African / Diasphoric Deathways

100 Black Women of Funeral Service
African American Burial Ground Network Act Introduced in Congress by Preservation Maryland (www.preservationmaryland.org, February 28, 2019)
African American Entrepreneurship in Richmond, 1890-1940: The Funeral Industry and the Story of R.C. Scott by Michael Plater
African American Funeral Programs from the Augusta-Richmond County Public Library-System
“African Americans in Bereavement: Grief as a Function of Ethnicity” by Anne Laurie and Robert Neimeyer (Omega, 2008)
“Afro-American Gravemarkers in North Carolina” by M. Ruth Little (Markers, 1989)
“And Die in Dixie: Funerals, Death & Heaven in the Slave Community 1700-1865” by David Roediger (The Massachusetts Review, 1981)
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Bennie Smith: Delmarva Black Businessman of the Year & CEO of Bennie Smith Funeral Homes (Delmarva African American Pride Magazine, Fall 2011).
“Black AfterLives Matter: Cultivating Kinfulness as Reproductive Justice” by Ruha Benjamin (within Making Kin Not Population edited by Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway)
Black Female Undertakers in 20^th-Century Baltimore by Kami Fletcher
Black Female Vampires in African American Women’s Novels, 1977-2011: She Bites Back by Kendra Parker
Black Women and the Peoples Temple in Jonestown by Sikivu Hutchinson
Dayveon (2017)
Death and the Afterlife in African Culture by Kwasi Wiredu (within Person and Community: Ghanaian Philosophical Studies I edited by Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye)
Death in Black and White: Death Ritual and Family Ecology by Charlton McIlwain
Death and Dying: Views from Many Cultures by Richard Kalish (editor)
Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492-1800 by Erik Seeman
For the Forgotten African-American Dead: Neglected Black Cemeteries Deserve the Same Level of Care that Their Confederate Counterparts Get by Brian Palmer (New York Times, January 7, 2017)
Fruitvale Station (2013)
Harlem Book of the Dead by James Van Der Zee
Hidden History: African American Cemeteries in Central Virginia by Lynn Rainville
Holy Spirits: The Power and Legacy of America’s Female Spiritualists by Dianca London Potts
Horror Noire Syllabus
“ ‘I Never Regretted Coming to Africa’: The Story of Harriet Ruggles Loomis’ Gravestone” by Laurel Gabel (Markers, 1999)
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe
“James C. Thomas, Undertaker and Business Man” (chapter 11) in The Negro in Business by Booker T. Washington
Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty by Dorothy Roberts
Lay Down Body: Living History in African American Cemeteries by Roberta Hughes Wright and Wilbur B. Hughes III
Love Cemetery: Unburying the Secret History of Slaves by China Galland
Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward
Miss Evers Boys (1997)
“Nine Night” by Natasha Gordon (stage play)
“Myths Laid to Rest: Death, Burial, and Memory in the American South” by Kristen Burton (dissertation)
Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner-City Funeral Home by Sheri Booker
Not Just the Funeral: Queen Sugar Puts the African American Burial Tradition on Full Display by Kami Fletcher
“On the Wrong Side of the Fence: Racial Segregation in American Cemeteries” by Angelika Krüger-Kahloula (within History and Memory in African-American Culture edited by Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally)
Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, a Memorial by Karla Holloway
Race & the Funeral Profession: What Jessica Mitford Missed by Kami Fletcher
“Real Business: Maryland’s First Black Cemetery Journey’s Into the Enterprise of Death, 1870-1920” by Kami Fletcher (Thanatological Studies, 2014)
Resting Place (1986)
Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland (2018)
“ ‘Sealing the Bond’: A Qualitative Study of African American Funeral Rituals”by Danielle (Grant) Graham (dissertation)
“Separated by Death and Color: The African American Cemetery of New Philadelphia, Illinois” by Charlotte King (Historical Archaeology, 2010)
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory Among Gullah/Geechee Women by LeRhonda Manigault-Bryan
The Best Man Holiday (2013)
The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosina, Croatia and Kosovo by Clea Koff
The Cancer Journals by Audre Lord
“The Changing Perceptions of Death and Burial: A Look at the Nigerian Obituaries” by Stella Ogbuagu (Anthropologica, 1989)
The Death Care Industry: African American Cemeteries and Funeral Homes by Roberta Hughes Wright and Wilbur Hughes III
The Disappearance of a Distinctly Black Way to Mourn Tiffany Stanley
The First Decoration Day by David Blight Newark Star Ledger (April 27, 2015)
The Green Mile (1999)
The Hate You Give (2018)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2017)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
The Impossibility of Religious Freedom by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
“The Living Dead: Art and Immortality Among the Yoruba of Nigeria” (Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 1977)
The Long Goodbye: Why Funerals are Big Deals in Ghana by Paula Newton, CNN (March 11, 2014)
The Naked Truth: Death by Delivery
“The Negro Undertaker” (chapter 10) in The Negro in Business by Booker T. Washington
“The Plantation Community Cemetery: Reading Black and White Relationships in the Landscape” by Stacey Graham (Markers, 2015)
The Politics of Mourning: Death and Horror in Arlington National Cemeteryby Micki McElya
The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America by Terri Snyder
The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation by Daina Ramey Berry
The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery by Vincent Brown
Time: The Kalief Browder Story (2017)
To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death by Suzanne Smith
“Tributes in Stone and Lapidary Lapses: Commemorating Black People in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century America” by Angelika Krüger-Kahloula (Markers, 1989)
Truth and Lies: Jonestown – Paradise Lost (2018)
“Up From the Grave: A Sociological Reconstruction of an African American Community from Cemetery Data in the Rural Midwest” by Gary Foster and Craig Eckert (Journal of Black Studies, 2003)
We Regret to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch
“What Lies Beneath: Reading the Cultural Landscape of Graveyard and Burial Grounds in African-American History and Literature” by Deborah Lafayette Henderson (dissertation)
Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward

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