"Holidays are communiqués or bulletins about a people's sacred past," Mayes writes, "and what work ought to be done about a community's present condition and its future." Kwanzaa serves as a kind of case study in the meanings of culturally constructed holidays. Inspired in part by black American holidays that predated it, Kwanzaa has since inspired its own imitators seeking a place on the black cultural calendar. Mayes (Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities) discusses Kwanzaa's "early beginnings, its internal promotion, and its external appropriation." Created in the mid-1960s as a holiday deriving from the cultural aesthetic associated with black power, Kwanzaa soon became incorporated into a broader commercialization of cultural holidays, to the disappointment and scolding of some of Kwanzaa's early proponents. The holiday thus emerged as part of a "black protest calendar," a case study in how "African-Americans used the calendar to perennialize their struggle and annually politicize themselves into existence," but eventually became an ethnic American holiday tagged with consumer icons. A thorough study, for advanced students and scholars. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. — P. Harvey, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Choice
"A groundbreaking, thorough, and illuminating discourse on Kwanzaa by one of the new leaders in the field. Kwanzaa: Black Power and the Making of the African-American Holiday Tradition is a vital resource that will enrich and enhance the discipline of African-American Studies. A pioneering work about a deeply important holiday."
– M.K. Asante, Jr., director of The Black Candle: A Kwanzaa Celebration
"Keith Mayes situates Kwanzaa's invention within the black holiday tradition while demonstrating how embedded it was in the cultural nationalism of Black Power. Those wishing to further their understanding of African American holidays and their place in American culture would do well to read this book."
– Ellen M. Litwicki, Professor of History, State University of New York at Fredonia – author of America’s Public Holidays, 1865-1920
"Kwanzaa is an important contribution to our understanding of the Black Power movement, cultural nationalism and the history of Kwanzaa… it is certain to be the leading text surveying the history of Kwanzaa and its place in the history of African American cultural politics."
– Scot Brown, author of Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism
"A thorough study, for advanced students and scholars. Recommended." – Choice
"Mayes deftly traces the journey from Kwanzaa’s Black Power roots to its evolution into a multicultural holiday embraced by multinational corporations and mainstream institutions including public schools, museums, and churches. ... The book situates the history of Kwanzaa not only in the history of black protest holidays but also in the larger politics of the American calendar."
– Suzanne E. Smith, GEorge Mason University, American Historical Review
