, hooks is known for explicitly and regularly describing and naming a complex network of structures — white supremacist capitalist patriarchy — that shape life, social engagement, and media, nationally and globally. She regularly used this lens to deconstruct what images in popular media convey about the values and fears of the people of the United States. The 61-minute work includes references to several films and prominent creators of the 1990s, including Madonna and Spike Lee. I’d recommend this work to anyone interested in media studies and/or women, gender, and sexuality studies.

“Mother of George,” Andrew Dosunmu, 2013

Platform: Kanopy

Largely about the clash between tradition and modernity, Adenike finds herself in the new world of Brooklyn, New York, an ocean away from her Nigerian home, making a life alongside her beloved husband, Ayodele. After 18 months of wedded bliss without conception, Adenike’s in-laws become restless. Desperate to appease, Adenike considers alternatives that threaten the same traditions she is trying to uphold. The film’s colorful costume design is a pleasure to behold and the storytelling is so intimate that it could take place in any major metropolis. I recommend this work for people who are curious about West African aesthetics, celebrations, dress, and foods, and moreover to anyone whose parents share opinions about their offspring’s fertility.

“Rafiki,” Kanuri Wahiu, 2018

Platform: Kanopy

Language: Both Swahili and English with English subtitles

Kena and Ziki fall hard for one another in their small, hyper religious, and patriarchal town, Slopes, in Kenya. In a space where privacy is impossible and conservative values are king, they struggle to nurture their love. With astute social commentary on what happens when Christianity, misogyny, homophobia, and the legacies of colonialism all meet, “Rafiki” invites viewers to view same-sex relationships with compassion. The film is excellent in its telling of place and time, documenting the contemporary lifestyles of young Kenyans, their dreams, their fashions, and the ways in which they confront modernity, determining what they want to hold onto from the past and what they want to release. I’d recommend this film to anyone desiring to study abroad in Africa, anyone studying Swahili, and anyone enrolled in a Women, Gender, and Sexuality course.

“Bande de Filles / Girlhood,” Céline Sciamma, 2014

Platform: Kanopy

Language: French with English subtitles

Trigger Warning: This film includes physical violence and sexual aggression.

When Marieme realizes she will not graduate and continue her studies, her life is thrown into turmoil. In a vulnerable moment as she grapples with her fear, she is tenuously welcomed into a group of girls who aimlessly wander the banlieues (suburbs) of Paris in search of amusement. Marieme learns to dress herself in cool, hard, and hip fashion, to drink, to smoke hookah, and to fight to defend her neighborhood’s honor. As the coming of age narrative progresses, Marieme loses touch with her innocence and comes to learn the threats that accompany crossing the threshold into womanhood, among which is the tarnishing power of a damaged reputation. I’d recommend this work to anyone wanting to know more about Paris beyond the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysées as it negates much of the carefully curated depictions of the city and highlights the contemporary struggles faced in the world’s grand metropolises.

“Djon África,” João Miller Guerra and Filipa Reis, 2020

Platform: Digitalia

Language: Portuguese with English subtitles

Miguel finds himself stuck between two worlds: Portugal, where he was born and raised by his maternal grandmother and where he has lived for 25 years, and Cape Verde, the country of his father’s origin — a place that has authored his African features, yet a place he has never known. He is not wholly European and not entirely African: he is both. He decides to visit his father’s island country in the Atlantic to get in touch with his roots and to meet Miguel, Sr., his elusive namesake. Arriving in Cape Verde, Miguel, Jr. launches a languid odyssey of serendipity and misadventure, meeting young women, dancing on the beach, performing labor for a matriarchal elder, and getting to know more Cape Verdean landscapes than you can count. The film is a love letter to the African coastlines it features with countless stills of the islands’ natural beauty, each worthy of a postcard of its own. I’d recommend this work to anyone who is considering joining the Peace Corps, working for an NGO, or performing other humanitarian labor in Africa and/or anyone studying the legacies of Lusophone colonialism.

“Los caminos de Aïssa/The Pathways of Aïssa,” Rolando Diaz, 2013

Platform: Digitalia

Language: Spanish with English subtitles

Trigger Warning: This film includes discussion of suicide, abortion, and emotional abuse.

Aïssa is a young African woman who was born in Cameroon and emigrated to Spain from Equatorial Guinea. Having a contentious relationship with her mother, she tries to make a life for herself in Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands. Her days are spent rehearsing for dance shows, volunteering with the Red Cross, designing costumes, modeling, and waitressing. Some nights she spends go-go dancing in popular clubs. This intimate documentary tells one story of what it can mean to be uprooted as a Black African living in white Europe. I’d recommend this film to anyone pursuing global studies, as it highlights fraught, contemporary complexities in Spain which are likely invisible to the casual tourist.

Learn about the assassination of civil rights leader Malcolm X in the new Library resource “Transcripts of the Malcolm X Assassination Trial.” At the time of his assassination, Malcolm X was seen as a controversial figure for giving voice to ideas that remain relevant to this day in light of the continued killings of unarmed Black people. He stated that it was hypocritical of whites to expect that Black people would not arm themselves for defense against racists. He told African Americans not to trust white liberals who, he argued, thought of them as “knee-grows,” and that Black people should see themselves as part of the majority of the world’s population that was brown. He was a follower of Islam but broke with the Nation of Islam and its leader Elijah Muhammad who espoused Black separatism. He openly criticized Elijah Muhammed and told Alex Haley, writer of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, “If I’m alive when this book comes out, it will be a miracle.”

On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was preparing to address the Organization of Afro-American Unity in Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom when a disturbance broke out. Malcolm and his bodyguards rushed into the crowd to restore order. Gunfire erupted, silencing a voice whose message seems more prescient with the passage of time.

The “Transcripts of the Malcolm X Assassination Trial” resource contains the full record of the New York State Supreme Court proceedings against ­­­­three men charged in the assassination. It includes forty-two fully searchable manuscripts that can be downloaded as PDFs or read as plain text on the web:

• Full testimony of all witnesses.
• Testimony of two witnesses who spoke in secrecy to hide their identities.
• Preliminary motions.
• Summations.
• The court’s charge.
• Verdicts and sentences.
• A confession made years after the trial by one of the men convicted.

For anyone interested in the life of the charismatic civil rights leader and in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the “Transcripts of the Malcolm X Assassination Trial” is a valuable research tool shedding light on a unique and turbulent time in American history. It can be located in the Library’s A-Z Databases list.

Through January, we’re publishing year-in-review highlights from FY2021. Download a full PDF of this year’s Annual Report to read more! For this final story, we encourage you to “visit” us—wherever you are—through a new virtual Walking Tour.

In spring of 2020 the Library added to the University’s store of knowledge about the enslaved African Americans who performed work vital to the functioning of UVA in the 19th century. Joining with UVA Landscape Architect Mary Hughes, Chief of Staff of the Division for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Meghan Faulkner, and Assistant Dean and History Professor Kirt von Daacke, a team from the Library conducted research, contributed text, and provided rare images from Special Collections to create a new virtual tour as part of the Walking Tours of Grounds app. The new tour, “Enslaved African Americans at the University of Virginia,” updates a print brochure published earlier by the President’s Commission on Slavery and the University.

The app is part of President Jim Ryan’s initiative to add context to the story of UVA’s past by emphasizing the contributions to University life made by enslaved people. According to team leader Elyse Girard, Executive Director of Library Communications and User Experience, “Access was really at the heart of the creation of this digital tour.” Anyone with internet may download the app for a view into the world of the enslaved laborers and artisans who excavated the terraced contours of the Lawn in 1817 and literally built the University, laying many thousands of bricks made of clay which they dug from the earth and then molded and fire-hardened in kilns. Viewers can also see how people who were rented to hotelkeepers as property rose from their quarters in basements and outbuildings before daylight every morning to haul water, lay fires, and prepare meals for faculty and students, in many cases laboring behind the high serpentine walls that were constructed to conceal their presence.

Only 600 names of UVA’s estimated 4,000 enslaved workers are currently known. Among them are husband and wife William and Isabella Gibbons who were divided by enslavement to serve professors in separate households. William Gibbons, a butler, taught himself to read by “observing and listening” to white students. His was a quiet resistance to prohibitions against educating enslaved people. Isabella Gibbons, a domestic servant, likewise risked punishment by teaching their daughter in secret. UVA residence hall Gibbons House is named in their honor.

Free people of color also resisted the social path that whites had mapped out for them. In 1833, seamstress Catherine “Kitty” Foster purchased a little more than two acres which became part of an African American neighborhood known as Canada. An aluminum frame has been erected which casts a shadow tracing the foundation of her house, recovering an idea of the physical space in which people of color lived and worked.

The tour includes a stop at the newly dedicated Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, where hundreds of names of the enslaved at UVA are engraved into the memorial’s innermost ring. Names of enslaved laborers still unknown are represented by slashes etched into the granite of the memorial. Research is ongoing to identify the many individuals not yet recognized, and these “memory marks” serve as placeholders in hopes that the missing names will one day be added.