ACT's PASS OVER: Beyond the Theatre
A Contemporary Theatre presents PASS OVER by Antoinette Nwandu from May 31 to June 23, 2019. Librarians at The Seattle Public Library created this resource list of books, music, and films to enhance your experience of the show.
-
Pass Over
"Moses and Kitch stand around on the corner - talking shit, passing the time, and hoping that maybe today will be different. As they dream of their promised land, a stranger wanders into their space with his own agenda and derails their plans. Emotional and lyrical, Pass Over crafts everyday profanities into poetic and humorous riffs, exposing the unquestionable human spirit of young men stuck in a cycle just looking for a way out." The script of PASS OVER, for your reading pleasure.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View Pass Over -
The Book of Exodus
Joel Baden tells the story of this influential and enduring book, tracing how its famous account of the Israelites' journey to the promised land has been adopted and adapted for millennia, often in unexpected ways.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
View The Book of Exodus -
Go Tell It on the Mountain
The story of John, a fourteen-year-old boy whose stepfather is a Pentecostal minister in Harlem in 1935, as he struggles to discover his own identity.
Format: Audiobook CD
Availability: Available
View Go Tell It on the Mountain -
Waiting for Godot
This volume is an absurdist play in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for the arrival of someone named Godot. They claim he's an acquaintance but in fact hardly know him, admitting that they would not recognize him when they do see him. To occupy the time they eat, sleep, converse, argue, sing, play games, exercise, swap hats, and contemplate suicide -- anything "to hold the terrible silence at bay". Throughout the play, the audience may encounter religious, philosophical, classical, psychoanalytical, biographical, and especially wartime references.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
View Waiting for Godot -
Blind Goddess
The most significant writings of practitioners, professors and advocates to make sense of what is perhaps America's most astonishing and shameful achievement: the highest per capita incarceration of its citizens anywhere in the world, compounded by the shockingly disproportionate imprisonment of poor ethnic minorities. Although there is growing awareness of the huge fiscal cost of mass incarceration, the moral, human and social devastation of racially skewed law enforcement remains largely unrecognised.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View Blind Goddess -
Policing Black Bodies
From Trayvon Martin to Freddie Gray, the stories of police violence against Black people are too often in the news. In Policing Black Bodies Angela J. Hattery and Earl Smith make a compelling case that the policing of Black bodies goes far beyond these individual stories of brutality. They connect the regulation of African American people in many settings, including the public education system and the criminal justice system, into a powerful narrative about the myriad ways Black bodies are policed.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View Policing Black Bodies -
12 Years A Slave
Twelve Years a Slave is the harrowing account of a black man, born free in New York State, who was drugged, kidnapped, and sold into slavery in 1841. Having no way to contact his family, and fearing for his life if he told the truth, Solomon Northup was sold from plantation to plantation in Louisiana, toiling under cruel masters for twelve years before meeting Samuel Bass, a Canadian who finally put him in touch with his family, and helped start the process to regain his freedom.
Format: Audiobook CD
Availability: Available
View 12 Years A Slave -
Citizen
"Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV--everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named 'post-race' society."
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View Citizen -
Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching
"A prominent journalist and contributing writer to The Nation magazine describes his education and the experiences of black masculinity against a backdrop of the Obama administration, the death of Trayvon Martin, the career of LeBron James and other pivotal influences that have shaped race relations in today's America,"--NoveList. How do you learn to be a black man in America? For young black men today, it means coming of age during the presidency of Barack Obama; witnessing the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and too many more. Smith chronicles his own personal and political education during these tumultuous years, describing his efforts to come into his own in a world that denied his humanity.
Format: Audiobook CD
Availability: Available
View Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching -
Stop - Challenging NYPD's "Stop and Frisk" Policies
For the past several years, stop & frisk in New York City has been front-page news. It has stirred passions, sown division, inspired social activism, and led to a monumental change in New York City’s understanding of policing and its vision of itself. The central catalyst for this change was Floyd et al. v. the City of New York et al. (Floyd), a class- action lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in 2008. The lawsuit alleged racial bias in the pattern and practice of stop & frisks conducted by the New York City Police Department (NYPD). It culminated in Federal Judge Scheindlin’s landmark ruling that the NYPD’s application of stop & frisk was unconstitutional. In January, 2014, Mayor Bill De Blasio announced that the city would drop its appeal to the ruling. The feature length documentary STOP follows three years in the life of David Ourlicht, one of the four named plaintiffs in Floyd. By interweaving the story of David’s family with the action around the trial, STOP places the stop & frisk controversy in the context of a long history of civil rights. From David’s Jewish grandfather, who describes being arrested in Greenwich village on his first date with David’s grandmother, an African- American woman, to David’s biracial father, Italian-American mother, and mixed race sister, the Ourlicht family offers a powerful backdrop to the flashpoint issue of stop & frisk.
Format: Streaming Video
View Stop - Challenging NYPD's "Stop and Frisk" Policies