Khalil Gibran Muhammad is Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He formerly served as Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world's leading library and archive of global Black history.
"The book presents the aesthetic of narrative employed by literary discourse through the literary works of some Arab writers renowned in the Arab World and at international levels, as well as some Palestinian writers in Israel, through literary models dealing with reality in the areas of: poetry, short story, and novel, and through a critical view trying to elucidate the intellectual and literary value of those literary models"--back cover
Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.