I've really enjoyed novels like Invisible Man and Native Son but what are some good books from black authors that don't...

Is that how you interpret Native Son?

As far as Veeky Forums memes go; Giovanni's Room, A Brief History of Seven Killings, Dhalgren and some other stuff by Delany I'm forgetting, that black sci-fi lady who's name I always forget, stuff by Dumas, stuff by Machado Assisi, that's probably not how you spell that, Ben Okri, Ellison's shorter works, and African lit, which almost never has racial themes but isn't anything like the works you posted (Achebe's Trilogy, comes to mind. I have a list of a couple hundred African works somewhere.)

But considering the fact that Native Son and Invisible Man have almost nothing in common I'm gonna go ahead and call you on your weak attempt at bait, summerfriend

It's the only rational way to interpret it. Blacks are mentally incapable of responsibility; their sub-Saharan minds just aren't evolved enough to process guilt and other higher order moral judgements.

>Implying he read it
>Implying he reads

Invisible Man was inspired by Ellison reading and disagreeing with what he saw as the message of Native Son, as an fyi.

I'm not OP, but if you get the chance could you post that list, I've read a couple of African authors but I'm always looking for more, especially something as different as African lit.

The list is African novels that are specifically appealing to anglophones, written in a more western style. Unfortunately it doesn't include any contemporary works.
>en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Writers_Series
I'm really interested in This Earth, My Brother. It's supposed to be pretty ambitious and inspired by the writing of Conrad and Joyce

Teju Cole is pretty good, Colson Whitehead is ok, I didn't like the intuitionist but zone one was good.

Who here listens to NPR?

Everybody ITT, I need you to be totally and completely honest with me right now: do you listen to NPR?

Well?

Do you fucking listen to All Things Considered, you 110 IQ prog faggot? Answer me.

death and the kings horseman is more about post colonialism than race, even tho its all about a tribe in africa.

if you dont want to read it, i can sum it up very simply. african tribe says the kings horseman is to kill himself after the death of the king. british people come in and say no to suicide. they take the son and the horseman into custody and both end up dying. so two people die instead of one from the influence of a post colonial society

From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate by Nathaniel Mackey.

redpilled as fuck

Reminder to praise Lord Kek, white brother

The best book after Don Quijote:

The Count of montecristo.

People say Machado de Asis is good.

IDK.

Obligatory

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Delaney for science fiction and um.... Alexander Dumas? lol

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o -- Wizard of the Crow
Werewere Liking -- The Amputated Memory
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis -- The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (this is the best of them; if you only pick one, pick this one)

I see invisible man as more of a portrayal of existential alienation, even though it uses race to portray it.

>Shut people out of jobs that pay
>segregate them in their own slum
>district can't collect enough taxes for basic amenities
>education suffers
>infrastructure suffers
>they can't leave
>honest families get shafted
>parents work so much on their shit incomes they can't raise their kids
>crime goes up from desperation
>men arrested families broken up,
>broken homes on a yearly exponential increase
>generations of generations later and still everyone living in the shit with gangs, drugs, hostile police force, shit schools, fighting for everyday survival on three jobs
>the ones who pull together through sheer ingenuity leave and never come back, only to live in middle class liberal communities where people still give you sideways glances like you don't belong, but insist racism is dead and their generation killed it
>open up your microsoft edge web browser to four chan dot org to see if anyone responded to your gassposting
>"if you really think about it white people aren't the problem here"
>close my lippy lappy and smdh

I'm happy Tom Ashbrook is back because the stand ins were all shit but I'm not used to listening to it anymore and I'm not going to go out of my way for it.

Invisible Man is a doestoyevsky ripoff

I wasn't trying to bait, just wanted to read something that doesn't focus so heavily on race
> that black sci-fi lady who's name I always forget
Octavia Butler? I've only read Kindred, which was about slavery.

Thanks for all the suggestions, guys.

>black people have no agency and are therefore technically not even human

Pretty racist of you, m80.

You'll have to back up and support the massive leap of logic from "the systems and institutions I was born into make leaving it a near impossibility" to "I am not a human being." How do you go from unfree to unhuman? Is humanity defined by states of freedom? perhaps you're saying these overlapping institutions of systemic racism have a dehumanizing effect on its subjects, and even Ellison would agree with you there.

"Things fall apart" was pretty good

The Best of All Possible Worlds

To a lesser extent Omeros, Derek Walcott

An Untamed State, Gay

I would recommend all of Whitehead. Underground Railroad is well worth reading, but deals with race, obvi

The point is that your argument excuses immoral act by pretending the actor had no choice. But he did. Even if life is shit, a person has the agency to not be shit as well. I've known people who have seen more shit than even the most systematically oppressed ghetto rat. They did not commit heinous crimes. As far as I'm concerned the moral relativism needed to make the acts of shitty people seem somehow justified is foolhardy. And in 100% of the cases I've seen where people employ it, they are never ready to use the same logic for people they have decided to hate.

In short, the leap of logic is yours, not mine. That's the point of the post. By denying the fact that these people have the agency to make their own choices, you effectively dehumanize them. And the act does not become more palatable if you do so to make them pets, instead of prey.

It's weird I read Invisible man years ago and just picked up Crime and Punishment and was thinking that it reminded me of Invisible man and I wasn't sure why

I just finished that. It didn't suck but I expected more.
The best parts didn't focus on the protagonist, Cora was pretty boring.

Everyone who isn't stupid sees it that way because that's what the book is. Saying Invisible Man is about race is equivalent to saying Heart of Darkness is about colonialism or Metamorphosis is about a guy that turns into a bug. Their existential themes by far outweigh the plot-vehicle for said themes.
That said, IM is extremely neutral; nobody is safe from it's criticism, blacks included

no, you were hyperbolizing to make a bad disingenuous argument, or one in which every black person is a criminal. which, to your example, wouldn't be true because truly not everyone is going to choose that for themselves. and of course not every black person lives in these communities.
but for those who do, you cannot deny the fact that humans learn everything from the environment you grow up in: your parents, your peers, your school, your community. and this all goes to shit when you have a community decades in poverty due to being the black zone that whites had cordoned you off into while denying you any decent jobs based on the arbitrary taboo of your color. decades later you're born, how are you socialized? parents? statistically you're born out of wedlock and living with your mother working multiple jobs, and you never see her. maybe you have grandparents that watch you. if not, it's you and your peers: the kids in your building and siblings if any. you're socialized into pack mentality. School? well public schools are funded primarily on property taxes, and in your slum that means even with grants and such they are underbudget and understaffed at all times. It's a madhouse at worst and daycare at best, where you're socialized into larger peer groups, which most definitely contain gang members and drug dealers as a normalized fixture of your day to day life. You already know how to assimilate into a pack setting, graduating into a gang takes no more than a desire for better shoes, and more than likely a few of your close friends have joined already. this is the environment you're born into, none of this you have any control over. and so your possible future? college? no money. Move? no money. work shit jobs like your mom did? only enough money to live day to day. get in gangs and deal drugs? live fast, die young/prison/addiction/go to community college on drug money and carve a niche there's your morality or choice/consequence. Both of them, you can't leave ever. the reason for this is one time people said we can't have niggers working in our stores and living near our white women.

Basically this, but I come from the UK and I can recognise that this isn't exclusive to black people but anyone from a working-class background. I may not get as many questionable looks as a black man in England, but being poor and from a poor family, a white person gets neglected quite often too.

I certainly have to admire people who do put money back into the communities that they grew up in though. In the US, you have artists like Dr Dre and Kendrick Lamar who raise money to help the areas and schools they grew up in.

I suppose a positive of this all is that many companies and organisations want to diversify their work force and many are hiring young black men and women to represent their company. This is great to show a positive representation of a variety of people, but I must admit, I am also a little concerned that, as a white male aiming to become a writer, I may be side-lined based, not on the quality of my work, but on the colour of my skin (the UK's diversity act of 2010 means an equally skilled black man will be hired for a job based on skin colour). I understand that black people and people of colour have faced this discrimination in multiple forms based on the colour of their skin, and that isn't right, but I don't necessarily believe the way of fixing that problem is to turn the tables in favour of discriminating against white people either.

I suppose it's just frustrating both ways, really. We all want equality, nobody wants discrimination, but it's difficult to figure out the best ways so that everyone can succeed if they put in the effort. Sorry for the semi-rant, just your post managed to ignite something in me.