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This chapter uses film theory and visual culture studies to parse Malcolm D Lee's film The Best Man (1999) and Gina Prince-Bythewood's film Love and Basketball (2000) as well as the corresponding soundtracks, screenplays, and publicity. It illuminates how the films unsettle genre boundaries as well as encode progressive and pernicious messages about the formation of African American marriage and Black love for its Black middle-class characters.

This chapter critically examines how meritocracy, antiblack racism, the Moynihan Report's neoliberal logics, and a growing political nostalgia for the Black Power Movement and the Civil Rights Movement have shaped the ways in which creative artists depict African American romance, marriage, and contemporary notions of Black love in popular fiction, film, and music. It draws on literary studies, Black feminist criticism and theory, cultural studies, visual culture studies, and media studies.

How might a renewed understanding of what it means to practice being human shape the development of anti-oppressive foodways and agricultural practices? The aim of this chapter is to answer this question by constructing a decolonial theological anthropology for Christians that countervails the tacit, but dominant understanding of the human person that places whiteness and maleness as pinnacles of Creation and justifies the animalization of Black bodies and exploitation of nonhuman nature. The theological anthropology outlined attempts to equip Christians with the necessary theological scaffolding to reimagine the God-human encounter through a renewed understanding of self-love, solidarity, and holistic interdependence. These three principles serve as guideposts for the development of decolonial foodways, agricultural practices, and socio-economic commitments that aim to attend to the immediate suffering of Black communities and promote the long-term flourishing of those selfsame communities.

This chapter explicates Sapphire's novel 1996 Push, alongside the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, Farrakhan's 1993 book Torchlight for America, and Sweet Honey in the Rock's 1983 song Testimony in order to unmask the political burden placed on African American marriage and Black love. It illustrates the ways in which touting marriage and heteropatriarchal family as a political responsibility enables intimate partner violence or domestic abuse.

This chapter concludes the book with an exploration of how African American book clubs and reading communities, gender reveal ceremonies, prom proposals or promposals, child marriage, reality television, Jagged Edge, and Steve Harvey will shape future representations of African American marriage and Black love in Black cultural production.