Black California Gold

Wendy M. Thompson (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

130 Seiten

2025
Bucknell University Press,U.S. (Verlag)
978-1-68448-550-5 (ISBN)

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For numerous migrants who ventured westward in the twentieth century in search of greater opportunities, the glitter of California often proved to be mere fool’s gold-promising easy riches but frequently resulting in dispossession and displacement. Poet Wendy M. Thompson is descended from two of these migrant waves-post-1965 Chinese immigrants and Black southerners of the Second Great Migration-whose presence has permanently transformed the region.

In this arresting debut poetry collection, Thompson traces the past and present of California’s Bay Area, exploring themes of family, migration, girlhood, and identity against a backdrop of urban redevelopment, advanced gentrification, and the erasure of Black communities. Traveling down both familiar highways and obscure side streets, her poems map a region where race, class, and language are just some of the fault lines that divide communities and produce periodic tremors of violence and resistance.

Confronting assimilationist myths of the American Dream, Black California Gold depicts a setting that is less a melting pot than a smelting pot, subjecting different ethnic groups to searing trials and extreme pressures that threaten to break them down entirely. Yet, it also celebrates the Black residents of the Bay Area who have struggled to sustain home and hope amid increasingly desperate conditions.

WENDY M. THOMPSON is an Oakland native whose creative work has most recently appeared in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Juked, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. She is an associate professor of African American studies at San JosÉ State University.

Part 1: county maps
Black California Gold
Part 2: Black in California
Black California Freedom
Black Southern Migrant Gifts
Earth 地球 Mother 妈妈 Father 爸爸 Race 种族
Catch the Spirit
Small Girl Smell
My Mother in English
San Francisco (an ode to Harlem of the West)
Part 3: In Oakland, there was once a forest of old-growth coastal redwoods
Black Garden Songs
A Delight (The Food Poem)
Family Money: A Prescription Told in Voices
California Wildfires, 2020
The Thing about Nature
Black on BART
Part 4: California Blackout
Black at Home in the Bay Area
Investors Leave No Landmarks
Life and Death in the Time of Black Lives Matter
Acknowledgments

Erscheinungsdatum	12.03.2025
Reihe/Serie	The Griot Project Book Series
Zusatzinfo	2 bw images
Sprache	englisch
Maße	127 x 203 mm
Gewicht	113 g
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Lyrik / Dramatik ► Lyrik / Gedichte
Themenwelt	Reisen ► Bildbände
ISBN-10	1-68448-550-9 / 1684485509
ISBN-13	978-1-68448-550-5 / 9781684485505
Zustand	Neuware