New Books in African American Studies

Justene Hill Edwards, "Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank" (Norton, 2024) Nov 03, 2024

InSavings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank (W. W. Norton, 2024), Justene Hill Edwards exposes how the rise and tragic failure of the Freedman’s Bank has shaped economic inequality in America. In the years immediately after the Civil War, tens of thousands of former slaves deposited millions of dollars into the Freedman’s Bank. African Americans envisioned this new bank as a launching pad for economic growth and self-determination. But only nine years after it opened, their trust was betrayed and the Freedman’s Bank collapsed.

Fully informed by new archival findings, historian Justene Hill Edwards unearths a major turning point in American history in this comprehensive account of the Freedman’s Bank and its depositors. She illuminates the hope with which the bank was first envisioned and demonstrates the significant setback that the sabotage of the bank caused in the fight for economic autonomy. Hill Edwards argues for a new interpretation of its tragic failure: the bank’s white financiers drove the bank into the ground, not Fredrick Douglass, its final president, or its Black depositors and cashiers. A page-turning story filled with both well-known figures like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Jay and Henry Cooke, and General O. O. Howard, and less well-known figures like Dr. Charles B. Purvis, John Mercer Langston, Congressman Robert Smalls, and Ellen Baptiste Lubin. Savings and Trust is necessary reading for those seeking to understand the roots of racial economic inequality in America.

Justene Hill Edwards is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia and the author of both Unfree Markets and a forthcoming Norton Short on the history of inequality in America. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. Twitter. Website.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Anne M. Whitesell, "Living Off the Government?: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Welfare" (NYU Press, 2024) Nov 03, 2024

Who deserves public assistance from the government? This age-old question has been revived by policymakers, pundits, and activists following the massive economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Anne Whitesell takes up this timely debate, showing us how our welfare system, in its current state, fails the people it is designed to serve.

From debates over stimulus check eligibility to the uncertain future of unemployment benefits, Living Off the Government?: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Welfare(NYU Press, 2024) tackles it all. Examining welfare rules across eight different states, as well as 19,000 state and local interest groups, Whitesell shows how we determine who is—and who isn't—deserving of government assistance. She explores racial and gender stereotypes surrounding welfare recipients, particularly Black women and mothers; how different groups take advantage of these harmful stereotypes to push their own political agendas; and how the interests and needs of welfare recipients are inadequately represented as a result. Living Off the Government? highlights how harmful stereotypes about the race, gender, and class of welfare recipients filter into our highly polarized political arena to shape public policy. Whitesell calls out a system that she believes serves special interests and not the interests of low-income Americans.

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Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva, "The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game" (UNC Press, 2024) Oct 27, 2024

In The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game (UNC Press, 2024), Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva offer an existential challenge to one of America's favorite pastimes: college football. Drawing on twenty-five in-depth interviews with former players from some of the country's most prominent college football teams, Kalman-Lamb and Silva explore how football is both predicated on a foundation of coercion and suffused with racialized harm and exploitation. Through the stories of those who lived it, the authors examine the ways in which college football must be understood as a site of harm, revealing how players are systematically denied the economic value they produce for universities and offered only a devalued education in return.

By illuminating the plantation dynamics that make college football a particularly racialized form of exploitation, the book makes legible the forms of physical sacrifice that are required, the ultimate cost in health and well-being, and the coercion that drives players into the sport and compels them to endure such abusive conditions.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won. His next book, a biography of Moses Malone will be published in 2025. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Eve Dunbar, "Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction: Black Women Writing Under Segregation" (U Minnesota Press, 2024) Oct 27, 2024

Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction: Black Women Writing Under Segregation(U Minnesota Press, 2024) offers new and insightful readings of African American women's writings in the 1930s-1950s, illustrating how these writers centered Black women's satisfaction as radical resistance to the false and incomplete promise of liberal racial integration. Eve Dunbar examines the writings of Ann Petry, Dorothy West, Alice Childress, and Gwendolyn Brooks to show how these women explored self-fulfillment over normative and sanctioned models of national belonging.

Paying close attention to literary moments of disruption, miscommunication, or confusion rather than ease, assimilation, or mutual understanding around race and gender, Dunbar tracks these writers' dissatisfaction with American race relations. She shows how Petry, West, Childress, and Brooks redeploy the idea of monstrous work to offer potential modalities for registering Black women's capacity to locate satisfaction within the domestic and interpersonal.

While racial integration may satisfy the national idea of equality and inclusion, it has not met the long-term needs of Black people's quest for equity. Dunbar responds, demonstrating how these mid-century women offer new blueprints for Black life by creating narrative models for radical satisfaction: Black women's completeness, joy, and happiness outside the bounds of normative racial inclusion.

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Steven T. Katz, "The Holocaust and New World Slavery: A Comparative History, Volume 2" (Cambridge UP, 2019) Oct 22, 2024

The Holocaust and New World Slavery: Volume 2 (Cambridge UP, 2019) second volume of the first, in-depth comparison of the Holocaust and new world slavery. Providing a reliable view of the relevant issues, and based on a broad and comprehensive set of data and evidence, Steven T. Katz analyses the fundamental differences between the two systems and re-evaluates our understanding of the Nazi agenda. Among the subjects he examines are: the use of black slaves as workers compared to the Nazi use of Jewish labor; the causes of slave demographic decline and growth in different New World locations; the main features of Jewish life during the Holocaust relative to slave life with regard to such topics as diet, physical punishment, medical care, and the role of religion; the treatment of slave women and children as compared to the treatment of Jewish women and children in the Holocaust.

Katz shows that slave women were valued as workers, as reproducers of future slaves, and as sexual objects, and that slave children were valued as commodities. For these reasons, neither slave women nor children were intentionally murdered. By comparison, Jewish slave women and children were viewed as the ultimate racial enemy and therefore had to be exterminated. These and other findings conclusively demonstrate the uniqueness of the Holocaust compared with other historical instances of slavery.

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Ashawnta Jackson, "Soul-Folk" (Bloomsbury, 2024) Oct 19, 2024

Folk music of the 1960s and 1970s was a genre that was always shifting and expanding, yet somehow never found room for so many. In the sounds of soul-folk, Black artists like Terry Callier and Linda Lewis began to reclaim their space in the genre, and use it to bring their own traditions to light- the jazz, the blues, the field hollers, the spirituals- and creating something wholly new, wholly theirs, wholly ours.

Soul-Folk (Bloomsbury, 2024) traces the growing imprints of soul-folk and how it made its way from folk tradition to subgenre. Along the way, it explores the musicians, albums, and histories that made the genre what it is.

Ashawnta Jackson is a writer based in Brooklyn. She writes mostly about music and culture and has written for Atlas Obscura, Artsy, Crime Reads, Bandcamp, JSTOR Daily, The Whitney Museum, and most recently Vinyl Me Please, where she wrote the liner notes for the reissue of Lee Morgan's Take Twelve. Earlier in her career, she was on the radio at KMHD Jazz Radio in Portland, OR.

Ashawnta on Twitter.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, Spring 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Palazzo Editions, Fall 2025).

Bradley on Twitter.

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Jennifer Chudy, "Some White Folks: The Interracial Politics of Sympathy, Suffering, and Solidarity" (U Chicago Press, 2024) Oct 18, 2024

There is racial inequality in America, and some people are distressed over it while others are not. Some White Folks: The Interracial Politics of Sympathy, Suffering, and Solidarity (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Jennifer Chudy is a book about white people who feel that distress. For decades, political scientists have studied the effects of white racial prejudice, but Dr. Chudy shows that white racial sympathy for Black Americans’ suffering is also a potent force in modern American politics. Grounded in the history of Black-white relations in America, racial sympathy is unique. It is not equivalent to a low level of racial prejudice or sympathy for other marginalized groups. Some White Folks reveals how racial sympathy shapes a significant number of white Americans’ opinions on policy areas ranging from the social welfare state to the criminal justice system. Under certain circumstances, it can also spur action—although effects on political behavior are weaker and less consistent, for reasons Dr. Chudy examines.

Drawing on diverse quantitative and qualitative evidence and integrating insights from multiple disciplines, Dr. Chudy explores the origins, importance, and complexity of racial sympathy, as well as the practical implications for political and movement leaders. A companion to the rich literature on prejudice, Some White Folks demonstrates the multifaceted role of race in American politics and public opinion.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Psychoanalytic Defense Mechanisms in James Baldwin’s "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone" Oct 16, 2024

This podcast describes a short history of a man who did something we’ve lost in America. That man was James Baldwin who insisted on telling the truth. He confronted the harsh realities of racism, believing that exposing its ugliness was necessary for progress. He rejected simplistic solutions, arguing that racism was deeply rooted in American consciousness and imagination, beyond just political and economic inequalities. Instead, Baldwin called for a fundamental transformation of American society and identity. He critiqued white America, urging white Americans to confront their own behavior and complicity in racist systems.

Controversially, Baldwin advocated for Black Americans to approach white countrymen with love, while still insisting on unconditional freedom, seeing this as necessary for true transformation. He ultimately wanted to build a nation that moved beyond racial categorization, focusing instead on individual humanity. Baldwin viewed racism as stemming from a deeper spiritual problem in America, where individuals and the nation lacked a true sense of identity. While he did not offer simple solutions to racism, Baldwin's penetrating analysis and powerful writing exposed the complexities of racism in our country, challenged both white and Black Americans to confront difficult truths, and provided a framework for understanding racism beyond just political reforms. His work continues to influence discussions on race in America today, aiming not to ameliorate racism in a superficial sense, but to push for a profound reckoning with and transformation of American society and identity in relation to race.

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is a powerful novel that explores the complexities of race, sexuality, and identity in America through the life of its protagonist, Leo Proud/hammer. As the story begins, Leo, a successful African-American actor, suffers from a heart attack. As he recovers he reflects on his life and relationships.

It is also of interest to note how James Baldwin’s novel relates to Dr. Matin Luther King Jr.’s non-fiction book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?

Both books are discussed in terms of the major contributions they made to racism in America as well as how they illustrate psychoanalytic mechanism of defense.

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Boris Adjemian, "The Brass Band of the King: Armenians in Ethiopia" (Bloomsbury, 2024) Oct 12, 2024

In 1924, the crown prince and future emperor of Ethiopia, Ras Täfäri, on a visit to Jerusalem, called on forty Armenian orphans who had survived the genocide of 1915-1916 to form his empire's royal brass band. The conductor, who was also Armenian, composed the first official anthem of the Ethiopian state.

Drawing on this highly symbolic event, and following the history of the small Armenian community in Ethiopia, in The Brass Band of the King: Armenians in Ethiopia(Bloomsbury, 2024) Boris Adjemian shows how it operated on the margins of political society, hiding in its interstices, preferring intimacy and discreet loyalty to the glitter of open politics. The astonishing role of the Armenians in their host country was embodied in the friendship that the kings and queens of Ethiopia extended to them, a theme that is echoed in the life stories collected from their descendants.

Bringing to light the political and cultural importance of a community that has long been ignored and has almost vanished, this study draws on the collective memory of Armenian immigration and the centuries-long history of proximity between the Armenian and Ethiopian Churches. The author argues for a sedentary approach to the diaspora, for a socio-history of this collective rootedness, which dates back to the 19th century and builds on historical representations of otherness from the early modern period up to the colonial era. Highlighting stateless immigrants halfway between the national and the foreign, this history reveals the agency of stateless immigrants and their descendants, their ability to play with identities and undermine assigned belongings.

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Frank R. Baumgartner, “Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race” (Cambridge UP, 2018) Oct 08, 2024

We recently marked the 50th Anniversary of Terry vs. Ohio, the US Supreme Court case that dramatically expanded the scope under which agents of the state could stop people and search them. Taking advantage of a North Carolina law that required the collection of demographic data on those detained by the police during routine traffic stops, Frank Baumgartner and his colleagues analyzed twenty million such stops from 2002-2016. They present the results of this research in Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Join us as we speak with Baumgartner about what they found—and what we can do to reduce the most discriminatory features of the practice.

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics and Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017).

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Natalie Wall, "Black Expression and White Generosity: A Theoretical Framework of Race" (Emerald Publishing, 2024) Oct 07, 2024

In Black Expression and White Generosity: A Theoretical Framework of Race (Emerald Publishing, 2024), Dr. Natalie Wall takes readers on a journey through the tropes and narratives of white generosity, from the onset of the African slave trade to contemporary efforts to ridicule and undermine the “woke agenda.” She offers a theoretical framework for use by antiracist scholars, students, and activists to name and interrogate this pervasive attitude and its role in the structures of white supremacy and in the continued marginalisation of non-white people. Providing an exploration of lived experience and of the theoretical underpinnings of that lived experience, Wall offers a new vocabulary with which to speak truth to power and decentre whiteness from the work of antiracism, by looking to moments of black expression and creativity in black arts production.

Taking inspiration from the bold, powerful, and experimental work of black artists and activists, Black Expression and White Generosity forges an alternative narrative that strives for freedom and justice without relinquishing anything in return. It is your indispensable guide to remaining ungrateful.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action Oct 03, 2024

Today’s book is: Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action(University of Rochester Press, 2024) by Dr. Donna J. Nicol, which examines the leadership strategies that Black women educators have employed as influential power brokers in predominantly white colleges and universities in the United States. Black Woman on Board tells the extraordinary story of Dr. Claudia H. Hampton, the California State University (CSU) system's first Black woman trustee, who later became the board's first woman chair, and her twenty-year fight (1974–94) to increase access within the CSU for historically marginalized and underrepresented groups. Amid a growing white backlash against changes brought on by the 1960s Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, Dr. Nicol argues that Hampton enacted "sly civility" to persuade fellow trustees, CSU system officials, and state lawmakers to enforce federal and state affirmative action mandates. Black Woman on Board explores how Hampton methodically "played the game of boardsmanship," using the soft power she cultivated amongst her peers to remove barriers that might have impeded the implementation and expansion of affirmative action policies and programs. In illuminating the ways that Hampton transformed the CSU as the "affirmative action trustee," this remarkable book makes an important contribution to the history of higher education and to the historiography of Black women's educational leadership in the post-Civil Rights era.

Our guest is: Dr. Donna J. Nicol, who is the Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts at California State University, Long Beach, CA.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.

Listeners may enjoy this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Camille Owens, "Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America" (NYU Press, 2024) Oct 03, 2024

Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America(NYU Press, 2024) argues that the child has been the key figure giving measure and meaning to the human in thought and culture since the early American period. Camille Owens demonstrates that white men’s power at the top of humanism’s order has depended on those at the bottom. As Owens shows, it was childhood’s modern arc—from ignorance and dependence to reason and rights—that structured white men’s power in early America: by claiming that black adults were like children, whites naturalized black subjection within the American family order. Demonstrating how Americans sharpened the child into a powerful white supremacist weapon, Owens nevertheless troubles the notion that either the child or the human have been figures of unadulterated whiteness or possess stable boundaries.

Like Children recenters the history of American childhood around black children and rewrites the story of the human through their acts. Through the stories of black and disabled children spectacularized as prodigies, Owens tracks enduring white investment in black children’s power and value, and a pattern of black children performing beyond white containment. She reconstructs the extraordinary interventions and inventions of figures such as the early American poet Phillis Wheatley, the nineteenth-century pianist Tom Wiggins (Blind Tom), a child known as “Bright” Oscar Moore, and the early-twentieth century “Harlem Prodigy,” Philippa Schuyler, situating each against the racial, gendered, and developmental rubrics by which they were designated prodigious exceptions. Ultimately, Like Children displaces frames of exclusion and dehumanization to explain black children’s historical and present predicament, revealing the immense cultural significance that black children have negotiated and what they have done to reshape the human in their own acts.

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Steven T. Katz, "The Holocaust and New World Slavery: A Comparative History" (Cambridge UP, 2019) Sep 30, 2024

The Holocaust and New World Slavery: A Comparative History (Cambridge UP, 2019) offers the first, in-depth comparison of the Holocaust and new world slavery. Providing a reliable view of the relevant issues, and based on a broad and comprehensive set of data and evidence, Steven Katz analyzes the fundamental differences between the two systems and re-evaluates our understanding of the Nazi agenda.

Among the subjects he examines are: the use of black slaves as workers compared to the Nazi use of Jewish labor; the causes of slave demographic decline and growth in different New World locations; the main features of Jewish life during the Holocaust relative to slave life with regard to such topics as diet, physical punishment, medical care, and the role of religion; the treatment of slave women and children as compared to the treatment of Jewish women and children in the Holocaust. Katz shows that slave women were valued as workers, as reproducers of future slaves, and as sexual objects, and that slave children were valued as commodities. For these reasons, neither slave women nor children were intentionally murdered. By comparison, Jewish slave women and children were viewed as the ultimate racial enemy and therefore had to be exterminated. These and other findings conclusively demonstrate the uniqueness of the Holocaust compared with other historical instances of slavery.

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Andrew W. Kahrl, "The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America" (U Chicago Press, 2024) Sep 25, 2024

In The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America(U Chicago Press, 2024), Andrew W. Kahrl uncovers the history of inequitable and predatory tax laws in the United States. He examines the structural traps within America’s tax system that have forced Black Americans to pay more for less despite being taxpayers with fewer resources compared to white taxpayers. Kahrl exposes these practices, From Reconstruction up to the present, Kahrl exposes these practices to describe how discrimination continues to take new forms, even as people continue to fight for their rights, their assets, and their power.

Dr. N’Kosi Oates is a curator. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at DrNKosiOates.

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Wayne A. Wiegand, "In Silence or Indifference: Racism and Jim Crow Segregated Public School Libraries" (UP of Mississippi, 2024) Sep 23, 2024

Librarians around the country are currently on a battleground, defending their right to purchase and circulate books dealing with issues of race and systemic racism. Despite this work, the library community has often overlooked—even ignored—its own history of White supremacy and deliberate inaction on the part of White librarians and library leadership. Author Wayne A. Wiegand takes a crucial step to amend this historical record. In Silence or Indifference: Racism and Jim Crow Segregated Public School Libraries (University of Mississippi Press, 2024) analyzes and critiques the world of professional librarianship between 1954 and 1974.

Wiegand begins by identifying racism in the practice and customs of public school libraries in the years leading up to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. This culture permeated the next two decades, as subsequent Supreme Court decisions led to feeble and mostly unsuccessful attempts to integrate Jim Crow public schools and their libraries. During this same period, the profession was honing its national image as a defender of intellectual freedom, a proponent of the freedom to read, and an opponent of censorship. Still, the community did not take any unified action to support Brown or to visibly oppose racial segregation. As Black school librarians and their Black patrons suffered through the humiliations and hostility of the Jim Crow educational establishment, the American library community remained largely ambivalent and silent.

The book brings to light a distressing history that continues to impact the library community, its students, and its patrons. Currently available school library literature skews the historical perspective that informs the present. In Silence or Indifference is the first attempt to establish historical accountability for the systemic racism contemporary school librarianship inherited in the twenty-first century.

Wayne A. Wiegand is F. William Summers Professor of Library and Information Studies Emeritus at Florida State University. Often referred to as “the Dean of American library historians,” he is author of many scholarly articles and books, including Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey; Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library; and American Public School Librarianship: A History.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Sarah Lewis, "The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America" (Harvard UP, 2024) Sep 21, 2024

In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen—until now.

The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War—the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War—revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive “Caucasian” for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them.

To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow and segregation took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising what no longer served the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what was left out, what we have been conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America(Harvard University Press, 2024) shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations—and offers a way to begin to dismantle it.

Sarah Lewis is the founder of Vision & Justice and the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press), the bestseller, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (Simon & Schuster), Lewis is the editor of the award-winning volumes, “Vision & Justice” by Aperture magazine and the anthology on the work of Carrie Mae Weems (MIT Press). She is the organizer of the landmark Vision & Justice Convening at Harvard University, and co-editor of the Vision & Justice Book Series, launched in partnership with Aperture. Her awards include the Infinity Award, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Cullman Fellowship, the Freedom Scholar Award (ASALH), the Arthur Danto/ASA Prize from the American Philosophical Association, and the Photography Network Book Prize. Her writing has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Artforum, and the New York Review of Books, and her work has been the subject of profiles from The Boston Globe to the New York Times. Lewis is a sought-after public speaker, with a mainstage TED talk that received over three million views. She received her BA from Harvard University, an MPhil from Oxford University, an MA from Courtauld Institute of Art, and her PhD from Yale University. She lives in New York City and Cambridge, MA.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Caree A. Banton, "More Auspicious Shores: Barbadian Migration to Liberia, Blackness, and the Making of an African Republic" (Cambridge UP, 2019) Sep 21, 2024

Caree A. Banton's bookMore Auspicious Shores: Barbadian Migration to Liberia, Blackness, and the Making of an African Republic(Cambridge UP, 2019) chronicles the migration of Afro-Barbadians to Liberia. In 1865, 346 Afro-Barbadians fled a failed post-emancipation Caribbean for the independent black republic of Liberia. They saw Liberia as a means of achieving their post-emancipation goals and promoting a pan-Africanist agenda while simultaneously fulfilling their 'civilizing' and 'Christianizing' duties.

Through a close examination of the Afro-Barbadians, Banton provides a transatlantic approach to understanding the political and sociocultural consequences of their migration and settlement in Africa. Banton reveals how, as former British subjects, Afro-Barbadians navigated an inherent tension between ideas of pan-Africanism and colonial superiority. Upon their arrival in Liberia, an English imperial identity distinguished the Barbadians from African Americans and secured them privileges in the Republic's hierarchy above the other group. By fracturing assumptions of a homogeneous black identity, Banton ultimately demonstrates how Afro-Barbadian settlement in Liberia influenced ideas of blackness in the Atlantic World.

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David Kroening Seitz, "A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine" (U Nebraska Press, 2023) Sep 20, 2024

A different kind of Star Trek television series debuted in 1993. Deep Space Nine was set not on a starship but a space station near a postcolonial planet still reeling from a genocidal occupation. The crew was led by a reluctant Black American commander and an extraterrestrial first officer who had until recently been an anticolonial revolutionary. DS9 extended Star Trek’s tradition of critical social commentary but did so by transgressing many of Star Trek’s previous taboos, including religion, money, eugenics, and interpersonal conflict. DS9 imagined a twenty-fourth century that was less a glitzy utopia than a critical mirror of contemporary U.S. racism, capitalism, imperialism, and heteropatriarchy.

Thirty years after its premiere, DS9 is beloved by critics and fans but remains marginalised in scholarly studies of science fiction. Drawing on cultural geography, Black studies, and feminist and queer studies, A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) by Dr. David Seitz is the first scholarly monograph dedicated to a critical interpretation of DS9’s allegorical world-building. If DS9 has been vindicated aesthetically, this book argues that its prophetic, place-based critiques of 1990s U.S. politics, which deepened the foundations of many of our current crises, have been vindicated politically, to a degree most scholars and even many fans have yet to fully appreciate.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Alexis Pauline Gumbs, "Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde" (FSG, 2024) Sep 19, 2024

We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity-center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde's teachings on "the creative power of difference" may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today.

Lorde's understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation. Possibly the focus on Lorde's quotable essays, to the neglect of her complex poems, has led us to ignore her deep engagement with the natural world, the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. For her, ecological images are not simply metaphors but rather literal guides to how to be of earth on earth, and how to survive--to live the ethics that a Black feminist lesbian warrior poetics demands.

In Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde(FSG, 2024), Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the first researcher to explore the full depths of Lorde's manuscript archives, illuminates the eternal life of Lorde. Her life and work become more than a sound bite; they become a cosmic force, teaching us the grand contingency of life together on earth.

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Michael L. Walker, "Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail" (Oxford UP, 2022) Sep 15, 2024

Jails are the principal people-processing machines of the criminal justice system. Mostly they hold persons awaiting trial who cannot afford or have been denied bail. Although jail sentences max out at a year, some spend years awaiting trial in jail-especially in counties where courts are jammed with cases. City and county jails, detention centers, police lockups, and other temporary holding facilities are regularly overcrowded, poorly funded, and the buildings are often in disrepair. American jails admit over ten million people every year, but very little is known about what happens to them while they're locked away.

Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail(Oxford UP, 2022) is an ethnographic study of a California county jail that reflects on what it means to do jail time and what it does to men. Michael L. Walker spent several extended spells in jail, having been arrested while trying to pay parking tickets in graduate school. This book is an intimate account of his experience and in it he shares the routines, rhythms, and subtle meanings that come with being incarcerated. Walker shows how punishment in jail is much more than the deprivation of liberties. It is, he argues, purposefully degrading. Jail creates a racial politics that organizes daily life, moves men from clock time to event time, normalizes trauma, and imbues residents with substantial measures of vulnerability. Deputies used self-centered management styles to address the problems associated with running a jail, some that magnified individual conflicts to potential group conflicts and others that created divisions between residents for the sake of control. And though not every deputy indulged, many gave themselves over to the pleasures of punishment.

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Grant Olwage, "Paul Robeson's Voices" (Oxford UP, 2023) Sep 13, 2024

Paul Robeson's Voices (Oxford UP, 2023)is a meditation on Robeson's singing, a study of the artist's life in song. Music historian Grant Olwage examines Robeson's voice as it exists in two broad and intersecting domains: as sound object and sounding gesture, specifically how it was fashioned in the contexts of singing practices, in recital, concert, and recorded performance, and as subject of identification. Olwage asks: how does the voice encapsulate modes of subjectivity, of being?

Combining deep archival research with musicological theory, this book is a study of voice as central to Robeson's sense of self and his politics. Paul Robeson's Voices charts the dialectal process of Robeson's vocal and self-discovery, documenting some of the ways Robeson's practice revised the traditions of concert singing in the first half of the twentieth century and how his voice manifested as resistance.”

Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University

nathan.smith@yale.edu

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Tracy Fessenden, “Religion Around Billie Holiday” (Penn State UP, 2018) Sep 08, 2024

Billie Holiday is one of the most iconic jazz performers of all time. Her voice is certainly unmistakable but for many her religious sensibilities may be invisible. In Religion Around Billie Holiday (Penn State University Press, 2018), Tracy Fessenden, Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University, delineates the religious worlds that shaped Holiday and her music. Fessenden takes the reader through Holiday’s short but full life by placing it within the contexts of Catholicism, black vernacular music, Jazz compositions, and the culture of American celebrity. She shows how race, gender, and religious conditions guided her sound and formed the prism through which her genius shone. In our conversation we discussed Holiday’s early Catholic formation, the Jewishness of the American songbook, Afro-Protestant notions of redemption, confessional performance, the eclectic religious orbits of her jazz contemporaries, Strange Fruit and the vigilante faith of some Southerners, the cinematic representation of a musician’s life, and the mytho-poetic nature of Holiday’s iconicity.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.

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The Epic Story of America's Great Migration: A Talk by Isabel Wilkerson Sep 07, 2024

In 2010, Isabel Wilkerson spoke to the Institute about the fifteen years she spent reporting and writing her book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Knopf, 2010). The book won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction,

In 1994, Wilkerson was the New York Times Chicago Bureau Chief when she won the Pulitzer Prize for her profile of a fourth-grader from Chicago's South Side, and for two stories on the Midwestern floods of 1993. She was the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.

Her 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents argues that racial stratification in the United States is best understood as a caste system, akin to those in India and in Nazi Germany

She has taught at Princeton, Emory and Boston universities.

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Sara E. Johnson, "Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World" (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2023) Sep 07, 2024

If you peer closely into the bookstores, salons, and diplomatic circles of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry is bound to appear. As a lawyer, philosophe, and Enlightenment polymath, Moreau created and compiled an immense archive that remains a vital window into the social, political, and intellectual fault lines of the Age of Revolutions. But the gilded spines and elegant designs that decorate his archive obscure the truth: Moreau's achievements were predicated upon the work of enslaved people and free people of color. Their labor afforded him the leisure to research, think, and write. Their rich intellectual and linguistic cultures filled the pages of his most applauded works. Every beautiful book Moreau produced contains an embedded story of hidden violence.

In Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2023), Sara Johnson's arresting investigation of race and knowledge in the revolutionary Atlantic surrounds Moreau with the African-descended people he worked so hard to erase, immersing him in a vibrant community of language innovators, forgers of kinship networks, and world travelers who strove to create their own social and political lives. Built from archival fragments, creative speculation, and audacious intellectual courage, Encyclopédie noire is a communal biography of the women and men who made Moreau’s world.

Sara E. Johnson is professor of literature of the Americas at University of California, San Diego.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Magdalena J. Zaborowska, "Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France" (Duke UP, 2018) Sep 06, 2024

The last sixteen years of James Baldwin's life (1971–87) unfolded in a village in the South of France, in a sprawling house nicknamed “Chez Baldwin.” In Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France(Duke UP, 2018), Magdalena J. Zaborowska employs Baldwin’s home space as a lens through which to expand his biography and explore the politics and poetics of blackness, queerness, and domesticity in his complex and underappreciated later works. Zaborowska shows how the themes of dwelling and black queer male sexuality in The Welcome Table, Just above My Head, and If Beale Street Could Talk directly stem from Chez Baldwin's influence on the writer. The house was partially torn down in 2014. Accessible, heavily illustrated, and drawing on interviews with Baldwin's friends and lovers, unpublished letters, and manuscripts, Me and My House offers new insights into Baldwin's life, writing, and relationships, making it essential reading for all students, scholars, and fans of Baldwin.

Magdalena J. Zaborowska is Professor of Afroamerican and American Studies and the John Rich Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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How Mechanisms of Psychoanalytic Defense Perpetuate Racism in America Sep 03, 2024

The third podcast in this series focuses on an article written by Dr. Dionne Powell who participated in the 2014 documentary, “Black Psychoanalysts Speak,” which was an excellent film created by Basia Winograd. Dr. Powell’s JAPA article written in 2018 was entitled, “Race, African Americans, and Psychoanalysis: Collective Silence in the Therapeutic Situation.” This is a an important illustration of racism in America and ties in nicely with our topic about psychoanalytic mechanisms of defense.

Dr. Karyne E. Messina is a psychologist and child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst. In addition to maintaining a full-time private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland, she is on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland which is part of Johns Hopkins Medicine. She is a podcast host for the New Books Network and chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Scholarship and Writing section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA). She is a member of the AI Council of APsA (CAI). She has also written and edited six books. Her topics focus on applying psychoanalytic ideas to real-world issues we all face in our complex world.

Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is a child and adolescent supervising psychoanalyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies in Houston, Texas, where she also holds the position of President of Board of Directors. Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is also a faculty member in the Child and Adult Training Programs. In addition, she provides clinical supervision for the State of Texas licensing board, as well as supervision as a Registered Play Therapist-Supervisor with the Association for Play Therapy. She is also the chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Diversity section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA).

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Andy Clarno et al., "Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago" (U Minnesota Press, 2024) Sep 03, 2024

Chicago is a city with extreme concentrations of racialized poverty and inequity, one that relies on an extensive network of repressive agencies to police the poor and suppress struggles for social justice. Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago(University of Minnesota Press, 2024) examines the role of local law enforcement, federal immigration authorities, and national security agencies in upholding the city’s highly unequal social order.

Collaboratively authored by the Policing in Chicago Research Group (PCRG), Imperial Policing was developed in dialogue with movements on the front lines of struggles against racist policing in Black, Latinx, and Arab/Muslim communities. The members of PCRG are Andy Clarno, Enrique Alvear Moreno, Janaé Bonsu-Love, Lydia Dana, Michael De Anda Muñiz, Ilā Ravichandran, and Haley Volpintesta. Imperial Policing analyzes the connections between three police “wars”—on crime, terror, and immigrants—focusing on the weaponization of data and the coordination between local and national agencies to suppress communities of color and undermine social movements. Topics include high-tech, data-based tools of policing; the racialized archetypes that ground the police wars; the manufacturing of criminals and terrorists; the subversion of sanctuary city protections; and abolitionist responses to policing, such as the Erase the Database campaign.

Andy Clarno is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Black Studies and coordinator of the Policing in Chicago Research Group at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research examines racism, capitalism, colonialism, and empire in the early 21st century, with a focus on racialized policing and struggles for social justice in contexts of extreme inequality.

Michael De Anda Muñiz is an Assistant Professor in the Latina/Latino Studies Department at San Francisco State University. His research interests include culture, art, community engagement, space, and resistance.

Ilā Ravichandran is an assistant professor of legal studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma. Dr. Ravichandran’s research interests include science, knowledge, technology, biopolitics, policing, surveillance, counterinsurgency, state, queerness & Black studies.

Timi Koyejo is a graduate student in urban studies at the University of Vienna. He has worked professionally as a researcher at the University of Chicago and as an urban policy advisor for the City of Chicago.

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Tadashi Dozono, "Discipline Problems: How Students of Color Trouble Whiteness in Schools" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) Aug 31, 2024

Angel, a Black tenth-grader at a New York City public school, self-identifies as a nerd and likes to learn. But she’s troubled that her history classes leave out events like the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous people in the Americas, presenting a sugar-coated image of the United States that is at odds with her everyday experience. “The history I learned in school is simpler,” she says. “The world I live in is a lot more complex.”

Angel, like every student interviewed in Discipline Problems: How Students of Color Trouble Whiteness in Schools (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024), has been identified by teachers as a “troublemaker,” a student whose behavior disrupts classroom norms and interferes with instruction. But her critiques of the curriculum she’s taught speak to her curiosity and insight, crucial foundations for understanding history. Like many students who have been marginalized by systemic racism in American schools, she exposes the shortcomings of her classrooms’ academic environments by challenging both the content and the methods of her education. All too often, these challenges are framed as “troublemaking,” and the students are disciplined for “acting out” instead of being rewarded for their intellectual engagement.

Tadashi Dozono, a professor of education and former high school social studies teacher, takes seriously the often-overlooked critiques that students of color who get labeled as troublemakers direct toward their high school history curriculum. He reinterprets “troublemaking,” usually cast as a behavioral deficit, as an intellectual asset and form of reasoning that challenges the “disciplining reason” of classrooms where whiteness is valued over the histories and knowledge of people of color. Dozono shows how what are traditionally framed as discipline problems can be seen through a different lens as responses to educational practices that marginalize non-white students. Discipline Problems reveals how students of color seek out alternate avenues for understanding their world and imagines a pedagogy that champions the curiosity, intellect, and knowledge of marginalized learners.

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Robin Bernstein, "Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit" (U Chicago Press, 2024) Aug 23, 2024

In the early nineteenth century, as slavery gradually ended in the North, a village in New York State invented a new form of unfreedom: the profit-driven prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the village of Auburn built a prison that enclosed industrial factories. There, "slaves of the state" were leased to private companies. The prisoners earned no wages, yet they manufactured furniture, animal harnesses, carpets, and combs, which consumers bought throughout the North. Then one young man challenged the system.

In Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit(U Chicago Press, 2024), Robin Bernstein tells the story of an Afro-Native teenager named William Freeman who was convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit and sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn's prison. Incensed at being forced to work without pay, Freeman demanded wages. His challenge triggered violence: first against him, then by him. Freeman committed a murder that terrified and bewildered white America. And white America struck back--with aftereffects that reverberate into our lives today in the persistent myth of inherent Black criminality. William Freeman's unforgettable story reveals how the North invented prison for profit half a century before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery "except as a punishment for crime"--and how Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and other African Americans invented strategies of resilience and resistance in a city dominated by a citadel of unfreedom.

Through one Black man, his family, and his city, Bernstein tells an explosive, moving story about the entangled origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism.

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Edward Pearson, "The Enslaved and Their Enslavers: Power, Resistance, and Culture in South Carolina, 1670-1825" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) Aug 22, 2024

In The Enslaved and Their Enslavers: Power, Resistance, and Culture in South Carolina, 1670-1825(U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Edward Pearson offers a sweeping history of slavery in South Carolina, from British settlement in 1670 to the dawn of the Civil War. For enslaved peoples, the shape of their daily lives depended primarily on the particular environment in which they lived and worked, and Pearson examines three distinctive settings in the province: the extensive rice and indigo plantations of the coastal plain; the streets, workshops, and wharves of Charleston; and the farms and estates of the upcountry. In doing so, he provides a fine-grained analysis of how enslaved laborers interacted with their enslavers in the workplace and other locations where they encountered one another as plantation agriculture came to dominate the colony.

The Enslaved and Their Enslavers sets this portrait of early South Carolina against broader political events, economic developments, and social trends that also shaped the development of slavery in the region. For example, the outbreak of the American Revolution and the subsequent war against the British in the 1770s and early 1780s as well as the French and Haitian revolutions all had a profound impact on the institution’s development, both in terms of what enslaved people drew from these events and how their enslavers responded to them.

Throughout South Carolina’s long history, enslaved people never accepted their enslavement passively and regularly demonstrated their fundamental opposition to the institution by engaging in acts of resistance, which ranged from vandalism to arson to escape, and, on rare occasions, organizing collectively against their oppression. Their attempts to subvert the institution in which they were held captive not only resulted in slaveowners tightening formal and informal mechanisms of control but also generated new forms of thinking about race and slavery among whites that eventually mutated into pro-slavery ideology and the myth of southern exceptionalism.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Devonya N. Havis, "Creating a Black Vernacular Philosophy" (Lexington Books, 2022) Aug 20, 2024

What can philosophy do? By taking up Black American cultural practices, Devonya N. Havis suggests that academic philosophy has been too narrow in its considerations of this question, supporting domination and oppression.

In Creating a Black Vernacular Philosophy (Lexington Books, 2022), Havis brings our focus to theoretically rich practices of African diasporic communities. Offering critical insight into how philosophy has been narrowed, Havis also offers a guide to interpreting the world otherwise, engaging stories, novels, the blues, jazz, work songs, naming and self-naming, and more. Havis does Black Vernacular Philosophy in conversation with other doers as she shows us the urgent need for such work.

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Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, "Haitian History: New Perspectives" (Routledge, 2012) Aug 17, 2024

Despite Haiti's proximity to the United States, and its considerable importance to our own history, Haiti barely registered in the historic consciousness of most Americans until recently. Those who struggled to understand Haiti's suffering in the earthquake of 2010 often spoke of it as the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, but could not explain how it came to be so.

In recent years, the amount of scholarship about the island has increased dramatically. Whereas once this scholarship was focused on Haiti's political or military leaders, now the historiography of Haiti features lively debates and different schools of thought. Even as this body of knowledge has developed, it has been hard for students to grasp its various strands.

Haitian History: New Perspectives(Routledge, 2012) presents the best of the recent articles on Haitian history, by both Haitian and foreign scholars, moving from colonial Saint Domingue to the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. It will be the go-to one-volume introduction to the field of Haitian history, helping to explain how the promise of the Haitian Revolution dissipated, and presenting the major debates and questions in the field today.

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Policing and White Power with Daniel Kryder and David Cunningham (JP, EF) Aug 15, 2024

This June 2020 episode, originally part of a Global Policing series, was Recall this Book's first exploration of police brutality, systemic and personal racism and Black Lives Matter. Elizabeth and John were lucky to be joined by Daniel Kryder and David Cunningham, two scholars who have worked on these questions for decades.

Many of the mechanisms that create an oppressed and subordinated American community of color can seem subtle and indirect, despite the insidious ways they pervade housing law (The Color of Law), education (Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together, Savage Inequalities) and the carceral state (The Condemnation of Blackness, The New Jim Crow, Locking Up Our Own).

Although there is plenty of subtle racism in policing as well, there can be a brutally frontal quality to white-power policing: just look at the racial disparity in the stubbornly astronomically number of fatal shootings by police. David and Daniel ask how much of the current system of racial and class disparity can be traced back to slavery or to subsequent 19th century racial logic, and howw much arises from the confluence of other forces.

The conversation notes the widespread white participation in 2020 protests–did we ever expect to hear Mitt Romney chanting “Black Lives Matter”?– and what this might suggest about the possibilities for actual change. It also touches on the roles of the media and institutions such as police unions and the erosion of federal oversight of local police departments.

Mentioned in this episode:

Klansville, USA (cf. the PBS show of the same name that drew heavily on the book; and an interview David did on the topic of today’s Klan)
Kerner Commission Report (1968)
Ethical Society of Police (cf. this compelling local post-Ferguson PBS documentary that speaks with St. Louis African-American police officers)

Recallable Books

Walter Johnson, “The Broken Heart of America” (2020)
James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time” (1963)
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Between the World and Me” (2015)

Listen and Read Here:

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Crystal Wilkinson, "Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks" (Clarkson Potter, 2023) Aug 14, 2024

Poet Laureate of Kentucky Crystal Wilkinson’s food memoir, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks(Clarkson Potter, 2023), honors her kitchen ghosts, five generations of Black Appalachian women. She contends, “The concept of the kitchen ghost came to me years ago, when I realized that my ancestors are always with me and that the women are most present while I’m chopping or stirring or standing at the stove.” Wilkinson shares nearly forty family recipes like Corn Pudding, Chicken and Dumplings, and Granny Christine’s Jam Cake, with stories and family photos to bring to life the rich heritage of Black Appalachia.

Dr. N’Kosi Oates is a curator. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at DrNKosiOates.

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The Role of Psychoanalytic Mechanisms of Defense; What They Are and How They Work Aug 07, 2024

Using one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s major ideas as a springboard for their discussion, “The truth will set you free,” the host and co-host discussed psychoanalytic mechanism of defense starting with denial which can emerge when a topic is too painful or difficult to face. A productive dialogue followed that focused on Dr. Filipe Copeland’s description of two different types of denial, Strategic Denial and Psychological Denial as described in “The American Psychoanalyst” (TAP) in an interview with Dr. Austin Ratner, editor-in-chief of the magazine. Amanual Elias’s paper, “Racism as Neglect and Denial” was also mentioned. Stay tuned for more discussions about the ways in which psychoanalytic thinking can help to explain racism in America.

Dr. Karyne E. Messina is a psychologist and child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst. In addition to maintaining a full-time private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland, she is on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland which is part of Johns Hopkins Medicine. She is a podcast host for the New Books Network and chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Scholarship and Writing section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA). She is a member of the AI Council of APsA (CAI). She has also written and edited seven books. Her topics focus on applying psychoanalytic ideas to real-world issues we all face in our complex world.

Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is a child and adolescent supervising psychoanalyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies in Houston, Texas, where she also holds the position of President of Board of Directors. Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is also a faculty member in the Child and Adult Training Programs. In addition, she provides clinical supervision for the State of Texas licensing board, as well as supervision as a Registered Play Therapist-Supervisor with the Association for Play Therapy. She is also the chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Diversity section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA).

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Race, Gender, and the 2024 Presidential Election Cycle Aug 05, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris is poised to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for president. The path to this nomination and the generation election has been a bit unusual—with President Joe Biden deciding not to pursue re-election but doing so after the primary season has concluded. Thus, there is a rather condensed election season, and Vice President Kamala Harris has worked to bring the Democratic Party together after she received President Biden’s endorsement after he withdrew from the race. Given the changing dynamics of the presidential race, we also find ourselves with an unexpected choice for the presidency, Kamala Harris, a former attorney general for California, a senator from California, a former prosecutor, and now the vice president of the United States. Harris is also bi-racial, of South Asian and Black heritage, and she will be the second woman nominated as the standard bearer for one of the two major political parties in the United States.

I invited three experts on presidential politics, gender, and race in American politics to join me to discuss Kamala Harris’s historic and unique run for the presidency. Mary McHugh, Executive Director of Civic and Community Engagement, Stevens Service Learning Center at Merrimack College and member of the Political Science Department at Merrimack, Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, Deputy Director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science SEA Change Program, and professor of political science at Purdue University, and Linda Beail, Professor of Political Science at Point Loma Nazarene University and co-author of the 2012 book, Framing Sarah Palin: Pit Bulls, Puritans, and Politics, all joined the conversation to think about the presidential race, Kamala Harris, race, gender, masculinity, and partisan politics. We cover a lot of ground, including the presentation of masculinity at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July, how TikTok and viral memes may influence younger voters, and how Kamala Harris is trying to frame herself and how others are trying to frame her in the course of the abbreviated election cycle. We examine historical contexts for women ascending to office, and how that might be a component of the shifting candidates and how Americans think about elections. We also dive into some of the controversial comments about “crazy cat ladies” and concepts of motherhood, politics, and racial and gendered double binds.

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Anne Gray Fischer, "The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification" (UNC Press, 2022) Aug 05, 2024

Anne Gray Fischer speaks about her path to and through research, including how sex workers informed her analysis of policing and state violence, the role of law enforcement in struggles over economic development, and the intellectual and practical factors of research design.

Men, especially Black men, often stand in as the ultimate symbol of the mass incarceration crisis in the United States. Women are treated as marginal, if not overlooked altogether, in histories of the criminal legal system. In The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification(UNC Press, 2022)--a searing history of women and police in the modern United States--Anne Gray Fischer narrates how sexual policing fueled a dramatic expansion of police power. The enormous discretionary power that police officers wield to surveil, target, and arrest anyone they deem suspicious was tested, legitimized, and legalized through the policing of women's sexuality and their right to move freely through city streets.

Throughout the twentieth century, police departments achieved a stunning consolidation of urban authority through the strategic discretionary enforcement of morals laws, including disorderly conduct, vagrancy, and other prostitution-related misdemeanors. Between Prohibition in the 1920s and the rise of broken windows policing in the 1980s, police targeted white and Black women in distinct but interconnected ways. These tactics reveal the centrality of racist and sexist myths to the justification and deployment of state power. Sexual policing did not just enhance police power. It also transformed cities from segregated sites of urban vice into the gentrified sites of Black displacement and banishment we live in today. By illuminating both the racial dimension of sexual liberalism and the gender dimension of policing in Black neighborhoods, The Streets Belong to Us illustrates the decisive role that race, gender, and sexuality played in the construction of urban police regimes.

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Nadirah Simmons, "First Things First: Hip-Hop Ladies Who Changed the Game" (Twelve, 2024) Aug 04, 2024

This enlightening book reframes the history of hip-hop—and this time, women are given credit for all their trailblazing achievements that have left an undeniable impact on music.

First Things First: Hip-Hop Ladies Who Changed the Game(Twelve, 2024), hip-hop is not just the music, and women have played a big role in shaping the way it looks today. First Things First takes readers on a journey through some notable firsts by women in hip-hop history and their importance. Factual firsts like Queen Latifah becoming the first rapper to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Lauryn Hill making history as the first rapper to win the coveted Album of the Year Award at the GRAMMYs, April Walker being the first woman to dominate in the hip-hop fashion game, and Da Brat being the first solo woman rapper to have an album go platinum, and metaphorical firsts like Missy Elliott being the first woman rapper to go to the future. (Trust me, she really did.)

There are chapters on music legends like Nicki Minaj, Lil’ Kim and Mary J. Blige, tv and radio hosts like Big Lez and Angie Martinez, and so many more ladies I would name but I don’t want to spoil the book! There are games, charts and some fire images, too.

Altogether, First Things First is a celebration of the achievements of women in hip-hop who broke down barriers and broke the mold. So the next time someone doesn’t have their facts straight on the ladies in hip-hop, you can hit them with “first things first”…

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Nik Ribianszky, "Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779-1865" (U Georgia Press, 2021) Aug 03, 2024

In Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779-1865 (U Georgia Press, 2021), Nik Ribianszky employs the lenses of gender and violence to examine family, community, and the tenacious struggles by which free blacks claimed and maintained their freedom under shifting international governance from Spanish colonial rule (1779-95), through American acquisition (1795) and eventual statehood (established in 1817), and finally to slavery’s legal demise in 1865.

Freedom was not necessarily a permanent condition, but one separated from racial slavery by a permeable and highly unstable boundary. This book explicates how the interlocking categories of race, class, and gender shaped Natchez, Mississippi’s free community of color and how implicit and explicit violence carried down from one generation to another. To demonstrate this, Ribianszky introduces the concept of generational freedom. Inspired by the work of Ira Berlin, who focused on the complex process through which free Africans and their descendants came to experience enslavement, generational freedom is an analytical tool that employs this same idea in reverse to trace how various generations of free people of color embraced, navigated, and protected their tenuous freedom. This approach allows for the identification of a foundational generation of free people of color, those who were born into slavery but later freed. The generations that followed, the conditional generations, were those who were born free and without the experience of and socialization into North America's system of chattel, racial slavery. Notwithstanding one's status at birth as legally free or unfree, though, each individual's continued freedom was based on compliance with a demanding and often unfair system.

Generations of Freedom tells the stories of people who collectively inhabited an uncertain world of qualified freedom. Taken together—by exploring the themes of movement, gendered violence, and threats to their property and, indeed, their very bodies—these accounts argue that free blacks were active in shaping their own freedom and that of generations thereafter. Their successful navigation of the shifting ground of freedom was dependent on their utilization of all available tools at their disposal: securing reliable and influential allies, maintaining their independence, and using the legal system to protect their property—including that most precious, themselves.

For more, see the "Generations of Freedom" website.

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Tisha Brooks, "Spirit Deep: Recovering the Sacred in Black Women’s Travel" (U Virginia Press, 2023) Aug 02, 2024

What would it mean for American and African American literary studies if readers took the spirituality and travel of Black women seriously?

With Spirit Deep: Recovering the Sacred in Black Women’s Travel (U Virginia Press, 2023), Tisha Brooks addresses this question by focusing on three nineteenth-century Black women writers who merged the spiritual and travel narrative genres: Zilpha Elaw, Amanda Smith, and Nancy Prince. Brooks hereby challenges the divides between religious and literary studies, and between coerced and "free" passages within travel writing studies to reveal meaningful new connections in Black women’s writings. Bringing together both sacred and secular texts, Spirit Deep uncovers an enduring spiritual legacy of movement and power that Black women have claimed for themselves in opposition to the single story of the Black (female) body as captive, monstrous, and strange. Spirit Deep thus addresses the marginalization of Black women from larger conversations about travel writing, demonstrating the continuing impact of their spirituality and movements in our present world.

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Jane-Marie Collins, "Emancipatory Narratives & Enslaved Motherhood: Bahia, Brazil, 1830-1888" (Liverpool UP, 2023) Aug 01, 2024

Jane-Marie Collins's book Emancipatory Narratives & Enslaved Motherhood: Bahia, Brazil, 1830-1888(Liverpool UP, 2023) examines three major currents in the historiography of Brazilian slavery: manumission, miscegenation, and creolisation. It revisits themes central to the history of slavery and race relations in Brazil, updates the research about them, and revises interpretations of the role of gender and reproduction within them. First, about the preponderance of women and children in manumission; second, about the association of black female mobility with intimate inter-racial relations; third, about the racialised and gendered routes to freed status; and fourth, about the legacies of West African female socio-economic behaviours for modalities of family and freedom in nineteenth-century Salvador da Bahia, Brazil.

The central concern within the book is how African and African descendant women navigated enslaved motherhood and negotiated the divide between enslavement and freedom for themselves and their children. The book is, therefore, organised around the subject position of the enslaved mother and the reproduction of her children in enslavement, while the condition of enslaved motherhood is examined through overlapping historical praxis evidenced in nineteenth-century Bahia: contested freedom, racialised mothering, and competing maternal interests - biological, ritual, surrogate. The point at which these interests converged historically was, it is argued, a conflict over black female reproductive rights.

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Prithi Kanakamedala, "Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough" (NYU Press, 2024) Jul 28, 2024

Meet the Black Brooklynites who defined New York City's most populous borough through their search for social justice.

Before it was a borough, Brooklyn was our nation's third largest city. Its free Black community attracted people from all walks of life--businesswomen, church leaders, laborers, and writers--who sought to grow their city in a radical anti-slavery vision. The residents of neighborhoods like DUMBO, Fort Greene, and Williamsburg organized and agitated for social justice. They did so even as their own freedom was threatened by systemic and structural racism, risking their safety for the sake of their city. Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough(NYU Press, 2024) recovers the lives of these remarkable citizens and considers their lasting impact on New York City's most populous borough.

This cultural and social history is told through four ordinary families from Brooklyn's nineteenth-century free Black community: the Crogers, the Hodges, the Wilsons, and the Gloucesters. The book illustrates the depth and scope of their activism, cementing Brooklyn's place in the history of social justice movements. Their lives offer valuable lessons on freedom, democracy, and family--both the ones we're born with and the ones we choose. Their powerful stories continue to resonate today, as borough residents fill the streets in search of a more just city.

This is a story of land, home, labor, of New Yorkers past, and the legacy they left us. This is the story of Brooklyn.

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Musa al-Gharbi, "We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite" (Princeton UP, 2024) Jul 28, 2024

How a new "woke" elite uses the language of social justice to gain more power and status--without helping the marginalized and disadvantaged.

Society has never been more egalitarian—in theory. Prejudice is taboo, and diversity is strongly valued. At the same time, social and economic inequality have exploded. In We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton UP, 2024), Musa al-Gharbi argues that these trends are closely related, each tied to the rise of a new elite—the symbolic capitalists. In education, media, nonprofits, and beyond, members of this elite work primarily with words, ideas, images, and data, and are very likely to identify as allies of antiracist, feminist, LGBTQ, and other progressive causes. Their dominant ideology is “wokeness” and, while their commitment to equality is sincere, they actively benefit from and perpetuate the inequalities they decry. Indeed, their egalitarian credentials help them gain more power and status, often at the expense of the marginalized and disadvantaged.

We Have Never Been Woke details how the language of social justice is increasingly used to justify this elite—and to portray the losers in the knowledge economy as deserving their lot because they think or say the “wrong” things about race, gender, and sexuality. Al-Gharbi’s point is not to accuse symbolic capitalists of hypocrisy or cynicism. Rather, he examines how their genuine beliefs prevent them from recognizing how they contribute to social problems—or how their actions regularly provoke backlash against the social justice causes they champion.

A powerful critique, We Have Never Been Woke reveals that only by challenging this elite’s self-serving narratives can we hope to address social and economic inequality effectively.

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Sheila Curran Bernard, "Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly's Truths from Jim Crow's Lies" (Cambridge UP, 2024) Jul 28, 2024

Known worldwide as Lead Belly, Huddie Ledbetter (1889-1949) is an American icon whose influence on modern music was tremendous - as was, according to legend, the temper that landed him in two of the South's most brutal prisons, while his immense talent twice won him pardons.

But, as Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly's Truths from Jim Crow's Lies (Cambridge UP, 2024) shows, these stories were shaped by the white folklorists who 'discovered' Lead Belly and, along with reporters, recording executives, and radio and film producers, introduced him to audiences beyond the South. Through a revelatory examination of arrest, trial, and prison records; sharecropping reports; oral histories; newspaper articles; and more, author Sheila Curran Bernard replaces myth with fact, offering a stunning indictment of systemic racism in the Jim Crow era of the United States and the power of narrative to erase and distort the past.

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Tiffany Gill, "To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism" (U Illinois Press, 2019) Jul 21, 2024

Black women undertook an energetic and unprecedented engagement with internationalism from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s. In many cases, their work reflected a complex effort to merge internationalism with issues of women's rights and with feminist concerns.

To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (U Illinois Press, 2019) examines these and other issues with a collection of cutting-edge essays on black women's internationalism in this pivotal era and beyond. Analyzing the contours of gender within black internationalism, scholars examine the range and complexity of black women's global engagements. At the same time, they focus on these women's remarkable experiences in shaping internationalist movements and dialogues. The essays explore the travels and migrations of black women; the internationalist writings of women from Paris to Chicago to Spain; black women advocating for internationalism through art and performance; and the involvement of black women in politics, activism, and global freedom struggles.

Tiffany Gill is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies & History and Cochran Scholar at the University of Delaware.

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Ujju Aggarwal, "Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education" (U Minnesota Press, 2024) Jul 20, 2024

What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually not about better choices for all but, rather, about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders—guaranteeing a system of winners and losers? Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education (U Minnesota Press, 2024) addresses such questions through a compelling ethnography that illuminates how one path of neoliberal restructuring in the United States emerged in tandem with, and in response to, the Civil Rights movement.

Drawing on ethnographic research in one New York City school district, Unsettling Choice traces the contestations that surfaced when, in the wake of the 2007–2009 Great Recession, public schools navigated austerity by expanding choice-based programs. Ujju Aggarwal argues that this strategy, positioned as “saving public schools,” mobilized mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side, thereby solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private—where contingency was anticipated and rights for some were marked by intensified precarity for poor and working-class Black and Latinx families. As Unsettling Choice shows, these struggles over public schools—one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—were entrapped within neoliberal regimes that exceeded privatization and ensured exclusion even as they were couched in language of equity, diversity, care, and rights. And yet this richly detailed and engaging book also tracks an architecture of expansive rights, care, and belonging built among poor and working-class parents at a Head Start center, whose critique of choice helps us understand how we might struggle for—and reimagine—justice, and a public that remains to be won.

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Michael J. Douma, "The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York: A Cultural, Economic, and Demographic History, 1700-1827" (Cambridge UP, 2024) Jul 20, 2024

Original and deeply researched, The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York: A Cultural, Economic, and Demographic History, 1700-1827 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) provides a new interpretation of Dutch American slavery which challenges many of the traditional assumptions about slavery in New York. With an emphasis on demography and economics, Michael J. Douma shows that slavery in eighteenth-century New York was mostly rural, heavily Dutch, and generally profitable through the cultivation of wheat. Slavery in Dutch New York ultimately died a political death in the nineteenth century, while resistance from enslaved persons, and a gradual turn against slavery in society and in the courts, encouraged its destruction. This important study will reshape the historiography of slavery in the American North.

Michael J. Douma is Associate Research Professor and Director, Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Freeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit Jul 18, 2024

Today’s book is: Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit(U Chicago Press, 2024), by Dr. Robin Bernstein, which tells the story of a teenager named William Freeman. Convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit, he was sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn’s new prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the facility included industrial factories where prisoners worked as “slaves of the state.” They earned no wages, yet they manufactured furniture, animal harnesses, carpets, and combs, which consumers bought throughout the North. Then one young man challenged the system. Incensed at being forced to work without pay, William Freeman demanded wages. His challenge triggered violence: first against him, then by him. Freeman committed a murder that terrified and bewildered white America. And white America struck back—with aftereffects that reverberate into our lives today in the persistent myth of inherent Black criminality. William Freeman’s story reveals how the North invented prison for profit half a century before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery “except as a punishment for crime”—and how Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and other African Americans invented strategies of resilience and resistance in a city dominated by a citadel of unfreedom. Through one Black man, his family, and his city, Dr. Bernstein tells an explosive, moving story about the entangled origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism.

Our guest is: Dr. Robin Bernstein, who is an award-winning cultural historian specializing in race and racism from the nineteenth century to the present. She teaches at Harvard University, where she is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell (and why) and what happens to those we never tell.

Playlist for listeners who wish to learn more:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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Toby Green, "A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2019) Jul 15, 2024

All too often, the history of early modern Africa is told from the perspective of outsiders. In his book A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Toby Green draws upon a range of underutilized sources to describe the evolution of West Africa over a period of four transformative centuries. With these sources Green demonstrates that the region was integrated into the developing transcontinental trade networks far earlier than is often portrayed in more Western-centric accounts, and in ways that influenced the development of local communities long before European ships arrived off of their coast. The arrival of the Portuguese in the 15th century, however, shifted the dynamics of this trade in dramatic ways, changing kingdoms and reshaping economic priorities. While West Africa was an equal partner for the first two and a half centuries of this period, Green shows how the growing demand for slaves and the very different nature of slavery in the West during this period combined increasingly disadvantaged the region, while simultaneously changing the internal political dynamics of kingdoms and the societies within them.

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Charly Palmer and Karida Brown, "The New Brownies' Book: A Love Letter to Black Families" (Chronicle Books, 2023) Jul 15, 2024

In 1920, W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP founders published The Brownies’ Book: A Monthly Magazine for Children of the Sun. A century later, The New Brownies' Book: A Love Letter to Black Families (Chronicle Books, 2023) recreates the very first publication created for Black youth in 1920 into a sensational anthology. Expanding on the mission of the original periodical to inspire the hearts and minds of Black children across the country Award-winning sociologist Karida L. Brown and accomplished artist Charly Palmer gathered more than fifty contemporary Black artists, intellectuals, and writers to produce a book filled with essays, poems, paintings, folktales, and short stories reflecting on the beauty of Blackness and the Black experience.

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Emily J. Lordi, "The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s" (Duke UP, 2020) Jul 15, 2024

Soul is one of those concepts that is often evoked, but rarely satisfactorily defined. In The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s (Duke University Press 2020), Emily J. Lordi takes on the challenge of explaining “soul,” through a book that zooms in and out between sweeping ideas about suffering and resilience in Black culture and fine-grained, close readings of individual performances by soul musicians. Rather than centering big musical gestures and major popular hits, Lordi pays close attention to musical practices like falsetto, ad-libs, and false endings to ground her analysis. She focuses on artists that are some of the most recognizable Black singers in the United States such as Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, and James Brown, but she also spends a lot of time with more obscure figures including Donny Hathaway and Minnie Riperton. She ends the book with a powerful contemplation of how the logic of soul, born in the political and social tumult of the late 1960s, still resonates with some of today’s most popular women singers.

Emily J. Lordi is an Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. The Meaning of Soul is her third book. In addition to her scholarly work, she is an active cultural critic and music journalist published in venues such as Billboard, The Atlantic, and NPR.

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Jill A. Fisher, "Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals" (NYU Press, 2020) Jul 15, 2024

Imagine that you volunteer for the clinical trial of an experimental drug. The only direct benefit of participating is that you will receive up to $5,175. You must spend twenty nights literally locked in a research facility. You will be told what to eat, when to eat, and when to sleep. You will share a bedroom with several strangers. Who are you, and why would you choose to take part in this kind of study?

This book explores the hidden world of pharmaceutical testing on healthy volunteers. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in clinics across the country and 268 interviews with participants and staff, it illustrates how decisions to take part in such studies are often influenced by poverty and lack of employment opportunities. It shows that healthy participants are typically recruited from African American and Latino/a communities, and that they are often serial participants, who obtain a significant portion of their income from these trials.

This book reveals not only how social inequality fundamentally shapes these drug trials, but it also depicts the important validity concerns inherent in this mode of testing new pharmaceuticals. These highly controlled studies bear little resemblance to real-world conditions, and everyone involved is incentivized to game the system, ultimately making new drugs appear safer than they really are.

Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals (New York University Press) provides an unprecedented view of the intersection of racial inequalities with pharmaceutical testing, signaling the dangers of this research enterprise to both social justice and public health.

Jill A. Fisher is Associate Professor of Social Medicine and Bioethics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Theresa McCulla, "Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans" (U Chicago Press, 2024) Jul 11, 2024

A history of food in the Crescent City that explores race, power, social status, and labor.

In Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans(U Chicago Press, 2024), Theresa McCulla probes the overt and covert ways that the production of food and the discourse about it both created and reinforced many strains of inequality in New Orleans, a city significantly defined by its foodways. Tracking the city’s economy from nineteenth-century chattel slavery to twentieth-century tourism, McCulla uses menus, cookbooks, newspapers, postcards, photography, and other material culture to limn the interplay among the production and reception of food, the inscription and reiteration of racial hierarchies, and the constant diminishment and exploitation of working-class people. The consumption of food and people, she shows, was mutually reinforced and deeply intertwined. Yet she also details how enslaved and free people of color in New Orleans used food and drink to carve paths of mobility, stability, autonomy, freedom, profit, and joy. A story of pain and pleasure, labor and leisure, Insatiable City goes far beyond the task of tracing New Orleans’s culinary history to focus on how food suffuses culture and our understandings and constructions of race and power.

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Kellie Carter Jackson, "We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance" (Seal Press, 2024) Jul 10, 2024

Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence and Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary.” In We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (Seal Press, 2024), historian Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women.

The dismissal of “Black violence” as an illegitimate form of resistance is itself a manifestation of white supremacy, a distraction from the insidious, unrelenting violence of structural racism. Force—from work stoppages and property destruction to armed revolt—has played a pivotal part in securing freedom and justice for Black people since the days of the American and Haitian Revolutions. But violence is only one tool among many. Carter Jackson examines other, no less vital tactics that have shaped the Black struggle, from the restorative power of finding joy in the face of suffering to the quiet strength of simply walking away.

Clear-eyed, impassioned, and ultimately hopeful, We Refuse offers a fundamental corrective to the historical record, a love letter to Black resilience, and a path toward liberation.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Racism as Power Relation: A Discussion with Adaner Usmani (EF, JP) Jul 04, 2024

Do we understand racism as the primary driving engine of American inequality? Or do we focus instead on the indirect ways that frequently hard-to-discern class inequality and inegalitarian power relations can produce racially differentiated outcomes? Adaner Usmani, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard and on the editorial board at Catalyst joined Elizabeth and John back in Fall, 2020, to wrestle with the subtle and complex genealogy of Southern plantation economy and its racist legacy.

Adaner offers a complex genealogy of violence, mass incarceration and their roots in the social inequity (and iniquity) of antebellum economic relations. He emphasizes a frequently overlooked fact that a century ago Du Bois had already identified a key issue: the belatedness of African-American access to the social mobility offered by the North's industrialization, thanks to structures of a racist Southern agricultural economy that kept African-American workers away from those high-wage jobs. The result? An explanation for racial injustice that hinges on ossified class imbalances--contingent advantages for certain groups that end up producing (rather than being produced by) bigotry and prejudice.

Adaner Usmani and John Clegg, "The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration" (Catalyst 3:3, 2019)
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010)
Robin Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (2006)
Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (2017)
Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (1987)

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Oneka LaBennett, "Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond" (NYU Press, 2024) Jul 03, 2024

Previously ranked among the hemisphere’s poorest countries, Guyana is becoming a global leader in per capita oil production, a shift which promises to profoundly transform the nation. This sea change presents a unique opportunity to dissect both the environmental impacts of modern-world resource extraction and the obscured yet damaging ways in which intersectional race and gender formations circumscribe Caribbean women’s lives.

Drawing from archival research and oral history, and examining mass-mediated flashpoints across the African and Indian diasporas―including Rihanna’s sonic routes, ethnic conflict reportage, HBO’s Lovecraft Country, and Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking―Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond(NYU Press, 2024) repositions this marginalized nation as a nexus of social and economic activity which drives popular culture and ideas about sexuality while reshaping the geopolitical and literal topography of the Caribbean region. Oneka LaBennett employs the powerful analytic of the pointer broom to disentangle the symbiotic relationship between Guyanese women’s gendered labor and global racial capitalism. She illuminates how both oil extraction and sand export are implicated in a well-established practice of pillaging the Caribbean’s natural resources while masking the ecological consequences that disproportionately affect women and children.

Global Guyana uncovers how ecological erosion and gendered violence are entrenched in extractive industries emanating from this often-effaced but pivotal country. Sounding the alarm on the portentous repercussions that ambitious development spells out for the nation’s people and its geographical terrain, LaBennett issues a warning for all of us about the looming threat of global environmental calamity.

Oneka LaBennett is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California. She’s the author of She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn and co-editor of Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Faith Smith, "Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean's Non-Sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century" (Duke UP, 2023) Jul 02, 2024

In Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean's Non-Sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century (Duke UP, 2023), Faith Smith engages with a period in the history of the Anglophone Caribbean often overlooked as nondescript, quiet, and embarrassingly pro-imperial within the larger narrative of Jamaican and Trinidadian nationalism. Between the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion and World War I, British imperialism was taken for granted among both elites and ordinary people, while nationalist discourses would not begin to shape political imagination in the West Indies for decades. Smith argues that this moment, far from being uneventful, disrupts the inevitability of nationhood in the mid-twentieth century and anticipates the Caribbean’s present-day relationship to global power.

Smith assembles and analyzes a diverse set of texts, from Carnival songs, poems, and novels to newspapers, photographs, and gardens, to examine theoretical and literary-historiographic questions concerning time and temporality, empire and diaspora, immigration and indigeneity, gender and the politics of desire, Africa’s place within Caribbeanist discourse, and the idea of the Caribbean itself. Closely examining these cultural expressions of apparent quiescence, Smith locates the quiet violence of colonial rule and the insistence of colonial subjects on making meaningful lives.

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Ben Wright, "Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism" (LSU Press, 2020) Jul 02, 2024

Ben Wright's Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism (LSU Press, 2020) demonstrates how religion structured the possibilities and limitations of American abolitionism during the early years of the republic. From the American Revolution through the eruption of schisms in the three largest Protestant denominations in the 1840s, this comprehensive work lays bare the social and religious divides that culminated in secession and civil war. Historians often emphasize status anxieties, market changes, biracial cooperation, and political maneuvering as primary forces in the evolution of slavery in the United States. Wright instead foregrounds the pivotal role religion played in shaping the ideological contours of the early abolitionist movement.

Wright first examines the ideological distinctions between religious conversion and purification in the aftermath of the Revolution, when a small number of white Christians contended that the nation must purify itself from slavery before it could fulfill its religious destiny. Most white Christians disagreed, focusing on visions of spiritual salvation over the practical goal of emancipation. To expand salvation to all, they created new denominations equipped to carry the gospel across the American continent and eventually all over the globe. These denominations established numerous reform organizations, collectively known as the "benevolent empire," to reckon with the problem of slavery. One affiliated group, the American Colonization Society (ACS), worked to end slavery and secure white supremacy by promising salvation for Africa and redemption for the United States.

Yet the ACS and its efforts drew strong objections. Proslavery prophets transformed expectations of expanded salvation into a formidable antiabolitionist weapon, framing the ACS's proponents as enemies of national unity. Abolitionist assertions that enslavers could not serve as agents of salvation sapped the most potent force in American nationalism--Christianity--and led to schisms within the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches. These divides exacerbated sectional hostilities and sent the nation farther down the path to secession and war. Wright's provocative analysis reveals that visions of salvation both created and almost destroyed the American nation.

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Kehbuma Langmia, "Black 'Race' and the White Supremacy Saga" (Anthem Press, 2024) Jul 01, 2024

Dr. Langmia's book Black 'Race' and the White Supremacy Saga(Anthem Press, 2024) examines the conundrum that has haunted the Black and White ancestry for ages on what supremacy actually means. Is it Black or White supremacy? Granted, the term "White supremacy" has occupied the sociopolitical, cultural and economic discourse for ages, but what does that really imply? All other ancestries on planet earth have been coerced to believe that conformity to Euro-American lifestyle is the way to become 'civilized' on planet earth.

But the term civilization owes its genesis to the African cultural and educational achievements in Egypt. Consequently, Black ancestry, the first human specie on planet earth, should lead humankind to cultural and epistemological supremacy--but that has always been met with skepticism. This book examines this debate, especially between the Black and the White ancestry. There appears to be a pejorative connotation associated with the term Black. It has been 'inferiorized' because of the stain of slavery, servitude and brutal murders suffered by those from the continent of Africa that are overwhelmingly Black. Dr. Kehbuma Langmia offers “counter arguments on ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority’ designations” (p. 181) that have been applied to particular groups and have prevented the unity of the entire human "race."

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Bayley J. Marquez, "Plantation Pedagogy: The Violence of Schooling Across Black and Indigenous Space" (U California Press, 2024) Jun 30, 2024

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, teachers, administrators, and policymakers fashioned a system of industrial education that attempted to transform Black and Indigenous peoples and land. This form of teaching—what Bayley J. Marquez names plantation pedagogy—was built on the claim that slavery and land dispossession are fundamentally educational. Plantation pedagogy and the formal institutions that encompassed it were thus integrally tied to enslavement, settlement, and their inherent violence toward land and people. Marquez investigates how proponents developed industrial education domestically and then spread the model abroad as part of US imperialism. A deeply thoughtful and arresting work, Plantation Pedagogy: The Violence of Schooling Across Black and Indigenous Space(U California Press, 2024) sits where Black and Native studies meet in order to understand our interconnected histories and theorize our collective futures.

Bayley J. Marquez is an Indigenous scholar from the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians and Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Max Jacobs is a PhD student in education at Rutgers University. He currently sits on the Graduate Student Council for the History of Education Society.

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On Michael Jackson: A Lecture by Margo Jefferson Jun 29, 2024

In September 2006, Margo Jefferson spoke to the Institute about her book,On Michael Jackson(Vintage, 2007). Jefferson received the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for criticism when she was at the New York Times. Her 2015 book, Negroland: A Memoir, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. And in 2022, she published, Constructing a Nervous System, a memoir in fragments. She has taught at NYU, The New School, and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she is a professor of professional practice.

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Jeremy Schipper, "Denmark Vesey's Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial" (Princeton UP, 2022) Jun 27, 2024

In Denmark Vesey's Bible: The Thwarted Revolt that Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial(Princeton UP, 2022), Dr. Jeremy Schipper tells the story of a free Black man accused of plotting an anti-slavery insurrection in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822. Vesey was found guilty and hanged along with dozens of others accused of collaborating with him.

At the center of the book is an examination of how former slave Denmark Vesey used interpretations of the Bible to justify the revolt while members of the white establishment in South Carolina use that same Bible to support the slaveholders view of themselves as benevolent biblical patriarchs.

The book is a riveting account of a key moment in antebellum American history that underscores deep racial inequities and the assumed supremacy of white Christians during a time of violence, fear, and conflicting understandings of moral superiority and biblical truth.

Recommended reading:

The Denmark Vesey Affair: A Documentary History edited by Douglas R. Egerton and Robert L. Paquette

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Frederick Klaits et al., "Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated US City: Designs for Vitality" (Bloomsbury, 2022) Jun 26, 2024

In Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated US City: Designs for Vitality (Bloomsbury, 2022), Frederick Klaits compares how members of one majority white and two African American churches in Buffalo, New York receive knowledge from God about their own and others' life circumstances.

In the Pentecostal Christian faith, believers say that they acquire divinely inspired insights by developing a "relationship with God." But what makes these insights appear necessary? This book offers a novel approach to this question, arguing that the inspirations believers receive from God lead them to take critical stances on what they regard as ordinary understandings of space, time, care, and personal value. Using a shared Pentecostal language, believers occupying different positions within racial, class, and gender formations reflect in divergent ways on God's designs. In the process, they engage critically with late liberal imaginaries of eventfulness and vitality to envision possibilities of life in a highly unequal society.

This text incorporates commentaries on Klaits' ethnography by LaShekia Chatman and Michael Richbart, junior scholars who have also studied and been part of Pentecostal communities in Buffalo.

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Jerry Rafiki Jenkins, "Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction" (Ohio State UP, 2024) Jun 25, 2024

In Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction(Ohio State UP, 2024), Jerry Rafiki Jenkins examines four types of human monsters that frequently appear in Black American horror fiction--the monsters of White rage, respectability, not-ness, and serial killing. Arguing that such monsters represent specific ideologies of American anti-Blackness, Jenkins shows that despite their various motivations for harming and killing Black people, these monsters embody the horrors that emerge when Black American is disassociated from American. Although these monsters of anti-Blackness are dangerous because they can terrorize Black people with virtual impunity, their "anti-Black sadism," as Jenkins calls it, is what makes them repulsive.

Jenkins examines a variety of these monstrous forms in Tananarive Due's The Between, Victor LaValle's The Changeling, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death, and many other works. While these monsters and the texts that they populate ask us to think about the role that anti-Blackness plays in being or becoming American, they also offer intellectual resources that Black and non-Black people might use to combat the everyday versions of human monstrosity.

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A Psychoanalytic Overview of Racism in America Jun 24, 2024

The first podcast in this series was inspired by a documentary film made in 2014 called “Black Analysts Speak” as well as some of the findings in the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis published in 2023. It also considered the reasons why racism has persisted so long in America including perspectives from a psychoanalytic vantage point. Mechanism of defense, particularly projective identification was discussed as one specific reason why change has been slow. The host and co-host also talked about the some of the reasons why it is important for white people to listen to the Black experience. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s book, Where do we go from here, Chaos or Community was also considered because of its relevance today.

Dr. Karyne E. Messina is a psychologist and child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst. In addition to maintaining a full-time private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland, she is on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland which is part of Johns Hopkins Medicine. She is a podcast host for the New Books Network and chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Scholarship and Writing section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA). She is a member of the AI Council of APsA (CAI). She has also written and edited six books. Her topics focus on applying psychoanalytic ideas to real-world issues we all face in our complex world.

Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is a child and adolescent supervising psychoanalyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies in Houston, Texas, where she also holds the position of President of Board of Directors. Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is also a faculty member in the Child and Adult Training Programs. In addition, she provides clinical supervision for the State of Texas licensing board, as well as supervision as a Registered Play Therapist-Supervisor with the Association for Play Therapy. She is also the chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Diversity section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA).

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Paula Marie Seniors, "Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions: African American Women Radical Activists" (U Georgia Press, 2024) Jun 22, 2024

Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions: African American Women Radical Activists (U Georgia Press, 2024) explores the significant contributions of African American women radical activists from 1955 to 1995. It examines the 1961 case of African American working-class self-defense advocate Mae Mallory, who traveled from New York to Monroe, North Carolina, to provide support and weapons to the Negroes with Guns Movement. Accused of kidnapping a Ku Klux Klan couple, she spent thirteen months in a Cleveland jail, facing extradition. African American women radical activists Ethel Azalea Johnson of Negroes with Guns, Audrey Proctor Seniors of the banned New Orleans NAACP, the Trotskyist Workers World Party, Ruthie Stone, and Clarence Henry Seniors of Workers World founded the Monroe Defense Committee to support Mallory. Mae’s daughter, Pat, aged sixteen also participated, and they all bonded as family. When the case ended, they joined the Tanzanian, Grenadian, and Nicaraguan World Revolutions. Using her unique vantage point as Audrey Proctor Seniors’s daughter, Paula Marie Seniors blends personal accounts with theoretical frameworks of organic intellectual, community feminism, and several other theoretical frameworks in analyzing African American radical women’s activism in this era.

Essential biographical and character narratives are combined with an analysis of the social and political movements of the era and their historical significance. Seniors examines the link between Mallory, Johnson, and Proctor Seniors’s radical activism and their connections to national and international leftist human rights movements and organizations. She asks the underlying question: Why did these women choose radical activism and align themselves with revolutionary governments, linking Black human rights to world revolutions?

Seniors’s historical and personal account of the era aims to recover Black women radical activists’ place in history. Her innovative research and compelling storytelling broaden our knowledge of these activists and their political movements.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Sally Stocksdale, "When Emancipation Came: The End of Enslavement on a Southern Plantation and a Russian Estate" (McFarland, 2022) Jun 19, 2024

Linked by declarations of emancipation within the same five-year period, two countries shared human rights issues on two distinct continents. In When Emancipation Came: The End of Enslavement on a Southern Plantation and a Russian Estate (McFarland, 2022), readers will find a case-study comparison of the emancipation of Russian serfs on the Yazykovo Selo estate and American slaves at the Palmyra Plantation. Although state policies and reactions may not follow the same paths in each area, there were striking thematic parallels. These findings add to our understanding of what happens throughout an emancipation process in which the state grants freedom, and therefore speaks to the universality of the human experience.

Despite the political and economic differences between the two countries, as well as their geographic and cultural distances, this book re-conceptualizes emancipation and its aftermath in each country: from a history that treats each as a separate, self-contained story to one with a unified, global framework.

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Duana Fullwiley, "Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science" (U California Press, 2024) Jun 12, 2024

In Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science (University of California Press, 2024), Duana Fullwiley has penned an intimate chronicle of laboratory life in the genomic age. She presents many of the influential scientists at the forefront of genetics who have redefined how we practice medicine and law and understand ancestry in an era of big data and waning privacy. Exceedingly relatable and human, the scientists in these pages often struggle for visibility, teeter on the tightrope of inclusion, and work tirelessly to imprint the future. As they actively imagine a more equal and just world, they often find themselves ensnared in reproducing timeworn conceits of race and racism that can seed the same health disparities they hope to resolve. Nothing dynamic can live for long as a blank slate, an innocent tabula rasa. But how the blank slate of the once-raceless human genome became one of racial differences, in various forms of what Fullwiley calls the tabula raza, has a very specific and familiar history--one that has cycled through the ages in unexpected ways.

Duana Fullwiley is an anthropologist of science and medicine at Stanford University. She is the author of the award-winning book The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa.

Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Screwed and Chopped Jun 10, 2024

Since the 1990s, many of Houston’s African American residents have customized cars and customized the sound of hip hop. Cars called “slabs” swerve a slow path through the city streets, banging out a distinctive local music that paid tribute to those very same streets and neighborhoods.

Folklorist and Houston native Langston Collin Wilkins studies slab culture and the “screwed and chopped” hip hop that rattles the slabs and serves as the culture’s soundtrack. Wilkins shows us how sonic creativity turns a space—a collection of buildings and streets—into a place that is known, respected, and loved.

In this show we hear the slow, muddy, psychedelic sounds ofDJ Screw and The Screwed Up Click, including rappers such as Lil Keke,Fat Pat, Big Hawk, and UGK–as well as songs by Geto Boys, Willie Dee, Swishahouse, Point Blank, Biggie Smalls, and MC T Tucker & DJ Irv.

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Adrienne Brown, "The Residential Is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership" (Stanford UP, 2024) Jun 09, 2024

Housing experts and activists have long described the foundational role race has played in the creation of mass homeownership. This book insistently tracks the inverse: the role of mass homeownership in changing the definition, perception, and value of race.

In The Residential Is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership (Stanford University Press, 2024) Dr. Adrienne Brown reveals how mass homeownership remade the rubrics of race, from the early cases realtors made for homeownership's necessity to white survival through to the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Reading real estate archives and appraisal textbooks alongside literary works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, and Thomas Pynchon, Dr. Brown goes beyond merely identifying the discriminatory mechanisms that the real estate industry used to forestall black homeownership. Rather, she reveals that redlining and other forms of racial discrimination are perceptual modes, changing what it means to sense race and assign it value.

Resituating residential discrimination as a key moment within the history of perception and aesthetics as well as of policy, demography, and democracy, we get an even more expansive picture of both its origins and its impacts. This book discovers that the racial honing of perception on the block—seeing race like a bureaucrat, an appraiser, and a homeowner—has become central to the functioning of the residential itself.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Financial Institutions and Enslavement Jun 08, 2024

In this special episode, we talk to two authors about the role of financial institutions in enslavement. Sharon Ann Murphy, associate professor of history, argues in Banking on Slavery Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States (University of Chicago Press, 2023) that Southern banks’ willingness to use enslaved people as loan collateral led to the exponential growth of Southern enslavement during the 1820-30s. In filmmaker, producer, and author David Montero’s book, The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations(Hatchette Book Group, 2024), he follows Wall Street bankers and large Northern banks were critical to the financing of slavery and, in turn, who massed incredible wealth from enslavement.

Dr. N’Kosi Oates is a curator and assistant professor. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at DrNKosiOates.

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Corey J. Miles, "Vibe: The Sound and Feeling of Black Life in the American South" (U Mississippi Press, 2024) Jun 07, 2024

In Vibe: The Sound and Feeling of Black Life in the American South (University of Mississippi Press, 2023), Corey J. Miles narrates how southern Black sound, feeling, and being is constantly policed, surveilled, and criminalized. In doing so, he re-narrates the region as the "carceral South," to capture the ways people in the South and beyond can feel the emotional weight of the criminalization of Blackness. Where exactly does the South begin and end? Current maps are too rigid to account for the ways Black people have built the South while being simultaneously excluded from it.

Drawing from the different ways Black artists in the 2-5-2 area code in North Carolina use "vibe" as a mode of knowing and communication, Miles illustrates how Black feeling and unfeeling offer entry points into the contemporary South that challenge static and monolithic notions of the region. Placing the local artists in conversation with other southern cultural creators such as 2 Chainz, Rod Wave, and Rapsody, these ethnographic narratives demonstrate that there are multiple Souths, with overlapping and distinct commitments to working through pain, sound, and belonging. Pain music, a subgenre of trap music, is used to take the listener to moments of violence to allow them to hear the desires, anger, and silences that bind Black life in community. Through conceptions of ratchet, hood, and ghetto, Black artists turn away from respectable images and unmap the South. In trap music, they move the South to a space where multiple modes of being find respect and care.

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Vince Brown, Caribbean Vectors (EF, JP) Jun 06, 2024

The largest slave uprising in the 18th century British Caribbean was also a node of the global conflict called the Seven Year’s War, though it isn’t usually thought of that way. In the first few days of the quarantine and our current geopolitical and epidemiological shitshow, John and Elizabeth spoke with Vincent Brown, who recently published Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Harvard UP, 2019), centered on a group of enslaved West Africans, known under the term “Coromantees” who were the chief protagonists in this war.

Tracing the vectors of this war within the Caribbean, the North Atlantic, and West Africa, Vince shows us how these particular enslaved Africans, who are caught in the gears of one of human history’s most dehumanizing institutions, constrained by repressive institutions, social-inscribed categories of differences and brutal force, operate tactically within and across space in complex and cosmopolitan ways.

Vince locates his interest in warfare (as an object of study) in emergence of new world order and disorder through the Gulf Wars. His attention to routes and mobilities he credits to an epidemiological turn of mind–perhaps inherited from his father Willie Brown, a medical microbiologist now retired from UCSD.

The idea of the vector shaped his first book as well. Vince’s “cartographic narrative” “A Slave Revolt in Jamaica: 1760-1761” and the film he produced with director Llewellyn Smith, Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (which traces African studies and anthropology’s understanding of cultural movements from between Africa and the Americas) also explore these burning questions.

Along the way, Vince discusses C.L.R. James’ notion of conflict, war and global connectedness in The Black Jacobins and the ways that categories of social difference both are constituted by global capital (reminding us of our conversation on caste, class and whiteness with Ajantha Subramanian) and those bumper stickers from the early 1980s in which the Taliban were the good guys.

Mentioned in this episode:

Rambo III (1988)
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by himself (1789)
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688)
Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (2002)
C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938)
John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic World-1400-1800 (1992)
Derrick ‘Black X’ Robinson on his advocacy to make Tacky a national hero in Jamaica
Black X walks barefoot across Jamaica to make Tacky a national hero

Recallable Books:

Marlon James, The Book of Night Women (2009)
John Tutino, Making a New World (2011)
Angel Palerm, The First Economic World-System (1980)

Listen and Read Here: 34 The Caribbean and Vectors of Warfare: Vincent Brown

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Matthew D. Morrison, "Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States" (U California Press, 2024) Jun 05, 2024

Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States(U California Press, 2024) explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.

Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake--for creators and audiences alike--in revisiting the long history of American popular music.

Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University (nathan.smith@yale.edu).

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Richard E. Ocejo, "Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City" (Princeton UP, 2024) Jun 02, 2024

Newburgh is a small postindustrial city of some twenty-eight thousand people located sixty miles north of New York City in the Hudson River Valley. Like many other similarly sized cities across America, it has been beset with poverty and crime after decades of decline, with few opportunities for its predominantly minority residents.

Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City(Princeton UP, 2024) tells the story of how Newburgh started gentrifying, describing what happens when White creative professionals seek out racially diverse and working-class communities and revealing how gentrification is increasingly happening outside large city centers in places where it unfolds in new ways.

As New York City’s housing market becomes too expensive for even the middle class, many urbanites are bypassing the suburbs and moving to smaller cities like Newburgh, where housing is affordable and historic. Richard Ocejo takes readers into the lives of these newcomers, examining the different ways they navigate racial difference and inequality among Newburgh’s much less privileged local residents, and showing how stakeholders in the city’s revitalization reframe themselves and gentrification to cast the displacement they cause to minority groups in a positive light.

An intimate exploration of the moral dilemma at the heart of gentrification, Sixty Miles Upriver explains how progressive White gentrifiers justify controversial urban changes as morally good, and how their actions carry profound and lasting consequences for vulnerable residents of color.

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Kyle Barnett, "Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry" (U Michigan Press, 2020) Jun 02, 2024

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz.

Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry’s challenges in the wake of the Great Depression.

Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University.

Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in December 2020. Mack is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. She published a 2019 essay for Longreads titled “Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me.”

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Ears Racing May 27, 2024

This episode, we talk with Jennifer Lynn Stoever–editor of the influential sound studies blog Sounding Out!–about her new book, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press, 2016). We tend to think of race and racism as visual phenomena, but Stoever challenges white listeners to examine how racism can infect our ears, altering the sound of the world and other people. We discuss the history of American prejudicial listening since slavery and learn how African American writers and musicians have pushed back against this invisible “sonic color line.”

Works discussed include Richard Wright’s Native Sonand music by Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly), Fishbone, and Lena Horne.

Additional music by Graeme Gibson and Blue the Fifth.

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Larry Roeder and Barry Harrelson, "Dirt Don't Burn: A Black Community's Struggle for Educational Equality Under Segregation" (Georgetown UP, 2023) May 27, 2024

The system of educational apartheid that existed in the United States until the Brown v. Board of Education decision and its aftermath has affected every aspect of life for Black Americans.

Larry Roeder and Barry Harrelson's book Dirt Don't Burn: A Black Community's Struggle for Educational Equality Under Segregation(Georgetown UP, 2023) is the riveting narrative of an extraordinary community that overcame the cultural and legal hurdles of systematic racism. Dirt Don't Burn describes how Loudoun County, Virginia, which once denied educational opportunity to Black Americans, gradually increased the equality of education for all children in the area. The book includes powerful stories of the largely unknown individuals and organizations that brought change to enduring habits of exclusion and prejudice toward African Americans.

Dirt Don't Burn sheds new light on the history of segregation and inequity in American history. It provides new historical details and insights into African American experiences based on original research through thousands of previously lost records, archival NAACP files, and records of educational philanthropies. This book will appeal to readers interested in American history, African American history, and regional history, as well as educational policy and social justice.

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Jesse McCarthy, "The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War" (U Chicago Press, 2024) May 26, 2024

‘The result is that, at the present time, the world is at an impasse.’

In 1956, Aimé Césaire pronounced the world to be at an impasse while renouncing his allegiance to the French Communist Party. In Jesse McCarthy’s The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War(U Chicago Press, 2024), this foreclosure of ideological avenues, this loss of belief in the prevailing modes of political praxis restricts and overdetermines the scope of writing and possibilities of culture during the Cold War. Although this story of Cold War disillusionment may sound familiar to readers of Mark Grief’s The Age of the Crisis of Man (2015) and Amanda Anderson’s Bleak Liberalism (2016), McCarthy argues that black writers such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Édouard Glissant, Paule Marshall, and Gwendolyn Brooks variously dissented from these delimitations in the name of alternate, unappeasable, quiet and disquieting bids for freedom. Across detailed chapters spanning from 1945 to 1965, the year in which Malcom X was assassinated and Amiri Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School by Amiri Baraka, McCarthy unfurls these writers’ efforts to work through negative experiences—alienation, dehiscence, dissolution, disaffiliation, disidentification—in order to, in Baldwin’s words, find ‘the power that will free us from ourselves.’

Jesse McCarthy is an essayist, novelist, editor at Point Magazine, and an assistant professor in English and African-American Studies at Harvard University.

Damian Maher is a fellow by examination at All Souls College, University of Oxford.

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Laura Helton, "Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History" (Columbia UP, 2024) May 22, 2024

During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American life. At a time when dominant institutions cast doubt on the value or even the idea of Black history, these bibliophiles, scrapbookers, and librarians created an enduring set of African diasporic archives. In building these institutions and amassing abundant archival material, they also reshaped Black public culture, animating inquiry into the nature and meaning of Black history.

In Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History(Columbia UP, 2024), Laura E. Helton tells the stories of these Black collectors, traveling from the parlors of the urban north to HBCU reading rooms and branch libraries in the Jim Crow south. Helton chronicles the work of six key figures: bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, scrapbook maker Alexander Gumby, librarians Virginia Lee and Vivian Harsh, curator Dorothy Porter, and historian L. D. Reddick. Drawing on overlooked sources such as book lists and card catalogs, she reveals the risks collectors took to create Black archives. This book also explores the social life of collecting, highlighting the communities that used these collections from the South Side of Chicago to Roanoke, Virginia. In each case, Helton argues, archiving was alive in the present, a site of intellectual experiment, creative abundance, and political possibility. Offering new ways to understand Black intellectual and literary history, Scattered and Fugitive Things reveals Black collecting as a radical critical tradition that reimagines past, present, and future.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Benjamin Bryce and David M. K. Sheinin, "Race and Transnationalism in the Americas" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021) May 22, 2024

Edited by Benjamin Bryce and David Sheinin, Race and Transnationalism in the Americas (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), highlights the importance of transnational forces in shaping the concept of race and understanding of national belonging across the Americas, from the late nineteenth century to the present times. The book also examines how race and its categories have functioned as mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion across cultural, political, and social dimensions. The authors across the different chapters examine phenomena such as immigration policies, indigenous decolonization efforts, and governmental colonization endeavors to discuss the intersections between race and both transnational and national elements. New ways to think about what it means to be a citizen, to belong, and to be of a particular race are offered, which prove useful and refreshing in our day and age, marked by considerable migration across borders in the Americas and the politization of racial identities.

Benjamin Bryce is a Professor of History at the University of British Columbia.

David Sheinin is a Professor of History at Trent University.

Ariadna Obregon is a PhD student at the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. On Twitter/X: @AriadnaObregn1

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Danielle R. Olden, "Racial Uncertainties: Mexican Americans, School Desegregation, and the Making of Race in Post–Civil Rights America" (U California Press, 2022) May 22, 2024

Mexican Americans have often fit uncertainly into the white/non-white binary that has goverens much of American history. After Colorado, and much of the rest of the American West, became American claimed territory after the Mexican-Americna War in 1848, thousands of formerly Mexican citizens became American citizens. Flash foward a century to post-war Denver. In the spring of 1969, Mexican American students staged a walk out in protest of poor quality education, racist teachers, and school segregation - they were met by police in riot gear, to beat and arrested dozens of peaceful protestors. Denver thus became ground zero for debates over race in the American West, a city as important to conceptions of whiteness, "minority" status, and colorblindness as any place in the South.

In the award winning book, Racial Uncertainties: Mexican Americans, School Desegregation, and the Making of Race in Post-Civil Rights America (U California Press, 2022), University of Utah historian Danielle Olden tracks the history of Chicano, Latinx, and Mexican American identities through Denver's history, focusing on the lead up to the 1973 Supreme Court case, Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1. Olden tracks the remarkable and complicated story of that city's Chicano, Black, and white communities through the halting process of school desegregation, and in doing so provides an explemary lesson in the social mutability of the concept of race.

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Ryan Reft, "Heroin and Chocolate City: Black Community Responses to Drug Addiction in the Nation’s Capital, 1967-1973" (2024) May 20, 2024

Ryan Reft is a historian in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, where he oversees collections pertaining to 20th and 21st century domestic politics and policies. He received his PhD in U.S. urban history from the University of California San Diego in 2014, and his writing has appeared all over the place, from edited volumes to academic journals, to the Washington Post and Zocalo Public Square. He’s also currently the senior co-editor of the Urban History Association’s blog The Metropole, where he recently authored a great article called “Heroin and Chocolate City: Black Community Responses to Drug Addiction in the Nation’s Capital, 1967-1973.” While it’s not a book, “Heroin and Chocolate City” is a deeply-researched article that offers compelling new insights into how Washington, D.C., responded to heroin use in the late 60s and early 70s, when both D.C., and heroin, were really unique.

*Note to listeners: Ryan realized later he connected Julius Hobson with SNCC. Hobson was actually associated with CORE.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

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Raven Simone Maragh-Lloyd, "Black Networked Resistance: Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age" (U California Press, 2024) May 19, 2024

Black Networked Resistance: Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age(U California Press, 2024) explores the creative range of Black digital users and their responses to varying forms of oppression, utilizing cultural, communicative, political, and technological threads both on and offline.

Raven Maragh-Lloyd demonstrates how Black users strategically rearticulate their responses to oppression in ways that highlight Black publics’ historically rich traditions and reveal the shifting nature of both dominance and resistance, particularly in the digital age. Through case studies and interviews, Maragh-Lloyd reveals the malleable ways resistance can take shape and the ways Black users artfully demonstrate such modifications of resistance through strategies of survival, reprieve, and community online. Each chapter grounds itself in a resistance strategy, such as Black humor, care, or archiving, to show the ways that Black publics reshape strategies of resistance over time and across media platforms.

Linking singular digital resistance movements while arguing for Black publics as strategic content creators who connect resistance strategies from our past to suit our present needs, Black Networked Resistance encourages readers to create and cultivate lasting communities necessary for social and political change by imagining a future of joy, community, and agency through their digital media practices.

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Adriana Chira, "Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations" (Cambridge UP, 2022) May 17, 2024

In nineteenth-century Santiago de Cuba, the island of Cuba's radical cradle, Afro-descendant peasants forged freedom and devised their own formative path to emancipation. Drawing on understudied archives, this pathbreaking work, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations (Cambridge UP, 2022) unearths a new history of Black rural geography and popular legalism, and offers a new framework for thinking about nineteenth-century Black freedom. Santiago de Cuba's Afro-descendant peasantries did not rely on liberal-abolitionist ideologies as a primary reference point in their struggle for rights. Instead, they negotiated their freedom and land piecemeal, through colonial legal frameworks that allowed for local custom and manumission. While gradually wearing down the institution of slavery through litigation and self-purchase, they reimagined colonial racial systems before Cuba's intellectuals had their say. Long before residents of Cuba protested for national independence and island-wide emancipation in 1868, it was Santiago's Afro-descendant peasants who, gradually and invisibly, laid the groundwork for emancipation.

Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.

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Christopher Tounsel, "Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity" (Cornell UP, 2024) May 15, 2024

Christopher Tounsel's book Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity (Cornell UP, 2024) explores the history of Black America's intellectual and cultural engagement with the modern state of Sudan. Ancient Sudan occupies a central place in the Black American imaginary as an exemplar of Black glory, pride, and civilization, while contemporary Sudan, often categorized as part of "Arab Africa," rather than "Black Africa," is often sidelined and overlooked. In this pathbreaking book, Christopher Tounsel unpacks the vacillating approaches of Black Americans to the Sudanese state and its multiethnic populace through periods defined by colonialism, postcolonial civil wars, genocide in Darfur, and South Sudanese independence. By exploring the work of African American intellectuals, diplomats, organizations, and media outlets, Tounsel shows how this transnational relationship reflects the robust yet capricious terms of racial consciousness in the African Diaspora.

Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.

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Kevin Woodson, "The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace" (U Chicago Press, 2023) May 13, 2024

America's elite law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms are known for grueling hours, low odds of promotion, and personnel practices that push out any employees who don't advance. While most people who begin their careers in these institutions leave within several years, work there is especially difficult for Black professionals, who exit more quickly and receive far fewer promotions than their White counterparts, hitting a "Black ceiling."

Sociologist and law professor Kevin Woodson knows firsthand what life at a top law firm feels like as a Black man. Examining the experiences of more than one hundred Black professionals at prestigious firms, Woodson discovers that their biggest obstacle in the workplace isn't explicit bias but racial discomfort, or the unease Black employees feel in workplaces that are steeped in Whiteness. He identifies two types of racial discomfort: social alienation, the isolation stemming from the cultural exclusion Black professionals experience in White spaces, and stigma anxiety, the trepidation they feel over the risk of discriminatory treatment. While racial discomfort is caused by America's segregated social structures, it can exist even in the absence of racial discrimination, which highlights the inadequacy of the unconscious bias training now prevalent in corporate workplaces. Firms must do more than prevent discrimination, Woodson explains, outlining the steps that firms and Black professionals can take to ease racial discomfort.

Offering a new perspective on a pressing social issue, The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a vital resource for leaders at preeminent firms, Black professionals and students, managers within mostly White organizations, and anyone committed to cultivating diverse workplaces.

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Courtney Thorsson, "The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture" (Columbia UP, 2023) May 13, 2024

The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture (Columbia University Press, 2023) explores how an incredible group of Black women writers, including Alice Walker, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, and writers and intellectuals convened an informal group called “The Sisterhood” and how they transformed American writing and cultural and educational institutions in the decades that followed. Thorsson traces the personal, professional, and political connections that led to the group’s emergence and explores the remarkable legacy. While focusing on the organizing, networking, and community building that nurtured Black women’s writing, The Sisterhood provides an impactful model of Black feminist collaboration.

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Rachelle Winkle-Wagner, "The Chosen We: Black Women's Empowerment in Higher Education" (SUNY Press, 2023) May 12, 2024

The Chosen We: Black Women's Empowerment in Higher Education (SUNY Press, 2023) elevates the oral histories of 105 accomplished, college-educated Black women who earned success despite experiencing reprehensible racist and sexist barriers. The central argument is that these women succeeded in and beyond college by developing a Chosen We—a community with one another. The book builds on their words and insights to offer a powerful rethinking of educational success that moves away from individualistic and competitive models and instead imagines success as a result of recognizing what people owe to one another. It also uncovers the importance of the type of institutions that students attend for higher education, comparing Black women's experiences not only by region and era but also by whether they attended a predominantly White institution (PWI) or a historically Black college or university (HBCU). The Chosen We features theoretical and methodological exemplars for how to conduct research across lines of difference. The Black women's oral histories shared here manifest the wisdom from which many groups in the United States might benefit—that liberation is only found through community.

Rachelle Winkle-Wagner is Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the coauthor (with Angela M. Locks) of Diversity and Inclusion on Campus: Supporting Students of Color in College, and the author of The Unchosen We: Black Women and Identity in Higher Education, among other books.

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Luis H. H. Favela, "The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment" (Routledge, 2024) May 10, 2024

Ecological psychology holds that perception and action are best explained in terms of dynamic interactions between brain, body, and environment, not in classical cognitivist terms of the manipulation of representations in the head. This anti-representationalist stance, argues Luis Favela, makes ecological psychology deeply at odds with dominant trends in some parts of neuroscience.

In The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment (Routledge, 2024), Favela lays out the seemingly irreconciliable theoretical commitments of ecological psychology and neuroscience, and then defends a framework for reconciling them: the NeuroEcological Nexus Theory (NExT). According to Favela, who is an associate professor of philosophy and cognitive sciences at the University of Central Florida, complexity science provides the conceptual tools that can help integrate these frameworks, such as by articulating the key notion of affordances in ecological psychology as a kind of dimensional reduction in complexity science.

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Kendra Y. Hamilton, "Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess" (U Georgia Press, 2024) May 10, 2024

Dr. Kendra Y. Hamilton’s Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess (University of Georgia Press, 2024) is a literary and cultural history of the Gullah Geechee Coast, a four-state area that is one of only a handful of places that can truly be said to be the “cradle of Black culture” in the United States. An African American ethnic group who predominantly live in the Lowcountry region of South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida within the coastal plain and the Sea Islands, the Gullah people have preserved a significant influence of Africanisms because of their unique geographic isolation.

This book seeks to fill a significant cultural gap in Gullah history. While there is a veritable industry of books on literary Charleston and on the Lowcountry, along with a plenitude of Gullah-inspired studies in history, anthropology, linguistics, folklore, and religion, there has never been a comprehensive study of the region’s literary influence, particularly in the years of the Harlem and Charleston Renaissance. By giving voice to artists and culture makers, uncovering buried histories, and revealing secret cross-racial connections amid official practices of Jim Crow, Hamilton sheds new light on an incomplete cultural history.

Dr. Kendra Y. Hamilton is an associate professor of English and Director of Southern Studies at Presbyterian College.

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Robert K. D. Colby, "An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South" (Oxford UP, 2024) May 10, 2024

The Confederate States of America was born in defense of slavery and, after a four-year struggle to become an independent slaveholding republic, died as emancipation dawned. Between Fort Sumter to Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands African American men, women, and children. These transactions in humanity made the internal slave trade a cornerstone of Confederate society, a bulwark of the Rebel economy, and a central part of the experience of the Civil War for all inhabiting the American South.

An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South (Oxford UP, 2024) shows, slave trading helped Southerners survive and fight the Civil War, as well as to build the future for which they fought. They mitigated the crises the war spawned by buying and selling enslaved people, using this commerce to navigate food shortages, unsettled gender roles, the demands of military service, and other hardships on the homefront. Some Rebels speculated wildly in human property, investing in slaves to ward off inflation and to buy shares in the slaveholding nation they hoped to create. Others traded people to counter the advance of emancipation. Given its centrality to their nationhood, Confederates went to great lengths to prolong the slave trade, which, in turn, supported the Confederacy. For those held in slavery, the surviving slave trade dramatically shaped their pursuit of freedom, inserting a retrograde movement into some people's journeys toward liberty while inspiring others to make the risky decision to escape.

Offering an original perspective on the intersections of slavery, capitalism, the Civil War, and emancipation, Robert K.D. Colby illuminates the place of the peculiar institution within the Confederate mind, the ways in which it underpinned the CSA's war effort, and its impact on those attempting to seize their freedom.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha, "Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States" (UNC Press, 2023) May 07, 2024

In Haitian Vodou, spirits impact Black practitioners' everyday lives, tightly connecting the sacred and the secular. As Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha reveals in Vodou En Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States (UNC Press, 2023), that connection is manifest in the dynamic relationship between public religious ceremonies, material aesthetics, bodily adornment, and spirit possession. Nwokocha spent more than a decade observing Vodou ceremonies from Montreal and New York to Miami and Port-au-Prince. She engaged particularly with a Haitian practitioner and former fashion designer, Manbo Maude, who presided over Vodou temples in Mattapan, Massachusetts, and Jacmel, Haiti. With vivid description and nuanced analysis, Nwokocha shows how Manbo Maude's use of dress and her production of ritual garments are key to serving Black gods and illuminate a larger transnational economy of fashion and spiritual exchange.

Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha is assistant professor of religion at the University of Miami.

Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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James Wolfinger, "If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress: Black Politics in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia" (Temple UP, 2022) May 06, 2024

If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress: Black Politics in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia (Temple UP, 2022) provides an in-depth historical analysis of Philadelphia politics from the days of the Great Migration to the present. Philadelphia has long been a crucial site for the development of Black politics across the nation and this volume emphasizes how Black activists have long protested against police abuse, pushed for education reform, challenged job and housing discrimination, and put presidents in the White House. If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress demonstrates that “Philadelphia must be central to any analysis of African American political history.”

But politics means more than elected office and the book highlights political strategies such as the "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" movement and the Double V campaign. It demonstrates how Black activism helped shift Philadelphia from the Republican machine to Democratic leaders in the 1950s and highlights the election of politicians like Robert N. C. Nix, Sr., the first African American representative from Philadelphia. The book highlights grassroots movements and the intersection of race, gender, class, and politics in the 1960s and shows how African Americans from the 1970s to the present challenged (white) Mayor Frank Rizzo and helped elect (Black) Mayors Wilson Goode, John Street, and Michael Nutter.

Dean James Wolfinger (he/him/his) serves as dean of the School of Education at St. John’s University in Queens, New York.

Dr. Stanley Arnold (he/him/his) is an Associate Professor of American History at Northern Illinois University.

Dr. Alyssa Ribeiro (she/her/hers) is the Henry A Logan, Sr, Professor of American History at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania.

Ms. Daniela Lavergne at Saint Joseph’s University served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

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Crystal Wilkinson, "Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks" (Clarkson Potter, 2023) May 02, 2024

Years ago, when O. Henry Prize-winning writer Crystal Wilkinson was baking a jam cake, she felt her late grandmother’s presence. She soon realized that she was not the only cook in her kitchen; there were her ancestors, too, stirring, measuring, and braising alongside her. These are her kitchen ghosts, five generations of Black women who settled in Appalachia and made a life, a legacy, and a cuisine.

An expert cook, Wilkinson shares nearly forty family recipes rooted deep in the past, full of flavor—delicious favorites including Corn Pudding, Chicken and Dumplings, Granny Christine’s Jam Cake, and Praisesong Biscuits, brought to vivid life through stunning photography. Together, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks(Clarkson Potter, 2023) honors the mothers who came before, the land that provided for generations of her family, and the untold heritage of Black Appalachia.

As the keeper of her family’s stories and treasured dishes, Wilkinson shares her inheritance in Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts. She found their stories in her apron pockets, floating inside the steam of hot mustard greens and tucked into the sweet scent of clove and cinnamon in her kitchen. Part memoir, part cookbook, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts weaves those stories together with recipes, family photos, and a lyrical imagination to present a culinary portrait of a family that has lived and worked the earth of the mountains for over a century.

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Adia Harvey Wingfield, "Gray Areas: How the Way We Work Perpetuates Racism and What We Can Do to Fix It" (Amistad Press, 2023) Apr 30, 2024

Labor and race have shared a complex, interconnected history in America. For decades, key aspects of work—from getting a job to workplace norms to advancement and mobility—ignored and failed Black people. While explicit discrimination no longer occurs, and organizations make internal and public pledges to honor and achieve “diversity,” inequities persist through what Dr. Adia Harvey Wingfield calls the “gray areas:” the relationships, networks, and cultural dynamics integral to companies that are now more important than ever. The reality is that Black employees are less likely to be hired, stall out at middle levels, and rarely progress to senior leadership positions.

Dr. Wingfield has spent a decade examining inequality in the workplace, interviewing over two hundred Black subjects across professions about their work lives. In Gray Areas: How the Way We Work Perpetuates Racism and What We Can Do to Fix It (Amistad Press, 2023), she introduces seven of them: Alex, a worker in the gig economy Max, an emergency medicine doctor; Constance, a chemical engineer; Brian, a filmmaker; Amalia, a journalist; Darren, a corporate vice president; and Kevin, who works for a nonprofit.

In this accessible and important antiracist work, Dr. Wingfield chronicles their experiences and blends them with history and surprising data that starkly show how old models of work are outdated and detrimental. She demonstrates the scope and breadth of gray areas and offers key insights and suggestions for how they can be fixed, including shifting hiring practices to include Black workers; rethinking organizational cultures to centralize Black employees’ experience; and establishing pathways that move capable Black candidates into leadership roles. These reforms would create workplaces that reflect America’s increasingly diverse population—professionals whose needs organizations today are ill-prepared to meet.

It’s time to prepare for a truly equitable, multiracial future and move our culture forward. To do so, we must address the gray areas in our workspaces today. This definitive work shows us how.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Christopher Cameron, "Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism" (Northwestern UP, 2019) Apr 29, 2024

Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism (Northwestern University Press, 2019) by Christopher Cameron, an Associate Professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, is a precise and nuanced history of African American secularism from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. This text is written with economy and clarity as defined by four concise chapters that detail the major moments in African American history including some discussion of Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights-Black Power era. Traversing nearly two centuries of black thought, from the Antebellum period to the demise of the Black Power era, Black Freethinkers is the first comprehensive historical survey of black free thought. For Cameron, free thought encompasses atheism, agnosticism, deism, paganism and other non-traditional modes of thinking. Cameron’s work focuses primarily on the ideas advanced by African American men and women of letters such as Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin to support his core argument that freethought and “unbelief” have been key elements of Black thought since the era of enslavement to the institutionalization of free thought oriented associations in African American society.

Cameron’s work forces us to rethink the way we study the era of enslavement and African American culture, and the place of Douglass as an American intellectual central to this history, as well as the role of religion in Black life more generally. In many respects, his text presents a more humanistic portrait of African American thought and culture from a historical perspective that goes well beyond most texts on this subject.

Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., has taught survey courses in U.S. history, Western Civilization, and upper division courses on the history of African Americans at the university level for more than fifteen years. Her teaching and research interests include: African American intellectual history, gender in U.S. history, and race/ethnicity studies. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. She has published book chapters, essays, and encyclopedia entries and edited/authored five books. Her latest publications include Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger, 2017) and, with Dr. G. Reginald Daniel, professor of historical sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union (University Press of Mississippi 2014). You can learn more about her work here or follow her on twitter (@DrHettie2017).

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John H. Cable, "Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi" (UP of Kansas, 2023) Apr 28, 2024

Historians of the American South have come to consider the mechanization and consolidation of cotton farming—the “Southern enclosure movement”—to be a watershed event in the region’s history. In the decades after World War II, this transition pushed innumerable sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and smallholders off the land, redistributing territory and resources upward to a handful of large, mainly white operators. By disproportionately displacing Black farmers, enclosure also slowed the progress of the civil rights movement and limited its impact.

Dr. John Cable’s Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi (University Press of Kansas, 2023) is among the first studies to explore that process through the interpretive lens of settler colonialism. Focusing on east-central Mississippi, home of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, Dr. Cable situates enclosure in the long history of dispossession that began with Indian Removal. The book follows elite white landowners and Black and Choctaw farmers from World War II to 1960—the period when the old, labor-intensive farm structure collapsed. By acknowledging that this process occurred on taken land, Dr. Cable demonstrates that the records of agricultural agents, segregationist politicians, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) are traces of ongoing colonization.

The settler colonial framework, rarely associated with the postwar South, sheds important light on the shifting categories of race and class. It also prompts comparisons with other settler societies (states in southern and eastern Africa, for instance) whose timelines, racial regimes, and agrarian transitions were similar to those of the South. This postwar history of the South suggests ways in which the BIA’s termination policy dovetailed with Southern segregationism and, at the same time, points to some of the shortcomings of the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Adam J. Criblez, "Kings of the Garden: The New York Knicks and Their City" (Three Hills, 2024) Apr 26, 2024

In Kings of the Garden: The New York Knicks and Their City(Three Hills, 2024), Adam J. Criblez traces the fall and rise of the New York Knicks between the 1973, the year they won their last NBA championship, and 1985, when the organization drafted Patrick Ewing and gave their fans hope after a decade of frustrations.

During these years, the teams led by Walt Frazier, Earl Monroe, Bob McAdoo, Spencer Haywood, and Bernard King never achieved tremendous on-court success, and their struggles mirrored those facing New York City over the same span. In the mid-seventies, as the Knicks lost more games than they won and played before smaller and smaller crowds, the city they represented was on the brink of bankruptcy, while urban disinvestment, growing income inequality, and street gangs created a feeling of urban despair.

Kings of the Garden details how the Knicks' fortunes and those of New York City were inextricably linked. As the team's Black superstars enjoyed national fame, Black musicians, DJs, and B-boys in the South Bronx were creating a new culture expression―hip-hop―that like the NBA would become a global phenomenon. Criblez's fascinating account of the era shows that even though the team's efforts to build a dynasty ultimately failed, the Knicks, like the city they played in, scrappily and spectacularly symbolized all that was right―and wrong―with the NBA and the nation during this turbulent, creative, and momentous time.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Fumilayo Showers, "Migrants Who Care: West Africans Working and Building Lives in U.S. Health Care" (Rutgers UP, 2023) Apr 21, 2024

As the U.S. population ages and as health care needs become more complex, demand for paid care workers in home and institutional settings has increased. This book draws attention to the reserve of immigrant labour that is called on to meet this need.

Migrants Who Care: West Africans Working and Building Lives in U.S. Health Care (Rutgers University Press, 2023) by Dr. Fumilayo Showers tells the little-known story of a group of English-speaking West African immigrants who have become central to the U.S. health and long-term care systems. With high human capital and middle-class pre-migration backgrounds, these immigrants - hailing from countries as diverse as Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, and Liberia - encounter blocked opportunities in the U.S. labour market. They then work in the United States, as home health aides, certified nursing assistants, qualified disability support professionals, and licensed practical and registered nurses.

This book reveals the global, political, social, and economic factors that have facilitated the entry of West African women and men into the health care labour force (home and institutional care for older adults and individuals with physical and intellectual disabilities; and skilled nursing). It highlights these immigrants’ role as labour brokers who tap into their local ethnic and immigrant communities to channel co-ethnics to meet this labour demand. It illustrates how West African care workers understand their work across various occupational settings and segments in the healthcare industry. This book reveals the transformative processes migrants undergo as they become produced, repackaged, and deployed as health care workers after migration.

Ultimately, this book tells the very real and human story of an immigrant group surmounting tremendous obstacles to carve out a labour market niche in health care, providing some of the most essential and intimate aspects of care labour to the most vulnerable members of society.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Rogers M. Smith and Desmond King, "America’s New Racial Battle Lines: Protect Versus Repair" (U Chicago Press, 2024) Apr 21, 2024

What is happening to the politics of race in America?

In America’s New Racial Battle Lines: Protect Versus Repair(U Chicago Press, 2024), Rogers Smith and Desmond King argue that the nation has entered a new, more severely polarized era of racial policy disputes, displacing older debates over color-blind versus race-targeted measures. Drawing on primary sources, interviews, and studies of federal, state, and local initiatives linked to global developments, the authors map the memberships and the goals of two rival racial policy alliances, comprised of grassroots activists, NGOs, government agencies, and wealthy funders on both sides. Today's conservatives promise to "protect" traditionalist Americans against assaults from what they see as a radical American Left. Today's progressives seek to "repair" all American institutions and practices that embody systemic racism. Though these sides have some common ground, they advance sharply opposed visions of America that threaten to make profound racial policy conflicts, sometimes erupting into violence, all too pervasive in the nation's present and future.

Professor Rogers Smith is Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Desmond King is Andrew W. Mellon professor of American Government at Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

Host Dr Ursula Hackett is a Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of America’s Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

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Tanisha Ford, "Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement" (Amistad Press, 2024) Apr 19, 2024

An engrossing social history of the unsinkable Mollie Moon, the stylish founder of the National Urban League Guild and fundraiser extraordinaire who reigned over the glittering "Beaux Arts Ball,” the social event of New York and Harlem society for fifty years—a glamorous soiree rivaling today’s Met Gala, drawing America’s wealthy and cultured, both Black and white.

Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement(Amistad Press, 2024) brilliantly illuminates a little known yet highly significant aspect of the civil rights movement that has been long overlooked—the powerhouse fundraising effort that supported the movement—the luncheons, galas, cabarets, and traveling exhibitions attended by middle-class and working-class Black families, the Negro press, and titans of industry, including Winthrop Rockefeller.

No one knew this world better or ruled over it with more authority than Mollie Moon. With her husband Henry Lee Moon, the longtime publicist for the NAACP, Mollie became half of one of the most influential couples of the period. Vivacious and intellectually curious, Mollie frequently hosted political salons attended by guests ranging from Langston Hughes to Lorraine Hansberry. As the president of the National Urban League Guild, the fundraising arm of the National Urban League; Mollie raised millions to fund grassroots activists battling for economic justice and racial equality. She was a force behind the mutual aid network that connected Black churches, domestic and blue-collar laborers, social clubs, and sororities and fraternities across the country.

Historian and cultural critic Tanisha C. Ford brings Mollie into focus as never before, charting her rise from Jim Crow Mississippi to doyenne of Manhattan and Harlem, where she became one of the most influential philanthropists of her time—a woman feared, resented, yet widely respected. She chronicles Mollie’s larger-than-life antics through exhaustive research, never-before-revealed letters, and dozens of interviews.

Our Secret Society ushers us into a world with its own rhythm and rules, led by its own Who’s Who of African Americans in politics, sports, business, and entertainment. It is both a searing portrait of a remarkable period in America, spanning from the early 1930s through the late 1960s, and a strategic economic blueprint today’s activists can emulate.

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Melvin L. Rogers, "The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2023) Apr 15, 2024

Political Theorist Melvin L. Rogers has a deep and rich new book delving into the work of a host of different African American political thinkers. But this work is much more than an exploration of some of the writings by African American thinkers, it importantly tells the story of America. The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (Princeton UP, 2023) takes the reader on a journey through distinct work and pieces by David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, and others not in an effort to be exhaustive or completist in examining their work, but in teasing out vital thematic approaches to consider race, democracy, and freedom in the American republic. Rogers starts from a foundation in considering the idea of democracy—what are the habits and sensibilities that are located in the people who compose a democracy, or, more precisely, “who are we?” in the understanding of “we the people” or in the we of “we hold these truths to be self-evident.” While there is attention to the institutions that structure our democracy, Rogers reads many of these authors to expand that focus, to think about what the culture, the societal concepts, and the community define as who we are and who we might hope to be. Thus, as Rogers weaves together chronological approaches to considering these ideas from the authors and artists included in the conversation, he is also toggling together components that are often considered separately: political standing and culture standing, and how individuals, particularly black individuals, are situated in each.

The Darkened Light of Faith is deeply engaged with the conceptual duality of a place and an idea – the United States – that is at once mired in the tragic history of enslavement and, at the same time, moving (maybe?) towards the promise of a democracy that holds freedom among its most important qualities. This tension is also the darkened light of faith and hope that the thinkers, activists, and artists wrap themselves and their work in as they consider the opportunities and problematics that are America. Rogers does not confine his analysis to the written word. There is an exploration of anti-slavery pamphlets by abolitionist David Walker, who wrote and advocated against slavery in the 1820s and 1803s. The anti-republican nature of enslavement in the United States is another dimension of the book, examining the conflict inherent in a republican society that incorporates racial domination. Furthering this discussion, Rogers considers the idea of “the people” and how this concept is complicated by the exclusionary nature of slavery and categorization of individuals into groups of citizens who are included and others who are excluded based on race. The second part of the book pivots to the 20th century and expands the dimensions of thinking about these tensions and conflicts that are at the heart of the United States. The Darkened Light of Faith explores not just the extra-judicial nature of lynching, but how this is also a site of invisible laws that make lynching, by white Americans, possible without any threat or potential for penalties. This section weaves together work and advocacy by Ida B. Well, Billie Holiday’s song and performances of Strange Fruit, and the NAACP’s campaign using images of lynched bodies to focus on the horror of lynching and the undermining of democratic ethos in the U.S. The final sections of the book take up work by W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin as they write about and comment on the complexity of American life, noting that charting a path forward towards the promise of the American experiment cannot leave untold or unknown the history in slavery and domination.

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Jeremy Black, "The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History" (Routledge, 2015) Apr 14, 2024

In The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History (Routledge, 2015), Jeremy Black presents a compact yet comprehensive survey of slavery and its impact on the world, primarily centered on the Atlantic trade. Opening with a clear discussion of the problems of defining slavery, the book goes on to investigate the Atlantic slave trade from its origins to abolition, including comparisons to other systems of slavery outside the Atlantic region and the persistence of modern-day slavery. Crucially, the book does not ask readers to abandon their emotional ties to the subject, but puts events in context so that it becomes clear how such an institution not only arose, but flourished.

Black shows that slavery and the slave trade were not merely add-ons to the development of Western civilization, but intimately linked to it. In a vital and accessible narrative, The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History enables students to understand this terrible element of human history and how it shaped the modern world.

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Joseph H. Holland, "Make Your Own History: Timeless Truths from Black American Trailblazers" (Dafina, 2023) Apr 14, 2024

One hundred and twenty Black leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs share their wisdom and experience across the centuries in Make Your Own History: Timeless Truths from Black American Trailblazers(Dafina, 2023), an inspiring collection of exemplary Black voices--past and present, familiar and unsung--which have the power to guide us today.

Celebrating the vast breadth and scope of Black excellence, Make Your Own History spotlights the principles of success exemplified by the lives of 120 Black role models - from unsung heroes to renowned leaders - who have blazed trails throughout American history.

Make Your Own History gathers together motivational quotes, historical contexts, and enlightening precepts from Black trailblazers spanning the eighteenth century to the present. These insights encompass twelve central themes: courage, self-discipline, compassion, perseverance, teamwork, integrity, industriousness, self-reliance, optimism, purposefulness, civility, and faith. These vigorous virtues will:

*Deepen your courage through journalist Ida B. Wells' strategic activism in the face of professional and personal peril . . .

*Fuel your perseverance through tennis superstar Serena Williams' journey to 23 Grand Slam singles titles . . .

*Spark optimism through poet Langston Hughes' work as an artistic and intellectual catalyst for the Harlem Renaissance . . .

Through these perspectives and so many more, Make Your Own History serves not only as an uplifting historical resource, but also as a spiritual road map for the life-long journey of purposefully setting and meeting personal goals. These pioneers are more than historic examples of Black excellence; their unique lives highlight universal truths that will inspire all readers to achieve great success and make their own history.

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R. J. Boutelle, "The Race for America: Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny" (UNC Press, 2023) Apr 13, 2024

As Manifest Destiny took hold in the national consciousness, what did it mean for African Americans who were excluded from its ambitions for an expanding American empire that would shepherd the Western Hemisphere into a new era of civilization and prosperity?

In The Race for America: Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny(UNC Press, 2023), R. J. Boutelle explores how Black intellectuals like Daniel Peterson, James McCune Smith, Mary Ann Shadd, Henry Bibb, and Martin Delany engaged this cultural mythology to theorize and practice Black internationalism. He uncovers how their strategies for challenging Manifest Destiny's white nationalist ideology and expansionist political agenda constituted a form of disidentification—a deconstructing and reassembling of this discourse that marshals Black experiences as racialized subjects to imagine novel geopolitical mythologies and projects to compete with Manifest Destiny.

Employing Black internationalist, hemispheric, and diasporic frameworks to examine the emigrationist and solidarity projects that African Americans proposed as alternatives to Manifest Destiny, Boutelle attends to sites integral to US aspirations of hemispheric dominion: Liberia, Nicaragua, Canada, and Cuba. In doing so, Boutelle offers a searing history of how internalized fantasies of American exceptionalism burdened the Black geopolitical imagination that encouraged settler-colonial and imperialist projects in the Americas and West Africa.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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JJ Johnson and Danica Novgorodoff, "The Simple Art of Rice: Recipes from Around the World for the Heart of Your Table" (Flatiron Books, 2023) Apr 13, 2024

The Simple Art of Rice: Recipes from Around the World for the Heart of Your Table (Flatiron Books, 2023) is a cookbook celebrating the versatility of this grain. Its recipes are rooted in many cultures from around the globe, including Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Award-winning author Chef JJ Johnson, along with Danica Novgorodoff, produces rice recipes for every meal and event. The Simple Art of Rice also provides valuable information on fool-proof methods and rice cooking that will help every person master the art of rice cooking.

Dr. N’Kosi Oates is a curator and assistant professor. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at DrNKosiOates.

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Elyse Ambrose, "A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive" (T&T Clark, 2024) Apr 11, 2024

In A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive (T&T Clark, 2024), Elyse Ambrose looks to an archive of blackqueerness as an authoritative source for religious ethical reflection. This approach counters the disintegrative norms of anti-black and anti-body traditionalism in Christian sexual ethics, even those that strive to be liberative. It builds upon a tradition of black queer and LGBTQ+-centered critique at the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and religion through exploring the moral imagination of sexual and gender non-conformist communities in 1920's Harlem (their rent parties, blues environments, and Hamilton Lodge Ball); ethics and theology blackqueering the disciplines; and contemporary oral histories (including photographs of the subjects by the scholar-artist) of those doing ethics in their blackqueerness. These serve as integrative sites that signal blackqueer ethical counter-patterns of communal belonging, individual and collective becoming, goodness, embodied spirit/inspirited bodies, and shared thriving. Emphases on both personal and social right-relatedness mark a shift from Christian sexual ethics based on rules, toward a communal relations-based transreligious ethics of sexuality.

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Shardé M. Davis, "Being Black in the Ivory: Truth-Telling about Racism in Higher Education" (UNC Press, 2024) Apr 09, 2024

When Sharde M. Davis turned to social media during the summer of racial reckoning in 2020, she meant only to share how racism against Black people affects her personally. But her hashtag, BlackintheIvory, went viral, fostering a flood of Black scholars sharing similar stories. Soon the posts were being quoted during summer institutes and workshops on social justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. And in fall 2020, faculty assigned the tweets as material for course curriculum.

Being Black in the Ivory: Truth-Telling about Racism in Higher Education (UNC Press, 2024) is a curated collection of original personal narratives from Black scholars across the country seeks to continue the conversation that started with BlackintheIvory. Put together, the stories reveal how racism eats its way through higher education, how academia systemically ejects Black scholars in overt and covert ways, and how academic institutions--and their individual members--might make lasting change. While anti-Black racism in academia is a behemoth with many entry points to the conversation, this book marshals a diverse group of Black voices to bring to light what for too long has been hidden in the shadow of the ivory tower.

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Christopher Michael Blakley, "Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World" (Louisiana State UP, 2023) Apr 08, 2024

Historians of early America, slavery, early African American history, the history of science, and environmental history have interrogated the complex ways in which enslaved people were thought about and treated as human but also dehumanized to be understood as private property or chattel. The comparison of enslaved people to animals, particularly dogs, cattle, or horses, was a common device deployed by enslavers. The letters, memoirs, and philosophical treatises of the enslaved and formerly enslaved reveal the complex ways in which enslaved people analyzed and fought these comparisons. Dr. Chris Blakely focuses on human-animal relationships to unpack “how, where, and when did such decisions regarding the chattel nature of human captives take place?”

In Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World(LSU Press, 2023), they argue that slaving and slavery relied on and generated complex human-animal networks and relations. Exploring these groupings leads to a deeper understanding of how enslavers worked out the process of turning people into chattel and laid the foundations of slavery by mingling enslaved people with nonhuman animals.

Efforts to remake people into property akin to animals involved exchange and trade, scientific fieldwork that exploited curiosity, and forms of labor. Using the correspondence of the Royal African Company, specimen catalogs and scientific papers of the Royal Society, plantation inventories and manuals, and diaries kept by slaveholders, Dr. Blakley describes human-animal networks spanning from Britain's slave castles and outposts throughout western Africa to plantations in the Caribbean and the American Southeast. They combine approaches from environmental history, history of science, and philosophy to examine slavery from the ground up and from the perspectives of the enslaved.

Dr. Chris Blakley is a visiting assistant professor in the Core Program at Occidental College and a historian interested in more-than-human relationships with a focus on racialization and empire-building. Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World is their first book and they are just beginning a second project on science, race, and the senses in the nineteenth century.

Daniela Lavergne served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

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Greg Jarrell, "Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods" (Fortress Press, 2024) Apr 03, 2024

Greg Jarrell's book Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods (Fortress Press, 2024) uncovers how race, geography, policy, and religion have created haunted landscapes in Charlotte, North Carolina, and throughout the United States. How do we value our lands, livelihoods, and communities? How does our theology inform our capacity--or lack thereof--for memory? What responsibilities do we bear toward those who have been harmed, not just by individuals but by our structures and collective ways of being in the world?

Abram and Annie North, both born enslaved, purchased a home in the historically Black neighborhood of Brooklyn in the years following the Civil War. Today, the site of that home stands tucked beneath a corner of the First Baptist Church property on a site purchased under the favorable terms of Urban Renewal campaigns in the mid-1960s. How did FBC wind up in what used to be Brooklyn--a neighborhood that no longer exists? What happened to the Norths? How might we heal these hauntings? This is an American story with implications far beyond Brooklyn, Charlotte, or even the South. By carefully tracing the intertwined fortunes of First Baptist Church and the formerly enslaved North family, Jarrell opens our eyes to uncomfortable truths with which we all must reckon.

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David J. Dennis Jr. and David J. Dennis Sr., "The Movement Made Us: A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride" (Harper, 2022) Mar 30, 2024

"The Movement Made Us takes literature to a momentous Southern Black space to which I honestly never thought a book could take us. This is literally the Movement that made us and both Davids love us whole here with a creation that is as ingenious as it is soulfully sincere. Stunning."--Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy.

A dynamic family exchange that pivots between the voices of a father and son,The Movement Made Us: A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride (Harper, 2022) is a unique work of oral history and memoir, chronicling the extraordinary story of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and its living legacy embodied in Black Lives Matter. David Dennis Sr, a core architect of the movement, speaks out for the first time, swapping recollections both harrowing and joyful with David Jr, a journalist working on the front lines of change today. Taken together, their stories paint a critical portrait of America, casting one nation's image through the lens of two individual Black men and their unique relationship. Playful and searching, anxious and restorative, fearless and driving, this intimate memoir features scenes from across David Sr's life, as he becomes involved in the movement, tries to move beyond it, and ultimately returns to it to find final solace and new sense of self--revealing a survivor who travels eternally with a cabal of ghosts. A crucial addition to Civil Rights history, The Movement Made Us is the story of a nation reckoning with change and the hopes, struggles, setbacks, and triumphs of modern Black life. This is it: the extant chronicle of why we live, why we move, and for what we are made.

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Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney, "From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle" (Vanderbilt UP, 2024) Mar 29, 2024

Broadly speaking, the traditionally conceptualized mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #BlackLivesMatter Movement possess some similar qualities. They both represent dynamic, complex moments of possibility and progress. They also share mass-based movement activities, policy/legislative advocacy, grassroots organizing, and targeted media campaigns. Innovation, growth, and dissension—core aspects of movement work—mark them both. Crucially, these moments also engender aggressive, repressive, multilevel responses to these assertions of Black humanity.

From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle (Vanderbilt UP, 2024) critically engages the dynamic relationship between these two moments of liberatory possibility on the Black Freedom Struggle timeline. The book’s contributors explore what we can learn when we place these moments of struggle in dialogue with each other. They grapple with how our understanding of the postwar moment shapes our analysis of #BLM and wherein lie the discontinuities, in order to glean lessons for future moments of insurgency.

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Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen, "The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition" (Haymarket Books, 2024) Mar 29, 2024

The story of the fight against fascism across the African diaspora, revealing that Black antifascism has always been vital to global freedom struggles.

At once a history for understanding fascism and a handbook for organizing against, The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition(Haymarket Books, 2024) is an essential book for understanding our present moment and the challenges ahead. From London to the Caribbean, from Ethiopia to Harlem, from Black Lives Matter to abolition, Black radicals and writers have long understood fascism as a threat to the survival of Black people around the world—and to everyone.

In The Black Antifascist Tradition, scholar-activists Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen show how generations of Black activists and intellectuals—from Ida B. Wells in the fight against lynching, to Angela Y. Davis in the fight against the prison-industrial complex—have stood within a tradition of Black Antifascism. As Davis once observed, pointing to the importance of anti-Black racism in the development of facism as an ideology, Black people have been “the first and most deeply injured victims of fascism.” Indeed, the experience of living under and resisting racial capitalism has often made Black radicals aware of the potential for fascism to take hold long before others understood this danger. The book explores the powerful ideas and activism of Paul Robeson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Claudia Jones, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, and Walter Rodney, as well as that of the Civil Rights Congress, the Black Liberation Army, and the We Charge Genocide movement, among others.

In shining a light on fascism and anti-Blackness, Hope and Mullen argue, the writers and organizers featured in this book have also developed urgent tools and strategies for overcoming it.

Jeanelle Hope is Director & Associate Professor of African American Studies

Bill V. Mullen is Professor of English and American Studies at Purdue University.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Tonia Sutherland, "Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife" (U California Press, 2023) Mar 22, 2024

The first critical examination of death and remembrance in the digital age—and an invitation to imagine Black digital sovereignty in life and death.

In Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife (U California Press, 2023), Tonia Sutherland considers the consequences of digitally raising the dead. Attending to the violent deaths of Black Americans—and the records that document them—from slavery through the social media age, Sutherland explores media evidence, digital acts of remembering, and the right and desire to be forgotten.

From the popular image of Gordon (also known as "Whipped Peter") to photographs of the lynching of Jesse Washington to the video of George Floyd's murder, from DNA to holograms to posthumous communication, this book traces the commodification of Black bodies and lives across time. Through the lens of (anti-)Blackness in the United States, Sutherland interrogates the intersections of life, death, personal data, and human autonomy in the era of Google, Twitter, and Facebook, and presents a critique of digital resurrection technologies. If the Black digital afterlife is rooted in bigotry and inspires new forms of racialized aggression, Resurrecting the Black Body asks what other visions of life and remembrance are possible, illuminating the unique ways that Black cultures have fought against erasure and oblivion.

Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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Coretta M. Pittman, "Literacy in a Long Blues Note: Black Women’s Literature and Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries" (UP of Mississippi, 2022) Mar 19, 2024

Literacy in a Long Blues Note: Black Women’s Literature and Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries by Coretta M. Pittman (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) traces the evolution of Black women’s literacy practices from 1892 to 1934.

Pittman explores two distinct but related eras of Black women’s writing—the Women’s Era of the 1890s and early 1900s, and the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Casting a wide net, Pittman analyzes fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic writing by Black women along with songs performed and written by classic blues singers like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Victoria Spivey. This innovative approach allows Pittman to show how women from these two generations approached issues of class, respectability, uplift, and empowerment.

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Whitney Nell Stewart, "This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations" (UNC Press, 2023) Mar 15, 2024

The cultural memory of plantations in the Old South has long been clouded by myth. A recent reckoning with the centrality of slavery to the US national story, however, has shifted the meaning of these sites. Plantations are no longer simply seen as places of beauty and grandiose hospitality; their reality as spaces of enslavement, exploitation, and violence is increasingly at the forefront of our scholarly and public narratives. Yet even this reckoning obscures what these sites meant to so many forced to live and labor on them: plantations were Black homes as much as white.

Insightfully reading the built environment of plantations, considering artifact fragments found in excavations of slave dwellings, and drawing on legal records and plantation owners' papers, Whitney Nell Stewart illuminates how enslaved people struggled to make home amid innumerable constraints and obstacles imposed by white southerners.

In This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations(UNC Press, 2023), Stewart demonstrates how homemaking was a crucial part of the battle over slavery and freedom, a fight that continues today in consequential confrontations over who has the right to call this nation home.

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Myisha Cherry, "Failures of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better" (Princeton UP, 2023) Mar 15, 2024

From religion to popular culture, institutions and people have shaped how we conceive forgiveness. Myisha Cherry, associate professor of philosophy, argues that these understandings have been limiting or even narrow. Those ideas, in turn, have been harmful to society. In Failures of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better(Princeton University Press 2023), Cherry offers a new conceptualization of forgiveness rooted in a holistic approach.

Dr. N'Kosi Oates is a curator and assistant professor. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University. Find him on Twitter at DrNKosiOates.

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Jonathan W. White, "Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) Mar 15, 2024

In Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), historian Jonathan W. White tells the riveting story of Appleton Oaksmith, a swashbuckling sea captain whose life intersected with some of the most important moments, movements, and individuals of the mid-19th century, from the California Gold Rush, filibustering schemes in Nicaragua, Cuban liberation, and the Civil War and Reconstruction. Most importantly, the book depicts the extraordinary lengths the Lincoln Administration went to destroy the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Using Oaksmith’s case as a lens, White takes readers into the murky underworld of New York City, where federal marshals plied the docks in lower Manhattan in search of evidence of slave trading. Once they suspected Oaksmith, federal authorities had him arrested and convicted, but in 1862 he escaped from jail and became a Confederate blockade-runner in Havana. The Lincoln Administration tried to have him kidnapped in violation of international law, but the attempt was foiled. Always claiming innocence, Oaksmith spent the next decade in exile until he received a presidential pardon from U.S. Grant, at which point he moved to North Carolina and became an anti-Klan politician. Through a remarkable, fast-paced story, this book will give readers a new perspective on slavery and shifting political alliances during the turbulent Civil War Era.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Victoria Perry, "A Bittersweet Heritage: Slavery, Architecture and the British Landscape" (Hurst, 2022) Mar 14, 2024

The 2020 toppling of slave-trader Edward Colston's statue by Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol was a dramatic reminder of Britain's role in trans-Atlantic slavery, too often overlooked. Yet the legacy of that predatory economy reaches far beyond bronze memorials; it continues to shape the entire visual fabric of the country.

Architect Victoria Perry explores the relationship between the wealth of slave-owning elites and the architecture and landscapes of Georgian Britain. She reveals how profits from Caribbean sugar plantations fed the opulence of stately homes and landscape gardens. Trade in slaves and slave-grown products also boosted the prosperity of ports like Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, shifting cultural influence towards the Atlantic west. New artistic centers like Bath emerged, while investment in poor, remote areas of Wales, Cumbria and Scotland led to their "reimagining" as tourist destinations: Snowdonia, the Lakes and the Highlands. The patronage of absentee planters popularized British ideas of "natural scenery"--viewing mountains, rivers and rocks as landscape art--and then exported the concept of "sublime and picturesque" landscapes across the Atlantic.

A Bittersweet Heritage: Slavery, Architecture and the British Landscape(Hurst, 2022) unearths the slavery-tainted history of Britain's manors, ports, roads and countryside, and powerfully explains what this legacy means today.

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Thomas Mareite, "Conditional Freedom: Free Soil and Fugitive Slaves from the U.S. South to Mexico's Northeast, 1803-1861" (Brill, 2024) Mar 13, 2024

While the literature on slave flight in nineteenth-century North America has commonly focused on fugitive slaves escaping to the U.S. North and Canada, Conditional Freedom: Free Soil and Fugitive Slaves from the U.S. South to Mexico's Northeast, 1803-1861(Brill, 2024) provides new insights on the social and political geography of freedom and slavery in nineteenth-century North America by exploring the development of southern routes of escape from slavery in the U.S. South and the experiences of self-emancipated slaves in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. In Conditional Freedom, Thomas Mareite offers a social history of U.S. refugees from slavery, and provides a political history of the clash between Mexican free soil and the spread of slavery west of the Mississippi valley during the nineteenth-century.

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Korey Garibaldi, "Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America" (Princeton UP, 2023) Mar 13, 2024

InImpermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America (Princeton UP, 2023), Korey Garibaldi explores interracial collaborations in American commercial publishing—authors, agents, and publishers who forged partnerships across racial lines—from the 1910s to the 1960s. Garibaldi shows how aspiring and established Black authors and editors worked closely with white interlocutors to achieve publishing success, often challenging stereotypes and advancing racial pluralism in the process.

Impermanent Blackness explores the complex nature of this almost-forgotten period of interracial publishing by examining key developments, including the mainstream success of African American authors in the 1930s and 1940s, the emergence of multiracial children’s literature, postwar tensions between supporters of racial cosmopolitanism and of “Negro literature,” and the impact of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements on the legacy of interracial literary culture.

By the end of the 1960s, some literary figures once celebrated for pushing the boundaries of what Black writing could be, including the anthologist W. S. Braithwaite, the bestselling novelist Frank Yerby, the memoirist Juanita Harrison, and others, were forgotten or criticized as too white. And yet, Garibaldi argues, these figures—at once dreamers and pragmatists—have much to teach us about building an inclusive society. Revisiting their work from a contemporary perspective, Garibaldi breaks new ground in the cultural history of race in the United States.

Korey Garibaldi is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Surya Parekh, "Black Enlightenment" (Duke UP, 2023) Mar 12, 2024

InBlack Enlightenment (Duke UP, 2023), Surya Parekh reimagines the Enlightenment from the position of the Black subject. Parekh examines the works of such Black writers as the free Jamaican Francis Williams (1697–1762), Afro-British thinker Ignatius Sancho (1729?–1780), and Afro-American poet Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784), placing them alongside those of their white European contemporaries David Hume (1711-1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). By rethinking the Enlightenment and its canons, Parekh complicates common understandings of the Enlightenment wherein Black subjects could exist only in negation to white subjects. Black Enlightenment points to the anxiety of race in Hume, Kant, and others while showing the importance of Black Enlightenment thought. Parekh prompts us to consider the timeliness of reading Black Enlightenment authors who become “free” in a society hostile to that freedom.

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Judith Tick, "Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song" (Norton, 2023) Mar 12, 2024

Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996) was one of America’s greatest musicians. In this major biography, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer who Transformed American Song(Norton 2023), Judith Tick documents Ella’s importance as a music maker, the ups and downs of her career, and her place in the music industry. Singers are often sidelined in histories of jazz, and jazz critics often celebrated instrumentalists over vocalists in their commentary. Consequently, many authors have not taken Ella seriously as a musical innovator, composer, arranger, or creative performer. Judith Tick shows that Ella was all these things and more. She provides new information about Ella’s family and early career, and analyzes how Ella negotiated the ever-shifting lines between jazz and pop. Tick shows that Ella was an ambitious risk-taker whose musical curiosity and skill led her to make some of the twentieth-century’s most important recordings, and helped establish the great American songbook.

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Sharon D. Wright Austin, "Political Black Girl Magic: The Elections and Governance of Black Female Mayors" (Temple UP, 2023) Mar 11, 2024

Political Black Girl Magic: The Elections and Governance of Black Female Mayors (Temple UP, 2023) explores black women's experiences as mayors in American cities. The editor and contributors to this comprehensive volume examine black female mayoral campaigns and elections where race and gender are a factor--and where deracialized campaigns have garnered candidate support from white as well as Hispanic and Asian American voters. Chapters also consider how Black female mayors govern, from discussions of their pursuit of economic growth and how they use their power to enact positive reforms to the challenges they face that inhibit their abilities to cater to neglected communities.

Case studies in this interdisciplinary volume include female mayors in Atlanta, Baltimore, Charlotte, Chicago, Compton, and Washington, DC, among other cities, along with discussion of each official's political context. Covering mayors from the 1960s to the present, Political Black Girl Magic identifies the most significant obstacles black women have faced as mayors and mayoral candidates, and seeks to understand how race, gender, or the combination of both affected them.

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Rachel Jamison Webster, "Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family" (Henry Holt, 2023) Mar 11, 2024

In 1791, Thomas Jefferson hired a Black man to help survey Washington, DC. That man was Benjamin Banneker, an African American mathematician, a writer of almanacs, and one of the greatest astronomers of his generation. Banneker then wrote what would become a famous letter to Jefferson, imploring the new president to examine his hypocrisy, as someone who claimed to love liberty yet was an enslaver. More than two centuries later, Rachel Jamison Webster, an ostensibly white woman, learns that this groundbreaking Black forefather is also her distant relative.

In Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family (Henry Holt, 2023), Webster draws on oral history and conversations with her DNA cousins to imagine the lives of their shared ancestors across eleven generations, among them Banneker’s grandparents, an interracial couple who broke the law to marry when America was still a conglomerate of colonies under British rule. These stories shed light on the legal construction of race and display the brilliance and resistance of early African Americans in the face of increasingly unjust laws, some of which are still in effect in the present day.

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Sean M. Kelley, "American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644-1865" (Yale UP, 2023) Mar 10, 2024

A total of 305,000 enslaved Africans arrived in the New World aboard American vessels over a span of two hundred years as American merchants and mariners sailed to Africa and to the Caribbean to acquire and sell captives. Using exhaustive archival research, including many collections that have never been used before, historian Sean M. Kelley argues that slave trading needs to be seen as integral to the larger story of American slavery.

InAmerican Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644-1865 (Yale UP, 2023), Kelley examines the experience of captivity, drawing on more than a hundred African narratives to offer a portrait of enslavement in the regions of Africa frequented by American ships. Kelley also provides a social history of the two American ports where slave trading was most intensive, Newport and Bristol, Rhode Island.

In telling this tragic, brutal, and largely unknown story, Kelley corrects many misconceptions while leaving no doubt that Americans were a nation of slave traders.

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Ilyon Woo, "Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom" (Simon and Schuster, 2023) Mar 09, 2024

Ilyon Woo's Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom (Simon and Schuster, 2023) tells the remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled White man and William posing as “his” slave.

In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.

Along the way, they dodged slave traders, military officers, and even friends of their enslavers, who might have revealed their true identities. The tale of their adventure soon made them celebrities, and generated headlines around the country. Americans could not get enough of this charismatic young couple, who traveled another 1,000 miles criss-crossing New England, drawing thunderous applause as they spoke alongside some of the greatest abolitionist luminaries of the day—among them Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.

But even then, they were not out of danger. With the passage of an infamous new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, all Americans became accountable for returning refugees like the Crafts to slavery. Then yet another adventure began, as slave hunters came up from Georgia, forcing the Crafts to flee once again—this time from the United States, their lives and thousands more on the line and the stakes never higher.

With three epic journeys compressed into one monumental bid for freedom, Master Slave Husband Wife is an American love story—one that would challenge the nation’s core precepts of life, liberty, and justice for all—one that challenges us even now.

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Carmen Fracchia, "'Black But Human': Slavery and Visual Arts in Hapsburg Spain, 1480-1700" (Oxford UP, 2019) Mar 08, 2024

Carmen Fracchia's book Black But Human': Slavery and Visual Arts in Hapsburg Spain, 1480-1700 (Oxford UP, 2019) is the first study to focus on the visual representations of African slaves and ex-slaves in Spain during the Hapsburg dynasty. The Afro-Hispanic proverb 'Black but Human' is the main thread of the six chapters and serves as a lens through which to explore the ways in which a certain visual representation of slavery both embodies and reproduces hegemonic visions of enslaved and liberated Africans, and at the same time provides material for critical and emancipatory practices by Afro-Hispanics themselves.

The African presence in the Iberian Peninsula between the late fifteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century was as a result of the institutionalization of the local and transatlantic slave trades. In addition to the Moors, Berbers, and Turks born as slaves, there were approximately two million enslaved people in the kingdoms of Castile, Aragón, and Portugal. The 'Black but Human' topos that emerges from the African work songs and poems written by Afro-Hispanics encodes the multi-layered processes through which a black emancipatory subject emerges and a 'black nation' forges a collective resistance. It is visually articulated by Afro-Hispanic and Spanish artists in religious paintings and in the genres of self-portraiture and portraiture. This extraordinary imagery coexists with the stereotypical representations of African slaves and ex-slaves by Spanish sculptors, engravers, jewellers, and painters mainly in the religious visual form and by European draftsmen and miniaturists, in their landscape drawings, and sketches for costume books.

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Edda Fields-Black, "Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War" (Oxford UP, 2023) Mar 07, 2024

Most Americans know of Harriet Tubman's legendary life: escaping enslavement in 1849, she led more than 60 others out of bondage via the Underground Railroad, gave instructions on getting to freedom to scores more, and went on to live a lifetime fighting for change. Yet the many biographies, children's books, and films about Tubman omit a crucial chapter: during the Civil War, hired by the Union Army, she ventured into the heart of slave territory--Beaufort, South Carolina--to live, work, and gather intelligence for a daring raid up the Combahee River to attack the major plantations of Rice Country, the breadbasket of the Confederacy.

In Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (Oxford UP, 2023), Edda L. Fields-Black--herself a descendent of one of the participants in the raid--shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 people, people whose Lowcountry Creole language and culture Tubman could not even understand. Black men who had liberated themselves from bondage on South Carolina's Sea Island cotton plantations after the Battle of Port Royal in November 1861 enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and risked their lives in the effort.

Using previous unexamined documents, including Tubman's US Civil War Pension File, bills of sale, wills, marriage settlements, and estate papers from planters' families, Fields-Black brings to life intergenerational, extended enslaved families, neighbors, praise-house members, and sweethearts forced to work in South Carolina's deadly tidal rice swamps, sold, and separated during the antebellum period. When Tubman and the gunboats arrived and blew their steam whistles, many of those people clambered aboard, sailed to freedom, and were eventually reunited with their families. The able-bodied Black men freed in the Combahee River Raid enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought behind Confederate lines for the freedom of others still enslaved not just in South Carolina but Georgia and Florida.

After the war, many returned to the same rice plantations from which they had escaped, purchased land, married, and buried each other. These formerly enslaved peoples on the Sea Island indigo and cotton plantations, together with those in the semi-urban port cities of Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah, and on rice plantations in the coastal plains, created the distinctly American Gullah Geechee dialect, culture, and identity--perhaps the most significant legacy of Harriet Tubman's Combahee River Raid.

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Amy Coddington, "How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race" (U California Press, 2023) Mar 06, 2024

How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race(U California Press, 2023) examines the programming practices at commercial radio stations in the 1980s and early 1990s to uncover how the radio industry facilitated hip hop's introduction into the musical mainstream. Constructed primarily by the Top 40 radio format, the musical mainstream featured mostly white artists for mostly white audiences. With the introduction of hip hop to these programs, the radio industry was fundamentally altered, as stations struggled to incorporate the genre's diverse audience. At the same time, as artists negotiated expanding audiences and industry pressure to make songs fit within the confines of radio formats, the sound of hip hop changed. Drawing from archival research, Amy Coddington shows how the racial structuring of the radio industry influenced the way hip hop was sold to the American public, and how the genre's growing popularity transformed ideas about who constitutes the mainstream.

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Derron Wallace, "The Culture Trap: Ethnic Expectations and Unequal Schooling for Black Youth" (Oxford UP, 2023) Mar 04, 2024

How does race matter in schools? In The Culture Trap: Ethnic Expectations and Unequal Schooling for Black Youth(Oxford UP, 2023), Derron Wallace, the Jacob S. Potofsky Chair in Sociology at Brandeis University, tells the contrasting stories of two schools in the UK and USA. The book demonstrates two very different sets of expectations for Black youth in the two countries schools, and two very different educational and social structures reinforcing these expectations. The book draws on a rich ethnographically informed narrative, which centres teachers’ and students’ understandings and experiences of education. In doing so, the book challenges ‘cultural’ explanations for failures and successes in the two schools, and the two countries. Demonstrating both the socially constructed nature of race in the UK and USA, and the racism at the centre of both educational systems, the book is essential reading across the social sciences, humanities and for anyone interested in schools, education, and social change.

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Horace J. Maxile, Jr. and Kristen M. Turner, "Race and Gender in the Western Music History Survey: A Teacher's Guide" (Routledge, 2022) Feb 27, 2024

Race and Gender in the Western Music History Survey: A Teacher’s Guide provides concrete information and approaches that will help instructors include women and people of color in the typical music history survey course and the foundational music theory classes. This book provides a reconceptualization of the principles that shape the decisions instructors should make when crafting the syllabus. It offers new perspectives on canonical composers and pieces that take into account musical, cultural, and social contexts where women and people of color are present. Secondly, it suggests new topics of study and pieces by composers whose work fits into a more inclusive narrative of music history. A thematic approach parallels the traditional chronological sequencing in Western music history classes. Three themes include people and communities that suffer from various kinds of exclusion: Locales & Locations; Forms & Factions; Responses & Reception. Each theme is designed to uncover a different cultural facet that is often minimized in traditional music history classrooms but which, if explored, lead to topics in which other perspectives and people can be included organically in the curriculum, while not excluding canonical composers.

Dr. Horace J. Maxile, Jr. is Associate Professor of Music Theory at Baylor University. His primary interests are the concert music of Black composers, music semiotics, and gospel music. His research has appeared in scholarly journals such as Perspectives of New Music, American Music, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and Black Music Research Journal.

Dr. Kristen M. Turner is a Lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her work centers on issues of race, gender, and class in American popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Her research has appeared in collected editions and scholarly journals including the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of the Society for American Music, American Studies, and Musical Quarterly.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Florida State University. Her current research is about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival.

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Matthew Fox-Amato, "Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America" (Oxford UP, 2019) Feb 24, 2024

Shortly after its introduction, photography transformed the ways Americans made political arguments using visual images. In the mid-19th century, photographs became key tools in debates surrounding slavery. Yet, photographs were used in interesting and sometimes surprising ways by a range of actors. Matthew Fox-Amato, an Assistant Professor at the University of Idaho, examines the role of photography in the politics of slavery during the 19th century and the important legacies of those uses on later visual politics in his new book, Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America (Oxford University Press, 2019). The book examines the use of photographs by slaves, abolitionists, slaveholders, and Union soldiers to explore the rich complexities of the visual politics of the moment. He also considers the legacies of this use of the new medium.

In this episode of the podcast, Fox-Amato discusses the ways these various groups used photography for individual purposes and to shape the debates surrounding slavery in the antebellum period. He explains how photographs also highlight how union soldiers were beginning to think about a post-slavery racial hierarchy during the war. The book demonstrates the importance of thinking about photographs as both visual images and material objects. In the interview, Fox-Amato discusses the research necessary to analyze the photographs in both these ways and the broader importance of studying visual and material culture in all their historical complexity.

Christine Lamberson is an Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu.

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Imani D. Owens, "Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean" (Columbia UP, 2023) Feb 23, 2024

In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday “folk.” Many critics have perceived these representations of folk culture as efforts to reclaim an authentic past. Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators’ relationship to folk culture, emphasizing their formal and stylistic innovations and experiments in self-invention that reach beyond the local to the world.

Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean(Columbia UP, 2023) explores how Black writers and performers reimagined folk forms through the lens of the unruly―that which cannot be easily governed, disciplined, or managed. Drawing on a transnational and multilingual archive―from Harlem to Havana, from the Panama Canal Zone to Port-au-Prince―Owens considers the short stories of Eric Walrond and Jean Toomer; the ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price-Mars; the recited poetry of Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and Eusebia Cosme; and the essays, dance work, and radio plays of Sylvia Wynter. Owens shows how these figures depict folk culture―and Blackness itself―as a site of disruption, ambiguity, and flux. Their works reveal how Black people contribute to the stirrings of modernity while being excluded from its promises. Ultimately, these works do not seek to render folk culture more knowable or worthy of assimilation, but instead provide new forms of radical world-making.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Laurence Ralph, "Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him" (Grand Central Publishing, 2023) Feb 21, 2024

In September of 2019, Luis Alberto Quiñonez—known as Sito— was shot to death as he sat in his car in the Mission District of San Francisco. He was nineteen. His killer, Julius Williams, was seventeen. It was the second time the teens had encountered one another. The first, five years before, also ended in tragedy, when Julius watched as his brother was stabbed to death by an acquaintance of Sito’s. The two murders merited a few local news stories, and then the rest of the world moved on.

But for the families of the slain teenagers, it was impossible to move on. And for Laurence Ralph, the stepfather of Sito’s half-brother who had dedicated much of his academic career to studying gang-affiliated youth, Sito’s murder forced him to revisit a subject of scholarly inquiry in a profoundly different, deeply personal way.

Written from Ralph's perspective as both a person enmeshed in Sito's family and as an Ivy League professor and expert on the entanglement of class and violence, SITO: An American Teenager and the City that Failed Him (Grand Central Publishing, 2024) is an intimate story with an message about the lived experience of urban danger, and about anger, fear, grief, vengeance, and ultimately grace.

Laurence Ralph is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, where he is the Director for the Center on Transnational Policing. Before that, he was a tenured professor at Harvard University for eight years. He is the author of Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago (2014) and The Torture Letters: Reckoning With Police Violence (2020), both published by University of Chicago Press. He is currently a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; he has also been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim National Science Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Ford Foundation. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife and daughter.

Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Norman Hill and Velma Murphy Hill, "Climbing the Rough Side of the Mountain: The Extraordinary Story of Love, Civil Rights, and Labor Activism" (Regalo Press, 2023) Feb 17, 2024

The remarkable story of a couple who came together during the civil rights movement and made fighting for equality and civil and workers' rights their purpose for more than sixty years, overcoming adversity--with the strength of their love and commitment--to bring about meaningful change,

When Velma Murphy was knocked unconscious by a brick thrown by a man from an angry white mob and was carried away by Norman Hill, it was the beginning of a six-decade-long love story and the turmoil, excitement, and struggle for civil rights and labor movements. In Climbing the Rough Side of the Mountain: The Extraordinary Story of Love, Civil Rights, and Labor Activism(Regalo Press, 2023), the Hills reflect upon their more than half a century of fighting to make America realize the best of itself.

Through profound conversations between the two, Velma and Norman Hill share their earliest memories of facing racial segregation in the 1960s, working with Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph, crossing paths with Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. They also reveal how they kept white supremacists like David Duke from taking office, organized workers into unions, met with Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and continued to work tirelessly, fighting the good fight and successfully challenging power with truth.

Norman Hill was the national program director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), staff coordinator for the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, staff representative of the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO, and president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute from 1980 to 2004, the longest tenure in the organization’s history. He remains its president emeritus.

Velma Murphy Hill, a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, was a leader of the Chicago Wade-In to integrate Rainbow Beach, East Coast field secretary for CORE, and assistant to the president of the United Federation of Teachers, where she unionized 10,000 paraprofessionals, mostly Black and Hispanic, working in New York public schools. She was vice president of the American Federation of Teachers and International Affairs and civil rights director of the Service Employees International Union.

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Jeanne Theoharis, "The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South" (NYU Press, 2019) Feb 12, 2024

In this New Books Network/Gotham Center for NYC History podcast, guest host Beth Harpaz, editor of the City University of New York website SUM, interviews Jeanne Theoharis, distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College. Their topic is a new book just out from NYU Press, co-edited by Theoharis, called The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South (NYU Press, 2019).

The book looks at the history of institutionalized racism around the U.S., showing that laws, policies, and entitlements in every region of the country not only created segregated communities, but also promoted affluence and opportunities for white Americans while keeping African Americans out of the middle class.

“There did not need to be a ‘no coloreds’ sign for hotels, restaurants, pools, parks, housing complexes, schools, and jobs to be segregated across the North as well,” wrote Theoharis and her co-editor Professor Brian Purnell of Bowdoin College.

In the podcast, Theoharis shows how African-Americans have faced discrimination in everything from pre-Civil War legal codes in New York, to 20th-century government programs like Social Security and the G.I. bill. She and Harpaz also discuss the ways in which the legacy of these racist policies persist today in public education, the criminal justice system, and other aspects of American society.

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Brian H. Williams, "The Bodies Keep Coming: Dispatches from a Black Trauma Surgeon on Racism, Violence, and How We Heal" (Broadleaf Books, 2023) Feb 10, 2024

Trauma surgeon and professor Dr. Brian H. Williams has seen it all: gunshot wounds, stabbings, and traumatic brain injuries. In The Bodies Keep Coming: Dispatches from a Black Trauma Surgeon on Racism, Violence, and How We Heal(Broadleaf Books, 2023), Williams ushers us into the trauma bay, where the wounds of a national emergency amass.

As a Harvard-trained physician, Williams learned to keep his head down and his scalpel ready. As a Black man, he learned to swallow the rage when patients told him to take out the trash. Just days after the tragic police shootings of two Black men, Williams tried to save the lives of police officers shot in Dallas in the deadliest incident for US law enforcement since 9/11. Thrust into the spotlight in a nation that loves feel-good stories about heroism more than hard truths about racism, Williams came to rethink everything he thought he knew about medicine, injustice, and what true healing looks like.

Now, in raw and intimate detail, Williams narrates not only the events of that night in 2016, but the grief and anger of a Black doctor on the front lines of trauma care. Working in the physician-writer tradition of Atul Gawande and Damon Tweedy, Williams diagnoses the roots of the violence that plagues us. He draws a through line between white supremacy, gun violence, and the bodies he tries to revive, and he trains his surgeon's gaze on the structural ills that manifest themselves in the bodies of his patients. What if racism is a feature of our healthcare system, not a bug? What if profiting from racial inequality is exactly what it was designed to do?

Black and brown bodies will continue to be wracked by all types of violence, Williams argues, until something changes. Until we transform policy and law with compassion and care, the bodies will keep coming.

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Jennifer Sdunzik, "The Geography of Hate: The Great Migration through Small-Town America" (U Illinois Press, 2023) Feb 09, 2024

During the Great Migration, Black Americans sought new lives in midwestern small towns only to confront the pervasive efforts of white residents determined to maintain their area’s preferred cultural and racial identity. Jennifer Sdunzik explores this widespread phenomenon by examining how it played out in one midwestern community. Sdunzik merges state and communal histories, interviews and analyses of population data, and spatial and ethnographic materials to create a rich public history that reclaims Black contributions and history. She also explores the conscious and unconscious white actions that all but erased Black Americans--and the terror and exclusion used against them--from the history of many midwestern communities.

An innovative challenge to myth and perceived wisdom, The Geography of Hate: The Great Migration through Small-Town America(U Illinois Press, 2023) reveals the socioeconomic, political, and cultural forces that prevailed in midwestern towns and helps explain the systemic racism and endemic nativism that remain entrenched in American life.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Bryce Henson, "Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil" (U Texas Press, 2023) Feb 07, 2024

Known as Black Rome, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, is a predominantly Black city. The local art, food, and dance are closely linked to the population's African roots. Yet many Black Brazilian residents are politically and economically disenfranchised. Bryce Henson details a culture of resistance and activism that has emerged in response, expressed through hip-hop and the social relations surrounding it.

Based on years of ethnographic research, Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil(University of Texas Press, 2023) illuminates how Black hip-hop artists and their circles contest structures of anti-Black racism by creating safe havens and alternative social, cultural, and political systems that serve Black people. These artists valorize and empower marginalized Black peoples through song, aesthetics, media, visual art, and community action that emphasize diasporic connections, ancestrality, and Black identifications in opposition to the anti-Black Brazilian nation. In the process, Henson argues, the Salvador hip-hop scene has reinvigorated and reterritorialized a critical legacy of Black politicocultural resistance: the quilombo, maroon communities of Black fugitives who refused slavery as a way of life, gathered away from the spaces of their oppression, protected their communities, and nurtured Black life in all its possibilities.

Bryce Henson is an assistant professor of media, culture, and identity in the Department of Communication and Journalism and associate faculty in the Africana Studies Program at Texas A&M University.

Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Steven High, "Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence, and Class" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) Feb 07, 2024

Point Saint-Charles, a historically white working-class neighborhood with a strong Irish and French presence, and Little Burgundy, a multiracial neighborhood that is home to the city’s English-speaking Black community, face each other across Montreal’s Lachine Canal, once an artery around which work and industry in Montreal were clustered and by which these two communities were formed and divided.

In Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence, and Class (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022), Steven High challenges the deepening divergence of class and race analysis by recognizing the intimate relationship between capitalism, class struggles, and racial inequality. Drawing extensive interviews, a massive and varied archive of imagery, and original photography by David Lewis into a complex chorus, Steven High brings the two communities to life, tracing their history from their earliest years to their decline and their current reality. He extends the analysis of deindustrialization, often focused on single-industry towns, to cities that have seemingly made the post-industrial transition.

Steven High is an interdisciplinary oral and public historian with a strong interest in transnational approaches to working-class studies, forced migration, community-engaged research, oral history methodology and ethics, and living archives. He is a professor of History and founding member of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Calvin John Smiley, "Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition" (U California Press, 2023) Feb 07, 2024

In Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition (University of California Press, 2023), Calvin John Smiley explores the lives of people who were formerly incarcerated and the many daunting challenges they face. Those being released from prison must navigate the reentry process with diminished legal rights and amplified social stigmas, in a journey that is often confusing, complex, and precarious.

Calvin John Smiley is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College, City University of New York.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Todd Mildfelt and David D. Schafer, "Abolitionist of the Most Dangerous Kind: James Montgomery and His War on Slavery" (U Oklahoma Press, 2023) Feb 05, 2024

A controversial character largely known (as depicted in the movie Glory) as a Union colonel who led Black soldiers in the Civil War, James Montgomery (1814-71) waged a far more personal and radical war against slavery than popular history suggests. It is the true story of this militant abolitionist that Todd Mildfelt and David D. Schafer tell in Abolitionist of the Most Dangerous Kind: James Montgomery and His War on Slavery(U Oklahoma Press, 2023), summoning a life fiercely lived in struggle against the expansion of slavery into the West and during the Civil War.

This book follows a harrowing path through the turbulent world of the 1850s and 1860s as Montgomery, with the fervor of an Old Testament prophet, inflicts destructive retribution on Southern slaveholders wherever he finds them, crossing paths with notable abolitionists John Brown and Harriet Tubman along the way. During the tumultuous years of "Bleeding Kansas," he became a guerilla chieftain of the antislavery vigilantes known as Jayhawkers. When the war broke out in 1861, Montgomery led a regiment of white troops who helped hundreds of enslaved people in Missouri reach freedom in Kansas. Drawing on regimental records in the National Archives, the authors provide new insights into the experiences of African American men who served in Montgomery's next regiment, the Thirty-Fourth United States Colored Troops (formerly Second South Carolina Infantry).

Montgomery helped enslaved men and women escape via one of the least-explored underground railways in the nation, from Arkansas and Missouri through Kansas and Nebraska. With support of abolitionists in Massachusetts, he spearheaded resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act in Kansas. And, when war came, he led Black soldiers in striking at the very heart of the Confederacy. His full story thus illuminates the actions of both militant abolitionists and the enslaved people fighting to destroy the peculiar institution.

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Murray Forman and Mark V. Campbell, "Hip Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production" (Intellect, 2023) Feb 04, 2024

Despite the vast popularity and cultural influence of hip-hop, efforts to archive its history are still in fairly early stages. Hip-Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production (Intellect, 2023), edited by Mark V. Campbell and Murray Forman, focuses on the cultural and political aspects of those undertakings. It addresses practical aspects, including methods of collection, curation, preservation, and digitization, and critically analyzes institutional power, community engagement, urban economics, public access, and the ideological implications of hip-hop culture’s enduring tensions with dominant social values. A wide swath of hip-hop culture is covered by the contributors, including dance, graffiti, clothing, and battle rap.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

83 'til Infinity: 40 Years of Hip-Hop in the Ottawa–Gatineau Region exhibit at Ottawa Art Gallery
Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool
Sarah Baker (Google Scholar profile)
Marion Leonard (university profile)
Les Roberts (university profile)
Sara Cohen (university profile)

Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

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George Fisher, "Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America's War on Drugs" (Oxford UP, 2024) Feb 03, 2024

George Fisher, the Judge John Crown Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, just released his new book Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America’s Drug War, with Oxford University Press. George has been teaching and writing in the realms of evidence, prosecution practice, and criminal legal history since 1995. He began practice as a prosecutor in Massachusetts and later taught at the law schools of Boston College, Harvard, and Yale. Beware Euphoria is the most recent among a slew of other books, articles, and essays that he’s published over the years, and perhaps the most contrarian. In this interview, George discusses his research methods and how he came to the conclusion that the history of America’s drug war, while racially motivated, was not meant to target minorities, but protect the morals and health of America’s white youth.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

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Marc Arsell Robinson, "Washington State Rising: Black Power on Campus in the Pacific Northwest" (NYU Press, 2023) Feb 02, 2024

In the late 1960s, as the United States was wracked by protests, assassinations, and political unrest, students in Washington State seized the moment.

In Washington State Rising: Black Power on Campus in the Pacific Northwest(NYU Press, 2023), California State University, Bernardino, history professor Marc Robinson tells the story of African American students at Washington State University and the University of Washington, and how their activism transformed their campuses in from 1967 thru the early 1970s. By founding Black Student Unions and engaging in various forms of direct action, student Black Power activists at these two campuses confronted racism and inequality both on campus and in the surrounding cities of Seattle and Pullman. Robinson also describes how the very different contexts of the two campuses - one in a city with a politically active Black community, the other in an overwhelmingly white, rural, small town - shaped activist strategies and outcomes. While many histories of student activism in the 1960s focus on Berkeley and Columbia, Washington State Rising makes a strong case for looking at less well studied college protests to understand both Black history in the West and as a window into a tumultuous era in American history.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and is the Assistant Director of the American Society for Environmental History.

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The Culture Trap, with Sociologist Derron Wallace (EF, JP) Feb 01, 2024

In this episode, Elizabeth and John talk with Derron Wallace, sociologist of education and Brandeis colleague, about his new book The Culture Trap, which explores "ethnic expectations" for Caribbean schoolchildren in New York and London. His work starts with the basic puzzle that while black Caribbean schoolchildren in New York are often considered as "high-achieving," in London, they have been, conversely thought to be "chronically underachieving." Yet in each case the main cause -- of high achievement in New York and low achievement in London -- is said to be cultural. We discuss the concept of "ethnic expectations" and the ways it can have negative effects even when the expectations themselves are positive, and the dense intertwining of race, class, nation, colonial status, and gender, and the travels of the concept of culture in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Mentioned in the episode:

The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities Report [the Sewell Report] (2021)
The Moynihan Report (1965)
Georg Lukacs, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat" (1923)
Diane Reay, "What Would a Socially Just Educational System Look Like?" (2012)
Bernard Coard, How the Caribbean Child is made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System
Steve McQueen, Small Axe, "Education," (2020)
Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (2019)
B. Brian Forster, I Don't Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (2020)
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "Adieu Culture: A New Duty Arises" (2003)
David Simon's TV show The Wire (and also Lean on Me, and To Sir, with Love and with major props from Derron, Top Boy)
Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle (1994)

Listen and Read

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Black Women, Ivory Tower: Revealing the Lies of White Supremacy in American Education Feb 01, 2024

Today’s book is: Black Women, Ivory Tower: Revealing the Lies of White Supremacy in American Education (Broadleaf Books, 2024), by Dr. Jasmine L. Harris, which is an exploration of what it means to be a Black woman in higher education. Dr. Jasmine Harris shares her own experiences attempting to be a Vassar girl and reckoning with a lack of legacy and agency, while examining the day-to-day impacts on Black women as individuals, and the longer-term consequences to their professional lives, and the generational costs to entire families. Trial and error has been required of Black students to navigate systems of discrimination and disadvantage. But this book now offers useful support, illuminating the community of Black women dealing with similar issues. The author's story is not unusual, nor are her interactions anomalies. Black Women, Ivory Tower explores why.

Our guest is: Dr. Jasmine L. Harris, who is associate professor of African American Studies and coordinator of the African American Studies Program in the Department of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas, San Antonio. A rising voice in the study of Black lives in the US, Dr. Harris's research and teaching focus on the experiences of Black people in predominantly white schools, specifically the social, physical, and economic impacts of their presence there. She has been published in the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Houston Chronicle, Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, Women's Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also be interested in:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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Maryam Kashani, "Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival" (Duke UP, 2023) Jan 31, 2024

From the Black Power movement and state surveillance to Silicon Valley and gentrification, Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival(Duke UP, 2023) examines how multiracial Muslim communities in the San Francisco Bay Area survive and flourish within and against racial capitalist, carceral, and imperial logics. Weaving expansive histories, peoples, and geographies together in an ethnographic screenplay of cinematic scenes, Maryam Kashani demonstrates how sociopolitical forces and geopolitical agendas shape Muslim ways of knowing and being. Throughout, Kashani argues that contemporary Islam emerges from the specificities of the Bay Area, from its landscapes and infrastructures to its Muslim liberal arts college, mosques, and prison courtyards. Theorizing the Medina by the Bay as a microcosm of socioeconomic, demographic, and political transformations in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, Kashani resituates Islam as liberatory and abolitionist theory, theology, and praxis for all those engaged in struggle.

Maryam Kashani is a filmmaker and associate professor in Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is an affiliate with Anthropology, Media and Cinema Studies, the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Her films and video installations have been shown at film festivals, universities, and museums internationally and include things lovely and dangerous still (2003), Best in the West (2006), las callecitas y la cañada (2009), and Signs of Remarkable History (2016); she is currently working on two film duets with composer/musician Wadada Leo Smith that examine the ongoing relationships between the struggles for Black freedom, creative music, and spirituality. Kashani is also in the leadership collective of Believers Bail Out, a community-led effort to bailout Muslims in pretrial and immigration incarceration towards abolition.

Najwa Mayer is an interdisciplinary cultural scholar of race, gender, sexuality, and Islam in/and the United States, working at the intersections of politics, aesthetics, and critical theory. She is currently a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University.

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Colorblindness and the Classics: A Conversation with Andre Archie Jan 30, 2024

Why has Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of a color-blind society suffered so many recent setbacks? Classical philosopher Andre Archie argues that we need to bring back King's vision, and points to the ways the Classical ideas of virtues can inform our modern understanding of virtue as separate from race. Along the way, the conversation covers recent events such as Claudine Gay's dismissal from Harvard, diversity training and DEI, and the ways in which the Black tradition is an integral part of the Western Tradition.

Dr. Andre Archie is an associate Professor of Ancient Greek Philosophy at Colorado State University, who specializes in the History of Ancient Greek Philosophy and Ancient Greek Political Philosophy. He is the author of The Virtue of Color-Blindness (Regnery Publishing, 2024). His op-eds include "We should fight for a color-blind society — not one separated by race" and "What Makes the Classics Worth Studying," referenced at the end of the episode as responding to concerns about ridding the Classics of 'white-ness.'

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Hajar Yazdiha, "The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement" (Princeton UP, 2023) Jan 30, 2024

In the post-civil rights era, wide-ranging groups have made civil rights claims that echo those made by Black civil rights activists of the 1960s, from people with disabilities to women's rights activists and LGBTQ coalitions. Increasingly since the 1980s, white, right-wing social movements, from family values coalitions to the alt-right, now claim the collective memory of civil rights to portray themselves as the newly oppressed minorities. The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement (Princeton UP, 2023) reveals how, as these powerful groups remake collective memory toward competing political ends, they generate offshoots of remembrance that distort history and threaten the very foundations of multicultural democracy.

In the revisionist memories of white conservatives, gun rights activists are the new Rosa Parks, antiabortion activists are freedom riders, and antigay groups are the defenders of Martin Luther King's Christian vision. Drawing on a wealth of evidence ranging from newspaper articles and organizational documents to television transcripts, press releases, and focus groups, Hajar Yazdiha documents the consequential reimagining of the civil rights movement in American political culture from 1980 to today. She shows how the public memory of King and civil rights has transformed into a vacated, sanitized collective memory that evades social reality and perpetuates racial inequality.

Powerful and persuasive, The Struggle for the People's King demonstrates that these oppositional uses of memory fracture our collective understanding of who we are, how we got here, and where we go next.

Hajar Yazdiha is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and faculty affiliate of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California. She is also a faculty affiliate of the Center for Security, Race, and Rights at Rutgers University. Her research examines the mechanisms underlying the politics of inclusion and exclusion as they shape intergroup boundaries, ethno-racial identities, and intergroup relations. This work crosses subfields of race and ethnicity, migration, social movements, culture, and law using mixed methods including interview, survey, historical, and computational text analysis.

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Damien Sojoyner, "Against the Carceral Archive: The Art of Black Liberatory Practice" (Fordham UP, 2023) Jan 28, 2024

Against the Carceral Archive: The Art of Black Liberatory Practice(Fordham UP, 2023) is a meditation upon what author Damien M. Sojoyner calls the “carceral archival project,” offering a distillation of critical, theoretical, and activist work of prison abolitionists over the past three decades. Working from collections at the Southern California Library (Black Panthers, LA Chapter; the Coalition Against Police Abuse; Urban Policy Research Institute; Mothers Reclaiming Our Children; and the collection of geographer Clyde Woods), it builds upon theories of the archive to examine carcerality as the dominant mode of state governance over Black populations in the United States since the 1960s.

Each chapter takes up an element of the carceral archive and its destabilization, destruction, and containment of Black life: its notion of the human and the production of “pejorative blackness,” the intimate connection between police and military in the protection of racial capitalism and its fossil fuel–based economy, the role of technology in counterintelligence, and counterinsurgency logics. Importantly, each chapter also emphasizes the carceral archive’s fundamental failure to destroy “Black communal logics” and radical Black forms of knowledge production, both of which contest the carceral archive and create other forms of life in its midst.

Concluding with a statement on the reckoning with the radical traditions of thought and being which liberation requires, Sojoyner offers a compelling argument for how the centering of Blackness enables a structuring of the mind that refuses the violent exploitative tendencies of Western epistemological traditions as viable life-affirming practices.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Ethel Morgan Smith, "Path to Grace: Reimagining the Civil Rights Movement" (UP of Mississippi, 2023) Jan 26, 2024

The civil rights movement is often defined narrowly, relegated to the 1950s and 1960s, and populated by such colossal figures as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Many forget that the movement was bigger than the figures on the frontline and that it grew from intellectual and historical efforts that continue today. In Path to Grace: Reimagining the Civil Rights Movement (UP of Mississippi, 2023), Ethel Morgan Smith shines a light on unsung heroes of the civil rights movement, the ordinary citizens working behind the scenes to make an impact in their communities.

Through eleven original interviews with teachers, parents hosting fundraisers for civil rights workers, volunteers helping with voter registration, and more, Smith highlights the contributions these figures made to the civil rights movement. Some of these brave warriors worked at the elbows of icons while others were clearing new paths, all passing through history without wide recognition. Path to Grace introduces readers to new witnesses and largely neglected voices. Also included are interviews with such esteemed but less studied figures as writer Gloria Naylor, poet Nikki Giovanni, fashion designer Ann Lowe, and educator Constance Curry.

This work of social change situates these narratives in both the past and present. Indeed, many of Smith’s subjects, such as Emma Bruce, John Canty, Andrea Lee, Ann Lowe, and Blanche Virginia Franklin Moore, can trace their ancestry back to enslavement, which provides a direct chain of narrators and firmly plants the roots of the civil rights movement in the country’s foundation. Through historical contextualization and an analysis of contemporary sociopolitical events, Path to Grace celebrates the contributions of some of the nameless individuals, generation after generation, who worked to make the United States better for all its citizens.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a Doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Nicholas Radburn, "Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2023) Jan 24, 2024

During the eighteenth century, Britain’s slave trade exploded in size. Formerly a small and geographically constricted business, the trade had, by the eve of the American Revolution, grown into an Atlantic-wide system through which fifty thousand men, women, and children were enslaved every year.

In Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale UP, 2023), Nicholas Radburn explains how thousands of slaving merchants in Africa, Britain, and the British Americas collectively created this cancerous system by devising highly efficient, but also violent, new business methods. African brokers developed commercial techniques that facilitated the enslavement and sale of millions of people. Britons invented shipping methods that quelled enslaved people’s constant resistance on the Middle Passage. And American slave traders formulated brutal techniques through which shiploads of people could be quickly sold to a variety of colonial buyers. Truly Atlantic-wide in its vision, this study shows how the slave trade became one of the most important phenomena in world history and dragged millions of people into the trade’s terrible vortex.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Kareem R. Muhammad, "The Fight for Black Empowerment in the USA: America’s Last Hope" (Routledge, 2023) Jan 22, 2024

Dr. Kareem Muhammad has a new book that focuses on the role of Black voters in the United States – specifically in their power as participants in democracy. In many ways, this is a “love story to the Black community” in the U.S. The book traces the sustained electoral power of Black voters, and teases at the fissures within this significant bloc of voters. Muhammad pays particular attention to what it looks like when policies that are important to Black voters are passed and implemented, and how this process reflects the coalition strength of this particular voting bloc. The research also notes that, historically, the Black vote has not really been taken into consideration as an important and vital bloc of voters, and thus less attention is paid to these voters by either party. But the research also notes that the Black vote is, in fact, decisive in supporting a political coalition that then puts into place policies and legislation that this community of voters wants to see established—like Reconstruction, like the Civil Rights agenda in the 1960s, like the efforts to protect democracy now.

The Fight for Black Empowerment in the USA: America’s Last Hope (Routledge, 2023) focuses on just that—the power that individuals have, especially when grouped together, to impact elections, political agendas, and elected officials in office. But this pursuit, of political power and strength within the African American community, is also set in the historical and contemporary context of white supremacy in the United States. This is important to understand since it also highlights what Muhammad refers to as “the bounds of power” within the U.S. It is vitally important to understand the contours of power and what that means and how it is constituted in order to explore empowerment, especially black empowerment. The impetus behind the research and the book was to see if there was collaboration between the black voting bloc and the elected officials they have supported in the contemporary period, specifically the Democratic party and Democratic presidents. But one of the key findings in the research is that there are also gendered differences within the African American community and among African American voters in regard to support and engagement. Diving into popular culture, Muhammad traces these divides, highlighting the sexism, homophobia, and patriarchy that often comes through these cultural artifacts. The research also exposes the discomfort and resentment that some men have with the increased power and influence of black women.

The Fight for Black Empowerment in the USA: America’s Last Hope is a complex analysis, including an assessment of political power in the United States, understandings of how culture interacts with positions within communities, tensions around gender and power, and the collaborations between different political entities, voting blocs, and elected officials. The concluding ideas highlight the particularly vital role that Black Americans, especially Black women, have in protecting democracy in the United States, especially as part of the Democratic Party coalition.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Cassander L. Smith, "Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic" (LSU Press, 2023) Jan 21, 2024

Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic(LSU Press, 2023) by Dr. Cassander L. Smith examines the means through which people of African descent embodied tenets of respectability as a coping strategy to navigate enslavement and racial oppression in the early Black Atlantic world. The term “respectability politics” refers to the way members of a minoritized population adopt the customs and manners of a dominant culture in order to gain visibility and combat negative stereotypes about their subject group. Today respectability politics can be seen in how those within and outside Black communities police the behaviour of Black celebrities, critique protest movements, and celebrate accomplishments by people of African descent who break racial barriers.

To study the origins of the complicated relationship between race and respectability, Dr. Smith shows that early American literatures reveal Black communities engaging with issues of respectability from the very beginning of the transatlantic slave trade. Concerns about character and comportment influenced the literary production of Black Atlantic communities, particularly in the long eighteenth century. Uncovering the central importance of respectability as a theme shaping the literary development of cultures throughout the early Black Atlantic, Smith illuminates the mechanics of respectability politics in a range of texts, including poetry, letters, and life writing by Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and expatriates on the west coast of Africa in Sierra Leone.

Through these early Black texts, Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic considers respectability politics as a malleable strategy that has both energized and suppressed Black cultures for centuries.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Black and Queer on Campus Jan 18, 2024

Today’s book is: Black and Queer on Campus (NYU Press, 2023) by Michael P. Jeffries, which offers an inside look at what life is like for LGBTQ college students on campuses across the United States. Dr. Jeffries shows that Black and queer college students often struggle to find safe spaces and a sense of belonging when they arrive on campus. Drawing on his interviews with students from over a dozen colleges, Dr. Jeffries provides a much-needed perspective on the specific challenges Black LGBTQ students face and the ways they overcome them. We learn through these intimate portraits that many of the most harmful stereotypes and threats to black queer safety continue to haunt this generation of students. We also learn how students build queer identities. Black and Queer on Campus sheds light on the oft-hidden lives of Black LGBTQ students, and how educational institutions can better serve them. It highlights the quiet beauty and joy of Black queer social life, and the bonds of friendship that sustain the students.

Our guest is: Dr. Michael P. Jeffries, who is Dean of Academic Affairs, Class of 1949 Professor in Ethics, and Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. He is the author of Behind the Laughs: Community and Inequality in Comedy; Paint the White House Black: Barack Obama and the Meaning of Race in America; Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop; and Black and Queer on Campus. He has published dozens of essays and works of criticism in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and The Boston Globe, and has been interviewed by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and NPR.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and show host of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also be interested in:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. The Academic Life podcast is currently listened to in more than 150 countries. You can help support the show’s mission of democratizing education and sharing the hidden curriculum by downloading episodes, and by telling a friend—because knowledge is for everybody. You’ll find all 190+ Academic Life episodes archived here.

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Scott Gac, "Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America" (Cambridge UP, 2023) Jan 18, 2024

Scott Gac's Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America (Cambridge UP, 2023) investigates one of history's most violent undertakings: The United States of America. People the world over consider violence in the United States as measurably different than that which troubles the rest of the globe, citing reasons including gun culture, the American West, Hollywood, the death penalty, economic inequality, rampant individualism, and more. This compelling examination of American violence explains a political culture of violence from the American Revolution to the Gilded Age, illustrating how physical force, often centered on racial hierarchy, sustained the central tenets of American liberal government. It offers an important story of nationhood, told through the experiences and choices of civilians, Indians, politicians, soldiers, and the enslaved, providing historical context for understanding how violence has shaped the United States from its inception.

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Miles P. Grier, "Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery" (U Virginia Press, 2023) Jan 15, 2024

In his new book Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery (University of Virginia Press, 2023), Miles P. Grier argues that blackness in Othello and the texts that it influenced should be understood as deeply material, transferable, and unstable. The defining of alphanumerical and dramatic characters, while represented as settled, was anything but. As Miles writes in the book, “Before the racial categories of high scientific racism were elaborated in the late eighteenth century, a functional white interpretive community was being forged through the shared exercise of interpretive authority over inky black figures. The stage offered a place in which control over symbols and their interpretation could be celebrated as if it were already a fait accompli, rather than a tense, ongoing battle.”

Miles Parks Grier is Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. Miles’s articles have appeared in The William and Mary Quarterly, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Shakespeare/Text: Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies, Editing and Performance. Along with Cassander L. Smith and Nicholas Jones, Miles co-edited Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave, 2018). Inkface is his first monograph.

John Yargo is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. He has published in Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies.

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Kathryn Mathers, "White Saviorism and Popular Culture: Imagined Africa as a Space for American Salvation" (Routledge, 2022) Jan 14, 2024

In White Saviorism and Popular Culture: Imagined Africa as a Space for American Salvation(Routledge, 2022), Kathryn Mathers interrogates the white savior industrial complex by exploring how America continues to present an imagined Africa as a space for its salvation in the 21st century.

Through close readings of multiple mediated sites where Americans imagine Africa, White Saviorism and Popular Culture examines how an era of new media technologies is reshaping encounters between Africans and westerners in the 21st century, especially as Africans living and experiencing the consequences of western imaginings are also mobilizing the same mediated spaces. Kathryn Mathers emphasizes that the articulation of different forms of humanitarian engagement between America and Africa marks the necessity to interrogate the white savior industrial complex and the ways Africa is being asked to fulfill American needs as life in the United States becomes increasingly intolerable for Black Americans. Drawing on case studies from Savior Barbie (@barbiesavior) to Black Panther and Black is King, Mathers posits that global imperialism not only still reigns, but that it also disguises white supremacy by outsourcing Black American emancipation onto an imagined Africa.

This is crucial reading for courses on the cultural politics of representation, particularly in relation to race, social media and popular culture, as well as anyone interested in issues of representation in the global humanitarianism industry.

Bryant Scott is a professor in the Liberal Arts Department at Texas A&M University at Qatar.

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Emily Brooks, "Gotham’s War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II-Era New York City" (UNC Press, 2023) Jan 13, 2024

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, members of the NYPD had worked to enforce partisan political power rather than focus on crime. That changed when La Guardia took office in 1934 and shifted the city's priorities toward liberal reform. La Guardia's approach to low-level policing anticipated later trends in law enforcement, including "broken windows" theory and "stop and frisk" policy. Police officers worked to preserve urban order by controlling vice, including juvenile delinquency, prostitution, gambling, and the "disorderly" establishments that officials believed housed these activities.

This mode of policing was central to La Guardia's influential vision of urban governance, but it was met with resistance from the Black New Yorkers, youth, and working-class women it primarily targeted. The mobilization for World War II introduced new opportunities for the NYPD to intensify policing and criminalize these groups with federal support. In the 1930s these communities were framed as perils to urban order; during the militarized war years, they became a supposed threat to national security itself.

In Gotham’s War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II-Era New York City (UNC Press, 2023), Emily M. Brooks recasts the evolution of urban policing by revealing that the rise of law-and-order liberalism was inseparable from the surveillance, militarism, and nationalism of war.

Jeffrey Lamson is a PhD student in world history at Northeastern University. His research focuses on the history of police technology, its relationship to the history of police reform, and its place at the intersection of U.S. domestic policing and global counterinsurgency.

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Hajar Yazdiha, "The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement" (Princeton UP, 2023) Jan 12, 2024

In the post-civil rights era, wide-ranging groups have made civil rights claims that echo those made by Black civil rights activists of the 1960s, from people with disabilities to women's rights activists and LGBTQ coalitions. Increasingly since the 1980s, white, right-wing social movements, from family values coalitions to the alt-right, now claim the collective memory of civil rights to portray themselves as the newly oppressed minorities. The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement(Princeton UP, 2023) reveals how, as these powerful groups remake collective memory toward competing political ends, they generate offshoots of remembrance that distort history and threaten the very foundations of multicultural democracy.

In the revisionist memories of white conservatives, gun rights activists are the new Rosa Parks, antiabortion activists are freedom riders, and antigay groups are the defenders of Martin Luther King's Christian vision. Drawing on a wealth of evidence ranging from newspaper articles and organizational documents to television transcripts, press releases, and focus groups, Hajar Yazdiha documents the consequential reimagining of the civil rights movement in American political culture from 1980 to today. She shows how the public memory of King and civil rights has transformed into a vacated, sanitized collective memory that evades social reality and perpetuates racial inequality.

Powerful and persuasive, The Struggle for the People's King demonstrates that these oppositional uses of memory fracture our collective understanding of who we are, how we got here, and where we go next.

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Patrick R. O'Malley, "The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy Across the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century" (U Virginia Press, 2023) Jan 11, 2024

Patrick R. O'Malley's book The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy Across the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century (U Virginia Press, 2023) analyzes the role of Irishness in nineteenth-century constructions of race and racialization, both in the British Isles and in the United States. Focusing on the years immediately preceding the American Civil War, Patrick O’Malley interrogates the bardic verse epic, the gothic tale, the realist novel, the stage melodrama, and the political polemic to ask how many mid-nineteenth-century Irish nationalist writers with liberationist politics declined to oppose race-based chattel enslavement in the United States and the structures of white supremacy that underpinned and ultimately outlived it. Many of the writers whose work O’Malley examines drew specifically upon the image of Black suffering to generate support for their arguments for Irish political enfranchisement; yet in doing so, they frequently misrepresented the fundamental differences between Irish and Black experience under the regimes of white supremacy, which has had profound consequences.

Patrick R. O'Malley is Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he teaches Irish and British literature of the long nineteenth century and critical theory. He is the author of two previous books: Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2006, and Liffey and Lethe: Paramnesiac History in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Ireland, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2017 and won the Robert Rhodes Prize for books on literature from the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University

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Kami Fletcher and Ashley Towle, "Grave History: Death, Race, and Gender in Southern Cemeteries" (U Georgia Press, 2023) Jan 11, 2024

Kami Fletcher and Ashley Towle’s edited collection Grave History: Death, Race and Gender in Southern Cemeteries(University of Georgia Press, 2023), demonstrates how Jim Crow laws extended into the realms of the dead. Cemeteries throughout the Southern states either relegated Black funerals to the margins in existing cemeteries or excluded the community altogether, often citing the excuse that inclusion would create unrest amongst white lot-holders, and disturb the peace of the cemetery. Burial spaces become demonstrative of oppression, but could also signal resistance to oppression. This impressive text provides an essential primer in African American cemetery history and illustrates how the Black community created frameworks of community support to ensure that homegoing services were dignified and affordable. Chapters also explore the historic importance of African American burial grounds, where grave markers are uniquely important to the recreation of otherwise poorly documented communities. The chapters also lean into the problems intrinsic to interpreting the material culture of oppression, where historic Black identities risk becoming fixed within narratives of victimhood.

The book includes workshop guidance for teachers, for use with students at all stages in the education process.

Dr Julie Rugg is Director of the Cemetery Research Group, University of York, UK.

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Darnise C. Martin, "Beyond Christianity: African Americans in a New Thought Church" (NYU Press, 2005) Jan 11, 2024

Darnise C. Martin's Beyond Christianity: African Americans in a New Thought Church (NYU Press, 2005) draws on rich ethnographic work in a Religious Science church in Oakland, California, to illuminate the ways a group of African Americans has adapted a religion typically thought of as white to fit their needs and circumstances. This predominantly African American congregation is an anomalous phenomenon for both Religious Science and African American religious studies. It stands at the intersection of New Thought doctrine, characterized by personal empowerment teachings,and a culturally familiar liturgical style reminiscent of Black Pentecostals and Black Spiritualists. This group challenges oversimplified concepts of the Black church experience and broadens the concept of Black religion outside the boundaries of Christianity—raising questions about what it means to be an African American congregation, and about the nature of blackness itself. Beyond Christianity adds a new dimension to the scholarship on Black religion.

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Jack Glazier, "Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race" (MSU Press, 2020) Jan 04, 2024

Paul Radin was one of the founding generation of American cultural anthropologists: A student of Franz Boas, and famed ethnographer of the Winnebago. Yet little is known about Radin's life. A leftist who was persecuted by the FBI and who lived for several years outside of the United States, and a bohemian who couldn't keep an academic job, there are many chapters in Radin's life which have not been told.

In Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race(Michigan State University Press, 2020), Jack Glazier tells the story of Radin's work at Fisk University in the late 1920s. During his three-year appointment, he and graduate student Andrew Polk Watson collected autobiographies and religious conversion narratives from elderly African Americans. That innovative, subject-centered research complemented like-minded scholarship by African American historians reacting against the disparaging portrayals of black people by white historians. In this book, Glazier describes Radin's commitment to documenting people's own stories as they told them and his respect for them as people as a form of 'radical humanism' and sets Paul Radin's findings within the broader context of Boasian anti-racism, African American culture, and his career-defining work among the Winnebago.

In this episode of the podcast Jack Glazier talks to host Alex Golub about Radin and the Boasians, the influence of Charles S. Johnson at Fisk, and how contemporary activists might view the strengths and limitations of Radin's radical humanism.

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

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Laura Briggs, "Taking Children: A History of American Terror" (U California Press, 2020) Dec 31, 2023

Laura Briggs’s Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press 2020) is a forceful and captivating book that readers won’t be able to put down, and that listeners from all sort of backgrounds will definitely want to hear more about. Weaving together histories of Black communities (in the US and the Americas more broadly), Native Americans, and multiple Latin Americans countries, Briggs tells us how taking of children has been used as a strategy to terrorize communities that demand social justice and change. This book, timely as no other, asks readers to question the narrative that portrays taking children as something that is done in the benefit of the child, and instead to see it as a strategy that seeks to control and dominate communities that are deem dangerous to the social order. As Prof. Briggs tells us by the end of the interview, in this summer of racial reckoning the BLM movement has asked to eliminate the foster care system for this has been another vehicle for the policing and criminalization of African American communities in the United States. This demand has everything to do with the long history of talking children that is so thoroughly documented in this book.

Yet this is not only a “History of American Terror” as the title suggests, it is also a history about how individuals, families, communities and organizations have resisted this terrorizing strategy. Make no mistake: this is not a story with a happy ending, still, it is one that teaches us that in our past lies both the ghostly hauntings that explain why taking children has been a strategy used for terror, but also why therein we can find the seeds to resistance and transformation. Definitely a must for these troubling and convoluted times.

Bonus: Prof. Briggs’s son makes a short but hilarious appearance in our conversation. We have decided not to delete this portion of the interview because it demonstrates one of Prof. Briggs main scholarly arguments: the distinction between the private and public is illusory.

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Laurent Dubois, “The Banjo: America’s African Instrument” (Harvard UP, 2016) Dec 30, 2023

Most scholars of popular music use songs, artists, and clubs as the key texts and sites in their exploration of the social, cultural, political, and economic effects of music. Laurent Dubois‘ new book looks at the history of an instrument, the banjo, to help us better understand American history and culture. Dubois also helps readers understand the banjo as part of an Afro-Atlantic musical heritage.

In The Banjo: Americas African Instrument (Harvard University Press, 2015), Dubois examines how the banjo came into existence in the Americas and what it reveals about debates about American culture. Dubois book starts in Africa with a wide range of instruments that shaped the banjo. He then follows these instruments as they cross the Atlantic in the Middle Passage, winding up in the Caribbean and in North America. Sifting through travelers accounts and documents in archives, Dubois shows how the banjo brought together African peoples in the Americas, creating a familiar but new instrument and sound. He describes the banjo as the product of parallel development in which many enslaved musicians deployed similar instrument-making strategies to create what we now know as the banjo.

The story, however, does not stop there. The banjo came to represent authentic Africa American and American culture and became a key symbol in abolitionist rhetoric and minstrelsy. As a result, the banjo was not simply an instrument but a powerful marker of identity within American culture. Dubois traces how the banjo played a significant role in jazz, country, bluegrass, and folk music, symbolizing a diverse set of values and politics. From the minstrel Joel Walker Sweeney to the political activist Pete Seeger, the history of the banjo is the history of American popular culture.

Laurent Dubois is Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History at Duke University. He is also the author of Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution and Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. More information about his work on the banjo can be found at Banjology and Musical Passage.

Richard Schur, Professor of English at Drury University, is the host for this podcast.

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Ralph H. Craig, "Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner" (Eerdmans, 2023) Dec 29, 2023

When Tina Turner reclaimed her throne as the Queen of Rock 'n' Roll in the 1980s, she attributed her comeback to one thing: the wisdom and power she found in Buddhism. Her spiritual transformation is often overshadowed by the rags-to-riches arc of her life story. But in this groundbreaking biography, Ralph H. Craig III traces Tina's journey from the Black Baptist church to Buddhism and situates her at the vanguard of large-scale movements in religion and pop culture.

Paying special attention to the diverse metaphysical beliefs that shaped her spiritual life, Craig untangles Tina's Soka Gakkai Buddhist foundation; her incorporation of New Age ideas popularized in '60s counterculture; and her upbringing in a Black Baptist congregation, alongside the influences of her grandmothers' disciplinary and mystical sensibilities. Through critical engagement with Tina's personal life and public brand, Craig sheds light on how popular culture has been used as a vehicle for authentic religious teaching. Scholars and fans alike will find Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner(Eerdmans, 2023) as enlightening as the iconic singer herself.

When Tina Turner reclaimed her throne as the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll in the 1980s, she attributed her comeback to one thing: the wisdom and power she found in Buddhism. Her spiritual transformation is often overshadowed by the rags-to-riches arc of her life story. But in this groundbreaking biography, Ralph H. Craig III traces Tina’s journey from the Black Baptist church to Buddhism and situates her at the vanguard of large-scale movements in religion and pop culture.

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Claudia Smith Brinson, "Stories of Struggle: The Clash over Civil Rights in South Carolina" (U South Carolina Press, 2020) Dec 29, 2023

In Stories of Struggle: The Clash over Civil Rights in South Carolina (U South Carolina Press, 2020), longtime journalist Claudia Smith Brinson details the lynchings, beatings, bombings, cross burnings, death threats, arson, and venomous hatred that black South Carolinians endured―as well as the astonishing courage, devotion, dignity, and compassion of those who risked their lives for equality.

Through extensive research and interviews with more than one hundred fifty civil rights activists, many of whom had never shared their stories with anyone, Brinson chronicles twenty pivotal years of petitioning, preaching, picketing, boycotting, marching, and holding sit-ins. Participants' use of nonviolent direct action altered the landscape of civil rights in South Carolina and reverberated throughout the South.

These firsthand accounts include those of the unsung petitioners who risked their lives by supporting Summerton's Briggs v. Elliot, a lawsuit that led to the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision; the thousands of students who were arrested and jailed in 1960 for protests in Rock Hill, Orangeburg, Denmark, Columbia, and Sumter; and the black female employees and leaders who defied a governor and his armed troops during the 1969 hospital strike in Charleston.

Brinson also highlights contributions made by remarkable but lesser-known activists, including James M. Hinton Sr., president of the South Carolina Conference of Branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Thomas W. Gaither, Congress of Racial Equality field secretary and scout for the Freedom Rides; Charles F. McDew, a South Carolina State College student and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; and Mary Moultrie, grassroots leader of the 1969 hospital workers' strike.

These intimate stories of courage and conviction, both heartbreaking and inspiring, shine a light on the progress achieved by nonviolent civil rights activists while also revealing white South Carolinians' often violent resistance to change. Although significant racial disparities remain, the sacrifices of these brave men and women produced real progress―and hope for the future. For more information on this book, see storiesofstruggle.com

Matt Simmons is an Assistant Professor of History at Emmanuel University where he teaches course in U.S. and public history. His research interests focus on the intersection of labor and race in the twentieth-century American South. You can follow him on X @matthewfsimmons.

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D. B. Maroon, "Black Lives, American Love: Essays on Race and Resilience" (Lawrence Hill Books, 2023) Dec 28, 2023

In this hard-hitting collection of essays, D.B. Maroon presents a personal biography of America, Blackness, and racial politics with unflinching style, and delivers a relentless truth-telling on some of the country’s fiercest debates and most profound challenges.

From the birthplace of the Black Lives Matter movement to the murders of unarmed Black people, this essay collection invites readers to ask questions as much as it asks for accountability. Moving through debates on the 1619 Project to the rippling impact of resurgent white nationalism, the golden thread of each essay is the hopeful continuance of the Black community, as well as a call to greater truth as the first step toward reconciliation.

Intersectional, personal, and ultimately centered on truth, love, and perseverance, Black Lives, American Love: Essays on Race and Resilience (Lawrence Hill Books, 2023) details and tends to the fractures in American culture. It is a meditation on how we can all do more to secure America’s vastly beautiful possibilities for all its citizens, rather than a few.

D. B. Maroon is an expert on American culture, an anthropologist, and CEO of an urban research institute. Her essays have been published in The Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nation, and Self and Spirited: Affirming the Soul and Black Gay/Lesbian Identity. A committed public scholar, she's appeared in Bustle, Shape, Healthline, and Women's Health. She holds a PhD in anthropology from UC Santa Cruz.

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Joseph Vogel, "James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era" (U Illinois Press, 2018) Dec 28, 2023

By the 1980s, critics and the public alike considered James Baldwin irrelevant. Yet Baldwin remained an important, prolific writer until his death in 1987. Indeed, his work throughout the decade pushed him into new areas, in particular an expanded interest in the social and psychological consequences of popular culture and mass media. In his new book James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era(University of Illinois Press, 2018), Joseph Vogel offers the first in-depth look at Baldwin's dynamic final decade of work. Delving into the writer's creative endeavors, crucial essays and articles, and the impassioned polemic The Evidence of Things Not Seen, Vogel finds Baldwin as prescient and fearless as ever. Baldwin's sustained grappling with "the great transforming energy" of mass culture revealed his gifts for media and cultural criticism. It also brought him into the fray on issues ranging from the Reagan-era culture wars to the New South, from the deterioration of inner cities to the disproportionate incarceration of black youth, and from pop culture gender-bending to the evolving women's and gay rights movements. Astute and compelling, revives and redeems the final act of a great American writer.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Elena Schneider, "The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World" (UNC Press, 2018) Dec 27, 2023

Histories of the British occupation of Havana in 1762 have focused on imperial rivalries and the actions and decisions of European planters, colonial officials, and military officers. In her stunning revision, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Elena Schneider restores the central roles of enslaved Africans in all stages of the story. The relevance of the slave trade and the multiple and essential roles of African and African descended people in battle and in urban life emerge in this beautifully written account. In the aftermath, their valor and loyalty were omitted from contemporary accounts and the ensuing historiography. This book draws from a wide range of sources and multiple archives in a careful narrative that connects the Atlantic worlds of Spain, London, Havana, Kingston and the colonial United States, and zooms in on the enslaved individuals that made that world possible.

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Bryan McCann, "The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era" (U Alabama Press, 2017) Dec 26, 2023

On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Communication at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Bryan McCann (he/his)--Associate Professor of Communication at Louisiana State University--on a dope new work of cultural criticism The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era (University of Alabama Press, 2017). The Mark of Criminality positions the work of key gangsta rap artists--Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur--as well as the controversies their work produced, squarely within the law-and-order politics and popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s to reveal a profoundly complex period in American history when the meanings of crime and criminality were incredibly unstable. McCann argues that, among other well-circulated meanings, the mark of criminality was a source of power, credibility, and revenue. By understanding gangsta rap as a potent, if deeply imperfect, enactment of the mark of criminality, we can better understand how crime is always a site of struggle over meaning.

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Jordana M. Saggese, "The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader" (U California Press, 2021) Dec 26, 2023

In The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader (University of California Press, 2021), Jordana Moore Saggese provides the first comprehensive sourcebook on the artist, closing gaps that have until now limited the sustained study and definitive archiving of his work and its impact. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) burst onto the art scene in the summer of 1980 as one of approximately one hundred artists exhibiting at the 1980 Times Square Show in New York City. By 1982, at the age of twenty-one, Basquiat had solo exhibitions in galleries in Italy, New York, and Los Angeles. Basquiat's artistic career followed the rapid trajectory of Wall Street, which boomed from 1983 to 1987. In the span of just a few years, this Black boy from Brooklyn had become one of the most famous American artists of the 1980s.

Eight years after his first exhibition, Basquiat was dead, but his popularity has only grown. Through a combination of interviews with the artist, criticism from the artist's lifetime and immediately after, previously unpublished research by the author, and a selection of the most important critical essays on the artist's work, this collection provides a full picture of the artist's views on art and culture, his working process, and the critical significance of his work both then and now.

Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

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Jafari S. Allen, "There's a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life" (Duke UP, 2022) Dec 25, 2023

In There's a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life(Duke UP, 2022), Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls “Black gay habits of mind.” In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory, historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. Throughout, Allen renarrates Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and fantasies of Black people throughout the world.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Walter Greason and Tim Fielder, "The Graphic History of Hip Hop" (NYC Department of Education, 2023) Dec 25, 2023

Hip Hop turned 50 this year. It has been five decades since DJ Cool Herc played a party in the Bronx that gave birth to a global cultural revolution. To honor this anniversary and teach this history, the New York City Department of Education has published The Graphic History of Hip Hop. Dr. Walter Greason wrote the text, which is beautifully illustrated by Afrofuturist graphic artist Tim Fielder.

As the first in a series of collaborative graphic novels, The Graphic History of Hip Hop brings together a powerful blend of music, art, and history drawn from over sixty years of research by hundreds of professional historians and other scholars from the humanities and social sciences. The book is designed to engage students as they will see, hear and experience how the world of Hip Hop evolved in response to the rapidly changing political and environments from the 1970s through the 2000s. This work is an essential resource to enhance modern urban and world history curriculums and create a unique and engaging classroom settings for students. This shorter version is free to download as PDF and a longer hardcover version will be published soon.

Also see the project website, here.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Nessette Falu, "Unseen Flesh: Gynecology and Black Queer Worth-Making in Brazil" (Duke UP, 2023) Dec 24, 2023

In Unseen Flesh: Gynecology and Black Queer Worth-Making in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2023) Nessette Falu explores how Black lesbians in Brazil define and sustain their well-being and self-worth against persistent racial, sexual, class, and gender-based prejudice. Focusing on the trauma caused by interactions with gynecologists, Falu draws on in-depth ethnographic work among the Black lesbian community to reveal their profoundly negative affective experiences within Brazil’s deeply biased medical system. In the face of such entrenched, intersectional intimate violence, Falu’s informants actively pursue well-being in ways that channel their struggle for self-worth toward broader goals of social change, self care, and communal action. Demonstrating how the racist and heteronormative underpinnings of gynecology erase Black lesbian subjecthood through mental, emotional, and physical traumas, Falu explores the daily resistance and abolitionist practices of worth-making that claim and sustain Black queer identity and living. Falu rethinks the medicalization of race, sex, and gender in Brazil and elsewhere while offering a new perspective on Black queer life through well-being grounded in relationships, socioeconomic struggles, the erotic, and freedom strivings.

Nessette Falu is Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Michelle J. Manno, "Denied: Women, Sports, and the Contradictions of Identity" (NYU Press, 2023) Dec 23, 2023

Women’s college basketball is big business—top teams bring in millions of dollars in revenue for their schools. Women’s NCAA games are broadcast regularly on sports networks, and many of the top players and coaches are household names. Yet these athletes face immense pressure to be more than successful at their sport. They must also conform to expectations about gender, sexuality, and race—expectations that are often in direct contrast to success in the game. They are not supposed to have muscles that are too big, they are not supposed to be too tough, they are not supposed to be too masculine or “look like men,” and they are not supposed to be queer.

A former college athlete herself, Michelle J. Manno spent a full season with a highly competitive NCAA Division I women’s basketball program as one of the team’s managers. In vivid detail, she takes us on the court, on the team bus, into the locker room, and to championship games to show the intense dedication that these women give to the game. She found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that these extremely talented women were strictly policed around the presentation of their gender and sexuality, especially the athletes who were Black. They were routinely monitored, banned from engaging in certain activities, and often punished for behavior that put their queerness, Blackness, and masculinity on display. Convincingly conforming to conventional expectations of gender and sexuality—from the clothes they wore to the people they dated—was yet another challenge at which they needed to excel. Importantly, Manno also highlights several well-known contemporary professional athletes—Brittney Griner, Serena Williams, Gabby Douglas, and Caster Semenya, among others—to show that fame and performing at the highest levels in sport does not protect women athletes from having to navigate the conflicting and often contradictory expectations of identity.

A riveting portrait of an elite basketball program, Denied: Women, Sports, and the Contradictions of Identity (NYU Press, 2023) will forever change our understanding of women athletes and the sports they play.

Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1

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Trent Masiki, "The Afro-Latino Memoir: Race, Ethnicity, and Literary Interculturalism" (UNC Press, 2023) Dec 21, 2023

Despite their literary and cultural significance, Afro-Latino memoirs have been marginalized in both Latino and African American studies. Trent Masiki remedies this problem by bringing critical attention to the understudied African American influences in Afro-Latino memoirs published after the advent of the Black Arts movement. In The Afro-Latino Memoir: Race, Ethnicity and Literary Interculturalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) Masiki argues that these memoirs expand on the meaning of racial identity for both Latinos and African Americans.

Using interpretive strategies and historical methods from literary and cultural studies, Masiki shows how Afro-Latino memoir writers often turn to the African American experience as a model for articulating their Afro-Latinidad. African American literary production, expressive culture, political ideology, and religiosity shaped Afro-Latino subjectivity more profoundly than typically imagined between the post-war and post-soul eras. Masiki recovers this neglected history by exploring how and why Black nationalism shaped Afro-Latinidad in the United States.

Trent Masiki is assistant professor of Africana Studies at Worchester Polytechnic Institute.

Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Michelle R. Scott, "T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owners' Booking Association in Jazz-Age America" (U Illinois Press, 2023) Dec 18, 2023

Black vaudevillians and entertainers joked that T.O.B.A. stood for "tough on black artists." But the Theater Owner's Booking Association (T.O.B.A.) played a foundational role in the African American entertainment industry. T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owners’ Booking Association in Jazz-Age America by Michelle R. Scott (University of Illinois Press, 2023) examines this circuit of vaudeville theaters active between 1920 and 1930 which booked blues singers, comedians, dancers, and many other kinds of entertainers into Black-serving theaters throughout the United States. T.O.B.A. launched and nurtured the careers of many Black performers including Cab Calloway, Sammy Davis Jr., Count Basie, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Hattie McDaniel. Scott traces T.O.B.A.’s antecedents in the first decades of the twentieth century and documents the ten years of its existence. She contextualizes T.O.B.A. within the politics of segregated America, the Black communities served by its theaters, and its effect on the lives and careers of thousands of Black performers.

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Jack D. Noe, "Contesting Commemoration: The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-Era South" (LSU Press, 2021) Dec 18, 2023

Examining identity and nationalism in the Reconstruction-era South, Jack Noe’s Contesting Commemoration: The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-Era South (Louisiana State University Press, 2021) investigates debates concerning the One Hundredth Anniversary of American Independence. This commemoration, which came only seven years after the conclusion of the Civil War, provided a crucible for whites, Blacks, northerners, and southerners to reflect on their identity as Americans and their memories of the recent conflict.

Using a rich archive, including a variety of newspapers, Contesting Commemoration illustrates how the Centennial became embroiled in the fierce political and racial debates of Reconstruction. African Americans celebrated this opportunity to assert their Americanness, while White Southerners approached the celebration with a profound pragmatism and flexibility, only partially re-embracing American nationalism as they attempted to maintain Southern distinctiveness.

Contesting Commemoration follows events in Philadelphia, where ten million visitors came to celebrate the Centennial, and in communities across the South. It is a searching interrogation of the powers of American memory, the bitter debates of Reconstruction, and continued contestations over Southern distinctiveness.

Jack Noe is a Teaching Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London and also lectures at Durham University. A native of Birmingham, Alabama, but a long-time resident of the United Kingdom, he earned his PhD from the University of Leeds in 2018.

Thomas Cryer is a PhD Student in American History at University College London, where he studies race, nationhood, and memory through the life, scholarship, and activism of the historian John Hope Franklin.

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David Steele, "It Was Always a Choice: Picking Up the Baton of Athlete Activism" (Temple UP, 2022) Dec 12, 2023

Today we are joined by the sports journalist David Steele, who has written for the Sporting News, AOL, the Baltimore Sun and the San Francisco Chronicle, and won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, the Association of Black Media Workers, the Associated Press Sports Editors, and the Society of Professional Journalists. He is also the author of It Was Always a Choice: Picking up the Baton of Athlete Activism(Temple UP, 2022). In our conversation, we discuss the beginnings of black athlete activism in the 20th century, the different approaches pursued by black and white athletes across the century, and whether or not athletes should use their privileged position to promote positive change in the world.

In It Was Always A Choice, Steele explores two interconnected histories: the longer durée story of black athlete activism in the 20th and 21st centuries, beginning with Jack Johnson in the 1910s, and the history of the Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protests and how contemporary athlete activists have engaged with the broader Black Lives Matter movement.

The book moves both chronologically and thematically, alternating between past and contemporary activist moments to tie them together. His chapters centre on specific questions: “Your Presence Is an Act of Protest: Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, and Jackie Robinson” looks at American sports idols and illustrates the significant challenges that they faced to competition but also the limits of their protest. In their case, their presence was often the only kind of protest available to them. In some instances – for example Jesse Owen’s case – they later stood up against the more radical protests of the 1960s.

Steele was influenced by Kaepernick’s protest and the Black Lives Matter movement to write the book, and that alone would have been an interesting story, but the real strength of the work is how he finds the echoes of these movements in earlier radical efforts by male and female black athletes to change American society. He makes references in many chapters to Tommie Smith and John Carlos, whose work with the Olympic Project for Human Rights and raised fist protest acted as a spiritual predecessor to Colin Kaepernick’s protest. He also notes early flag protests such as Eroseanna “Rose” Robinson’s refusal to stand for the US National Anthem during the 1959 Pan America Games.

His work also points out the ways that athlete activists have succeeded and failed to change the broader culture. Although black athletes have won significantly inside of sporting organizations, Colin Kaepernick’s protests have highlighted how far American society still must go. The WNBA might be the most progressive league: the Atlanta Dream’s players forced out an owner that they opposed and then successfully campaigned against her running for the US Senate.

It Was Always A Choice raises interesting questions about the nature of athlete protests. Steele’s chapter “Peter Norman, Chris Long, and Gregg Popovich: White Allies” shows the ways that white athletes can support their black teammates and players; some members of the public and sporting leagues seem more receptive to the Black Lives Matter message from white athletes. Steele offers a strong but nuanced criticism of Micheal Jordan, OJ Simpson and Tiger Woods who “dropped the baton” and privileged their own financial success over their politics. White House visits both offer opportunities for the government to promote the popularity of the president but also a chance for athletes to protest against them.

Steele’s work demands that athletes (and readers) make a choice. It is a must read for people interested in the history of athlete protest and as a whole or in individual chapters it would be useful for teaching the history of sport.

Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history.

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Genealogies of Modernity Episode 3: What Is Genealogy Dec 07, 2023

Genealogy, in Charles Darwin’s terms, is the study of “descent with modification.” Taken as an analogy for the study of history, genealogy can guard against the potential dangers of claiming modernity. Against the effort to erase the past, genealogy asserts that our ancestry will always be with us. Against the effort to master the past, genealogy reminds us that our descendants have the freedom to create new futures. Sociologist Alondra Nelson tells the story of how African Americans have used DNA-informed genealogy to recover African identity despite slavery’s erasure of family history. Genealogical thinking can help us shape a disposition to the past that recognizes the legacy of injustice while also fostering human flourishing in the future.

Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Ryan McDermott, Associate Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh; Senior Research Fellow, Beatrice Institute

Featured Scholars:

Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study

Caro Pirri, Assistant Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh

Michael Puett, Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, Harvard University

Special thanks to: Eduard Fiedler, Christopher Firestone, Thomas A. Lewis, Thomalind Martin Polite, Sara Trevisan

For transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, click here.

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Hidden No More: A Conversation with Space Suit Technician Sharon McDougle Dec 07, 2023

Who dresses the astronauts for flight? Why are the suits orange? And how are they cared for? Sharon Caples McDougle joins us to talk about her work as a modern day hidden figure, a space suit technician responsible for processing the orange launch and re-entry pressure suit assemblies worn by all NASA space shuttle astronauts. She explains how she became one of only two women CEE Suit Technicians, led the first and only all-female suit tech crew, and how she made history when she suited up Dr. Mae Jemison.

Our guest is: Sharon Caples McDougle, who began her aerospace career in the Air Force where she served proudly as an Aerospace Physiology Specialist at Beale Air Force Base, in California. She was the first female and first Black Crew Chief in CEE. As Crew Chief she had the honor of leading the first and only all-female suit tech crew. McDougle went on to become the first, and only female, and Black person, to become the Manager of the CEE Processing Department. She managed the team of more than twenty-five employees responsible for the equipment worn by the astronaut crews aboard the space shuttle. This team suited up the astronauts, tested the equipment, strapped the astronauts into the space shuttle before launch, and recovered the crew upon landing. McDougle is a United States Air Force (USAF) veteran, and the author of Suit Up for Launch with Shay.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the host and producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also be interested in:

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, by Margot Lee Shetterly
The 100 Year Starship, by Mae Jemison and Dana Meachen Rau
Suit Up for Launch with Shay, by Sharon Caples McDougle
NASA.gov

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 175+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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Monica Huerta, "The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism" (NYU Press, 2023) Dec 04, 2023

The end of the nineteenth century saw massive developments and innovations in photography at a time when the forces of Western modernity—industrialization, racialization, and capitalism—were quickly reshaping the world. The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism(NYU Press, 2023) slows down the moment in which the technology of photography seemed to speed itself—and so the history of racial capitalism—up. It follows the substantial shifts in the markets, mediums, and forms of photography during a legally murky period at the end of the nineteenth century. Monica Huerta traces the subtle and paradoxical ways legal thinking through photographic lenses reinscribed a particular aesthetics of whiteness in the very conceptions of property ownership.

The book pulls together an archive that encompasses the histories of performance and portraiture alongside the legal, pursuing the logics by which property rights involving photographs are affirmed (or denied) in precedent-setting court cases and legal texts. Emphasizing the making of “expression” into property to focus our attention on the failures of control that cameras do not invent, but rather put new emphasis on, this book argues that designations of control’s absence are central to the practice and idea of property-making.

The Unintended proposes that tracking and analyzing the sensed horizons of intention, control, autonomy, will, and volition offers another way into understanding how white supremacy functions. Ultimately, its unique historical reading practice offers a historically-specific vantage on the everyday workings of racial capitalism and the inheritances of white supremacy that structure so much of our lives.

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Ramsey Lewis and Aaron Cohen, "Gentleman of Jazz: A Life in Music" (Blackstone, 2023) Dec 04, 2023

This immersive new autobiography provides insight into the early life and illustrious career of the late great Ramsey Lewis, one of the most popular jazz pianists of all time. Beginning with his childhood growing up in Chicago's Cabrini Green neighborhood, Ramsey Lewis recounts his memories of the music in his parents' church and his early piano lessons. As he learned classical technique, Lewis also absorbed countless jazz records and heard gospel music weekly, finally becoming a performer himself in his teenage years. With his coauthor and collaborator, Aaron Cohen, Lewis describes his early steps in jazz from joining the Clefs in the '50s, to eventually establishing the Ramsey Lewis Trio.

This memoir provides an evocative tour of Lewis's life from the club circuit of the early 1960s and recording with Chess Records to working with producer Maurice White and musicians such as Stevie Wonder. In this deep dive into an exceptional life and expansive career, Lewis takes us through his artistic challenges, offers insight and perspective on his own musical growth and the creative process, and describes his eventual foray into symphonic composition and performance.

Gentleman of Jazz: A Life in Music (Blackstone, 2023) is an inspiration to young musicians eager to follow in his footsteps and a tribute to the legacy of Ramsey Lewis and is sure to appeal to longtime fans as well as those new to the jazz scene.

Ramsey Lewis (1935-2022) was one of the most popular jazz pianists of all time, with more than eighty albums to his name. A National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, Top 10 hitmaker, and winner of three Grammys, Lewis also hosted popular television and radio shows that honored the history of jazz music. He was not only influential for many modern jazz artists but beats he created decades ago can be heard across R&B and hip-hop. Through it all, Lewis remained grounded, never leaving behind his roots in Chicago.

Aaron Cohen covers the arts for numerous publications and teaches English, journalism, and humanities at the City Colleges of Chicago. He is the author of Aretha Franklin's "Amazing Grace" and Move on Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power.

Aaron Cohen on Twitter.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music.

Bradley Morgan on Twitter.

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Barbara D. Savage, "Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar" (Yale UP, 2023) Dec 03, 2023

Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905–1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world.” Against all odds, the brilliant and hardworking Tate earned degrees in international relations from Oxford University in 1935 and a doctorate in government from Harvard in 1941. She then joined the faculty of Howard University, where she taught for three decades of her long life spanning the tumultuous twentieth century.

Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar(Yale UP, 2023) revives and critiques Tate’s prolific and prescient body of scholarship, with topics ranging from nuclear arms limitations to race and imperialism in India, Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Tate credited her success to other women, Black and white, who helped her realize her dream of becoming a scholar. Her quest for research and adventure took her around the world twice, traveling solo with her cameras.

Barbara Savage’s skilled rendering of Tate’s story is built on more than a decade of research. Tate’s life and work challenge provincial approaches to African American and American history, women’s history, the history of education, diplomatic history, and international thought.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a History educator based in Southern California. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Chhaya Kolavalli, "Well-Intentioned Whiteness: Green Urban Development and Black Resistance in Kansas City" (U Georgia Press, 2023) Dec 02, 2023

Chhaya Kolavalli's book Well-Intentioned Whiteness: Green Urban Development and Black Resistance in Kansas City (U Georgia Press, 2023) documents how whiteness can take up space in U.S. cities and policies through well-intentioned progressive policy agendas that support green urbanism. Through in-depth ethnographic research in Kansas City, Kolavalli explores how urban food projects--central to the city's approach to green urbanism--are conceived and implemented and how they are perceived by residents of "food deserts," those intended to benefit from these projects.

Through her analysis, Kolavalli examines the narratives and histories that mostly white local food advocates are guided by and offers an alternative urban history of Kansas City--one that centers the contributions of Black and brown residents to urban prosperity. She also highlights how displacement of communities of color, through green development, has historically been a key urban development strategy in the city.

Well-Intentioned Whiteness shows how a myopic focus on green urbanism, as a solution to myriad urban "problems," ends up reinforcing racial inequity and uplifting structural whiteness. In this context, fine-grained analysis of how whiteness takes up space in our cities--even through progressive policy agendas--is more important. Kolavalli examines this process intimately and, in so doing, fleshes out our understanding of how racial inequities can be (re)created by everyday urban actors.

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Rachel Stephens, "Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture" (U Arkansas Press, 2023) Dec 01, 2023

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, abolitionists crafted a variety of visual messages about the plight of enslaved people, portraying the violence, familial separation, and dehumanisation that they faced. In response, proslavery southerners attempted to counter these messages either through idealisation or outright erasure of enslaved life.

In Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture(University of Arkansas Press, 2023), Dr. Rachel Stephens addresses an enormous body of material by tracing themes of concealment and silence through paintings, photographs, and ephemera, connecting long overlooked artworks with both the abolitionist materials to which they were responding and archival research across a range of southern historical narratives.

Dr. Stephens begins her fascinating study with an examination of the ways that slavery was visually idealised and defended in antebellum art. She then explores the tyranny—especially that depicted in art—enacted by supporters of enslavement, introduces a range of ways that artwork depicting slavery was tangibly concealed, considers photographs of enslaved female caretakers with the white children they reared, and investigates a printmaker’s confidential work in support of the Confederacy. Finally, she delves into an especially pernicious group of proslavery artists in Richmond, Virginia. Reading visual culture as a key element of the antebellum battle over slavery, Hidden in Plain Sight complicates the existing narratives of American art and history.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Russ Castronovo, "American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability" (Princeton UP, 2023) Nov 30, 2023

An incisive critique that examines the origins of contemporary American ideas about surveillance, terrorism, and white supremacy.

For more than three centuries, Americans have pursued strategies of security that routinely make them feel vulnerable, unsafe, and insecure. American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability (Princeton UP, 2023) probes this paradox by examining American attachments to the terror of the sublime, the fear of uncertainty, and the anxieties produced by unending racial threat.

Challenging conventional approaches that leave questions of security to policy experts, Russ Castronovo turns to literature, philosophy, and political theory to show how security provides an organizing principle for collective life in ways that both enhance freedom and limit it. His incisive critique ranges from frontier violence and white racial anxiety to insurgent Black print culture and other forms of early American terror, uncovering the hidden logic of insecurity that structures modern approaches to national defense, counterterrorism, cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy.

Drawing on examples from fiction, journalism, tracts, and pamphlets, Castronovo uncovers the deep affective attachments that Americans have had since the founding to the sources of fear and insecurity that make them feel unsafe. Timely and urgent, American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability sheds critical light on how and why the fundamental political desire for security promotes unease alongside assurance and fixates on risk and danger while clamoring for safety.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Salim Yaqub, "Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Nov 28, 2023

Salim Yaqub's Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945 (Cambridge UP, 2022) explores how Americans from all walks of life – political leaders, businesspeople, public intellectuals, workers, students, activists, migrants, and others – struggled to define the nation's political, economic, geopolitical, demographic, and social character. It chronicles the nation's ceaseless ferment, from the rocky conversion to peacetime in the early aftermath of World War II; to the frightening emergence of the Cold War and repeated US military adventures abroad; to the struggles of African Americans and other minorities to claim a share of the American Dream; to the striking transformations in social attitudes catalyzed by the women's movement and struggles for gay and lesbian liberation; to the dynamic force of political, economic, and social conservatism. Carrying the story to the spring of 2022, Winds of Hope also shows how dizzying technological changes at times threatened to upend the nation's civic and political life.

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Edward L. Ayers, "American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860" (Norton, 2023) Nov 25, 2023

American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860 (Norton, 2023) is a revealing history of the formative period when voices of dissent and innovation defied power and created visions of America still resonant today.

With so many of our histories falling into dour critique or blatant celebration, here is a welcome departure: a book that offers hope as well as honesty about the American past. The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of slavery, Native dispossession, and wars with Canada and Mexico. Mass immigration and powerful religious movements sent tremors through American society. But even as the powerful defended the status quo, others defied it: voices from the margins moved the center; eccentric visions altered the accepted wisdom, and acts of empathy questioned self-interest.

Edward L. Ayers’s rich history examines the visions that moved Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, the Native American activist William Apess, and others to challenge entrenched practices and beliefs. So, Lydia Maria Child condemned the racism of her fellow northerners at great personal cost. Melville and Thoreau, Joseph Smith and Samuel Morse all charted new paths for America in the realms of art, nature, belief, and technology. It was Henry David Thoreau who, speaking of John Brown, challenged a hostile crowd "Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?" Through decades of award-winning scholarship on the Civil War, Edward L. Ayers has himself ventured beyond the interpretative status quo to recover the range of possibilities embedded in the past as it was lived. Here he turns that distinctive historical sensibility to a period when bold visionaries and critics built vigorous traditions of dissent and innovation into the foundation of the nation. Those traditions remain alive for us today.

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Ian Smith, "Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Nov 24, 2023

In Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Ian Smith urges readers of Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet to develop “racial literacy.” Through both wide social influences and specific professional pressures, Shakespearean critics have been taught to ignore, suppress, and explain away the racial thinking of the plays, a set of evasion strategies that inevitably have political and social ramifications in the contemporary United States. As Ian writes in the introduction, Black Shakespeare is intended to “shift the focus to conditions that shape readers, inform their epistemologies, and influence their reading practices” (3).

Today’s guest is Ian Smith, Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Ian is the author of the previous monograph, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (Palgrave, 2009), as well as one of the most important articles in early modern literary criticism of the last twenty years, “Othello’s Black Handkerchief.” Ian is the current President of the Shakespeare Association of America.

John Yargo is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. He has published in Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies.

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Mia Mask, "Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western" (U Illinois Press, 2023) Nov 24, 2023

Did you know Sidney Poitier was a western icon? In a genre best known for John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, African American actors and directors have played an important role in both shaping, and subverting, Hollywood westerns. In Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western (U Illinois Press, 2023), Vassar College film professor Mia Mask unravels the history of Black westerns dating back to 1910s and 1920s rodeo films, all the way through modern iterations such as Django Unchained (2012). Mask explains the eras in film history that changed the genre, including the infusion of pro athletes into Hollywood in the 1940s, New Hollywood in the 1960s, and the rise of Blaxploitation in the 1970s. Through this history, Mask explains how African Americans were central to the development and lasting appeal of westerns as a global film genre, and how genre conventions from westerns are in the very DNA of American popular culture today.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and is the Assistant Director of the American Society for Environmental History.

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Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine et al., "When Will the Joy Come?: Black Women in the Ivory Tower" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023) Nov 23, 2023

How do Black women in higher education create, experience, and understand joy? What sustains them? While scholars have long documented sexism, racism, and classism in the academy, one topic has been conspicuously absent from the literature--how Black women academics have found joy in the midst of adversity. Moving beyond questions of resilience, labor for others, and coping, Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine, Abena Ampofoa Asare, and Michelle Dionne Thompson's book When Will the Joy Come?: Black Women in the Ivory Tower (U Massachusetts Press, 2023) focuses on the journeys of over thirty Black women at various stages of their careers.

Joy is a mixture of well-being, pleasure, alignment, and purpose that can be elusive for Black women scholars. With racial reckoning and a global pandemic as context, this volume brings together honest and vital essays that ponder how Black women balance fatigue and frustrations in the halls of the ivory tower, and explore where, when, and if joy enters their lives. By carefully contemplating the emotional, physical, and material consequences of their labor, this collection demonstrates that joy is a tactical and strategic component of Black women's struggle.

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Biko Mandela Gray and Ryan J. Johnson, "Phenomenology of Black Spirit" (Edinburgh UP, 2023) Nov 22, 2023

In Phenomenology of Black Spirit (Edinburgh UP, 2023), Ryan Johnson and Biko Mandela Gray study the relationship between Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Black Thought from Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis.

This staging of an elongated dialectical parallelism between Hegel's classic text and major 19th-20th-century Black thinkers explodes the western canon of philosophy. Johnson and Mandela Gray show that Hegel's abstract dialectic is transformed and critiqued when put into conversation with the lived dialectics of Black Thought: from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs through to Malcolm X and Angela Davis.

While Hegel articulates the dynamic logics that we see in these Black thinkers, when they are placed in parallel and considered together, the whiteness, both explicit and implicit, of Hegelianism itself is revealed. Forcing Hegelianism into the embodied history of Black Thought reveals a phenomenology of America whose spirit is Black.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Lama Rod Owens, "The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors" (Sounds True, 2023) Nov 19, 2023

Lama Rod Owens is an author, activist, and authorized lama in the Karma Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism. In his new book, The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors(Sounds True, 2023), he draws from the bodhisattva tradition to rethink the relationship between social liberation and ultimate freedom, putting forth the notion of the New Saint. In the process, he pulls from the wisdom of the Old Saints of Tibetan Buddhism and the legacy of Black liberation movements.

In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Owens to discuss why he believes that the apocalypse is an opportunity for awakening, the power of connecting with our ancestors and unseen beings, why the New Saint is not necessarily a good person, and how fierceness can be a form of awakened care.

Tricycle Talks is a monthly podcast featuring prominent voices from within and beyond the Buddhist fold. Listen to more episodes here.

Tricycle: The Buddhist Review provides a unique and independent public forum for exploring Buddhism, establishing a dialogue between Buddhism and the broader culture, and introducing Buddhist thinking to Western disciplines. This approach has enabled Tricycle to successfully attract readers from all walks of life, many of whom desire to enrich their lives through a deeper knowledge of Buddhist traditions.

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Charisse Burden-Stelly, "Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States" (U Chicago Press, 2023) Nov 17, 2023

In the early twentieth century, two panics emerged in the United States. The Black Scare was rooted in white Americans’ fear of Black Nationalism and dread at what social, economic, and political equality of Black people might entail. The Red Scare, sparked by communist uprisings abroad and subversion at home, established anticapitalism as a force capable of infiltrating and disrupting the American order. In Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States(U Chicago Press, 2023), Charisse Burden-Stelly meticulously outlines the conjoined nature of these state-sanctioned panics, revealing how they unfolded together as the United States pursued capitalist domination. Antiradical repression, she shows, is inseparable from anti-Black oppression, and vice versa.

Beginning her account in 1917—the year of the Bolshevik Revolution, the East St. Louis Race Riot, and the Espionage Act—Burden-Stelly traces the long duration of these intertwined and mutually reinforcing phenomena. She theorizes two bases of the Black Scare / Red Scare: US Capitalist Racist Society, a racially hierarchical political economy built on exploitative labor relationships, and Wall Street Imperialism, the violent processes by which businesses and the US government structured domestic and foreign policies to consolidate capital and racial domination. In opposition, Radical Blackness embodied the government’s fear of both Black insurrection and Red instigation. The state’s actions and rhetoric therefore characterized Black anticapitalists as foreign, alien, and undesirable. This reactionary response led to an ideology that Burden-Stelly calls True Americanism, the belief that the best things about America were absolutely not Red and not Black, which were interchangeable threats.

Black Scare / Red Scare illuminates the anticommunist nature of the US and its governance, but also shines a light on a misunderstood tradition of struggle for Black liberation. Burden-Stelly highlights the Black anticapitalist organizers working within and alongside the international communist movement and analyzes the ways the Black Scare/Red Scare reverberates through ongoing suppression of Black radical activism today. Drawing on a range of administrative, legal, and archival sources, Burden-Stelly incorporates emancipatory ideas from several disciplines to uncover novel insights into Black political minorities and their legacy.

@amandajoycehall is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the Department of African American Studies.

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Beatriz Nascimento, "The Dialectic Is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento" (Princeton UP, 2023) Nov 15, 2023

Beatriz Nascimento (1942-1995) was a poet, historian, artist, and political leader in Brazil's Black movement, an innovative and creative thinker whose work offers a radical reimagining of gender, space, politics, and spirituality around the Atlantic and across the Black diaspora. Her powerful voice still resonates today, reflecting a deep commitment to political organizing, revisionist historiography, and the lived experience of Black women. The Dialectic Is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento(Princeton UP, 2023) is the first English-language collection of writings by this vitally important figure in the global tradition of Black radical thought.

The Dialectic Is in the Sea traces the development of Nascimento's thought across the decades of her activism and writing, covering topics such as the Black woman, race and Brazilian society, Black freedom, and Black aesthetics and spirituality. Incisive introductory and analytical essays provide key insights into the political and historical context of Nascimento's work. This engaging collection includes an essay by Bethânia Gomes, Nascimento's only daughter, who shares illuminating and uniquely personal insights into her mother's life and career.

This is an interview with Christen A. Smith, Bethânia Gomes and Archie Davies.

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Jeffrey Scholes, "Christianity, Race, and Sport" (Routledge, 2021) Nov 14, 2023

This book provides a rigorously researched introduction to the relationship between Christianity, race, and sport in the United States.Christianity, Race, and Sport (Routledge, 2021) examines how Protestant Christianity and race have interacted, often to the detriment of Black bodies, throughout the sporting world over the last century. Important sporting figures and case studies discussed include: the sanctification of baseball player Jackie Robinson; the domestication of Muhammad Ali and George Foreman; religious expressions of athletes in the NFL; treatment of African American tennis player Serena Williams; Colin Kaepernick and his prophetic voice. This accessible and conversational book is essential reading for undergraduate students approaching religion and race or religion and sport for the first time, as well as those working within the sociology of sport, sport studies, history of sport, or philosophy of sport.

Jeffrey Scholes is associate professor of religious studies in the Department of Philosophy and the Director of the Center for Religious Diversity and Public Life at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, USA.

This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com

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Juliet Hooker, "Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss" (Princeton UP, 2023) Nov 13, 2023

In democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can't always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally. Propped up by white supremacy, whites (as a group) are accustomed to winning; they have generally been able to exercise political rule without having to accept sharing it. Black citizens, on the other hand, are expected to be political heroes whose civic suffering enables progress toward racial justice.

In Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss (Princeton UP, 2023), Juliet Hooker, a leading thinker on democracy and race, argues that the two most important forces driving racial politics in the United States today are Black grief and white grievance. Black grief is exemplified by current protests against police violence--the latest in a tradition of violent death and subsequent public mourning spurring Black political mobilization. The potent politics of white grievance, meanwhile, which is also not new, imagines the United States as a white country under siege.

Drawing on African American political thought, Hooker examines key moments in US racial politics that illuminate the problem of loss in democracy. She connects today's Black Lives Matter protests to the use of lynching photographs to arouse public outrage over post-Reconstruction era racial terror, and she discusses Emmett Till's funeral as a catalyst for the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. She also traces the political weaponization of white victimhood during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Calling for an expansion of Black and white political imaginations, Hooker argues that both must learn to sit with loss, for different reasons and to different ends.

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Musab Younis, "On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought" (U California Press, 2022) Nov 13, 2023

On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought(U California Press, 2022) examines the reverberations of anticolonial ideas that spread across the Atlantic between the two world wars. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Black intellectuals in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean established theories of colonialism and racism as structures that must be understood, and resisted, on a global scale. In this richly textured book, Musab Younis gathers the work of writers and poets, journalists and editors, historians and political theorists whose insights speak urgently to contemporary movements for liberation.

Bringing together literary and political texts from Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, France, the United States, and elsewhere, Younis excavates a vibrant and understudied tradition of international political thought. From the British and French colonial occupations of West Africa to the struggles of African Americans, the hypocrisy of French promises of 'assimilation, ' and the many-sided attacks on the sovereignties of Haiti, Liberia, and Ethiopia, On the Scale of the World shows how racialized imperialism provoked critical responses across the interwar Black Atlantic. By transcending the boundaries of any single imperial system, these counternarratives of global order enabled new ways of thinking about race, nation, and empire.

Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor in International History at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at here.

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Jennifer E. Brooks, "Resident Strangers: Immigrant Laborers in New South Alabama" (LSU Press, 2022) Nov 12, 2023

Immigrant laborers who came to the New South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found themselves poised uncomfortably between white employers and the Black working class, a liminal and often precarious position. Campaigns to recruit immigrants primarily aimed to suppress Black agency and mobility. If that failed, both planters and industrialists imagined that immigrants might replace Blacks entirely. Thus, white officials, citizens, and employers embraced immigrants when they acted in ways that sustained Jim Crow. However, when they directly challenged established political and economic power structures, immigrant laborers found themselves ostracized, jailed, or worse, by the New South order. Both industrial employers and union officials lauded immigrants' hardworking and noble character when it suited their purposes, and both denigrated and racialized them when immigrant laborers acted independently.

Jennifer E. Brooks's Resident Strangers: Immigrant Laborers in New South Alabama(LSU Press, 2022) restores immigrant laborers to their place in the history of the New South, considering especially how various immigrant groups and individuals experienced their time in New South Alabama. Brooks utilizes convict records, censuses, regional and national newspapers, government documents, and oral histories to construct the story of immigrants in New South Alabama. The immigrant groups she focuses on appeared most often as laborers in the records, including the Chinese, southern Italians, and the diverse nationals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, along with a sprinkling of others. Although recruitment crusades by Alabama's employers and New South boosters typically failed to bring in the vast numbers of immigrants they had envisioned, significant populations from around the world arrived in industries and communities across the state, especially in the coal- and ore-mining district of Birmingham.

Resident Strangers reveals that immigrant laborers' presence and individual agency complicated racial categorization, disrupted labor relations, and diversified southern communities. It also presents a New South that was far from isolated from the forces at work across the nation or in the rest of the world. Immigrant laborers brought home to New South Alabama the turbulent world of empire building, deeply embedding the region in national and global networks of finance, trade, and labor migration.

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Adrien Sebro, "Scratchin' and Survivin': Hustle Economics and the Black Sitcoms of Tandem Productions" (Rutgers UP, 2023) Nov 12, 2023

The 1970s was a golden age for representations of African American life on TV sitcoms: Sanford & Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons. Surprisingly, nearly all the decade’s notable Black sitcoms were made by a single company, Tandem Productions. Founded by two white men, the successful team behind All in the Family, writer Norman Lear and director Bud Yorkin, Tandem gave unprecedented opportunities to Black actors, writers, and producers to break into the television industry. However, these Black auteurs also struggled to get the economic privileges and creative autonomy regularly granted to their white counterparts.

Scratchin' and Survivin': Hustle Economics and the Black Sitcoms of Tandem Productions(Rutgers UP, 2023) discovers surprising parallels between the behind-the-scenes drama at Tandem and the plotlines that aired on their sitcoms, as both real and fictional African Americans devised various strategies for getting their fair share out of systems prone to exploiting their labor. The media scholar Adrien Sebro describes these tactics as a form of “hustle economics,” and he pays special attention to the ways that Black women—including actresses like LaWanda Page, Isabel Sanford, and Esther Rolle—had to hustle for recognition. Exploring Tandem’s complex legacy, including its hit racially mixed sitcom Diff’rent Strokes, he showcases the Black talent whose creative agency and labor resilience helped to transform the television industry.

Adrien Sebro is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He specializes in critical media studies at the intersections of comedy, gender, and Black popular culture.

Peter C. Kunze is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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Ralph H. Craig III, "Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner" (Eerdmans, 2023) Nov 10, 2023

If you don’t know Tina Turner’s spirituality, you don’t know Tina.

When Tina Turner reclaimed her throne as the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll in the 1980s, she attributed her comeback to one thing: the wisdom and power she found in Buddhism. Her spiritual transformation is often overshadowed by the rags-to-riches arc of her life story. But in this groundbreaking biography, Ralph H. Craig III traces Tina’s journey from the Black Baptist church to Buddhism and situates her at the vanguard of large-scale movements in religion and pop culture.

Paying special attention to the diverse metaphysical beliefs that shaped her spiritual life, Craig untangles Tina’s Soka Gakkai Buddhist foundation; her incorporation of New Age ideas popularized in ’60s counterculture; and her upbringing in a Black Baptist congregation, alongside the influences of her grandmothers’ disciplinary and mystical sensibilities. Through critical engagement with Tina’s personal life and public brand, Craig sheds light on how popular culture has been used as a vehicle for authentic religious teaching. Scholars and fans alike will find Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner (Eerdmans, 2023) as enlightening as the iconic singer herself.

For those of you interested in the stories and poems of the first Buddhist nuns mentioned in the interview yet not included in the book's footnotes (hey, it's a trade book, so space for footnotes is limited), collected in Therīgāthā, you can find the stories here: Kisāgotamī; Ambapālī; Isidāsī. You can also find a modern recreation of Ambapālī's song here.

For a trustworthy, philologically solid, yet still readable translation of Therīgāthā, see here. I also find this translation most useful because of its high-quality but manageable footnotes.

Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California.

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Matthew J. Clavin, "Symbols of Freedom: Slavery and Resistance Before the Civil War" (NYU Press, 2023) Nov 07, 2023

In the early United States, anthems, flags, holidays, monuments, and memorials were powerful symbols of an American identity that helped unify a divided people. A language of freedom played a similar role in shaping the new nation. The Declaration of Independence’s assertion “that all men are created equal,” Patrick Henry’s cry of “Give me liberty, or give me death!,” and Francis Scott Key’s “star-spangled banner” waving over “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” were anthemic celebrations of a newly free people. Resonating across the country, they encouraged the creation of a republic where the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was universal, natural, and inalienable.

For enslaved people and their allies, the language and symbols that served as national touchstones made a mockery of freedom. Deriding the ideas that infused the republic’s founding, they encouraged an empty American culture that accepted the abstract notion of equality rather than the concrete idea. Yet, as award-winning author Matthew J. Clavin reveals, it was these powerful expressions of American nationalism that inspired forceful and even violent resistance to slavery.

Symbols of Freedom: Slavery and Resistance Before the Civil War(NYU Press, 2023) is the surprising story of how enslaved people and their allies drew inspiration from the language and symbols of American freedom. Interpreting patriotic words, phrases, and iconography literally, they embraced a revolutionary nationalism that not only justified but generated open opposition. Mindful and proud that theirs was a nation born in blood, these disparate patriots fought to fulfill the republic’s promise by waging war against slavery.

In a time when the US flag, the Fourth of July, and historical sites have never been more contested, this book reminds us that symbols are living artifacts whose power is derived from the meaning with which we imbue the

Matthew J. Clavin is Professor of History at the University of Houston and the author of The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community, Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers, and Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Drew A. Swanson, "A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction" (UNC Press, 2023) Nov 04, 2023

Five years after the Civil War, North Carolina Republican state senator John W. Stephens was found murdered inside the Caswell County Courthouse. Stephens fought for the rights of freedpeople, and his killing by the Ku Klux Klan ultimately led to insurrection, Governor William W. Holden's impeachment, and the early unwinding of Reconstruction in North Carolina. In A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction (UNC Press, 2023), Drew A. Swanson tells a story of race, politics, and social power shaped by violence and profit. The struggle for dominance in Reconstruction-era rural North Carolina, Swanson argues, was an economic and ecological transformation. Arson, beating, and murder became tools to control people and landscapes, and the ramifications of this violence continued long afterward. The failure to prosecute anyone for decades after John Stephens's assassination left behind a vacuum, as each side shaped its own memory of Stephens and his murder.

The malleability of and contested storytelling around Stephens's legacy presents a window into the struggle to control the future of the South.

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Sharony Green, "The Chase and Ruins: Zora Neale Hurston in Honduras" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023) Nov 01, 2023

Zora Neale Hurston, an anthropologist and writer best known for her classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, led a complicated life often marked by tragedy and contradictions. When both she and her writing fell out of favor after the Harlem Renaissance, she struggled not only to regain an audience for her novels but also to simply make ends meet. In The Chase and Ruins: Zora Neale Hurston in Honduras (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), Sharony Green uncovers an understudied but important period of Hurston's life: her stay in Honduras in the late 1940s.

On the eve of an awful accusation that nearly led to her suicide, Hurston fled to Honduras in search of a lost Mayan ruin. During her yearlong trip south of the US border, she appears to have never found the ruin she was chasing. But by escaping the Jim Crow south to Honduras, she avoided racist violence in the United States while still embracing her privilege—and power—as a US citizen in postwar Central America. While in Honduras, Hurston wrote Seraph on the Suwanee, her final novel and her only book to feature white characters, in an attempt to appeal to Hollywood's growing appetite for "crackerphilia" (stories about poor white folks) and to finally secure herself some financial stability. In a letter to her editor, Hurston wrote that in Honduras, she may not have found the Mayan ruin she was looking for, but she finally found herself.

Hurston's experience in Honduras has much to teach us about Black women's lives and the thorny politics of postwar America as well as America's long and complicated entanglement with Central America. In an attempt to find historical meaning in an extraordinary woman's conceptions of herself in a changing world, Green unearths letters, diaries, literary writings, research reports, and other archival materials. The Chase and Ruins encourages us to reckon with and reimagine Hurston's fascinating life in all of its complexity and contradictions.

Award-winning writer Sharony Green is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Remember Me to Miss Louisa: Hidden Black-White Intimacies in Antebellum America.

Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Melvin L. Rogers, "The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2023) Nov 01, 2023

Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” is notoriously fiery. No doubt part of what’s gripping about it is its internal tension. Douglass begins by sincerely praising the founders and their philosophical principles, and then turns to a devastating critique of the hypocrisy of the United States. Underlying Douglass’s argument is a commitment to the democratic project in the United States that one imagines could be sustained only with extraordinary effort. What prevented Douglass from embracing the understandable, warranted pessimism that the democratic experiment in the United States had failed – or perhaps had never really been taken up?

In The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2023), Melvin Rogers takes his reader on a journey through the efforts of African American philosophers, social critics, and artists to make sense of the United States.

Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

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Frederick V. Engram, "Black Liberation Through Action and Resistance: MOVE" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) Oct 30, 2023

Black Liberation through Action and Resistance: MOVE (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) serves as a call to action for Black millennials and co-conspirators who are immersed in the work of Black liberation or want to begin their own journey toward anti-racism. Its central mission is to provide additional context to an ongoing discussion regarding Black liberation and proper allyship. The theory behind MOVE challenges anti-Blackness, patriarchy, white supremacy, and misogynoir ideologies aimed at the continued oppression of the descendants of the American enslaved.

Dr. Frederick V. Engram Jr. is an assistant professor of higher education at Fairleigh Dickinson University. His research focuses on understanding how African Americans comprehend anti-Black racism in higher education and the criminal justice system.

Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology.

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Claire Jean Kim, "Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World" (Cambridge UP, 2023) Oct 30, 2023

Where do Asian Americans fit into the U.S. racial order? How do we understand anti-Asian racism in relation to structural anti-Blackness? Are Asian Americans subordinated comparably to Black people or permitted adjacency to whiteness? For Dr. Claire Jean Kim, the police murder of George Floyd and the surge in anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic make these questions urgent – and the answers may alter the US racial order.

In Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World (Cambridge UP, 2023), Dr. Kim argues that understanding US racial dynamics requires careful analysis of two forces: anti-Blackness and white supremacy. Dr. Kim’s meticulously researched book treats White supremacy and anti-Blackness as “kinetic forces or energy flows that have shaped and been shaped by the structural regimes of slavery, colonialism, capitalism, settler colonialism, and empire across the globe.” White supremacy lifts up one group as it pushes down all others. Anti-Blackness “abjects Blackness and elevates not-Blackness.” Based on her detailed analysis of law, history, and politics, Dr. Kim demonstrates how Asian Americans are “dynamically constituted as not-white, but above all not-Black” – and that Not-Blackness is a “vital form of property in an anti-Black world.” The construction of Asian Americans as not-white but above all not-Black has determined their positionality for nearly two centuries. Asian Americans are “dynamically positioned and weaponized by the U.S. state as it seeks to preserve structural anti-Blackness.” How Asian Americans choose to respond to their not-Black status will help to define racial politics in the U.S. in the twenty-first century. Can “Asian Americanness be reimagined as a force that destabilizes, rather than stabilizes, an anti-Black world?

Dr. Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on race, politics, and human-animal studies. She is the author of two previous award-winning books, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (Yale University Press, 2000) and Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Sarah Mayorga, "Urban Specters: The Everyday Harms of Racial Capitalism" (UNC Press, 2023) Oct 29, 2023

Racial capitalism, invisible but threaded throughout the world, shapes our lives. Focusing on the experiences of white, Black, and Latinx residents of Cincinnati, Sarah Mayorga argues that residents' interpretations of their circumstances, what she calls urban specters, are often partial recognitions of the exploitation and dehumanization produced by racial capitalism.

In Urban Specters: The Everyday Harms of Racial Capitalism (UNC Press, 2023), much scholarly work on racial capitalism has necessarily focused on historical, theoretical, and macro-level accounts. Mayorga takes these vital insights and applies them to two contemporary working-class neighborhoods, centering the lives of working-class and poor people. Using data from interviews with 117 residents, Mayorga maps how racial capitalism creates the everyday harms people know all too well. Chronic underdevelopment, private property, and policing, she shows, have produced these harms. In this enlightening book, Mayorga identifies small windows into abolitionist possibilities that create different types of relations, ones based on care and connection. This is a guide for anyone trying to understand urban inequality, but also more importantly, for how we might create a different world.

Richard E. Ocejo is professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).

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Nikki M. Taylor, "Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance" (Cambridge UP, 2023) Oct 28, 2023

From the colonial through the antebellum era, enslaved women in the US used lethal force as the ultimate form of resistance. By amplifying their voices and experiences, Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance (Cambridge UP, 2023) strongly challenges assumptions that enslaved women only participated in covert, non-violent forms of resistance, when in fact they consistently seized justice for themselves and organized toward revolt.

Nikki M. Taylor expertly reveals how women killed for deeply personal instances of injustice committed by their owners. The stories presented, which span centuries and legal contexts, demonstrate that these acts of lethal force were carefully pre-meditated. Enslaved women planned how and when their enslavers would die, what weapons and accomplices were necessary, and how to evade capture in the aftermath. Original and compelling, Brooding Over Bloody Revenge presents a window into the lives and philosophies of enslaved women who had their own ideas about justice and how to achieve it.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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James V. Fenelon, "Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 1492-1790" (Routledge, 2023) Oct 28, 2023

In this interview James Fenelon discusses his new book entitled Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 1492-1790, recently published with Routledge (2023).

The book traces 500 years of European-American colonization and racialized dominance, expanding our common assumptions about the ways racialization was used to build capitalism and the modern world-system. Professor Fenelon draws on personal experience and the agency of understudied Native (and African) resistance leaders, to weave a story too often hidden or distorted in the annals of the academy, that remains invisible at many universities and historical societies.

Fenelon identifies three epochs of racial constructions, colonialism, and capitalism that created the USA. Indigenous nations, the first to be racialized on a global scale, African peoples, enslaved and brought to the Americas, and European immigrants. It offers a sweeping analysis of the forces driving the invasion, occupation, and exploitation of Native America and the significance of labor in American history provided by Indigenous people, Africans, and immigrants, specifically the Irish. Indian, Black and Irish makes major contributions toward a deeper understanding of where Supremacy and Sovereignty originated from, and how our modern world has used these socio-political constructions, to build global hegemony that now threatens our very existence through wars and climate change. It will be a vital resource to those studying history, colonialism, race and racism, labor history, and indigenous peoples.

James Fenelon is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Indigenous Peoples Studies at California State University, San Bernardino. He is also currently the Lang Visiting Professor for Issues of Social Change at Swarthmore College. His books include Redskins? Sports Mascots, Indian Nations and White Racism, Indigenous Peoples and Globalization (with Thomas D. Hall), and Culturicide, Resistance and Survival of the Lakota (Sioux Nation).

Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 1492-1790, is published with Routledge

Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University

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Marisel C. Moreno, "Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Art" (U Texas Press, 2022) Oct 27, 2023

Debates over the undocumented migration of Latin Americans invariably focus on the southern US border, but most migrants never cross that arbitrary line. Instead, many travel, via water, among the Caribbean islands. The first study to examine literary and artistic representations of undocumented migration within the Hispanophone Caribbean, Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Art (U Texas Press, 2022) relates a journey that remains silenced and largely unknown.

Analyzing works by novelists, short-story writers, poets, and visual artists replete with references to drowning and echoes of the Middle Passage, Marisel Moreno shines a spotlight on the plight that these migrants face. In some cases, Puerto Rico takes on a new role as a stepping-stone to the continental United States and the society migrants will join there. Meanwhile the land border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the only terrestrial border in the Hispanophone Caribbean, emerges as a complex space within this cartography of borders. And while the Border Patrol occupies US headlines, the Coast Guard occupies the nightmares of refugees.

An untold story filled with beauty, possibility, and sorrow, Crossing Waters encourages us to rethink the geography and experience of undocumented migration and the role that the Caribbean archipelago plays as a border zone.

Marisel C. Moreno is the Rev. John O'Brien Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Family Matters: Puerto Rican Women Authors on the Island and the Mainland.

Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Christopher P. Barton, "The Archaeology of Race and Class at Timbuctoo: A Black Community in New Jersey" (UP of Florida, 2023) Oct 25, 2023

The Archaeology of Race and Class at Timbuctoo: A Black Community in New Jersey(UP of Florida, 2023) is the first book to examine the historic Black community of Timbuctoo, New Jersey, which was founded in 1826 by formerly enslaved migrants from Maryland and served as a stop on the Underground Railroad. In collaboration with descendants and community members, Christopher Barton explores the intersectionality of life at Timbuctoo and the ways Black residents resisted the marginalizing structures of race and class.

Despite some support from local Quaker abolitionists, the people of Timbuctoo endured strained relationships with neighboring white communities, clashes with slave catchers, and hostilities from the Ku Klux Klan. Through a multiscalar approach that ranges from landscape archaeology and settlement patterns to analysis of consumer artifacts, this book demonstrates how residents persevered to construct their own identities and navigate poverty. Barton incorporates oral histories from community elders that offer insights into the racial tensions of the early- to mid-twentieth century and convey the strong, lasting character of the community in the face of repression.

Weaving together memories and inherited accounts, current archaeological investigations, historical records, and comparisons to nearby Black-established communities of the era, this book illuminates the everyday impacts of slavery and race relations in a part of the country that seemed to promise freedom and highlights the use of archaeology as a medium for social activism.

Christopher P. Barton, associate professor of archaeology at Francis Marion University, is the editor of Trowels in the Trenches: Archaeology as Social Activism.

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Decolonizing Praxis Oct 23, 2023

In this episode of High Theory, Erin Pineda talks about decolonizing praxis. Black American activists in the 1950s and 1960s used strategies of civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action as part of a broader anticolonial movement, and reading their story in an international context can help us rethink the narrative of the US civil rights movement enshrined in American political theory.

In the episode Erin references Jack Halberstam’s concept of “low theory” which derives from the work of Stuart Hall, and appears in the book, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP 2011). She also references several mainstream liberal political philosophers who set the terms of the debate about “civil disobedience” in the US academy in the 1970s, John Rawls Theory of Justice (Harvard UP, 1971), Hugo Bedau, “On Civil Disobedience” (Journal of Philosophy 58, no. 21 (1961): 653-665) and Carl Cohen, Civil Disobedience: Conscience, Tactics, and the Law (Columbia University Press, 1971). Pineda writes against this tradition. The American activists she studies developed a different set of theoretical commitments to civil disobedience that are a bit less polite, and have a bit more potential for actual revolution.

Erin Pineda is the Phyllis Cohen Rappaport ’68 New Century Term Professor of Government at Smith College. She teaches courses in the history of political thought, democratic theory, race and politics, social movements and American political thought. Her research interests include the politics of protest and social movements, Black political thought, race and politics, radical democracy and 20th-century American political development. If you want to learn more about the topics she discusses in this episode, read her book! It’s called Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford UP, 2021).

The image for this episode is a famous photograph of Black student Elizabeth Eckford being jeered by white student Hazel Bryan as she attempts to enter Little Rock Central High School, taken by Will Counts on 4 September 1957, one of the more famous images of school desegregation from the US Civil Rights Movement. This digital version came from wikimedia commons.

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Matthew Guariglia, "Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York" (Duke UP, 2023) Oct 21, 2023

During the years between the Civil War and World War II, police in New York City struggled with how to control a diverse metropolis. In Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York(Duke UP, 2023), Matthew Guariglia tells the history of the New York Police Department to show how its origins were built upon and inseparably entwined with the history of race, ethnicity, and whiteness in the United States.

Guariglia explores the New York City Police Department through its periods of experimentation and violence as police experts imported tactics from the US occupation of the Philippines and Cuba, devised modern bureaucratic techniques to better suppress Black communities, and infiltrated supposedly unknowable immigrant neighborhoods. Innovations ranging from recruiting Chinese, Italian, and German police to form “ethnic squads” to the use of deportation and federal immigration restrictions to control local crime—even the introduction of fingerprinting—were motivated by attempts to govern a multiracial city. Campaigns to remake the police department created an urban landscape where power, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, crime, and bodies collided and provided a foundation for the supposedly color-blind, technocratic, federally backed, and surveillance-based policing of today.

Jeffrey Lamson is a PhD student in world history at Northeastern University. His research focuses on the history of police technology, its relationship to the history of police reform, and its place at the intersection of U.S. domestic policing and global counterinsurgency.

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Danielle N. Boaz, "Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur" (Oxford UP, 2023) Oct 21, 2023

Coined in the middle of the nineteenth century, the term "voodoo" has been deployed largely by people in the U.S. to refer to spiritual practices--real or imagined--among people of African descent. "Voodoo" is one way that white people have invoked their anxieties and stereotypes about Black people--to call them uncivilised, superstitious, hypersexual, violent, and cannibalistic.

In Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Danielle N. Boaz explores public perceptions of "voodoo" as they have varied over time, with an emphasis on the intricate connection between stereotypes of "voodoo" and debates about race and human rights. The term has its roots in the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s, especially following the Union takeover of New Orleans, when it was used to propagate the idea that Black Americans held certain "superstitions" that allegedly proved that they were unprepared for freedom, the right to vote, and the ability to hold public office. Similar stereotypes were later extended to Cuba and Haiti in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1930s, Black religious movements like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam were derided as "voodoo cults." More recently, ideas about "voodoo" have shaped U.S. policies toward Haitian immigrants in the 1980s, and international responses to rituals to bind Nigerian women to human traffickers in the twenty-first century. Drawing on newspapers, travelogues, magazines, legal documents, and books, Dr. Boaz shows that the term "voodoo" has often been a tool of racism, colonialism, and oppression.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Philip Dray, "A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age" (FSG, 2022) Oct 19, 2023

On June 2, 1892, in the small, idyllic village of Port Jervis, New York, a young Black man named Robert Lewis was lynched by a violent mob. The twenty-eight-year-old victim had been accused of sexually assaulting Lena McMahon, the daughter of one of the town's well-liked Irish American families. The incident was infamous at once, for it was seen as a portent that lynching, a Southern scourge, surging uncontrollably below the Mason-Dixon Line, was about to extend its tendrils northward. What factors prompted such a spasm of racial violence in a relatively prosperous, industrious upstate New York town, attracting the scrutiny of the Black journalist Ida B. Wells, just then beginning her courageous anti-lynching crusade? What meaning did the country assign to it? And what did the incident portend?

Today, it’s a terrible truth that the assault on the lives of Black Americans is neither a regional nor a temporary feature, but a national crisis. There are regular reports of a Black person killed by police, and Jim Crow has found new purpose in describing the harsh conditions of life for the formerly incarcerated, as well as in large-scale efforts to make voting inaccessible to Black people and other minority citizens. The “mobocratic spirit” that drove the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol―a phrase Abraham Lincoln used as early as 1838 to describe vigilantism’s corrosive effect on America―frightfully insinuates that mob violence is a viable means of effecting political change. These issues remain as deserving of our concern now as they did a hundred and thirty years ago, when America turned its gaze to Port Jervis.

An alleged crime, a lynching, a misbegotten attempt at an official inquiry, and a past unresolved. In A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age(FSG, 2022), the acclaimed historian Philip Dray revisits this time and place to consider its significance in our communal history and to show how justice cannot be achieved without an honest reckoning.

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The Future of Incarceration: A Discussion with Colleen P. Eren Oct 18, 2023

The United States has long been associated with a very harsh criminal justice system with, in some cases, people serving long sentence for minor crimes. But attempts to reform the system have proven very difficult. In her new book Reform Nation: The First Step Act and the Movement to End Mass Incarceration (Stanford UP, 2023), Colleen P. Eren explains why. Listen to her in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Paul Clammer, "Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean's Forgotten Kingdom" (Hurst, 2023) Oct 18, 2023

How did a Caribbean child, born into plantation slavery, come to defeat Napoleon's armies in battle and crown himself king of the first free black nation in the Americas? Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean's Forgotten Kingdom(Hurst, 2023) is the story of Henry Christophe: one of the most remarkable, yet least known, figures from the Age of Revolution.

Christophe fought as a child soldier in the American War of Independence, before rising to prominence during the Haitian Revolution as one of Toussaint Louverture's top generals, commanding troops against Bonaparte's invasion. Following Haitian independence, Christophe's ambition for rule helped plunge the country into civil war. He crowned himself King Henry I of Haiti, and his attempts to build a modern black state won the support of leading British abolitionists.

Christophe saw himself as an Enlightenment ruler, and his kingdom produced great literary works, epic fortresses and opulent palaces. But while he was a proud anti-imperialist and fought off French plots against him, the Haitian people chafed under his rule. After ten years on the throne, he committed suicide rather than face being overthrown. Christophe's mountaintop Citadelle still stands, as Haiti's sole World Heritage site-a monument to a revolutionary black monarchy, in a world of empire and slavery.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Katherine Jensen, "The Color of Asylum: The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil" (U Chicago Press, 2023) Oct 18, 2023

In 2013, as Syrians desperate to escape a brutal war fled the country, Brazil took the remarkable step of instituting an open-door policy for all Syrian refugees. Why did Brazil—in contrast to much of the international community—offer asylum to any Syrian who would come? And how do Syrians differ from other refugee populations seeking status in Brazil?

In The Color of Asylum: The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil(U Chicago Press, 2023), Katherine Jensen offers an ethnographic look at the process of asylum seeking in Brazil, uncovering the different ways asylum seekers are treated and the racial logic behind their treatment. She focuses on two of the largest and most successful groups of asylum seekers: Syrian and Congolese refugees. While the groups obtain asylum status in Brazil at roughly equivalent rates, their journey to that status could not be more different, with Congolese refugees enduring significantly greater difficulties at each stage, from arrival through to their treatment by Brazilian officials. As Jensen shows, Syrians, meanwhile, receive better treatment because the Brazilian state recognizes them as white, in a nation that has historically privileged white immigration. Ultimately, however, Jensen reaches an unexpected conclusion: Regardless of their country of origin, even migrants who do secure asylum status find their lives remain extremely difficult, marked by struggle and discrimination.

Katherine Jensen is assistant professor of sociology and international studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican.

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Orisanmi Burton, "Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt" (U California Press, 2023) Oct 17, 2023

Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (University of California Press, 2023) boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls.

Burton goes beyond the state records that other histories have relied on for the story of Attica and expands that archive, drawing on oral history and applying Black radical theory in ways that center the intellectual and political goals of the incarcerated people who led the struggle. Packed with little-known insights from the prison movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Black Liberation Army, Tip of the Spear promises to transform our understanding of prisons—not only as sites of race war and class war, of counterinsurgency and genocide, but also as sources of defiant Black life, revolutionary consciousness, and abolitionist possibility.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Jesi Faust whose research focuses on the gendered and racialized structures of Spanish colonialism in Morocco and the Philippines, their connections to contemporary imperialism and counterinsurgency, and indigenous resistance.

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Nick Tabor, "Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created" (St. Martin's Press, 2023) Oct 16, 2023

An evocative and epic story, Nick Tabor's Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created(St. Martin's Press, 2023) charts the fraught history of America from those who were brought here as slaves but nevertheless established a home for themselves and their descendants, a community which often thrived despite persistent racism and environmental pollution.

In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the U.S. from West Africa. Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders, a story chronicled in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon.

That community, Africatown, has endured to the present day, and many of the community residents are the shipmates’ direct descendants. After many decades of neglect and a Jim Crow legal system that targeted the area for industrialization, the community is struggling to survive. Many community members believe the pollution from the heavy industry surrounding their homes has caused a cancer epidemic among residents, and companies are eyeing even more land for development.

At the same time, after the discovery of the remains of the Clotilda in the riverbed nearby, a renewed effort is underway to create a living memorial to the community and the lives of the slaves who founded it.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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John D. Garrigus, "A Secret Among the Blacks: Slave Resistance Before the Haitian Revolution" (Harvard UP, 2023) Oct 15, 2023

A bold rethinking of the Haitian Revolution reveals the roots of the only successful slave uprising in the modern world.

Unearthing the progenitors of the Haitian Revolution has been a historical project of two hundred years. In A Secret Among the Blacks: Slave Resistance Before the Haitian Revolution (Harvard UP, 2023), John D. Garrigus introduces two dozen Black men and women and their communities whose decades of resistance to deadly environmental and political threats preceded and shaped the 1791 revolt.

In the twenty-five miles surrounding the revolt’s first fires, enslaved people of diverse origins lived in a crucible of forces that arose from the French colonial project. When a combination of drought, trade blockade, and deadly anthrax bacteria caused waves of death among the enslaved in the 1750s, poison investigations spiraled across plantations. Planters accused, tortured, and killed enslaved healers, survivors, and community leaders for deaths the French regime had caused. Facing inquisition, exploitation, starvation, and disease, enslaved people devised resistance strategies that they practiced for decades. Enslaved men and women organized labor stoppages and allied with free Blacks to force the French into negotiations. They sought enforcement of freedom promises and legal protection from abuse. Some killed their abusers.

Through remarkable archival discoveries and creative interpretations of the worlds endured by the enslaved, A Secret Among the Blacks reveals the range of complex, long-term political visions pursued by enslaved people who organized across plantations located in the seedbed of the Haitian Revolution. When the call to rebellion came, these men and women were prepared to answer.

Brigid Wallace is a Graduate Student in the History Department at Lehigh University. (Twitter: @faithismine51)

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Michael Taylor, "The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery" (Bodley Head, 2021) Oct 15, 2023

In 1807, Parliament outlawed the slave trade in the British Empire, but for the next quarter of a century, despite heroic and bloody rebellions, more than 700,000 people in the British colonies remained enslaved. And when a renewed abolitionist campaign was mounted, making slave ownership the defining political and moral issue of the day, emancipation was fiercely resisted by the powerful 'West India Interest'. Supported by nearly every leading figure of the British establishment - including Canning, Peel and Gladstone, The Times and Spectator - the Interest ensured that slavery survived until 1833 and that when abolition came at last, compensation worth billions in today's money was given not to the enslaved but to the slaveholders, entrenching the power of their families to shape modern Britain to this day.

Drawing on major new research, Michael Taylor's The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery (Bodley Head, 2021) provides a gripping narrative account of the tumultuous and often violent battle that divided and scarred the nation during these years of upheaval. The Interest reveals the lengths to which British leaders went to defend the indefensible in the name of profit, showing that the ultimate triumph of abolition came at a bitter cost and was one of the darkest and most dramatic episodes in British history.

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Kristen Green, "The Devil's Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South's Most Notorious Slave Jail" (Seal Press, 2022) Oct 14, 2023

The inspiring true story of an enslaved woman who liberated an infamous slave jail and transformed it into one of the nation’s first HBCUs. In The Devil's Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South's Most Notorious Slave Jail (Seal Press, 2022), New York Times bestselling author Kristen Green draws on years of research to tell the extraordinary and little-known story of young Mary Lumpkin, an enslaved woman who blazed a path of liberation for thousands. She was forced to have the children of a brutal slave trader and live on the premises of his slave jail, known as the “Devil’s Half Acre.”

When she inherited the jail after the death of her slaveholder, she transformed it into “God’s Half Acre,” a school where Black men could fulfill their dreams. It still exists today as Virginia Union University, one of America’s first Historically Black Colleges and Universities. A sweeping narrative of a life in the margins of the American slave trade, The Devil’s Half Acre brings Mary Lumpkin into the light. This is the story of the resilience of a woman on the path to freedom, her historic contributions, and her enduring legacy.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Robert Greene and Tyler D. Parry, "Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina" (U South Carolina Press, 2021) Oct 13, 2023

Since its founding in 1801, African Americans have played an integral, if too often overlooked, role in the history of the University of South Carolina. Robert Greene and Tyler D. Parry's edited volume Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina (U South Carolina Press, 2021) seeks to recover that historical legacy and reveal the many ways that African Americans have shaped the development of the university. The essays in this volume span the full sweep of the university's history, from the era of slavery to Reconstruction, Civil Rights to Black Power and Black Lives Matter. This collection represents the most comprehensive examination of the long history and complex relationship between African Americans and the university.

Like the broader history of South Carolina, the history of African Americans at the University of South Carolina is about more than their mere existence at the institution. It is about how they molded the university into something greater than the sum of its parts. Throughout the university's history, Black students, faculty, and staff have pressured for greater equity and inclusion. At various times they did so with the support of white allies, other times in the face of massive resistance; oftentimes, there were both.

Between 1868 and 1877, the brief but extraordinary period of Reconstruction, the University of South Carolina became the only state-supported university in the former Confederacy to open its doors to students of all races. This "first desegregation," which offered a glimpse of what was possible, was dismantled and followed by nearly a century during which African American students were once again excluded from the campus. In 1963, the "second desegregation" ended that long era of exclusion but was just the beginning of a new period of activism, one that continues today. Though African Americans have become increasingly visible on campus, the goal of equity and inclusion—a greater acceptance of African American students and a true appreciation of their experiences and contributions—remains incomplete. Invisible No More represents another contribution to this long struggle.

A foreword is provided by Valinda W. Littlefield, associate professor of history and African American studies at the University of South Carolina. Henrie Monteith Treadwell, research professor of community health and preventative medicine at Morehouse School of Medicine and one of the three African American students who desegregated the university in 1963, provides an afterword.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Alejandra Dubcovsky, "Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South" (Yale UP, 2023) Oct 13, 2023

Historian Alejandra Dubcovsky tells a story of war, slavery, loss, remembrance, and the women whose resilience and resistance transformed the colonial South. In exploring their lives she rewrites early American history, challenging the established male-centered narrative.

In Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South (Yale UP, 2023), Dubcovsky reconstructs the lives of Native women—Timucua, Apalachee, Chacato, and Guale—to show how they made claims to protect their livelihoods, bodies, and families. Through the stories of the Native cacica who demanded her authority be recognized; the elite Spanish woman who turned her dowry and household into a source of independent power; the Floridiana who slapped a leading Native man in the town square; and the Black woman who ran a successful business at the heart of a Spanish town, Dubcovsky reveals the formidable women who claimed and used their power, shaping the history of the early South.

Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2021) and co-editor of Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020 (Texas A&M University Press, scheduled Spring 2023). Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1.

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Helen Rappaport, "In Search of Mary Seacole: The Making of a Black Cultural Icon" (Pegasus Books, 2022) Oct 13, 2023

Raised in Jamaica, Mary Seacole first came to England in the 1850s after working in Panama. She wanted to volunteer as a nurse and aide during the Crimean War. When her services were rejected, she financed her own expedition to Balaclava, where her reputation for her nursing—and for her compassion—became almost legendary. Popularly known as ‘Mother Seacole’, she was the most famous Black celebrity of her generation—an extraordinary achievement in Victorian Britain.

She regularly mixed with illustrious royal and military patrons and they, along with grateful war veterans, helped her recover financially when she faced bankruptcy. However, after her death in 1881, she was largely forgotten.

More recently, her profile has been revived and her reputation lionized, with a statue of her standing outside St Thomas's Hospital in London and her portrait—rediscovered by the author—now on display in the National Portrait Gallery. In Search of Mary Seacole is the fruit of almost twenty years of research and reveals the truth about Seacole's personal life, her "rivalry" with Florence Nightingale, and other misconceptions.

Vivid and moving, In Search of Mary Seacole: The Making of a Black Cultural Icon (Pegasus Books, 2022) shows that reality is often more remarkable and more dramatic than the legend.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik, "Maghreb Noir: The Militant-Artists of North Africa and the Struggle for a Pan-African, Postcolonial Future" (Stanford UP, 2023) Oct 11, 2023

Upon their independence, Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian governments turned to the Global South and offered military and financial aid to Black liberation struggles. Tangier and Algiers attracted Black American and Caribbean artists eager to escape American white supremacy; Tunis hosted African filmmakers for the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage; and young freedom fighters from across the African continent established military training camps in Morocco. North Africa became a haven for militant-artists, and the region reshaped postcolonial cultural discourse through the 1960s and 1970s.

Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik's book Maghreb Noir: The Militant-Artists of North Africa and the Struggle for a Pan-African, Postcolonial Future (Stanford UP, 2023) dives into the personal and political lives of these militant-artists, who collectively challenged the neo-colonialist structures and the authoritarianism of African states. Drawing on Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English sources, as well as interviews with the artists themselves, Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik expands our understanding of Pan-Africanism geographically, linguistically, and temporally. This network of militant-artists departed from the racial solidarity extolled by many of their nationalist forefathers, instead following in the footsteps of their intellectual mentor, Frantz Fanon. They argued for the creation of a new ideology of continued revolution—one that was transnational, trans-racial, and in defiance of the emerging nation-states. Maghreb Noir establishes the importance of North Africa in nurturing these global connections—and uncovers a lost history of grassroots collaboration among militant-artists from across the globe.

Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik is Assistant Professor of History at Suffolk University.

Tugrul Mende holds an M.A in Arabic Studies. He is based in Berlin as a project coordinator and independent researcher.

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Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, "The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn" (UNC Press, 2023) Oct 10, 2023

In The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (UNC Press, 2023), award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1796–1833), the enslaved wife of Richard Mentor Johnson, owner of Blue Spring Farm, veteran of the War of 1812, and US vice president under Martin Van Buren. Johnson never freed Chinn, but during his frequent absences from his estate, he delegated to her the management of his property, including Choctaw Academy, a boarding school for Indigenous men and boys on the grounds of the estate. This meant that Chinn, although enslaved herself, oversaw Blue Spring's slave labor force and had substantial control over economic, social, financial, and personal affairs within the couple's world. Chinn's relationship with Johnson was unlikely to have been consensual since she was never manumitted.

What makes Chinn's life exceptional is the power that Johnson invested in her, the opportunities the couple's relationship afforded her and her daughters, and their community's tacit acceptance of the family—up to a point. When the family left their farm, they faced steep limits: pews at the rear of the church, burial in separate graveyards, exclusion from town dances, and more. Johnson’s relationship with Chinn ruined his political career and Myers compellingly demonstrates that it wasn't interracial sex that led to his downfall but his refusal to keep it—and Julia Chinn—behind closed doors.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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John Arena, "Expelling Public Schools: How Antiracist Politics Enable School Privatization in Newark" (U Minnesota Press, 2023) Oct 09, 2023

Exploring the role of identitarian politics in the privatization of Newark’s public school system In Expelling Public Schools, John Arena explores the more than two-decade struggle to privatize public schools in Newark, New Jersey—a conflict that is raging in cities across the country—from the vantage point of elites advancing the pro-privatization agenda and their grassroots challengers. Analyzing the unsuccessful effort of Cory Booker—Newark’s leading pro-privatization activist and mayor—to generate popular support for the agenda, and Booker’s rival and ultimate successor Ras Baraka’s eventual galvanization of the charter movement, Arena argues that Baraka’s black radical politics cloaked a revanchist agenda of privatization.

John Arena's book Expelling Public Schools: How Antiracist Politics Enable School Privatization in Newark(U Minnesota Press, 2023) reveals the political rise of Booker and Baraka, their one-time rivalry and subsequent alliance, and what this particular case study illuminates about contemporary post–civil rights Black politics. Ultimately, Expelling Public Schools is a critique of Black urban regime politics and the way in which antiracist messaging obscures real class divisions, interests, and ideological diversity.

Laura Beth Kelly is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.

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Sharon Patricia Holland, "an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life" (Duke UP, 2023) Oct 07, 2023

In an other: a black feminist examination of animal life (Duke UP, 2023), Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawing on writers and thinkers ranging from Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Toni Morrison, and C. E. Morgan to Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway, Holland decenters the human in Black feminist thought to interrogate blackness, insurgence, flesh, and femaleness. She examines MOVE's incarnation as an animal liberation group; uses sovereignty in Morrison's A Mercy to understand blackness, indigeneity, and the animal; analyzes Charles Burnett's films as commentaries on the place of animals in Black life; and shows how equestrian novels address Black and animal life in ways that rehearse the practices of the slavocracy. By focusing on doing rather than being, Holland demonstrates that Black life is not solely likened to animal life; it is relational and world-forming with animal lives.

Sharon P. Holland (she/her) is the President of the American Studies Association. She is also the Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor in American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She served as Chair of the Department from July 2020- July 2022.

Callie Smith, PhD. is a museum educator and poet based in Louisiana.

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Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, "Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution" (Polity, 2023) Oct 04, 2023

In their remarkable new book Slavery, Capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution (Polity, 2023), Professor Maxine Berg and Professor Pat Hudson “follow the money” to document in revealing detail the role of slavery in the making of Britain’s industrial revolution. Slavery was not just a source of wealth for a narrow circle of slave owners who built grand country houses and filled them with luxuries. The forces set in motion by the slave and plantation trades seeped into almost every aspect of the economy and society.

In textile mills, iron and copper smelting, steam power, and financial institutions, slavery played a crucial part. Things we might think far removed from the taint of slavery, like 18th century fashions for indigo- patterned cloth, sweet tea, snuff boxes, mahogany furniture, ceramics and silverware, were intimately connected. Even London’s role as a centre for global finance was partly determined by the slave trade as insurance, financial trading and mortgage markets were developed in the City to promote distant and risky investments in enslaved people.

The result is a bold and unflinching account of how Britain became a global superpower, and how the legacy of slavery persists. Acknowledging Britain’s role in slavery is not just about toppling statues and renaming streets. We urgently need to come to terms with slavery’s inextricable links with Western capitalism, and the ways in which many of us continue to benefit from slavery to this day.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Rebecca J. Fraser, "Black Female Intellectuals in 19th Century America: Born to Bloom Unseen?" (Routledge, 2022) Oct 01, 2023

Drawing on letters, personal testimony, works of art, novels, and historic Black newspapers, this book is an interdisciplinary exploration of Black women’s contributions to the intellectual life of nineteenth-century America.

Rebecca J Fraser's book Black Female Intellectuals in 19th Century America: Born to Bloom Unseen? (Routledge, 2022) reconceptualizes the idea of what the term "intellectual" means through its discussions of both familiar and often forgotten Black women, including Edmonia Lewis, Harriet Powers, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, amongst others. This re-envisioning brings those who have previously been excluded from the scholarship of Black intellectualism more generally, and Black female intellectuals specifically, into the center of the debate. Importantly, it also situates the histories of Black women participating in the intellectual cultures of the United States much earlier than most previous scholarship.

This book will be of interest to both undergraduate and postgraduate specialists and students in the fields of African American history, women’s and gender history, and American studies, as well as general readers interested in historical and biographical works.

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Kiana Fitzgerald, "Ode to Hip-Hop: 50 Albums That Define 50 Years of Trailblazing Music" (Running Press Adult, 2023) Sep 30, 2023

From underground roots to mainstream popularity, hip-hop's influence on music and entertainment around the world has been nothing short of extraordinary. Ode to Hip-Hop chronicles the journey with profiles of fifty albums that have defined, expanded, and ultimately transformed the genre into what it is today. From 2 Live Crew's groundbreaking As Nasty As They Wanna Be in 1989 to Cardi B's similarly provocative Invasion of Privacy almost thirty years later, and more, Kiana Fitzgerald's book Ode to Hip-Hop: 50 Albums That Define 50 Years of Trailblazing Music(Running Press Adult, 2023) covers hip-hop from coast to coast. Organized by decade and with sidebars on fashion, mixtapes, and key players throughout, the result is a comprehensive homage to hip-hop, published just in time for the fiftieth anniversary. Enjoyed in the club, at a party, through speakers or headphones–the albums in this book deserve to be listened to again and again, for the next fifty years and beyond.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Sara Marcus, "Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis" (Harvard UP, 2023) Sep 30, 2023

Moving from the aftermath of Reconstruction through the AIDS crisis, a new cultural history of the United States shows how artists, intellectuals, and activists turned political disappointment--the unfulfilled desire for change--into a basis for solidarity.

Sara Marcus argues that the defining texts in twentieth-century American cultural history are records of political disappointment. Through insightful and often surprising readings of literature and sound, Marcus offers a new cultural history of the last century, in which creative minds observed the passing of moments of possibility, took stock of the losses sustained, and fostered intellectual revolutions and unexpected solidarities.

Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis (Harvard UP, 2023) shows how, by confronting disappointment directly, writers and artists helped to produce new political meanings and possibilities. Marcus first analyzes works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers that expressed the anguish of the early Jim Crow era, during which white supremacy thwarted the rebuilding of the country as a multiracial democracy. In the ensuing decades, the Popular Front work songs and stories of Lead Belly and Tillie Olsen, the soundscapes of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the feminist poetry of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, and the queer art of Marlon Riggs and David Wojnarowicz continued building the century-long archive of disappointment. Marcus shows how defeat time and again gave rise to novel modes of protest and new forms of collective practice, keeping alive the dream of a better world.

Disappointment has proved to be a durable, perhaps even inevitable, feature of the democratic project, yet so too has the resistance it precipitates. Marcus's unique history of the twentieth century reclaims the unrealized desire for liberation as a productive force in American literature and life.

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Peter Reed, "Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race and Popular Performance" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Sep 28, 2023

American culture maintained a complicated relationship with Haiti from its revolutionary beginnings onward. In Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race and Popular Performance(Cambridge UP, 2022), Peter P. Reed reveals how Americans embodied and re-enacted their connections to Haiti through a wide array of performance forms. In the wake of Haiti's slave revolts in the 1790s, generations of actors, theatre professionals, spectators, and commentators looked to Haiti as a source of both inspiring freedom and vexing disorder. French colonial refugees, university students, Black theatre stars, blackface minstrels, abolitionists, and even writers such as Herman Melville all reinvented and restaged Haiti in distinctive ways. Reed demonstrates how Haiti's example of Black freedom and national independence helped redefine American popular culture, as actors and audiences repeatedly invoked and suppressed Haiti's revolutionary narratives, characters, and themes. Ultimately, Haiti shaped generations of performances, transforming America's understandings of race, power, freedom, and violence in ways that still reverberate today.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Sirpa Salenius, "An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe" (U Massachusetts Press, 2016) Sep 27, 2023

Sarah Parker Remond (1826–1894) left the free black community of Salem, Massachusetts, where she was born, to become one of the first women to travel on extensive lecture tours across the United Kingdom. Remond eventually moved to Florence, Italy, where she earned a degree at one of Europe's most prestigious medical schools. Her language skills enabled her to join elite salons in Florence and Rome, where she entertained high society with musical soirees even while maintaining connections to European emancipation movements.

Remond's extensive travels and diverse acquaintances demonstrate that the nineteenth-century grand tour of Europe was not exclusively the privilege of white intellectuals but included African American travelers, among them women. Sirpa Salenius' book An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe (U Massachusetts Press, 2016), based on international archival research, tells the fascinating story of how Remond forged a radical path, establishing relationships with fellow activists, artists, and intellectuals across Europe.

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Dylan C. Penningroth, "Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights" (Liveright, 2023) Sep 26, 2023

A prize-winning scholar draws on astonishing new research to demonstrate how Black people used the law to their advantage long before the Civil Rights Movement.

The familiar story of civil rights goes like this: once, America’s legal system shut Black people out and refused to recognize their rights, their basic human dignity, or even their very lives. When lynch mobs gathered, police and judges often closed their eyes, if they didn’t join in. For Black people, law was a hostile, fearsome power to be avoided whenever possible. Then, starting in the 1940s, a few brave lawyers ventured south, bent on changing the law. Soon, ordinary African Americans, awakened by Supreme Court victories and galvanized by racial justice activists, launched the civil rights movement.

In Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (Liveright, 2023), acclaimed historian Dylan C. Penningroth brilliantly revises the conventional story. Drawing on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, Penningroth reveals that African Americans, far from being ignorant about law until the middle of the twentieth century, have thought about, talked about, and used it going as far back as even the era of slavery. They dealt constantly with the laws of property, contract, inheritance, marriage and divorce, of associations (like churches and businesses and activist groups), and more. By exercising these “rights of everyday use,” Penningroth demonstrates, they made Black rights seem unremarkable. And in innumerable subtle ways, they helped shape the law itself—the laws all of us live under today.

Penningroth’s narrative, which stretches from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s, partly traces the history of his own family. Challenging accepted understandings of Black history framed by relations with white people, he puts Black people at the center of the story—their loves and anger and loneliness, their efforts to stay afloat, their mistakes and embarrassments, their fights, their ideas, their hopes and disappointments, in all their messy humanness. Before the Movement is an account of Black legal lives that looks beyond the Constitution and the criminal justice system to recover a rich, broader vision of Black life—a vision allied with, yet distinct from, “the freedom struggle.”

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Jonathan Mael, "Harlem World: How Hip Hop's Super Showdown Changed Music Forever" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023) Sep 26, 2023

July 3, 1981, was a pivotal night for the future of America's newest art form: hip hop. In New York's Harlem World Club, the Fantastic Romantic Five and the Cold Crush Brothers competed, with an unprecedented $1,000--and their reputations--on the line in a highly anticipated rap battle. The show drew hundreds of fans to settle a question that still dominates hip hop circles: Who's the best?

In Harlem World: How Hip Hop's Super Showdown Changed Music Forever(Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), journalist Jonathan Mael chronicles this fateful night of hip hop rivalry and shares a new look at how Harlem helped ignite a musical revolution. Since hip hop first emerged in New York in the early 1970s, artists like Theodore Livingston (DJ Grand Wizzard Theodore) and Curtis Brown (Grandmaster Caz) sought to elevate this uniquely American musical genre by pushing the limits of record-playing techniques and lyricism. The two crews they assembled put on the best shows in a world where hip hop was still a strictly live art form. Even as acts like the Sugarhill Gang and Kurtis Blow became commercially successful, New York's top two crews strove to claim the ultimate spot atop the city's hip hop scene.

The battle blew the roof off Harlem World that night, and bootlegged cassette tapes of the match-up sent aftershocks around the city as more fans listened to the legendary performances. Set in the New York of the 1970s and '80s, this book shares dozens of new, exclusive interviews and a treasure trove of previously unpublished archival material to tell the story of Cold Crush and Fantastic's rivalry, documenting one of the most important stories in hip hop history. This is the first book of its kind to focus on 1979-1983 and the legendary battles at Harlem World while connecting the genre's formative years to its massive role in American society today.

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Laura F. Edwards, "The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South" (UNC Press, 2009) Sep 25, 2023

Do individuals have the right to “keep and bear” arms? Do “the people” have any collective rights to public safety? Now that the United States Supreme Court requires each side to argue based on the “history” and “tradition” of 1791 and 1868, what do scholars tell us about legal practices and public understanding in those times? Dr. Laura F. Edwards argues that Americans in the South transformed their understanding of inequality during the half century following the Revolutionary War. Drawing on extensive archival research in North and South Caroline, she outlines the changes in the legal system, highlighting the importance of localized legal practices that favored maintaining the "peace”: a concept intended to protect the social order and its patriarchal hierarchies. Ordinary people, rather than legal professionals and political leaders, were central to its workings. People without rights – even those enslaved – “had influence within the system because of their positions of subordination, not in spite of them.” Edwards documents how, by the 1830s, state leaders secured support for a more centralized system that excluded people who were not specifically granted individual rights, including women, African Americans, and the poor. The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South(UNC Press, 2009) concludes that the emphasis on rights affirmed and restructured existing patriarchal inequalities, giving them new life within state law with implications that affected all Americans.

This award-winning 2009 book is now central to a new Supreme Court case (United States v. Rahimi) dealing with domestic violence and guns – and has been cited in the legal briefs.

Dr. Laura F. Edwards is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University and the award-winning author of four books. Most recently, she wrote Only the Clothes on Her Back: Textiles, Law, and Commerce in the Nineteenth-Century United States published by Oxford in 2022.

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Zebulon Vance Miletsky, "Before Busing: A History of Boston's Long Black Freedom Struggle" (UNC Press, 2022) Sep 22, 2023

In many histories of Boston, African Americans have remained almost invisible. Partly as a result, when the 1972 crisis over school desegregation and busing erupted, many observers professed shock at the overt racism on display in the "cradle of liberty." Yet the city has long been divided over matters of race, and it was also home to a far older Black organizing tradition than many realize. A community of Black activists had fought segregated education since the origins of public schooling and racial inequality since the end of northern slavery.

Before Busing: A History of Boston's Long Black Freedom Struggle (UNC Press, 2022) tells the story of the men and women who struggled and demonstrated to make school desegregation a reality in Boston. It reveals the legal efforts and battles over tactics that played out locally and influenced the national Black freedom struggle. And the book gives credit to the Black organizers, parents, and children who fought long and hard battles for justice that have been left out of the standard narratives of the civil rights movement. What emerges is a clear picture of the long and hard-fought campaigns to break the back of Jim Crow education in the North and make Boston into a better, more democratic city—a fight that continues to this day.

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David Cunningham, January 6th and Asymmetrical Policing (JP, EF) Sep 21, 2023

Recall This Book first heard from the sociologist of American racism David Cunningham in Episode 36 Policing and White Power. Less than a week after the horrors of January 6th, 2021, he came back for this conversation about “asymmetrical policing” of the political right and left–and of White and Black Americans. His very first book (There’s Something Happening Here, 2004) studied the contrast between the FBI’s work in the 1960’s to wipe out left-wing and Black protests and its efforts to control and tame right-wing and white supremacist movements. That gives him a valuable perspective on the run-up to January 6th–and what may happen next.

Mentioned in the Episode

David Cunningham collaborated on this article about the “common pattern of underestimating the threat from right-wing extremists.”
Ulster Defence Association
Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
Ulster Defence Association
Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing: FBI perspective and reported book
Two of the “after-action” reports on Charlottesville that David discusses are:
“Independent Review of the 2017 Protest Events in Charlottesville, Virginia” (Hunton and Williams 2017)
“Virginia’s Response to the Unite the Right Rally: After-Action Review” (International Association of Chiefs of Police, December 2017)
Lessons Charlottesville (should have) taught us: “Prohibiting Private Armies at Public Rallies” (Georgetown Law School, Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and protection, September 2020).

Listen and Read

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Lipika Pelham, "Passing: An Alternative History of Identity" (Oxford UP, 2021) Sep 20, 2023

A slave woman in 1840s America dresses as a white, disabled man to escape to freedom, while a twenty-first-century black rights activist is 'cancelled' for denying her whiteness. A Victorian explorer disguises himself as a Muslim in Arabia's forbidden holy city. A trans man claiming to have been assigned male at birth is exposed and murdered by bigots in 1993. Today, Japanese untouchables leave home and change their name.

All of them have "passed," performing or claiming an identity that society hasn't assigned or recognized as theirs. For as long as we've drawn lines describing ourselves and each other, people have naturally fallen or deliberately stepped between them. What do their stories--in life and in art--tell us about the changing meanings of identity? About our need for labels, despite their obvious limitations?

In Passing: An Alternative History of Identity (Oxford UP, 2021), Lipika Pelham reflects on tales of fluidity and transformation, including her own. From Pope Joan to Parasite, Brazil to Bangladesh, London to Liberia, Passing is a fascinating, timely history of the self.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Maria Smilios, "The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis" (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2023) Sep 19, 2023

New York City, 1929. A sanatorium, a deadly disease, and a dire nursing shortage.

In the pre-antibiotic days when tuberculosis stirred people’s darkest fears, killing one in seven, white nurses at Sea View, New York’s largest municipal hospital, began quitting en masse. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the strictures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themselves on an isolated hilltop in the remote borough of Staten Island, yet again confronting racism and consigned to a woefully understaffed sanatorium, dubbed “the pest house,” where it was said that “no one left alive.”

Spanning the Great Depression and moving through World War II and beyond, this remarkable true story follows the intrepid young women known by their patients as the “Black Angels.” For twenty years, they risked their lives working under appalling conditions while caring for New York’s poorest residents, who languished in wards, waiting to die, or became guinea pigs for experimental surgeries and often deadly drugs. But despite their major role in desegregating the New York City hospital system—and their vital work in helping to find the cure for tuberculosis at Sea View—these nurses were completely erased from history. Maria Smilios' book The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis(G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2023) recovers the voices of these extraordinary women and puts them at the center of this riveting story, celebrating their legacy and spirit of survival. New York City, 1929. A sanatorium, a deadly disease, and a dire nursing shortage.

In the pre-antibiotic days when tuberculosis stirred people’s darkest fears, killing one in seven, white nurses at Sea View, New York’s largest municipal hospital, began quitting en masse. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the strictures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themselves on an isolated hilltop in the remote borough of Staten Island, yet again confronting racism and consigned to a woefully understaffed sanatorium, dubbed “the pest house,” where it was said that “no one left alive.”

Spanning the Great Depression and moving through World War II and beyond, this remarkable true story follows the intrepid young women known by their patients as the “Black Angels.” For twenty years, they risked their lives working under appalling conditions while caring for New York’s poorest residents, who languished in wards, waiting to die, or became guinea pigs for experimental surgeries and often deadly drugs. But despite their major role in desegregating the New York City hospital system—and their vital work in helping to find the cure for tuberculosis at Sea View—these nurses were completely erased from history. The Black Angels recovers the voices of these extraordinary women and puts them at the center of this riveting story, celebrating their legacy and spirit of survival.

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Kimberly Mack, "Living Colour's Time's Up" (Bloomsbury, 2023) Sep 19, 2023

The iconic Black rock band Living Colour's Time's Up, released in 1990, was recorded in the aftermath of the spectacular critical and commercial success of their debut record Vivid. Time's Up is a musical and lyrical triumph, incorporating distinct forms and styles of music and featuring inspired collaborations with artists as varied as Little Richard, Queen Latifah, Maceo Parker, and Mick Jagger. The clash of sounds and styles don't immediately fit. The confrontational hardcore-thrash metal - complete with Glover's apocalyptic wail - in the title track is not a natural companion with Doug E. Fresh's human beat box on "Tag Team Partners," but it's precisely this bold and brilliant collision that creates the barely-controlled chaos. And isn't rock & roll about chaos?

Living Colour's sophomore effort holds great relevance in light of its forward-thinking politics and lyrical engagement with racism, classism, police brutality, and other social and political issues of great importance. InLiving Colour's Time's Up (Bloomsbury, 2023),

Kimberly Mack explores the creation and reception of this artistically challenging album, while examining the legacy of this culturally important and groundbreaking American rock band.

Kimberly Mack is the author of Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White (2020), which won the 2021 College English Association of Ohio's Nancy Dasher Award. She is also a music critic and memoirist who has written for publications including Longreads, Music Connection, No Depression, Relix, PopMatters, and Hot Press.

Kimberly Mack on Twitter.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter.

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Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, "Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap" (U California Press, 2023) Sep 19, 2023

This book shows how a century of redlining, disinvestment, and the War on Drugs wreaked devastation on Black people and paved the way for gentrification in Washington, DC. In Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap (U California Press, 2023), Tanya Maria Golash-Boza tracks the cycles of state abandonment and punishment that have shaped the city, revealing how policies and policing work to displace and decimate the Black middle class.

Through the stories of those who have lost their homes and livelihoods, Golash-Boza explores how DC came to be the nation's "murder capital" and incarceration capital, and why it is now a haven for wealthy White people. This troubling history makes clear that the choice to use prisons and policing to solve problems faced by Black communities in the twentieth century--instead of investing in schools, community centers, social services, health care, and violence prevention--is what made gentrification possible in the twenty-first. Before Gentrification unveils a pattern of anti-Blackness and racial capitalism in DC that has implications for all US cities.

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Chris Molanphy, "Old Town Road" (Duke UP, 2023) Sep 15, 2023

In Old Town Road(Duke University Press, 2023), Chris Molanphy considers Lil Nas X’s debut single as pop artifact, chart phenomenon, and cultural watershed. “Old Town Road” was more than a massive hit, with the most weeks at No. 1 in Billboard Hot 100 history. It is also a prism through which to track the evolution of popular music consumption and the ways race influences how the music industry categorizes songs and artists. By both lionizing and satirizing genre tropes—it’s a country song built from an alternative rock sample, a hip-hop song in which nobody raps, a comical song that transcends novelty, and a queer anthem—Lil Nas X troubles the very idea of genre. Ultimately, Molanphy shows how “Old Town Road” channeled decades of Americana to point the way toward our cultural future.

Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

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Christopher Paul Harris, "To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care" (Princeton UP, 2023) Sep 15, 2023

When #BlackLivesMatter emerged in 2013, it animated the most consequential Black-led mobilization since the civil rights and Black power era. Today, the hashtag turned rallying cry is but one expression of a radical reorientation toward Black politics, protest, and political thought. To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care(Princeton UP, 2023) examines the spirit and significance of this insurgency, offering a revelatory account of a new political culture--responsive to pain, suffused with joy, and premised on care--emerging from the centuries-long arc of Black rebellion, a tradition that traces back to the Black slave.

Drawing on his own experiences as an activist and organizer, Christopher Paul Harris takes readers inside the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) to chart the propulsive trajectory of Black politics and thought from the Middle Passage to the present historical moment. Carefully attending to the social forces that produce Black struggle and the contradictions that arise within it, Harris illustrates how M4BL gives voice to an abolitionist praxis that bridges the past, present, and future, outlining a political project at once directed inward to the Black community while issuing an outward challenge to the world.

Essential reading for the age of #BlackLivesMatter, this visionary and provocative book reveals how the radical politics of joy, pain, and care, in sharp contrast to liberal political thought, can build a Black future that transcends ideology and pushes the boundaries of our political imagination.

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Jonathan Daniel Wells, "The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War" (Bold Type Press, 2020) Sep 14, 2023

In a rapidly changing New York, two forces battled for the city's soul: the pro-slavery New Yorkers who kept the illegal slave trade alive and well, and the abolitionists fighting for freedom.

We often think of slavery as a southern phenomenon, far removed from the booming cities of the North. But even though slavery had been outlawed in Gotham by the 1830s, Black New Yorkers were not safe. Not only was the city built on the backs of slaves; it was essential in keeping slavery and the slave trade alive.

In The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War(Bold Type Press, 2020), historian Jonathan Daniel Wells tells the story of the powerful network of judges, lawyers, and police officers who circumvented anti-slavery laws by sanctioning the kidnapping of free and fugitive African Americans. Nicknamed "The New York Kidnapping Club," the group had the tacit support of institutions from Wall Street to Tammany Hall whose wealth depended on the Southern slave and cotton trade. But a small cohort of abolitionists, including Black journalist David Ruggles, organized tirelessly for the rights of Black New Yorkers, often risking their lives in the process.

Taking readers into the bustling streets and ports of America's great Northern metropolis, The Kidnapping Club is a dramatic account of the ties between slavery and capitalism, the deeply corrupt roots of policing, and the strength of Black activism.

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Jonathan Leal, "Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop" (Duke UP, 2023) Sep 14, 2023

In Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop (Duke UP, 2023), Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new futures for racialized and minoritized communities. Blending lyrical nonfiction with transdisciplinary critique and moving beyond standard Black/white binary narratives of jazz history, Leal focuses on the stories and experiences of three musicians and writers of color: James Araki, a Nisei multi-instrumentalist, soldier-translator, and literature and folklore scholar; Raúl Salinas, a Chicano poet, jazz critic, and longtime activist who endured the US carceral system for over a decade; and Harold Wing, an Afro-Chinese American drummer, pianist, and songwriter who performed with bebop pioneers before working as a public servant. Leal foregrounds that for these men and their collaborators, bebop was an affectively and intellectually powerful force that helped them build community and dream new social possibilities. Bebop’s complexity and radicality, Leal contends, made it possible for those like Araki, Salinas, and Wing who grappled daily with state-sanctioned violence to challenge a racially supremacist, imperial nation, all while hearing and making the world anew.

"Dreams of Autumn" on Spotify.
"Dreams of Autumn on Apple Music.

Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University Email: nathan.smith@yale.edu

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A Better Way to Buy Books Sep 12, 2023

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities.

Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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William Darity et al., "The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice" (U California Press, 2023) Sep 12, 2023

A surge in interest in black reparations is taking place in America on a scale not seen since the Reconstruction Era. The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice(U California Press, 2023) gathers an accomplished interdisciplinary team of scholars--members of the Reparations Planning Committee--who have considered the issues pertinent to making reparations happen. This book will be an essential resource in the national conversation going forward.

The first section of The Black Reparations Project crystallizes the rationale for reparations, cataloguing centuries of racial repression, discrimination, violence, mass incarceration, and the immense black-white wealth gap. Drawing on the contributors' expertise in economics, history, law, public policy, public health, and education, the second section unfurls direct guidance for building and implementing a reparations program, including draft legislation that addresses how the program should be financed and how claimants can be identified and compensated. Rigorous and comprehensive, The Black Reparations Project will motivate, guide, and speed the final leg of the journey for justice.

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Josephine Lee, "Oriental, Black, and White: The Formation of Racial Habits in American Theater" (UNC Press, 2022) Sep 11, 2023

The history of race in American theater is more complicated than you might think, writes Dr. Josephine Lee in Oriental, Black, and White: The Formation of Racial Habits in American Theater (UNC Press, 2022). Dr. Lee, a professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota, examines the linked histories of orientalism, Blackface and Yellowface, in nineteenth and early twentieth century American theater, showing how identity creation and racialization occurred among multiple groups simultaneously. Within the context of large scale East Asian immigration to the West coast, labor debates, and American empire building. Theaters, both on the East and West coasts, and touring Black and white theater companies, thus both reflected and shaped American ideas about race and belonging throughout this time period. A fascinating and complex look at how Americans tried to make sense of their world, Lee asks readers to look beyond easy answers and assumptions, and look at American theater in a new way.

Oriental, Black, and White is an open access book, available for free via JStor.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Padraic X. Scanlan, "Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain" (Robinson, 2021) Sep 11, 2023

The British empire, in sentimental myth, was more free, more just and more fair than its rivals. But this claim that the British empire was 'free' and that, for all its flaws, it promised liberty to all its subjects was never true. The British empire was built on slavery.

Padraic X. Scanlan's book Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain(Robinson, 2021) puts enslaved people at the centre the British empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In intimate, human detail, the chapters show how British imperial power and industrial capitalism were inextricable from plantation slavery. With vivid original research and careful synthesis of innovative historical scholarship, Slave Empire shows that British freedom and British slavery were made together.

In the nineteenth century, Britain abolished its slave trade, and then slavery in its colonial empire. Because Britain was the first European power to abolish slavery, many Victorian Britons believed theirs was a liberal empire, promoting universal freedom and civilisation. And yet, the shape of British liberty itself was shaped by the labour of enslaved African workers. There was no bright line between British imperial exploitation and the 'civilisation' that the empire promised to its subjects. Nineteenth-century liberals were blind to the ways more than two centuries of colonial slavery twisted the roots of 'British liberty'.

Freedom - free elections, free labour, free trade - were watchwords in the Victorian era, but the empire was still sustained by the labour of enslaved people, in the United States, Cuba and elsewhere. Modern Britain has inherited the legacies and contradictions of a liberal empire built on slavery. Modern capitalism and liberalism emphasise 'freedom' - for individuals and for markets - but are built on human bondage.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Race and Electrical Infrastructure in the Jim Crow South Sep 11, 2023

Conor Harrison, Associate Professor of Geography and the School of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at the University of South Carolina, talks about his research into the racist development of electrical systems in the Jim Crow South with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The pair discuss how Harrison’s research fits within larger trends in the academic discipline of geography and the kinds of empirical research Harrison did to support his articles on the racial dimensions of electricity infrastructure. They also discuss how Harrison’s research has shifted in recent years to focus on the financial structures of the electricity industry.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Isabel Machado, "Carnival in Alabama: Marked Bodies and Invented Traditions in Mobile" (UP of Mississippi, 2023) Sep 10, 2023

Mobile is simultaneously a typical and unique city in the postwar United States. It was a quintessential boomtown during World War II. That prosperity was followed by a period of rapid urban decline and subsequent attempts at revitalizing (or gentrifying) its downtown area. As in many other US cities, urban renewal, integration, and other socioeconomic developments led to white flight, marginalized the African American population, and set the stage for the development of LGBTQ+ community building and subculture. Yet these usually segregated segments of society in Mobile converged once a year to create a common identity, that of a Carnival City.

Carnival in Alabama: Marked Bodies and Invented Traditions in Mobile(UP of Mississippi, 2023) looks not only at the people who participated in Mardi Gras organizations divided by race, gender, and/or sexual orientation, but also investigates the experience of “marked bodies” outside of these organizations, or people involved in Carnival through their labor or as audiences (or publics) of the spectacle. It also expands the definition of Mobile’s Carnival “tradition” beyond the official pageantry by including street maskers and laborers and neighborhood cookouts.

Using archival sources and oral history interviews to investigate and analyze the roles assigned, inaccessible to, or claimed and appropriated by straight-identified African American men and women and people who defied gender and sexuality normativity in the festivities (regardless of their racial identity), this book illuminates power dynamics through culture and ritual. By looking at Carnival as an “invented tradition” and as a semiotic system associated with discourses of power, it joins a transnational conversation about the phenomenon.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Nicole Fabricant, "Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore" (U California Press, 2022) Sep 10, 2023

Industrial toxic emissions on the South Baltimore Peninsula are among the highest in the nation. Because of the concentration of factories and other chemical industries in their neighborhoods, residents face elevated rates of lung cancer and other respiratory illnesses in addition to heart attacks, strokes, and cardiovascular disease, all of which can lead to premature death.

Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore (U California Press, 2022) follows a dynamic and creative group of high school students who decided to fight back against the race- and class-based health disparities and inequality in their city. For more than a decade, student organizers stood up to unequal land use practices and the proposed construction of an incinerator and instead initiated new waste management strategies. As a Baltimore resident and activist-scholar, Nicole Fabricant documents how these young organizers came to envision, design, and create a more just and sustainable Baltimore.

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Vincent W. Lloyd, "Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination" (Yale UP, 2022) Sep 09, 2023

This radical work by one of the leading young scholars of Black thought delineates a new concept of Black dignity, yet one with a long history in Black writing and action. Previously in the West, dignity has been seen in two ways: as something inherent in one’s station in life, whether acquired or conferred by birth; or more recently as an essential condition and right common to all of humanity.

In what might be called a work of observational philosophy—an effort to describe the philosophy underlying the Black Lives Matter movement—Vincent W. Lloyd defines dignity as something performative, not an essential quality but an action: struggle against domination. Without struggle, there is no dignity.

In Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination (Yale UP, 2022), Lloyd defines anti-Blackness as an inescapable condition of American life, and the slave’s struggle against the master as the “primal scene” of domination and resistance. Exploring the way Black writers such as Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, and Audre Lorde have dealt with themes such as Black rage, Black love, and Black magic, Lloyd posits that Black dignity is the paradigm of all dignity and, more audaciously, that Black philosophy is the starting point of all philosophy.

Vincent W. Lloyd is associate professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University. His previous books include Black Natural Law and the coedited Race and Secularism in America. He coedits the journal Political Theology.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Andrew Chan, "Why Mariah Carey Matters" (U Texas Press, 2023) Sep 05, 2023

Why Mariah Carey Matters (University of Texas Press, 2023) examines the creative and complicated evolution of the musical artist. In the 1990s, Carey perfected blending pop, hip-hop, and R&B and drew from her turbulent personal life to create introspective, sonically sound masterpieces like “Vision of Love,” “Make it Happen,” and “Butterfly.” There is no doubt about Carey’s star power, as she has sold over 220 million albums globally and has the most Billboard chart-topping singles of any solo artist. Although a pioneering songwriter and producer, Carey’s musicianship and influence are still insufficiently appreciated.

Andrew Chan looks beyond Carey’s glamorous persona to explore her experience as a biracial Black woman in the music business, her adventurous forays into house music and gospel, and her appeal to multiple generations of queer audiences. He also reckons with the transcendent ideal of the voice that Carey represents, showing how this international icon taught artists worldwide to sing with soul-shaking intensity and a spirit of innovation.

Andrew Chan writes regularly about music, film, and books. His work has been published by the Criterion Collection, Film Comment, NPR, the New Yorker, and Reverse Shot.

Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master’s in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include popular culture, the public history of women’s fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology.

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Kristal Brent Zook, "The Girl in the Yellow Poncho: A Memoir" (Duke UP, 2023) Sep 05, 2023

At five years old, Kristal Brent Zook sat on the steps of a Venice Beach, California, motel trying to make sense of her white father’s abandonment, which left her feeling unworthy of a man’s love and of white protection. Raised by her working-class African American mother and grandmother, Zook was taught not to count on anyone, especially men. Men leave. Men disappoint. In adulthood she became a feminist, activist, and “race woman” journalist in New York City. Despite her professional success, something was missing. Coming to terms with her identity was a constant challenge.

The Girl in the Yellow Poncho: A Memoir (Duke UP, 2023) is Zook’s coming-of-age tale about what it means to be biracial in America. Throughout, she grapples with in-betweenness while also facing childhood sexual assault, economic insecurity, and multigenerational alcoholism and substance abuse on both the Black and white sides of her family. Her story is one of strong Black women—herself, her cousin, her mother, and her grandmother—and the generational cycles of oppression and survival that seemingly defined their lives.

Setting out on an inner journey that takes her across oceans and continents, Zook tells the story of a little girl who never gives up on love, even long after it seems to have been destroyed. In the end she triumphs, reconciling with her father and mother to create the family of her dreams through forgiveness and sheer force of will. A testament to the power of settling into one’s authentic identity, this book tells a story of a daughter’s lifelong yearning, a mother’s rediscovery of lost love, and the profound power of atonement and faith to heal a broken family.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Kidada E. Williams, "I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction" (Bloomsbury, 2023) Sep 03, 2023

The story of Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and journalists whose accounts claim an outsized place in collective memory. But this pivotal era looked very different to African Americans in the South transitioning from bondage to freedom after 1865. They were besieged by a campaign of white supremacist violence that persisted through the 1880s and beyond. For too long, their lived experiences have been sidelined, impoverishing our understanding of the obstacles post-Civil War Black families faced, their inspiring determination to survive, and the physical and emotional scars they bore because of it.

In I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction(Bloomsbury, 2023), Kidada E. Williams offers a breakthrough account of the much-debated Reconstruction period, transporting readers into the daily existence of formerly enslaved people building hope-filled new lives. Drawing on overlooked sources and bold new readings of the archives, Williams offers a revelatory and, in some cases, minute-by-minute record of nighttime raids and Ku Klux Klan strikes. And she deploys cutting-edge scholarship on trauma to consider how the effects of these attacks would linger for decades-indeed, generations-to come. For readers of Carol Anderson, Tiya Miles, and Clint Smith, I Saw Death Coming is an indelible and essential book that speaks to some of the most pressing questions of our times.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Tomiko Brown-Nagin, "Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality" (Knopf Doubleday, 2023) Aug 30, 2023

With the US Supreme Court confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, “it makes sense to revisit the life and work of another Black woman who profoundly shaped the law: Constance Baker Motley” (CNN). Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hairdresser. Instead, she became the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only black woman member in the legal team at the NAACP’s Inc. Fund at the time, she defended Martin Luther King in Birmingham, helped to argue in Brown vs. The Board of Education, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. She was the first black woman elected to the state Senate in New York, the first woman elected Manhattan Borough President, and the first black woman appointed to the federal judiciary.

Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality(Knopf Doubleday, 2023) captures the story of a remarkable American life, a figure who remade law and inspired the imaginations of African Americans across the country. Burnished with an extraordinary wealth of research, award-winning, esteemed Civil Rights and legal historian and dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Tomiko Brown-Nagin brings Motley to life in these pages. Brown-Nagin compels us to ponder some of our most timeless and urgent questions–how do the historically marginalized access the corridors of power? What is the price of the ticket? How does access to power shape individuals committed to social justice? In Civil Rights Queen, she dramatically fills out the picture of some of the most profound judicial and societal change made in twentieth-century America.

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Ana Lucia Araujo, "Museums and Atlantic Slavery" (Routledge, 2021) Aug 29, 2023

Ana Lucia Araujo's book Museums and Atlantic Slavery(Routledge, 2021) explores how slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and enslaved people are represented through words, visual images, artifacts, and audiovisual materials in museums in Europe and the Americas.

Divided into four chapters, the book addresses four recurrent themes: wealth and luxury; victimhood and victimization; resistance and rebellion; and resilience and achievement. Considering the roles of various social actors who have contributed to the introduction of slavery in the museum in the last thirty years, the analysis draws on selected exhibitions, and institutions entirely dedicated to slavery, as well as national, community, plantation, and house museums in the United States, England, France, and Brazil. Engaging with literature from a range of disciplines, including history, anthropology, sociology, art history, tourism and museum studies, Araujo provides an overview of a topic that has not yet been adequately discussed and analysed within the museum studies field.

Museums and Atlantic Slavery encourages scholars, students, and museum professionals to critically engage with representations of slavery in museums. The book will help readers to recognize how depictions of human bondage in museums and exhibitions often fail to challenge racism and white supremacy inherited from the period of slavery.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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David Waldstreicher, "The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence" (FSG, 2023) Aug 28, 2023

Thy Power, O Liberty, make strong the weak,

And (wond’rous instinct) Ethiopians speak.

At the age of 19, Phillis Wheatley published the first book in English by a person of African descent and the third book of poetry by a North American Woman. She was a poet but also a political actor and celebrity – the most famous African in North America and Europe during the era of the American Revolution. George Washington wrote to her. Thomas Jefferson ridiculed her.

In The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence (FSG, 2023) – a joint exercise in history and literary criticism, Dr. David Waldstreicher writes that Wheatley is “Homer and Odysseus and the slaves and the women they knew or imagined. She aimed for the universal without forgetting who was suffering most and why.” Reading Wheatley’s poetry in historical context reveals the extent to which the American Revolution both strengthened and limited black slavery – and also how Wheatley herself affected the debates about American slavery and independence.

Mastering the Bible, Greek and Latin translations, and the works of Pope and Milton, Wheatley composed elegies for local elites, celebrated political events, and praised warriors. Despite her skill, knowledge, and fame, she often had to write indirectly about subjects that mattered deeply to her – race, slavery, and discontent with British rule. During a period in which writing was central to political conversation, she used her verse to lampoon, question, and assert the injustice of her enslaved condition. As Waldstreicher demonstrates, Wheatley wrote about events and people – turning what was available and acceptable for a person in her position into poetry that could be read for its art – but also subversively for its political ideas. He concludes that her work proves that the story of the American revolution and Phillis Wheatley are inextricably joined – and that story is one of “resilience and creativity, of antislavery and antiracist possibilities, and of backlash and loss, dreams dashed and deferred.”

Dr. David Waldstreicher is distinguished professor of history, American Studies, and Africana Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research interests include U.S. cultural and political history, colonial and early US, African American history, slaver, and antislavery. He is the author of Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (Hill and Wang) and Runaway American: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). His public facing writing includes contributions to The New York Times Book Review, the Boston Review, and The Atlantic.

Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Beverly C. Tomek, "Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania" (Temple UP, 2021) Aug 27, 2023

In her concise history Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania(Temple UP, 2021), Beverly Tomek corrects the long-held notion that slavery in the North was “not so bad” as, or somehow “more humane” than, in the South due to the presence of abolitionists. While the Quaker presence focused on moral and practical opposition to bondage, slavery was ubiquitous. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania was the first state to pass an abolition law in the United States.

Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania traces this movement from its beginning to the years immediately following the American Civil War. Discussions of the complexities of the state’s antislavery movement illustrate how different groups of Pennsylvanians followed different paths in an effort to achieve their goal. Tomek also examines the backlash abolitionists and Black Americans faced. In addition, she considers the civil rights movement from the period of state reconstruction through the national reconstruction that occurred after the Civil War.

While the past few decades have shed light on enslavement and slavery in the South, much of the story of northern slavery remains hidden. Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania tells the full and inclusive story of this history, bringing the realities of slavery, abolition, and Pennsylvania's attempt to reconstruct its post-emancipation society.

Beverly C. Tomek is Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at Monroe County Community College. She is the author of Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Hall: A "Legal Lynching" in the Shadow of the Liberty Bell, as well as the coeditor of New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization.

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Vanessa I. Corredera, "Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America" (Edinburgh UP, 2022) Aug 27, 2023

Vanessa I. Corredera’s book Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America (Edinburgh Univeristy Press, 2022) looks at how that seventeenth-century play and its protagonist was imagined in theatre, television, and other media between 2008 and 2016. Corredera’s analysis ranges from the sketch comedy Key & Peele to Keith Hamilton Cobb’s play American Moor, from ever-persistent tradition of minstrel Othello to the reimagining of Shakespeare’s play by writers of color. Bringing together examples of cultural texts that perpetuate anti-black racism and other artifacts that offer anti-racist possibilities, Corredera’s book helps us to understand this recent moment in U.S. history. At times, to quote Reanimating Shakespeare’s Othello in Post-Racial America, creators like Serial’s Sarah Koenig “have operationalize[d] what this book demonstrates is in fact the common Othello narrative without truly thinking about its force, wielding Shakespearean authority without any regard as to the potentially subjugating purpose for which she is employing it” (127). Other reanimations invite us to shift our perspective and, by extension, reconsider our identifications with characters such as Desdemona or Iago.

Vanessa I. Corredera is Department Chair and Professor of English at Andrews University. Corredera’s scholarship has appeared in Literature Compass, Borrowers and Lenders, Shakespeare Quarterly, and The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation. Corredera also just published Shakespeare and Cultural Appropriation, which is co-edited with Geoffrey Way and L. Monique Pittman (Routledge, 2023). In addition to scholarship, Corredera is a celebrated teacher having won campus-wide honors including the Daniel S. Augsburger Excellence in Teaching Award and the Undergraduate Research Mentor Award.

During the conversation, Vanessa discusses Brandi K. Adams’s article “Black ‘(un)bookishness’ in Othello and American Moor: A Meditation” (Shakespeare, 2021), Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor (Methuen, 2020), Carol Anderson’s White Rage (Bloomsbury, 2016), Kim Hall’s edition of Othello (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006), Imani Perry’s Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Duke University Press, 2004), Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003).

John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.

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Karima K. Jeffrey-Legette, "Speculative Film and Moving Images by or about Black Women and Girls" (Lexington Books, 2022) Aug 27, 2023

Karima K. Jeffrey-Legette's book Speculative Film and Moving Images by or about Black Women and Girls(Lexington Books, 2022) examines depictions of African-descended women and girls in twentieth and twenty-first century filmmaking. Topics include a discursive analysis of stereotypes; roles garnered by Halle Berry, the only Black woman to receive an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role; the promise of characters, relationships, and scripts found in works ranging from Altered Carbon, Lovecraft Country, and HBO’s Watchmen series; and a closing chapter that considers the legacy of Black women in horror. Jeffrey-Legette illustrates the ways in which recent texts explore the trauma endured by people of African descent in the United States of America in evocative ways. In doing so, she provides a compelling interpretation of prevalent, well-received, and recurring images of Black women and girls in American popular culture.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Hollis Robbins, "Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition" (U Georgia Press, 2020) Aug 26, 2023

As I learned from Hollis Robbins’s monograph Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition (U Georgia Press, 2020), there has been a long-standing skepticism of the sonnet form among Black writers and literary critics. Langston Hughes wrote that “the Shakespearean sonnet would be no mold to express the life of Beale Street or Lenox Avenue.” Ishmael Reed condemned sonneteering, alongside ode-writing, as “the feeble pluckings of musky gentlemen and slaves of the metronome.” And yet African American poets such as Terrance Hayes and Natasha Trethewey continue to contribute to a tradition of sonnet-writing that includes Robert Hayden, Phyllis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Amiri Baraka, and James Corrothers.

Today’s guest is Hollis Robbins, the author of Forms of Contention, published with the University of Georgia Press in 2020. Hollis is the Dean of Humanities at the University of Utah. Previously, she served as Dean of Arts and Humanities at Sonoma State University, Professor of Humanities at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and Professor of English at Millsaps College. Hollis is also the co-editor of a number of field-defining books including The Portable Nineteenth Century African American Women Writers (Penguin, 2017); The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Norton, 2006); and the Works of William Wells Brown (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Forms of Contention tests the premise that a literary form such as the sonnet can both offer opportunities for reimagining society and politics and pose perils of constraint. This book captures the complexity and longevity of a vibrant tradition of Black poets taking up the sonnet form to explore race, liberation, enslavement, solidarity, and abolitionism. It also invites us to find new directions for the intersection of literary formalism and African American cultural studies.

John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.

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Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin, "Public Workers in Service of America: A Reader" (U Illinois Press, 2023) Aug 26, 2023

From white-collar executives to mail carriers, public workers meet the needs of the entire nation. In Public Workers in Service of America: A Reader (U Illinois Press, 2023), Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin provide an edited collection of new research on this understudied workforce:

Part One begins in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century to explore how questions of race, class, and gender shaped public workers, their workplaces, and their place in American democracy. In Part Two, essayists examine race and gender discrimination while revealing the subtle contemporary forms of marginalization that keep Black men and Black and white women underpaid and overlooked for promotion. The historic labor actions detailed in Part Three illuminate how city employees organized not only for better pay and working conditions but to seek recognition from city officials, the public, and the national labor movement. Part Four focuses on nurses and teachers to address the thorny question of whether certain groups deserve premium pay for their irreplaceable work and sacrifices or if serving the greater good is a reward unto itself. Contributors: Eileen Boris, Cathleen D. Cahill, Frederick W. Gooding Jr., William P. Jones, Francis Ryan, Jon Shelton, Joseph E. Slater, Katherine Turk, Eric S. Yellin, and Amy Zanoni.

Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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Chesya Burke, "Hero Me Not: The Containment of the Most Powerful Black, Female Superhero" (Rutgers UP, 2023) Aug 25, 2023

First introduced in the pages of X-Men, Storm is probably the most recognized Black female superhero. She is also one of the most powerful characters in the Marvel Universe, with abilities that allow her to control the weather itself. Yet that power is almost always deployed in the service of White characters, and Storm is rarely treated as an authority figure.

Hero Me Not: The Containment of the Most Powerful Black, Female Superhero (Rutgers UP, 2023) offers an in-depth look at this fascinating yet often frustrating character through all her manifestations in comics, animation, and films. Chesya Burke examines the coding of Storm as racially “exotic,” an African woman who nonetheless has bright white hair and blue eyes and was portrayed onscreen by biracial actresses Halle Berry and Alexandra Shipp. She shows how Storm, created by White writers and artists, was an amalgam of various Black stereotypes, from the Mammy and the Jezebel to the Magical Negro, resulting in a new stereotype she terms the Negro Spiritual Woman.

With chapters focusing on the history, transmedia representation, and racial politics of Storm, Burke offers a very personal account of what it means to be a Black female comics fan searching popular culture for positive images of powerful women who look like you.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Erica O. Turner, "Suddenly Diverse: How School Districts Manage Race and Inequality" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Aug 25, 2023

For the past five years, American public schools have enrolled more students identified as Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Asian than white. At the same time, more than half of US school children now qualify for federally subsidized meals, a marker of poverty. The makeup of schools is rapidly changing, and many districts and school boards are at a loss as to how they can effectively and equitably handle these shifts.

Suddenly Diverse: How School Districts Manage Race and Inequality(U Chicago Press, 2020) is an ethnographic account of two school districts in the Midwest responding to rapidly changing demographics at their schools. It is based on observations and in-depth interviews with school board members and superintendents, as well as staff, community members, and other stakeholders in each district: one serving “Lakeside,” a predominately working class, conservative community and the other serving “Fairview,” a more affluent, liberal community. Erica O. Turner looks at district leaders’ adoption of business-inspired policy tools and the ultimate successes and failures of such responses. Turner’s findings demonstrate that, despite their intentions to promote “diversity” or eliminate “achievement gaps,” district leaders adopted policies and practices that ultimately perpetuated existing inequalities and advanced new forms of racism.

While suggesting some ways forward, Suddenly Diverse shows that, without changes to these managerial policies and practices and larger transformations to the whole system, even district leaders’ best efforts will continue to undermine the promise of educational equity and the realization of more robust public schools.

Joao Souto-Maior is a postdoc at the New York University’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change.

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Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst, "I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar Ibn Said's America" (UNC Press, 2023) Aug 25, 2023

Carl Ernst’s and Mbaye Lo’s new book I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar Ibn Said's America (UNC Press, 2023) is a fascinating and rivetting book that offers the most authoritative account to date of the life and Arabic writings of Omar Ibn Said, a scholar from what is today Senegal who was sold to slavery in the early 19th century and brought to Southern US. Moreover, this path paving book offers critical correctives to dominant perceptions of Said’s remarkable life narrative. Rather than understand Omar Ibn Said as a Muslim slave who had made peace with his new life in the US or had even converted to Christianity, Ernst and Lo demonstrate the deep imprints of Islam and Islamicate knowledge traditions in Omar Ibn Said’s varied writings such as his reflections on his life and his letters. This book, written in lyrical and engaging prose, makes available for the first time comprehensive translations of Omar Ibn Said’s Arabic writings into English. It also makes a compelling and convincing case for taking seriously Arabic texts from Africa as part of world literature.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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Christopher C. Sellers, "Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis" (U Georgia Press, 2023) Aug 21, 2023

Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis (U Georgia Press, 2023) turns an environmental lens on Atlanta’s ascent to thriving capital of the Sunbelt over the twentieth century. Uniquely wide ranging in scale, from the city’s variegated neighborhoods up to its place in regional and national political economies, this book reinterprets the fall of Jim Crow as a democratization born of two metropolitan movements: a well-known one for civil rights and a lesser known one on behalf of “the environment.” Arising out of Atlanta’s Black and white middle classes respectively, both movements owed much to New Deal capitalism’s undermining of concentrated wealth and power, if not racial segregation, in the Jim Crow South.

Placing these two movements on the same historical page, Christopher C. Sellers spotlights those environmental inequities, ideals, and provocations that catalyzed their divergent political projects. He then follows the intermittent, sometimes vital alliances they struck as civil rights activists tackled poverty, as a new environmental state arose, and as Black politicians began winning elections. Into the 1980s, as a wealth-concentrating style of capitalism returned to the city and Atlanta became a national “poster child” for sprawl, the seedbeds spread both for a national environmental justice movement and for an influential new style of antistatism. Sellers contends that this new conservativism, sweeping the South with an anti-environmentalism and budding white nationalism that echoed the region’s Jim Crow past, once again challenged the democracy Atlantans had achieved.

Christopher Sellers is professor of history at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Hazards of the Job, Crabgrass Crucible, Dangerous Trade, and Landscapes of Exposure, among other publications. He is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including those from the National Science Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the National Library of Medicine. He lives in Stony Brook, New York. Website. Twitter.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Becoming Justice Thomas Aug 20, 2023

On today’s podcast, we are changing things up a bit. Instead of interviewing the author of a recent book, I am interviewing another podcaster about their recent narrative podcast season. So, today, I’m interviewing Joel Anderson, staff writer at Slate, co-host of Hang Up and Listen, and the host of Seasons 3, 6, and, most recently, 8 of Slow Burn. On this episode, I chop it up with Joel about Season 8 of Slow Burn, titled, Becoming Justice Thomas.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Jennifer Keys Adair and Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove, "Segregation by Experience: Agency, Racism, and Learning in the Early Grades" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Aug 18, 2023

Early childhood can be a time of rich discovery, a period when educators have an opportunity to harness their students’ fascination to create unique learning opportunities. Some teachers engage with their students’ ideas in ways that make learning collaborative--but not all students have access to these kinds of learning environments.

In Segregation by Experience: Agency, Racism, and Learning in the Early Grades (U Chicago Press, 2021), the authors filmed and studied a a first-grade classroom led by a Black immigrant teacher who encouraged her diverse group of students to exercise their agency. When the researchers showed the film to other schools, everyone struggled. Educators admired the teacher but didn’t think her practices would work with their own Black and brown students. Parents of color—many of them immigrants—liked many of the practices, but worried that they would compromise their children. And the young children who viewed the film thought that the kids in the film were terrible, loud, and badly behaved; they told the authors that learning was supposed to be quiet, still, and obedient. In Segregation by Experience Jennifer Keys Adair and Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove show us just how much our expectations of children of color affect what and how they learn at school, and they ask us to consider which children get to have sophisticated, dynamic learning experiences at school and which children are denied such experiences because of our continued racist assumptions about them.

Laura Beth Kelly is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.

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Jennifer Ritterhouse, "Discovering the South: One Man's Travels through a Changing America in the 1930s" (UNC Press, 2017) Aug 16, 2023

During the Great Depression, the American South was not merely "the nation's number one economic problem," as President Franklin Roosevelt declared. It was also a battlefield on which forces for and against social change were starting to form. For a white southern liberal like Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, it was a fascinating moment to explore. Attuned to culture as well as politics, Daniels knew the true South lay somewhere between Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind.

On May 5, 1937, he set out to find it, driving thousands of miles in his trusty Plymouth and ultimately interviewing even Mitchell herself. In Discovering the South historian Jennifer Ritterhouse pieces together Daniels's unpublished notes from his tour along with his published writings and a wealth of archival evidence to put this one man's journey through a South in transition into a larger context. Daniels's well chosen itinerary brought him face to face with the full range of political and cultural possibilities in the South of the 1930s, from New Deal liberalism and social planning in the Tennessee Valley Authority, to Communist agitation in the Scottsboro case, to planters' and industrialists' reactionary worldview and repressive violence. Jennifer Ritterhouse's book Discovering the South: One Man's Travels through a Changing America in the 1930s (UNC Press, 2017) is a lively narrative of black and white southerners fighting for and against democratic social change at the start of the nation's long civil rights era. For more information on this book, see www.discoveringthesouth.org.

Matt Simmons is an Assistant Professor of History at Emmanuel University where he teaches courses in U.S. and public history. His research focuses on the intersection of labor and race in the twentieth-century American South. You can follow him on Twitter.

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Bobby J. Smith II, "Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement" (UNC Press, 2023) Aug 16, 2023

Bobby J. Smith II's book Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (UNC Press, 2023 )unearths a food story buried deep within the soil of American civil rights history. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and oral histories, Smith re-examines the Mississippi civil rights movement as a period when activists expanded the meaning of civil rights to address food as integral to sociopolitical and economic conditions. For decades, white economic and political actors used food as a weapon against Black sharecropping communities in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, but members of these communities collaborated with activists to transform food into a tool of resistance. Today, Black youth are building a food justice movement in the Delta to continue this story, grappling with inequalities that continue to shape their lives.

Drawing on multiple disciplines including critical food studies, Black studies, history, sociology, and southern studies, Smith makes critical connections between civil rights activism and present-day food justice activism in Black communities, revealing how power struggles over food empower them to envision Black food futures in which communities have the full autonomy and capacity to imagine, design, create, and sustain a self-sufficient local food system.

Kelly Spivey is a writer and documentarian.

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Lauren S. Foley, "On the Basis of Race: How Higher Education Navigates Affirmative Action Policies" (NYU Press, 2023) Aug 16, 2023

Diversity in higher education is under attack as the Supreme Court limits the use of race-conscious admissions practices at American colleges and universities. In On the Basis of Race: How Higher Education Navigates Affirmative Action Policies(NYU Press, 2023), Lauren S. Foley sheds light on our current crisis, exploring the past, present, and future of this contentious policy. From Brown v. Board of Education in the mid-twentieth century to the current Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Foley explores how organizations have resisted and complied with public policies regarding race. She examines how admissions officers, who have played an important role in the long fight to protect racial diversity in higher education, work around the law to maintain diversity after affirmative action is banned.

Foley takes us behind the curtain of student admissions, shedding light on how multiple universities, including the University of Michigan, have creatively responded to affirmative action bans. On the Basis of Race traces the history of a controversial idea and policy, and provides insight into its uncertain future.

Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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Earl Cureton and Jake Uitti, "Earl the Twirl: My Life in Basketball" (McFarland, 2023) Aug 16, 2023

Today I talked to Earl Careton about his new book (co-authored with Jake Uitti), Earl the Twirl: My Life in Basketball (McFarland, 2023)

Earl "The Twirl" Cureton was never a star player in the NBA, but then again, few people will ever be a celebrity athlete. Earl's story, instead, is about a life on the fringes of the league during its "Golden Era" of the '80s and '90s. A teammate of Julius Erving, Moses Malone, Michael Jordan, Charles Oakley, Muggsy Bogues, Hakeem Olajuwon, and more, Earl was a part of seven NBA teams in his twelve-season career. He won two championships during his career, first in 1983 with the Philadelphia 76ers, and then in 1994 with the Houston Rockets. And yet, as a professional basketball journeyman, every day was a struggle.

Growing up in Detroit during race riots, Earl worked hard and became a standout player at the University of Detroit. A 6' 9" center in the pros, Earl battled with Karem Abdul-Jabbar in back-to-back NBA Finals. While many know the stories of big names like Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird, few understand the life of a player on the outskirts of the league. This is Earl's own story, a unique perspective on the trials of a journeyman player: non-guaranteed contracts, tryouts and cuts, playing overseas, coming back from injury, and the looming "right of first refusal."

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Keith A. Mayes, "The Unteachables: Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education" (U Minnesota Press, 2023) Aug 13, 2023

The Unteachables: Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education (U Minnesota Press, 2023) examines the overrepresentation of Black students in special education over the course of the twentieth century. As African American children integrated predominantly white schools, many were disproportionately labeled educable mentally retarded (EMR), learning disabled (LD), and emotionally behavioral disordered (EBD). Keith A. Mayes charts the evolution of disability categories and how these labels kept Black learners segregated in American classrooms.

The civil rights and the educational disability rights movements, Mayes shows, have both collaborated and worked at cross-purposes since the beginning of school desegregation. Disability rights advocates built upon the opportunity provided by the civil rights movement to make claims about student invisibility at the level of intellectual and cognitive disabilities. Although special education ostensibly included children from all racial groups, educational disability rights advocates focused on the needs of white disabled students, while school systems used disability discourses to malign and marginalize Black students.

From the 1940s to the present, social science researchers, policymakers, school administrators, and teachers have each contributed to the overrepresentation of Black students in special education. Excavating the deep-seated racism embedded in both the public school system and public policy, The Unteachables explores the discriminatory labeling of Black students, and how it indelibly contributed to special education disproportionality, to student discipline and push-out practices, and to the school-to-prison pipeline effect.

Joao Souto-Maior is a postdoc at the New York University’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change.

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Donovan X. Ramsey, "When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era" (One World, 2023) Aug 12, 2023

The crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s is arguably the least examined crisis in American history. Beginning with the myths inspired by Reagan's war on drugs, journalist Donovan X. Ramsey's exacting analysis traces the path from the last triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement to the devastating realities we live with today: a racist criminal justice system, continued mass incarceration and gentrification, and increased police brutality.

When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era (One World, 2023) follows four individuals to give us a startling portrait of crack's destruction and devastating legacy: Elgin Swift, an archetype of American industry and ambition and the son of a crack-addicted father who turned their home into a "crack house"; Lennie Woodley, a former crack addict and sex worker; Kurt Schmoke, the longtime mayor of Baltimore and an early advocate of decriminalization; and Shawn McCray, community activist, basketball prodigy, and a founding member of the Zoo Crew, Newark's most legendary group of drug traffickers.

Weaving together riveting research with the voices of survivors, When Crack Was King is a crucial reevaluation of the era and a powerful argument for providing historically violated communities with the resources they deserve.

A journalist, author, and indispensable voice on issues of identity, justice, and patterns of power in America, Ramsey’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, GQ, WSJ Magazine, Ebony, and Essence, among a host of other outlets, and he’s worked at such venerable newsrooms as the Los Angeles Times and the Marshall Project. A native of Columbus, Ohio, where he saw the crack epidemic firsthand, Donovan now lives in LA. When Crack was King, released to great acclaim, is his first book.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

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Ashley Robertson Preston, "Mary Mcleod Bethune the Pan-Africanist" (UP of Florida, 2023) Aug 12, 2023

This book examines the Pan-Africanism of Mary McLeod Bethune through her work, which internationalized the scope of Black women's organizations to create solidarity among Africans throughout the diaspora. Broadening the familiar view of Bethune as an advocate for racial and gender equality within the United States, Ashley Preston argues that Bethune consistently sought to unify African descendants around the world with her writings, through travel, and as an advisor.

Preston shows how Bethune's early involvement with Black women's organizations created personal connections across Cuba, Haiti, India, and Africa and shaped her global vision. Bethune founded and led the National Council of Negro Women, which strengthened coalitions with women across the diaspora to address issues in their local communities. Bethune served as director of the Division of Negro Affairs for the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and later as associate consultant for the United Nations alongside W.E.B. DuBois and Walter White, using her influence to address diversity in the military, decolonization, suffrage, and imperialism.

Ashley Robertson Preston's book Mary Mcleod Bethune the Pan-Africanist(UP of Florida, 2023) provides a fuller, more accurate understanding of Bethune's work, illustrating the perspective and activism behind Bethune's much-quoted words: "For I am my mother's daughter, and the drums of Africa still beat in my heart." Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Kris Marsh, "The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class" (Cambridge UP, 2023) Aug 12, 2023

Drawing from stratification economics, intersectionality, and respectability politics, Kris Marsh's The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class(Cambridge UP, 2023)centers on the voices and lifestyles of members of the Black middle class who are single and living alone (SALA). While much has been written about both the Black middle class and the rise of singlehood, this book represents a first foray into bridging these two concepts. In studying these intersections, The Love Jones Cohort provides a more nuanced understanding of how race, gender, and class, coupled with social structures, shape five central lifestyle factors of Black middle-class adults who are SALA. The book explores how these Black adults define family and friends and decide on whether and how to pursue romantic relationships, articulate the ebbs and flows of being Black and middle class, select where to live and why, accumulate and disseminate wealth, and maintain overall health, well-being, and coping mechanisms.

Blyss Cleveland is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stanford University.

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Zahi Zalloua, "Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality" (Bloomsbury, 2023) Aug 11, 2023

Zahi Zalloua provides the first examination of Palestinian identity from the perspective of Indigeneity and Critical Black Studies. Examining the Palestinian question through the lens of settler colonialism and Indigeneity, this timely book warns against the liberal approach to Palestinian Indigeneity, which reinforces cultural domination, and urgently argues for the universal nature of the Palestinian struggle.

Foregrounding Palestinian Indigeneity reframes the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a problem of wrongful dispossession, a historical harm that continues to be inflicted on the population under the brutal Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. At the same time, in a global context marked by liberal democratic ideology, such an approach leads either to liberal tolerance – the minority is permitted to exist so long as their culture can be contained within the majority order – or racial separatism, that is, appeals for national independence typically embodied in the two-state solution.

Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality(2023 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC) not only insists that any analysis of Indigeneity's purchase must keep this problem of translation in mind, but also that we must recast the Palestinian struggle as a universal one. As demonstrated by the Palestinian support for such movements as Black Lives Matter, and the reciprocal support Palestinians receive from BLM activists, the Palestinian cause fosters a solidarity of the excluded. This solidarity underscores the interlocking, global struggles for emancipation from racial domination and economic exploitation.

Drawing on key Palestinian voices, including Edward Said and Larissa Sansour, as well as a wide range of influential philosophers such as Slavoj Žižek, Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe, Zalloua brings together the Palestinian question, Indigeneity and Critical Black Studies to develop a transformative, anti-racist vision of the world.

Zahi is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature, and Director of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College, USA.

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Driving While Black: African Americans and the Automobile Aug 07, 2023

Gretchen Sorin, Director and Distinguished Professor of the Cooperstown Graduate Program at the State University of New York - Oneonta, talks about her book,Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights (Liveright, 2020), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Driving While Black examines how cars fit into black lives and sheds light on how this technology fits into much larger patterns of history, including the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter movements. Sorin and Vinsel also talk about the field of public history and communicating to non-academic audiences.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey, "Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America" (UNC Press, 2023) Aug 04, 2023

Twentieth-century African American history cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story of U.S. policy from 1900 to 2000 cannot be told without accounting for fears of an African World. In the early 1900s, Marcus Garvey and his followers perceived the North American mainland, particularly Canada following U.S. authorities' deportation of Garvey to Jamaica, as a forward-operating base from which to liberate the Black masses. After World War II, Vietnam War resisters, Black Panthers, and Caribbean students joined the throngs of cross-border migrants. In time, as urban uprisings proliferated in northern U.S. cities, the prospect of coalitions among the Black Power, Red Power, and Quebecois Power movements inspired U.S. and Canadian intelligence services to collaborate, infiltrate, and sabotage Black organizations across North America. Assassinations of "Black messiahs" further radicalized revolutionaries, rekindling the dream for an African World from Washington, D.C., to Toronto to San Francisco to Antigua to Grenada and back to Africa. Alarmed, Washington's national security elites invoked the Cold War as the reason to counter the triangulation of Black Power in the Atlantic World, funneling arms clandestinely from the United States and Canada to the Caribbean and then to its proxies in southern Africa.

By contending that twentieth-century global Black liberation movements began within the U.S.-Canadian borderlands as cross-border, continental struggles, Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America(University of North Carolina Press, 2023) reveals the revolutionary legacies of the Underground Railroad and America's Great Migration and the hemispheric and transatlantic dimensions of this history.

Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey is assistant professor of post-Reconstruction U.S. and African Diaspora history at McGill University, where he holds the William Dawson Chair. He also goes by Nii Laryea Osabu I, Oblantai Mantse of Atrekor We.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Tamara J. Walker, "Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad" (Crown, 2023) Aug 04, 2023

Part historical exploration, part travel memoir, Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad (Crown, 2023) reveals poignant histories of a diverse group of African Americans who have left the United States over the course of the past century. Together, the interwoven stories highlight African Americans’ complicated relationship to the United States and the world at large. Beyond the Shores is not just about where African Americans stayed or where they ate when they traveled but also about why they left in the first place and how they were treated once they reached their destinations.

Drawing on years of research, Dr. Tamara J. Walker chronicles their experiences in atmospheric detail, taking readers from well-known capital cities to more unusual destinations like Yangiyul, Uzbekistan, and Kabondo, Kenya. She follows Florence Mills, the would-be Josephine Baker of her day, in Paris, and Richard Wright, the author turned actor and filmmaker, in Buenos Aires. She relays tender stories of adventurous travelers, including a group of gifted Black crop scientists in the 1930s, a housewife searching for purpose in the 1950s, a Peace Corps volunteer discovering his identity in the 1970s, and her own grandfather, who, after losing his eye fighting in World War II and returning to a country that showed no signs of honoring his sacrifice, set out with his wife and children on a circuitous journey that sent them back and forth across the Atlantic. Tying these tales together is Walker’s personal account of her family’s, and her own, experiences abroad—in France, Brazil, Argentina, Austria, and beyond. By sharing the accounts of those who escaped the racism of the United States to try their hands at life abroad, Beyond the Shores shines a light on the meaning of home and the search for a better life.

Tamara J. Walker is a historian and associate professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College of Columbia University, where her research and teaching focus on the history of slavery and freedom in Latin America. Her first book, Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima, won the Harriet Tubman Prize awarded by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Olivier Burtin, "A Nation of Veterans: War, Citizenship, and the Welfare State in Modern America" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) Aug 03, 2023

In examining how the veterans' movement inscribed martial citizenship onto American law, politics, and culture, A Nation of Veterans: War, Citizenship, and the Welfare State in Modern America(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) offers a new history of the U.S. welfare state that highlights its longstanding connection with warfare. It shows how a predominantly white and male group such as military veterans was at the center of social policy debates in the interwar and postwar period and how women and veterans of color were often discriminated against or denied access to their benefits. It moves beyond the traditional focus on the 1944 G.I. Bill to examine other important benefits like pensions, civil service preference, and hospitals. The book also examines multiple generations of veterans, by shedding light on how former service members from both World Wars as well as Korea and the Cold War interacted with each other.

Olivier Burtin is Associate Professor of U.S. History and Civilization at the University of Amiens, France.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Jill L. Newmark, "Without Concealment, Without Compromise: The Courageous Lives of Black Civil War Surgeons" (Southern Illinois UP, 2023) Aug 03, 2023

Of some twelve thousand Union Civil War surgeons, only fourteen were Black men. This book is the first-ever comprehensive exploration of their lives and service.

In Without Concealment, Without Compromise: The Courageous Lives of Black Civil War Surgeons (Southern Illinois UP, 2023), Jill L. Newmark's outstanding research uncovers stories hidden for more than 150 years, illuminating the unique experiences of proud, patriotic men who fought racism and discrimination to attend medical school and serve with the U.S. military. Their efforts and actions influenced societal change and forged new pathways for African Americans.

Individual biographies bring to light Alexander T. Augusta, who challenged discriminatory laws; William P. Powell Jr., who pursued a military pension for twenty-five years; Anderson R. Abbott, a friend of Elizabeth Keckley's; John van Surly DeGrasse, the only Black surgeon to serve on the battlefield; John H. Rapier Jr., an international traveler; Richard H. Greene, the only Black surgeon known to have served in the Navy; Willis R. Revels, a preacher; Benjamin A. Boseman, a politician and postmaster; and Charles B. Purvis, who taught at Howard University. Information was limited for five other men, all of whom broke educational barriers by attending medical schools in the United States: Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed, William B. Ellis, Alpheus W. Tucker, Joseph Dennis Harris, and Charles H. Taylor.

Newmark presents all available information about the surgeons' early lives, influences, education, Civil War service, and post-war experiences. Many of the stories overlap, as did the lives of the men. Each man, through his service as a surgeon during the war and his lifelong activism for freedom, justice, and equality, became a catalyst of change and a symbol of an emancipated future.

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Talking Clarence Thomas: A Conversation with Amul Thapar Aug 01, 2023

As the last few months of landmark Supreme Court decisions have showcased, Clarence Thomas is one of the most important men in America. To wrap up our Summer of Law series, Judge Amul Thapar discusses his recent book, The People's Justice: Clarence Thomas and the Constitutional Stories that Define Him (Regnery Publishing, 2023), digging into Justice Thomas's judicial legacy and some of his most interesting, influential, and surprising decisions.

Amul Thapar is serves as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He became the first South Asian Article III judge in American history when President George W. Bush nominate him to serve on the Eastern District of Kentucky, where he then also served as the United States Attorney. In 2017, he became President Donald J. Trump’s first appellate court nominee.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy his most recent speech at the Madison Program.

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

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Blair Kelley, "Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class" (LIveright, 2023) Jul 31, 2023

In the United States, the stoicism and importance of the “working class” is part of the national myth. The term is often used to conjure the contributions and challenges of the white working class – and this obscures the ways in which Black workers built institutions like the railroads and universities – but also how they transformed unions, changed public policy, and established community.

In Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (LIveright, 2023), Dr. Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story by interrogating the lives of laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers. The book is both a personal journey and a history of Black labor in the United States from enslavement to the present day with a focus on a critical era: after Southern Emancipation to the early 20th century, when the first generations of Black working people carved out a world for themselves.

Dr. Kelley captures the character of the lives of Black workers not only as laborers, activists, or members of a class but as individuals whose daily experiences mattered – to themselves, to their communities, and to “the nation at large, even as it denied their importance.” As she weaves together rich oral histories, memoirs, photographs, and secondary sources, she shows how Black workers of all genders were “intertwined with the future of Black freedom, Black citizenship, and the establishment of civil rights for Black Americans.” She demonstrates how her own family’s experiences mirrors this wider history of the Black working class – sometimes in ways that she herself did not realize before writing the book.

Even as the book confronts violence, poor working conditions, and a government that often legislated to protect the interests of white workers and consumers, Black Folk celebrates the ways in which Black people “built and rebuilt vital spaces of resistance, grounded in the secrets that they knew about themselves, about their community, their dignity, and their survival.” Black Folk looks back but also forward. In examining the labor and challenges of individuals, Dr. Kelley sheds light on reparations and suggests that Amazon package processing centers, supermarkets, and nursing homes can be spaces of resistance and labor activism in the 21st century.

Dr. Blair LM Kelley is the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and incoming director of the Center for the Study of the American South, the first Black woman to serve in that role in the center’s thirty-year history. She is also the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson from the University of North Carolina Press.

Dr. Kelley mentions Dr. Tera W. Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, Duke University’s Behind the Veil oral history project, and Philip R. Rubio’s There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality.

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Adom Getachew and Jennifer Pitts eds. "W. E. B. Du Bois: International Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Jul 30, 2023

W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the most significant American political thinkers of the twentieth century. This volume collects 24 of his essays and speeches on international themes, spanning the years 1900-1956. These key texts reveal Du Bois's distinctive approach to the problem of empire and demonstrate his continued importance in our current global context. The volume charts the development of Du Bois's anti-imperial thought, drawing attention to his persistent concern with the relationship between democracy and empire and illustrating the divergent inflections of this theme in the context of a shifting geopolitical terrain; unprecedented political crises, especially during the two world wars; and new opportunities for transnational solidarity. With a critical introduction and extensive editorial notes, W.E.B. Du Bois: International Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2022) conveys both the coherence and continuity of Du Bois's international thought across his long life and the tremendous range and variety of his preoccupations, intellectual sources, and interlocutors.

Adom Getachew is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago.

Jennifer Pitts is Professor of Political Science and in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Marzia Milazzo, "Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power" (Northwestern UP, 2022) Jul 29, 2023

In Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power(Northwestern UP, 2022), Marzia Milazzo offers a transnational account of anti-Blackness and white supremacy that pushes against the dominant emphasis on historical change pervading current racial theory. This emphasis on change, she contends, misses critical lessons from the past.

Bringing together a capacious archive of texts on race produced in Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, the United States, and South Africa from multiple disciplines and genres, Milazzo uncovers transnational continuities in structural racism and white supremacist discourse from the inception of colonial modernity to the present. In the process, she traces the global workings of what she calls colorblind tools: technologies and strategies that at once camouflage and reproduce white domination. Whether examining Rijno van der Riet's defense of slavery in the Cape Colony, discourses of racial mixture in Latin American eugenics and their reverberations in contemporary scholarship, the pitfalls of white "antiracism," or Chicana indigenist aesthetics, Milazzo illustrates how white people collectively disavow racism to maintain power across national boundaries, and how anti-Black and colonial logics can be reproduced even in some decolonial literatures. Milazzo's groundbreaking study proves that colorblindness is not new, nor is it a subtype of racist ideology or a hallmark of our era. It is a constitutive technology of racism—a tool the master cannot do without.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a History Educator and an Independent scholar based in Southern California. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com

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Rob Eschmann,, "When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age" (U California Press, 2023) Jul 29, 2023

From cell phone footage of police killing unarmed Black people to leaked racist messages and even comments from friends and family on social media, online communication exposes how racism operates in a world that pretends to be colorblind. In When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age (U California Press, 2023), Rob Eschmann blends rigorous research and engaging personal narrative to examine the effects of online racism on communities of color and society, and the unexpected ways that digital technologies enable innovative everyday tools of antiracist resistance.

Drawing on a wealth of data, including interviews with students of Color around the country and analyses of millions of social media posts over the past decade, Eschmann investigates the influence of online communication on face-to-face interactions. When the Hood Comes Off highlights the power of the internet as an organizing tool, and shows that online racism can be a profound wake-up call. How will we respond?

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Anthony Russell Jerry, "Blackness in Mexico: Afro-Mexican Recognition and the Production of Citizenship in the Costa Chica" (UP of Florida, 2023) Jul 26, 2023

Through historical and ethnographic research, Blackness in Mexico: Afro-Mexican Recognition and the Production of Citizenship in the Costa Chica (UP of Florida, 2023) delves into the ongoing movement toward recognizing Black Mexicans as a cultural group within a nation that has long viewed the non-Black mestizo as the archetypal citizen. Anthony Jerry focuses on this process in Mexico's Costa Chica region in order to explore the relational aspects of citizenship and the place of Black people in how modern citizenship is imagined. Jerry's study of the Costa Chica shows the political stakes of the national project for Black recognition; the shared but competing interests of the Mexican government, activists, and townspeople; and the ways that the state and NGOs are working to make "Afro-Mexican" an official cultural category. He argues that that the demand for recognition by Black communities calls attention to how the mestizo has become an intuitive point of reference for identifying who qualifies as "other." Jerry also demonstrates that while official recognition can potentially empower African descendants, it can simultaneously reproduce the same logics of difference that have brought about their social and political exclusion. One of few books to center Blackness within a discussion of Mexico or to incorporate a focus on Mexico into Black studies, this book ultimately argues that the official project for recognition is itself a methodology of mestizaje, an opportunity for the government to continue to use Blackness to define the national subject and to further the Mexican national project.

Anthony Russell Jerry is Assistant Professor of anthropology at the University of California, Riverside.

Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Jessica D. Klanderud, "Struggle for the Street: Social Networks and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Pittsburgh" (UNC Press, 2023) Jul 17, 2023

Cities are nothing without the streets—the arteries through which goods, people, and ideas flow. Neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, the city streets are where politics begins. In Struggle for the Street: Social Networks and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Pittsburgh(UNC Press, 2023), Jessica D. Klanderud documents the development of class-based visions of political, social, and economic equality in Pittsburgh's African American community between World War I and the early 1970s. Klanderud emphasizes how middle-class and working-class African Americans struggled over the appropriate uses and dominant meanings of street spaces in their neighborhoods as they collectively struggled to define equality.

In chapters that move from one community to the next, Klanderud tracks the transformation of tactics over time with a streets-eye view that reveals the coalescing alliances between neighbors and through space. Drawing on oral histories of neighborhood residents, Black newspapers, and papers from the NAACP and Urban League, this study reveals complex class negotiations in the struggle for civil rights at the street level.

Jessica D. Klanderud is associate professor of African and African American studies and history at Berea College.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Victor Luckerson, "Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street" (Random House, 2023) Jul 17, 2023

When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to Greenwood, Tulsa, in 1914, his family joined a growing community on the cusp of becoming a national center of black life. But, just seven years later, on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood, laying waste to thirty-five blocks and murdering as many as three hundred people. The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the most brutal acts of racist violence in U.S. history, a ruthless attempt to smother a spark of black independence.

But that was never the whole story of Greenwood. The Goodwins and their neighbors soon rebuilt it into “a Mecca,” in Ed’s words, where nightlife thrived, small businesses flourished, and an underworld economy lived comfortably alongside public storefronts. Prosperity and poverty intermixed, and icons from W.E.B. Du Bois to Muhammad Ali ambled down Greenwood Avenue, alongside maids, doctors, and every occupation in between. Ed grew into a prominent businessman and bought a newspaper called the Oklahoma Eagle to chronicle Greenwood’s resurgence and battles against white bigotry. He and his wife, Jeanne, raised an ambitious family, and their son Jim, an attorney, embodied their hopes for the Civil Rights Movement in his work. But by the 1970s, urban renewal policies had nearly emptied the neighborhood, even as Jim and his neighbors tried to hold on to it. Today, while new high-rises and encroaching gentrification risk wiping out Greenwood’s legacy for good, the family newspaper remains, and Ed’s granddaughter Regina represents the neighborhood in the Oklahoma state legislature, working alongside a new generation of local activists.

In Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street (Random House, 2023), journalist Victor Luckerson moves beyond the mythology of Black Wall Street to tell the story of an aspirant black neighborhood that, like so many others, has long been buffeted by racist government policies. Through the eyes of dozens of race massacre survivors and their descendants, Luckerson delivers an honest, moving portrait of this potent national symbol of success and solidarity—and weaves an epic tale about a neighborhood that refused, more than once, to be erased.

Victor Luckerson is a journalist and author based in Tulsa who works to bring neglected Black history to light. He is a former staff writer at The Ringer and business reporter for Time magazine. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, and Smithsonian. He was nominated for a National Magazine Award for his reporting in Time on the 1923 Rosewood Massacre. He also manages an email newsletter about underexplored aspects of Black history called Run It Back.

Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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African American Women on the American Railroad: A Conversation with Miriam Thaggert Jul 17, 2023

Miriam Thaggert, Professor of English at the University of Buffalo, talks about her book, Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad (University of Illinois Press, 2022), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Riding Jane Crow features creative uses of a wide variety of sources to reconstruct how African American women interacted with Jim Crow railroads as both riders and workers. Thaggert and Vinsel also discuss what kinds of research were necessary to reconstruct these stories and why so many previous histories of the railroad passed over the lives of black women, even when they were noticing black men.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Vivian Nun Halloran, "Caribbean American Narratives of Belonging" (Ohio State UP, 2023) Jul 16, 2023

In Caribbean American Narratives of Belonging (Ohio State University Press, 2023), Vivian Nun Halloran analyzes memoirs, picture books, comic books, young adult novels, musicals, and television shows through which Caribbean Americans recount and celebrate their contributions to contemporary politics, culture, and activism in the United States. The writers, civil servants, illustrators, performers, and entertainers whose work is discussed here show what it is like to fit in and be included within the body politic. From civic memoirs by Sonia Sotomayor and others, to West Side Story, Hamilton, and Into the Spider-Verse, these texts share a forward-looking perspective, distinct from the more nostalgic rhetoric of traditional diasporic texts that privilege connections to the islands of origin.

There is no one way of being Caribbean. Diasporic communities exhibit a broad spectrum of ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic, and political qualities. Claiming a Caribbean American identity asks wider society to recognize and affirm hybridity in ways that challenge binaristic conceptions of race and nationality. Halloran provides a common language and critical framework to discuss the achievements of members of the Caribbean diaspora and their considerable cultural and political capital as evident in their contributions to literature and popular culture.

Vivian Nun Halloran is Professor of English and Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a scholar of Caribbean literature, food studies, ethnic American literature, postmodernism, and popular culture. She previously wrote The Immigrant Kitchen: Food, Ethnicity, and Diaspora (Ohio State University Press, 2016) and Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum (University of Virginia Press, 2009).

Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion, and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter.

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Kelly Ross, "Slavery, Surveillance and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature" (Oxford UP, 2022) Jul 16, 2023

Slavery, Surveillance and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature(Oxford UP, 2022) argues for the existence of deep, often unexamined, interconnections between genre and race by tracing how surveillance migrates from the literature of slavery to crime, gothic, and detective fiction. Attending to the long history of surveillance and policing of African Americans, the book challenges the traditional conception of surveillance as a top-down enterprise, equally addressing the tactics of sousveillance (watching from below) that enslaved people and their allies used to resist, escape, or merely survive racial subjugation.

Examining the dialectic of racialized surveillance and sousveillance from fugitive slave narratives to fictional genres focused on crime and detection, the book shows how these genres share a thematic concern with the surveillance of racialized bodies and formal experimentation with ways of telling a story in which certain information is either rendered visible or kept hidden. Through close readings of understudied fugitive slave narratives published in the 1820s and 1830s, as well as texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, Ross analyzes the different ways white and black authors take up these issues in their writing--from calming white fears of enslaved rebellion to abolishing slavery--and demonstrates how literary representations ultimately destabilize any clear-cut opposition between watching from above and below. In so doing, the book demonstrates the importance of race to surveillance studies and claims a greater role for the impact of surveillance on literary expression in the US during the era of slavery.

Kendall Dinniene is a PhD candidate in English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their research examines how contemporary American authors respond to anti-fatness in their work, revealing the contours of citizenship and paths toward liberation.

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Brianna Holt, "In Our Shoes: On Being a Young Black Woman in Not-So 'Post-Racial' America" (Plume Books, 2023) Jul 16, 2023

Part memoir, part cultural critique, In Our Shoes: On Being a Young Black Woman in Not-So 'Post-Racial' America (Plume Books, 2023) uses pop culture and author Brianna Holt’s own lived experience to dissect the stereotypes and preconceived notions that young Black women must overcome in America today. In this fresh exploration of cultural appropriation, wokeness, tone policing, and more, Holt carefully dismantles myths about Black womanhood, allowing readers to assess their biases while examining the roles Black millennial women are forced to take on simply to survive. Through nine thoughtful chapters—such as “Leave the Box Braids for the Black Girls” and “Why Are You So Dark?”—laced with searing commentary, personal anecdotes from Brianna’s own life, and interviews conducted with “everyday” Black women, In Our Shoes reveals the complexities of existence for Black women and creates a thought-provoking book that helps readers to learn, empathize, reflect, and, most importantly, act. A history, a work of criticism, a piece of reporting, and a call to action, In Our Shoes is a timely exploration of race and womanhood that will entertain, inspire, and inform in equal measures.

Brianna Holt is an author, screenwriter, and reporter living in New York City. Holt's writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, GQ, The Cut, The Atlantic, Complex, and more, including her own column, Active Voice, through Medium's GEN. In Our Shoes is her first book.

Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Nikki M. Taylor, "Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance" (Cambridge UP, 2023) Jul 15, 2023

From the colonial through the antebellum era, enslaved women in the US used lethal force as the ultimate form of resistance. By amplifying their voices and experiences, Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance (Cambridge UP, 2023) strongly challenges assumptions that enslaved women only participated in covert, non-violent forms of resistance, when in fact they consistently seized justice for themselves and organized toward revolt.

Nikki M. Taylor expertly reveals how women killed for deeply personal instances of injustice committed by their owners. The stories presented, which span centuries and legal contexts, demonstrate that these acts of lethal force were carefully pre-meditated. Enslaved women planned how and when their enslavers would die, what weapons and accomplices were necessary, and how to evade capture in the aftermath. Original and compelling, Brooding Over Bloody Revenge presents a window into the lives and philosophies of enslaved women who had their own ideas about justice and how to achieve it.

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Stephen Bright and James Kwak, "The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts" (The New Press, 2023) Jul 15, 2023

Glenn Ford, a Black man, spent thirty years on Louisiana’s death row for a crime he did not commit. He was released in 2014—and given twenty dollars—when prosecutors admitted they did not have a case against him.

Ford’s trial was a travesty. One of his court-appointed lawyers specialized in oil and gas law and had never tried a case. The other had been out of law school for only two years. They had no funds for investigation or experts. The prosecution struck all the Black prospective jurors to get the all-white jury that sentenced Ford to death.

In The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts (The New Press, 2023), legendary death penalty lawyer Stephen B. Bright and legal scholar James Kwak offer a heart-wrenching overview of how the criminal legal system fails to live up to the values of equality and justice. The book ranges from poor people squeezed for cash by private probation companies because of trivial violations to people executed in violation of the Constitution despite overwhelming evidence of intellectual disability or mental illness. They also show examples from around the country of places that are making progress toward justice.

With a foreword by Bryan Stevenson, who worked for Bright at the Southern Center for Human Rights and credits him for “[breaking] down the issues with the death penalty simply but persuasively,” The Fear of Too Much Justice offers a timely, trenchant, firsthand critique of our criminal courts and points the way toward a more just future.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a History Educator and an Independent Scholar based in Southern California. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Emily Flitter, "The White Wall: How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America" (Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2022) Jul 11, 2023

In 2018, Emily Flitter received a tip that Morgan Stanley had fired a Black employee without cause. Flitter had been searching for a way to investigate the deep-rooted racism in the American financial industry, and that one tip lit the sparkplug for a three-year journey through the shocking yet normalized corruption in our financial institutions.

Examining local insurance agencies and corporate titans like JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock, and Wells Fargo and reveals the practices that have kept the racial wealth gap practically as wide as it was during the Jim Crow era. Flitter exposes hiring and layoff policies designed to keep Black employees from advancing to high levels; racial profiling of customers in internal emails between bank tellers; major insurers refusing to pay Black policyholders’ claims; and the systematic denial of funding to Black entrepreneurs. She also gives a voice to victims, from single mothers to professional athletes to employees themselves: people who were scammed, lied to, and defrauded by the systems they trusted with their money, and silenced when they attempted to speak out and seek reform.

Flitter connects the dots between data, history, legal scholarship, and powerful personal stories to provide a “must-read wake-up call” (Valerie Red-Horse Mohl, president of KNOWN Holdings) about what it means to bank while Black. As America continues to confront systemic racism and pave a path forward, The White Wall: How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America(Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2022) is an essential examination of one of its most caustic contributors.

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Keisha Ray, "Black Health: The Social, Political, and Cultural Determinants of Black People's Health" (Oxford UP, 2023) Jul 08, 2023

Why do American Black people generally have worse health than American White people? To answer this question, Keisha Ray's book Black Health: The Social, Political, and Cultural Determinants of Black People's Health(Oxford UP, 2023) dispels any notion that Black people have inferior bodies that are inherently susceptible to disease. This is simply false racial science used to justify White supremacy and Black inferiority. A genuine investigation into the status of Black people's health requires us to acknowledge that race has always been a powerful social category that gives access to the resources we need for health and wellbeing to some people, while withholding them from other people.

Systemic racism, oppression, and White supremacy in American institutions have largely been the perpetrators of differing social power and access to resources for Black people. It is these systemic inequities that create the social conditions needed for poor health outcomes for Black people to persist. An examination of social inequities reveals that is no accident that Black people have poorer health than White people. Black Health provides a succinct discussion of Black people's health, including the social, political, and at times cultural determinants of their health. Using real stories from Black people, Ray examines the ways in which Black people's multiple identities--social, cultural, and political--intersect with American institutions--such as housing, education, environmentalism, and health care--to facilitate their poor outcomes in pregnancy and birth, pain management, sleep, and cardiovascular disease.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Katherine C. Mooney, "Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey" (Yale UP, 2023) Jul 02, 2023

Isaac Murphy, born enslaved in 1861, still reigns as one of the greatest jockeys in American history. Black jockeys like Murphy were at the top of the most popular sport in America at the end of the nineteenth century. They were internationally famous, the first African American superstar athletes—and with wins in three Kentucky Derbies and countless other prestigious races, Murphy was the greatest of them all.

At the same time, he lived through the seismic events of Emancipation and Reconstruction and formative conflicts over freedom and equality in the United States. And inevitably he was drawn into those conflicts, with devastating consequences.

In Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey(Yale UP, 2023), Katherine C. Mooney uncovers the history of Murphy’s troubled life, his death in 1896 at age thirty-five, and his afterlife. In recounting Murphy’s personal story, she also tells two of the great stories of change in nineteenth-century America: the debates over what a multiracial democracy might look like and the battles over who was to hold power in an economy that increasingly resembled the corporate, wealth-polarized world we know today.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a History Educator and an Independent scholar based in Southern California. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com

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Samuel G. Freedman, "Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights" (Oxford UP, 2023) Jun 21, 2023

From one of the country's most distinguished journalists, a revisionist and riveting look at the American politician whom history has judged a loser, yet who played a key part in the greatest social movement of the 20th century.

During one sweltering week in July 1948, the Democratic Party gathered in Philadelphia for its national convention. The most pressing and controversial issue facing the delegates was not whom to nominate for president -the incumbent, Harry Truman, was the presumptive candidate -but whether the Democrats would finally embrace the cause of civil rights and embed it in their official platform. Even under Franklin Roosevelt, the party had dodged the issue in order to keep a bloc of Southern segregationists-the so-called Dixiecrats-in the New Deal coalition.

On the convention's final day, Hubert Humphrey, just 37 and the relatively obscure mayor of the midsized city of Minneapolis, ascended the podium. Defying Truman's own desire to occupy the middle ground, Humphrey urged the delegates to "get out of the shadow of state's rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights." Humphrey's speech put everything on the line, rhetorically and politically, to move the party, and the country, forward.

To the surprise of many, including Humphrey himself, the delegates voted to adopt a meaningful civil-rights plank. With no choice but to run on it, Truman seized the opportunity it offered, desegregating the armed forces and in November upsetting the frontrunner Thomas Dewey, a victory due in part to an unprecedented surge of Black voters.

The outcome of that week in July 1948-which marks its 75th anniversary as this book is published-shapes American politics to this day. And it was in turned shaped by Humphrey. His journey to that pivotal speech runs from a remote, all-white hamlet in South Dakota to the mayoralty of Minneapolis as he tackles its notorious racism and anti-Semitism to his role as a national champion of multiracial democracy. His allies in that struggle include a Black newspaper publisher, a Jewish attorney, and a professor who had fled Nazi Germany. And his adversaries are the white supremacists, Christian Nationalists, and America Firsters of mid-century America - one of whom tries to assassinate him.

Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights (Oxford UP, 2023) is a book that celebrates one of the overlooked landmarks of civil rights history, and illuminates the early life and enduring legacy of the man who helped bring it about.

Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning professor, columnist, and author of nine acclaimed books. Freedman was a staff reporter for The New York Times from 1981 through 1987. From 2004 through 2008, he wrote the paper's "On Education" column, winning first prize in the Education Writers Association's annual competition in 2005. From 2006 through 2016, Freedman wrote the "On Religion" column, receiving the Goldziher Prize for Journalists in 2017 for a series of columns about Muslim-Americans that had been published over the preceding six years. As a professor of journalism at Columbia University, Freedman has been named the nation's outstanding journalism educator by the Society of Professional Journalists and received Columbia's coveted Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching.

Connor Christensen is a graduate student at the University of Chicago, pursuing both an MPP at the Harris School of Public Policy and an MA at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He welcomes collaboration, so feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or at his email, ctchristensen@uchicago.edu.

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Down Deep in My Soul (with Fr. Maurice Nutt, C.Ss.R.) Jun 15, 2023

In his new book, Down Deep in My Soul: An African American Catholic Theology of Preaching (Orbis Books, 2023), Father Maurice Nutt, a doctor of preaching from the Aquinas Institute of Theology and a Redemptorist priest, teaches us about African American oratorical and homiletic tradition and shows how it can enrich preaching in every church. This is a discussion about history, cultural anthropology, and the Roman Catholic Church. As always, we ask how we got here and where do we go next. I also ask Father Maurice to respond to Pope Francis’s recommendation that homilies should be kept under ten minutes. Finally, Father Maurice gives guidance that will benefit all preachers—and, in fact, all public speakers.

Father Maurice’s webpage
Father Maurice’s book, Deep Down in My Soul (Orbis, 2023)
Father Maurice’s spiritual direction ministry
Father Maurice on Almost Good Catholics, episode 21: We Shall Overcome: Sister Thea Bowman and the Black Catholic Experience

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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Roy Christopher, "Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism" (MIT Press, 2022) Jun 12, 2023

Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism(MIT Press, 2022), edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the way to hip-hop enlightenment. Hip-hop permeates our world, and yet it is continually misunderstood. Hip-hop's intersections with Afrofuturism and science fiction provide fascinating touchpoints that enable us to see our todays and tomorrows. This book can be, for the curious, a window into a hip-hop-infused Alter Destiny--a journey whose spaceship you embarked on some time ago. Are you engaging this work from the gaze of the future? Are you the data thief sailing into the past to U-turn to the now? Or are you the unborn child prepping to build the next universe? No, you're the superhero. Enjoy the journey.--from the introduction by Ytasha L. Womack

Through essays by some of hip-hop's most interesting thinkers, theorists, journalists, writers, emcees, and DJs, Boogie Down Predictions embarks on a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture and what that means for the culture at large. Introduced by Ytasha L. Womack, author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, this book explores these temporalities, possible pasts, and further futures from a diverse, multilayered, interdisciplinary perspective.

Alex Kuchma is an MA student in history at York University. He has have researching hip-hop actively and collecting oral histories for more than a decade.

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Kathryn Olivarius, "Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom" (Harvard UP, 2022) Jun 10, 2023

Disease is thought to be a great leveler of humanity, but in antebellum New Orleans acquiring immunity from the scourge of yellow fever magnified the brutal inequities of slave-powered capitalism.

Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America’s slave and cotton kingdoms. It was also where yellow fever epidemics killed as many as 150,000 people during the nineteenth century. With little understanding of mosquito-borne viruses—and meager public health infrastructure—a person’s only protection against the scourge was to “get acclimated” by surviving the disease. About half of those who contracted yellow fever died.

Repeated epidemics bolstered New Orleans’s strict racial hierarchy by introducing another hierarchy, what Kathryn Olivarius terms “immunocapital.” As this highly original analysis shows, white survivors could leverage their immunity as evidence that they had paid their biological dues and could then pursue economic and political advancement. For enslaved Blacks, the story was different. Immunity protected them from yellow fever, but as embodied capital, they saw the social and monetary value of their acclimation accrue to their white owners. Whereas immunity conferred opportunity and privilege on whites, it relegated enslaved people to the most grueling labor.

The question of good health—who has it, who doesn’t, and why—is always in part political. Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom(Harvard UP, 2022) shows how powerful nineteenth-century white Orleanians—all allegedly immune—pushed this politics to the extreme. They constructed a society that capitalized mortal risk and equated perceived immunity with creditworthiness and reliability. Instead of trying to curb yellow fever through sanitation or quarantines, immune white Orleanians took advantage of the chaos disease caused. Immunological discrimination therefore became one more form of bias in a society premised on inequality, one more channel by which capital disciplined and divided the population.

Kendall Dinniene is an English PhD candidate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their research examines how contemporary American authors respond to anti-fatness in their work, revealing the contours of citizenship and paths toward liberation.

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Mark R. Warren, "Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline" (Oxford UP, 2021) Jun 07, 2023

The story of how Black and Brown parents, students and members of low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their local schools and built a movement that spread across the country.

In Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline (Oxford UP, 2021), Mark R. Warren documents how Black and Brown parents, students, and low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their local schools and built an intersectional movement that spread across the country. Examining organizing processes in Mississippi, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other localities, he shows how relatively small groups of community members built the power to win policy changes to reduce suspensions and expulsions by combining deep local organizing with resources from the national movement. As a result, over the course of twenty years, the movement to combat the school-to-prison pipeline resulted in falling suspension rates across the country and began to make gains in reducing police presence in schools, especially in places where there have been sustained organizing and advocacy efforts. In documenting the struggle organizers waged to build national alliances led by community groups and people most impacted by injustice rather than Washington-based professional advocates, Warren offers a new model for movements that operate simultaneously at local, state and national levels, while primarily oriented to support and spread local organizing. In doing so, he argues for the need to rethink national social justice movements as interconnected local struggles whose victories are lifted and spread, In the end, the book highlights lessons from the school-to-prison pipeline movement for organizers, educators, policymakers and a broader public seeking to transform deep-seated and systemic racism in public schools and the broader society.

This episode's host, Laura Kelly, is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College.

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Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour, "The Politics of Survival: Black Women Social Welfare Beneficiaries in Brazil and the United States" (Columbia UP, 2023) Jun 04, 2023

Poor Black women who benefit from social welfare are marginalized in a number of ways by interlocking systemic racism, sexism, and classism. The media renders them invisible or casts them as racialized and undeserving "welfare queens" who exploit social safety nets. Even when Black women voters are celebrated, the voices of the poorest too often go unheard. How do Afro-descendant women in former slave-holding societies survive amid multifaceted oppression?

In The Politics of Survival: Black Women Social Welfare Beneficiaries in Brazil and the United States (Columbia University Press, 2023), Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour offers a comparative analysis of how Black women social welfare beneficiaries in Brazil and the United States defy systems of domination. She argues that poor Black women act as political subjects in the struggle to survive, to provide food for their children and themselves, and challenge daily discrimination even in dire circumstances. Mitchell-Walthour examines the effects of social welfare programs, showing that mutual aid networks and informal labor play greater roles in beneficiaries' lives. She also details how Afro-descendant women perceive stereotypes and discrimination based on race, class, gender, and skin color. Mitchell-Walthour considers their formal political participation, demonstrating that low-income Black women support progressive politics and that religious affiliation does not lead to conservative attitudes. Drawing on Black feminist frameworks, The Politics of Survival confronts the persistent invisibility of poor Black women by foregrounding their experiences and voices. Providing a wealth of empirical evidence on these women's views and survival strategies, this book not only highlights how systemic structures marginalize them but also offers insight into how they resist such forces.

Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour is Dan T. Blue Endowed Chair of Political Science at North Carolina Central University. She is the author of The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil (2018). Mitchell-Walthour is a national co-coordinator of the U.S. Network for Democracy in Brazil and former president of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA).

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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J. T. Roane, "Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place" (NYU Press, 2023) Jun 04, 2023

In Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place(NYU Press, 2023), author J. T. Roane shows how working-class Black communities cultivated two interdependent modes of insurgent assembly--dark agoras--in twentieth century Philadelphia. He investigates the ways they transposed rural imaginaries about and practices of place as part of their spatial resistances and efforts to contour industrial neighborhoods. In acts that ranged from the mundane acts of refashioning intimate spaces to expressly confrontational and liberatory efforts to transform the city's social and ecological arrangement, these communities challenged the imposition of Progressive and post-Progressive visions for urban order seeking to enclose or displace them.

Under the rubric of dark agoras Roane brings together two formulations of collectivity and belonging associated with working-class Black life. While on their surface diametrically opposed, the city's underground--its illicit markets, taverns, pool halls, unlicensed bars, as well as spaces housing illicit sex and informal sites like corners associated with the economically and socially disreputable--constituted a spatial and experiential continuum with the city's set apart--its house meetings, storefronts, temples, and masjid, as well as the extensive spiritually appropriated architectures of the interwar mass movements that included rural land experiments as well as urban housing, hotels, and recreational facilities. Together these sites incubated Black queer urbanism, or dissident visions for urban life challenging dominant urban reform efforts and their modes of producing race, gender, and ultimately the city itself. Roane shows how Black communities built a significant if underappreciated terrain of geographic struggle shaping Philadelphia between the Great Migration and Black Power. This fascinating book will help readers appreciate the importance of Black spatial imaginaries and worldmaking in shaping matters of urban place and politics.

This interview was conducted during an event at Charis Books.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Lorenzo Costaguta, "Workers of All Colors Unite: Race and the Origins of American Socialism" (U Illinois Press, 2023) Jun 03, 2023

As the United States transformed into an industrial superpower, American socialists faced the vexing question of how to approach race. Lorenzo Costaguta balances intellectual and institutional history to illuminate the clash between two major points of view. On one side, some believed labor should accept and apply the ascendant tenets of scientific theories of race. But others stood with International Workingmen's Association leaders J. P. McDonnell and F. A. Sorge in rejecting the idea that racial and ethnic division influenced worker-employer relations, arguing instead that class played the preeminent role.

In Workers of All Colors Unite: Race and the Origins of American Socialism (U Illinois Press, 2023), Costaguta charts the socialist movement's journey through the conflict and down a path that ultimately abandoned scientific racism in favor of an internationalist class-focused American socialism. As he shows, the shift had a paradoxical effect: while distancing American socialism from the most hideous forms of white supremacism, it made the movement blind to the racist nature of American capitalism. The position that emerged out of the Gilded Age became American socialism's most common approach to race in the twentieth century and beyond.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a History educator and independent scholar based in Southern California. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Kidada E. Williams, "I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction" (Bloomsbury, 2023) Jun 02, 2023

The story of Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and journalists whose accounts claim an outsized place in collective memory. But this pivotal era looked very different to African Americans in the South transitioning from bondage to freedom after 1865. They were besieged by a campaign of white supremacist violence that persisted through the 1880s and beyond. For too long, their lived experiences have been sidelined, impoverishing our understanding of the obstacles post-Civil War Black families faced, their inspiring determination to survive, and the physical and emotional scars they bore because of it.

In I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kidada E. Williams offers a breakthrough account of the much-debated Reconstruction period, transporting readers into the daily existence of formerly enslaved people building hope-filled new lives. Drawing on overlooked sources and bold new readings of the archives, Williams offers a revelatory and, in some cases, minute-by-minute record of nighttime raids and Ku Klux Klan strikes. And she deploys cutting-edge scholarship on trauma to consider how the effects of these attacks would linger for decades--indeed, generations--to come.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Rebeca L. Hey-Colón, "Channeling Knowledges: Water and Afro-Diasporic Spirits in Latinx and Caribbean Worlds" (U Texas Press, 2023) May 30, 2023

Water is often tasked with upholding division through the imposition of geopolitical borders. We see this in the construction of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo on the US-Mexico border, as well as in how the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean are used to delineate the limits of US territory. In stark contrast to this divisive view, Afro-diasporic religions conceive of water as a place of connection; it is where spiritual entities and ancestors reside, and where knowledge awaits.

Departing from the premise that water encourages confluence through the sustainment of contradiction, Channeling Knowledges: Water and Afro-Diasporic Spirits in Latinx and Caribbean Worlds(U Texas Press, 2023) fathoms water’s depth and breadth in the work of Latinx and Caribbean creators such as Mayra Santos-Febres, Rita Indiana, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, and the Border of Lights collective. Combining methodologies from literary studies, anthropology, history, and religious studies, Rebeca L. Hey-Colón’s interdisciplinary study traces how Latinx and Caribbean cultural production draws on systems of Afro-diasporic worship—Haitian Vodou, La 21 División (Dominican Vodou), and Santería/Regla de Ocha—to channel the power of water, both salty and sweet, in sustaining connections between past, present, and not-yet-imagined futures.

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Chris Campion and Bud Lee, "The War is Here: Newark 1967" (ZE Books, 2023) May 28, 2023

July 1967. After the arrest, beating, and imprisonment of cab driver John Smith by local police, the city of Newark--already a tinderbox, became a hotbed of protest and retaliation. Over five long days, 26 people were killed by police gunfire and hundreds more were injured, thousands arrested, and millions of dollars in property damage was caused. The scars on the city remained for decades.

Bud Lee, a 26-year-old novice photographer for Life magazine, was shooting a portrait of a Wall Street stockbroker when a call came in requesting he leave immediately to cover the civic uprising in Newark, which had already been raging for two days. Lee and Life magazine reporter Dale Wittner arrived in the city late on 14th July. What they found was a majority Black population--already living in deprivation under a thoroughly corrupt local government, and a vicious, authoritarian police force--struggling to maintain some semblance of normalcy under extraordinary circumstances: stores burnt and looted; a city under siege by trigger-happy city and state police; and the young, inexperienced, and exhausted National Guardsmen, sent to patrol it day and night.

The War is Here: Newark 1967(ZE Books, 2023) documents the several days Bud Lee spent in Newark. These photographs, most of which have never been published, capture life in a city transformed into an urban war zone and killing ground, something Lee would witness first-hand on seeing two policemen shoot a man named Billy Furr in the back, murdering him in cold blood. This, Lee captured in a dramatic sequence of images that ran in Life.

The same bullets also hit and wounded a 12-year-old boy named Joey Bass Jr., who had been playing at a nearby intersection. Lee's stark, emotional image of Bass, lying bleeding and contorted in pain on dirty concrete, ran on the July 28, 1967 cover of Life, sparking a national conversation on race and police violence, and becoming the defining image of the 'long, hot summer' of '67--a summer of fire and fury, protest and rage across the country. Over half a century later, Bud Lee's raw, desolate, and empathetic photographs of the people of Newark, at a turning point in the city's history, continue to resonate: a testament to their resilience and fortitude.

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Ed Mitchell et al., "Ed Mitchell's Barbeque" (Ecco, 2023) May 26, 2023

Ed Mitchell’s journey in the barbeque business began in 1991 with a lunch for his mama, who was grieving the loss of Ed’s father. Ed drove to the nearby Piggly Wiggly to buy a thirty-five-pound pig—that’s a small one—and fired up the coals. As smoke filled the air and the pork skin started to crackle, the few customers at the family bodega started to inquire about lunch and what smelled so good. More than thirty years later, Ed is known simply as “The Pitmaster” in barbeque circles and is widely considered one of the best at what he does.

From cracklin to hush puppies, fried green tomatoes to deviled eggs, okra poppers, skillet cornbread, potato salad, and pickled pigs’ feet, Ed Mitchell's Barbeque(Ecco, 2023) is filled with delicious and essential recipes honed over decades. And, of course, there is the barbeque—mouth-watering baby back ribs, smoked pork chops, backyard brisket, and barbequed chicken—all paired with lively and warmly told stories from the Mitchell family. Ed Mitchell’s Barbeque is rich with the history of Wilson, North Carolina, and yet promises to bring barbeque to the next level.

Ed’s son Ryan Mitchell, who is a renowned pitmaster in his own right, co-authored the book with his father, along with Zella Palmer.

Ryan talks to New Books Network about the unwritten chapters of the rich and complex history of North Carolina whole-hog barbeque – a method passed down through generations over the course of 125 years and hearkens back even further than that, to his ancestors who were plantation sharecroppers and, before that, enslaved. He shares stories of his father’s journey and his own, discusses the impetus behind the cookbook, and offers his views on the future of barbecue.

Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger at Vittlesvamp.com.

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Samantha Nogueira Joyce, "Afro-Brazilians in Telenovelas: Social, Political, and Economic Realities" (Lexington Books, 2022) May 22, 2023

In Afro-Brazilians in Telenovelas: Social, Political, and Economic Realities (Lexington Books, 2022), Samantha Nogueira Joyce examines representations of Blackness on Brazilian TV, interrogating the role of mass media in developing racial equality and social change. Nogueira Joyce challenges assumptions that place the inclusion of Afro-Brazilians in mass media as a step towards racial progress while contextualizing media representation with the social, political, and economic realities of the Brazilian society at large, thus linking media representations to progressive gains and conservative backlashes in the Brazilian public sphere. This book joins conversations with other works on multiculturalism, Blackness, and whiteness within media studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and Latin American studies. This multilayered approach combines textual analysis with studies of political and economic systems and digital media activism to carefully unravel Brazilian racial dynamics.

Samantha Nogueira Joyce is Associate Professor of global communication at Saint Mary's College of California. She is the author of Brazilian Telenovelas and the Myth of Racial Democracy (Lexington Books, 2012).

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Rebecca Brückmann, "Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation" (U Georgia Press, 2021) May 22, 2023

Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation (U Georgia Press, 2021) offers a comparative sociocultural and spatial history of white supremacist women involved in massive resistance. The book focuses on segregationist grassroots activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Charleston, South Carolina from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. Dr. Rebecca Brückmann combines theory and detailed case studies to interrogate the “roles, actions, self-understandings, and media representations” of these segregationist women.

Dr. Brückmann argues that these women – motivated by an everyday culture of white supremacy – created performative spaces for their segregationist agitation in the public sphere to legitimize their actions. Unlike other studies of mass resistance that have focused on maternalism, Dr. Brückmann argues that women’s invocation of motherhood was varied and primarily served as a tactical tool to continuously expand these women’s spaces. Her book carefully differentiates the circumstances, tactics, and representations used in the creation of performative spaces by working-class, middle-class, and elite women engaged in massive resistance. Brückmann contrasts the transgressive “street politics” of working-class female activists in Little Rock and New Orleans with the more traditional political actions of segregationist, middle-class, and elite women in Charleston. While these women aligned white supremacist agitation with long-standing experience in conservative women’s clubs (e.g., United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Daughters of the American Revolution), working-class women’s groups (who lacked the economic, cultural, and social capital) chose consciously transgressive strategies, including violence, to elicit shock value and create states of emergency to further legitimize their actions and push for white supremacy. Dr. Brückmann’s nuanced work of history uses scholarship from sociology, political science, law, and other relevant disciplines to demonstrate how “interactions between class and status concerns, race, space, and gender shaped these women’s views and actions.”

Dr. Rebecca Brückmann is an Associate Professor of History at Carleton College. Her research and teachings interrogate African American history, the transnational history of the Black Diaspora, Southern US history, White Supremacy, and gender.

Daniela Lavergne assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Book Talk 60: Cleo McNellly Kearns on Mark Twain’s "Huckleberry Finn" May 20, 2023

Celebrated, censored, canceled: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn cannot be avoided. William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature.” Toni Morrison explained that “the brilliance of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that it is the argument it raises…. The cyclical attempts to remove the novel from classrooms extend Jim’s captivity on into each generation of readers.” Ernest Hemingway claimed “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn… There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” Ralph Waldo Ellison added that “Hemingway missed completely the structural, symbolic and moral necessity for that part of the plot in which the boys rescue Jim. Yet it is precisely this part which gives the novel its significance.”

I spoke with Cleo McNelly Kearns, author of a seminal essay on Jim’s role in the book, about Huckleberry Finn as a challenge and an opportunity for 21st-century readers to understand ourselves, our country, and our moral obligations more accurately.

Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer.

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Virginia Jackson, "Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric" (Princeton UP, 2023) May 18, 2023

Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton UP, 2023) examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, produced the conditions for the invention of modern American poetry. Through inspired readings of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters, George Moses Horton, Ann Plato, James Monroe Whitfield, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper—as well as the poetry of neglected but once popular White poets William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—Virginia Jackson demonstrates how Black poets inspired the direction that American poetics has taken for the past two centuries. As an idea of poetry based on genres of poems such as ballads, elegies, odes, hymns, drinking songs, and epistles gave way to an idea of poetry based on genres of people—Black, White, male, female, Indigenous—almost all poetry became lyric poetry. Jackson discusses the important role played by Frederick Douglass as an influential editor and publisher of Black poetry, and traces the twisted paths leading to our current understanding of lyric, along the way presenting not only a new history but a new theory of American poetry.

A major reassessment of the origins and development of American poetics, Before Modernism argues against a literary critical narrative that links American modernism directly to British or European Romanticism, emphasizing instead the many ways in which early Black poets intervened by inventing what Wheatley called “the deep design” of American lyric.

Hal Coase is a PhD candidate at La Sapienza, University of Rome.

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Meredith Broussard, "More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech" (MIT Press, 2023) May 18, 2023

The word "glitch" implies an incidental error, as easy to patch up as it is to identify. But what if racism, sexism, and ableism aren't just bugs in mostly functional machinery--what if they're coded into the system itself? In the vein of heavy hitters such as Safiya Umoja Noble, Cathy O'Neil, and Ruha Benjamin, Meredith Broussard demonstrates in More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech(MIT Press, 2023) how neutrality in tech is a myth and why algorithms need to be held accountable.

Broussard, a data scientist and one of the few Black female researchers in artificial intelligence, masterfully synthesizes concepts from computer science and sociology. She explores a range of examples: from facial recognition technology trained only to recognize lighter skin tones, to mortgage-approval algorithms that encourage discriminatory lending, to the dangerous feedback loops that arise when medical diagnostic algorithms are trained on insufficiently diverse data. Even when such technologies are designed with good intentions, Broussard shows, fallible humans develop programs that can result in devastating consequences.

Broussard argues that the solution isn't to make omnipresent tech more inclusive, but to root out the algorithms that target certain demographics as "other" to begin with. With sweeping implications for fields ranging from jurisprudence to medicine, the ground-breaking insights of More Than a Glitch are essential reading for anyone invested in building a more equitable future.

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America & Democracy Ep. 5: Brandon Terry on MLK May 17, 2023

In the final episode of this series, Brandon Terry, political theorist and African American Studies scholar at Harvard discusses the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr.

Terry is the editor of Fifty Years Since MLK, published in 2018 by MIT Press and Boston Review and co-edited To Shape a New World, alongside Tommie Shelby, which was published in 2018 by Harvard University Press.

These books explore the conscription of MLK's legacy to narratives not of his own politics, and how his work might be wrestled back and engaged with on its own radical merit.

Produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux

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Daniel Ruiz-Serna, "When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories" (Duke UP, 2023) May 13, 2023

In When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories(Duke University Press, 2023)Daniel Ruiz-Serna follows the afterlives of war, showing how they affect the variety of human and nonhuman beings that compose the region of Bajo Atrato: the traditional land of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples. Attending to Colombia’s armed conflict as an experience that resounds in the lives and deaths of people, animals, trees, rivers, and spirits, Ruiz-Serna traces a lasting damage that brought Indigenous peoples to compel the Colombian government to legally recognize their territories as victims of war. Although this recognition extends transitional justice into new terrains, Ruiz-Serna considers the collective and individual wounds that continue unsettling spirits, preventing shamans from containing evil, attracting jaguars to the taste of human flesh, troubling the flow of rivers, and impeding the ability of people to properly deal with the dead. Ruiz-Serna raises potent questions about the meanings of justice, the forms it can take, and the limits of human-rights frameworks to repair the cosmic order that war unravels when it unsettles more-than-human worlds—causing forests to run amok.

Daniel Ruiz-Serna is Lecturer of Anthropology at Dawson College.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Alvin J. Henry, "Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel" (U Minnesota Press, 2021) May 13, 2023

Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel (U Minnesota Press, 2021) reinterprets key African American novels from the Harlem Renaissance to Black Modernism to contemporary literature, showing how authors have imagined a new model of Black queer selfhood. African American authors blame liberal humanism’s model of subjectivity for double consciousness and find that liberal humanism’s celebration of individual autonomy and agency is a way of disciplining Black queer lives. These authors thus reject subjectivity in search of a new mode of the self that Alvin J. Henry names “Black queer flesh”—a model of selfhood that is collective, plural, fluctuating, and deeply connected to the Black queer past.

Henry begins with early twentieth-century authors such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and James Weldon Johnson. These authors adapted the Bildungsroman, the novel of self-formation, to show African Americans gaining freedom and agency by becoming a liberal, autonomous subjects. These authors, however, discovered that the promise of liberal autonomy held out by the Bildungsroman was yet another tool of antiblack racism. As a result, they tentatively experimented with repurposing the Bildungsroman to throw off subjectivity and its attendant double consciousness. In contrast, Nella Larsen, Henry shows, was the first author to fully reject subjectivity. In Quicksand and Passing, Larsen invented a new genre showing her queer characters—characters whose queerness already positioned them on the margins of subjectivity—escaping subjectivity altogether. Using Ralph Ellison’s archival drafts, Henry then powerfully rereads Invisible Man, revealing that the protagonist as a queer, disabled character taught by the novel’s many other queer, disabled characters to likewise seek a selfhood beyond subjectivity. Although Larsen and Ellison sketch glimpses of this selfhood beyond subjectivity, only Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments shows a protagonist fully inhabiting Black queer flesh—a new mode of selfhood that is collective, plural, always evolving, and no longer alienated from the black past.

Black Queer Flesh is an original and necessary contribution to Black literary studies, offering new ways to understand and appreciate the canonical texts and far more.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Bill Steigerwald, "30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South" (Lyons Press, 2017) May 13, 2023

The dangerous, trailblazing work of a white journalist and black leader who struck a shocking early blow against legal segregation In 1948, most white people in the North had no idea how unjust and unequal daily life was for 10 million African Americans living in the Jim Crow South. Then, Ray Sprigle, a famous white journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and alongside Atlanta s black civil rights pioneer John Wesley Dobbs lived as a black man in the South for thirty days. His impassioned newspaper series shocked millions and sparked the first nationally aired television-and-radio debate about ending America s shameful system of apartheid.

With 30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South (Lyons Press, 2017), author Bill Steigerwald returns this long-forgotten part of American history to its rightful place among the seminal events of the Civil Rights movement. For 30 days and 3,000 miles, Sprigle and Dobbs traveled among dirt-poor sharecroppers, principals of ramshackle black schools, and families of lynching victims. The nationally syndicated newspaper series hit the media like an atom bomb, eliciting a fierce response from the Southern media. Six years before Brown v. Board of Education, seven years before the murder of Emmett Till, eight years before Little Rock s Central High School was integrated, and thirteen years before John Howard Griffin s similar experiment became the bestselling Black Like Me, an unlikely pair of heroes brought black lives to the forefront of American consciousness.

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John Klaess, "Breaks in the Air: The Birth of Rap Radio in New York City" (Duke UP, 2022) May 12, 2023

In Breaks in the Air: The Birth of Rap Radio in New York City (Duke UP, 2022), John Klaess tells the story of rap's emergence on New York City's airwaves by examining how artists and broadcasters adapted hip hop's performance culture to radio. Initially, artists and DJs brought their live practice to radio by buying time on low-bandwidth community stations and building new communities around their shows. Later, stations owned by New York's African American elite, such as WBLS, reluctantly began airing rap even as they pursued a sound rooted in respectability, urban sophistication, and polish. At the same time, large commercial stations like WRKS programmed rap once it became clear that the music attracted a demographic that was valuable to advertisers. Moving between intimate portraits of single radio shows and broader examinations of the legal, financial, cultural, and political forces that indelibly shaped the sound of rap radio, Klaess shows how early rap radio provides a lens through which to better understand the development of rap music as well as the intertwined histories of sounds, institutions, communities, and legal formations that converged in the post-Civil Rights era.

John Klaess is an independent scholar based in Boston. John on Duke University Press.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter.

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Karin Chenoweth, "Districts That Succeed: Breaking the Correlation Between Race, Poverty, and Achievement" (Harvard Education Press, 2021) May 09, 2023

In Districts That Succeed: Breaking the Correlation Between Race, Poverty, and Achievement (Harvard Education Press, 2021), long-time education writer Karin Chenoweth turns her attention from effective schools to effective districts. Leveraging new, cutting-edge national research on district performance as well as in-depth reporting, Chenoweth profiles five districts that have successfully broken the correlation between race, poverty, and achievement. Focusing on high performing or rapidly improving districts that serve children of color and children from low-income backgrounds, the book explores the common elements that have led to the districts' successes, including leadership, processes, and systems.

Districts That Succeed reveals that helping more students achieve is not a matter of adopting a program or practice. Rather, it requires developing a district-wide culture where all adults feel responsible for the academic well-being of students and adopt systems and processes that support that culture. Chenoweth explores how districts, from urban Chicago, Illinois to suburban Seaford, Delaware, have organized themselves to look at data to guide improvement. Her research highlights the essential role of districts in closing achievement gaps and illustrates how successful outliers can serve as resources for other districts. With important lessons for district leaders and policy makers alike, Chenoweth offers the hard-won wisdom of educators who understand the power of schools to, as one superintendent says, "change the path of poverty."

Host Laura Kelly is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, where she researches and teaches about language and literacy learning and teaching in culturally and linguistically diverse educational contexts.

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Kyla Sommers, "When the Smoke Cleared: The 1968 Rebellion and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights in the Nation's Capital" (New Press, 2023) May 08, 2023

In April 1968, following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., a wave of uprisings swept across America. None was more visible—or resulted in more property damage, arrests, or federal troop involvement—than in Washington, DC, where thousands took to the streets in protest against racial inequality, looting and burning businesses in the process. The nation’s capital was shaken to its foundations.

When the Smoke Cleared: The 1968 Rebellion and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights in the Nation's Capital (The New Press, 2023) tells the story of the Washingtonians who seized the moment to rebuild a more just society, one that would protect and foster Black political and economic power. A riveting account of activism, urban reimagination, and political transformation, Kyla Sommers’s revealing and deeply researched narrative is ultimately a tale of blowback, as the Nixon administration and its allies in Congress thwarted the ambitions of DC’s reformers, opposing civil rights reforms and self-governance. And nationwide, conservative politicians used the specter of crime in the capital to roll back the civil rights movement and create the modern carceral state.

A vital chapter in the struggle for racial equality, When the Smoke Cleared is an account of open wounds, paths not taken, and their unforeseen consequences—revealed here in all of their contemporary significance.

Dr Kyla Sommers earned her PhD in history at George Washington University. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Washington History journal, and Demand the Impossible: Essays in History as Activism (Westphalia Books, 2018). She is former editor-in-chief of the History News Network, and works as Digital Engagement Editor at American Oversight.

Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email, Mastodon or Twitter.

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Jonathan Eig, "King: A Life" (FSG, 2023) May 07, 2023

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig's King: A Life(FSG, 2023) is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.--and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family's origins as well as MLK's complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father--as well as the nation's most mourned martyr.

In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history's greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.

Jonathan Eig is a former senior special writer for The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of several books, including two highly acclaimed bestsellers, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig and Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season. Visit him at JonathanEig.com.

Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

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Chad Williams, "The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War" (FSG, 2023) May 05, 2023

When W. E. B. Du Bois, believing in the possibility of full citizenship and democratic change, encouraged African Americans to "close ranks" and support the Allied cause in World War I, he made a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Seeking both intellectual clarity and personal atonement, for more than two decades Du Bois attempted to write the definitive history of Black participation in World War I. His book, however, remained unfinished.

In The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War(FSG, 2023), Chad Williams offers the dramatic account of Du Bois's failed efforts to complete what would have been one of his most significant works. The surprising story of this unpublished book offers new insight into Du Bois's struggles to reckon with both the history and the troubling memory of the war, along with the broader meanings of race and democracy for Black people in the twentieth century.

Drawing on a broad range of sources, most notably Du Bois's unpublished manuscript and research materials, Williams tells a sweeping story of hope, betrayal, disillusionment, and transformation, setting into motion a fresh understanding of the life and mind of arguably the most significant scholar-activist in African American history. In uncovering what happened to Du Bois's largely forgotten book, Williams offers a captivating reminder of the importance of World War I, why it mattered to Du Bois, and why it continues to matter today.

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Cedric Johnson, "After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle" (Verso, 2023) May 04, 2023

The historic uprising in the wake of the murder of George Floyd transformed the way Americans and the world think about race and policing. Why did it achieve so little in the way of substantive reforms? After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle (Verso, 2023) argues that the failure to leave an institutional residue was not simply due to the mercurial and reactive character of the protests. Rather, the core of the movement itself failed to locate the central racial injustice that underpins the crisis of policing: socio-economic inequality.

For Johnson, the anti-capitalist and downwardly redistributive politics expressed by different Black Lives Matter elements has too often been drowned out in the flood of black wealth creation, fetishism of Jim Crow black entrepreneurship, corporate diversity initiatives, and a quixotic reparations demand. None of these political tendencies addresses the fundamental problem underlying mass incarceration. That is the turn from welfare to domestic warfare as the chief means of regulating the excluded and oppressed. Johnson sees the way forward in building popular democratic power to advance public works and public goods. Rather than abolishing police, After Black Lives Matter argues for abolishing the conditions of alienation and exploitation contemporary policing exists to manage.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Philip Ewell, "On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone" (U Michigan Press, 2023) May 03, 2023

On Music Theory and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone(University of Michigan Press, 2023) by Philip Ewell is an unflinching look at white supremacy and the academy, specifically in the discipline of music theory, although Ewell’s insights and arguments can apply just as well to all music studies and most, if not all, other academic fields. Using meticulous research and his own experiences, Ewell documents the results of music theory’s white racial frame. He shows how the power traditionally wielded by white, cisgender men in academia is supported by the methodologies, the pedagogy, and the very music that most music specialists study, perform, and teach, and how this white racial frame makes it difficult for anyone else to feel comfortable, much less succeed in the field. Ultimately, the book brings attention to the myriad ways that people are excluded, denigrated, and marginalized by deeply entrenched beliefs, analytical methods, and systems in music theory. Ewell reminds readers that there is a difference between diversity work and antiracism, and how important it is to recognize when “solutions” are actually supporting the very racial injustices they purport to reform. Although the problem is too complex for easy answers, Ewell ends the book with some strategies to begin to subvert music’s white racial frame and make “music more welcoming for everyone.”

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Evie Shockley, "Suddenly We" (Wesleyan UP, 2023) May 01, 2023

In her new poetry collection Suddenly We (Wesleyan UP, 2023), Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious "we." How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley's poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Mauro Porto, "Mirrors of Whiteness: Media, Middle-Class Resentment, and the Rise of the Far Right in Brazil" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023) May 01, 2023

In Mirrors of Whiteness: Media, Middle-Class Resentment, and the Rise of the Far Right in Brazil(U Pittsburgh Press, 2023), Mauro P. Porto examines the conservative revolt of Brazil's white middle class, which culminated with the 2018 election of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro. He identifies the rise of a significant status panic among middle-class publics following the relative economic and social ascension of mostly Black and brown low-income laborers. The book highlights the role of the media in disseminating "mirrors of whiteness," or spheres of representation that allow white Brazilians to legitimate their power while softening or hiding the inequalities and injustices that such power generates. A detailed analysis of representations of domestic workers in the telenovela Cheias de Charme and of news coverage of affirmative action by the magazine Veja demonstrates that they adopted whiteness as an ideological perspective, disseminating resentment among their audiences and fomenting the conservative revolt that took place in Brazil between 2013 and 2018.

Mauro P. Porto is Associate Professor of Communication at Tulane University. He is the author of Media Power and Democratization in Brazil: TV Globo and the Dilemmas of Political Accountability and Televisão e Política no Brasil.

Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Charles Reagan Wilson, "The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South" (UNC Press, 2023) Apr 29, 2023

How does one begin to understand the idea of a distinctive southern way of life--a concept as enduring as it is disputed? In this examination of the American South in national and global contexts, celebrated historian Charles Reagan Wilson assesses how diverse communities of southerners have sought to define the region's identity. Surveying three centuries of southern regional consciousness across many genres, disciplines, and cultural strains, Wilson considers and challenges prior presentations of the region, advancing a vision of southern culture that has always been plural, dynamic, and complicated by race and class.

Structured in three parts, The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South(UNC Press, 2023) takes readers on a journey from the colonial era to the present, from when complex ideas of "southern civilization" rooted in slaveholding and agrarianism dominated to the twenty-first-century rise of a modern, multicultural "southern living." As Wilson shows, there is no singular or essential South but rather a rich tapestry woven with contestations, contingencies, and change.

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Tatiana D. McInnis, "To Tell a Black Story of Miami" (UP of Florida, 2022) Apr 28, 2023

In To Tell a Black Story of Miami (UP of Florida, 2022), Tatiana McInnis examines literary and cultural representations of Miami alongside the city's material realities to challenge the image of South Florida as a diverse cosmopolitan paradise. McInnis discusses how this favorable "melting pot" narrative depends on the obfuscation of racialized violence against people of African descent.

Analyzing novels, short stories, and memoirs by Edwidge Danticat, M.J. Fievre, Carlos Moore, Carlos Eire, Patricia Stephens Due, and Tananarive Due, as well as films such as Dawg Fight and Moonlight, McInnis demonstrates how these creations push back against erasure by representing the experiences of Black Americans and immigrants from Caribbean nations. McInnis considers portrayals of state-sanctioned oppression, residential segregation, violent detention of emigres, and increasing wealth gaps and concludes that celebrations of Miami's diversity disguise the pervasive, adaptive nature of white supremacy and anti-Blackness.

To Tell a Black Story of Miami offers a model of how to use literature as a primary archive in urban studies. It draws attention to the similarities and divergences between Miami's Black diasporic communities, a historically underrepresented demographic in popular and scholarly awareness of the city. Increasing understanding of Miami's political, social, and economic inequities, this book brings greater nuance to traditional narratives of exceptionalism in cities and regions.

Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Paul R. Semendinger, "Roy White: From Compton to the Bronx" (Artemesia, 2023) Apr 26, 2023

Roy White played on the New York Yankees from 1965 through the 1979 season. Roy grew up on the tough streets of Compton and created a successful all-star baseball career playing alongside such greats as Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Whitey Ford, Thurman Munson, Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, and many others. Today Roy White sits among the greatest all-time Yankees in most offensive categories. After his career with the Yankees, Roy White became a star in Japan playing for the Tokyo Giants and playing alongside the greatest Japanese player of all time, Sadaharu Oh.

Paul R. Semendinger's Roy White: From Compton to the Bronx (Artemesia, 2023) is Roy White's story, but it's also the story of a unique period in baseball history when the Yankees fell from grace and regained glory and the country dealt with societal changes in many ways.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Beth Bailey, "An Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era" (UNC Press, 2023) Apr 25, 2023

By the Tet Offensive in early 1968, what had been widely heralded as the best qualified, best-trained army in US history was descending into crisis as the Vietnam War raged without end. Morale was tanking. AWOL rates were rising. And in August of that year, a group of Black soldiers seized control of the infamous Long Binh Jail, burned buildings, and beat a white inmate to death with a shovel. The days of "same mud, same blood" were over, and by the end of the decade, a new generation of Black GIs had decisively rejected the slights and institutional racism their forefathers had endured.

In An Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era(UNC Press, 2023), acclaimed military historian Beth Bailey shows how the Army experienced, defined, and tried to solve racism and racial tension (in its own words, "the problem of race") in the Vietnam War era. Some individuals were sympathetic to the problem but offered solutions that were more performative than transformational, while others proposed remedies that were antithetical to the army's fundamental principles of discipline, order, hierarchy, and authority. Bailey traces a frustrating yet fascinating arc where the army initially rushed to create solutions without taking the time to fully identify the origins, causes, and proliferation of racial tension. It was a difficult, messy process, but only after Army leaders ceased viewing the issue as a Black issue and accepted their own roles in contributing to the problem did change become possible.

Beth Bailey is Foundation Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Kansas.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Arleen Tuchman, "Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease" (Yale UP, 2020) Apr 23, 2023

Arleen Marcia Tuchman’s book, Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease (Yale UP, 2020), tells the American history of a disease that continues to defy categorizations. Researchers for more than a century have worked to create distinctions between “types” of diabetes to parse people who all share the trait of high levels of sugar in their blood. Tuchman shows how efforts to divide diabetes into types tracked efforts to divide people into different types—specifically by race. For Tuchman, this move reflects an American obsession with race that too often overlooks racism as a fundamental cause of disease.

The book won the 2022 Rosen Prize from the American Association for the History of Medicine and will be of immediate interest to readers interested in Science & Technology Studies, American History, and social justice.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the course, “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom. Email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu.

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Rachel Anne Gillett, "At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris" (Oxford UP, 2021) Apr 22, 2023

Rachel Gillett's At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021) explores the world of the French "Jazz Age" in the years after the First World War. Tracing the common ground and differences between communities of African American, French Antillean, and French West African artists who lived, performed, and interacted with one another in the French capital during the 1920s and 30s, the book asks questions about Blackness, Frenchness, colonialism, racism, identity, and solidarity through a focus on the experiences of a diversity of historical actors and sources. Connecting the rich and complex world of entertainment to social and political change and resistance, the book draws attention to class and gender as well as race to think through issues of nationalism, transnational movement and exchange, and anti-colonialism. Its chapters work with a range of materials including police records, recordings, biography and autobiography, and a wealth of images of/from the diverse Parisian cultural life the era.

Pushing beyond the well-established history of white responses to Black musical forms (Jazz and the Biguine) during this period, the book emphasizes the perspective of Black observers, including the famous Nardal sisters of Martinique, who commented on the varied cultural and political effects of artists and performances. The book will be a fascinating read for anyone interested in the history of music, race, and exchanges across the Atlantic, including different points within the French empire during this period. And the legacies of this moment continue to resonate in France and beyond a century later.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013.

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Thomas Aiello, "Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration: The Cultural Geography of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate" (U Georgia Press, 2023) Apr 22, 2023

In this episode, Thomas Aiello joins E. James West to discuss Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration: The Cultural Geography of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate(University of Georgia Press, 2023).

Building on his earlier book The Grapevine of the Black South, which focused on the rise and fall of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate through its flagship publication the Atlanta Daily World, this book further reshapes the place of southern newspapers in the historiography of Black journalism. Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration traces the development and trajectory of the individual newspapers of the Syndicate, evaluating those with surviving issues, and presenting them as they existed in proximity to their Atlanta hub. In so doing, he emphasizes the thread of practical radicalism that ran through Syndicate editorial policy, providing a fuller picture of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate and the Black press in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

James West is a historian of race, media and business in the modern United States and Black diaspora. Author of "Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America" (Illinois, 2020), "A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago" (Illinois, 2022), "Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (Massachusetts, 2022).

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Keith Brian Wood, "Memphis Hoops: Race and Basketball in the Bluff City,1968-1997" (U Tennessee Press, 2021) Apr 21, 2023

Memphis Hoops: Race and Basketball in the Bluff City, 1968-1997 (U Tennessee Press, 2021) tells the story of basketball in Tennessee’s southwestern-most metropolis following the 1968 assassination of Marin Luther King Jr. Keith Brian Wood examines the city through the lens of the Memphis State University basketball team and its star player turned-coach Larry Finch. Finch, a Memphis native and the first highly recruited black player signed by Memphis State, helped the team make the 1973 NCAA championship game in his senior year. In an era when colleges in the south began to integrate their basketball programs, the city of Memphis embraced its flagship university’s shift toward including black players. Wood interjects the forgotten narrative of LeMoyne-Owen’s (the city’s HBCU) 1975 NCAA Division III National Championship team as a critical piece to understanding this era. Finch was drafted by the Lakers following the 1973 NCAA championship but instead signed with the American Basketball Association’s Memphis Tams. After two years of playing professionally, Finch returned to the sidelines as a coach and would eventually become the head coach of the Memphis State Tigers.

Wood deftly weaves together basketball and Memphis’s fraught race relations during the post–civil rights era. While many Memphians viewed the 1973 Tigers’ championship run as representative of racial progress, Memphis as a whole continued to be deeply divided on other issues of race and civil rights. And while Finch was championed as a symbol of the healing power of basketball that helped counteract the city’s turbulence, many black players and coaches would discover that even its sports mirrored Memphis’s racial divide. Today, as another native son of Memphis, Penny Hardaway, has taken the reigns of the University of Memphis’s basketball program, Wood reflects on the question of progress in the city that saw King’s assassination little more than forty years ago.

In this important examination of sports and civil rights history, Wood summons social memory from an all-too-recent past to present the untold—and unfinished—story of basketball in the Bluff City.

Keith B. Wood teaches history at Christian Brothers High School in Memphis.

Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB, MT. The ideas expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, or the Department of Defense.

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Lorgia García Peña, "Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective" (Duke UP, 2022) Apr 19, 2023

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, is a new podcast featuring interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.

In this episode, Lorgia García Peña discusses her new book, Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (Duke University Press, 2022). For a long time, Afro-Latino scholars and community organizers have argued both for their greater belonging within Black and Latinx communities in the United States and recognition of their difference from them.

Conversations about Blackness within latinidad became more urgent when members of the Los Angeles City Council were caught saying ugly things on tape and because of a proposal to combine race and ethnicity questions on the US Census that could lump all Latinos together as members of the same racial group, despite the fact that Latinos come from many racial backgrounds. As Afro-Latinas including García Peña have argued in opposition to the proposal, Latinos are not a race.

We discuss these broader issues of the relationship between Blackness and latinidad explicitly and implicitly by talking about historical figures like Frederick Douglass, Gregorio Luperón, and Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, as well as topics such as women’s activism and global movements led by Black Latinas and Latinos.

García Peña is a professor at Tufts University, in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. As of July 1, she will begin a new position at Princeton University as a professor in the Effron Center for the Study of America and the Department of African American Studies. In addition to Translating Blackness, she is the author of Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color (Haymarket, 2022) and The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction (Duke University Press, 2016).

Geraldo L. Cadava is a historian of the United States and Latin America. He focuses on Latinos in the United States and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. He hosts the podcast "Writing Latinos."

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Nicholas Guyatt, "The Hated Cage: An American Tragedy in Britain's Most Terrifying Prison" (Basic Books, 2022) Apr 18, 2023

After the War of 1812, more than five thousand American sailors were marooned in Dartmoor Prison on a barren English plain; the conflict was over but they had been left to rot by their government. Although they shared a common nationality, the men were divided by race: nearly a thousand were Black, and at the behest of the white prisoners, Dartmoor became the first racially segregated prison in US history.

The Hated Cage: An American Tragedy in Britain's Most Terrifying Prison(Basic Books, 2022) documents the extraordinary but separate communities these men built within the prison--and the terrible massacre of nine Americans by prison guards that destroyed these worlds. As white people in the United States debated whether they could live alongside African Americans in freedom, could Dartmoor's Black and white Americans band together in captivity? Drawing on extensive new material, The Hated Cage is a gripping account of this forgotten history.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Shelly M. Jones, "Women Who Count: Honoring African American Women Mathematicians" (American Mathematical Society, 2019) Apr 17, 2023

African-Americans and women are increasingly visible in professional mathematical institutions, organizations, and literature, expanding our mental models of the mathematics community. Yet early representation also matters: We begin building these models as soon as we begin seeing and doing mathematics, and they can be slow to adapt. In her wonderful activity book Women Who Count: Honoring African American Women Mathematicians (MAA Press, 2019), Dr. Shelly Jones invites children, and their parents and educators, to immerse themselves in the lives and deeds of Black women mathematicians.

The 29 profiles trace back to "the Firsts" in their fields, such as early PhD awardee Evelyn Boyd Granville; the "Pioneers" of emerging fields and programs, including ethnomathematics co-founder Gloria Gilmer; through "Unhidden Figures" like Dorothy Johnson Vaughan of recent biopic fame; and to "Contemporary Firsts" who are living, working, and opening new doors today. Along with their mathematical contributions, Dr. Jones shares details of these mathematicians' early lives, their hobbies and interests, and how they have been shaped by and in turn shaped their communities. Each mini-biography introduces a whole person whom readers new to mathematics can relate to and be inspired by.

Each profile is accompanied by a pencil-and-paper activity that brings to life the some part of their story. Some are classics, including word searches and I-Spy, while others introduce readers to mathematical and educational concepts explored by their subjects—coloring tessellations, for example, or solving equations to decode messages. The text and activities are targeted to grades 3–8, and are ideal for elementary and middle school classrooms.

In our conversation, Dr. Jones described how she conceived the book, assembled the stories and activities, and connected with illustrator Veronica Martins. I came away with a richer perspective on the state of the field for aspiring mathematicians—in addition to a perfect gift for my second-grade nephew.

Suggested companion works:

Dr. Shelly M. Jones is a Professor of Mathematics Education at Central Connecticut State University. She has been an educator for 30 years and currently teaches undergraduate mathematics content and methods courses for pre-service teachers as well as graduate level mathematics content, curriculum and STEM courses for in-service teachers. Dr. Jones serves her community by working with various professional and community organizations. You can see her CCSU TEDx talk on YouTube where she talks about culturally relevant mathematics. She is also a contributing author to The Brilliance of Black Children in Mathematics: Beyond the Numbers and Toward a New Discourse and co-author of Engaging in Culturally Relevant Math Tasks: Fostering Hope.

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Gregory J. Kaliss, "Beyond the Black Power Salute: Athlete Activism in an Era of Change" (U Illinois Press, 2023) Apr 16, 2023

Unequal opportunity sparked Jim Brown's endeavors to encourage Black development while Billie Jean King fought so that women tennis players could earn more money and enjoy greater freedom. Gregory J. Kaliss examines these events and others to guide readers through the unprecedented wave of protest that swept sports in the 1960s and 1970s. The little-known story of the University of Wyoming football players suspended for their activism highlights an analysis of protests by college athletes. The 1971 Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier clash provides a high-profile example of the Black male athlete's effort to redefine Black masculinity. An in-depth look at the American Basketball Association reveals a league that put Black culture front and center with its style of play and shows how the ABA influenced the development of hip-hop. In Beyond the Black Power Salute: Athlete Activism in an Era of Change (University of Illinois Press, 2023), Kaliss describes the breakthroughs achieved by these athletes, while also exploring the barriers that remained--and in some cases remain today.

Bennett Koerber is an instructor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. He can be reached at bkoerber@andrew.cmu.edu.

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Tomiko Brown-Nagin, "Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality" (Pantheon Books, 2022) Apr 15, 2023

With the US Supreme Court confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, “it makes sense to revisit the life and work of another Black woman who profoundly shaped the law: Constance Baker Motley” (CNN). Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hairdresser. Instead, she became the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only black woman member in the legal team at the NAACP’s Inc. Fund at the time, she defended Martin Luther King in Birmingham, helped to argue in Brown vs. The Board of Education, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. She was the first black woman elected to the state Senate in New York, the first woman elected Manhattan Borough President, and the first black woman appointed to the federal judiciary.

Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality(Pantheon Books, 2022) captures the story of a remarkable American life, a figure who remade law and inspired the imaginations of African Americans across the country. Burnished with an extraordinary wealth of research, award-winning, esteemed Civil Rights and legal historian and dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Tomiko Brown-Nagin brings Motley to life in these pages. Brown-Nagin compels us to ponder some of our most timeless and urgent questions–how do the historically marginalized access the corridors of power? What is the price of the ticket? How does access to power shape individuals committed to social justice? In Civil Rights Queen, she dramatically fills out the picture of some of the most profound judicial and societal change made in twentieth-century America.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Joshua Myers, "Of Black Study" (Pluto Press, 2022) Apr 15, 2023

Joshua Myers considers the work of thinkers who broke with the racial and colonial logic of academic disciplinarity and how the ideas of Black intellectuals created different ways of thinking and knowing in their pursuit of conceptual and epistemological freedom.

Bookended by meditations with June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara, Of Black Study(Pluto Press, 2023) focuses on how W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Jacob Carruthers, and Cedric Robinson contributed to Black Studies approaches to knowledge production within and beyond Western structures of knowledge.

Of Black Study is especially geared toward understanding the contemporary evolution of Black Studies in the neoliberal university and allows us to consider the stakes of intellectual freedom and the path toward a new world.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Cristina Mejia Visperas, "Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory" (NYU, 2022) Apr 14, 2023

An abolitionist approach to STS and the history of the life sciences: this is the model that Cristina Mejia Visperas offers in her book, Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory (NYU 2022). By now, scientists’ experiments on captive men at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison are well known, thanks to the brave and important testimony of former captive-subjects in books like Allen Hornblum’s Acres of Skin. Building on this documentary work, Visperas turns attention to the prison experiments’ “optical rationality,” the way of seeing images that came out of a space that was simultaneously prison and laboratory. For Visperas, skin is a scientific apparatus and a metaphor for what science makes visible—and what it leaves as a void, namely, the endurance of anti-Black racism in the US, from slavery to mass incarceration. At its core, the book asks “What is the relationship between science and the project of freedom?”—and it hopes towards a reparative bioethics that dismantles scientific racism and the prison nation that it upholds.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the seminar “Critical Bioethics.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom.

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Tina Post, "Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression" (NYU Press, 2023) Apr 12, 2023

Explores expressionlessness, inscrutability, and emotional withholding in Black cultural production.

Arguing that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert with blackness, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression (NYU Press, 2023) tracks instances and meanings of deadpan—a vaudeville term meaning “dead face”—across literature, theater, visual and performance art, and the performance of self in everyday life. Tina Post reveals that the performance of purposeful withholding is a critical tool in the work of black culture makers, intervening in the persistent framing of African American aesthetics as colorful, loud, humorous, and excessive. Beginning with the expressionless faces of mid-twentieth-century documentary photography and proceeding to early twenty-first-century drama, this project examines performances of blackness’s deadpan aesthetic within and beyond black embodiments, including Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, as well as Buster Keaton’s signature character and Steve McQueen’s restitution of the former’s legacy within the continuum of Black cultural production. Through this varied archive, Post reveals how deadpan aesthetics function in and between opacity and fugitivity, minimalism and saturation, excess and insensibility.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Celeste Day Moore, "Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France" (Duke UP, 2021) Apr 10, 2023

Celeste Day Moore is a historian of African American culture, media, and Black internationalism in the twentieth century. Her first book, Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France (Duke University Press, 2021), was awarded the Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies. Her research has appeared in American Quarterly, the Journal of African American History, and the first edited volume of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). She received her doctorate from the University of Chicago and has been a fellow at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. As an associate professor of history at Hamilton College, she teaches courses on African American history as well as histories of empire, race, Black internationalism, and U.S. international relations.

In Soundscapes of Liberation, Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest. Moore surveys a wide range of musical genres, soundscapes, and media: the US military's wartime records and radio programs; the French record industry's catalogs of blues, jazz, and R&B recordings; the translations of jazz memoirs; a provincial choir specializing in spirituals; and US State Department-produced radio programs that broadcast jazz and gospel across the French empire. In each of these contexts, individual intermediaries such as educators, producers, writers, and radio deejays imbued African American music with new meaning, value, and political power. Their work resonated among diverse Francophone audiences and transformed the lives and labor of many African American musicians, who found financial and personal success as well as discrimination in France. By showing how the popularity of African American music was intertwined with contemporary structures of racism and imperialism, Moore demonstrates this music's centrality to postwar France and the convergence of decolonization, the expanding globalized economy, the Cold War, and worldwide liberation movements.

Annie deSaussure, holds a Ph.D. in French from Yale University and is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Languages and Literary Studies at Lafayette College. Her work focuses on minority regional languages, literatures, and cultures in contemporary France, with a focus on the region of Brittany, the historical and artistic dimensions of radio in France, and podcasting.

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Mari N. Crabtree, "My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching" (Yale UP, 2023) Apr 08, 2023

InMy Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching (Yale UP, 2023), Mari N. Crabtree traces the long afterlife of lynching in the South through the traumatic memories it left in its wake. She unearths how African American victims and survivors found ways to live through and beyond the horrors of lynching, offering a theory of African American collective trauma and memory rooted in the ironic spirit of the blues sensibility--a spirit of misdirection and cunning that blends joy and pain.

Black southerners often shielded their loved ones from the most painful memories of local lynchings with strategic silences but also told lynching stories about vengeful ghosts or a wrathful God or the deathbed confessions of a lyncher tormented by his past. They protested lynching and its legacies through art and activism, and they mourned those lost to a mob's fury. They infused a blues element into their lynching narratives to confront traumatic memories and keep the blues at bay, even if just for a spell. Telling their stories troubles the simplistic binary of resistance or submission that has tended to dominate narratives of Black life and reminds us that amid the utter devastation of lynching were glimmers of hope and an affirmation of life.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Bettina Judd, "Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought" (Northwestern UP, 2022) Apr 08, 2023

Feeling is not “feelin”. Feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work.

Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, 2022) discusses Black women’s creative production as feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect called feelin. Through interviews, close readings, and archival research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black women.

Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, scholar, and performer whose research focus is Black women’s creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. She is Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington.

Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology.

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Jonathan A. C. Brown, "Islam and Blackness" (Oneworld Academic, 2022) Apr 07, 2023

Jonathan Brown’s Islam and Blackness (Oneworld Academic, 2022) is a thorough and thoroughly riveting study of the tensions and conceptions of Blackness in Muslim intellectual traditions and social histories, premodern and modern, in a variety of contexts. At once deeply reflective, philologically majestic, and theoretically productive, Islam and Blackness engages and examines a range of texts from a wide expanse of scholarly genres to show that the question of whether Islam is antiblack is immensely complicated and knotty. Unafraid to pose and address difficult and provocative questions on issues of race, class, and difference in Islamic thought, this book not only represents a profound meditation on Islam and Blackness, but is also a painstakingly researched presentation of the depth and complexity of Muslim scholarly traditions and debates more broadly. The ethical perceptiveness of this book competes fiercely with the clarity of its prose and propose, and the intellectual cum political significance of its argument.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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Leah Mickens, "In the Shadow of Ebenezer: A Black Catholic Parish in the Age of Civil Rights and Vatican II" (NYU Press, 2022) Apr 07, 2023

The history and practices of African American Catholics has been vastly understudied, and Black Catholics are often written off as a fringe sector of the religious population. Yet, Catholics of African descent have been a part of Catholicism since the early days of European exploration into the New World.

In the Shadow of Ebenezer: A Black Catholic Parish in the Age of Civil Rights and Vatican II(NYU Press, 2022) examines how the Civil Rights Movement and the Second Vatican Council affected African American Catholics in Atlanta, Georgia, focusing on the historic Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in the Old Fourth Ward. Our Lady of Lourdes is a neighbor of major historic Black Protestant churches in the city, including Ebenezer Baptist Church, a block away, which during the Civil Rights era was the pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr. Featuring archival and oral history sources, the book examines the religious and cultural life of the parishioners of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, showing how this Black Catholic congregation fit into the overall religious ecology of the neighborhood. Examining Our Lady of Lourdes in relation to these larger Black Protestant congregations helps to illuminate whether and how they were shaped by their place at a center of the civil rights struggle, and how religious change and social change intersect.

Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

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Charles Price, "Rastafari: The Evolution of a People and Their Identity" (NYU Press, 2022) Apr 04, 2023

Misunderstood, misappropriated, belittled: though the Rastafari feature frequently in media and culture, they have most often been misrepresented, their political and religious significance minimized. But they have not been vanquished.

Charles Price’s Rastafari: The Evolution of a People and Their Identity(NYU Press, 2022) reclaims the rich history of this relatively new world religion. Charting its humble and rebellious roots in Jamaica’s backcountry in the late nineteenth century to the present day, Price explains how Jamaicans’ obsession with the Rastafari wavered from campaigns of violence to appeasement and cooptation. Indeed, he argues that the Rastafari as a political, religious, and cultural movement survived the biases and violence they faced through their race consciousness and uncanny ability to ride the waves of anti-colonialism and Black Power.

This social movement traveled throughout the Caribbean, Africa, Central America, and the United States, capturing the heart and imagination of much of the African diaspora. Rastafari spans the movement’s struggle for autonomy, its multiple campaigns for repatriation to Africa, and its leading role in the Black consciousness movements of the twentieth century. Not satisfied with simply narrating the past, Rastafari also takes on the challenges of gender equality and the commodification of Rastafari culture in the twenty-first century without abandoning its message of equality and empowering the downpressed.

Rastafari shows how this cultural and political context helped to shape the development of a Black collective identity, demonstrating how Rastafarians confronted society-wide ridicule and oppression and emerged prouder and more united, steadfast in their conviction that they were a chosen people.

Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter

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Katherine Johnston, "The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World" (Oxford UP, 2022) Apr 03, 2023

The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World(Oxford UP, 2022) interrogates how people with an interest in African slavery manufactured and publicly disseminated a baseless rhetoric about climate, race, and labor that they knew, privately, to contradict their lived experiences.

In the late eighteenth century, plantation owners and slaveholders in the Caribbean and the American South publicly argued that physiological and biological differences made African people more capable of withstanding the heat and labor required to work on plantations. This climatic defense of slavery allowed planters to deny their own culpability in enslaving human beings while also framing the issue of racial slavery. The Nature of Slavery challenges this framing of labor, environment, and the development of racial ideologies. Using extensive personal and professional correspondence and colonial records, Dr. Katherine Johnston demonstrates that privately planters did not observe any health differences between Black and white bodies. White slaveholders publicly defended racial slavery constructed on a climatic rhetoric and biological theory of race they knew to be false. The ideology linking race and climate supported the economic motives of these enslavers and this defense of racial slavery in the late 18th century became a retroactive explanation for its establishment in the colonies. This climatic dichotomy to justify slavery and their economic livelihood contributed to historical myths about enslaved bodies and a groundless theory of race which was used to perpetuate the institution of slavery. Nature of Slavery powerfully argues that a “rhetoric of bodily difference gained strength and power as slaveholders and others imbued it with a language of nature.”

Dr. Katherine Johnston is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History & Philosophy at Montana State University. Her work focuses on slavery, race, the body, and the environment in Atlantic plantation societies.

Daniela Lavergne served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Julia H. Lee, "The Racial Railroad" (NYU Press, 2022) Apr 01, 2023

Despite the seeming supremacy of car culture in the United States, the train has long been and continues to be a potent symbol of American exceptionalism, ingenuity, and vastness. For almost two centuries, the train has served as the literal and symbolic vehicle for American national identity, manifest destiny, and imperial ambitions. It’s no surprise, then, that the train continues to endure in depictions across literature, film, ad music.

The Racial Railroad (NYU Press, 2022) highlights the surprisingly central role that the railroad has played―and continues to play―in the formation and perception of racial identity and difference in the United States. Julia H. Lee argues that the train is frequently used as the setting for stories of race because it operates across multiple registers and scales of experience and meaning, both as an invocation of and a depository for all manner of social, historical, and political narratives.

Lee demonstrates how, through legacies of racialized labor and disenfranchisement―from the Chinese American construction of the Transcontinental Railroad and the depictions of Native Americans in landscape and advertising, to the underground railroad and Jim Crow segregation―the train becomes one of the exemplary spaces through which American cultural works explore questions of racial subjectivity, community, and conflict. By considering the train through various lenses, The Racial Railroad tracks how racial formations and conflicts are constituted in significant and contradictory ways by the spaces in which they occur.

Julia H. Lee is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California at Irvine and author of Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 and Understanding Maxine Hong Kingston.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Geoff Harkness, "DVS Mindz: The Twenty-Year Saga of the Greatest Rap Group to Almost Make It Outta Kansas" (Columbia UP, 2023) Mar 30, 2023

99.9% of aspiring rappers never make it in the music industry. So why do we only hear the stories of the ones who do?

DVS Mindz might be the greatest rap group you've never heard of. Formed in Topeka, Kansas, in the mid-1990s, they developed a reputation for ferocious rhyming and frenetic live performances. In their heyday, DVS Mindz released a critically acclaimed CD, received nominations for prestigious awards, and opened for legends such as Wu-Tang Clan, Run-DMC, and De La Soul as well as KC icon Tech N9ne. But the group struggled with creative differences, substance abuse, ego battles, and money issues, and they split up in 2003.

Geoff Harkness takes readers on a unique two-decade journey alongside the members of DVS Mindz, chronicling their childhoods, their brush with success, and what became of them in the years that followed. Based on more than one hundred hours of video and audio recordings from 1999 to 2022, this fly-on-the-wall account offers a backstage pass into the recording studios and radio stations, video shoots and house parties, nightclubs and concert halls of the Kansas City-Lawrence-Topeka music scene circa 2000.

DVS Mindz: The Twenty-Year Saga of the Greatest Rap Group to Almost Make It Outta Kansas(Columbia UP, 2023) is at once a compulsively readable group biography of four talented MCs, a vibrant voyage through the forgotten history of local hip hop, and a breathtakingly real story of struggling to achieve big dreams.

Alex Kuchma is an MA student in history at York University. He has have researching hip-hop actively and collecting oral histories for more than a decade.

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Leslie M. Alexander, "Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States" (U Illinois Press, 2022) Mar 27, 2023

The emergence of Haiti as a sovereign Black nation lit a beacon of hope for Black people throughout the African diaspora. Leslie M. Alexander's study reveals the untold story of how free and enslaved Black people in the United States defended the young Caribbean nation from forces intent on maintaining slavery and white supremacy. Concentrating on Haiti's place in the history of Black internationalism, Alexander illuminates the ways Haitian independence influenced Black thought and action in the United States. As she shows, Haiti embodied what whites feared most: Black revolution and Black victory. Thus inspired, Black activists in the United States embraced a common identity with Haiti's people, forging the idea of a united struggle that merged the destinies of Haiti with their own striving for freedom. A bold exploration of Black internationalism's origins, Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States (U Illinois Press, 2022) links the Haitian revolution to the global Black pursuit of liberation, justice, and social equality.

Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On Twitter.

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David Wright Faladé, "Black Cloud Rising" (Grove Press, 2022) Mar 26, 2023

By fall of 1863, Union forces had taken control of Tidewater Virginia, and established a toehold in eastern North Carolina, including along the Outer Banks. Thousands of freed slaves and runaways flooded the Union lines, but Confederate irregulars still roamed the region. In December, the newly formed African Brigade, a unit of these former slaves led by General Edward Augustus Wild—a one-armed, impassioned Abolitionist—set out from Portsmouth to hunt down the rebel guerillas and extinguish the threat.

From this little-known historical episode comes Black Cloud Rising(Grove Press, 2022), a dramatic, moving account of these soldiers—men who only weeks earlier had been enslaved, but were now Union infantrymen setting out to fight their former owners. At the heart of the narrative is Sergeant Richard Etheridge, the son of a slave and her master, raised with some privileges but constantly reminded of his place. Deeply conflicted about his past, Richard is eager to show himself to be a credit to his race. As the African Brigade conducts raids through the areas occupied by the Confederate Partisan Rangers, he and his comrades recognize that they are fighting for more than territory. Wild’s mission is to prove that his troops can be trusted as soldiers in combat. And because many of the men have fled from the very plantations in their path, each raid is also an opportunity to free loved ones left behind. For Richard, this means the possibility of reuniting with Fanny, the woman he hopes to marry one day.

With powerful depictions of the bonds formed between fighting men and heartrending scenes of sacrifice and courage, Black Cloud Rising offers a compelling and nuanced portrait of enslaved men and women crossing the threshold to freedom.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Robin M. Morris, "Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right" (U Georgia Press, 2022) Mar 23, 2023

Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right(U Georgia Press, 2022) is a statewide study of women’s part in the history of conservatism, the New Right, and the Republican Party in the state of Georgia. Robin M. Morris examines how the growth of the Republican Party in the 1960s and 1970s was due in large part to the political activism of white women. The book begins with the African American women who established the Georgia Federation of Republican Women and follows how they lost the organization and the party to white women moving to the Sunbelt South. Conservative white women developed a language and strategy of family values that they deployed to battle school busing, defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, and elect Republican leaders even in Jimmy Carter’s home state.

Morris uses original interviews and archival research in personal papers of women activists in the Georgia New Right movement, including Lee Ague Miller, Beth Callaway, Kathryn Dunaway, Lee Wysong, and Hattie Greene, to reveal the motivations and actions that transformed the state from blue to red. In this era, perceived threats to family life and traditional values spurred women-led grassroots organization that enabled broad political shifts on the state level. Conservative women carved out their political niche as they consolidated and expanded their power and influence. Rather than a male-dominated, top-down approach, Morris centers her historical account on the middle-class white women whose actions changed the political landscape of the state and ultimately the country.

Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1.

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Aaron Spencer Fogleman and Robert Hanserd, "Five Hundred African Voices: A Catalog of Published Accounts by Africans Enslaved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1586-1936" (APS, 2022) Mar 22, 2023

The importance of published accounts by African slave ship survivors is well-known but not their existence in large numbers. Fogleman and Hanserd catalog nearly five hundred discrete accounts and more than 2,500 printings of them over four centuries in numerous Atlantic languages. Short biographies of each African, print histories of the complete or partial life story. Five Hundred African Voices: A Catalog of Published Accounts by Africans Enslaved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1586-1936 (American Philosophical Society, 2022) is an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, students, and others wishing to study transatlantic slavery using African Voices.

Aaron Spencer Fogleman is professor of history at Northern Illinois University.

Robert Hanserd teaches African, Afro-Atlantic, and African-American history at Columbia College Chicago.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Woody Holton, "Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution" (Simon and Schuster, 2021) Mar 21, 2023

A “deeply researched and bracing retelling” (Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian) of the American Revolution, showing how the Founders were influenced by overlooked Americans—women, Native Americans, African Americans, and religious dissenters.

Using more than a thousand eyewitness records, Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution(Simon and Schuster, 2021) is a “spirited account” (Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution) that explores countless connections between the Patriots of 1776 and other Americans whose passion for freedom often brought them into conflict with the Founding Fathers. “It is all one story,” prizewinning historian Woody Holton writes.

Holton describes the origins and crucial battles of the Revolution from Lexington and Concord to the British surrender at Yorktown, always focusing on marginalized Americans—enslaved Africans and African Americans, Native Americans, women, and dissenters—and on overlooked factors such as weather, North America’s unique geography, chance, misperception, attempts to manipulate public opinion, and (most of all) disease. Thousands of enslaved Americans exploited the chaos of war to obtain their own freedom, while others were given away as enlistment bounties to whites. Women provided material support for the troops, sewing clothes for soldiers and in some cases taking part in the fighting. Both sides courted native people and mimicked their tactics.

Liberty Is Sweet is a “must-read book for understanding the founding of our nation” (Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin), from its origins on the frontiers and in the Atlantic ports to the creation of the Constitution. Offering surprises at every turn—for example, Holton makes a convincing case that Britain never had a chance of winning the war—this majestic history revivifies a story we thought we already knew.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Alvin Hall, "Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance" (HarperOne, 2023) Mar 21, 2023

For countless Americans, the open road has long been a place where dangers lurk. In the era of Jim Crow, Black travelers encountered locked doors, hostile police, and potentially violent encounters almost everywhere, in both the South and the North. From 1936 to 1967, millions relied on The Negro Motorist Green Book, the definitive guide to businesses where they could safely rest, eat, or sleep.

Most Americans only know of the guide from the 2018 Green Book movie or the 2020 Lovecraft Country TV show. Alvin Hall set out to revisit the world of the Green Book to instruct us all on the real history of the guide that saved many lives. With his friend Janée Woods Weber, he drove from New York to Detroit to New Orleans, visiting motels, restaurants, shops, and stores where Black Americans once found a friendly welcome. They explored historical and cultural landmarks, from the theatres and clubs where stars like Duke Ellington and Lena Horne performed to the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Along the way, they gathered memories from some of the last living witnesses for whom the Green Book meant survival--remarkable people who not only endured but rose above the hate, building vibrant Black communities against incredible odds.

Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance(HarperOne, 2023) is a vital work of national history as well as a hopeful chronicle of Black resilience and resistance.

Nicole Trujillo-Pagán is a sociologist and Associate Professor at Wayne State University who studies race, the Latina/o/x population, and socio-spatial mobility. You can follow her on Twitter @BorderStruggles.

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Magdalena J. Zaborowska, "James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile" (Duke UP, 2009) Mar 18, 2023

Between 1961 and 1971 James Baldwin spent extended periods of time in Turkey, where he worked on some of his most important books. In this first in-depth exploration of Baldwin’s “Turkish decade,” Magdalena J. Zaborowska reveals the significant role that Turkish locales, cultures, and friends played in Baldwin’s life and thought. Turkey was a nurturing space for the author, who by 1961 had spent nearly ten years in France and Western Europe and failed to reestablish permanent residency in the United States. Zaborowska demonstrates how Baldwin’s Turkish sojourns enabled him to re-imagine himself as a black queer writer and to revise his views of American identity and U.S. race relations as the 1960s drew to a close.

Following Baldwin’s footsteps through Istanbul, Ankara, and Bodrum, Zaborowska presents many never published photographs, new information from Turkish archives, and original interviews with Turkish artists and intellectuals who knew Baldwin and collaborated with him on a play that he directed in 1969. She analyzes the effect of his experiences on his novel Another Country (1962) and on two volumes of his essays, The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972), and she explains how Baldwin’s time in Turkey informed his ambivalent relationship to New York, his responses to the American South, and his decision to settle in southern France.

James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke UP, 2009) expands the knowledge of Baldwin’s role as a transnational African American intellectual, casts new light on his later works, and suggests ways of reassessing his earlier writing in relation to ideas of exile and migration.

Magdalena J. Zaborowska is Professor of Afroamerican and American Studies and the John Rich Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Jessica Wilson, "It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women's Bodies" (Hachette Go, 2023) Mar 17, 2023

In It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women's Bodies (Hachette Go, 2023) eating disorder specialist and storyteller Jessica Wilson challenges us to rethink what having a "good" body means in contemporary society. By centering the bodies of Black women in her cultural discussions of body image, food, health, and wellness, Wilson argues that we can interrogate white supremacy's hold on us and reimagine the ways we think about, discuss, and tend to our bodies.

A narrative that spans the year of racial reckoning (that wasn't), It's Always Been Ours is an incisive blend of historical documents, contemporary writing, and narratives of clients, friends, and celebrities that examines the politics of body liberation. Wilson argues that our culture's fixation on thin, white women reinscribes racist ideas about Black women's bodies and ways of being in the world as "too much." For Wilson, this white supremacist, capitalist undergirding in wellness movements perpetuates a culture of respectability and restriction that force Black women to perform unhealthy forms of resilience and strength at the expense of their physical and psychological needs.

With just the right mix of wit, levity, and wisdom, Wilson shows us how a radical reimagining of body narratives is a prerequisite to well-being. It's Always Been Ours is a love letter that celebrates Black women's bodies and shows us a radical and essential path forward to rediscovering their vulnerability and joy.

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R. J. M. Blackett, "Samuel Ringgold Ward: A Life of Struggle" (Yale UP, 2023) Mar 15, 2023

Born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817–c. 1869) escaped enslavement and would become a leading figure in the struggle for Black freedom, citizenship, and equality. He was extolled by his contemporary Frederick Douglass for his “depth of thought, fluency of speech, readiness of wit, logical exactness.” Until now, his story has been largely untold.

Ward, a newspaper editor, Congregational minister, and advocate for the temperance movement, was considered one of the leading orators of his time. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 he fled to Canada, where he lectured widely to improve conditions for formerly enslaved people who had settled there. Ward then went to Britain as an agent of the Canadian Antislavery Society and published his influential book Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro. He never returned to the United States, and he died in obscurity in Jamaica.

Despite Ward’s prominent role in the abolitionist movement, his story has been lost because of the decades he spent in exile. In Samuel Ringgold Ward: A Life of Struggle (Yale UP, 2023), R. J. M. Blackett brings light to Ward’s life and his important role in the struggle against slavery and discrimination, and to the personal price he paid for confronting oppression.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Damian Alan Pargas, "Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Mar 13, 2023

In Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Damian Alan Pargas introduces a new conceptualization of 'spaces of freedom' for fugitive slaves in North America between 1800 and 1860, and answers the questions: How and why did enslaved people flee to – and navigate – different destinations throughout the continent, and to what extent did they succeed in evading recapture and re-enslavement? Taking a continental approach, this study highlights the diversity of slave fight by conceptually dividing the continent into three distinct – and continuously evolving – spaces of freedom. Namely, spaces of informal freedom in the US South, where enslaved people attempted to flee by passing as free blacks; spaces of semi-formal freedom in the US North, where slavery was abolished but the precise status of fugitive slaves was contested; and spaces of formal freedom in Canada and Mexico, where slavery was abolished and runaways were considered legally free and safe from re-enslavement.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Traveling Black, A Story of Race and Resistance: A Conversation with Mia Bay Mar 13, 2023

Mia Bay, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Chair in American History at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about her book Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance(Harvard University Press, 2023), with Peoples & Things, Lee Vinsel. From stagecoaches and trains to buses, cars, and planes, Traveling Black explores when, how, and why racial restrictions took shape and brilliantly portrays what it was like to live with them. Bay unearths troves of supporting evidence, rescuing forgotten stories of undaunted passengers who made it back home despite being insulted, stranded, re-routed, or ignored. Black travelers never stopped challenging these humiliations and insisting on justice in the courts. Traveling Black upends our understanding of Black resistance, documenting a sustained fight that falls outside the traditional boundaries of the civil rights movement. Bay and Vinsel also talk about where Traveling Black fits in Bay’s broader career as a historian and which project she is turning to next.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Susan J. Stanfield, "Rewriting Citizenship: Women, Race, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture" (U Georgia Press, 2022) Mar 12, 2023

Rewriting Citizenship: Women, Race, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture(U Georgia Press, 2022) provides an interdisciplinary approach to antebellum citizenship. Interpreting citizenship, particularly how citizenship intersects with race and gender, is fundamental to understanding the era and directly challenges the idea of Jacksonian Democracy. Susan J. Stanfield uses an analysis of novels, domestic advice, essays, and poetry, as well as more traditional archival sources, to provide an understanding of both the prescriptions for womanhood espoused in print culture and how those prescriptions were interpreted in everyday life.

While much has been written about the cultural marker of true womanhood as a gender ideology of white middle-class women, Stanfield reveals how it served an even more significant purpose by defining racial difference and attaching civic purpose to the daily practices of women. Black and white women were actively engaged in redefining citizenship in ways that did not necessarily call for suffrage rights but did claim a relationship to the state.

The prominence of true womanhood relied upon a female-focused print culture. The act of publication gave power to the ideology and allowed for a shared identity among white middle-class women and those who sought to emulate them. Stanfield argues that this domestic literature created a national code for womanhood that was racially constructed and infused with civic purpose. By defining women’s household practices as an obligation not only to their husbands but also to the state, women could reimagine themselves as citizens. Through print sources, women publicized their performance of these defined obligations and laid claim to citizenship on their own behalf.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Theresa Runstedtler, "Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation That Saved the Soul of the NBA" (Bold Type Books, 2023) Mar 11, 2023

Against a backdrop of ongoing resistance to racial desegregation and strident calls for Black Power, the NBA in the 1970s embodied the nation’s imagined descent into disorder. A new generation of Black players entered the league then, among them Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Spencer Haywood, and the press and public were quick to blame this cohort for the supposed decline of pro basketball, citing drugs, violence, and greed. Basketball became a symbol for post-civil rights America: the rules had changed, allowing more Black people onto the playing field, and now they were ruining everything.

Enter Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation That Saved the Soul of the NBA (Bold Type Books, 2023)l, a gripping history and corrective in which scholar Theresa Runstedtler expertly rewrites basketball’s “Dark Ages.” Weaving together a deep knowledge of the game with incisive social analysis, Runstedtler argues that this much-maligned period was pivotal to the rise of the modern-day NBA. Black players introduced an improvisational style derived from the playground courts of their neighborhoods. They also challenged the team owners’ autocratic power, garnering higher salaries and increased agency. Their skills, style, and savvy laid the foundation for the global popularity and profitability of the league we know today.

Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Brian Harker, "Sportin' Life: John W. Bubbles, an American Classic" (Oxford UP, 2022) Mar 11, 2023

John W. Bubbles was an actor, singer, comedian, and most importantly, a dancer. Born in 1902, Bubbles was an innovator in the jazz tap style and half of the great vaudeville act, "Buck and Bubbles," with his partner pianist Buck Washington. Brian Harker tells Bubbles' story in Sportin’ Life: John W. Bubbles, An American Classic (Oxford University Press, 2022). Bubbles’ long career, which largely ended after a stroke in 1967, spanned several significant shifts in American popular entertainment. He started entertaining audiences in vaudeville just as films began to dominate the landscape followed by television. Harker tells the story of Bubbles’ tumultuous life and situates his career as a Black dancer within segregated America and an entertainment industry that perpetuated racist stereotypes and exploited its workers—especially those from minoritized communities. Although Bubbles originated the role of Sportin’ Life in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, he has largely slipped out of American memory. Harker restores Bubbles to his rightful place as an innovative dancer and an important figure in twentieth-century American popular entertainment.

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Robin L. Owens, "'My Faith in the Constitution Is Whole': Barbara Jordan and the Politics of Scriptures" (Georgetown UP, 2022) Mar 11, 2023

US Congresswoman Barbara Jordan is well-known as an interpreter and defender of the Constitution, particularly through her landmark speech during Richard Nixon's 1974 impeachment hearings. However, before she developed faith in the Constitution, Jordan had faith in Christianity. In "My Faith in the Constitution is Whole" Barbara Jordan and the Politics of Scripture (Georgetown UP, 2022), Robin L. Owens shows how Jordan turned her religious faith and her faith in the Constitution into a powerful civil religious expression of her social activism.

Owens begins by examining the lives and work of the nineteenth-century Black female orator-activists Maria W. Stewart and Anna Julia Cooper. Stewart and Cooper fought for emancipation and women's rights by "scripturalizing," or using religious scriptures to engage in political debate. Owens then demonstrates how Jordan built upon this tradition by treating the Constitution as an American "scripture" to advocate for racial justice and gender equality. Case studies of key speeches throughout Jordan's career show how she quoted the Constitution and other founding documents as sacred texts, used them as sociolinguistic resources, and employed a discursive rhetorical strategy of indirection known as "signifying on scriptures."

Jordan's particular use of the Constitution--deeply connected with her background and religious, racial, and gender identity--represents the agency and power reflected in her speeches. Jordan's strategies also illustrate a broader phenomenon of scripturalization outside of institutional religion and its rhetorical and interpretive possibilities.

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Hilbourne A. Watson, "Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Transformation of Barbados: The Late Colonial Period" (U The West Indies Press, 2019) Mar 09, 2023

Beginning in the 1920s, Barbadians and other British West Indians began organizing politically in an international environment that was marked by a severe capitalist economic and financial crisis that intensified in the 1930s. The response in the British Caribbean during the 1930s was in the form of rebellions that demanded colonial reform. The ensuing struggles resulted in constitutional and political changes that led to decolonization and independence. In Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Transformation of Barbados: The Late Colonial Period (U The West Indies Press, 2019), Hilbourne Watson examines the contradictory process through the lens of political economy and class analysis, informed by an internationalist historical perspective that centres the concerns and interests of the working class.

Britain freed the colonies in ways that reflected its own subordination to US hegemony under the rubric of the Cold War, which served as the geopolitical strategy for liberal internationalism. Watson's analysis concentrates on the roles played by the labour movement, political parties, capitalist interests, and working-class and other popular organizations in Barbados and the British Caribbean, with support from Caribbean-American groups in New York that forged alliances with those black American organizations which saw their freedom struggles in an international context. Practically all the decolonizing (nationalist) elites in Barbados and other British Caribbean territories endorsed a British and American prescription for decolonization and self-government based on territorial primacy and at the expense of a strong West Indian federation that prioritized the working class. This move sidelined the working class and its interests also set back the struggle for self-determination, liberty and sovereignty.

Watson situates the role Errol Barrow played in the transformation of Barbados in the wider Caribbean and international context. His study draws on archival records from Britain and Barbados, interviews and other sources, and he pays close attention to how the racialization of social life around nature, culture, history, the state, class, gender, politics, poverty and other factors conditioned the colonial experience.

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Joan Flores-Villalobos, "The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) Mar 06, 2023

In The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West Indian women made the canal construction possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. West Indian women built a provisioning economy that fed, housed, and cared for the segregated Black West Indian labor force, in effect subsidizing the construction effort and the racial calculus that separated pay in silver for Black workers and gold for white Americans. But while also subject to racial discrimination and segregation, West Indian women mostly worked outside the umbrella of U.S. canal authorities. They did not hold contracts, had little access to official services and wages, and received pay in both silver and gold. From this position, they found ways to skirt, and at times subvert, the legal, moral, and economic parameters imperial authorities sought to impose on the migrant workforce. West Indian women developed important strategies of claims-making, kinship, community building, and market adaptation that helped them navigate the contradictions and violence of U.S. empire. In the meantime, these strategies of social reproduction nurtured further West Indian migrations, linking Panama to places like Harlem and Santiago de Cuba.

The Silver Women is thus a history of Black women’s labor of social reproduction as integral to U.S. imperial infrastructure, the global Caribbean diaspora, and women’s own survival.

Nicole Ramsey is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African & African American Studies at the University of Virginia. Her research examines formations of blackness, indigeneity, identity, and nation in Belize and the circum-Caribbean. On Twitter.

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Nicola Rollock, "The Racial Code: Tales of Resistance and Survival" (Penguin, 2022) Mar 05, 2023

Why do racial inequalities persist? In The Racial Code: Tales of Resistance and Survival (Penguin, 2023), Nicola Rollock, a Professor of Social Policy & Race at King’s College London, examines the often hidden and subtle rules that underpin the long-term existence of racism. The book draws on a huge range of qualitative and quantitative data to craft individual narratives that illustrate the operation of the racial code. In doing so, the book offers an clear overview of the lived experience of racism, across a variety of social and professional settings. In addition, the book is interspersed with interludes that add further intensity to the already rich analysis of how racism operates. Featuring deeply developed research that is also instantly accessible, the book is essential reading for every academic as well as anyone interested in understanding racism in society today.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield.

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Jovan Scott Lewis, "Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa" (Duke UP, 2022) Mar 05, 2023

In Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke UP, 2022), Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, from the post-Reconstruction migration of Black people to Oklahoma Indian Territory to contemporary efforts to rebuild Black prosperity. He focuses on how the massacre in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood—colloquially known as Black Wall Street—curtailed the freedom built there. Rather than framing the massacre as a one-off event, Lewis places it in a larger historical and social context of widespread patterns of anti-Black racism, segregation, and dispossession in Tulsa and beyond. He shows how the processes that led to the massacre, subsequent urban renewal, and intergenerational poverty shored up by nonprofits constitute a form of continuous slow violence. Now, in their attempts to redevelop resources for self-determination, Black Tulsans must reconcile a double inheritance: the massacre’s violence and the historical freedom and prosperity that Greenwood represented. Their future is tied to their geography, which is the foundation from which they will repair and fulfill Greenwood’s promise.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com

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Hilbourne A. Watson, "Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Transformation of Barbados: The Independence Period, 1966-1976" (U West Indies Press, 2020) Mar 04, 2023

Hilbourne A. Watson's Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Transformation of Barbados: The Independence Period, 1966-1976(U West Indies Press, 2020) is the companion volume to Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Transformation of Barbados: The Late Colonial Period, which covered the social and political forces between the 1920s and 1966 that shaped the trajectory of working-class struggles in Barbados and led to its decolonization, addresses mainly the first two decades of Barbados's independence as a sovereign monarchy under Errol Barrow and the Democratic Labour Party.

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Thomas Aiello, "Dixieball: Race and Professional Basketball in the Deep South, 1947-1979" (U Tennessee Press, 2019) Mar 03, 2023

In Dixieball: Race and Professional Basketball in the Deep South, 1947-1979(U Tennessee Press, 2019), Thomas Aiello considers the cultural function of professional basketball in the Deep South between 1947 and 1979. Making a strong case for the role of race in this process, Aiello ties the South’s initial animus toward basketball to the same complex that motivated the region to sacrifice its own economic interests to the cause of white supremacy. Fans of basketball, as compared to other team sports, were closer to the players, who showed more of their bodies; blackness, then, had more visibility in basketball than it had in other sports. By the time Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, African Americans made up 47.5 percent of professional basketball players, and despite integrating later than baseball and football, it was fast becoming known as a “black” sport. Over time, survival for southern teams grew more tenuous, fan support more fickle, and racial incidents between players and fans more hostile. Racism clashed with civic development in a fast-evolving region.

To identify the sources of this clash, Dixieball (The University of Tennessee Press, 2019) locates the main points of intersection between professional basketball and the Deep South in the two decades prior to the region’s first major franchise. Aiello then takes readers to New Orleans, where the first major Deep South professional basketball team—the New Orleans Buccaneers—was born, and on to Atlanta, Birmingham, St. Louis, and others, leading up to 1979.

Bennett Koerber is an instructor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. He can be reached at bkoerber@andrew.cmu.edu

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Marcus Rediker, "The Slave Ship: A Human History" (Penguin, 2008) Mar 03, 2023

In this widely praised history of an infamous institution, award-winning scholar Marcus Rediker shines a light into the darkest corners of the British and American slave ships of the eighteenth century. Drawing on thirty years of research in maritime archives, court records, diaries, and firsthand accounts, The Slave Ship: A Human History (Penguin, 2008) is riveting and sobering in its revelations, reconstructing in chilling detail a world nearly lost to history: the “floating dungeons” at the forefront of the birth of African American culture.

Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. His “histories from below,” including The Slave Ship: A Human History, have won numerous awards, including the George Washington Book Prize, and have been translated into seventeen languages worldwide. He has produced a film, Ghosts of Amistad, with director Tony Buba, and written a play, “The Return of Benjamin Lay,” with playwright Naomi Wallace. He is currently writing a book about escaping slavery by sea in antebellum America.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Celeste Vaughan Curington et al., "The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance" (U California Press, 2021) Mar 01, 2023

The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance(U California Press, 2021) is the first comprehensive look at "digital-sexual racism," a distinct form of racism that is mediated and amplified through the impersonal and anonymous context of online dating. Drawing on large-scale behavioral data from a mainstream dating website, extensive archival research, and more than seventy-five in-depth interviews with daters of diverse racial backgrounds and sexual identities, Curington, Lundquist, and Lin illustrate how the seemingly open space of the internet interacts with the loss of social inhibition in cyberspace contexts, fostering openly expressed forms of sexual racism that are rarely exposed in face-to-face encounters. The Dating Divide is a fascinating look at how a contemporary conflux of individualization, consumerism, and the proliferation of digital technologies has given rise to a unique form of gendered racism in the era of swiping right--or left.

The internet is often heralded as an equalizer, a seemingly level playing field, but the digital world also acts as an extension of and platform for the insidious prejudices and divisive impulses that affect social politics in the "real" world. Shedding light on how every click, swipe, or message can be linked to the history of racism and courtship in the United States, this compelling study uses data to show the racial biases at play in digital dating spaces.

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Lerone A. Martin, "The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism" (Princeton UP, 2023) Mar 01, 2023

On a Sunday morning in 1966, a group of white evangelicals dedicated a stained glass window to J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI director was not an evangelical, but his Christian admirers anointed him as their political champion, believing he would lead America back to God. The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism (Princeton UP, 2023) reveals how Hoover and his FBI teamed up with leading white evangelicals and Catholics to bring about a white Christian America by any means necessary.

Lerone Martin draws on thousands of newly declassified FBI documents and memos to describe how, under Hoover's leadership, FBI agents attended spiritual retreats and worship services, creating an FBI religious culture that fashioned G-men into soldiers and ministers of Christian America. Martin shows how prominent figures such as Billy Graham, Fulton Sheen, and countless other ministers from across the country partnered with the FBI and laundered bureau intel in their sermons while the faithful crowned Hoover the adjudicator of true evangelical faith and allegiance. These partnerships not only solidified the political norms of modern white evangelicalism, they also contributed to the political rise of white Christian nationalism, establishing religion and race as the bedrock of the modern national security state, and setting the terms for today's domestic terrorism debates.

Taking readers from the pulpits and pews of small-town America to the Oval Office, and from the grassroots to denominational boardrooms, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover completely transforms how we understand the FBI, white evangelicalism, and our nation's entangled history of religion and politics.

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Damien M. Sojoyner, "Joy and Pain: A Story of Black Life and Liberation in Five Albums" (U California Press, 2022) Mar 01, 2023

This highly original story reflects on how the carceral state shapes daily life for young Black people--and how Black Americans resist, find joy, and cultivate new visions for the future. Joy and Pain: A Story of Black Life and Liberation in Five Albums (University of California Press, 2022) is about a young man, Marley, and a particular place, the Southern California Library--an archive of radical and progressive movements and a community organization where the author meets Marley.

Taking music as its thematic undercurrent, the book is structured as a "record collection." Each of the five "albums" relates Marley's personal encounters with everyday aspects of the carceral state through an ethnographic A side and then offers deeper context through an anthropological and archival B side. In telling Marley's story, Damien M. Sojoyner depicts the overwhelming nature of Black precarity in the twenty-first century through the lenses of housing, education, health care, social services, and juvenile detention facilities. But Black life is not defined by precarity; it must embrace social visions of radical freedom that allow the cultivation of a life of joy beyond systems of oppression. In Joy and Pain, we see how Marley's experience intersects with history and the contemporary political moment--Black knowledge production, Black liberation movements, community-based organizing--to imagine expansive futures.

Damien Sojoyner is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Helena Hansen et al., "Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America" (U California Press, 2023) Feb 28, 2023

In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? Some argued that skyrocketing overdoses were “deaths of despair” signaling deeper socioeconomic anguish in white communities. Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America(U California Press, 2023) makes the counterintuitive case that the opioid crisis was the product of white racial privilege as well as despair.

Anchored by interviews, data, and riveting firsthand narratives from three leading experts—an addiction psychiatrist, a policy advocate, and a drug historian—Whiteout reveals how a century of structural racism in drug policy, and in profit-oriented medical industries led to mass white overdose deaths. The authors implicate racially segregated health care systems, the racial assumptions of addiction scientists, and relaxed regulation of pharmaceutical marketing to white consumers. Whiteout is an unflinching account of how racial capitalism is toxic for all Americans.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Saida Grundy, "Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man" (U California Press, 2022) Feb 28, 2023

How does it feel to be groomed as the "solution" to a national Black male "problem"? This is the guiding paradox of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man(U California Press, 2022), an in-depth examination of graduates of Morehouse College, the nation's only historically Black college for men. While Black male collegians are often culturally fetishized for "beating the odds," the image of Black male success that Morehouse assiduously promotes and celebrates is belied by many of the realities that challenge the students on this campus. Saida Grundy offers a unique insider perspective: a graduate of Spelman college and a former "Miss Morehouse," Grundy crafts an incisive feminist and sociological account informed by her personal insights and scholarly expertise.

Respectable gathers the experiences of former students and others connected to Morehouse to illustrate the narrow, conservative vision of masculinity molded at a competitive Black institution. The thirty-two men interviewed unveil a culture that forges confining ideas of respectable Black manhood within a context of relentless peer competition and sexual violence, measured against unattainable archetypes of idealized racial leadership. Grundy underlines the high costs of making these men—the experiences of low-income students who navigate class issues at Morehouse, the widespread homophobia laced throughout the college's notions of Black male respectability, and the crushingly conformist expectations of a college that sees itself as making "good" Black men. As Morehouse's problems continue to pour out into national newsfeeds, this book contextualizes these issues not as a defect of Black masculinity, but as a critique of what happens when an institution services an imagination of what Black men should be, at the expense of more fully understanding the many ways these young people see themselves.

Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter.

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Leslie M. Alexander, "Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States" (U Illinois Press, 2022) Feb 27, 2023

The emergence of Haiti as a sovereign Black nation lit a beacon of hope for Black people throughout the African diaspora. Leslie M. Alexander’s study reveals the untold story of how free and enslaved Black people in the United States defended the young Caribbean nation from forces intent on maintaining slavery and white supremacy. Concentrating on Haiti’s place in the history of Black internationalism, Alexander illuminates the ways Haitian independence influenced Black thought and action in the United States. As she shows, Haiti embodied what whites feared most: Black revolution and Black victory. Thus inspired, Black activists in the United States embraced a common identity with Haiti’s people, forging the idea of a united struggle that merged the destinies of Haiti with their own striving for freedom.

A bold exploration of Black internationalism’s origins, Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States (U Illinois Press, 2022) links the Haitian revolution to the global Black pursuit of liberation, justice, and social equality.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com

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Jonathan W. White and Lydia J. Davis, ed., "My Work Among the Freedmen: The Civil War and Reconstruction Letters of Harriet M. Buss" (U Virginia Press, 2021) Feb 26, 2023

Between 1863 and 1871, Harriet M. Buss of Sterling, Massachusetts, taught former slaves in three different regions of the South, in coastal South Carolina, Norfolk, Virginia, and Raleigh, North Carolina. A white, educated Baptist woman, she initially saw herself as on a mission to the freedpeople of the Confederacy but over time developed a shared mission with her students and devoted herself to training the next generation of Black teachers.

The geographical and chronological reach of her letters is uncommon for a woman in the Civil War era. In each place she worked, she taught in a different type of school and engaged with different types of students, so the subjects she explored in her letters illuminate a remarkably broad history of race and religion in America. Her experiences also offer an inside perspective of the founding of Shaw University, an important historically Black university. Now available to specialists and general readers alike for the first time inMy Work Among the Freedmen: The Civil War and Reconstruction Letters of Harriet M. Buss (U Virginia Press, 2021), her correspondence offers an extensive view of the Civil War and Reconstruction era rarely captured in a single collection.

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Mary Crossley, "Embodied Injustice: Race, Disability, and Health" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Feb 26, 2023

Black people and people with disabilities in the United States are distinctively disadvantaged in their encounters with the health care system. These groups also share harsh histories of medical experimentation, eugenic sterilizations, and health care discrimination. Yet the similarities in inequities experienced by Black people and disabled people and the harms endured by people who are both Black and disabled have been largely unexplored. To fill this gap, Embodied Injustice: Race, Disability, and Health(Cambridge UP, 2022) uses an interdisciplinary approach, weaving health research with social science, critical approaches, and personal stories to portray the devastating effects of health injustice in America.

Author Mary Crossley takes stock of the sometimes-vexed relationship between racial justice and disability rights advocates and interrogates how higher disability prevalence among Black Americans reflects unjust social structures. By suggesting reforms to advance health equity for disabled people, Black people, and disabled Black people, this book lays a crucial foundation for intersectional, cross-movement advocacy to advance health justice in America.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England.

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Mitchell Schwarzer, "Hella Town: Oakland's History of Development and Disruption" (U California Press, 2022) Feb 26, 2023

Oakland grew up on the shadow of the dynamo of the nineteenth century West, always the "other" city on San Francisco Bay.

But as Mitchell Schwarzer, Professor Emeritus of art history and visual culture at California College of the Arts, argues in Hella Town: Oakland's History of Development and Disruption (University of California, 2021), the city also has much to tell us about the history of urban development, inequality, and the role of transit in shaping city life. In this way, Oakland is every city in the United States, a synecdoche for 20th century urban renewal, American car culture, and recent trends in labor such as remote work. From sports to cable cars, the story of 20th century Oakland is both tragedy and triumph, and its center, the story of people and a culture changing and creating change in the inherently dynamic urban American West.

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Ashley Brown, "Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson" (Oxford UP, 2023) Feb 24, 2023

From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career, Althea Gibson became the most famous black sportswoman of the mid-twentieth century. In her unprecedented athletic career, she was the first African American to win titles at the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open.

In this comprehensive biography, Ashley Brown narrates the public career and private struggles of Althea Gibson (1927-2003). Based on extensive archival work and oral histories, Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson(Oxford UP, 2023) sets Gibson's life and choices against the backdrop of the Great Migration, Jim Crow racism, the integration of American sports, the civil rights movement, the Cold War, and second wave feminism. Throughout her life Gibson continuously negotiated the expectations of her supporters and adversaries, including her patrons in the black-led American Tennis Association, the white-led United States Lawn Tennis Association, and the media, particularly the Black press and community's expectations that she selflessly serve as a representative of her race.

An incredibly talented, ultra-competitive, and not always likeable athlete, Gibson wanted to be treated as an individual first and foremost, not as a member of a specific race or gender. She was reluctant to speak openly about the indignities and prejudices she navigated as an African American woman, though she faced numerous institutional and societal barriers in achieving her goals. She frequently bucked conventional norms of femininity and put her career ahead of romantic relationships, making her personal life the subject of constant scrutiny and rumors. Despite her major wins and international recognition, including a ticker tape parade in New York City and the covers of Sports Illustrated and Time, Gibson endeavored to find commercial sponsorship and permanent economic stability. Committed to self-sufficiency, she pivoted from the elite amateur tennis circuit to State Department-sponsored goodwill tours, attempts to find success as a singer and Hollywood actress, the professional golf circuit, a tour with the Harlem Globetrotters and her own professional tennis tour, coaching, teaching children at tennis clinics, and a stint as New Jersey Athletics Commissioner. As she struggled to support herself in old age, she was left with disappointment, recounting her past achievements decades before female tennis players were able to garner substantial earnings.

A compelling life and times portrait, Serving Herself offers a revealing look at the rise and fall of a fiercely independent trailblazer who satisfied her own needs and simultaneously set a pathbreaking course for Black athletes.

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Jeffrey J. Matthews, "Colin Powell: Imperfect Patriot" (U Notre Dame Press, 2019) Feb 24, 2023

Until he passed away in 2021, Colin Powell was revered as one of America's most trusted and admired leaders. Jeffrey J. Matthews' Colin Powell: Imperfect Patriot (U Notre Dame Press, 2019) demonstrates that Powell's decades-long development as an exemplary subordinate is crucial to understanding his astonishing rise from a working-class immigrant neighborhood to the highest echelons of military and political power, including his roles as the country's first Black national security advisor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and secretary of state.

Once an aimless, ambitionless teenager who barely graduated from college, Powell became an extraordinarily effective and staunchly loyal subordinate to many powerful superiors who, in turn, helped to advance his career. By the time Powell became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he had developed into the consummate follower--motivated, competent, composed, honorable, and independent. The quality of Powell's followership faltered at times, however, while in Vietnam, during the Iran-Contra scandal, and after he became George W. Bush's secretary of state. Powell proved a fallible patriot, and in the course of a long and distinguished career he made some grave and consequential errors in judgment. While those blunders do not erase the significance of his commendable achievements amid decades of public service, we can learn much from his good and bad leadership.

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Ian C. Hartman and David Reamer, "Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest" ( U Washington Press, 2022) Feb 24, 2023

The history of Black Alaskans runs deep and spans generations. Decades before statehood and earlier even than the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s, Black men and women participated in Alaska's politics and culture. They hunted whales, patrolled the seas, built roads, served in the military, and opened businesses, even as they endured racism and fought injustices. Into the twentieth century, Alaska's Black residents were often part of the larger, nationwide freedom struggle. At the same time, Black settlers found themselves in a far different context than elsewhere in the United States, as Alaska's strategic military location, economic reliance on oil, and unique racial landscape influenced how Black Alaskans made a home for themselves in the northwesternmost corner of the country.

Centering the agency and diversity of Black Alaskans, Ian C. Hartman and David Reamer's book Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest(U Washington Press, 2022) chronicles how Alaska's Black population, though small, has had an outsized impact on the culture and civic life of the region. Alaska's history of race relations and civil rights reminds the reader that the currents of discrimination and its responses--determination, activism, and perseverance--are American stories that might be explored in the unlikeliest of places.

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Chris Bongie, trans. and ed., "The Colonial System Unveiled by Baron de Vastey" (Liverpool UP, 2014) Feb 21, 2023

Long neglected in mainstream history books, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is now being claimed across a range of academic disciplines as an event of world-historical importance. The former slaves' victory over their French masters and the creation of the independent nation of Haiti in 1804 is being newly heralded not only as a seminal moment in the transnational formation of the 'black Atlantic' but as the most far-reaching manifestation of 'Radical Enlightenment'.

The best known Haitian writer to emerge in the years after the revolution is Baron de Vastey (1781-1820), who authored over ten books and pamphlets between 1814 and his murder in 1820. His first and most incendiary work, Le système colonial dévoilé (1814), provides a moving invocation of the horrors of slavery in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue. Its trailblazing critique of colonialism anticipates by over a hundred years the anticolonial politics (and poetics) of Césaire, Fanon, and Sartre. Translated here for the first time by Chris Bongie, The Colonial System Unveiled by Baron de Vastey (Liverpool UP, 2014) will be compulsory reading for scholars across the humanities.

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Gerald F. Goodwin, "Race in the Crucible of War: African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023) Feb 19, 2023

When African American servicemen went to fight in the Vietnam War, discrimination and prejudice followed them. Even in a faraway country, their military experiences were shaped by the racial environment of the home front. War is often viewed as a crucible that can transform society, but American race relations proved remarkably durable.

In Race in the Crucible of War: African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam (U Massachusetts Press, 2023), Gerald F. Goodwin examines how Black servicemen experienced and interpreted racial issues during their time in Vietnam. Drawing on more than fifty new oral interviews and significant archival research, as well as newspapers, periodicals, memoirs, and documentaries, Goodwin reveals that for many African Americans the front line and the home front were two sides of the same coin. Serving during the same period as the civil rights movement and the race riots in Chicago, Detroit, and dozens of other American cities, these men increasingly connected the racism that they encountered in the barracks and on the battlefields with the tensions and violence that were simmering back home.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com

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Nicholas Mirzoeff, "White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness" (MIT Press, 2023) Feb 19, 2023

From the author of How to See the World comes a new history of white supremacist ways of seeing—and a strategy for dismantling them. White supremacy is not only perpetuated by laws and police but also by visual culture and distinctive ways of seeing.

Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that this form of “white sight” has a history. By understanding that it was not always a common practice, we can devise better ways to dismantle it. Spanning centuries across this wide-ranging text, Mirzoeff connects Renaissance innovations—from the invention of perspective and the erection of Apollo statues as monuments to (white) beauty and power to the rise of racial capitalism dependent on slave labor—with the ever-expanding surveillance technologies of the twenty-first century to show that white sight creates an oppressively racializing world, in which subjects who do not appear as white are under constant threat of violence. Analyzing recent events like the George Floyd protests and the Central Park birdwatching incident, Mirzoeff suggests that we are experiencing a general crisis of white supremacy that presents both opportunities and threats to social justice. If we do not seize this moment to dismantle white sight, then white supremacy might surge back stronger than ever. To that end, he highlights activist interventions to strike the power of the white heteropatriarchal gaze. White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness (MIT Press, 2023) is a vital handbook and call to action for anyone who refuses to live under white-dominated systems and is determined to find a just way to see the world.

Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On Twitter.

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Philip Nel, "Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books" (Oxford UP, 2017) Feb 16, 2023

Racism is resilient, duplicitous, and endlessly adaptable, so it is no surprise that America is again in a period of civil rights activism. A significant reason racism endures is because it is structural: it's embedded in culture and in institutions. One of the places that racism hides-and thus perhaps the best place to oppose it-is books for young people.

Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books (Oxford UP, 2017) presents five serious critiques of the history and current state of children's literature tempestuous relationship with both implicit and explicit forms of racism. The book fearlessly examines topics both vivid-such as The Cat in the Hat's roots in blackface minstrelsy-and more opaque, like how the children's book industry can perpetuate structural racism via whitewashed covers even while making efforts to increase diversity. Rooted in research yet written with a lively, crackling touch, Nel delves into years of literary criticism and recent sociological data in order to show a better way forward. Though much of what is proposed here could be endlessly argued, the knowledge that what we learn in childhood imparts both subtle and explicit lessons about whose lives matter is not debatable. The text concludes with a short and stark proposal of actions everyone-reader, author, publisher, scholar, citizen- can take to fight the biases and prejudices that infect children's literature. While Was the Cat in the Hat Black? does not assume it has all the answers to such a deeply systemic problem, its audacity should stimulate discussion and activism.

Philip Nel is University Distinguished Professor of English at Kansas State University. His many books include Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children's Literature (UP Mississippi, 2012), Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature (NYU Press, 2008, co-edited with Julia Mickenberg), The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats (Random House, 2007), and Dr. Seuss: American Icon (Continuum, 2004).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Lauron J. Kehrer, "Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance" (U Michigan Press, 2022) Feb 14, 2023

Notions of hip hop authenticity, as expressed both within hip hop communities and in the larger American culture, rely on the construction of the rapper as a Black, masculine, heterosexual, cisgender man who enacts a narrative of struggle and success.

In Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance(University of Michigan Press, 2022), Lauron J. Kehrer turns our attention to openly queer and trans rappers and presents an alternative and more inclusive narrative about the development of hip hop that includes the contributions of queer people throughout the history of the genre. They consider the role of disco, house music, and the ballroom scene in New York City to demonstrate how these different communities and networks played and continue to play a role in hip hop. Kehrer also explores Bounce, a regional form of hip hop with deep roots in New Orleans and its queer communities that has recently entered national circulation. By centering the performances of openly queer and trans artists of color, Queer Voices in Hip Hop reclaims their work as essential to the development and persistence of hip hop in the United States as it tells the story of the queer roots of hip hop.

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Lee D. Baker, "From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954" (U California Press, 1998) Feb 13, 2023

On today’s podcast we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of Dr. Lee D. Baker’s book From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (University of California Press, 1998). From Savage to Negro examines the relationship between the discipline of anthropology and the construction of racial categories used for African Americans in the United States. He analyzes how “ideas about racial inferiority were supplanted by notions of racial equality in law, science, and public opinion” (2). Dr. Baker and I had a conversation about his intellectual foundations, how he came to write the book, his work doing public anthropology by appearing in documentaries, Zora Neale Hurston, and more.

Lee D. Baker is the Mrs. A. Hehmeyer Professor of Cultural Anthropology, African & African-American Studies, and Sociology at Duke University. He is the author of From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (University of California Press, 1998) and Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (Duke University Press, 2010). He edited Life in America: Identity and Everyday Experience (Blackwell, 2004).

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Lesly Deschler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago, "Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing" (Leuven UP, 2022) Feb 12, 2023

Lesly Deschler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago'sedited volumeBlack Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing(Leuven UP, 2022) questions how the Black female body, specifically the Black maternal body, navigates interlocking structures that place a false narrative on her body and that of her maternal ancestors. Drawing on a wide range of scholarly inquiry and contemporary art, this book addresses these misconceptions and fills in the gaps that exist in the photographic representation of Black motherhood, mothering, and mutual care within Black communities.

The essays and interviews, paired with a curated selection of images, address the complicated relationship between Blackness and photography and in particular its gendered dimension, its relationship to health, sexuality, and digital culture - primarily in the context of racialized heteronormativity. This collection, then, challenges racist images and discourses, both historically and in its persistence in contemporary society, while reclaiming the innate brilliance of Black women through personal stories, history, political acts, connections to place, moments of pleasure, and communal celebration.

This visual exploration of Black motherhood through pictures made by Black woman-identifying photographers thus serves as a reflection of the past and a portal to the future and contributes to recent scholarship on the complexity of Black life and Black joy.

This book emerges from the project Women Picturing Revolution.

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Winston James, "Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik" (Columbia UP, 2022) Feb 11, 2023

One of the foremost Black writers and intellectuals of his era, Claude McKay (1889–1948) was a central figure in Caribbean literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black radical tradition. McKay’s life and writing were defined by his class consciousness and anticolonialism, shaped by his experiences growing up in colonial Jamaica as well as his early career as a writer in Harlem and then London. Dedicated to confronting both racism and capitalist exploitation, he was a critical observer of the Black condition throughout the African diaspora and became a committed Bolshevik.

In Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik (Columbia UP, 2022), Winston James offers a revelatory account of McKay’s political and intellectual trajectory from his upbringing in Jamaica through the early years of his literary career and radical activism. In 1912, McKay left Jamaica to study in the United States, never to return. James follows McKay’s time at the Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State University, as he discovered the harshness of American racism, and his move to Harlem, where he encountered the ferment of Black cultural and political movements and figures such as Hubert Harrison and Marcus Garvey. McKay left New York for London, where his commitment to revolutionary socialism deepened, culminating in his transformation from Fabian socialist to Bolshevik.

Drawing on a wide variety of sources, James offers a rich and detailed chronicle of McKay’s life, political evolution, and the historical, political, and intellectual contexts that shaped him.

Articles referenced in the show:

Winston James, “Letters from London in Black and Red: Claude McKay, Marcus Garvey and the Negro World,” History Workshop Journal, Issue 85 (Spring 2018), pp. 281-293.
Winston James, "To the East Turn: The Russian Revolution and the Black Radical Imagination in the United States, 1917–1924," The American Historical Review, Volume 126, Issue 3, September 2021, Pages 1001–1045.

@amandajoycehall is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the Department of African American Studies.

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Hannah Noel, "Deflective Whiteness: Coopting Black and Latinx Identity Politics" (Ohio State UP, 2022) Feb 10, 2023

In Deflective Whiteness: Coopting Black and Latinx Identity Politics (Ohio State UP, 2022), Hannah Noel repositions Whiteness studies in relation to current discussions around racialized animus and White victimhood, demonstrating how White supremacy adapts its discursive strategies by cannibalizing the language and rhetoric of Black and Latinx social justice movements. Analyzing a wide-ranging collection of cultural objects—memes, oration, music, advertisements, and news coverage—Noel shows how White deflection sustains and reproduces structures of inequality and injustice.

White deflection offers a script for how social justice rhetoric and the emotions of victimization are appropriated to conjure a hegemonic White identity. Using derivative language, deflection claims Whiteness as the aggrieved social status. Through case studies of cultural moments and archives including Twitter, country music, the Black Lives Matter movement, and more, Deflective Whiteness exposes the various forms of tacit White supremacy that operate under the alibi of injury and that ultimately serve to deepen racial inequities. By understanding how, where, and why White deflection is used, Noel argues, scholars and social justice advocates can trace, tag, and deconstruct covert White supremacy at its rhetorical foundations.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com

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Kate Masur, "Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction" (Norton, 2021) Feb 10, 2023

The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling within their boundaries and restricted their rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws. They countered the states' insistences that states were merely trying to maintain the domestic peace with the equal-rights promises they found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They were pastors, editors, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women, and they fought in the press, the courts, the state legislatures, and Congress, through petitioning, lobbying, party politics, and elections. Long stymied by hostile white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, the movement's ideals became increasingly mainstream in the 1850s, particularly among supporters of the new Republican party. When Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans installed this vision of racial equality in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. These were the landmark achievements of the first civil rights movement.

Kate Masur's magisterial history, Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction(W. W. Norton, 2021) delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Until Justice Be Done was aPulitzer Prize finalist in history and winner of the American Historical Association's Littleton-Griswold Prize in US law and society, broadly defined.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Energy Costs, Poverty, and Race Feb 09, 2023

Destenie Nock, an assistant professor in the Engineering and Public Policy and Civil and Environmental Engineering Departments at Carnegie Mellon University and CEO of People’s Energy Analytics, a new startup, talks about her co-authored paper “The Energy Equity Gap: Unveiling Hidden Energy Poverty” with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The two also talk about the arc of Nock’s career; poverty, race, and infrastructure in the United States; and how Nock’s new company can help energy utilities identify and address hidden forms of energy poverty.

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Dianne M. Stewart, "Black Women, Black Love: America's War on African-American Marriage" (Seal Press, 2020) Feb 08, 2023

According to the 2010 US census, more than seventy percent of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love: America's War on African-American Marriage(Seal Press, 2020) reveals how four centuries of laws, policies, and customs have created that crisis.

Dianne Stewart begins in the colonial era, when slave owners denied Blacks the right to marry, divided families, and, in many cases, raped enslaved women and girls. Later, during Reconstruction and the ensuing decades, violence split up couples again as millions embarked on the Great Migration north, where the welfare system mandated that women remain single in order to receive government support. And no institution has forbidden Black love as effectively as the prison-industrial complex, which removes Black men en masse from the pool of marriageable partners.

Prodigiously researched and deeply felt, Black Women, Black Love reveals how white supremacy has systematically broken the heart of Black America, and it proposes strategies for dismantling the structural forces that have plagued Black love and marriage for centuries.

Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter

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Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh, "Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix" (UP of Mississippi, 2021) Feb 02, 2023

Identity is often fraught for multiracial Douglas, people of both South Asian and African descent in the Caribbean. In this groundbreaking volume titled Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh explore the particular meanings of a Dougla identity and examine Dougla maneuverability both at home and in the diaspora.

The authors scrutinize the perception of Douglaness over time, contemporary Dougla negotiations of social demands, their expansion of ethnicity as an intersectional identity, and the experiences of Douglas within the diaspora outside the Caribbean. Through an examination of how Douglas experience their claim to multiracialism and how ethnic identity may be enforced or interrupted, the authors firmly situate this analysis in ongoing debates about multiracial identity.

Based on interviews with over one hundred Douglas, Barratt and Ranjitsingh explore the multiple subjectivities Douglas express, confirm, challenge, negotiate, and add to prevailing understandings. Contemplating this, Dougla in the Twenty-First Century adds to the global discourse of multiethnic identity and how it impacts living both in the Caribbean, where it is easily recognizable, and in the diaspora, where the Dougla remains a largely unacknowledged designation. This book deliberately expands the conversation beyond the limits of biraciality and the Black/white binary and contributes nuance to current interpretations of the lives of multiracial people by introducing Douglas as they carve out their lives in the Caribbean.

Sue Ann Barratt is lecturer and head of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS), University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus. She is a graduate of the University of the West Indies, holding a BA in Media and Communication Studies with Political Science, an MA in Communication Studies, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies. Her research areas are interpersonal interaction, human communication conflict, social media use and its implications, gender and ethnic identities, mental health and gender-based violence, and Carnival and cultural studies.

Aleah N. Ranjitsingh is an assistant professor in the Caribbean Studies Program, Africana Studies Department of Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (CUNY). She holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies from the Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS), University of the West Indies, St. Augustine and; MA and BA degrees in Political Science from Brooklyn College (CUNY). Her research areas are gender and politics; Latin American and Caribbean politics; African diaspora studies with particular reference to North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean; and gender and ethnic identities.

Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter.

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Michael Lawrence Dickinson, "Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680-1807" (U Georgia Press, 2022) Feb 02, 2023

Beginning in the late seventeenth century and concluding with the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680-1807 (U Georgia Press, 2022) reveals how the thousands of captives who lived, bled, and resisted in the Black Urban Atlantic survived to form dynamic communities. Michael Lawrence Dickinson uses cities with close commercial ties to shed light on similarities, variations, and linkages between urban Atlantic slave communities in mainland America and the Caribbean.

The study adopts the perspectives of those enslaved to reveal that, in the eyes of the enslaved, the distinctions were often in degree rather than in kind as cities throughout the Black Urban Atlantic remained spaces for Black oppression and resilience. The tenets of subjugation remained all too similar, as did captives' need to stave off social death and hold on to their humanity. Almost Dead argues that urban environments provided unique barriers to and avenues for social rebirth: the process by which African-descended peoples reconstructed their lives individually and collectively after forced exportation from West Africa. This was an active process of cultural remembrance, continued resistance, and communal survival. Indeed it was in these urban slave communities-within the connections between neighbors and kinfolk-that the enslaved found the physical and psychological resources necessary to endure the seemingly unendurable. Whether sites of first arrival, commodification, sale, short-term captivity, or lifetime enslavement, the urban Atlantic shaped and was shaped by Black lives.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Derrick Darby, "A Realistic Blacktopia: Why We Must Unite to Fight" (Oxford UP, 2022) Feb 01, 2023

In the United States, unjust disparities in things like income, opportunity, health, safety, and education tightly track racial categorizations of the US population. An intuitive approach to social justice calls us to look to the sites of the greatest disadvantage, and take measures aimed at relieving them. This approach favors “race specific” policies for pursuing justice. However, that kind of rationale is increasingly vulnerable in a country that’s largely convinced that it has achieved a “post-racial” condition. Hence the remaining disparities remain, but are explained away by appeals to alleged faults of those who suffer under them.

In A Realistic Blacktopia: Why We Must Unite to Fight (Oxford UP, 2023), Derrick Darby defends a different approach. According to Darby, the psychological and social realities of the United States suggest that we must adopt a non-race-specific social justice agenda, explicitly tying our efforts to mitigate unjust inequalities that track racial categorization to “big tent” initiatives to broaden and deepen democratic inclusion for citizens as such.

Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

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J. Brent Morris, "Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp" (UNC Press, 2022) Jan 31, 2023

The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early seventeenth century, the nearly impassable Dismal frustrated settlement. However, what may have been an impediment to the expansion of slave society became an essential sanctuary for many of those who sought to escape it. In the depths of the Dismal, thousands of maroons--people who had emancipated themselves from enslavement and settled beyond the reach of enslavers--established new lives of freedom in a landscape deemed worthless and inaccessible by whites.

Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp(UNC Press, 2022) is the first book to fully examine the lives of these maroons and their struggles for liberation. Drawing from newly discovered primary sources and archeological evidence that suggests far more extensive maroon settlement than historians have previously imagined, award-winning author J. Brent Morris uncovers one of the most exciting yet neglected stories of American history. This is the story of resilient, proud, and determined people of color who made the Great Dismal Swamp their free home and sanctuary and who played an outsized role in undermining slavery through the Civil War.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Above the Veil: Beyond Segregationism and Assimilationism Jan 29, 2023

The work of Ibram X. Kendi distinguishes between two forms of racism: segregationism and assimilationism. Segregationists argue that some groups are inferior by nature; assimilationists, on the other hand, argue that some groups are inferior by 'nurture,' but can overcome this inferiority if they conform to another group's cultural standards -- in America, always a White cultural standard. Black leaders past and present have challenged these racist assumptions while revealing the liberatory potential of a cultural engagement based on equality and mutual exchange.

Guests:

Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, contributing writer to The Atlantic and author of "How To Be An Antiracist" and "Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America 1619-2019."
Max Mueller, assistant professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and author of "Race and the Making of the Mormon People."
Dr. Anika Prather, adjunct professor in the Classics Department at Howard University and author of "Living in the Constellation of the Canon: The Lived Experiences of African American Students Reading Great Books Literature."

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Anthony Reed, "Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production" (Duke UP, 2020) Jan 28, 2023

In Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production(Duke UP, 2020), Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958–1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially.

Soundwork is Reed’s term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. Through analyses of Langston Hughes’s collaboration with Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka’s work with the New York Art Quartet, Jayne Cortez’s albums with the Firespitters, and the multimedia projects of Archie Shepp, Matana Roberts, Cecil Taylor, and Jeanne Lee, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requires attending to it as the product of material, technical, sensual, and ideological processes.

Henry Ivry is a Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century Literature in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow.

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Stephen C. Finley, "In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam" (Duke UP, 2022) Jan 27, 2023

With In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam (Duke University Press, 2022), Stephen C. Finley, Inaugural Chair, Department of African and African American Studies at Louisiana State University, examines the religious practices and discourses that have shaped the Nation of Islam (NOI) in America. Drawing on the speeches and writing of figures such as Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Warith Deen Mohammad, and Louis Farrakhan, Finley shows that the Nation of Islam and its leaders used multiple religious symbols, rituals, and mythologies meant to recast the meaning of the cosmos and create new transcendent and immanent black bodies whose meaning cannot be reduced to products of racism. Whether examining how the myth of Yakub helped Elijah Muhammad explain the violence directed at black bodies, how Malcolm X made black bodies in the Nation of Islam publicly visible, or the ways Farrakhan’s discourses on his experiences with the Mother Wheel UFO organize his interpretation of black bodies, Finley demonstrates that the Nation of Islam intended to retrieve, reclaim, and reform black bodies in a context of antiblack violence. In our conversation we discussed the theoretical framework of In- or Out-of-place, the body as both as social and symbolic, Nation of Islam mythological and cosmological narratives , Elijah Muhammad’s theological vision for African Americans, Malcolm X’ focus on civil and human rights movements, Warith Deen Mohammed’s notions of race, the identity of “Bilalians,” Louis Farrakhan’s mystical extraterrestrial experiences, and women’s embodiment in the Nation of Islam.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.

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Shaun M. Anderson, "The Black Athlete Revolt: The Sport Justice Movement in the Age Of #BlackLivesMatter" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) Jan 27, 2023

In the age of social media, athletes have a powerful influence like never before. Many Black athletes have used that power in positive ways, galvanizing their platforms to create impactful educational opportunities, donate to Black social causes, and raise political awareness on important issues.

In The Black Athlete Revolt: The Sport Justice Movement in the Age Of #BlackLivesMatter(Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), Shaun M. Anderson examines the Black athlete's rise in advocating for social justice and how today's athletes have moved beyond protesting to create substantial change for Black Americans. Anderson reflects on the history and evolution of Black athlete activism, breaking down its importance during the civil rights movement, the commodification of athletes during the 1990s, and how twenty-first century athletes have utilized their wealth and influence to create lasting societal change in the age of #BlackLivesMatter. With fascinating portraits of notable individuals in the history of Black activism, as well as insights from athletes and allies who discuss the future of athlete activism, The Black Athlete Revolt reveals the ever-evolving and crucial role of Black athletes beyond the world of sports.

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Viola Franziska Müller, "Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South" (UNC Press, 2022) Jan 20, 2023

In Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South (UNC Press, 2022), Viola Franziska Müller examines runaways who camouflaged themselves among the free Black populations in Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, and Richmond. In the urban South, they found shelter, work, and other survival networks that enabled them to live in slaveholding territory, shielded and supported by their host communities in an act of collective resistance to slavery. While all fugitives risked their lives to escape slavery, those who fled to southern cities were perhaps the most vulnerable of all. Not dissimilar to modern-day refugees and illegal migrants, runaway slaves that sought refuge in the urban South were antebellum America's undocumented people, forging lives free from bondage but without the legal status of freedpeople. Spanning from the 1810s to the start of the Civil War, Müller reveals how urbanization, work opportunities, and the interconnectedness of free and enslaved Black people in each city determined how successfully runaways could remain invisible to authorities.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Emily A. Owens, "Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans" (UNC Press, 2023) Jan 19, 2023

In histories of enslavement and in Black women's history, coercion looms large in any discussion of sex and sexuality. At a time when sexual violence against Black women was virtually unregulated—even normalized—a vast economy developed specifically to sell the sexual labor of Black women. In Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans (UNC Press, 2023), Emily A. Owens wrestles with the question of why white men paid notoriously high prices to gain sexual access to the bodies of enslaved women to whom they already had legal and social access.

Owens centers the survival strategies and intellectual labor of Black women enslaved in New Orleans to unravel the culture of violence they endured, in which slaveholders obscured "the presence of force" with arrangements that included gifts and money. Owens's storytelling highlights that the classic formulation of rape law that requires "the presence of force" and "the absence of consent" to denote a crime was in fact a key legal fixture that packaged predation as pleasure and produced, rather than prevented, violence against Black women. Owens dramatically reorients our understanding of enslaved women's lives as well as of the nature of violence in the entire venture of racial slavery in the U.S. South. Unsettling the idea that consent is necessarily incompatible with structural and interpersonal violence, this history shows that when sex is understood as a transaction, women are imagined as responsible for their own violation.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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We Shall Overcome: Sister Thea Bowman and the Black Catholic Experience Jan 18, 2023

Though we are all one—“there is neither Jew nor Greek,” St. Paul wrote to the Galatians—each of us brings a particular heritage to the mosaic of God’s universal pilgrim church on Earth. Father Maurice Nutt helps us understand and celebrate the special contribution of African Americans in the Catholic Church. Father Maurice is a redemptorist priest and former director of the Institute for Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University in New Orleans, an apostolate that celebrates and connects Black Catholicism in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. And, as fewer Americans are embracing the vocation of the priesthood, more pastors are coming to us from other countries, which brings both cultural opportunities and challenges.

In addition, Fr. Maurice tells us about his friend and mentor, Sister Thea Bowman, and the case he and others are making for her sainthood.

Father Maurice’s spiritual direction ministry
The case for Sr Thea Bowman’s canonization
Sr Thea Bowman addressing the US Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1989

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Paulina Laura Alberto et al., "Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870-1960" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Jan 17, 2023

Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) offers English translations of more than one hundred articles published in Black newspapers in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Uruguay from 1870 to 1960. Those publications were as important in Black community and intellectual life in Latin America as African American newspapers were in the United States, yet they are almost completely unknown to English-language readers. Expertly curated, the articles are organized into chapters centered on themes that emerged in the Black press: politics and citizenship, racism and anti-racism, family and education, community life, women, Africa and African culture, diaspora and Black internationalism, and arts and literature. Each chapter includes an introduction explaining how discussions on those topics evolved over time, and a list of questions to provoke further reflection. Each article is carefully edited and annotated; footnotes and a glossary explain names, events, and other references that will be unfamiliar to English-language readers. A unique, fascinating insight into the rich body of Black cultural and intellectual production across Latin America.

Paulina Alberto is Professor of African and African American Studies and of History at Harvard University. She is the author of Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentina (Cambridge University Press) and Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil (University of North Carolina Press). She is the editor (with Eduardo Elena) of Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina (Cambridge University Press).

George Reid Andrews is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Afro-Latin America: Black Lives, 1600-2000 (Harvard University Press), Afro-Latin America 1800-2000 (Oxford University Press), Blackness in the White Nation: A History of Afro-Uruguay (University of North Carolina Press), Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988 (University of Wisconsin Press), and The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800-1900 (University of Wisconsin Press).

Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof is Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the author of Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean (Princeton University Press) and A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950 (Princeton University Press)

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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The History of the Black Urban Working-Class in the United States Jan 16, 2023

Joe William Trotter, Jr., Giant Eagle University Professor of History and Founder and Director of the Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE) at Carnegie Mellon University, talks about his book, Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America(University of California Press, 2019), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Workers on Arrival examines the long history of the black urban working-class going back to the 18th century and coming right up to the present. While Trotter fully acknowledges the hardships African-Americans have faced, he also emphasizes the agency of black people as they organized, resisted, and found ways to cope in the contexts they found themselves. Trotter and Vinsel also discuss current trends in African-American historical scholarship and Trotter’s own present and future research projects.

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Lisa Biggs, "The Healing Stage: Black Women, Incarceration, and the Art of Transformation" (Ohio State UP, 2022) Jan 16, 2023

Over the last five decades, Black women have been one of the fastest-growing segments of the global prison population, thanks to changes in policies that mandate incarceration for nonviolent offenses and criminalize what women do to survive interpersonal and state violence. In The Healing Stage: Black Women, Incarceration, and the Art of Transformation(Ohio State UP, 2022), Lisa Biggs reveals how four ensembles of currently and formerly incarcerated women and their collaborating artists use theater and performance to challenge harmful policies and popular discourses that justify locking up "bad" women.

Focusing on prison-based arts programs in the US and South Africa, Biggs illustrates how Black feminist cultural traditions--theater, dance, storytelling, poetry, humor, and protest--enable women to investigate the root causes of crime and refute dominant narratives about incarcerated women. In doing so, the arts initiatives that she writes about encourage individual and collective healing, a process of repair that exceeds state definitions of rehabilitation. These case studies offer powerful examples of how the labor of incarcerated Black women artists--some of the most marginalized and vulnerable people in our society--radically extends our knowledge of prison arts programs and our understanding of what is required to resolve human conflicts and protect women's lives.

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Tanya Katerí Hernández, "Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality" (Beacon Press, 2022) Jan 14, 2023

Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality(Beacon Press, 2022) will challenge what you thought about racism and bias and demonstrate that it’s possible for a historically marginalized group to experience discrimination and also be discriminatory. Racism is deeply complex, and law professor and comparative race relations expert Tanya Katerí Hernández exposes “the Latino racial innocence cloak” that often veils Latino complicity in racism. As Latinos are the second-largest ethnic group in the US, this revelation is critical to dismantling systemic racism. Basing her work on interviews, discrimination case files, and civil rights law, Hernández reveals Latino anti-Black bias in the workplace, the housing market, schools, places of recreation, the criminal justice system, and Latino families.

By focusing on racism perpetrated by communities outside those of White non-Latino people, Racial Innocence brings to light the many Afro-Latino and African American victims of anti-Blackness at the hands of other people of color. Through exploring the interwoven fabric of discrimination and examining the cause of these issues, we can begin to move toward a more egalitarian society.

Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On Twitter.

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Miguel Valerio, "Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Jan 14, 2023

Sovereign Joy Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640(Cambridge University Press, 2022) explores the performance of festive black kings and queens among Afro-Mexicans between 1539 and 1640. It illustrates how the first African and Afro-creole people in colonial Mexico transformed their ancestral culture into a shared identity among Afro-Mexicans, with particular focus on how public festival participation expressed their culture and subjectivities, as well as redefined their colonial condition and social standing. As the book shows, through performance, Afro-Mexicans affirmed their being: the sovereignty of joy, and the joy of sovereignty.

Dr. Miguel Valerio is assistant professor of Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a scholar of the African diaspora in the Iberian world and teaches courses in Afro-colonial culture and contemporary Afro-Latin American literature and culture. His research has focused on black Catholic brotherhoods or confraternities and Afro-creole festive practices in colonial Latin America, especially Mexico and Brazil. His work has been published in several academic journals, and he is also the co-editor of Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices(Amsterdam University Press, 2022). He is currently working on his second book project, Architects of Their World: The Artistic and Ritualistic Spaces of Afro-Brazilian Irmandades (under contract with Cambridge University Press).

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Seeing Truth in the Speculative: A Conversation with Dexter Gabriel Jan 12, 2023

Historian and author Dexter Gabriel talks about his relationship to truth and memory in his fiction and non-fiction writing. Come for his thoughts on what truth we can find in history and stay for his thoughts about George Washington’s teeth and his affection for astrolabes.

Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website.

Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod

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Christopher Loperena, "The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras" (Stanford UP, 2022) Jan 09, 2023

The future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over two hundred years. In The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras(Stanford UP, 2022), Christopher A. Loperena examines the Garifuna struggle for life and collective autonomy, and demonstrates how this struggle challenges concerted efforts by the state and multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, to render both their lands and their culture into fungible tourism products. Using a combination of participant observation, courtroom ethnography, and archival research, Loperena reveals how purportedly inclusive tourism projects form part of a larger neoliberal, extractivist development regime, which remakes Black and Indigenous territories into frontiers of progress for the mestizo majority. The book offers a trenchant analysis of the ways Black dispossession and displacement are carried forth through the conferral of individual rights and freedoms, a prerequisite for resource exploitation under contemporary capitalism.

By demanding to be accounted for on their terms, Garifuna anchor Blackness to Central America—a place where Black peoples are presumed to be nonnative inhabitants—and to collective land rights. Steeped in Loperena's long-term activist engagement with Garifuna land defenders, this book is a testament to their struggle and to the promise of "another world" in which Black and Indigenous peoples thrive.

Christopher A. Loperena is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. You can find the article discussed during this conversation, published in American Anthropologist, here.

Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban anthropology, futurity, care, and migration. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican

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Philippe-Richard Marius, "The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society" (UP of Mississippi, 2022) Jan 08, 2023

In The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society(University Press of Mississippi, 2022), Philippe-Richard Marius recasts the world-historical significance of the Saint-Domingue Revolution to investigate the twinned significance of color/race and class in the reproduction of privilege and inequality in contemporary Haiti. Through his ethnography, class emerges as the principal site of social organization among Haitians, notwithstanding the country’s global prominence as a “Black Republic.” It is class, and not color or race, that primarily produces distinctive Haitian socioeconomic formations.

When Marius arrived in Port-au-Prince to begin fieldwork for this monograph, to him and to legions of people worldwide, Haiti was axiomatically the first Black Republic. Descendants of Africans did in fact create the Haitian nation-state on January 1, 1804, as the outcome of a slave uprising that defeated white supremacy in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Haiti’s Founding Founders, as colonial natives, were nonetheless to varying degrees Latinized subjects of the Atlantic. They envisioned freedom differently than the African-born former slaves, who sought to replicate African nonstate societies. Haiti’s Founders indeed first defeated native Africans’ armies before they defeated the French. Not surprisingly, problematic vestiges of colonialism carried over to the independent nation.

Marius interrogates Haitian Black nationalism without diminishing the colossal achievement of the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue in destroying slavery in the colony, then the Napoleonic army sent to restore it. Providing clarity on the uses of race, color, and nation in sociopolitical and economic organization in Haiti and other postcolonial bourgeois societies, Marius produces a provocative characterization of the Haitian nation-state that rejects the Black Republic paradigm.

Philippe-Richard Marius is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island (CUNY). Marius has conducted extensive fieldwork in Haiti. He is writer, producer, and codirector of the film A City Called Heaven.

Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.

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Jonathan W. White, "To Address You as My Friend: African Americans' Letters to Abraham Lincoln" (UNC Press, 2021) Jan 08, 2023

Many African Americans of the Civil War era felt a personal connection to Abraham Lincoln. For the first time in their lives, an occupant of the White House seemed concerned about the welfare of their race. Indeed, despite the tremendous injustice and discrimination that they faced, African Americans now had confidence to write to the president and to seek redress of their grievances. Their letters express the dilemmas, doubts, and dreams of both recently enslaved and free people in the throes of dramatic change. For many, writing Lincoln was a last resort. Yet their letters were often full of determination, making explicit claims to the rights of U.S. citizenship in a wide range of circumstances.

Jonathan W. White's To Address You as My Friend: African Americans' Letters to Abraham Lincoln (UNC Press, 2021) presents more than 120 letters from African Americans to Lincoln, most of which have never before been published. They offer unflinching, intimate, and often heart-wrenching portraits of Black soldiers' and civilians' experiences in wartime. As readers continue to think critically about Lincoln's image as the "Great Emancipator," this book centers African Americans' own voices to explore how they felt about the president and how they understood the possibilities and limits of the power vested in the federal government.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com

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White Balance: How Do Race and Class Intersect? Jan 06, 2023

Understanding race in America requires understanding its relationship to class.

Guests

Joshua Bennett, writer and poet
Julian Bourg, Professor of History at Boston College
Nancy Isenberg, author of White Trash

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Roger A Sneed, "The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought" (Ohio State UP, 2021) Jan 06, 2023

In The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought(Ohio State UP, 2021), Professor Roger Sneed illuminates the interplay of Black religious thought with science fiction narratives to present a bold case for Afrofuturism as an important channel for Black spirituality. In the process, he challenges the assumed primacy of the Black church as the arbiter of Black religious life. Incorporating analyses of Octavia Butler’s Parable books, Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturistic saga, Star Trek’s Captain Benjamin Sisko, Marvel’s Black Panther, and the philosophies of Sun Ra and the Nation of Islam, Sneed demonstrates how Afrofuturism has contributed to Black visions of the future. He also investigates how Afrofuturism has influenced religious scholarship that looks to Black cultural production as a means of reimagining Blackness in the light of the sacred. The result is an expansive new look at the power of science fiction and Afrofuturism to center the diversity of Black spirituality.

Roger A. Sneed is Professor and Chair of Religion at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. His work involves the intersections of African American religious thought and culture, Christian thought and gay male sexualities, and religious ethics. He is a contributor for Huffington Post and has previously published the book Representations of Homosexuality: Black Liberation Theology and Cultural Criticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland

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Dannelle Gutarra Cordero, "She Is Weeping: An Intellectual History of Racialized Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Jan 03, 2023

Dannelle Gutarra Cordero's expansive study incorporates writers, cultural figures and intellectuals from antiquity to the present day to analyze how discourses on emotion serve to create and maintain White supremacy and racism. Throughout history, scientific theories have played a vital role in the accumulation of power over colonized and racialized people. Scientific intellectual discourses on race, gender, and sexuality characterized Blackness as emotionally distinct in both deficiency and excess, a contrast with the emotional benevolence accorded to Whiteness. Ideas on racialized emotions have simultaneously driven the development of devastating body politics by enslaving structures of power. Bold and thought provoking, She Is Weeping: An Intellectual History of Racialized Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World (Cambridge UP, 2022) provides a new understanding of racialized emotions in the Atlantic World, and how these discourses proved instrumental to the rise of slavery and racial capitalism, racialized sexual violence, and the expansion of the carceral state.

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Felicity M. Turner, "Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America" (UNC Press, 2022) Jan 01, 2023

Examining infanticide cases in the United States from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Felicity M. Turner's Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America(UNC Press, 2022) documents how women—Black and white, enslaved and free—gradually lost control over reproduction to male medical and legal professionals. In the first half of the nineteenth century, community-based female knowledge played a crucial role in prosecutions for infanticide: midwives, neighbors, healers, and relatives were better acquainted with an accused woman's intimate life, the circumstances of her pregnancy, and possible motives for infanticide than any man. As the century progressed, women accused of the crime were increasingly subject to the scrutiny of white male legal and medical experts educated in institutions that reinforced prevailing ideas about the inferior mental and physical capacities of women and Black people. As Reconstruction ended, the reach of the carceral state expanded, while law and medicine simultaneously privileged federal and state regulatory power over that of local institutions. These transformations placed all women's bodies at the mercy of male doctors, judges, and juries in ways they had not been before.

Reframing knowledge of the body as property, Felicity M. Turner shows how, at the very moment when the federal government expanded formal civil and political rights to formerly enslaved people, the medical profession instituted new legal regulations across the nation that restricted access to knowledge of the female body to white men.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Tommie Shelby, "The Idea of Prison Abolition" (Princeton UP, 2022) Dec 30, 2022

By any reasonable metric, prisons as they exist in the United States and in many other countries are normatively unacceptable. What is the proper moral response to this? Can prisons and the practices surrounding incarceration feasibly be reformed, or should the entire enterprise be abolished? If the latter, then what? If the former, what are the necessary reforms?

In The Idea of Prison Abolition (Princeton UP, 2022), Tommie Shelby undertakes a systematic and critical examination of the arguments in favor of prison abolition. Although he ultimately rejects abolitionism as a philosophical position, he builds from the abolitionist program’s crucial insights a positive view of what it would take to create a prison and incarceration system that is consistent with justice.

Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

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Abdul Alkalimat, "The Future of Black Studies" (Pluto Press, 2022) Dec 29, 2022

The marginalisation of Black voices from the academy is a problem in the Western world. But Black Studies, where it exists, is a powerful, boundary-pushing discipline, grown out of struggle and community action. In The Future of Black Studies (Pluto Press, 2022), Abdul Alkalimat, one of the founders of Black Studies in the US, presents a reimagining of the future trends in the study of the Black experience.

Taking Marxism and Black Experientialism, Afro-Futurist and Diaspora frameworks, he projects a radical future for the discipline at this time of social crisis. Choosing cornerstones of culture, such as the music of Sun Ra, the movie Black Panther and the writer Octavia Butler, he looks at the trajectory of Black liberation thought since slavery, including new research on the rise in the comparative study of Black people all over the world.

Turning to look at how digital tools enhance the study of the discipline, this book is a powerful read that will inform and inspire students and activists.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the Department of African American Studies. She's on Twitter @amandajoycehall.

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Jefferson Cowie, "Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power" (Basic Books, 2022) Dec 28, 2022

"History recalls Wallace’s inaugural address as a set piece in the larger drama of defending Southern segregation, which it was. But the speech was about something even more profound, more enduring, even more virulent than segregation. Aside from his infamous “Segregation Forever” slogan, Wallace mentioned “segregation” only one other time that afternoon. In contrast, he invoked “freedom” twenty-five times in his speech—more than Martin Luther King Jr. would use the term later that year in his “I Have a Dream” address at the March on Washington. “Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us,” Wallace told his audience, “and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South.” Those rattling shackles of oppression were forged by the enemy of the people of his beloved Barbour County: the federal government."

– Jefferson Cowie, Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (Basic Books, 2022).

Professor Cowie titles his latest book’s introduction ‘George Wallace and American Freedom’, which frames part of the historical narrative within which he reexamines one of our most celebrated values within the purview of local history. But as The New York Times review of the book in December by author Jeff Shesol articulately summarized:

‘Freedom’s Dominion is local history, but in the way that Gettysburg was a local battle or the Montgomery bus boycott was a local protest. The book recounts four peak periods in the conflict between white Alabamians and the federal government: the wild rush, in the early 19th century, to seize and settle lands that belonged to the Creek Nation; Reconstruction; the reassertion of white supremacy under Jim Crow; and the attempts of Wallace and others to nullify the civil rights reforms of the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout, as Cowie reveals, white Southerners portrayed the oppression of Black people and Native Americans not as a repudiation of freedom, but its precondition, its very foundation.’

This book is an engrossing read and check this from Shesol’s review about Wallace and his attraction:

‘Racism was central to his appeal, yet its common note was grievance; the common enemies were elites, the press and the federal government. “Being a Southerner is no longer geographic,” he declared in 1964, during the first of his four runs for the White House. “It’s a philosophy and an attitude.” That attitude, we know, is pervasive now — a primal, animating principle of conservative politics. We hear it in conspiracy theories about the “deep state”; we see it in the actions of Republican officials like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who built a case for his re-election in 2022 by banning — in the name of “individual freedom” — classroom discussions of gender, sexuality and systemic racism.’

Some of Professor Cowie’s other books mentioned in this interview:

Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor (1999) received the 2000 Phillip Taft Prize for the Best Book in Labor History in 2000
Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (2010) awarded the Francis Parkman Prize for the Best Book in American History in 2011
The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (2016)

Professor Cowie’s work in social and political history focuses on how class, inequality, and labor shape American politics and culture. Formerly at Cornell, he is currently the James G. Stahlman Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.

Sydney Business School at Shanghai University - can be reached at keith.krueger1@uts.edu.au or keithNBn@gmail.com

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Pedro Lebrón Ortiz, "The Philosophy of Marronage" (Editora Educación Emergente, 2021) Dec 25, 2022

Pedro Lebrón Ortis's book The Philosophy of Marronage (Filosofía del cimarronaje) theorizes the broader context behind the notion of "cimarronaje," marronage. Usually conceived of as enslaved peoples' flight from the plantation during colonial times, cimarronaje is an expansive term referring to the mentality of living beyond oppressive societal norms. Lebrón Ortiz synthesizes philosophical notions behind cimarronaje to argue that we can see evidence of cimarronaje that continue today.

Other praise:

"Comenzar por la experiencia de quienes no pueden librarse de nada –y mucho menos detener otra voluntad que no sea con los recursos de su propia fuerza– es partir de una experiencia totalmente distinta a la descrita habitualmente en los libros de filosofía política. Se trata de comenzar a pensar la libertad desde la perspectiva de quien experimenta el mundo como una molienda y del que no tiene más vínculos con el poder que una cita pautada con la muerte. Para el esclavizado, la libertad está en salir de esa condición impuesta que lo define todo. Es el camino a otro sitio. Una puerta que se abre cuando menos se espera."

-Anayra O. Santory Jorge

"La filosofía del cimarronaje que se elabora en este texto apunta a la necesidad de pensar la filosofía, no a la manera de admiración desinteresada con respecto a las simplicidades y misterios del mundo, sino como escándalo ante las violencias genocidas y las contradicciones profundas del mundo moderno/colonial."

-Nelson Maldonado-Torres

Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On Twitter.

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Naa Oyo A. Kwate, "White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation" (U Minnesota Press, 2023) Dec 25, 2022

The long and pernicious relationship between fast food restaurants and the African American community. Today, fast food is disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods and marketed to Black Americans through targeted advertising. But throughout much of the twentieth century, fast food was developed specifically for White urban and suburban customers, purposefully avoiding Black spaces.

In White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation(U Minnesota Press, 2023), Naa Oyo A. Kwate traces the evolution in fast food from the early 1900s to the present, from its long history of racist exclusion to its current damaging embrace of urban Black communities. Fast food has historically been tied to the country's self-image as the land of opportunity and is marketed as one of life's simple pleasures, but a more insidious history lies at the industry's core. White Burgers, Black Cash investigates the complex trajectory of restaurant locations from a decided commitment to Whiteness to the disproportionate densities that characterize Black communities today. Kwate expansively charts fast food's racial and spatial transformation and centers the cities of Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C., in a national examination of the biggest brands of today, including White Castle, KFC, Burger King, McDonald's, and more. Deeply researched, grippingly told, and brimming with surprising details, White Burgers, Black Cash reveals the inequalities embedded in the closest thing Americans have to a national meal.

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Michael Ayers Trotti, "The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South" (UNC Press, 2022) Dec 23, 2022

Michael Ayers Trotti's The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion and Punishment in the American South (The University of North Carolina Press, 2022) documents the complex religious and cultural textures of post-Civil War executions in the U.S. South. Before 1850, all legal executions in the South were performed before crowds that could number in the thousands; the last legal public execution was in 1936. This study focuses on the shift from public executions to ones behind barriers, situating that change within our understandings of lynching and competing visions of justice and religion. Intended to shame and intimidate, public executions after the Civil War had quite a different effect on southern Black communities. Crowds typically consisting of as many Black people as white behaved like congregations before a macabre pulpit, led in prayer and song by a Black minister on the scaffold. Black criminals often proclaimed their innocence and almost always their salvation. This turned the proceedings into public, mixed-race and mixed-gender celebrations of Black religious authority and devotion. In response, southern states rewrote their laws to eliminate these crowds and this Black authority, ultimately turning to electrocutions in the bowels of state penitentiaries. In just the same era when a wave of lynchings crested around the turn of the twentieth century, states transformed the ways that the South's white-dominated governments controlled legal capital punishment, making executions into private affairs witnessed only by white people.

Lane Davis is an Instructor of Religion at Huntingdon College. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis

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Lyzette Wanzer, "Trauma, Tresses, and Truth: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives" (Chicago Review Press, 2022) Dec 21, 2022

Black women continue to have a complex and convoluted relationship with their hair. From grammar and high schools to corporate boardrooms and military squadrons, Black and Afro Latina natural hair continues to confound, transfix, and enrage members of White American society. Why, in 2022, is this still the case? Why have we not moved beyond that perennial racist emblem? And why are women so disproportionately affected?

Why does our hair become most palatable when it capitulates, and has been subjugated, to resemble Caucasian features as closely as possible? Who or what is responsible for the web of supervision and surveillance of our hair? Who in our society gets to author the prevailing constitution of professional appearance?

Particularly relevant during this time of emboldened White supremacy, racism, and provocative othering, Lyzette Wanzer's Trauma, Tresses, and Truth: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives (Chicago Review Press, 2022) explores how writing about one of the still-remaining systemic biases in schools, academia, and corporate America might lead to greater understanding and respect.

Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches in the areas of digital cultures, postcolonial literatures, transnational digital feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and global south film studies. Check out their latest book: The Other #MeToos. Follow them on Twitter.

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Craig Seymour, "Luther: The Life and Longing of Luther Vandross" (2017) Dec 21, 2022

On April 16, 2003, Luther Vandross suffered a near-fatal stroke, and the world held its breath. Inside sources said he might never sing again. He was too weak to receive visitors, but cards and good wishes came from Aretha Franklin, David Bowie, Anita Baker, Halle Berry, Patti LaBelle, Jesse Jackson, Burt Bacharach, Bette Midler, Star Jones, Gladys Knight, and Dionne Warwick, among others. With a will to live matched only by the enormous strength and power of his heart, soul, and singing talent, Luther survived and is regaining his voice. Craig Seymour's Luther: The Life and Longing of Luther Vandross (2017) is a loving tribute to the man who has entertained millions.

Luther remains one of the music industry's most private celebrities. In Luther, the first biography of the hugely popular and beloved singer, Craig Seymour investigates and illuminates Luther's life, from his early obsession with soulful girl groups to the day he was discovered by glam rocker David Bowie to his devastating stroke and inspiring recovery. Seymour explores Luther's elusive sexuality, the taboo question that has plagued him for his entire career. He talks about Luther's yo-yo dieting, and the pain his weight has caused him and those around him. He tells the whole story behind the widely publicized feuds between Luther and R&B icons Aretha Franklin and Anita Baker as well as the group En Vogue. And he frankly and honestly explores the tragedies of Luther's life: the 1986 car crash that killed his best friend and nearly destroyed his career, and the 2003 stroke that almost ended his life.

An authentic R&B legend, Luther Vandross is one of the most popular and talented vocalists in the world. His life has been full of pain and love, tragedy and redemption. And now, for the first time ever, Luther gives you a backstage pass into his life and longing.

Cresa Pugh is a PhD Candidate in sociology and social policy at Harvard University. For more information see scholar.harvard.edu/cresa and follow her on Twitter @CresaPugh.

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Jacob Kramer, "The New Freedom and the Radicals: Woodrow Wilson, Progressive Views of Radicalism, and the Origins of Repressive Tolerance" (Temple UP, 2015) Dec 21, 2022

In The New Freedom and the Radicals: Woodrow Wilson, Progressive Views of Radicalism, and the Origins of Repressive Tolerance (Temple University Press, 2015), Jacob Kramer examines how progressivism emerged at a time of critical transformation in American life. Kramer presents a study of Wilsonian-era politics to convey an understanding of the progressives’ views on radical America.

Jacob Kramer is an Associate Professor of History at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Quito J. Swan, "Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-Colonialism, and the African World" (NYU Press, 2022) Dec 20, 2022

Oceania is a vast sea of islands, large scale political struggles and immensely significant historical phenomena. Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-Colonialism, and the African World(NYU Press, 2022) is a compelling history of understudied anti-colonial movements in this region, exploring how indigenous Oceanic activists intentionally forged international connections with the African world in their fights for liberation.

Drawing from research conducted across Fiji, Australia, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Britain, and the United States, Quito Swan shows how liberation struggles in Oceania actively engaged Black internationalism in their diverse battles against colonial rule. Pasifika Black features as its protagonists Oceania's many playwrights, organizers, religious leaders, scholars, Black Power advocates, musicians, environmental justice activists, feminists, and revolutionaries who carried the banners of Black liberation across the globe. It puts artists like Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and her 1976 call for a Black Pacific into an extended conversation with Nigeria's Wole Soyinka, the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific's Amelia Rokotuivuna, Samoa's Albert Wendt, African American anthropologist Angela Gilliam, the NAACP's Roy Wilkins, West Papua's Ben Tanggahma, New Caledonia's Déwé Gorodey, and Polynesian Panther Will 'Ilolahia. In so doing, Swan displays the links Oceanic activists consciously and painstakingly formed in order to connect Black metropoles across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.

In a world grappling with the global significance of Black Lives Matter and state-sanctioned violence against Black and Brown bodies, Pasifika Black is a both triumphant history and tragic reminder of the ongoing quests for decolonization in Oceania, the African world, and the Global South.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the Department of African American Studies. She's on Twitter @amandajoycehall.

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Sonya Y. Ramsey, "Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership" (UP of Florida, 2022) Dec 18, 2022

Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership (UP of Florida, 2022) examines a life of remarkable achievements and leadership in the desegregated South. Sonya Ramsey modernizes the nineteenth-century term "race woman" to describe how Maxwell-Roddey and her peers turned hard-won civil rights and feminist milestones into tangible accomplishments in North Carolina and nationwide from the late 1960s to the 1990s.

Born in 1930, Maxwell-Roddey became one of Charlotte's first Black women principals of a white elementary school; she was the founding director of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte's Africana Studies Department; and she cofounded the Afro-American Cultural and Service Center, now the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Art + Culture. Maxwell-Roddey founded the National Council for Black Studies, helping institutionalize the field with what is still its premier professional organization, and served as the 20th National President of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., one of the most influential Black women's organizations in the United States.

Using oral histories and primary sources that include private records from numerous Black women's home archives, Ramsey illuminates the intersectional leadership strategies used by Maxwell-Roddey and other modern race women to dismantle discriminatory barriers in the classroom and the boardroom. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey offers new insights into desegregation, urban renewal, and the rise of the Black middle class through the lens of a powerful leader's life story.

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Matthew F. Delmont, "Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad" (Viking, 2022) Dec 18, 2022

Over one million Black men and women served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in segregated units and performing unheralded but vital support jobs, only to be denied housing and educational opportunities on their return home. Without their crucial contributions to the war effort, the United States could not have won the war. And yet the stories of these Black veterans have long been ignored, cast aside in favor of the myth of the “Good War” fought by the “Greatest Generation.”

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (Viking, 2022) is American history as you’ve likely never read it before. In these pages are stories of Black heroes such as Thurgood Marshall, the chief lawyer for the NAACP, who investigated and publicized violence against Black troops and veterans; Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., leader of the Tuskegee Airmen, who was at the forefront of the years-long fight to open the Air Force to Black pilots; Ella Baker, the civil rights leader who advocated on the home front for Black soldiers, veterans, and their families; James Thompson, the 26-year-old whose letter to a newspaper laying bare the hypocrisy of fighting against fascism abroad when racism still reigned at home set in motion the Double Victory campaign; and poet Langston Hughes, who worked as a war correspondent for the Black press. Their bravery and patriotism in the face of unfathomable racism is both inspiring and galvanizing. In a time when the questions World War II raised regarding race and democracy in America remain troublingly relevant and still unanswered, this meticulously researched retelling makes for urgently necessary reading.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com

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Gregory Smithsimon, "Liberty Road: Black Middle-Class Suburbs and the Battle Between Civil Rights and Neoliberalism" (NYU Press, 2022) Dec 16, 2022

Half of Black Americans who live in the one hundred largest metropolitan areas are now living in suburbs, not cities. In Liberty Road: Black Middle-Class Suburbs and the Battle Between Civil Rights and Neoliberalism (NYU Press, 2022), Gregory Smithsimon shows us how this happened, and why it matters, unearthing the hidden role that suburbs played in establishing the Black middle-class.

Focusing on Liberty Road, a Black middle-class suburb of Randallstown, Maryland, Smithsimon tells the remarkable story of how residents broke the color barrier, against all odds, in the face of racial discrimination, tensions with suburban Whites and urban Blacks, and economic crises like the mortgage meltdown of 2008. Drawing on interviews, census data, and archival research he shows us the unique strategies that suburban Black residents in Liberty Road employed, creating a blueprint for other Black middle-class suburbs.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Philip Nanton, "Riff: The Shake Keane Story" (Papillote Press, 2022) Dec 14, 2022

Philip Nanton's new book Riff: The Shake Keane Story (Papillote Press, 2022) follows the life and work of Shake Keane, the peripatetic and creative poet and musician from St. Vincent. Keane was an influential figure in the 1960s London jazz scene, worked briefly for the government on his home island, and moved to New York where he built lasting relationships, all the while creating an extensive discography and numerous publications. Nanton's considerations of Keane's contributions to freeform jazz as well as his innovative approach to poetry will inspire readers to seek out the sounds and words he left behind.

Alejandra Bronfman is Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany.

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Autumn Womack, "The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Dec 08, 2022

Autumn Womack is a professor of English and of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her new book, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2022), addresses scholars and readers interested in literary studies, visual culture, and transformative justice in modern America. The book also transcends these areas to speak to readers in science & technology studies, in history of technology, or broadly interested in science justice.

The premise of the book is that America was living through two collective experiments as it suffered the aftermath of the failed Reconstruction following the US Civil War. The first was the experiment of Black freedom and the second was the experiment of new technologies to document (Black) life at a time when standards for how to use and to read their outputs were excitingly wide-open. In the hands of Black cultural producers, the yield of these technologies was “undisciplined data,” which pointed to the possibility of true freedom not mere social reform as defined by White progressives.

Readers follow writer Zora Neale Hurston working with anthropological film, WEB Dubois working with the social survey as a foundation for his urban sociology as well as for his literary novels, and other historical actors who were using documentary technologies to demonstrate the impossibility of capturing the fullness of Black sociality with those very technologies. Producing “undisciplined data,” Womack suggests, is not only a practice of the past, but the hope for greater justice in the present day.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the seminar “Science & Technology Studies.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom. Email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu.

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Barbara E. Mattick, "Teaching in Black and White: The Sisters of St. Joseph in the American South" (Catholic U of America Press Dec 07, 2022

Teaching in Black and White: The Sisters of St. Joseph in the American South(Catholic University of America Press, 2022) discusses the work of the Sisters of St. Joseph of (the city of) St. Augustine, who came to Florida from France in 1866 to teach newly freed blacks after the Civil War, and remain to this day. It also tells the story of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Georgia, who sprang from the motherhouse in St. Augustine.

A significant part of the book is a comparison of the Sisters of St. Josephs’ work against that of their major rivals, missionaries from the Protestant American Missionary Association. Using letters the Sisters wrote back to their motherhouse in France, the book provides rare glimpses into the personal and professional (pun intended) lives of these women religious in St. Augustine and other parts of Florida and Georgia, from the mid-nineteenth century through the era of anti-Catholicism in the early twentieth century South. It carries the story through 1922, the end of the pioneer years of the Sisters of St. Josephs’ work in Florida, and the end of Sisters of St. Joseph of Georgia’s existence as a distinct order. Through the lenses of Catholicism, Florida and Southern history, gender, and race, the book addresses the Protestant concept of domesticity and how it was reinforced in Catholic terms by women who seemingly defied the ideal. It also relates the Sisters’ contributions in shaping life in the South during Reconstruction as they established elite academies and free schools, created orphanages, ministered to all during severe yellow fever epidemics, and fought the specter of anti-Catholicism as it crept across the rural regions of the country. To date, little has been written about Catholics in the South, much less the women religious who served there. This book helps to fill that gap.

Teaching in Black and White provides rare glimpses into the personal and professional lives of women religious in Florida and Georgia, from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth-century.

Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

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Virginia L. Summey, "The Life of Elreta Melton Alexander: Activism within the Courts" (U Georgia Press, 2022) Dec 07, 2022

Virginia L. Summey's book The Life of Elreta Melton Alexander: Activism within the Courts (U Georgia Press, 2022) explores the life and contributions of groundbreaking attorney, Elreta Melton Alexander Ralston (1919–98). In 1945 Alexander became the first African American woman to graduate from Columbia Law School. In 1947 she was the first African American woman to practice law in the state of North Carolina, and in 1968 she became the first African American woman to become an elected district court judge. Despite her accomplishments, Alexander is little known to scholars outside of her hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina. Her life and career deserve recognition, however, not just because of her impressive lists of “firsts,” but also owing to her accomplishments during the civil rights movement in the U.S. South.

While Alexander did not actively participate in civil rights marches and demonstrations, she used her professional achievements and middle-class status to advocate for individuals who lacked a voice in the southern legal system. Virginia L. Summey argues that Alexander was integral to the civil rights movement in North Carolina as she, and women like her, worked to change discriminatory laws while opening professional doors for other minority women. Using her professional status, Alexander combatted segregation by demonstrating that Black women were worthy and capable of achieving careers alongside white men, thereby creating environments in which other African Americans could succeed. Her legal expertise and ability to reach across racial boundaries made her an important figure in Greensboro history.

Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2021) and co-editor of Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020 (Texas A&M University Press, scheduled Spring 2023). Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1.

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Barbara Harris Combs, "Bodies Out of Place: Theorizing Anti-Blackness in U.S. Society" (U Georgia Press, 2022) Dec 06, 2022

Bodies Out of Place: Theorizing Anti-Blackness in U.S. Society(U Georgia Press, 2022) asserts that anti-Black racism is not better than it used to be; it is just performed in more-nuanced ways. Barbara Harris Combs argues that racism is dynamic, so new theories are needed to help expose it. The Bodies-out-of-Place (BOP) theory she advances in the book offers such a corrective lens. Interrogating several recent racialized events—the Central Park birding incident, the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, sleeping while Black occurrences, and others—Combs demonstrates how the underlying belief that undergirds each encounter is a false presumption that Black bodies in certain contexts are out of place.

Within these examples she illustrates how, even amid professions to color-blindness, fixed attitudes about where Black bodies belong, in what positions, at what time, and with whom still predominate. Combs describes a long historical pattern of White pushback against Black advancement and illuminates how each of the various forms of pushback is aimed at social control and regulation of Black bodies. She describes overt and covert attempts to push Black bodies back into their presumed place in U.S. society. While the pushback takes many forms, each works to paint a narrative to justify, rationalize, and excuse continuing violence against Black bodies. Equally important, Combs celebrates the resilient Black agency that has resisted this subjugation.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at okaverettephillips@ucdavis.edu.

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On James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" Dec 05, 2022

The writer and activist James Baldwin grew up in a majority white America that saw white American lives as standard and universal, and Black American lives as different and particular. But in his 1963 book The Fire Next Time, Baldwin showed that his life as a Black man in America was universally human. Josef Sorett is the Professor of Religion and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. He is also chair of the Department of Religion and directs the Center on African-American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice. He is the author of Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod.

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Ryan Thomas Skinner, "Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country" (U Minnesota Press, 2022) Nov 29, 2022

Contemporary Sweden is a country with a worldwide progressive reputation, despite an undeniable tradition of racism within its borders. In the face of this contradiction of culture and history, Afro-Swedes have emerged as a vibrant demographic presence, from generations of diasporic movement, migration, and homemaking. In Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country(U Minnesota Press, 2022), Ryan Thomas Skinner uses oral histories, archival research, ethnography, and textual analysis to explore the history and culture of this diverse and growing Afro-European community.

Skinner employs the conceptual themes of "remembering" and "renaissance" to illuminate the history and culture of the Afro-Swedish community, drawing on the rich theoretical traditions of the African and Black diaspora. Remembering fosters a sustained meditation on Afro-Swedish social history, while Renaissance indexes a thriving Afro-Swedish public culture. Together, these concepts illuminate significant existential modes of Afro-Swedish being and becoming, invested in and contributing to the work of global Black studies.

The first scholarly monograph in English to focus specifically on the African and Black diaspora in Sweden, Afro-Sweden emphasizes the voices, experiences, practices, knowledge, and ideas of these communities. Its rigorously interdisciplinary approach to understanding diasporic communities is essential to contemporary conversations around such issues as the status and identity of racialized populations in Europe and the international impact of Black Lives Matter.

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Sarah Abel, "Permanent Markers: Race, Ancestry, and the Body After the Genome" (UNC Press, 2021) Nov 29, 2022

Over the past twenty years, DNA ancestry testing has morphed from a niche market into a booming international industry that encourages members of the public to answer difficult questions about their identity by looking to the genome. At a time of intensified interest in issues of race and racism, the burgeoning influence of corporations like AncestryDNA and 23andMe has sparked debates about the commodification of identity, the antiracist potential of genetic science, and the promises and pitfalls of using DNA as a source of "objective" knowledge about the past.

Permanent Markers: Race, Ancestry, and the Body After the Genome (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) engages these debates by looking at the ways genomic ancestry testing has been used in Brazil and the United States to address the histories and legacies of slavery, from personal genealogical projects to collective racial politics. Reckoning with the struggles of science versus capitalism, "race-blind" versus "race-positive" public policies, and identity fluidity versus embodied experiences of racism, Permanent Markers seeks to explain why those of us in societies that have broadly embraced the social construction of race continue to search for, and find, evidence that our bodies are marked permanently by the past.

Sarah Abel is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge's Centre of Latin American Studies.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of Southern California.

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Jasmine Nichole Cobb, "New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair" (Duke UP, 2022) Nov 25, 2022

From Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, “natural hair” has been associated with the Black freedom struggle. In New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair(Duke UP, 2022), Jasmine Nichole Cobb traces the history of Afro-textured coiffure, exploring it as a visual material through which to reimagine the sensual experience of Blackness. Through close readings of slave narratives, scrapbooks, travel illustrations, documentary films, and photography as well as collage, craft, and sculpture, from the nineteenth century to the present, Cobb shows how the racial distinctions ascribed to people of African descent become simultaneously visible and tactile. Whether examining Soul Train’s and Ebony’s promotion of the Afro hairstyle alongside styling products or how artists such as Alison Saar and Lorna Simpson underscore the construction of Blackness through the representation of hair, Cobb foregrounds the inseparability of Black hair’s look and feel. Demonstrating that Blackness is palpable through appearance and feeling, Cobb reveals the various ways that people of African descent forge new relationships to the body, public space, and visual culture through the embrace of Black hair.

Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter

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Gregory Nobles, "The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Nov 25, 2022

The life of Betsey Stockton (ca. 1798–1865) is a remarkable story of a Black woman’s journey from slavery to emancipation, from antebellum New Jersey to the Hawai‘ian Islands, and from her own self-education to a lifetime of teaching others—all told against the backdrop of the early United States’ pervasive racism. It’s a compelling chronicle of a critical time in American history and a testament to the courage and commitment of a woman whose persistence grew into a potent form of resistance.

When Betsey Stockton was a child, she was “given, as a slave” to the household of Rev. Ashbel Green, a prominent pastor and later the president of what is now Princeton University. Although she never went to school, she devoured the books in Green’s library. After being emancipated, she used that education to benefit other people of color, first in Hawai‘i as a missionary, then Philadelphia, and, for the last three decades of her life, Princeton—a college town with a genteel veneer that never fully hid its racial hostility. Betsey Stockton became a revered figure in Princeton’s sizeable Black population, a founder of religious and educational institutions, and a leader engaged in the day-to-day business of building communities.

In The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (U Chicago Press, 2022), Gregory Nobles illuminates both a woman and her world, following her around the globe, and showing how a determined individual could challenge her society’s racial obstacles from the ground up. It’s at once a revealing lesson on the struggles of Stockton’s times and a fresh inspiration for our own.

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Tara T. Green, "Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson" (Bloomsbury, 2022) Nov 25, 2022

Born in New Orleans in 1875 to a mother who was formerly enslaved and a father of questionable identity, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a pioneering activist, writer, suffragist, and educator. Until now, Dunbar-Nelson has largely been viewed only in relation to her abusive ex-husband, the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (Bloomsbury, 2022) is the first book-length look at this major figure in Black women's history, covering her life from the post-reconstruction era through the Harlem Renaissance. Tara T. Green builds on Black feminist, sexuality, historical and cultural studies to create a literary biography that examines Dunbar-Nelson's life and legacy as a respectable activist – a woman who navigated complex challenges associated with resisting racism and sexism, and who defined her sexual identity and sexual agency within the confines of respectability politics. It's a book about the past, but it's also a book about the present that nods to the future.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Christopher Willoughby, "Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in US Medical Schools" (UNC Press, 2022) Nov 24, 2022

Medical science in antebellum America was organized around a paradox: it presumed African Americans to be less than human yet still human enough to be viable as experimental subjects, as cadavers, and for use in the training of medical students. By taking a hard look at the racial ideas of both northern and southern medical schools, Christopher D. E. Willoughby reveals that racist ideas were not external to the medical profession but fundamental to medical knowledge.

In this history of racial thinking and slavery in American medical schools, the founders and early faculty of these schools emerge as singularly influential proponents of white supremacist racial science. They pushed an understanding of race influenced by the theory of polygenesis—that each race was created separately and as different species—which they supported by training students to collect and measure human skulls from around the world. Medical students came to see themselves as masters of Black people's bodies through stealing Black people’s corpses, experimenting on enslaved people, and practicing distinctive therapeutics on Black patients. In documenting these practices Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in US Medical Schools(UNC Press, 2022) charts the rise of racist theories in U.S. medical schools, throwing new light on the extensive legacies of slavery in modern medicine.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Ray Scott, "The NBA in Black and White: The Memoir of a Trailblazing NBA Player and Coach" (Seven Stories Press, 2022) Nov 24, 2022

“There’s a basic insecurity with Black guys my size,” Scott writes. “We can’t hide and everybody turns to stare when we walk down the street. … Whites believe that their culture is superior to African-American culture. ... We don’t accept many of [their] answers, but we have to live with them.”

Ray Scott was part of the early wave of Black NBA players like Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, and later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who literally changed how the game of professional basketball is played—leading to the tremendously popular financial blockbuster the NBA is today. Scott was a celebrated 6’9” forward/center after being chosen by the Detroit Pistons as the #4 pick of the 1961 NBA draft, and then again after he was named head coach of the Pistons in October 1972, winning Coach of the Year in the spring of 1974—the first black man ever to capture that honor.

Scott’s is a story of quiet persistence, hard work, and, most of all, respect. He credits the mentorship of NBA player and coach Earl Lloyd, and talks about fellow Philly native Wilt Chamberlain and friends Muhammad Ali and Aretha Franklin, among many others. Ray has lived through one of the most turbulent times in our nation’s history, especially the time of assassinations of so many Black leaders at the end of the 1960s. Through it all, his voice remains quiet and measured, transcending all the sorrows with his steadiness and positive attitude. The NBA in Black and White: The Memoir of a Trailblazing NBA Player and Coach (Seven Stories Press, 2022) is his story, told in collaboration with the great basketball writer, former college player and CBA coach Charley Rosen.

Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Marquis Bey, "Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender" (Duke UP, 2022) Nov 24, 2022

In Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender(Duke UP, 2022), Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender. Bey asks, What does it mean to have a gender that “matches” one’s sex---that is, to be cisgender---when decades of feminist theory have destroyed the belief that there is some natural way to be a sex? Moving from the The Powerpuff Girls to the greeting “How ya mama’n’em?” to their own gender identity, Bey finds that cisgender is too flat as a category to hold the myriad ways that people who may or may not have undergone gender-affirmative interventions depart from gender alignment. At the same time, blackness, they contend, strikes at the heart of cisgender’s invariable coding as white: just as transness names a non-cis space, blackness implies a non-cis space. By showing how blackness opens up a way to subvert the hegemonic power of the gender binary, Bey makes a case for an antiracist gender abolition project that rejects cisgender as a regulatory apparatus.

Marquis Bey is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University and author of several books, most recently Black Trans Feminism, also published by Duke University Press.

Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Candidate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies.

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Anna Arabindan-Kesson, "Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World" (Duke UP, 2021) Nov 23, 2022

In Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Duke UP, 2021), Anna Arabindan-Kesson uses cotton, a commodity central to the slave trade and colonialism, as a focus for new interpretations of the way art, commerce, and colonialism were intertwined in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. In doing so, Arabindan-Kesson models an art historical approach that makes the histories of the Black diaspora central to nineteenth-century cultural production. She traces the emergence of a speculative vision that informs perceptions of Blackness in which artistic renderings of cotton--as both commodity and material--became inexorably tied to the monetary value of Black bodies. From the production and representation of "negro cloth"--the textile worn by enslaved plantation workers--to depictions of Black sharecroppers in photographs and paintings, Arabindan-Kesson demonstrates that visuality was the mechanism through which Blackness and cotton became equated as resources for extraction. In addition to interrogating the work of nineteenth-century artists, she engages with contemporary artists such as Hank Willis Thomas, Lubaina Himid, and Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, who contend with the commercial and imperial processes shaping constructions of Blackness and meanings of labor.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Rhonda F. Levine, "When Race Meets Class: African Americans Coming of Age in a Small City" (Routledge, 2019) Nov 23, 2022

In When Race Meets Class: African Americans Coming of Age in a Small City (Routledge, 2019), Rhonda Levine provides a 15-year ethnography that follows the lives of individual, low-income African American youth from the beginning of high school into their early adult years. Levine shows how their interaction and experience with multiple institutions (family, school, community) and individuals (parents, friends, teachers, coaches, strangers) shape their hopes, fears, aspirations, and worldviews. Levine explores the volatility and constraints underlying their decision-making and behaviors.

Rhonda Levine is Professor of Sociology, Emerita, at Colgate University, USA.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Jeanne Theoharis, "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks" (Beacon Press, 2015) Nov 23, 2022

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Beacon Press, 2015) is the definitive political biography of Rosa Parks and the basis for a 2022 documentary, Theoharis's book examines Park's six decades of activism, challenging perceptions of her as an accidental actor in the civil rights movement.

This interview revisits the original book, as well as Dr. Theoharis's involvement as a consulting producer and participant in the documentary. The film premiered in 2022 at the Tribeca Film Festival and is currently streaming on Peacock Presenting a powerful corrective to the popular iconography of Rosa Parks as the quiet seamstress who with a single act birthed the modern civil rights movement, scholar Jeanne Theoharis excavates Parks’s political philosophy and six decades of activism. Theoharis masterfully details the political depth of a national heroine who dedicated her life to fighting American inequality and, in the process, resurrects a civil rights movement radical who has been hidden in plain sight far too long.

Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University and an Associate Faculty member at University of Arizona Global Campus. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne.

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Caroline Grego, "Hurricane Jim Crow: How the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Shaped the Lowcountry South" (UNC Press, 2022) Nov 22, 2022

On an August night in 1893, the deadliest hurricane in South Carolina history struck the Lowcountry, killing thousands—almost all African American. But the devastating storm is only the beginning of this story. The hurricane's long effects intermingled with ongoing processes of economic downturn, racial oppression, resistance, and environmental change. In the Lowcountry, the political, economic, and social conditions of Jim Crow were inextricable from its environmental dimensions.

This narrative history of a monumental disaster and its aftermath uncovers how Black workers and politicians, white landowners and former enslavers, northern interlocutors and humanitarians all met on the flooded ground of the coast and fought to realize very different visions for the region's future. Through a telescoping series of narratives in which no one's actions were ever fully triumphant or utterly futile, Hurricane Jim Crow: How the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Shaped the Lowcountry South (UNC Press, 2022) explores with nuance this painful and contradictory history and shows how environmental change, political repression, and communal traditions of resistance, survival, and care converged.

Caroline Grego is assistant professor of history at Queens University of Charlotte. Twitter. Website.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Paul Barba, "Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands" (U Nebraska Press, 2021) Nov 22, 2022

Most of what people think they know about Texas history is wrong, argues Bucknell University history professor Paul Barba in Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery in the Texas Borderlands(U Nebraska Press, 2021). Setting out to write a book on Texas history that didn't mention The Alamo, Barba instead views the region's past through the lenses of borderlands analysis, slavery and captivity, and anti-Blackness, to paint a very different picture than the Texas of popular memory. From the sixteenth century onwards, Texas was defined by captivity and kinship, two mutually constitutive sides of the same story. In a place where no one group - Spanish, Comanche, Anglo - could easily take the upper hand of power, all sides needed unfree people to perform colonial labor and conduct diplomacy across cultures. Slavery became critical to the region's history from the earliest days of colonization, and only deepened as Texas grew into an extension of the enslaved economy of the cotton south. Rather than a land of democratic freedom, the Texas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is defined by captivity and struggle between colonized, colonizers, and those caught in between.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Elliott H. Powell, "Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music" (U Minnesota Press, 2020) Nov 21, 2022

From Beyoncé's South Asian music-inspired Super Bowl Halftime performance, to jazz artists like John and Alice Coltrane's use of Indian song structures and spirituality in their work, to Jay-Z and Missy Elliott's high-profile collaborations with diasporic South Asian artists such as the Panjabi MC and MIA, African American musicians have frequently engaged South Asian cultural productions in the development of Black music culture. Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music (U Minnesota Press, 2020) traces such engagements through an interdisciplinary analysis of the political implications of African American musicians' South Asian influence since the 1960s.

Elliott H. Powell asks, what happens when we consider Black musicians' South Asian sonic explorations as distinct from those of their white counterparts? He looks to Black musical genres of jazz, funk, and hip hop and examines the work of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Rick James, OutKast, Timbaland, Beyoncé, and others, showing how Afro-South Asian music in the United States is a dynamic, complex, and contradictory cultural site where comparative racialization, transformative gender and queer politics, and coalition politics intertwine. Powell situates this cultural history within larger global and domestic sociohistorical junctures that link African American and South Asian diasporic communities in the United States. The long historical arc of Afro-South Asian music in Sounds from the Other Side interprets such music-making activities as highly political endeavors, offering an essential conversation about cross-cultural musical exchanges between racially marginalized musicians.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Psyche A. Williams-Forson, "Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America" (UNC Press, 2022) Nov 21, 2022

In Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America(UNC Press, 2022), Psyche A. Williams-Forson offers her knowledge and experience to illuminate how anti-Black racism operates in the practice and culture of eating. She shows how mass media, nutrition science, economics, and public policy drive entrenched opinions among both Black and non-Black Americans about what is healthful and right to eat. Distorted views of how and what Black people eat are pervasive, bolstering the belief that they must be corrected and regulated. What is at stake is nothing less than whether Americans can learn to embrace nonracist understandings and practices in relation to food. Starkly exposing the rampant shaming and policing around how Black people eat, Williams-Forson contemplates food's role in cultural transmission, belonging, homemaking, and survival. Black people's relationships to food have historically been connected to extreme forms of control and scarcity--as well as to stunning creativity and ingenuity. In advancing dialogue about eating and race, this book urges us to think and talk about food in new ways in order to improve American society on both personal and structural levels.

Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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Riché Richardson, "Emancipation's Daughters: Re-Imagining Black Femininity and the National Body" (Duke UP, 2020) Nov 17, 2022

In Emancipation's Daughters: Re-Imagining Black Femininity and the National Body(Duke UP, 2020), Riché Richardson examines iconic black women leaders who have contested racial stereotypes and constructed new national narratives of black womanhood in the United States. Drawing on literary texts and cultural representations, Richardson shows how five emblematic black women—Mary McLeod Bethune, Rosa Parks, Condoleezza Rice, Michelle Obama, and Beyoncé—have challenged white-centered definitions of American identity. By using the rhetoric of motherhood and focusing on families and children, these leaders have defied racist images of black women, such as the mammy or the welfare queen, and rewritten scripts of femininity designed to exclude black women from civic participation. Richardson shows that these women's status as national icons was central to reconstructing black womanhood in ways that moved beyond dominant stereotypes. However, these formulations are often premised on heteronormativity and exclude black queer and trans women. Throughout Emancipation's Daughters, Richardson reveals new possibilities for inclusive models of blackness, national femininity, and democracy.

Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter

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R. Isabela Morales, "Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom" (Oxford UP, 2022) Nov 15, 2022

When Samuel Townsend died at his home in Madison County, Alabama, in November 1856, the fifty-two-year-old white planter left behind hundreds of slaves, thousands of acres of rich cotton land, and a net worth of approximately $200,000. In life, Samuel had done little to distinguish himself from other members of the South's elite slaveholding class. But he made a name for himself in death by leaving almost the entirety of his fortune to his five sons, four daughters, and two nieces: all of them his slaves.

In Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom(Oxford UP, 2022), R. Isabela Morales reconstructs the migration of this mixed-race family across the American West and South over the second half of the nineteenth century. Searching for communities where they could exercise their newfound freedom and wealth to the fullest, members of the family homesteaded and attended college in Ohio and Kansas; fought for the Union Army in Mississippi; mined for silver in the Colorado Rockies; and, in the case of one son, returned to Alabama to purchase part of the old plantation where he had once been held as a slave. In Morales's telling, the Townsends' story maps a new landscape of opportunity and oppression, where the meanings of race and freedom--as well as opportunities for social and economic mobility--were dictated by highly local circumstances.

During the turbulent period between the Civil War and the rise of Jim Crow at the turn of the twentieth century, the Townsends carved out spaces where they were able to benefit from their money and mixed-race ancestry, pass down generational wealth, and realize some of their happy dreams of liberty.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Jeffrey Bellin, "Mass Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became Addicted to Prisons and Jails and How it Can Recover" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Nov 15, 2022

The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than any other nation. Mass Incarceration Nation offers a novel, in-the-trenches perspective to explain the factors - historical, political, and institutional - that led to the current system of mass imprisonment. Jeffrey Bellin's book Mass Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became Addicted to Prisons and Jails and How it Can Recover (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines the causes and impacts of mass incarceration on both the political and criminal justice systems. With accessible language and straightforward statistical analysis, former prosecutor turned law professor Jeffery Bellin provides a formula for reform to return to the low incarceration rates that characterized the United States prior to the 1970s.

Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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Therí Alyce Pickens, "Black Madness :: Mad Blackness" (Duke UP, 2019) Nov 14, 2022

In Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Duke UP, 2019), Therí Alyce Pickens rethinks the relationship between Blackness and disability, unsettling the common theorization that they are mutually constitutive. Pickens shows how Black speculative and science fiction authors such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due craft new worlds that reimagine the intersection of Blackness and madness. These creative writer-theorists formulate new parameters for thinking through Blackness and madness. Pickens considers Butler's Fledgling as an archive of Black madness that demonstrates how race and ability shape subjectivity while constructing the building blocks for antiracist and anti-ableist futures. She examines how Hopkinson's Midnight Robber theorizes mad Blackness and how Due's African Immortals series contests dominant definitions of the human. The theorizations of race and disability that emerge from these works, Pickens demonstrates, challenge the paradigms of subjectivity that white supremacy and ableism enforce, thereby pointing to the potential for new forms of radical politics.

Clayton Jarrard is a Research Project Coordinator at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives that bridge research, policy, and community efforts. His scholarly engagement spans the subject areas of Cultural Anthropology, Queer Studies, Disability Studies, Mad Studies, and Religious Studies.

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Kathryn Gin Lum, "Heathen: Religion and Race in American History" (Harvard UP, 2022) Nov 11, 2022

In Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022), Kathryn Gin Lum shows how the idea of the “heathen” has been maintained from the colonial era to the present in religious and secular discourses—discourses, specifically, of race. Race continues to operate as a heathen inheritance in the United States, animating Americans’ sense of being a world apart from an undifferentiated mass of needy, suffering peoples. Heathen thus reveals a key source of American exceptionalism and a prism through which Americans have defined themselves as a progressive and humanitarian nation even as supposed heathens have drawn on the same to counter this national myth.

Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser).

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Muggsy Bogues and Jake Uitti, "Muggsy: My Life from a Kid in the Projects to the Godfather of Small Ball" (Triumph, 2022) Nov 10, 2022

Growing up, Muggsy Bogues was always told he should do something else, anything besides basketball. He never acknowledged his many doubters except to prove them spectacularly wrong. Twenty years after receiving his first basketball as a toddler, he stood proud—at five-foot-three—as the starting point guard for the Charlotte Hornets in the NBA. From the East Baltimore playground courts where he earned his nickname by muggin' opponents for possession of the ball to Dunbar High School where he excelled alongside future NBA players, Bogues set the tone in his early years for the great heights he'd reach professionally.

In Muggsy: My Life from a Kid in the Projects to the Godfather of Small Ball (Triumph, 2022), Bogues delves deep into his life and career, reflecting on legendary battles with Michael Jordan, John Stockton, and other generational stars of ’80s and ’90s hoops. He shares far-ranging anecdotes from playoff runs in Charlotte, filming Space Jam, and even watching a young Steph Curry grow up. Conversational and clear-sighted, this is a story of uncompromising vision and fleet-footed determination during a golden era for the NBA.

Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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David Silkenat, "Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South" (Oxford UP, 2022) Nov 10, 2022

They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people found their lives indelibly shaped by the Southern environment. By day, they plucked worms and insects from the crops, trod barefoot in the mud as they hoed rice fields, and endured the sun and humidity as they planted and harvested the fields. By night, they clandestinely took to the woods and swamps to trap opossums and turtles, to visit relatives living on adjacent plantations, and at times to escape slave patrols and escape to freedom.

Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South(Oxford UP, 2022) is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape. Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple calculation had profound consequences: rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce. They saw the landscape as disposable, relocating to more fertile prospects once they had leached the soils and cut down the forests. On the leading edge of the frontier, slavery laid waste to fragile ecosystems, draining swamps, clearing forests to plant crops and fuel steamships, and introducing devastating invasive species. On its trailing edge, slavery left eroded hillsides, rivers clogged with sterile soil, and the extinction of native species. While environmental destruction fueled slavery's expansion, no environment could long survive intensive slave labor. The scars manifested themselves in different ways, but the land too fell victim to the slave owner's lash.

Although typically treated separately, slavery and the environment naturally intersect in complex and powerful ways, leaving lasting effects from the period of emancipation through modern-day reckonings with racial justice.

Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2021) and co-editor of Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020 (Texas A&M University Press, scheduled Spring 2023). Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1.

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Todd Meyers, "All That Was Not Her" (Duke UP, 2022) Nov 09, 2022

While studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Meyers met a woman named Beverly. In All That Was Not Her (Duke UP, 2022) Meyers presents an intimate ethnographic portrait of Beverly, stitching together small moments they shared scattered over months and years and, following her death, into the present. He meditates on the possibilities of writing about someone who is gone—what should be represented, what experiences resist rendering, what ethical challenges exist when studying the lives of others. Meyers considers how chronic illness is bound up in the racialized and socioeconomic conditions of Beverly’s life and explores the stakes of the anthropologist’s engagement with one subject. Even as Meyers struggles to give Beverly the final word, he finds himself unmade alongside her. All That Was Not Her captures the complexity of personal relationships in the field and the difficulty of their ending.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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On Toni Morrison's "Beloved" Nov 09, 2022

In 1987, Toni Morrison published her fourth novel, Beloved, based on the story of Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery with her child. Garner and her daughter were discovered by slave catchers. Rather than have her return to slavery, Garner killed her child. In Beloved, Morrison’s character Sethe has a similar story, but years later she meets a young girl who is the incarnation of the daughter she had killed. When Beloved came out, it immediately became Morrison’s most acclaimed work. It was nominated for the National Book Award and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Beloved examines community, motherhood, identity, slavery, freedom, and our relationship to the past. Amy Hungerford is the Vice President for Arts and Sciences as well as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University. She is a professor of English and the author of Making Literature Now and The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod.

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Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach, "Dream Books and Gamblers: Black Women's Work in Chicago's Policy Game" (U Illinois Press, 2022) Nov 07, 2022

Ubiquitous illegal lotteries known as policy flourished in Chicago's Black community during the overlapping waves of the Great Migration. Policy "queens" owned stakes in lucrative operations while women writers and clerks canvased the neighborhood, passed out winnings, and kept the books.

In Dream Books and Gamblers: Black Women's Work in Chicago's Policy Game (University of Illinois Press, 2022). Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach examines the complexities of policy and gender politics in Chicago. Policy provided Black women with a livelihood for themselves and their families. At the same time, navigating gender expectations, aggressive policing, and other hazards of the infromal economy led them to refashion ideas about Black womanhood and respectability. Policy earnings also funded above-board enterprises ranging from neighborhood businesses to philanthropic institutions, and Schlabach delves into the various ways Black women straddled the illegal policy business and reputable community involvement.

Vivid and revealing, Dream Books and Gamblers tells the stories of Black women in the underground economy and how they used their work to balance the demands of living and laboring in Black Chicago.

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Guthrie P. Ramsey, "Who Hears Here?: On Black Music, Pasts and Present" (U California Press, 2022) Nov 07, 2022

Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., is an award-winning musicologist, music historian, composer, and pianist whose prescient theoretical and critical interventions have bridged Black cultural studies and musicology. Representing twenty-five years of commentary and scholarship, these essays document Ramsey's search to understand America's Black musical past and present and to find his own voice as an African American writer in the field of musicology.

Who Hears Here?: On Black Music, Pasts and Present (U California Press, 2022) embraces historiography, ethnography, cultural criticism, musical analysis, and autobiography, traversing the landscape of Black musical expression from sacred music to art music, and jazz to hip-hop. Taken together, these essays and the provocative introduction that precedes them are testament to the legacy work that has come to define a field, as well as a rousing call to readers to continue to ask the hard questions and write the hard truths.

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Aisha Khan, "The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World" (Harvard UP, 2021) Nov 07, 2022

In The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2021), Aisha Khan explores how colonial categories of race and religion together created identities and hierarchies that today are vehicles for multicultural nationalism and social critique in the Caribbean and its diasporas.

When the British Empire abolished slavery, Caribbean sugar plantation owners faced a labor shortage. To solve the problem, they imported indentured “coolie” laborers, Hindus and a minority Muslim population from the Indian subcontinent. Indentureship continued from 1838 until its official end in 1917. The Deepest Dye begins on post-emancipation plantations in the West Indies—where Europeans, Indians, and Africans intermingled for work and worship—and ranges to present-day England, North America, and Trinidad, where colonial-era legacies endure in identities and hierarchies that still shape the post-independence Caribbean and its contemporary diasporas.

Aisha Khan focuses on the contested religious practices of obeah and Hosay, which are racialized as “African” and “Indian” despite the diversity of their participants. Obeah, a catch-all Caribbean term for sub-Saharan healing and divination traditions, was associated in colonial society with magic, slave insurrection, and fraud. This led to anti-obeah laws, some of which still remain in place. Hosay developed in the West Indies from Indian commemorations of the Islamic mourning ritual of Muharram. Although it received certain legal protections, Hosay’s mass gatherings, processions, and mock battles provoked fears of economic disruption and labor unrest that led to criminalization by colonial powers. The proper observance of Hosay was debated among some historical Muslim communities and continues to be debated now.

In a nuanced study of these two practices, Aisha Khan sheds light on power dynamics through religious and racial identities formed in the context of colonialism in the Atlantic world, and shows how today these identities reiterate inequalities as well as reinforce demands for justice and recognition.

Aisha Khan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University. She is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests focus on the ways that race and religion intersect in the Atlantic world, particularly in the production of identities and political culture. Her work also is concerned with Asian and African diasporas in the Americas, indenture as a system of labor, the carceral state, and the prison industrial complex. She has published in numerous journals and anthologies. Her other books include Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad (Duke University Press, 2004) and Islam and the Americas (University Press of Florida, 2015). She has also been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter.

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Christopher Stuart Taylor, "Flying Fish in the Great White North: The Autonomous Migration of Black Barbadians" (Fernwood, 2016) Nov 04, 2022

Canadians are proud of their multicultural image both at home and abroad. But that image isn t grounded in historical facts. As recently as the 1960s, the Canadian government enforced discriminatory, anti-Black immigration policies, designed to restrict and prohibit the entry of Black Barbadians and Black West Indians. The Canadian state capitalized on the public s fear of the Black unknown and racist stereotypes to justify their exclusion.

In Flying Fish in the Great White North: The Autonomous Migration of Black Barbadians (Fernwood, 2016), Christopher Stuart Taylor utilizes the intersectionality of race, gender and class to challenge the perception that Blacks were simply victims of racist and discriminatory Canadian and international, immigration policies by emphasizing the agency and educational capital of Black Barbadian emigrants during this period. In fact, many Barbadians were middle to upper class and were well educated, and many, particularly women, found autonomous agency and challenged the very Canadian immigration policies designed to exclude them.

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4.5 The Best Error You Can Make: Brent Hayes Edwards and Jean-Baptiste Naudy on Claude McKay Nov 03, 2022

What can a French translator do with a novelist who writes brilliantly about the “confrontation between Englishes?” How can such a confrontation be made legible across the boundaries of language, nation, and history? Renowned scholar and translator Brent Hayes Edwards sits down with publisher and translator Jean-Baptiste Naudy to consider these questions in a wide-ranging discussion about translating the Jamaican American writer Claude McKay. They focus especially on the recent translation into French of McKay’s 1941 Amiable with Big Teeth, which paints a satirical portrait of efforts by 1930s Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia. Brent and Jean-Baptiste consider McKay’s lasting legacy and ongoing revival in the U.S. and France. Translating McKay into French, they note, is a matter of reckoning with France’s own imperial history. That history, along with McKay’s complex understanding of race both in the U.S. and abroad, is illuminated in this conversation about one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most celebrated writers. Be sure to check out this episode’s special bonus material for a dramatic, bilingual reading from Amiable with Big Teeth by Jean-Baptiste!

Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics.

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Matthew Delmont, "Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad" (Viking, 2022) Nov 02, 2022

Today I talked to Matthew Delmont about his new book Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (Viking, 2022)

Delmont is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College. A Guggenheim Fellow and expert on African American history and the history of civil rights, he is the author of four books: Black Quotidian, Why Busing Failed, Making Roots, and The Nicest Kids in Town. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, NPR, and several academic journals. Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Delmont earned his B.A from Harvard University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University.

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Jeremi Suri, "Civil War by Other Means: America's Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy" (PublicAffairs, 2022) Nov 02, 2022

In 1865, the Confederacy was defeated, but the military victory did not end the tensions of the war or signal acceptance of a new, more equal nation. In Civil War by Other Means: America's Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy(PublicAffairs, 2022), Jeremi Suri argues that, instead, efforts to bolster white supremacy began immediately. The big questions and conflicts of the Civil War lingered, continuing to cause other types of conflict among Americans. From conflicting interpretations of Abraham Lincoln's assassination by John Wilkes Booth to postwar riots to contested elections and stymied presidential agendas, Suri shows how the battles of the Civil War continued in other forms in the decades after the military conflict ended. Suri argues that, in fact, competing visions of democracy, freedom, and race still evident today have their roots in this period. In this episode of the podcast, Suri, who is the Mack Brown Distinguished Professor for Global Leadership, History, and Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, discusses this historical moment, what led him to research and write about it, and what it means for understanding the current challenges facing American democracy.

Christine Lamberson, PhD, is a historian. Her research focuses on 20th century U.S. legal, political, and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s.

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Sarah Quesada, "The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Nov 01, 2022

The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2022) unearths a buried African archive within widely-read Latinx writers of the last fifty years. It challenges dominant narratives in World Literature and transatlantic studies that ignore Africa's impact in broader Latin American culture. Sarah Quesada argues that these canonical works evoke textual memorials of African memory. She shows how the African Atlantic haunts modern Latinx and Caribbean writing, and examines the disavowal or distortion of the African subject in the constructions of national, racial, sexual, and spiritual Latinx identity. Quesada shows how themes such as the 19th century 'scramble for Africa,' the decolonizing wars, Black internationalism, and the neoliberal turn are embedded in key narratives. Drawing from multilingual archives about West and Central Africa, she examines how the legacies of colonial French, Iberian, British and U.S. Imperialisms have impacted on the relationships between African and Latinx identities. This is the first book-length project to address the African colonial and imperial inheritance of Latinx literature. -From the Cambridge University Press website.

Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Communication Department at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On Twitter.

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Elizabeth Drame et al., "The Resistance, Persistence and Resilience of Black Families Raising Children with Autism" (Peter Lang, 2020) Nov 01, 2022

The Resistance, Persistence and Resilience of Black Families Raising Children with Autism(Peter Lang, 2020) presents nuanced perspectives in the form of counternarratives of what Black families who have children with autism experience at the intersection of race, class, disability and gender. It intentionally centers the expertise of Black parents, challenging what is considered knowledge, whose knowledge counts, and how knowledge can be co-generated for learning, sharing and advocacy. The book speaks directly to Black parents on the autism journey.

To right systemic racial inequities and to cultivate culturally responsive practices, it is critical for practitioners and professionals to understand what is known about Black families' experiences with autism in general and how these experiences differ because of our intersecting identities. University faculty and students in programs involving medicine, speech and language pathology, occupational therapy, nursing, political science, school psychology, teaching, special education and leadership can benefit from the wisdom offered by these parents. This text is perfect for several courses, including those in departments of anthropology, women and gender studies, health sciences, psychology, special education, teacher education and administrative leadership. In addition, given the uniquely Black perspective presented in the text, this text is relevant to other fields, including ethnic studies, cultural studies, urban studies and African American studies. It is relevant to individuals who wish to better understand how issues of race and intra-racial differences shape lived experiences with disability in American society.

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Sam W. Haynes, "Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas" (Basic Books, 2022) Oct 31, 2022

The Texas Revolution has long been cast as an epic episode in the origins of the American West. As the story goes, larger-than-life figures like Sam Houston, David Crockett, and William Barret Travis fought to free Texas from repressive Mexican rule. In Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas(Basic Books, 2022), historian Sam Haynes reveals the reality beneath this powerful creation myth. He shows how the lives of ordinary people—white Americans, Mexicans, Native Americans, and those of African descent—were upended by extraordinary events over twenty-five years. After the battle of San Jacinto, racial lines snapped taut as a new nation, the Lone Star republic, sought to expel Indians, marginalize Mexicans, and tighten its grip on the enslaved.

This is a revelatory and essential new narrative of a major turning point in the history of North America.

Andrew R. Graybill is professor of history and director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is the author of The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (Liveright, 2013).

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Mario Nisbett, "The Workings of Diaspora: Jamaican Maroons and the Claims to Sovereignty" (Lexington Books, 2021) Oct 29, 2022

Engaging the past, the present, and the future, The Workings of Diaspora: Jamaican Maroons and the Claims to Sovereignty(Lexington Books, 2021) shows how the lived experience of Jamaican Maroons is linked to the African Diaspora. In so doing, this interdisciplinary undertaking interrogates the definition of Diaspora but mainly emphasizes the term’s use. Mario Nisbett demonstrates that an examination of Jamaican Maroon communities, particularly their socio-political development, can further highlight the significance of the African Diaspora as an analytical tool. He shows how Jamaican Maroons inform resistance to abjection, a denial of full humanity, through claiming their African origin and developing solidarity and consciousness in order to affirm black humanity. This book establishes that present-day Jamaican Maroons remain relevant and engage the African Diaspora to improve black standing and bolster assertions of sovereignty.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at okaverettephillips@ucdavis.edu.

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Ross Cole, "The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination" (U California Press, 2021) Oct 28, 2022

In The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination(U California Press, 2021), Ross Cole revisits the remarkable upswell of interest in folk songs in fin de siècle Britain and America. While the work of folk collectors such as John Lomax, Cecil Sharp and Hubert Parry seems primarily about the preservation of premodern musical cultures, Cole suggests that the anxieties about the disappearance of these traditions were inseparable from – and constitutive of – a critique of industrial modernity. That is, the preoccupation with folk culture in this period was as much about discontent with the present and imagining new visions for the future as it was motivated by a socio-historical interest in the vernacular musics of the past. Cole shows how the desire for ‘folk culture’ actually occluded the messy, hybrid reality of vernacular music making, and the lives of those who made it, as a result.

Cole makes the compelling case that what he calls the ‘folkloric imagination’ is shot through with a twinned politics of nostalgia and utopia, with both radical and reactionary elements lying just beneath the surface. The Folk traces how the invention of folk song by the collectors of the late 19th and early 20th Century was tightly bound up with contentious questions of race, nation, and empire that would come to an ugly head with the advent of fascism. By pursuing these threads into the present day, Cole shows how the same tensions continue to permeate the use and abuse of ‘the folk’ in contemporary political culture.

Dr Ross Cole is Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Leeds.

Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds.

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Guy Lancaster, "American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching" (U Arkansas Press, 2021) Oct 26, 2022

Lynching is often viewed as a narrow form of violence: either the spontaneous act of an angry mob against accused individuals, or a demonstration of white supremacy against an entire population considered subhuman. However, in this new treatise, historian Guy Lancaster exposes the multiple forms of violence hidden beneath the singular label of lynching.

Lancaster, who has written extensively on racial violence, details several lynchings of Blacks by white posses in post-Reconstruction Arkansas. Drawing from the fields of history, philosophy, cognitive science, sociology, and literary theory, and quoting chilling contemporary accounts, he argues that the act of lynching encompasses five distinct but overlapping types of violence. This new framework reveals lynching to be even more of an atrocity than previously understood: that mobs did not disregard the humanity of their victims but rather reveled in it; that they were not simply enacting personal vengeance but manifesting an elite project of subjugation. Lancaster thus clarifies and connects the motives and goals of seemingly isolated lynch mobs, embedding the practice in the ongoing enforcement of white supremacy. By interrogating the substance of lynching, American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching (U Arkansas Press, 2021) shines new light on both past anti-Black violence and the historical underpinnings of our present moment.

Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2021) and co-editor of Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020 (Texas A&M University Press, scheduled Spring 2023). Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1.

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Lynn M. Hudson, "West of Jim Crow: The Fight Against California's Color Line" (U Illinois Press, 2020) Oct 26, 2022

California was born "under the shadow of slavery," writes Lynn Hudson, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In West of Jim Crow: The Fight Against California's Color Line(U of Illinois Press, 2020), Hudson argues that despite its reputation as a land of opportunity and freedom, California's deeply racist past extended well into the twentieth century. As one Black Californian put it, the only difference between California and Mississippi was the way they were spelled. Yet, African Americans in the state nonetheless resisted Jim Crow in the West at every turn, from founding all Black communities to struggling to integrate public facilities such as swimming pools. West of Jim Crow is a fascinating look at how the myths about where Jim Crow segregation began and ended hide important truth's about segregation and discrimination's extent.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Jose O. Fernandez, "Against Marginalization: Convergences in Black and Latinx Literatures" (Ohio State UP, 2022) Oct 26, 2022

In Against Marginalization: Convergences in Black and Latinx Literatures(Ohio State University Press, 2022), Jose O. Fernandez examines thematic, aesthetic, historical, and cultural commonalities among post-1960s Black and Latinx writers, showing how such similarities have propelled their fight against social, cultural, and literary marginalization by engaging, adopting, and subverting elements from the larger American literary tradition. Drawing on the work of scholars in both literary traditions--including those who engage with the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s--Fernandez finds intriguing points of convergence. His cross-cultural and comparative analysis puts Black and Latinx authors and literary works into the same frame as he considers the plays of Amiri Baraka and Luis Valdez, the fiction of James Baldwin and Rudolfo Anaya, the essays of Ralph Ellison and Richard Rodriguez, novels by Alice Walker and Helena María Viramontes, and the short fiction of Edward P. Jones and Junot Díaz. Against Marginalization thus uncovers points of correspondence and convergence among Black and Latinx literary and cultural legacies, interrogating how both traditions have moved from a position of literary marginalization to a moment of visibility and critical recognition.

Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Communication Department at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On Twitter.

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Kelisha B. Graves, ed., "Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Documentary Portrait of an Early Civil Rights Pioneer, 1900-1959" (U Notre Dame Press, 2019) Oct 26, 2022

Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879-1961) is just one of the many African American intellectuals whose work has long been excluded from the literary canon. In her time, Burroughs was a celebrated African American (or, in her era, a race woman) female activist, educator, and intellectual. Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Documentary Portrait of an Early Civil Rights Pioneer, 1900-1959 (U Notre Dame Press, 2019) represents a landmark contribution to the African American intellectual historical project by allowing readers to experience Burroughs in her own words. This anthology of her works written between 1900 and 1959 encapsulates Burroughs's work as a theologian, philosopher, activist, educator, intellectual, and evangelist, as well as the myriad of ways that her career resisted definition. Burroughs rubbed elbows with such African American historical icons as W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Mary McLeod Bethune, and these interactions represent much of the existing, easily available literature on Burroughs's life. This book aims to spark a conversation surrounding Burroughs's life and work by making available her own tracts on God, sin, the intersections of church and society, black womanhood, education, and social justice. Moreover, the volume is an important piece of the growing movement toward excavating African American intellectual and philosophical thought and reformulating the literary canon to bring a diverse array of voices to the table.

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Dan Immergluck, "Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First-Century Atlanta" (U California Press, 2022) Oct 25, 2022

Atlanta, the capital of the American South, is at the red-hot core of expansion, inequality, and political relevance. In recent decades, central Atlanta has experienced heavily racialized gentrification while the suburbs have become more diverse, with many affluent suburbs trying to push back against this diversity. Exploring the city’s past and future, Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First-Century Atlanta(U California Press, 2022) tracks these racial and economic shifts and the politics and policies that produced them.

Dan Immergluck documents the trends that are inverting Atlanta’s late-twentieth-century “poor-in-the-core” urban model. New emphasis on capital-driven growth has excluded low-income people and families of color from the city’s center, pushing them to distant suburbs far from mass transit, large public hospitals, and other essential services. Revealing critical lessons for leaders, activists, and residents in cities around the world, Immergluck considers how planners and policymakers can reverse recent trends to create more socially equitable cities.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on his next book where he conducted research on an annual canoeing and kayaking event that takes place on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Kenyon Gradert, "Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Oct 25, 2022

Modern imagination of the Puritans typically casts them in a repressive, conservative light. But that wasn't always the case. Abolitionist activists in the nineteenth century, especially in New England, understood their Puritan heritage as one with radical political and spiritual responsibilities. Kenyon Gradert's new book, Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination (U Chicago Press, 2020) tells the surprising story of unexpected connections between the English Civil Wars and the literary drumbeats for a holy war in late antebellum America.

Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.

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Kwame Edwin Otu, "Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana" (U California Press, 2022) Oct 24, 2022

Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana (University of California Press, 2022) is an ethnographic study of a community of self-identified effeminate men--known in local parlance as sasso--residing in coastal Jamestown, a suburb of Accra, Ghana's capital. Drawing on the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye's notion of "amphibious personhood," Kwame Edwin Otu argues that sasso embody and articulate amphibious subjectivity in their self-making, creating an identity that moves beyond the homogenizing impulses of western categories of gender and sexuality. Such subjectivity simultaneously unsettles claims purported by the Christian heteronationalist state and LGBT+ human rights organizations that Ghana is predominantly heterosexual or homophobic. Weaving together personal interactions with sasso, participant observation, autoethnography, archival sources, essays from African and African-diasporic literature, and critical analyses of documentaries such as the BBC's The World's Worst Place to Be Gay, Amphibious Subjects is an ethnographic meditation on how Africa is configured as the "heart of homophobic darkness" in transnational LGBT+ human rights imaginaries.

Kwame Edwin Otu is a Visiting Associate Professor of African Studies at Georgetown University and an Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies, University of Virginia. He wrote and starred in the award-winning short film Reluctantly Queer.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of Southern California.

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On Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" Oct 21, 2022

By the early 19th century, slavery was still a brutal reality in southern U.S. states, and a growing movement to abolish slavery nationwide was taking hold. In 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe published her first novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was intended to be an anti-slavery book, to provide a positive view of Black people in America. But it also has another, more complicated legacy, unintentionally birthing new racist stereotypes. Professor Robin Bernstein is a Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. She is the author of Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights as well as Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater and a children’s book titled Terrible, Terrible! See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod.

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Scott Bukatman, "Black Panther" (U Texas Press, 2022) Oct 21, 2022

Black Panther was the first Black superhero in mainstream American comics. Black Panther was a cultural phenomenon that broke box office records. Yet it wasn’t just a movie led by and starring Black artists. It grappled with ideas and conflicts central to Black life in America and helped redress the racial dynamics of the Hollywood blockbuster.

Scott Bukatman, one of the foremost scholars of superheroes and cinematic spectacle, brings his impeccable pedigree to this lively and accessible study, finding in the utopianism of Black Panther(University of Texas Press, 2022) a way of re-envisioning what a superhero movie can and should be while centering the Black creators, performers, and issues behind it. He considers the superheroic Black body; the Pan-African fantasy, feminism, and Afrofuturism of Wakanda; the African American relationship to Africa; the political influence of director Ryan Coogler’s earlier movies; and the entwined performances of Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa and Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger. Bukatman argues that Black Panther is escapism of the best kind, offering a fantasy of liberation and social justice while demonstrating the power of popular culture to articulate ideals and raise vital questions.

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David Weinfeld, "An American Friendship: Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, and the Development of Cultural Pluralism" (Cornell UP, 2022) Oct 18, 2022

In An American Friendship: Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, and the Development of Cultural Pluralism(Cornell UP, 2022), David Weinfeld presents the biography of an idea, cultural pluralism, the intellectual precursor to modern multiculturalism. He roots its origins in the friendship between two philosophers, Jewish immigrant Horace Kallen and African American Alain Locke, who advanced cultural pluralism in opposition to both racist nativism and the assimilationist "melting pot." It is a simple idea—different ethnic groups can and should coexist in the United States, perpetuating their cultures for the betterment of the country as whole—and it grew out of the lived experience of this friendship between two remarkable individuals.

Kallen, a founding faculty member of the New School for Social Research, became a leading American Zionist. Locke, the first Black Rhodes Scholar, taught at Howard University and is best known as the intellectual godfather of the Harlem Renaissance and the editor of The New Negro in 1925. Their friendship began at Harvard and Oxford during the years 1906 through 1908 and was rekindled during the Great Depression, growing stronger until Locke's death in 1954. To Locke and Kallen, friendship itself was a metaphor for cultural pluralism, exemplified by people who found common ground while appreciating each other's differences. Weinfeld demonstrates how this understanding of cultural pluralism offers a new vision for diverse societies across the globe. An American Friendship provides critical background for understanding the conflicts over identity politics that polarize US society today.

Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history.

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Patricia A. Turner, "Trash Talk: Anti-Obama Lore and Race in the Twenty-First Century" (U California Press, 2022) Oct 18, 2022

Barack Obama and his family have been the objects of rumors, legends, and conspiracy theories unprecedented in US politics. Outbreaks of anti-Obama lore have occurred in every national election cycle since 2004 and continue to the present day--two elections after his presidency ended. In Trash Talk: Anti-Obama Lore and Race in the Twenty-First Century(U California Press, 2022), folklorist Patricia A. Turner examines how these thought patterns have grown ever more vitriolic and persistent and what this means for American political culture.

Through the lens of attacks on Obama, Trash Talk explores how racist tropes circulate and gain currency. As internet communications expand in reach, rumors and conspiracy theories have become powerful political tools, and new types of lore like the hoax and fake news have taken root. The mainstream press and political establishment dismissed anti-Obama mythology for years, registering concern only when it became difficult to deny how much power those who circulated it could command. Trash Talk demonstrates that the ascendancy of Barack Obama was never a signal of a postracial America.

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Radicalism, Humility, and Racism in America Oct 17, 2022

Today’s episode focuses on the new book by Lydia Moland, who is a Professor of Philosophy at Colby College. Her book, Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life(U Chicago Press, 2022) offers a powerful window into questions of humility and its relationship to racism and other forms of discrimination in American history. We talk about Child’s ideas, particularly as they relate to many of the issue facing contemporary American society.

John Kaag is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at UMass Lowell and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations.

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Charles Sawyer, "B. B. King: From Indianola to Icon: A Personal Odyssey with the 'King of the Blues'" (Schiffer Publishing, 2022) Oct 14, 2022

Want to take a trip with the king of the Blues? As B.B. King’s photographer and original biographer, Charlie Sawyer was along for the ride. In B.B. King from Indianola to Icon: A Personal Odyssey with the King of the Blues(Schiffer, 2022), journalist and photographer Charles Sawyer discusses his many years working with and near the greatest of Blues icons, from the early years as King was transitioning to the “Chitlin Circuit” to mainstream audiences to the founding of the B. B. King Museum & Delta Interpretive Center, Sawyer was there for it all, and shares it with us—along with more than 100 photographs.

David Hamilton Golland is professor of history and immediate past president of the faculty senate at Governors State University in Chicago's southland. @DHGolland.

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Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan W. Concannon, "Does Scripture Speak for Itself?: The Museum of the Bible and the Politics of Interpretation" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Oct 13, 2022

Is the Bible the unembellished Word of God or the product of human agency? There are different answers to that question. And they lie at the heart of this book's powerful exploration of the fraught ways in which money, race and power shape the story of Christianity in American public life. The authors' subject is the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC: arguably the latest example of a long line of white evangelical institutions aiming to amplify and promote a religious, political, and moral agenda of their own.

In Does Scripture Speak for Itself?: The Museum of the Bible and the Politics of Interpretation (Cambridge UP, 2022), Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon disclose the ways in which the Museum's exhibits reinforce a particularized and partial interpretation of the Bible's meaning. Bringing to light the Museum's implicit messaging about scriptural provenance and audience, the authors reveal how the MOTB produces a version of the Bible that in essence authorizes a certain sort of white evangelical privilege; promotes a view of history aligned with that same evangelical aspiration; and above all protects a cohort of white evangelicals from critique. They show too how the Museum collapses vital conceptual distinctions between its own conservative vision of the Bible and 'The Bible' as a cultural icon. This revelatory volume above all confirms that scripture – for all the claims made for it that it speaks only divine truth – can in the end never be separated from human politics.

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Sami Schalk, "Black Disability Politics" (Duke UP, 2022) Oct 12, 2022

In Black Disability Politics (Duke UP, 2022) Sami Schalk explores how issues of disability have been and continue to be central to Black activism from the 1970s to the present. Dr. Schalk shows how Black people have long engaged with disability as a political issue deeply tied to race and racism. She points out that this work has not been recognized as part of the legacy of disability justice and liberation because Black disability politics differ in language and approach from the mainstream white-dominant disability rights movement. Drawing on the archives of the Black Panther Party and the National Black Women’s Health Project alongside interviews with contemporary Black disabled cultural workers, Dr. Schalk identifies common qualities of Black disability politics, including the need to ground public health initiatives in the experience and expertise of marginalized disabled people so that they can work in antiracist, feminist, and anti-ableist ways. Prioritizing an understanding of disability within the context of white supremacy, Dr. Schalk demonstrates that the work of Black disability politics not only exists but is essential to the future of Black liberation movements.

Dr. Sami Schalk is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is the author of Bodymind Reimagined: Disability, Race, Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Duke University Press, 2018).

Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Candidate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies.

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Anima Adjepong, "Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra" (UNC Press, 2021) Oct 11, 2022

Beyond simplistic binaries of the dark continent or Africa Rising, Africans at home and abroad articulate their identities through their quotidian practices and cultural politics. Amongst the privileged classes, these articulations can be characterized as Afropolitan projects--cultural, political, and aesthetic expressions of global belonging rooted in African ideals.

Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra(UNC Press, 2021) examines the Afropolitan projects of Ghanaians living in two cosmopolitan cities: Houston, Texas, and Accra, Ghana. Anima Adjepong's focus shifts between the cities, exploring contests around national and pan-African cultural politics, race, class, sexuality, and religion. Focusing particularly on queer sexuality, Adjepong offers unique insight into the contemporary sexual politics of the Afropolitan class. The book expands and complicates existing research by providing an in-depth transnational case study that not only addresses questions of cosmopolitanism, class, and racial identity but also considers how gender and sexuality inform the racialized identities of Africans in the United States and in Ghana. Bringing an understudied cohort of class-privileged Africans to the forefront, Adjepong offers a more fully realized understanding of the diversity of African lives.

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Emerald Garner, "Finding My Voice" (Haymarket, 2022) Oct 07, 2022

In this unforgetable memoir, Emerald Garner recounts her father's cruel and unjust murder, the immense pain that followed, the pressures of an exploitative media, and her difficult yet determined journey as an activist against police violence.

She begins with the morning of July 17, 2014--a rare day off from work, one she had hoped to enjoy with rest and family, that quickly turned her world inside out. What follows is a personal account of the suffering Emerald and her family endured: unsympathetic camera lenses, the stares and whispers of strangers, and the inability to mourn in private.

In addition to these vulnerable, personal essays, Finding My Voice (Haymarket Books, 2022) includes conversations in which Emerald found inspiration, empathy, and community: politicians, athletes, and activists like Brian Benjamin and Etan Thomas; others who had survived similarly unfathomable grief like Lora Dene King, Angelique Kearse, and Pamela Brooks; and Emerald's own family, Mrs. Esaw Garner and Eric Garner Jr. The book ends with a powerful call-to-action by author and daughter of Malcolm X, Ilyasah Shabazz. With growing calls for radical transformation and accountability, Emerald Garner's memoir is a story of family and community, and the strength it takes to survive, to stand, to speak.

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Kathryn Gin Lum, "Heathen: Religion and Race in American History" (Harvard UP, 2022) Oct 07, 2022

If an eighteenth-century parson told you that the difference between "civilization and heathenism is sky-high and star-far," the words would hardly come as a shock. But that statement was written by an American missionary in 1971. In a sweeping historical narrative, Kathryn Gin Lum shows how the idea of the heathen has been maintained from the colonial era to the present in religious and secular discourses--discourses, specifically, of race.

Americans long viewed the world as a realm of suffering heathens whose lands and lives needed their intervention to flourish. The term "heathen" fell out of common use by the early 1900s, leading some to imagine that racial categories had replaced religious differences. But the ideas underlying the figure of the heathen did not disappear. Americans still treat large swaths of the world as "other" due to their assumed need for conversion to American ways. Purported heathens have also contributed to the ongoing significance of the concept, promoting solidarity through their opposition to white American Christianity. Gin Lum looks to figures like Chinese American activist Wong Chin Foo and Ihanktonwan Dakota writer Zitkála-Sá, who proudly claimed the label of "heathen" for themselves.

Race continues to operate as a heathen inheritance in the United States, animating Americans' sense of being a world apart from an undifferentiated mass of needy, suffering peoples. Heathen: Religion and Race in American History(Harvard UP, 2022) thus reveals a key source of American exceptionalism and a prism through which Americans have defined themselves as a progressive and humanitarian nation even as supposed heathens have drawn on the same to counter this national myth.

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Adam Elliott-Cooper, "Black Resistance to British Policing" (Manchester UP, 2021) Oct 05, 2022

As police racism unsettles Britain's tolerant self-image, Black Resistance to British Policing (Manchester UP, 2021) details the activism that made movements like Black Lives Matter possible. Adam Elliott-Cooper analyses racism beyond prejudice and the interpersonal - arguing that black resistance confronts a global system of racial classification, exploitation and violence.

Imperial cultures and policies, as well as colonial war and policing highlight connections between these histories and contemporary racisms. But this is a book about resistance, considering black liberation movements in the 20th century while utilising a decade of activist research covering spontaneous rebellion, campaigns and protest in the 21st century. Drawing connections between histories of resistance and different kinds of black struggle against policing is vital, it is argued, if we are to challenge the cutting edge of police and prison power which harnesses new and dangerous forms of surveillance, violence and criminalisation.

Black Resistance to British Policing is a must read for all those who are interested in the history of the British Empire, its enduring legacies, and anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance.

Adam Elliot-Cooper is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Public and Social Policy at Queen Mary University of London. He is also co-author of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, 2021). He sits on the board of The Monitoring Group, an anti-racist organisation challenging state racisms and racial violence.

Deniz Yonucu is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University. Her work focuses on counterinsurgency, policing and security, surveillance, left-wing and anti-colonial resistance, memory, racism, and emerging digital control technologies. Her book, Police, Provocation, Politics Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022), presents a counterintuitive analysis of policing, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence and perpetual conflict by state security apparatus.

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Sarah F. Derbew, "Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Oct 04, 2022

Sarah Derbew’s new book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2022) asks how should articulations of blackness from the fifth century BCE to the twenty-first century be properly read and interpreted? This important and timely book is the first concerted treatment of black skin color in the Greek literature and visual culture of antiquity. In charting representations in the Hellenic world of black Egyptians, Aithiopians, Indians, and Greeks, Derbew dexterously disentangles the complex and varied ways in which blackness has been co-produced by ancient authors and artists; their readers, audiences, and viewers; and contemporary scholars. Exploring the precarious hold that race has on skin coloration, the author uncovers the many silences, suppressions, and misappropriations of blackness within modern studies of Greek antiquity. Shaped by performance studies and critical race theory alike, her book maps out an authoritative archaeology of blackness that reappraises its significance. It offers a committedly anti-racist approach to depictions of black people while rejecting simplistic conflations or explanations.

Get 20% off a copy of Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity using promo code UBGA2022 at Cambridge University Press (valid until February 2023).

Keep up with Sarah’s work on Twitter @BlackAntiquity and on her website.

@amandajoycehall is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the Department of African American Studies.

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On Trafficking Hadassah and Book of Esther Oct 04, 2022

Ericka Shawndricka Dunbar (she/her/hers) is an adjunct professor at Spelman College (Atlanta, GA) in the Religious Studies Department. She received her Ph.D. in Biblical Studies (Old Testament) in May 2020 from Drew University. Her dissertation is interdisciplinary and focused on how the discipline of biblical studies is increasingly responsive to social issues, namely, sexual trafficking. Dunbar’s dissertation, entitled “Trafficking Hadassah: An Africana Reading of Collective Trauma, Memory, and Identity in the Book of Esther and the African Diaspora,” is a dialogical cultural study of sexual trafficking in the book of Esther and during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. She assesses sexual trafficking in both contexts, evaluates the traumatic impact of trafficking on Africana collective identity, and examines and critiques ideologies and stereotypes that were espoused to justify sexual abuse against Africana girls and women.

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NBN Classic: Anne Balay, "Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers" (UNC Press, 2018) Oct 02, 2022

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.

In this multi-layered ethnography that centers truck drivers, Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) describes both the long-haul trucking industry as well as the significance of truck driving for LGBTQ truck drivers and truck drivers of color. Anne Balay first lays out the industry in arguing the ways that systemically truck drivers both are “overregulated and underpaid” and yet is still able to provide intimate portraits for many of her 66 narrators. Among many topics, Balay details how racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are a part, and not a part, of truck drivers’ interactions with customers, shippers, and receivers, how so many drivers find freedom in trucking, the culture of sex at rest stops, and how contrary to middle-class opinion, working-class environments do hold space for LGBTQ folks and people of color. While recognizing the way that truck driving is both dangerous and hard-work, Balay relays the pride and fulfillment that marginalized truck drivers hold in performing jobs that are vital to so many industries and institutions within the United States.

Adrian King (pronouns: they/them/theirs) is a recently graduate of Brandies University’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies MA program and is an incoming graduate student in University of Michigan’s American Culture PhD program.

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NBN Classic: Courtney Pace, "Freedom Faith: The Womanist Vision of Prathia Hall" (U Georgia Press, 2019) Oct 02, 2022

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.

Freedom Faith: The Womanist Vision of Prathia Hall (University of Georgia Press, 2019) is the first full-length critical study of Rev. Dr. Prathia Laura Ann Hall (1940–2002), an undersung leader in both the civil rights movement and African American theology. Freedom faith was the central concept of Hall’s theology: the belief that God created humans to be free and assists and equips those who work for freedom. Hall rooted her work simultaneously in social justice, Christian practice, and womanist thought.

Courtney Pace examines Hall’s life and philosophy, particularly through the lens of her civil rights activism, her teaching career, and her ministry as a womanist preacher. Moving along the trajectory of Hall’s life and civic service, Freedom Faith focuses on her intellectual and theological development and her radiating influence on such figures as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, and the early generations of womanist scholars. Hall was one of the first women ordained in the American Baptist Churches, USA, was the pastor of Mt. Sharon Baptist Church in Philadelphia, and in later life joined the faculty at the Boston University School of Theology as the Martin Luther King Chair in Social Ethics. In activism and ministry, Hall was a pioneer, fusing womanist thought with Christian ethics and visions of social justice.

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Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean, "Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing" (Verso, 2022) Sep 28, 2022

Black Communist women throughout the early to mid-twentieth century fought for and led mass campaigns in the service of building collective power in the fight for liberation. Through concrete materialist analysis of the conditions of Black workers, these women argued that racial and economic equality can only be achieved by overthrowing capitalism.

The first collection of its kind, Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing(Verso, 2022) brings together three decades of Black Communist women’s political writings. In doing so, it highlights the link between Communism and Black liberation. Likewise, it makes clear how Black women fundamentally shaped, and were shaped by, Communist praxis in the twentieth century.

Organize, Fight, Win includes writings from card-carrying Communists like Dorothy Burnham, Williana Burroughs, Grace P. Campbell, Alice Childress, Marvel Cooke, Esther Cooper Jackson, Thelma Dale Perkins, Vicki Garvin, Yvonne Gregory, Claudia Jones, Maude White Katz, and Louise Thompson Patterson, and writings by those who organized alongside the Communist Party, like Ella Baker, Charlotta Bass, Thyra Edwards, Lorraine Hansberry, and Dorothy Hunton.

In this interview, I spoke with the editors of this collection, Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean.

Charisse Burden-Stelly (@blackleftaf) is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Wayne State University. She is the author, with Gerald Horne, of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Life in American History.

Jodi Dean (@Jodi7768) is a professor in the Political Science Department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She has written or edited thirteen books, including recent Verso title Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging.

Catriona Gold (@cat__gold) is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel.

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NBN Classic: Erica Armstrong Dunbar, "She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman" (37 Ink, 2019) Sep 25, 2022

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.

Harriet Tubman is best known as one of the most famous conductors on the Underground Railroad. As a leading abolitionist, her bravery and selflessness has inspired generations in the continuing struggle for civil rights. Now, National Book Award nominee Erica Armstrong Dunbar presents a fresh take on this American icon blending traditional biography, illustrations, photos, and engaging sidebars that illuminate the life of Tubman as never before.

Not only did Tubman help liberate hundreds of slaves, she was the first woman to lead an armed expedition during the Civil War, worked as a spy for the Union Army, was a fierce suffragist, and was an advocate for the aged. She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman (37 Ink, 2019) reveals the many complexities and varied accomplishments of one of our nation’s true heroes and offers an accessible and modern interpretation of Tubman’s life that is both informative and engaging.

Filled with rare outtakes of commentary, an expansive timeline of Tubman’s life, photos (both new and those in public domain), commissioned illustrations, and sections including “Harriet By the Numbers” (number of times she went back down south, approximately how many people she rescued, the bounty on her head) and “Harriet’s Homies” (those who supported her over the years), She Came to Slay is a stunning and powerful mix of pop culture and scholarship and proves that Harriet Tubman is well deserving of her permanent place in our nation’s history.

Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. McNeil focuses on eighteenth and early nineteenth century Black Women’s histories of slavery and freedom under the direction of Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar.

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NBN Classic: Garrett Felber, "Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State" (UNC Press, 2020) Sep 25, 2022

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.

Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the post-war Black Freedom Movement. In his new book Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (UNC Press, 2020), Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. In doing so, he reveals a multifaceted freedom struggle that focused as much on policing and prisons as on school desegregation and voting rights. The book examines efforts to build broad-based grassroots coalitions among liberals, radicals, and nationalist to oppose the carceral state and struggle for local Black self-determination. It captures the ambiguous place of the Nation of Islam specifically, and Black nationalist organizing more broadly, during an era which has come to redefined by non-violent resistance, desegregation campaigns, and racial liberalism.

By provocatively documenting the interplay between law enforcement and Muslim communities, Felber decisively shows state repression and Muslim organizing laid the groundwork for the modern carceral state and the contemporary prison abolition movement which opposes it. Exhaustively researched, the book illuminates new sites and forms of political struggle as Muslims prayed under surveillance in prison yards and used courtroom political theatre to put the state on trial. This history captures familiar figures in new ways Malcolm X the courtroom lawyer and A. Philip Randolph the Harlem coalition builder while highlighting the forgotten organizing of rank and file activists in prisons such as Martin Sostre. This definitive account is an urgent reminder that Islamophobia, state surveillance, and police violence have deep roots in the state repression of Black communities during the mid-20th century.

Adam McNeil is a 3rd year Early African American History PhD Student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey

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NBN Classic: Alys Eve Weinbaum, "The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of History" (Duke UP, 2019) Sep 24, 2022

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.

In The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of History (Duke University Press, 2019), University of Washington Professor of English Alys Eve Weinbaum investigates the continuing resonances of Atlantic slavery in the cultures and politics of human reproduction that characterize contemporary biocapitalism. As a form of racial capitalism that relies on the commodification of the human reproductive body, biocapitalism is dependent upon what Weinbaum calls the slave episteme—the racial logic that drove four centuries of slave breeding in the Americas and Caribbean. Weinbaum outlines how the slave episteme shapes the practice of reproduction today, especially through use of biotechnology and surrogacy. Engaging with a broad set of texts, from Toni Morrison's Beloved and Octavia Butler's dystopian speculative fiction to black Marxism, histories of slavery, and legal cases involving surrogacy, Weinbaum shows how black feminist contributions from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s constitute a powerful philosophy of history—one that provides the means through which to understand how reproductive slavery haunts the present.

Jerrad P. Pacatte is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-New Brunswick studying eighteenth and nineteenth century African American women’s history and the history of slavery and capitalism. Follow him on Twitter @Jerrad_Pacatte!

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NBN Classic: Marcia Chatelain, "Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America" (Liveright, 2020) Sep 24, 2022

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.

Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America (Liveright, 2020) by Marcia Chatelain is a fascinating examination of the relationship between the fast-food industry, Black business owners, and the communities where they set up franchises after the Holy Week Uprisings of 1968.

Using McDonalds as a “prism” to study the expansion of the fast-food industry and the effects of Black capitalism, Franchise tells a complex origins story about Black franchisees and their reception in Black communities across the nation in Atlanta, Chicago, Portland, Cleveland, and Los Angeles after the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement.

Chatelain ultimately exposes the limits of Black entrepreneurship to supplant state responsibility to create socially and economically reparative conditions in Black communities, while demonstrating how a range of progressive Black politicians and activists came to support Black entrepreneurship as a solution to widespread federal and municipal disinvestment from Black communities.

As Black franchise owners assisted the development of McDonalds into a wealthy and successful national brand, they also encountered glass-ceilings and discriminatory practices within McDonalds corporate and the larger business world despite their tremendous success compared to white counterparts. Chatelain traces these tensions and interconnections across political, business, and community stakeholders to explain how fast-food franchises ingratiated themselves into Black communities, while exasperating inequalities in Black America.

Francise teaches readers to be skeptical of corporate or market-driven solutions whether articulated as Black capitalism or “empowerment,” especially during and after moments of Black uprising.

Marcia Chatelain is a scholar, speaker, and strategist based in Washington, D.C. She teaches courses in African American life and culture at Georgetown University.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the grassroots movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall

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Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) Sep 23, 2022

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day.

The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.

Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).

Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

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Charles L. Chavis Jr., "The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022) Sep 22, 2022

On December 4, 1931, a mob of white men in Salisbury, Maryland, lynched and set ablaze a twenty-three-year-old Black man named Matthew Williams. His gruesome murder was part of a wave of silent white terrorism in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, which exposed Black laborers to white rage in response to economic anxieties. For nearly a century, the lynching of Matthew Williams has lived in the shadows of the more well-known incidents of racial terror in the deep South, haunting both the Eastern Shore and the state of Maryland as a whole. In The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022), author Charles L. Chavis Jr. draws on his discovery of previously unreleased investigative documents to meticulously reconstruct the full story of one of the last lynchings in Maryland.

Bringing the painful truth of anti-Black violence to light, Chavis breaks the silence that surrounded Williams's death. Though Maryland lacked the notoriety for racial violence of Alabama or Mississippi, he writes, it nonetheless was the site of at least 40 spectacle lynchings after the abolition of slavery in 1864. Families of lynching victims rarely obtained any form of actual justice, but Williams's death would have a curious afterlife: Maryland's politically ambitious governor Albert C. Ritchie would, in an attempt to position himself as a viable challenger to FDR, become one of the first governors in the United States to investigate the lynching death of a Black person. Ritchie tasked Patsy Johnson, a member of the Pinkerton detective agency and a former prizefighter, with going undercover in Salisbury and infiltrating the mob that murdered Williams. Johnson would eventually befriend a young local who admitted to participating in the lynching and who also named several local law enforcement officers as ringleaders. Despite this, a grand jury, after hearing 124 witness statements, declined to indict the perpetrators. But this denial of justice galvanized Governor Ritchie's Interracial Commission, which would become one of the pioneering forces in the early civil rights movement in Maryland.

Complicating historical narratives associated with the history of lynching in the city of Salisbury, The Silent Shore explores the immediate and lingering effect of Williams's death on the politics of racism in the United States, the Black community in Salisbury, the broader Eastern Shore, the state of Maryland, and the legacy of "modern-day lynchings."

Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at okaverettephillips@ucdavis.edu.

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Abby L. Goode, "Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability" (UNC Press, 2022) Sep 20, 2022

In this book, Abby L. Goode reveals the foundations of American environmentalism and its enduring connections to racism, eugenics, and agrarian ideals. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers as diverse as Martin Delany, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Walt Whitman worried about unsustainable conditions such as population growth and plantation slavery. In response, they imagined agrotopias—sustainable societies unaffected by the nation's agricultural and population crises—elsewhere. Though seemingly progressive, these agrotopian visions depicted selective breeding and racial "improvement" as the path to environmental stability. In this fascinating study, Goode uncovers an early sustainability rhetoric interested in shaping, just as much as sustaining, the American population. Showing how ideas about race and reproduction were central to early sustainability thinking, Goode unearths an alternative environmental archive that ranges from gothic novels to Black nationalist manifestos, from Waco, Texas, to the West Indies, from city tenements to White House kitchen gardens. Exposing the eugenic foundations of some of our most well-regarded environmental traditions, this book compels us to reexamine the benevolence of American environmental thought.

Dr. Abby Goode is Associate Professor with tenure at Plymouth State University, where she teaches in the English and Sustainability Studies programs. Twitter.

Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Raúl Pérez, "The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy" (Stanford UP, 2022) Sep 19, 2022

Having a "good" sense of humor generally means being able to take a joke without getting offended—laughing even at a taboo thought or at another's expense. The insinuation is that laughter eases social tension and creates solidarity in an overly politicized social world. But do the stakes change when the jokes are racist? In The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy(Stanford UP, 2022), Raúl Pérez argues that we must genuinely confront this unsettling question in order to fully understand the persistence of anti-black racism and white supremacy in American society today.

W.E.B. Du Bois's prescient essay "The Souls of White Folk" was one of the first to theorize whiteness as a social and political construct based on a feeling of superiority over racialized others—a kind of racial contempt. Pérez extends this theory to the study of humor, connecting theories of racial formation to parallel ideas about humor stemming from laughter at another's misfortune. Critically synthesizing scholarship on race, humor, and emotions, he uncovers a key function of humor as a tool for producing racial alienation, dehumanization, exclusion, and even violence. Pérez tracks this use of humor from blackface minstrelsy to contemporary contexts, including police culture, politics, and far-right extremists. Rather than being harmless fun, this humor plays a central role in reinforcing and mobilizing racist ideology and power under the guise of amusement.

The Souls of White Jokes exposes this malicious side of humor, while also revealing a new facet of racism today. Though it can be comforting to imagine racism as coming from racial hatred and anger, the terrifying reality is that it is tied up in seemingly benign, even joyful, everyday interactions as well— and for racism to be eradicated we must face this truth.

Peter C. Kunze is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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Kaysha Corinealdi, "Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century" (Duke UP, 2022) Sep 19, 2022

In Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century (Duke UP, 2022), Kaysha Corinealdi traces the multigenerational activism of Afro-Caribbean Panamanians as they forged diasporic communities in Panama and the United States throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on a rich array of sources including speeches, yearbooks, photographs, government reports, radio broadcasts, newspaper editorials, and oral histories, Corinealdi presents the Panamanian isthmus as a crucial site in the making of an Afro-diasporic world that linked cities and towns like Colón, Kingston, Panamá, Brooklyn, Bridgetown, and La Boca. In Panama, Afro-Caribbean Panamanians created a diasporic worldview of the Caribbean that privileged the potential of Black innovation. Corinealdi maps this innovation by examining the longest-running Black newspaper in Central America, the rise of civic associations created to counter policies that stripped Afro-Caribbean Panamanians of citizenship, the creation of scholarship-granting organizations that supported the education of Black students, and the emergence of national conferences and organizations that linked anti-imperialism and Black Liberation. By showing how Afro-Caribbean Panamanians used these methods to navigate anti-Blackness, xenophobia, and white supremacy, Corinealdi offers a new mode of understanding activism, community, and diaspora formation.

Nicole Ramsey is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African & African American Studies at the University of Virginia. Her research examines formations of blackness, indigeneity, identity, and nation in Belize and the circum-Caribbean. On Twitter.

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Aria S. Halliday, "Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture" (U Illinois Press, 2022) Sep 16, 2022

Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture(U Illinois Press, 2022) examines the role American Black women play in Black consumption in the US and worldwide, with a focus on their pivotal role in packaging Black feminine identity since the 1960s. Through an exploration of the dolls, princesses, and rags-to-riches stories that represent Black girlhood and womanhood in everything from haircare to Nicki Minaj’s hip-hop, Aria S. Halliday spotlights how the products created by Black women have furthered Black women’s position as the moral compass and arbiter of Black racial progress.

Buy Black reveals what attitudes inform a contemporary Black sensibility based in representation and consumerism. It also traces the parameters of Black symbolic power, mapping the sites where intraracial ideals of blackness, womanhood, beauty, play, and sexuality meet and mix in consumer and popular culture.

Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter.

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Derek H. Alderman et al., "Remembering Enslavement: Reassembling the Southern Plantation Museum" (U Georgia Press, 2022) Sep 13, 2022

Remembering Enslavement: Reassembling the Southern Plantation Museum(U Georgia Press, 2022) explores plantation museums as sites for contesting and reforming public interpretations of slavery in the American South. Emerging out of a three-year National Science Foundation grant (2014-17), the book turns a critical eye toward the growing inclusion of the formerly enslaved within these museums, specifically examining advances but also continuing inequalities in how they narrate and memorialize the formerly enslaved.

Using assemblage theory as a framework, Remembering Enslavement offers an innovative approach for studying heritage sites, retelling and remapping the ways that slavery and the enslaved are included in southern plantation museums.

It examines multiple plantation sites across geographic areas, considering the experiences of a diversity of actors: tourists, museum managers/owners, and tour guides/interpreters. This approach allows for an understanding of regional variations

among plantation museums, narratives, and performances, as well as more in-depth study of the plantation tour experience and public interpretations. The authors conclude the book with a set of questions designed to help professionals reassemble plantation museum narratives and landscapes to more justly position the formerly enslaved at their center.

This interview is with three of the authors: Derek Alderman, Amy Potter, and Stephen Hanna.

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Jodi Skipper, "Behind the Big House: Reconciling Slavery, Race, and Heritage in the U.S. South" (U Iowa Press, 2022) Sep 09, 2022

When residents and tourists visit sites of slavery, whose stories are told? All too often the lives of slaveowners are centered, obscuring the lives of enslaved people. Behind the Big House: Reconciling Slavery, Race, and Heritage in the U.S. South (U Iowa Press, 2022) gives readers a candid, behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to interpret the difficult history of slavery in the U.S. South. The book explores Jodi Skipper’s eight-year collaboration with the Behind the Big House program, a community-based model used at local historic sites to address slavery in the collective narrative of U.S. history and culture.

In laying out her experiences through an autoethnographic approach, Skipper seeks to help other activist scholars of color negotiate the nuances of place, the academic public sphere, and its ambiguous systems of reward, recognition, and evaluation.

Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 202) Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1

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Lorgia García Peña, "Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective" (Duke UP, 2022) Sep 08, 2022

In Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective(Duke University Press, 2022),Lorgia García Peña considers Black Latinidad in a global perspective in order to chart colonialism as an ongoing sociopolitical force. Drawing from archives and cultural productions from the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, García Peña argues that Black Latinidad is a social, cultural, and political formation—rather than solely a site of identity—through which we can understand both oppression and resistance. She takes up the intellectual and political genealogy of Black Latinidad in the works of Frederick Douglass, Gregorio Luperón, and Arthur Schomburg. She also considers the lives of Black Latina women living in the diaspora, such as Black Dominicana guerrillas who migrated throughout the diaspora after the 1965 civil war and Black immigrant and second-generation women like Mercedes Frías and Milagros Guzmán organizing in Italy with other oppressed communities. In demonstrating that analyses of Black Latinidad must include Latinx people and cultures throughout the diaspora, García Peña shows how the vaivén—or, coming and going—at the heart of migrant life reveals that the nation is not a sufficient rubric from which to understand human lived experiences.

Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Communication Department at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On Twitter.

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Decoteau Irby, "Stuck Improving: Racial Equity and School Leadership" (Harvard Education Press, 2021) Sep 05, 2022

An incisive case study of changemaking in action, Stuck Improving: Racial Equity and School Leadership (Harvard Education Press, 2021) analyzes the complex process of racial equity reform within K-12 schools. Scholar Decoteau J. Irby emphasizes that racial equity is dynamic, shifting as our emerging racial consciousness evolves and as racism asserts itself anew. Those who accept the challenge of reform find themselves "stuck improving," caught in a perpetual dilemma of both making progress and finding ever more progress to be made. Rather than dismissing stuckness as failure, Irby embraces it as an inextricable part of the improvement process.

Irby brings readers into a large suburban high school as school leaders strive to redress racial inequities among the school's increasingly diverse student population. Over a five-year period, he witnesses both progress and setbacks in the leaders' attempts to provide an educational environment that is intellectually, socioemotionally, and culturally affirming.

Looking beyond this single school, Irby pinpoints the factors that are essential to the work of equity reform in education. He argues that lasting transformation relies most urgently on the cultivation of organizational conditions that render structural racism impossible to preserve. Irby emphasizes how schools must strengthen and leverage personal, relational, and organizational capacities in order to sustain meaningful change.

Stuck Improving offers a clear-eyed accounting of school-improvement practices, including data-driven instructional approaches, teacher cultural competency, and inquiry-based leadership strategies. This timely work contributes both to the practical efforts of equity-minded school leaders and to a deeper understanding of what the work of racial equity improvement truly entails.

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Marcus Nevius on Becoming a Historian, Marronage, Slave Resistance, and More! Sep 03, 2022

Today's episode of "New Books in African American Studies" is special. Why, you might ask? Because today's episode marks my 100th episode on the NBN! To celebrate, I am chopping it up with my good brother, Dr. Marcus Nevius, Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Rhode Island. In today's convo, Brotha Dr. Nevius and I discuss why he chose to become a historian, his route to become a scholar of marronage and slave resistance, the great Dr. Leslie Alexander, and much much more. Enjoy NBN interview #100, family!

Marcus Nevius is the author of City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763-1856 (University of Georgia Press, 2021).

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Aria S. Halliday, "Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture" (U Illinois Press, 2022) Sep 01, 2022

In Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2022), Aria Halliday negotiates the line between "sell out" and "for us, by us," exploring how Black women cultural producers' further Black women's historical position as the moral compass and arbiter of Black racial progress in the United States.

Black women cultural producers' aesthetic choices communicate that even though capitalist discourses dictate that anything is sellable in our society, there are some symbols of beauty, femininity, and sexuality that sell better than others because of how they occupy the set of already recognizable and, at times, relatable representations of blackness. While they compete in the consumer market for the attention and loyalty of Black consumer dollars, their capitulation to white corporate interests and audiences requires propagating historical tensions regarding Black consumer citizenship and multicultural inclusion. Each chapter contextualizes the role that Black women in the United States play in the global project of Black consumption, questioning which dolls, which princesses, which rags-to-riches narratives, and which characteristics represent the repertoire of Black girlhood. Through themes of self-making and objectification in dolls, princesses, and hip-hop, Buy Black maps the imagined space of "America" and the cultural attitudes that produced a twenty-first-century Black American sensibility based in representation and consumerism. Buy Black teaches all of us the parameters of Black symbolic power by mapping the confluence of intraracial ideals of blackness, womanhood, beauty, play, and sexuality in popular culture."

Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

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John M. Kinder and Jason A. Higgins, "Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022) Aug 31, 2022

Wartime military service is held up as a marker of civic duty and patriotism, yet the rewards of veteran status have never been equally distributed. Certain groups of military veterans--women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and former service members with stigmatizing conditions, "bad paper" discharges, or criminal records--have been left out of official histories, excised from national consciousness, and denied state recognition and military benefits.

Chronicling the untold stories of marginalized veterans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History (U Massachusetts Press, 2022) uncovers the generational divides, cultural stigmas, and discriminatory policies that affected veterans during and after their military service. Together, the chapters in this collection recast veterans beyond the archetype, inspiring an innovative model for veterans studies that encourages an intersectional and interdisciplinary analysis of veterans history. In addition to contributions from the volume editors, this collection features scholarship by Barbara Gannon, Robert Jefferson, Evan P. Sullivan, Steven Rosales, Heather Marie Stur, Juan Coronado, Kara Dixon Vuic, John Worsencroft, and David Kieran.

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Kate Phillips, "Bought & Sold: Scotland, Jamaica and Slavery" (Luath Press, 2022) Aug 31, 2022

Bought & Sold: Scotland, Jamaica and Slavery(Luath Press, 2022) by Kate Phillips traces the story of how and why thousands of Scots made money from buying and selling humans... a story we need to own. We need to admit that many Scots were enthusiastic participants in slavery.

Union with England gave Scotland access to both trade and settlement in Jamaica, Britain’s richest colony and its major slave trading hub. Tens of thousands from Scotland lived and worked there. The abolition campaign and slave revolts threatened Scottish plantation owners, merchants, traders, bankers and insurance brokers who made their fortunes from slave-farmed sugar in Jamaica and fought hard to preserve the system of slavery. Archives and parliamentary papers in both countries reveal these transatlantic Scots in their own words and allow us to access the lives of their captives.

Scotland and Jamaica were closely entwined for over one hundred years. Bought & Sold traces this shared story from its early beginnings in the 1700s to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and reflects on the meaning of those years for both nations today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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E. James West, "Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr." (U Massachusetts Press, 2022) Aug 30, 2022

Journalist, activist, popular historian, and public intellectual, Lerone Bennett Jr. left an indelible mark on twentieth-century American history and culture. Rooted in his role as senior editor of Ebony magazine, but stretching far beyond the boundaries of the Johnson Publishing headquarters in Chicago, Bennett’s work and activism positioned him as a prominent advocate for Black America and a scholar whose writing reached an unparalleled number of African American readers.

This critical biography—the first in-depth study of Bennett’s life—travels with him from his childhood experiences in Jim Crow Mississippi and his time at Morehouse College in Atlanta to his later participation in a dizzying range of Black intellectual and activist endeavors. Drawing extensively on Bennett’s previously inaccessible archival collections at Emory University and Chicago State, as well as interviews with close relatives, colleagues, and confidantes, Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (U Massachusetts Press, 2022) celebrates his enormous influence within and unique connection to African American communities across more than half a century of struggle.

Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history.

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Jeroen Dewulf, "Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America's First Black Christians" (U Notre Dame Press, 2022) Aug 26, 2022

Black Christianity in America has long been studied as a blend of indigenous African and Protestant elements. Jeroen Dewulf redirects the conversation by focusing on the enduring legacy of seventeenth-century Afro-Atlantic Catholics in the broader history of African American Christianity. With homelands in parts of Africa with historically strong Portuguese influence, such as the Cape Verde Islands, São Tomé, and Kongo, these Africans embraced variants of early modern Portuguese Catholicism that they would take with them to the Americas as part of the forced migration that was the transatlantic slave trade. Their impact upon the development of Black religious, social, and political activity in North America would be felt from the southern states as far north as what would become New York.

Dewulf’s analysis focuses on the historical documentation of Afro-Atlantic Catholic rituals, devotions, and social structures. Of particular importance are brotherhood practices, which were critical in the dissemination of Afro-Atlantic Catholic culture among Black communities, a culture that was pre-Tridentine in nature and wary of external influences. These fraternal Black mutual-aid and burial society structures were critically important to the development and resilience of Black Christianity in America through periods of changing social conditions. Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America's First Black Christians(U Notre Dame Press, 2022) shows how a sizable minority of enslaved Africans actively transformed the American Christian landscape and would lay a distinctly Afro-Catholic foundation for African American religious traditions today. This book will appeal to scholars in the history of Christianity, African American and African diaspora studies, and Iberian studies.

Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

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Jamil W. Drake, "To Know the Soul of a People: Religion, Race, and the Making of Southern Folk" (Oxford UP, 2022) Aug 22, 2022

To Know the Soul of a People: Religion, Race, and the Making of Southern Folk(Oxford UP, 2022) is a history of religion and race in the agricultural South before the Civil Rights era. Jamil W. Drake chronicles a cadre of social scientists who studied the living conditions of black rural communities, revealing the abject poverty of the Jim Crow south. These university-affiliated social scientists documented shotgun houses, unsanitary privies and contaminated water, scaly hands, enlarged stomachs, and malnourished bodies. However, they also turned their attention to the spiritual possessions, chanted sermons, ecstatic singing, conjuration, dreams and visions, fortune-telling, taboos, and other religious cultures of these communities. These scholars aimed to illuminate the impoverished conditions of their subjects for philanthropic and governmental organizations, as well as the broader American public, in the first half of the 20th century, especially during the Great Depression. Religion was integral to their efforts to chart the long economic depression across the South.

From 1924 to 1941, Charles Johnson, Guy Johnson, Allison Davis, Lewis Jones, and other social scientists framed the religious and cultural practices of the black communities as "folk" practices, aiming to reform them and the broader South. Drawing on their correspondence, fieldnotes, and monographs, Drake shows that social scientists' use of "folk" reveals the religion was an important site for highlighting the supposed mental, moral, and cultural deficits of America's so-called folk population. Moreover, these social scientists did not just pioneer rural social science and reform but used their study of religion to plant the seeds of the concept that would become known as the "culture of poverty" in the latter half of the twentieth century. To Know the Soul of a People is an exciting intellectual history that invites us to explore the knowledge that animated the earnest yet shortsighted liberal efforts to reform black and impoverished communities.

Joseph Stuart is a scholar of African American history, particularly of the relationship between race, freedom rights, and religion in the twentieth century Black Freedom Movement.

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Autumn Womack, "The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Aug 22, 2022

As the nineteenth century came to a close and questions concerning the future of African American life reached a fever pitch, many social scientists and reformers approached post-emancipation Black life as an empirical problem that could be systematically solved with the help of new technologies like the social survey, photography, and film. What ensued was nothing other than a "racial data revolution," one which rendered African American life an inanimate object of inquiry in the name of social order and racial regulation. At the very same time, African American cultural producers and intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Kelly Miller, Sutton Griggs, and Zora Neale Hurston staged their own kind of revolution, un-disciplining racial data in ways that captured the dynamism of Black social life.

Autumn Womack's The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930 (U Chicago Press, 2022) excavates the dynamic interplay between racial data and Black aesthetic production that shaped late nineteenth-century social, cultural, and literary atmosphere. Through assembling previously overlooked archives and seemingly familiar texts, Womack shows how these artists and writers recalibrated the relationship between data and Black life. The result is a fresh and nuanced take on the history of documenting Blackness. The Matter of Black Living charts a new genealogy from which we can rethink the political and aesthetic work of racial data, a task that has never been more urgent.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Studying Black Religious Thought Aug 22, 2022

The Journal of Black Religious Thought advances critical scholarship in the fields of Religious Studies – with special attention to Black religious studies, which includes and intersects, but not limited to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, New Testament, Intertestamental, Quran, theology, history, ethics, practical theology, religion-science, philosophy of religion, Black hermeneutics, philosophy of religion, womanist, intersectionality, cultural studies, among others – offering African American, African, and/or African Diaspora points of view.

Dr. John Ahn is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Howard University School of Divinity. He is trained in ancient Near Eastern and Religious Studies. He specializes in the historical and social reconstructions of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE with interests to the first century CE. Dr. Ahn is the editor-in-chief of The Journal of Black Religious Thought (Brill).

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Gene Andrew Jarrett, "Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird" (Princeton UP, 2022) Aug 22, 2022

A major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation. In this definitive biography, the first full-scale life of Dunbar in half a century, Gene Andrew Jarrett offers a revelatory account of a writer whose Gilded Age celebrity as the "poet laureate of his race" hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a "caged bird" that sings.

In Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird (Princeton UP, 2022), Jarrett tells the fascinating story of how Dunbar, born during Reconstruction to formerly enslaved parents, excelled against all odds to become an accomplished and versatile artist. A prolific and successful poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and Broadway librettist, he was also a friend of such luminaries as Frederick Douglass and Orville and Wilbur Wright. But while audiences across the United States and Europe flocked to enjoy his literary readings, Dunbar privately bemoaned shouldering the burden of race and catering to minstrel stereotypes to earn fame and money. Inspired by his parents' survival of slavery, but also agitated by a turbulent public marriage, beholden to influential benefactors, and helpless against his widely reported bouts of tuberculosis and alcoholism, he came to regard his racial notoriety as a curse as well as a blessing before dying at the age of only thirty-three.

Beautifully written, meticulously researched, and generously illustrated, this biography presents the richest, most detailed, and most nuanced portrait yet of Dunbar and his work, transforming how we understand the astonishing life and times of a central figure in American literary history.

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Antonio C. Cuyler, "Access, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Cultural Organizations: Insights from the Careers of Executive Opera Managers of Color in the US" (Routledge, 2020) Aug 18, 2022

Where are the success stories for people of color in opera? In Access, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Cultural Organizations: Insights from the Careers of Executive Opera Managers of Color in the U.S. (Routledge, 2021), Antonio Cuyler, Director of the MA Program & Associate Professor of Arts Administration at Florida State University (FSU), and Visiting Associate Professor of Theatre & Drama at the University of Michigan, explores the careers of six leading figures in the American opera industry, and in doing so creates important theoretical insights and practical lessons about success and struggle in the arts. The book combines detailed interview data with a deep understanding of arts management and cultural policy as a field, along with a personal commitment to transforming opera to make it both an open and a sustainable genre. The book is essential reading across arts and humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in opera and the arts!

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His Sister, Her Monologue: A Discussion with Hilton Als Aug 17, 2022

In this 2011 episode from The Vault, Hilton Als reads from, and discusses, His Sister, Her Monologue, a novella he published in Mcsweeney's #35. Als is a staff writer at the New Yorker, and his theater criticism was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. He is the author of two books. The Women, published in 1996., and White Girls, which came out in 2014. "A Pryor Love," His New Yorker profile of Richard Pryor appeared in 1999.

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Julius B. Fleming Jr., "Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation" (NYU Press, 2022) Aug 17, 2022

“Freedom, Now!” This rallying cry became the most iconic phrase of the Civil Rights Movement, challenging the persistent command that Black people wait—in the holds of slave ships and on auction blocks, in segregated bus stops and schoolyards—for their long-deferred liberation.

InBlack Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation(NYU Press, 2022), Julius B. Fleming Jr. argues that, during the Civil Rights Movement, Black artists and activists used theater to energize this radical refusal to wait. Participating in a vibrant culture of embodied political performance that ranged from marches and sit-ins to jail-ins and speeches, these artists turned to theater to unsettle a violent racial project that Fleming refers to as “Black patience.” Inviting the likes of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Douglas Turner Ward, Duke Ellington, and Oscar Brown Jr. to the stage, Black Patience illuminates how Black artists and activists of the Civil Rights era used theater to expose, critique, and repurpose structures of white supremacy. In this bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement, Fleming contends that Black theatrical performance was a vital technology of civil rights activism, and a crucial site of Black artistic and cultural production.

Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter.

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On W. E. B. DuBois' "The Souls of Black Folk" Aug 16, 2022

Nearly 40 years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, American writer, sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. DuBois shed light on Black life in America and what it meant to be seen through a White gaze. In his 1905 text The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois explores the rich and complex African American world and how it helped shape the broader American culture. James Campbell is Professor of US History at Stanford University. He is the author of Slavery and the University - Histories and Legacies and more. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm.

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Tom Zoellner, "Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire" (Harvard UP, 2020) Aug 16, 2022

For five horrific weeks after Christmas in 1831, Jamaica was convulsed by an uprising of its enslaved people. What started as a peaceful labor strike quickly turned into a full-blown revolt, leaving hundreds of plantation houses in smoking ruins. By the time British troops had put down the rebels, more than a thousand Jamaicans lay dead from summary executions and extrajudicial murder.

While the rebels lost their military gamble, their sacrifice accelerated the larger struggle for freedom in the British Atlantic. The daring and suffering of the Jamaicans galvanized public opinion throughout the empire, triggering a decisive turn against slavery. For centuries bondage had fed Britain’s appetite for sugar. Within two years of the Christmas rebellion, slavery was formally abolished.

Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire (Harvard University Press, 2020) is a dramatic day-by-day account of this transformative uprising. A skillful storyteller, Tom Zoellner goes back to the primary sources to tell the intimate story of the men and women who rose up and tasted liberty for a few brief weeks. He provides the first full portrait of the rebellion’s enigmatic leader, Samuel Sharpe, and gives us a poignant glimpse of the struggles and dreams of the many Jamaicans who died for liberty.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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On Frederick Douglass Aug 15, 2022

When Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in 1818, it was illegal for him to learn the alphabet. Slave masters feared the power of a literate slave, so Douglass vowed to read. He became one of the most famous and accomplished American writers of his day, harnessing the power of the King James Bible, the spoken word, and the new visual language of photographs. Harvard professor John Stauffer discusses Douglass’s life and work. John Stauffer is the Sumner R. and Marshall S. Kates Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of GIANTS: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, Picturing Frederick Douglass, and more. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm.

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Christopher M. Reali, "Music and Mystique in Muscle Shoals" (U Illinois Press, 2022) Aug 12, 2022

The forceful music that rolled out of Muscle Shoals in the 1960s and 1970s shaped hits by everyone from Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones and Paul Simon. Christopher M. Reali's in-depth look at the fabled musical hotbed examines the events and factors that gave the Muscle Shoals sound such a potent cultural power. Many artists trekked to FAME Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound in search of the sound of authentic southern Black music—and at times expressed shock at the mostly white studio musicians waiting to play it for them. Others hoped to draw on the hitmaking production process that defined the scene. Reali also chronicles the overlooked history of Muscle Shoals's impact on country music and describes the region's recent transformation into a tourism destination. Multifaceted and informed, Music and Mystique in Muscle Shoals (University of Illinois Press, 2022) reveals the people, places, and events behind one of the most legendary recording scenes in American history.

Dr. Christopher Reali is an assistant professor of music at Ramapo College of New Jersey.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Florida State University. Her current research focuses on parade musics in Mobile, Alabama's carnival.

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Writing Beyond a Limited Narrative: A Conversation with Hari Ziyad Aug 11, 2022

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:

Hari Ziyad’s journey through higher education.
Why they became editor of RaceBaitr after finishing film school at NYU.
The necessary disruption of social norms.
The challenges of writing memoir.
And a discussion of the book Black Boy Out of Time.

Our guest is: Hari Ziyad (he/they), a screenwriter, and the Editor-in-Chief of RaceBaitr. Originally from Cleveland, OH, they currently reside in Brooklyn, NY, and received their BFA from New York University, where they concentrated in Film and Television and Psychology. They are a 2021 Lambda Literary Fellow, and their writing has been featured in the peer-reviewed academic journal Critical Ethnic Studies, among other publications. They are also currently a writer at CBS, and were previously a script consultant on the drama series David Makes Man (OWN), as well as Managing Editor of Black Youth Project, and an Assistant Editor of Vinyl Poetry & Prose. They are the author of Black Boy Out of Time (Little A, 2021)

Today’s book is: Black Boy Out of Time, which explores childhood, gender, race, and the trust that is built, broken, and repaired through generations. Memoirist Hari Ziyad investigates what it means to live beyond the limited narratives Black children are given and challenges the irreconcilable binaries that restrict them. Heartwarming and heart-wrenching, radical and reflective, Hari Ziyad’s vital memoir is for the outcast, the unheard, the unborn, and the dead. It offers us a new way to think about survival and the necessary disruption of social norms. It looks back in tenderness as well as justified rage, forces us to address where we are now, and, born out of hope, illuminates the possibilities for the future.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-creator of the Academic Life.

Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:

Hari’s website
Hari’s pieces in Gawker, Out, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Ebony, Mic, Paste Magazine , AFROPUNK
The Future is Black: Afropessimism, Fugitivity and Radical Hope in Education, edited by Michael Dumas, Ashley Woodson and Carl Grant
This Academic Life episode on memoir and the MFA

You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN.

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Saladin Ambar, "Stars and Shadows: The Politics of Interracial Friendship from Jefferson to Obama" (Oxford UP, 2022) Aug 11, 2022

Slavery and its lingering remnants remain a plague on the United States, continuing to foster animosity between races that hinders the understanding and connection conducive to dismantling the remains of such systems. Personal relationships and connection can provide a path towards reconciling differences and overcoming the racial divisiveness that is America’s original sin.

In his fascinating new book, Stars and Shadows: The Politics of Interracial Friendship from Jefferson to Obama (Oxford UP, 2022), Saladin Ambar, professor of Political Science and Senior Scholar at the Center on the American Governor at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, constructs a comprehensive overview of interracial friendships throughout U.S. history, detailing how friendship can be an invaluable and often overlooked tool when advocating for equality. Because political leaders, celebrities, and other cultural figures have such an influence on the general public, they can play a particular role in shaping public opinion. Thus, analyzing significant interracial friendships between well-known individuals throughout different historical moments can serve as windows into the state of race relations as they developed through time, and what that can mean for our future.

Ambar meditates on the power of friendship in general, and interracial friendship in particular, through ten different, iconic cases, examining these relationships in both their personal and political capacity. The specific focus of each friendship duet is to explore the public consequences of relationships across race. Each duo has unique experiences that are particular to their historical moments and the political constraints of the time. Through these stories, Ambar develops a theory rejecting the notion that we must separate the personal from the political, detailing how, in an interracial democracy predicated on equality, the two must and do intertwine in order to overcome racial differences. Stars and Shadows examines, among others, Benjamin Banneker and Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, Angela Davis and Gloria Steinem, Marlon Brando and James Baldwin, and ends with Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s iconic bond. The analysis wrestles with the American political structure, which is not based on connecting individuals to each other in any kind of personal way, and yet friendship is what connects us all as human beings. Ambar’s theory challenges citizens to look inward and outward when interacting with one another, to engage intentionally with our differences, and not to run away from our past but to critically analyze it and incorporate it going forward.

Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Simone White, "Or, on Being the Other Woman" (Duke UP, 2022) Aug 11, 2022

In or, on being the other woman (Duke UP, 2022), Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life. Throughout this book-length poem, White writes through a hybrid of poetry, essay, personal narrative, and critical theory, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist. She considers black social life—from art and motherhood to trap music and love—as unspeakably troubling and reflects on the degree to which it strands and punishes black women. She also explores what constitutes sexual freedom and the rewards and dangers that come with it. White meditates on trap music and the ways artists such as Future and Meek Mill and the sonic waves of the drum machine convey desire and the black experience. Charting the pressures of ordinary black womanhood, White pushes the limits of language, showing how those limits can be the basis for new modes of expression.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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On Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" Aug 09, 2022

Zora Neale Hurston was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance, but her novels didn’t conform to the style of her contemporaries. As a result, her work was almost lost—until the writer Alice Walker found her unmarked grave in 1974. Now, Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is on high school reading lists across the US. Dartmouth professor and poet Joshua Bennett discusses the novel’s longstanding impact and what it can teach us about cancel culture. Joshua Bennett is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author of The Sobbing School. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. You can hear the full interview with Professor Bennett on the Lyceum app.

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Miriam Thaggert, "Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad" (U Illinois Press, 2022) Aug 08, 2022

Miriam Thaggert illuminates the stories of African American women as passengers and as workers on the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century railroad. As Jim Crow laws became more prevalent and forced Black Americans to "ride Jim Crow" on the rails, the train compartment became a contested space of leisure and work.

Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad(U Illinois Press, 2022) examines four instances of Black female railroad travel: the travel narratives of Black female intellectuals such as Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell; Black middle-class women who sued to ride in first class "ladies' cars"; Black women railroad food vendors; and Black maids on Pullman trains. Thaggert argues that the railroad represented a technological advancement that was entwined with African American attempts to secure social progress. Black women's experiences on or near the railroad illustrate how American technological progress has often meant their ejection or displacement; thus, it is the Black woman who most fully measures the success of American freedom and privilege, or "progress," through her travel experiences.

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Daniel T. Fleming, "Living the Dream: The Contested History of Martin Luther King Jr. Day" (UNC Press, 2022) Aug 05, 2022

Living the Dream: The Contested History of Martin Luther King Jr. Day(UNC Press, 2022) tells the history behind the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the battle over King's legacy that continued through the decades that followed. Creating the first national holiday to honor an African American was a formidable achievement and an act of resistance against conservative and segregationist opposition. Congressional efforts to commemorate King began shortly after his assassination. The ensuing political battles slowed the progress of granting him a namesake holiday and crucially defined how his legacy would be received. Though Coretta Scott King's mission to honor her husband's commitment to nonviolence was upheld, conservative politicians sought to use the holiday to advance a whitewashed, nationalistic, and even reactionary vision of King's life and thought. This book reveals the lengths that activists had to go to elevate an African American man to the pantheon of national heroes, how conservatives took advantage of the commemoration to bend the arc of King's legacy toward something he never would have expected, and how grassroots causes, unions, and antiwar demonstrators continued to try to claim this sanctified day as their own.

Daniel T. Fleming is lecturer at the University of New South Wales and an Honorary Post-Doctoral Fellow at Macquarie University.

E. James West is a UK-based historian and writer. He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (Illinois, 2020), A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago (Illinois, 2022) and Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (UMass, 2022).

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Victoria Reyes, "Academic Outsider: Stories of Exclusion and Hope" (Stanford UP, 2022) Aug 04, 2022

In Academic Outsider: Stories of Exclusion and Hope (Stanford University Press, 2022), sociologist Victoria Reyes combines her personal experiences with research findings to examine how academia creates conditional citizenship for its marginalized members. Reyes draws from her family background, experiences during routine university life, and academic scholarship to theorize the academic outsiders as those who "are constantly reminded that our presence in the academy is contingent and in constant flux" (10-11). She elaborates on how love and worth are assessed in the university and her experiences as a mother in the academy. The final chapter calls for academic justice and offers practical strategies to combat the academy's exclusionary practices. In this book Reyes contributes to important conversations in the university on the experiences of people of color, women, and those from marginalized backgrounds. This book will be of interest to those who experience the academy's conditional citizenship, those who want to understand how the university perpetuates inequality, and those who want to challenge these conditions.

Victoria Reyes is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Global Borderlands (Stanford, 2019).

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (Illinois, 2022).

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Corey Robin, "The Enigma of Clarence Thomas" (Metropolitan Books, 2019) Aug 04, 2022

Most people can tell you two things about Clarence Thomas: Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, and he almost never speaks from the bench. Here are some things they don't know: Until Thomas went to law school, he was a black nationalist. In college he memorized the speeches of Malcolm X. He believes white people are incurably racist.

In The Enigma of Clarence Thomas (Metropolitan Books, 2019), Corey Robin--one of the foremost analysts of the right--delves deeply into both Thomas's biography and his jurisprudence, masterfully reading his Supreme Court opinions against the backdrop of his autobiographical and political writings and speeches. The hidden source of Thomas's conservative views, Robin argues, is a profound skepticism that racism can be overcome. Thomas is convinced that any government action on behalf of African-Americans will be tainted by this racism, and that the most African-Americans can hope for is that white people will get out of their way. There's a reason, Robin concludes, why liberals often complain that Thomas doesn't speak but seldom pay attention when he does. Were they to listen, they'd hear a racial pessimism that sounds shockingly similar to their own. Cutting across the ideological spectrum, this unacknowledged consensus about the impossibility of progress is key to understanding today's political stalemate.

Corey Robin is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Lindsay Pérez Huber and Susana M. Muñoz, "Why They Hate Us: How Racist Rhetoric Impacts Education" (Teachers College Press, 2021) Aug 03, 2022

Why They Hate Us: How Racist Rhetoric Impacts Education (Teachers College Press, 2021) examines how racist political rhetoric has created damaging and dangerous conditions for Students of Color in schools and higher education institutions throughout the United States. The authors show how the election of the 45th president has resulted in a defining moment in U.S. history where racist discourses, reinforced by ideologies of white supremacy, have affected the educational experiences of our most vulnerable students. This volume situates the rhetoric of the Trump presidency within a broader historical narrative and provides recommendations for those who seek to advocate for anti-racism and social justice. As we enter the uncharted waters of a global pandemic and national racial reckoning, this will be invaluable reading for scholars, educators, and administrators who want to be part of the solution.

Dr. Lindsay Pérez Huber is a professor of education at California State University-Long Beach as well as a visiting scholar at the UCLA Center for Critical Race Studies. Her research analyzes racial inequities in education, the impact on marginalized urban students of color, and how students and their communities respond to those inequities through strategies of resistance. Dr. Susana Muñoz is an associate professor of education at Colorado State University. Her research focuses on issues of access, equity, and college persistence for undocumented Latina/o students.

Autumn Wilke works in higher education as an ADA coordinator and diversity officer and is also an author and doctoral candidate with research/topics related to disability and higher education.

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Will Jawando, "My Seven Black Fathers: A Young Activist's Memoir of Race, Family, and the Mentors Who Made Him Whole" (FSG, 2022) Aug 01, 2022

Will Jawando tells a deeply affirmative story of hope and respect for men of color at a time when Black men are routinely stigmatized. As a boy growing up outside DC, Will, who went by his Nigerian name, Yemi, was shunted from school to school, never quite fitting in. He was a Black kid with a divorced white mother, a frayed relationship with his biological father, and teachers who scolded him for being disruptive in class and on the playground. Eventually, he became close to Kalfani, a kid he looked up to on the basketball court. Years after he got the call telling him that Kalfani was dead, another sickening casualty of gun violence, Will looks back on the relationships with an extraordinary series of mentors that enabled him to thrive.

Among them were Mr. Williams, the rare Black male grade school teacher, who found a way to bolster Will's self-esteem when he discovered he was being bullied; Jay Fletcher, the openly gay colleague of his mother who got him off junk food and took him to his first play; Mr. Holmes, the high school coach and chorus director who saw him through a crushing disappointment; Deen Sanwoola, the businessman who helped him bridge the gap between his American upbringing and his Nigerian heritage, eventually leading to a dramatic reconciliation with his biological father; and President Barack Obama, who made Will his associate director of public engagement at the White House--and who invited him to play basketball on more than one occasion. Without the influence of these men, Will knows he would not be who he is today: a civil rights and education policy attorney, a civic leader, a husband, and a father.

Drawing on Will's inspiring personal story and involvement in My Brother's Keeper, President Obama's national initiative to address persistent opportunity gaps facing boys and young men of color, My Seven Black Fathers: A Young Activist's Memoir of Race, Family, and the Mentors Who Made Him Whole(FSG, 2022) offers a transformative way for Black men to shape the next generation.

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Peter H. Wood, "Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion" (Norton, 1996) Jul 29, 2022

Welcome to New Books in African American Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I am your host, Adam Xavier McNeil. Today’s podcast is special, not because this is the 99th episode of my New Books career, but because I get the chance to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Peter H. Wood completing the dissertation version of Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion. In this wide-ranging interview, I discuss the origin story of Peter’s work, what happened at Duke University in the 80s and 90s that opened opportunities for the likes of Jennifer L. Morgan, Vincent Brown, and the late great Julius Scott to come through the Durham doors, and where he sees the field of slavery studies going? Enjoy the conversation, family.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Hawa Allan, "Insurrection: Rebellion, Civil Rights, and the Paradoxical State of Black Citizenship" (Norton, 2022) Jul 29, 2022

The little-known and under-studied 1807 Insurrection Act was passed to give the president the ability to deploy federal military forces to fend off lawlessness and rebellion, but it soon became much more than the sum of its parts. Its power is integrally linked to the perceived threat of black American equity in what lawyer and critic Hawa Allan demonstrates is a dangerous paradox. While the Act was initially used to repress rebellion against slavery, during Reconstruction it was invoked by President Grant to quell white-supremacist uprisings in the South. During the civil rights movement, it enabled the protection of black students who attended previously segregated educational institutions. Most recently, the Insurrection Act has been the vehicle for presidents to call upon federal troops to suppress so-called “race riots” like those in Los Angeles in 1992, and for them to threaten to do so in other cases of racial justice activism. Yet when the US Capitol was stormed in January 2021, the impulse to restore law and order and counter insurrectionary threats to the republic lay dormant.

Allan’s distinctly literary voice underscores her paradigm-shifting reflections on the presence of fear and silence in history and their shadowy impact on the law. Throughout, she draws revealing insight from her own experiences as one of the only black girls in her leafy Long Island suburb, as a black lawyer at a predominantly white firm during a visit from presidential candidate Barack Obama, and as a thinker about the use and misuse of appeals to law and order.

Elegant and profound, deeply researched and intensely felt, Insurrection: Rebellion, Civil Rights, and the Paradoxical State of Black Citizenship(Norton, 2022)is necessary reading in our reckoning with structural racism, government power, and protest in the United States.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Michael K. Beauchamp, "Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815" (LSU Press, 2021) Jul 27, 2022

M. K. Beauchamp's Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815(LSU Press, 2021) examines the challenges that resulted from U.S. territorial expansion through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. With the acquisition of this vast region, the United States gained a colonial European population whose birthplace, language, and religion often differed from those of their U.S. counterparts. This population exhibited multiple ethnic tensions and possessed little experience with republican government. Consequently, administration of the territory proved a trial-and-error endeavor involving incremental cooperation between federal officials and local elites. As Beauchamp demonstrates, this process of gradual accommodation served as an essential nationalizing experience for the people of Louisiana.

After the acquisition, federal officials who doubted the loyalty of the local French population and their capacity for self-governance denied the territory of Orleans--easily the region's most populated and economically robust area--a quick path to statehood. Instead, U.S. officials looked to groups including free people of color, Native Americans, and recent immigrants, all of whom found themselves ideally placed to negotiate for greater privileges from the new territorial government. Beauchamp argues that U.S. administrators, despite claims of impartiality and equality before the law, regularly acted as fickle agents of imperial power and frequently co-opted local elites with prominent positions within the parishes. Overall, the methods utilized by the United States in governing Louisiana shared much in common with European colonial practices implemented elsewhere in North America during the early nineteenth century.

While historians have previously focused on Washington policy makers in investigating the relationship between the United States and the newly acquired territory, Beauchamp emphasizes the integral role played by territorial elites who wielded enormous power and enabled government to function. His work offers profound insights into the interplay of class, ethnicity, and race, as well as an understanding of colonialism, the nature of republics, democracy, and empire. By placing the territorial period of early national Louisiana in an imperial context, this study reshapes perceptions of American expansion and manifest destiny in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Instruments of Empire serves as a rich resource for specialists studying Louisiana and the U.S. South, as well as scholars of slavery and free people of color, nineteenth-century American history, Atlantic World and border studies, U.S. foreign relations, and the history of colonialism and empire.

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Traci Parker, "Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s" (UNC Press, 2019) Jul 22, 2022

In Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s (UNC Press, 2019), Traci Parker examines the movement to racially integrate white-collar work and consumption in American department stores, and broadens our understanding of historical transformations in African American class and labor formation. Built on the goals, organization, and momentum of earlier struggles for justice, the department store movement channeled the power of store workers and consumers to promote black freedom in the mid-twentieth century. Sponsoring lunch counter sit-ins and protests in the 1950s and 1960s, and challenging discrimination in the courts in the 1970s, this movement ended in the early 1980s with the conclusion of the Sears, Roebuck, and Co. affirmative action cases and the transformation and consolidation of American department stores. In documenting the experiences of African American workers and consumers during this era, Parker highlights the department store as a key site for the inception of a modern black middle class, and demonstrates the ways that both work and consumption were battlegrounds for civil rights.

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Darts and Lasers: The Future of Science Fiction, Afro-Futurism, and Feminist Speculative Fiction Jul 20, 2022

It’s stardate 99040.01 and lead producer Jay Cockburn is temporarily taking over command of Darts and Letters for an episode.

For this episode, as part of the week’s theme of “ideas in strange places” we boldly go into the strange new worlds of science fiction, revealing how it’s long been a vehicle for radical thought. We dig into post-scarcity, Afrofuturism, and feminist speculative fiction as we set our phasers to fun and go where no podcast has gone before.

This episode is a rebroadcast from our catalogue. We’re revisiting some of our favourites until the new season of Darts and Letters launches on September 18th.

First (@10:54), Cory Doctorow is a journalist, activist, blogger, and author of many books including the post-scarcity speculative fiction novel Walkaway. He takes us through the idea of a post-scarcity world as he breaks down the idea of abundance and what we might do with it, or not.
Then, (@34:52), Nalo Hopkinson is a science fiction writer, editor, professor, and author of Brown Girl in the Ring. She talks to us about Afrofuturism as a critical lens and different ways of seeing the future for different communities — and re-imagining the present. Plus, be sure to read her own recommendation: Sister Mine.
Finally, (@49:43), Batya Weinbaum is a poet, artist, professor, and the editor of FemSpec, an academic journal of feminist speculative fiction. She charts the history of feminism in science fiction and how art, including novels, helps drive social, political, and economic change.

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Darts and Letters is hosted and edited by Gordon Katic; this episode our guest host and lead producer is Jay Cockburn. Gordon Katic is our editor. Our managing producer is Marc Apollonio. Our research assistants for this episode were Addye Susnick and David Moscrop. Our theme song was created by Mike Barber. Our graphic design was created by Dakota Koop.

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Gabrielle David, "Trailblazers: Black Women Who Helped Make America Great, American Firsts/American Icons" (2leaf Press, 2021) Jul 20, 2022

Since slavery, Black women have struggled to liberate themselves from racism and sexism. Yet despite these hurdles and under the most difficult circumstances, they managed to achieve greatness. Trailblazers: Black Women Who Helped Make America Great, American Firsts/American Icons (2leaf Press, 2021) shines a light on these their accomplishments, which often led to widespread cultural change. Trailblazers is a six-volume series that examines the lives and careers of over four hundred brilliant women from the eighteenth century to the present who blazed uncharted paths in every conceivable way.

Each Trailblazers volume is organized into several sections. Along with biographical information and powerful photographs, David provides a historical timeline for each section--written from the viewpoint of Black women--that maps out the significance of the featured women that follow.

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Xine Yao, "Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America" (Duke UP, 2021) Jul 19, 2022

What is unfeeling? According to today’s guest, Xine Yao, unfeeling includes “a broad range of affective modes, including withholding, disregard, growing a thick skin, refusing to care, opacity, numbness, dissociation, inscrutability, frigidity, insensibility, obduracy, flatness, insensitivity, disinterest, coldness, heartlessness, fatigue, desensitization, and emotional unavailability.”

In short, Xine argues in a new book from Duke University Press, titled Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America, “people who are disaffected break from affectability and present themselves as unaffected” (11). Xine is a Lecturer of English before 1900 at University College London. Xine is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker and the co-host of the PhDivas Podcast which focuses on social justice and academia across the STEM/Humanities divide. Disaffected is an urgent book that examines how sentimentality was (and is) a part of the political architecture of white supremacy and governmentality—and the forms of unfeeling that writers of color used (and continue to use) to roil that architecture.

John Yargo holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including The Tempest, Oroonoko, and the poetry of Milton. He has published in Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies.

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Thulani Davis, "The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom" (Duke UP, 2022) Jul 19, 2022

In The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom (Duke UP, 2022) Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. This interdisciplinary history shows that these circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid. Mapping the emancipation circuits, Davis shows the geography of ideas of freedom---circulating on shipping routes, via army maneuvers, and with itinerant activists---that became the basis for the first mass Black political movement for equal citizenship in the United States. In this work, she reconfigures understandings of the evolution of southern Black political agendas while outlining the origins of the enduring Black freedom struggle from the Jim Crow era to the present.

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Black Trans Feminism Jul 19, 2022

Marquis Bey talks about the radical and abolitionist project of Black Trans Feminism. Rather than an identity formation, it is a politics and modality of being that vitiates the limits of subjectivity. Black Trans Feminism finds joy in irreverence, just like we try to do on High Theory.

You can recalibrate your understanding of the subject by reading Marquis’s forthcoming book Black Trans Feminism, published by Duke University Press. Released next week! On February 25th.

In the episode Marquis references a wonderful quote from Saidiya Hartman, that “A Black revolution makes everyone freer than they actually want to be.” It’s a hard quote to find, but it appears in Frank Wilderson’s interview with C.S. Soong, “Blacks and the Master/Slave Relation” in Afropessimism: An Introduction (Racked & Dispatched, 2017).

Marquis is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University. They also serve as Faculty Affiliate and Advisory Board Member in Gender & Sexuality Studies and Advisory Board Faculty Member in Critical Theory.

This week’s image was provided by Marquis.

Music used in promotional material: ‘Semiacoustic’ by Pk Jazz Collective

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Victoria W. Wolcott, "Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Jul 18, 2022

Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals the unexplored impact of utopian thought on the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement.

Utopian thinking is often dismissed as unrealistic, overly idealized, and flat-out impractical-in short, wholly divorced from the urgent conditions of daily life. This is perhaps especially true when the utopian ideal in question is reforming and repairing the United States' bitter history of racial injustice. But as Victoria W. Wolcott provocatively argues, utopianism is actually the foundation of a rich and visionary worldview, one that specifically inspired the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement in ways that haven't yet been fully understood or appreciated.

Wolcott makes clear that the idealism and pragmatism of the Civil Rights Movement were grounded in nothing less than an intensely utopian yearning. Key figures of the time, from Martin Luther King Jr. and Pauli Murray to Father Divine and Howard Thurman, all shared a belief in a radical pacificism that was both specifically utopian and deeply engaged in changing the current conditions of the existing world. Living in the Future recasts the various strains of mid-twentieth-century civil rights activism in a utopian light, revealing the power of dreaming in a profound and concrete fashion, one that can be emulated in other times that are desperate for change, like today.

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Erin C. MacLeod, "Visions of Zion: Ethiopians and Rastafari in the Search for the Promised Land" (NYU Press, 2014) Jul 15, 2022

In reggae song after reggae song Bob Marley and other reggae singers speak of the Promised Land of Ethiopia. "Repatriation is a must!" they cry. The Rastafari have been travelling to Ethiopia since the movement originated in Jamaica in 1930s. They consider it the Promised Land, and repatriation is a cornerstone of their faith. Though Ethiopians see Rastafari as immigrants, the Rastafari see themselves as returning members of the Ethiopian diaspora.

In Visions of Zion: Ethiopians and Rastafari in the Search for the Promised Land (NYU Press, 2014), Erin C. MacLeod offers the first in-depth investigation into how Ethiopians perceive Rastafari and Rastafarians within Ethiopia and the role this unique immigrant community plays within Ethiopian society.

Rastafari are unusual among migrants, basing their movements on spiritual rather than economic choices. This volume offers those who study the movement a broader understanding of the implications of repatriation. Taking the Ethiopian perspective into account, it argues that migrant and diaspora identities are the products of negotiation, and it illuminates the implications of this negotiation for concepts of citizenship, as well as for our understandings of pan-Africanism and south-south migration. Providing a rare look at migration to a non-Western country, this volume also fills a gap in the broader immigration studies literature.

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Anthony W. Wood, "Black Montana: Settler Colonialism and the Erosion of the Racial Frontier, 1877-1930" (U Nebraska Press, 2021) Jul 14, 2022

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many African Americans moved westward as Greater Reconstruction came to a close. Though, along with Euro-Americans, Black settlers appropriated the land of Native Americans, sometimes even contributing to ongoing violence against Indigenous people, this migration often defied the goals of settler states in the American West.

In Black Montana: Settler Colonialism and the Erosion of the Racial Frontier, 1877-1930(U Nebraska Press, 2021), Anthony W. Wood explores the entanglements of race, settler colonialism, and the emergence of state and regional identity in the American West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By producing conditions of social, cultural, and economic precarity that undermined Black Montanans' networks of kinship, community, and financial security, the state of Montana, in its capacity as a settler colony, worked to exclude the Black community that began to form inside its borders after Reconstruction.

Black Montana depicts the history of Montana's Black community from 1877 until the 1930s, a period in western American history that represents a significant moment and unique geography in the life of the U.S. settler-colonial project.

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Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman, "Second-Class Daughters: Black Brazilian Women and Informal Adoption as Modern Slavery" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Jul 13, 2022

A legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, Brazil is home to the largest number of African descendants outside Africa and the greatest number of domestic workers in the world. Drawing on ten years of interviews and ethnographic research, Second-Class Daughters: Black Brazilian Women and Informal Adoption as Modern Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2022) examines the lives of marginalized informal domestic workers who are called 'adopted daughters' but who live in slave-like conditions in the homes of their adoptive families. Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman traces a nuanced and, at times, disturbing account of how adopted daughters, who are trapped in a system of racial, gender, and class oppression, live with the coexistence of extreme forms of exploitation and seemingly loving familial interactions and affective relationships. Highlighting the humanity of her respondents, Hordge-Freeman examines how filhas de criação (raised daughters) navigate the realities of their structural constraints and in the context of pervasive norms of morality, gratitude, and kinship. In all, the author clarifies the link between contemporary and colonial forms of exploitation, while highlighting the resistance and agency of informal domestic workers.

Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman is an Associate Professor of sociology, interim Vice President for Institutional Equity, and Senior Advisor to the President and Provost for Diversity and Inclusion at The University of South Florida.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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David Silkenat, "Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South" (Oxford UP, 2022) Jul 12, 2022

They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people found their lives indelibly shaped by the Southern environment. By day, they plucked worms and insects from the crops, trod barefoot in the mud as they hoed rice fields, and endured the sun and humidity as they planted and harvested the fields. By night, they clandestinely took to the woods and swamps to trap opossums and turtles, to visit relatives living on adjacent plantations, and at times to escape slave patrols and escape to freedom.

Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South(Oxford UP, 2022) is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape. Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple calculation had profound consequences: rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce. They saw the landscape as disposable, relocating to more fertile prospects once they had leached the soils and cut down the forests. On the leading edge of the frontier, slavery laid waste to fragile ecosystems, draining swamps, clearing forests to plant crops and fuel steamships, and introducing devastating invasive species. On its trailing edge, slavery left eroded hillsides, rivers clogged with sterile soil, and the extinction of native species. While environmental destruction fueled slavery's expansion, no environment could long survive intensive slave labor. The scars manifested themselves in different ways, but the land too fell victim to the slave owner's lash.

Although typically treated separately, slavery and the environment naturally intersect in complex and powerful ways, leaving lasting effects from the period of emancipation through modern-day reckonings with racial justice.

David Silkenat is a Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of several books, including Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War, a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. Twitter.

Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Negro Literature Jul 11, 2022

Elizabeth McHenry talks about the moment in the history of African American literature in the decade following the 1896 legalization of segregation, the subject of her new book To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship. She redirects attention to overlooked archives of unpublished and unsuccessful literary production and thereby offers a radically alternative genealogy of Black literature.

Elizabeth McHenry is Professor of English at New York University and author of Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies, also published by Duke University Press. The book relies on a number of theoretical and disciplinary lenses to understand the epistemological and social conditions of print culture and literary community for African Americans between 1830 and 1940. It expands our definition of literacy and urges of us think about literature as broadly as it was conceived of in the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries.

Image: The Louisville Western Branch Library in Louisville, Kentucky

Music used in promotional material: ‘Afro-American Symphony: II – Adagio’, William Grants Still

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Shannen Dee Williams, "Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle" (Duke UP, 2022) Jul 11, 2022

In Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle(Duke UP, 2022), Shannen Dee Williams, provides the first full history of Black Catholic nuns in the United States, hailing them as the forgotten prophets of Catholicism and democracy. Drawing on oral histories and previously sealed Church records, Williams demonstrates how master narratives of women’s religious life and Catholic commitments to racial and gender justice fundamentally change when the lives and experiences of African American nuns are taken seriously. For Black Catholic women and girls, embracing the celibate religious state constituted a radical act of resistance to white supremacy and the sexual terrorism built into chattel slavery and segregation. Williams shows how Black sisters—such as Sister Mary Antona Ebo, who was the only Black member of the inaugural delegation of Catholic sisters to travel to Selma, Alabama, and join the Black voting rights marches of 1965—were pioneering religious leaders, educators, healthcare professionals, desegregation foot soldiers, Black Power activists, and womanist theologians. In the process, Williams calls attention to Catholic women’s religious life as a stronghold of white supremacy and racial segregation—and thus an important battleground in the long African American freedom struggle.

Allison Isidore is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association and is an Instructor of Record for the Religious Studies department at the University of Alabama. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism, and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. Allison is also a Video Editor for The Religious Studies Project, producing videos for the podcast and marketing team. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

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H. H. Leonards, "Rosa Parks Beyond the Bus: Life, Lessons, and Leadership" (R. H. Boyd, 2022) Jul 08, 2022

Rosa Parks Beyond the Bus: Life, Lessons, and Leadership (R. H. Boyd, 2022) is a collection of inspiring and instructive memories compiled from the decade that Mrs. Parks was a guest in author H.H. Leonard’s Washington, DC home. During those years, Mrs. Leonards was able to know the heart, mind, and spirit of the woman who refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama city bus on December 1, 1955.

The author shares her remembrances, both delightful and somber, in a way that offers readers an intimate and personal glimpse into the personhood of Mrs. Parks.

Mrs. Parks is a seminal point in the history of civil, human, and women’s rights. Her story, as told through the eyes of H. H. Leonards, also touches the journey of African-American women who have somehow managed to survive a system that cared little about the indignities they suffered—from discrimination to sexual assault.

While many of her contemporaries attempted to define her as the woman who refused to give up her seat on the bus, she was more than the sum of one pivotal decision. She was decidedly multi-dimensional.

Rosa Parks Beyond the Bus is a personal look into Mrs. Parks’ life, her thoughts, her beliefs, and her immense wisdom that moved people— from world leaders Nelson Mandela, Deepak Chopra and Pope John Paul II to the smallest of children—to seek and revere her presence.

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Xinling Li, "Black Masculinity and Hip-Hop Music: Black Gay Men Who Rap" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) Jul 06, 2022

In Black Masculinity and Hip-Hop Music: Black Gay Men Who Rap (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), XinLing Li offers an interdisciplinary study of hip-hop music written and performed by rappers who are black gay men. This study examines the storytelling mechanisms of gay themed lyrics, and how these form protests and become enabling tools for (black) gay men to discuss issues such as living on the down-low and HIV/AIDS. It considers how the biased promotion of feminized gay male artists/characters in the mainstream entertainment industry have rendered masculinity an exclusively male heterosexual property, providing a representational framework for men to identify with a form of “homosexual masculinity” – one that is constructed without having to either victimize anything feminine or necessarily convert to femininity. The book makes a strong case that it is possible for individuals (like gay rappers) to perform masculinity against masculinity, and open up a new way of striving for gender equality.

XinLing Li received his PhD in sociology from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Jessica Lipsky, "It Ain't Retro: Daptone Records and the 21st-Century Soul Revolution" (Jawbone, 2021) Jul 05, 2022

Soul is the most powerful expression of American music--a distinct combination of roots, migration, race, culture, and politics packaged together for your dancing pleasure. But if you thought the sounds of Motown or Stax Records died along with 8-tracks and macramé, you'd be wrong. For two decades, Daptone Records has churned out hard funk and such beautiful soul that these records sparked a musical revolution.

Run by a collective of soul-obsessed producers and musicians, the Brooklyn-based independent label launched the careers of artists such as Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, Charles Bradley, and Bruno Mars. Daptone's records--and those of the larger soul revival scene--pay homage but never lip service to the original artists, proving that soul is still culturally relevant, and just as exciting as ever.

It Ain't Retro: Daptone Records and the 21st-Century Soul Revolution (Jawbone, 2021) charts this revival's players, sounds, and tectonic shifts over the past twenty years, taking you from dingy clubs where soul crazed DJs packed the dancefloor, to just uptown where some of the genre's heaviest musicians jumpstarted the renaissance in a basement studio, and all the way to the White House. This definitive tale of Daptone Records' soulful revolution chronicles the label's history, players, and sounds while dissecting the scene's cultural underpinnings, which continue to reverberate in pop music. The book also contains rare and unseen images of Daptone artists past and present, including Sharon Jones, Charles Bradley, Lee Fields, Antibalas, The Sugarman 3, The Budos Band, and more.

Jessica Lipsky is a journalist and DJ from Brooklyn by way of the San Francisco Bay. She first encountered sweet soul music as a child by obsessively tuning her radio dial and has since extensively covered soul, funk, reggae, and alternative Latin music. Her work on the intersection of culture, music, and politics has appeared in NPR, Billboard, Grammy.com, Columbia Journalism Review, Vice, and LA Weekly.

Jessica Lipsky on Twitter.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music.

Bradley Morgan on Twitter.

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Elisabeth R. Anker, "Ugly Freedoms" (Duke UP, 2022) Jul 04, 2022

In Ugly Freedoms (Duke UP, 2022), Elisabeth R. Anker reckons with the complex legacy of freedom offered by liberal American democracy, outlining how the emphasis of individual liberty has always been entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, climate destruction, economic exploitation, and patriarchy. These "ugly freedoms" legitimate the right to exploit and subjugate others. At the same time, Anker locates an unexpected second type of ugly freedom in practices and situations often dismissed as demeaning, offensive, gross, and ineffectual but that provide sources of emancipatory potential. She analyzes both types of ugly freedom at work in a number of texts and locations, from political theory, art, and film to food, toxic dumps, and multispecies interactions. Whether examining how Kara Walker's sugar sculpture A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby reveals the importance of sugar plantations to liberal thought or how the impoverished neighborhoods in The Wire blunt neoliberalism's violence, Anker shifts our perspective of freedom by contesting its idealized expressions and expanding the visions for what freedom can look like, who can exercise it, and how to build a world free from domination.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Mae Ngai, "The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes, Chinese Migration, and Global Politics" (W. W. Norton, 2022) Jul 04, 2022

Between 1848 and 1899, miners extracted more gold from the earth than in the previous 3,000 years of human history combined. Each gold rush in this period, from the Sierra Nevada to the highlands of Australia to the Transvaal, was a global event, drawing argonauts and others seeking new lives from all corners of the world, including from China. In her Bancroft-Prize winning book, The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics(Norton, 2021), Columbia University Professor of Asian American Studies and History Mae Ngai seeks to dispel a long held myth that Chinese gold-seekers arrived as unfree labor to sites of gold rushes. Instead, Mae describes in great detail not just the global nature of gold rushes, but the complicated lives and politics of Chinese participation in imperial-era gold mining. Using a comparative study of three gold rushes in California, Australia, and South Africa, Ngai explains why "The Chinese Question" became a driving social and political question among White settlers in each of these zones of industrial gold mining, and how Chinese people navigated increasingly unfriendly and racist environments and legal structures. The Chinese Question is not just a thing of the past either, and Ngai makes a compelling case for its lasting impact on American and global politics into the twenty first century.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Stefanie K. Dunning, "Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture" (UP of Mississippi, 2021) Jul 01, 2022

In Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture(University Press of Mississippi, 2021), author Stefanie K. Dunning considers both popular and literary texts that range from Beyoncé’s Lemonade to Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. These key works restage Black women in relation to nature. Dunning argues that depictions of protagonists who return to pastoral settings contest the violent and racist history that incentivized Black disavowal of the natural world. Dunning offers an original theoretical paradigm for thinking through race and nature by showing that diverse constructions of nature in these texts are deployed as a means of rescrambling the teleology of the Western progress narrative. In a series of fascinating close readings of contemporary Black texts, she reveals how a range of artists evoke nature to suggest that interbeing with nature signals a call for what Jared Sexton calls “the dream of Black Studies”—abolition.

Black to Nature thus offers nuanced readings that advance an emerging body of critical and creative work at the nexus of Blackness, gender, and nature. Written in a clear, approachable, and multilayered style that aims to be as poignant as nature itself, the volume offers a unique combination of theoretical breadth, narrative beauty, and broader perspective that suggests it will be a foundational text in a new critical turn towards framing nature within a cultural studies context.

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Book Talk 53: Paul Edwards on Toni Morrison's "Playing in the Dark" Jun 30, 2022

Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a must-read for anyone interested in American literature and in the formation of American identity in general. In her short, incisive book, Nobel-prize winner Morrison explores the ways in which canonical authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway conspicuously invented African American characters for their projects of creating American identity – and how critics have deliberately overlooked, ignored or dismissed this dimension of the American canon. Morrison’s point is not to out these writers as racist or to cancel their works but to explain the role of African American figures in the aesthetic and artistic project of inventing American identity and a canon of national literature. I spoke with Paul Edwards, who is my colleague as Assistant Professor of English and Dramatic Literature at New York University and a book reviews editor for The Black Scholar. Professor Edwards’s current book project, The Black Wave: The New Negro Renaissance in Interwar Germany, reveals the effects of the New Negro/Harlem Renaissance in Germany from 1925 to 1938.

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Holly A. Pinheiro Jr., "The Families' Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice" (U Georgia Press, 2022) Jun 29, 2022

The Families' Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice (U Georgia Press, 2022) tells the stories of freeborn northern African Americans in Philadelphia struggling to maintain families while fighting against racial discrimination. Taking a long view, from 1850 to the 1920s, Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. shows how Civil War military service worsened already difficult circumstances due to its negative effects on family finances, living situations, minds, and bodies. At least seventy-nine thousand African Americans served in northern USCT regiments. Many, including most of the USCT veterans examined here, remained in the North and constituted a sizable population of racial minorities living outside the former Confederacy.

In The Families’ Civil War, Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. provides a compelling account of the lives of USCT soldiers and their entire families but also argues that the Civil War was but one engagement in a longer war for racial justice. By 1863 the Civil War provided African American Philadelphians with the ability to expand the theater of war beyond their metropolitan and racially oppressive city into the South to defeat Confederates and end slavery as armed combatants. But the war at home waged by white northerners never ended.

Civil War soldiers are sometimes described together as men who experienced roughly the same thing during the war. However, this book acknowledges how race and class differentiated men’s experiences too. Pinheiro examines the intersections of gender, race, class, and region to fully illuminate the experiences of northern USCT soldiers and their families.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at okaverettephillips@ucdavis.edu.

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Claire Bellerjeau and Tiffany Yecke Brooks, "Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution: The True Story of Robert Townsend and Elizabeth" (Lyons Press, 2021) Jun 28, 2022

Today I talked to Claire Bellerjeau about her book (co-authored with Tiffany Yecke Brooks) Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution: The True Story of Robert Townsend and Elizabeth (Lyons Press, 2021).

In January 1785, a young African American woman named Elizabeth was put on board the Lucretia in New York Harbor, bound for Charleston, where she would be sold to her fifth master in just twenty-two years. Leaving behind a small child she had little hope of ever seeing again, Elizabeth was faced with the stark reality of being sold south to a life quite different from any she had known before. She had no idea that Robert Townsend, a son of the family she was enslaved by, would locate her, safeguard her child, and return her to New York—nor how her story would help turn one of America’s first spies into an abolitionist. Robert Townsend is best known as one of George Washington’s most trusted spies, but few know about how he worked to end slavery. As Robert and Elizabeth’s story unfolds, prominent figures from history cross their path, including Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Benedict Arnold, John André, and John Adams, as well as participants in the Boston Massacre, the Sons of Liberty, the Battle of Long Island, Franklin’s Paris negotiations, and the Benedict Arnold treason plot.

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Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation" (Verso, 2022) Jun 27, 2022

Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (Verso, 2022) presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present.

Edited and introduced by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an “anti-state state” that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place.

In this interview, we spent time unpacking how the book came to be, its focus, and its central concept: abolition geography. Among other things, we discussed the meaning and merits of taking a specifically geographical approach to abolition, Ruthie’s activist and intellectual influences, and the role of scholars in bringing about a more just world.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she is also Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She is also the author of Golden Gulag and Opposition in Globalizing California.

Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility.

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Dayna Bowen Matthew, "Just Health: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America" (NYU Press, 2022) Jun 23, 2022

In the United States, systemic racism is embedded in policies and practices, thereby structuring American society to perpetuate inequality and all of the symptoms and results of that inequality. Racial, social, and class inequities and the public health crises in the United States are deeply intertwined, their roots and manifestations continually pressuring each other. This has been both illuminated and exacerbated since 2020, with the Movement for Black Lives (BLM) and the disproportionate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on historically disadvantaged groups within the U.S. Dr. Dayna Bowen Matthew, Dean of the George Washington University Law School, explores and unpacks the public health crisis that is racism in her new book Just Health: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America (NYU Press, 2022). She describes how structural inequality undermines the interests of a thriving nation and the steps we can take to undo the pervasive nature of inequality to create more equitable and just systems.

Dr. Bowen Matthew describes her personal relationship with the concepts of structural inequality and racism in the public health system, opening with a heart-wrenching ode to her father’s experience with poverty and prejudice, which ultimately led to his premature death. Through her family’s story, she explains how structural inequality is perpetuated on a large-enough scale and with a powerful-enough scope so as to virtually guarantee social outcomes that reflect predetermined hierarchies based on race and/or class, hierarchies that remain consistent across generations. These disproportionate outcomes are often dismissed as due to comorbidities without the attention paid to social factors are the primary cause of comorbidities, because oppression in its many forms blocks equitable access to the social determinants of health. These social determinants include, but are not limited to, clean and safe housing, adequate education, nutritious food and fresh water, access to recreational spaces, and mental health services. Individuals who lack these, through no fault of their own, are then obligated to accept disproportionate care, illness, and disturbingly shorter life spans then are the norm for many Americans and are much closer to life spans in impoverished countries. Dr. Bowen Matthew presents evidence of discrimination in housing, education, employment, and the criminal justice system, detailing how law has played a central role in erecting disproportionate access to the social determinants of health, and therefore is a requisite tool for dismantling it. She provides a clear path to undoing structural racism and providing an equitable society to all, encouraging health providers, law makers, and citizens all to fight to dismantle the hurdles that many patients face because of the zip code in which they live.

Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Bianca C. Williams et al., "Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education" (SUNY Press, 2021) Jun 23, 2022

Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education(SUNY Press, 2021) provides a multidisciplinary exploration of the contemporary university's entanglement with the history of slavery and settler colonialism in the United States. Inspired by more than a hundred student-led protests during the Movement for Black Lives, contributors examine how campus rebellions—and university responses to them—expose the racialized inequities at the core of higher education. Plantation politics are embedded in the everyday workings of universities—in not only the physical structures and spaces of academic institutions, but in its recruitment and attainment strategies, hiring practices, curriculum, and notions of sociality, safety, and community. The book is comprised of three sections that highlight how white supremacy shapes campus communities and classrooms; how current diversity and inclusion initiatives perpetuate inequality; and how students, staff, and faculty practice resistance in the face of institutional and legislative repression. Each chapter interrogates a connection between the academy and the plantation, exploring how Black people and their labor are viewed as simultaneously essential and disruptive to university cultures and economies. The volume is an indispensable read for students, faculty, student affairs professionals, and administrators invested in learning more about how power operates within education and imagining emancipatory futures.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Anne Gray Fischer, "The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification" (UNC Press, 2022) Jun 23, 2022

Anne Gray Fischer speaks about her path to and through research, including how sex workers informed her analysis of policing and state violence, the role of law enforcement in struggles over economic development, and the intellectual and practical factors of research design.

Men, especially Black men, often stand in as the ultimate symbol of the mass incarceration crisis in the United States. Women are treated as marginal, if not overlooked altogether, in histories of the criminal legal system. In The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification(UNC Press, 2022)--a searing history of women and police in the modern United States--Anne Gray Fischer narrates how sexual policing fueled a dramatic expansion of police power. The enormous discretionary power that police officers wield to surveil, target, and arrest anyone they deem suspicious was tested, legitimized, and legalized through the policing of women's sexuality and their right to move freely through city streets.

Throughout the twentieth century, police departments achieved a stunning consolidation of urban authority through the strategic discretionary enforcement of morals laws, including disorderly conduct, vagrancy, and other prostitution-related misdemeanors. Between Prohibition in the 1920s and the rise of broken windows policing in the 1980s, police targeted white and Black women in distinct but interconnected ways. These tactics reveal the centrality of racist and sexist myths to the justification and deployment of state power. Sexual policing did not just enhance police power. It also transformed cities from segregated sites of urban vice into the gentrified sites of Black displacement and banishment we live in today. By illuminating both the racial dimension of sexual liberalism and the gender dimension of policing in Black neighborhoods, The Streets Belong to Us illustrates the decisive role that race, gender, and sexuality played in the construction of urban police regimes.

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Paul T. Murray, "Seeing Jesus in the Eyes of the Oppressed: Franciscans Working for Peace and Justice" (AAFH, 2022) Jun 20, 2022

Following World War II, the United States enjoyed unprecedented prosperity as the post-war economy exploded. While Americans pondered affluence, U.S. Franciscans focused on the forgotten members of U.S. society, those who had been left out or left behind. Seeing Jesus in the Eyes of the Oppressed tells the story of eight Franciscans and their communities who struggled to create a more just and equitable society.

Through eight mini-biographies, Paul T. Murray, professor emeritus at Siena College, explores Franciscan efforts to establish racial and economic justice and to promote peace and nonviolence: Father Nathaniel Machesky led the battle for civil rights in Greenwood, MS; Sister Antona Ebo was one of two African American Sisters at the Selma march; Brother Booker Ashe worked for interracial justice and Black pride in Milwaukee; Sister Thea Bowman celebrated Black gifts to the U.S. Church and worked toward an expression of the faith that was "authentically Black and truly Catholic;" Father Alan McCoy pushed his community and the Church in the United States to greater engagement with Social Justice; Sister Pat Drydyk worked with Cesar Chavez for justice for the farmworkers; Father Joseph Nangle brought solidarity with Latin America to the fore in the U.S. Church, and Father Louis Vitale used civil disobedience to oppose nuclear proliferation, while serving the poor and homeless. In all, the book emphasizes the passion and struggle of Franciscans in the United States to create a more just world within society and within the Church.

Allison Isidore is an Instructor of Record for the Religious Studies department at the University of Alabama. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. Allison is also a Video Editor for The Religious Studies Project, producing videos for the podcast and marketing team. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

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Louis M. Maraj, "Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics" (Utah State UP, 2020) Jun 14, 2022

Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics (Utah State University Press, 2020)explores notions of Blackness in white institutional—particularly educational—spaces. In it, Louis M. Maraj theorizes how Black identity operates with/against ideas of difference in the age of #BlackLivesMatter. Centering Blackness in frameworks for antiracist agency through interdisciplinary Black feminist lenses, Black or Right asks how those racially signifying “diversity” in US higher education (and beyond) make meaning in the everyday. Offering four Black rhetorics as antiracist means for rhetorical reclamation—autoethnography, hashtagging, inter(con)textual reading, and reconceptualized disruption—the book uses Black feminist relationality via an African indigenous approach.

Maraj examines fluid, quotidian ways Black folk engage anti/racism at historically white institutions in the United States in response to violent campus spaces, educational structures, protest movements, and policy practice. Black or Right’s experimental, creative style strives to undiscipline knowledge from academic confinement. Exercising different vantage points in each chapter—autoethnographer, digital media scholar/pedagogue, cultural rhetorician, and critical discourse analyst—Maraj challenges readers to ecologically understand shifting, multiple meanings of Blackness in knowledge-making. Black or Right’s expressive form, organization, narratives, and poetics intimately interweave with its argument that Black folk must continuously invent “otherwise” in reiterative escape from oppressive white spaces. In centering Black experiences, Black theory, and diasporic Blackness, Black or Right mobilizes generative approaches to destabilizing institutional whiteness, as opposed to reparative attempts to “fix racism,” which often paradoxically center whiteness. It will be of interest to both academic and general readers and significant for specialists in cultural rhetorics, Black studies, and critical theory.

Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Communication Department at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On Twitter.

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Brandi Clay Brimmer, "Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South" (Duke UP, 2020) Jun 14, 2022

In Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South (Duke UP, 2020), Brandi Clay Brimmer analyzes the US pension system from the perspective of poor black women during and after the Civil War. Reconstructing the grassroots pension network in New Bern, North Carolina, through a broad range of historical sources, she outlines how the mothers, wives, and widows of black Union soldiers struggled to claim pensions in the face of evidentiary obstacles and personal scrutiny. Brimmer exposes and examines the numerous attempts by the federal government to exclude black women from receiving the federal pensions that they had been promised. Her analyses illustrate the complexities of social policy and law administration and the interconnectedness of race, gender, and class formation. Expanding on previous analyses of pension records, Brimmer offers an interpretive framework of emancipation and the freedom narrative that places black women at the forefront of demands for black citizenship.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at okaverettephillips@ucdavis.edu.

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Elizabeth Alexander, "The Trayvon Generation" (Grand Central, 2022) Jun 13, 2022

The Trayvon Generation(Grand Central, 2022) expands upon Elizabeth Alexander’s gripping essay — under the same name — originally published in The New Yorker amid the 2020 summer social unrest. This collection is a meditation on race by recounting the pervasiveness of racial violence in American culture. The Trayvon Generation weaves prose, poetry, and art to cast historical and cultural resonances to understand the human experience while also humanizing the Black dead and living. This slender and exquisite book is a profound assertation that even though Black pain has become normalized, African Americans have always sought to memorialize their people to keep their spirits, memories, and joy alive.

N’Kosi Oates earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.

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Sarah Deutsch, "Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898-1940" (U Nebraska Press, 2022) Jun 13, 2022

To many Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the West was simultaneously the greatest symbol of American opportunity, the greatest story of its history, and the imagined blank slate on which the country's future would be written. From the Spanish-American War in 1898 to the Great Depression's end, from the Mississippi to the Pacific, policymakers at various levels and large-scale corporate investors, along with those living in the West and its borderlands, struggled over who would define modernity, who would participate in the modern American West, and who would be excluded.

In Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898-1940 (U Nebraska Press, 2022)Sarah Deutsch surveys the history of the U.S. West from 1898 to 1940. Centering what is often relegated to the margins in histories of the region--the flows of people, capital, and ideas across borders--Deutsch attends to the region's role in constructing U.S. racial formations and argues that the West as a region was as important as the South in constructing the United States as a "white man's country." While this racial formation was linked to claims of modernity and progress by powerful players, Deutsch shows that visions of what constituted modernity were deeply contested by others. This expansive volume presents the most thorough examination to date of the American West from the late 1890s to the eve of World War II.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Mark Anthony Neal, "Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive" (NYU Press, 2022) Jun 10, 2022

We are living in an era of unprecedented access to popular culture: contemporary digital infrastructure provides anyone with an internet connection access to a dizzying array of cultural objects past and present, which mingle and connect in fascinating, bizarre and sometimes troubling ways.

In Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive(NYU Press, 2022), Mark Anthony Neal considers the opportunities and challenges that this vast archive represents for Black American culture, with a particular focus on music and sound. He suggests that despite the profusion of what he terms ‘Black big data’ and the supposed democratisation of access this entails, the contemporary moment is characterised by a profound amnesia and an absence of attention to the dense web of connections that bind the analogue past with the digital present. Black Ephemera seeks to at once draw out and ‘mystify’ these links, by attending to recordings, historical moments and archival projects which have often been neglected in other studies of Black music. Neal’s explorations have a wide historical scope and operate simultaneously in microscopic and conjunctural registers. The book includes analyses of legendary Memphis record label Stax, the place of Aretha Franklin and Mavin Gaye’s overlooked early recordings in/as the Great American Songbook, the use of musical citation to try and combat the erasure of Black women’s experience from the historical archive, and the significance of archival ephemera to Black mourning practices from Pattie LaBelle to Kendrick Lamar.

We cover a lot of music in this episode, and there’s even more in the book! A good place to start might be with two mixes made in response to Black Ephemera, which you can listen to here and here.

Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds.

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Ethnography, Humility, Identity, and the Academy Jun 10, 2022

In today’s episode of How To Be Wrong we welcome Dr. Khytie Brown, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Brown’s research examines the intersections of religion, race, gender and sexual alterity, criminality, material culture, sensory epistemologies and social media practices among African diasporic religious practitioners in the Caribbean, Latin America and North America. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard and is a research associate at the Center on Transnational Policing at Princeton. Our conversation explores the humbling power of ethnographic research as well as ways in which race and gender influence perceptions about academic identity and power.

John Kaag is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at UMass Lowell and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations.

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Treva B. Lindsey, "America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice" (U California Press, 2022) Jun 09, 2022

Echoing the energy of Nina Simone's searing protest song that inspired the title, this book is a call to action in our collective journey toward just futures.

America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice (U California Press, 2022) explores the combined force of anti-Blackness, misogyny, patriarchy, and capitalism in the lives of Black women and girls in the United States today.

Through personal accounts and hard-hitting analysis, Black feminist historian Treva B. Lindsey starkly assesses the forms and legacies of violence against Black women and girls, as well as their demands for justice for themselves and their communities. Combining history, theory, and memoir, America, Goddam renders visible the gender dynamics of anti-Black violence. Black women and girls occupy a unique status of vulnerability to harm and death, while the circumstances and traumas of this violence go underreported and understudied. America, Goddam allows readers to understand

How Black women—who have been both victims of anti-Black violence as well as frontline participants—are rarely the focus of Black freedom movements.
How Black women have led movements demanding justice for Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Toyin Salau, Riah Milton, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and countless other Black women and girls whose lives have been curtailed by numerous forms of violence.
How across generations and centuries, their refusal to remain silent about violence against them led to Black liberation through organizing and radical politics.

America, Goddam powerfully demonstrates that the struggle for justice begins with reckoning with the pervasiveness of violence against Black women and girls in the United States”

Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter

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Peter C. Zimmerman, "The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight" (UP of Mississippi, 2021) Jun 08, 2022

The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight(UP of Mississippi, 2021) is a celebration of jazz and the men and women who created and transformed it. In the twenty-one conversations contained in this engaging and highly accessible book, we hear from the musicians themselves, in their own words, direct and unfiltered. Peter Zimmerman’s interviewing technique is straightforward. He turns on a recording device, poses questions, and allows his subjects to improvise, similar to the way the musicians do at concerts and in recording sessions. Topics range from their early days, their struggles and victories, to the impact the music has had on their own lives. The interviews have been carefully edited for sense and clarity, without changing any of the musicians’ actual words.

Peter Zimmerman tirelessly sought virtuosi whose lives span the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The reader is rewarded with an intimate look into the past century’s extraordinary period of creative productivity. The oldest two interview subjects were born in 1920 and all are professional musicians who worked in jazz for at least five decades, with a few enjoying careers as long as seventy-five years. These voices reflect some seventeen hundred years of accumulated experience yielding a chronicle of incredible depth and scope.

The focus on musicians who are now emeritus figures is deliberate. Some of them are now in their nineties; six have passed since 2012, when Zimmerman began researching The Jazz Masters. Five of them have already received the NEA’s prestigious Jazz Masters award: Sonny Rollins, Clark Terry, Yusef Lateef, Jimmy Owens, and most recently, Dick Hyman. More undoubtedly will one day, and the balance are likewise of compelling interest. Artists such as David Amram, Charles Davis, Clifford Jordan, Valery Ponomarev, and Sandy Stewart, to name a few, open their hearts and memories and reveal who they are as people.

This book is a labor of love celebrating the vibrant style of music that Dizzy Gillespie once described as “our native art form.” Zimmerman’s deeply knowledgeable, unabashed passion for jazz brings out the best in the musicians. Filled with personal recollections and detailed accounts of their careers and everyday lives, this highly readable, lively work succeeds in capturing their stories for present and future generations. An important addition to the literature of music, The Jazz Masters goes a long way toward “setting the record straight.”

Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com.

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Andrea C. Mosterman, "Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York" (Cornell UP, 2021) Jun 07, 2022

In Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York(Cornell UP, 2021), Andrea C. Mosterman addresses the persistent myth that the colonial Dutch system of slavery was more humane. Investigating practices of enslavement in New Netherland and then in New York, Mosterman shows that these ways of racialized spatial control held much in common with the southern plantation societies.

In the 1620s, Dutch colonial settlers brought slavery to the banks of the Hudson River and founded communities from New Amsterdam in the south to Beverwijck near the terminus of the navigable river. When Dutch power in North America collapsed and the colony came under English control in 1664, Dutch descendants continued to rely on enslaved labor. Until 1827, when slavery was abolished in New York State, slavery expanded in the region, with all free New Yorkers benefitting from that servitude.

Mosterman describes how the movements of enslaved persons were controlled in homes and in public spaces such as workshops, courts, and churches. She addresses how enslaved people responded to regimes of control by escaping from or modifying these spaces so as to expand their activities within them. Through a close analysis of homes, churches, and public spaces, Mosterman shows that, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the region's Dutch communities were engaged in a daily struggle with Black New Yorkers who found ways to claim freedom and resist oppression.

Spaces of Enslavementwrites a critical and overdue chapter on the place of slavery and resistance in the colony and young state of New York.

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Reighan Gillam, "Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media" (U Illinois Press, 2022) Jun 07, 2022

A new generation of Afro-Brazilian media producers have emerged to challenge a mainstream that frequently excludes them. Reighan Gillam delves into the dynamic alternative media landscape developed by Afro-Brazilians in the twenty-first century. With works that confront racism and focus on Black characters, these artists and the visual media they create identify, challenge, or break with entrenched racist practices, ideologies, and structures. Gillam looks at a cross-section of media to show the ways Afro-Brazilians assert control over various means of representation in order to present a complex Black humanity. These images--so at odds with the mainstream--contribute to an anti-racist visual politics fighting to change how Brazilian media depicts Black people while highlighting the importance of media in the movement for Black inclusion.

An eye-opening union of analysis and fieldwork, Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (U Illinois Press, 2022) examines the alternative and activist Black media and the people creating it in today's Brazil.

Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican

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Tajja Isen, "Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service" (Atria/One Signal, 2022) Jun 07, 2022

In this stunning debut collection, Catapult editor-in-chief and award-winning voice actor Tajja Isen explores the absurdity of living in a world that has grown fluent in the language of social justice but doesn't always follow through.

These nine daring essays explore the sometimes troubling and often awkward nature of that discord. Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service (Atria/One Signal, 2022) takes on the cartoon industry's pivot away from colorblind casting, the pursuit of diverse representation in the literary world, the law's refusal to see inequality, and the cozy fictions of nationalism. Isen deftly examines the quick, cosmetic fixes society makes to address systemic problems, and reveals the unexpected ways they can misfire.

In the spirit of Zadie Smith, Cathy Park Hong, and Jia Tolentino, Isen interlaces cultural criticism with her lived experience to explore the gaps between what we say and what we do, what we do and what we value, what we value and what we demand.

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A Newly Discovered Essay by Fredrick Douglas: "Slavery" (1894-1895) Jun 07, 2022

Today’s guest is Leslie Leonard, who received their doctorate in American Studies and 19th C. American Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Their dissertation, The Burdens and Blessings of Responsibility: Duty and Community in Nineteenth-Century America, is a study of the emergent idea of personal responsibility as it conflicted with more established ideas of duty in the writings of Herman Melville, and Harriet Jacobs. Drawing on a range of sources –works of literature, theology, domestic manuals, labor pamphlets – their research shows how many Americans began to conceive of moral responsibility as distinct from both duty and rules of behavior prescribed by traditional social roles. Today, we are discussing Leslie's discovery of an unpublished text by Frederick Douglass, an essay titled “Slavery,” which appeared in the fall 2021 issue of J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

John Yargo recently received his PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.

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Melissa Ford, "A Brick and a Bible: Black Women's Radical Activism in the Midwest During the Great Depression" (Southern Illinois UP, 2022) Jun 06, 2022

In this first study of Black radicalism in midwestern cities before the civil rights movement, Melissa Ford connects the activism of Black women who championed justice during the Great Depression to those involved in the Ferguson Uprising and the Black Lives Matter movement. A Brick and a Bible: Black Women's Radical Activism in the Midwest During the Great Depression (Southern Illinois UP, 2022) examines how African American working-class women, many of whom had just migrated to “the promised land” only to find hunger, cold, and unemployment, forged a region of revolutionary potential.

A Brick and a Bible theorizes a tradition of Midwestern Black radicalism, a praxis-based ideology informed by but divergent from American Communism. Midwestern Black radicalism that contests that interlocking systems of oppression directly relates the distinct racial, political, geographic, economic, and gendered characteristics that make up the American heartland. This volume illustrates how, at the risk of their careers, their reputations, and even their lives, African American working-class women in the Midwest used their position to shape a unique form of social activism.

Case studies of Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, and Cleveland—hotbeds of radical activism—follow African American women across the Midwest as they participated in the Ford Hunger March, organized the Funsten Nut Pickers’ strike, led the Sopkin Dressmakers’ strike, and supported the Unemployed Councils and the Scottsboro Boys’ defense. Ford profoundly reimagines how we remember and interpret these “ordinary” women doing extraordinary things across the heartland. Once overlooked, their activism shaped a radical tradition in midwestern cities that continues to be seen in cities like Ferguson and Minneapolis today.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at okaverettephillips@ucdavis.edu.

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Andy Hines, "Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Jun 06, 2022

This striking contribution to Black literary studies examines the practices of Black writers in the mid-twentieth century to revise our understanding of the institutionalization of literary studies in America.

In Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University (U Chicago Press, 2022), Andy Hines uncovers a vibrant history of interpretive resistance to university-based New Criticism by Black writers of the American left. These include well-known figures such as Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry as well as still underappreciated writers like Melvin B. Tolson and Doxey Wilkerson. In their critical practice, these and other Black writers levied their critique from “outside” venues: behind the closed doors of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in the classroom at a communist labor school under FBI surveillance, and in a host of journals. From these vantages, Black writers not only called out the racist assumptions of the New Criticism, but also defined Black literary and interpretive practices to support communist and other radical world-making efforts in the mid-twentieth century. Hines’s book thus offers a number of urgent contributions to literary studies: it spotlights a canon of Black literary texts that belong to an important era of anti-racist struggle, and it fills in the pre-history of the rise of Black studies and of ongoing Black dissent against the neoliberal university.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Irvin J. Hunt, "Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement" (UNC Press, 2022) Jun 02, 2022

In their darkest hours over the course of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ella Baker, George Schuyler, and Fannie Lou Hamer gathered hundreds across the United States and beyond to build vast, now forgotten, networks of mutual aid: farms, shops, schools, banks, daycares, homes, health clinics, and burial grounds. They called these spaces cooperatives, local challenges to global capital, where people pooled all they had to meet all their needs.

In Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement (UNC Press, 2022), Irvin J. Hunt argues that their overarching need was to free their movement from the logic of progress. Steeped in the wonders of this movement's material afterlife, Hunt extrapolates three non-progressive forms of movement time: a continual beginning, a deliberate falling apart, and a kind of all-at-once simultaneity. These temporalities describe how these leaders, along with their circles, maneuvered the law, reappropriated property, expressed the pleasures of resistance, challenged the value of longevity, built autonomous communities, and fundamentally reimagined what a movement can be. Hunt offers both an original account of Black mutual aid and, in a world of diminishing of futures, a moving meditation on the possibilities of the present.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Richard Stamz and Patrick A. Roberts, "Give 'em Soul, Richard!: Race, Radio, and Rhythm and Blues in Chicago" (U Illinois Press, 2010) Jun 01, 2022

Give 'em Soul, Richard!: Race, Radio, and Rhythm and Blues in Chicago (U Illinois Press, 2010) is the remarkable story of a remarkable man. Richard Stamz (1906-2007) never stopped hustling. From his birth on a Mississippi riverboat to appearances with Ma Rainey, from his connection to Governor Adlai Stevenson to his prison stint as a southside DJ fired over payola, Richard’s is the story of Twentieth-century Chicago. In a unique memoir, Prof. Patrick Roberts of Northern Illinois University repeats, explains, and interprets the life of Richard Stamz.

David Hamilton Golland is professor of history and immediate past president of the faculty senate at Governors State University in Chicago's southland. @DHGolland.

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Colleen Wessel-McCoy, "Freedom Church of the Poor: Martin Luther King Jr's Poor People's Campaign" (Fortress Academic, 2021) Jun 01, 2022

When The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. looked over into the promised land and tried to discern how we would get there, he called the poor to lead the way. The Poor People’s Campaign was part of a political strategy for building a movement expansive enough to tackle the enmeshed evils of racism, poverty, and war. In Freedom Church of the Poor: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign(Fortress Academic, 2021), Colleen Wessel-McCoy roots King’s political vision solidly in his theological ethics and traces the spirit of the campaign in the community and religious leaders who are responding to the devastating crises of inequality today.

Colleen Wessel-McCoy is an Assistant Professor of Peace & Justice Studies and the Director of the Master of Arts in Peace and Social Transformation program at the Earlham School of Religion.

Brady McCartney is an interdisciplinary environmental studies scholar at the University of Florida. Email: Brady.McCartney@UFL.edu

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Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross, "Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana" (Cambridge UP, 2020) May 31, 2022

How did Africans become 'blacks' in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge UP, 2020) tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders' efforts to make blackness synonymous with slavery. Looking closely at three slave societies - Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana - Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross demonstrate that the law of freedom - not slavery - established the meaning of blackness in law. Contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims to citizenship would be tied to racial identity. Laws regulating the lives and institutions of free people of color created the boundaries between black and white, the rights reserved to white people, and the degradations imposed only on black people.

Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 202) Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1

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Brandon T. Jett, "Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South" (Louisiana State UP, 2021) May 27, 2022

In this groundbreaking work, Professor Brandon T. Jett unearths how police departments evolved with the urbanization of the Jim Crow South, to target African Americans through a variety of mechanisms of control and violence, such as violent interactions, unjust arrests, and the enforcement of segregation laws and customs. Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South, published by Louisiana State University in July 2021, provides explanation and context to show the way that modern institution of policing in the United States has evolved from, but clings to historical patterns and attitudes that situate African Americans in positions of relative vulnerability in their interactions with police.

Still, what surprises in Jett's work is the way that Black residents co-operated and even manipulated the police in aid of crime reduction and to extract services in the urban spaces that they lived. Vivid examples and rich detail provides the reader with a thorough understanding of criminal justice and the way that policing reinforced segregation during the Jim Crow era.

Brandon T. Jett is a professor of history at Florida South Western State College. In 2017, he was awarded a William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Early Career Scholar Fellowship. You can listen to him host on New Books in The American South. Race, Crime Policing in the Jim Crow South was the Silver Medal Winner of the Florida Book Award in 2021.

Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

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Sean J. Drake, "Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb" (U California Press, 2022) May 25, 2022

In Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb(U California Press, 2022), sociologist Sean J. Drake addresses long-standing problems of educational inequality from a nuanced perspective, looking at how race and class intersect to affect modern school segregation. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic observation and dozens of interviews at two distinct high schools in a racially diverse Southern California suburb, Drake unveils hidden institutional mechanisms that lead to the overt segregation and symbolic criminalization of Black, Latinx, and lower-income students who struggle academically. His work illuminates how institutional definitions of success contribute to school segregation, how institutional actors leverage those definitions to justify inequality, and the ways in which local immigrant groups use their ethnic resources to succeed. Academic Apartheid represents a new way forward for scholars whose work sits at the intersection of education, race and ethnicity, class, and immigration.

Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter.

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Elizabeth Rodrigues, "Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century Us Literatures" (U Michigan Press, 2022) May 17, 2022

On a near-daily basis, data is being used to narrate our lives. Categorizing algorithms drawn from amassed personal data to assign narrative destinies to individuals at crucial junctures, simultaneously predicting and shaping the paths of our lives. Data is commonly assumed to bring us closer to objectivity, but the narrative paths these algorithms assign seem, more often than not, to replicate biases about who an individual is and could become.

While the social effects of such algorithmic logics seem new and newly urgent to consider, Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century Us Literatures(U Michigan Press, 2022) looks to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century U.S. to provide an instructive prehistory to the underlying question of the relationship between data, life, and narrative. Rodrigues contextualizes the application of data collection to human selfhood in order to uncover a modernist aesthetic of data that offers an alternative to the algorithmic logic pervading our sense of data's revelatory potential. Examining the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Rodrigues asks how each of these authors draw from their work in sociology, history, psychology, and journalism to formulate a critical data aesthetic as they attempt to answer questions of identity around race, gender, and nation both in their research and their life writing. These data-driven modernists not only tell different life stories with data, they tell life stories differently because of data.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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On Women of Color in American Islam May 16, 2022

Sylvia Chan-Malik is Associate Professor in the Departments of American and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She talks, teaches, and writes about the intersections of race, gender, and religion, with a focus on the history and cultures of Islam and Muslims in the United States. Her research highlights the lives, voices, histories, and representations of Muslim women, and reveals how critical legacies of Black freedom, women’s agency, and global liberation struggles have continually marked U.S. Muslim women’s engagements with Islam.

She is the author of Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam (New York University Press, 2018).

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Cynthia Parker-Ohene, "Daughters of Harriet: Poems" (UP of Colorado, 2022) May 13, 2022

Drawing inspiration from the life of Harriet Tubman, Cynthia Parker-Ohene's poetic narratives follow a historical arc of consciousness of Black folks: mislaid in potters' fields and catalogued with other misbegotten souls, now unsettled as the unknown Black denominator. Who loved them? Who turned them away? Who dismembered their souls? In death, they are the institutionalized marked Black bodies assigned to parcels, scourged beneath plastic sheets identified as a number among Harriets as black, marked bodies. These poems speak to how the warehousing of enslaved and somewhat free beings belies their humanity through past performances in reformatories, workhouses, and hospitals for the negro insane. To whom did their Black lives belong? How are Black grrls socialized within the family to be out in the world? What is the beingness of Black women? How have the Harriets--the descended daughters of Harriet Tubman--confronted issues of caste and multiple oppressions? The poems in Daughters of Harriet: Poems (UP of Colorado, 2022) give voice to the unspeakable, the unreachable, the multiple Black selves waiting to become.

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Zachary F. Price, "Black Dragon: Afro-Asian Performance and the Martial Arts Imagination" (Ohio State UP, 2022) May 13, 2022

In Black Dragon: Afro Asian Performance and the Martial Arts Imagination(Ohio State UP, 2022), Zachary F. Price illuminates martial arts as a site of knowledge exchange between Black, Asian, and Asian American people and cultures to offer new insights into the relationships among these historically marginalized groups. Drawing on case studies that include Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's appearance in Bruce Lee's film Game of Death, Ron van Clief and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Wu-Tang Clan, and Chinese American saxophonist Fred Ho, Price argues that the regular blending and borrowing between their distinct cultural heritages is healing rather than appropriative. His analyses of performance, power, and identity within this cultural fusion demonstrate how, historically, urban working-class Black men have developed community and practiced self-care through the contested adoption of Asian martial arts practice. By directing his analysis to this rich but heretofore understudied vein of American cultural exchange, Price not only broadens the scholarship around sites of empowerment via such exchanges but also offers a compelling example of nonessentialist emancipation for the twenty-first century.

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Paul M. Heideman, "Class Struggle and the Color Line: American Socialism and the Race Question 1900-1930" (Haymarket Books, 2022) May 11, 2022

In Class Struggle and the Color Line: American Socialism and the Race Question, 1900-1930 (Haymarket Books, 2018), Paul Heideman collects, for the first time, source materials from a diverse array of socialist writers and organizers, providing a new perspective on the complex history of revolutionary debates about fighting anti-Black racism.

Paul Heideman holds a PhD in American studies from Rutgers University–Newark and is a frequent contributor to Jacobin magazine.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Glenda E. Gilmore, "Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination: An Artist's Reckoning with the South" (UNC Press, 2022) May 10, 2022

In Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination: An Artist's Reckoning with the South(UNC Press, 2022), Glenda Gilmore meticulously documents and interprets the artistic life of Romare Bearden. Gilmore details four generations of the Bearden family and grounds the reader in places formative to Bearden like North Carolina, New York, and Pennsylvania. By centering Bearden’s art, Gilmore mines the historical record and this artist’s recollections which were at times conflicting, but nevertheless, shaped his creative imagination. This text weaves archival depth with visual art analysis, illuminating a richer understanding of this important twentieth-century artist and his work.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She tweets from @amandajoycehall.

N’Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. Candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter @NKosiOates.

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Nicole Charles, "Suspicion: Vaccines, Hesitancy, and the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados" (Duke UP, 2022) May 10, 2022

In 2014 Barbados introduced a vaccine to prevent certain strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) and reduce the risk of cervical cancer in young women. Despite the disproportionate burden of cervical cancer in the Caribbean, many Afro-Barbadians chose not to immunize their daughters. In Suspicion: Vaccines, Hesitancy, and the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados(Duke University Press, 2022), Nicole Charles reframes Afro-Barbadian vaccine refusal from a question of hesitancy to one of suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, black feminist theory, transnational feminist studies and science and technology studies, Charles foregrounds Afro-Barbadians' gut feelings and emotions and the lingering trauma of colonial and biopolitical violence. She shows that suspicion, far from being irrational, is a fraught and generative affective orientation grounded in concrete histories of mistrust of government and coercive medical practices foisted on colonized peoples. By contextualizing suspicion within these longer cultural and political histories, Charles troubles traditional narratives of vaccine hesitancy while offering new entry points into discussions on racialized biopolitics, neocolonialism, care, affect, and biomedicine across the Black diaspora.

Nicole Charles is Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies in Culture and Media, University of Toronto, Mississauga.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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Dhanveer Singh Brar, "Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century" (Goldsmiths Press, 2021) May 06, 2022

Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century (Goldsmiths Press, 2021) uses three Black electronic musics – footwork, grime, and the work of the producer Actress – to provide a theory of how Black musical experimentation has disrupted the circuits of racialized domination and exclusion in the 21st Century city. The book carefully attends to the unique ‘sonic ecologies’ produced by these three musical forms in South/West Chicago; East London and South London respectively, steering a course between uncritical celebration narratives of ‘resistant’ cultural production and dystopian analyses of urban decay.

Brar instead theorises these musics as forms of popular experimentalism which are not just inseparable from questions of space, race and class, but are productive of social and spatial relations. The book draws upon, and intervenes in, Black Studies literature to contribute a set of examples, questions and provocations that help readers to think about how the ‘Blackness of Black electronic dance music’ has produced (and continues to produce) a fugitive urban aesthetic sociality that has flourished in spite of the degradations of state and capital.

At the end of the interview, Dhanveer recommended some music as good entry points into the three musical worlds that we discuss and that he analyses in the book:

Actress – Splazsh (2010)

DJ Rashad – Just a Taste Vol. 1 (2011)

Slimzee/Wiley/Dizzee Rascal and more – Sidewinder sessions (2002-2004)

Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds.

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, "Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else)" (Haymarket, 2022) May 05, 2022

“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests.

But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests.

Táíwò’s book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) (Haymarket, 2022) both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Aaron Cohen, "Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power" (U Chicago Press, 2019) May 04, 2022

Curtis Mayfield. The Chi-Lites. Chaka Khan. Chicago’s place in the history of soul music is rock solid. But for Chicagoans, soul music in its heyday from the 1960s to the 1980s was more than just a series of hits: it was a marker and a source of black empowerment.

In Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power (U Chicago Press, 2019), Aaron Cohen tells the remarkable story of the explosion of soul music in Chicago. Together, soul music and black-owned businesses thrived. Record producers and song-writers broadcast optimism for black America’s future through their sophisticated, jazz-inspired productions for the Dells and many others. Curtis Mayfield boldly sang of uplift with unmistakable grooves like “We’re a Winner” and “I Plan to Stay a Believer.” Musicians like Phil Cohran and the Pharaohs used their music to voice Afrocentric philosophies that challenged racism and segregation, while Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire and Chaka Khan created music that inspired black consciousness. Soul music also accompanied the rise of African American advertisers and the campaign of Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983. This empowerment was set in stark relief by the social unrest roiling in Chicago and across the nation: as Chicago’s homegrown record labels produced rising stars singing songs of progress and freedom, Chicago’s black middle class faced limited economic opportunities and deep-seated segregation, all against a backdrop of nationwide deindustrialization.

Drawing on more than one hundred interviews and a music critic’s passion for the unmistakable Chicago soul sound, Cohen shows us how soul music became the voice of inspiration and change for a city in turmoil. Aaron Cohen covers the arts for numerous publications and teaches English, journalism, and humanities at City Colleges of Chicago. He is the author of Aretha Franklin's "Amazing Grace."

Aaron Cohen on Twitter.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter.

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The Future of Statues: A Conversation with Alex Von Tunzelmann May 03, 2022

What are the rights and wrongs of toppling statues? Sometimes everyone agrees it’s a good idea. After the second world war, for example, the defeat of fascism meant that all over Europe Hitler statues were toppled and destroyed. After the collapse of communism some statues of Stalin actually survived. Just a couple of years ago Black Lives Matter protests led to the hauling down statues of slaveholders and imperialists – for example in the UK a statue of slaver – and philanthropist, Edward Colston was hurled into a harbour. Some argued Colston should be left alone because he was just a man of his time. So, when is it right to tear down a statue and do you need a democratically elected committee to make the decision? A discussion with screenwriter and historian Alex Von Tunzelmann, author of Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Rana A. Hogarth, "Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840" (UNC Press, 2017) Apr 28, 2022

Medicine and slavery went hand-in-hand. But what was the nature of this vile partnership? In Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (UNC Press, 2017), Rana Hogarth shows that familiar histories, though excellent, fail to explain how and why medicine and slavery became fused in the first place.

No doubt, defenders of slavery used medicine to justify the corrupt practice once it was under threat. But Hogarth shows how science and medicine grafted during times and in places where slavery was secure—where white elites had no need to justify the violent practice with medical ideas because slavery was taken for granted. How and why did medicine and slavery fuse, Hogarth asks, in the Atlantic World of the newly invented United States and ascendant imperial Britain? Understanding the answer helps us grasp the valences and impacts of racialized national and social identities, then as well as today.

White physicians inflated their value—financial as well as reputational—by locating medical reasons for already existing racist tropes. Circa 1800, white physicians were a disreputable and loosely aligned lot. They had many rivals (Black healers), rich skeptics (plantation owners), and no professional organization until the mid-nineteenth century under which they could rally. Before then, a wide-spread, active white belief in an innate difference between Black and white bodies was the foregone conclusion that white physicians worked to explain in order to appear of use. White physicians in the English-speaking Caribbean developed medical theories of innate difference in the etiology, progress and experience of illness in Black and white bodies—evidence to the contrary be damned. As a consequence, they ignored immense Black suffering, exposed Black workers to deadly diseases, and policed Black people through the hospital system, all the while seeing Black people as appropriate for service in the military and as objects for teaching dissection, that is to say, in projects of imperial and professional expansion.

Medicalizing Blackness broadens the story of medicine in the Atlantic World with a lens that perceives more than the institution of slavery. It also demonstrates the emergence of the Caribbean as a locus—not an outpost—of trustworthy medical knowledge circulated through an array of genres, including journals articles, plantation guides, hospital advertisements, and other media of “textual subjugation” that Hogarth reads with great insight. In short, medicine needed the racist logics of slavery in order to gain power before slavery needed racist medicine to defend its own might.

July 2022 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the exposure of the abusive and unethical Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments in the US media. Engaging the roots of white supremacist ideas and practices is essential for better understanding and for stronger political action against racism, as important fifty years ago as it is in our ongoing racialized pandemic.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu.

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Hurricanes Apr 28, 2022

Kim talks with Sonya Posmentier about hurricanes.

Sonya writes about hurricanes and diaspora in her book, Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.

In the episode she references Kamau Brathwaite’s essay “The History of the Voice” and Rob Nixon’s book Slow Violence, Harvard University Press, 2011.

She also talks about a genre of Jamaican dancehall music that grew in the wake of Hurricane Gilbert in 1988. To hear some of that music and learn more about the musical resonances of hurricanes, you can read her “Hurricane Season Playlist” on the Johns Hopkins University Press blog.

Sonya teaches African American literature in the English Department at New York University (where she is an excellent dissertation advisor for literary scholars and future podcasters).

This week’s image of a spiral evoking hurricane wind patterns was borrowed from Wikimedia Commons. Creative commons license, CC By Share Alike.

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Marlon B. Ross, "Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness" (Duke UP, 2022) Apr 28, 2022

Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness (Duke University Press, 2022) by Marlon B. Ross focuses on the figure of the sissy in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how it constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Demonstrating that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy, he also shows how it constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender.

Dr. Marlon B. Ross is professor of English at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 2001. Before that, he was professor of English and African American & African Studies at the University of Michigan. His interests include a variety of fields related to race, gender, sexuality, and culture. He is also the author of Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era and The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry.

Isabel Machado is a cultural historian whose work often crosses national and disciplinary boundaries.

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Thomas Aiello, "Hoops: A Cultural History of Basketball in America" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021) Apr 27, 2022

From its early days as a sport to build “muscular Christianity” among young men flooding nineteenth-century cities to its position today as a global symbol of American culture, basketball has been a force in American society. It grew through high school gymnasiums, college pep rallies, and the fits and starts of professionalization. It was a playground game, an urban game, tied to all of the caricatures that were associated with urban culture. It struggled with integration and representations of race. Today, basketball’s influence seeps into film, music, dance, and fashion. Hoops tells the story of the reciprocal relationship between the sport and the society that received it.

In Hoops: A Cultural History of Basketball in America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), Thomas Aiello presents the only contemporary cultural history of the sport from the street to the highest levels of professional mens and womens competition. He argues that the game has existed in a reciprocal relationship with the broader culture, both embodying conflicts over race, class, and gender and serving a s public theater for them. Aiello places cultural icons like Bill Russell, Michael Jordan, and Kobe Bryant in the context of their times and explores how the sport negotiated controversies and scandals. Hoops belongs on the bookshelf of every reader interested in the history of basketball, sports, race, urban life, and pop culture in America.

Paul Knepper used to cover the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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The Future of Race: A Discussion with John McWhorter Apr 26, 2022

Race is the subject of passionate and increasingly angry debate. But amidst all the talk of unconscious bias it’s an area into which many fear to tread. In this podcast Professor McWhorter of Colombia University outlines his sometimes controversial views on these issues and explains why he wants to debate them in public. His latest book is Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (Portfolio, 2021).

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Michael L. Walker, "Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail" (Oxford UP, 2022) Apr 25, 2022

Jails are the principal people-processing machines of the criminal justice system. Mostly they hold persons awaiting trial who cannot afford or have been denied bail. Although jail sentences max out at a year, some spend years awaiting trial in jail-especially in counties where courts are jammed with cases. City and county jails, detention centers, police lockups, and other temporary holding facilities are regularly overcrowded, poorly funded, and the buildings are often in disrepair. American jails admit over ten million people every year, but very little is known about what happens to them while they're locked away.

Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail(Oxford UP, 2022) is an ethnographic study of a California county jail that reflects on what it means to do jail time and what it does to men. Michael L. Walker spent several extended spells in jail, having been arrested while trying to pay parking tickets in graduate school. This book is an intimate account of his experience and in it he shares the routines, rhythms, and subtle meanings that come with being incarcerated. Walker shows how punishment in jail is much more than the deprivation of liberties. It is, he argues, purposefully degrading. Jail creates a racial politics that organizes daily life, moves men from clock time to event time, normalizes trauma, and imbues residents with substantial measures of vulnerability. Deputies used self-centered management styles to address the problems associated with running a jail, some that magnified individual conflicts to potential group conflicts and others that created divisions between residents for the sake of control. And though not every deputy indulged, many gave themselves over to the pleasures of punishment.

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Kristin Henning, "The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth" (Pantheon Books, 2021) Apr 25, 2022

Drawing upon twenty-five years of experience representing Black youth in Washington, D.C.'s juvenile courts, Kristin Henning confronts America's irrational, manufactured fears of these young people and makes a powerfully compelling case that the crisis in racist American policing begins with its relationship to Black children.

Henning explains how discriminatory and aggressive policing has socialized a generation of Black teenagers to fear, resent, and resist the police, and she details the long-term consequences of racism that they experience at the hands of the police and their vigilante surrogates. She makes clear that unlike White youth, who are afforded the freedom to test boundaries, experiment with sex and drugs, and figure out who they are and who they want to be, Black youth are seen as a threat to White America and are denied healthy adolescent development. She examines the criminalization of Black adolescent play and sexuality, and of Black fashion, hair, and music. She limns the effects of police presence in schools and the depth of police-induced trauma in Black adolescents.

Especially in the wake of the recent unprecedented, worldwide outrage at racial injustice and inequality, The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth(Pantheon Books, 2021) is an essential book for our moment.

Donations to the Georgetown Law Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative can be made here.

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Nina M. Yancy, "How the Color Line Bends: The Geography of White Prejudice in Modern America" (Oxford UP, 2022) Apr 22, 2022

How the Color Line Bends: The Geography of White Prejudice in Modern America (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the connection between prejudice and place in modern America. Existing scholarship suggests that living near Black Americans presents a "threat" to White Americans, which in turn influences White opinions on policies related to race. This book rejects the tendency to position White people as tacit victims and Black people as threatening, instead recasting White Americans as active viewers of their surroundings. This reframing brings a critical focus on power and positionality to scholarship on racial threat, and challenges the neutrality typically assigned to the White perspective. The book first presents ethnographic analysis of Louisiana residents caught in a racialized debate over incorporating a new city in the Baton Rouge area, using interpretive methods to show how race colors White residents' perspective on local geography and politics. Then, the book applies its conceptualization of a White perspective to the quantitative study of prejudice and place, revisiting the classic racialized policy issues of welfare and affirmative action. These analyses emphasize White Americans' diverse beliefs and surroundings but also their common structural position, and how an interest in defending that position shapes the White perspective. This emphasis supports new empirical insights on the behavior of racially tolerant White people, perceptions of the Black middle class, and the consequences of segregation for racial politics. The book also includes discussion of the author's own positionality as a Black woman researcher in conversation with White interview subjects, and the risks of Whiteness studies that leave Black people invisible.

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Joseph Darda, "The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism" (Stanford UP, 2022) Apr 21, 2022

What if, Joseph Darda asks, our desire to solve racism--with science, civil rights, antiracist literature, integration, and color blindness--has entrenched it further? In The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism (Stanford UP, 2022), he traces the rise of liberal antiracism, showing how reformers' faith in time, in the moral arc of the universe, has undercut future movements with the insistence that racism constitutes a time-limited crisis to be solved with time-limited remedies. Most historians attribute the shortcomings of the civil rights era to a conservative backlash or to the fracturing of the liberal establishment in the late 1960s, but the civil rights movement also faced resistance from a liberal "frontlash," from antiredistributive allies who, before it ever took off, constrained what the movement could demand and how it could demand it. Telling the stories of Ruth Benedict, Kenneth Clark, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Howard Griffin, Pauli Murray, Lillian Smith, Richard Wright, and others, Darda reveals how Americans learned to wait on time for racial change and the enduring harm of that trust in the clock.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Patricia A. Banks, "Black Culture, Inc.: How Ethnic Community Support Pays for Corporate America" (Stanford UP, 2022) Apr 19, 2022

Why do corporations fund cultural organisations and events? In Black Culture, Inc: How ethnic community support pays for corporate America Patricia Banks, Professor of Sociology at Mount Holyoke College, explores the role of corporate funding in shaping cultural life, from historical examples of tobacco advertising and media, through to contemporary social media businesses’ presence at music festivals. The book draws on a wealth of examples and scholarship on Black culture in America, alongside analysis of diversity policy and practices. Most crucially, the book introduces the idea of ‘diversity capital’, showing the costs of corporate influence on culture, as well as the ambivalence and enthusiasm of cultural producers and audiences. Moving beyond simple explanations and analysis of race, corporate funding, and culture, the book is essential reading across the arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in the arts today.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield.

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Kelly Bauer, "Negotiating Autonomy: Mapuche Territorial Demands and Chilean Land Policy" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021) Apr 18, 2022

The 1980s and '90s saw Latin American governments recognizing the property rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities as part of a broader territorial policy shift. But the resulting reforms were not applied consistently, more often extending neoliberal governance than recognizing Indigenous Peoples' rights. In Negotiating Autonomy: Mapuche Territorial Demands and Chilean Land Policy(U Pittsburgh Press, 2021), Kelly Bauer explores the inconsistencies by which the Chilean government transfers land in response to Mapuche territorial demands. Interviews with community and government leaders, statistical analysis of an original dataset of Mapuche mobilization and land transfers, and analysis of policy documents reveals that many assumptions about post-dictatorship Chilean politics as technocratic and depoliticized do not apply to Indigenous policy. Rather, state officials often work to preserve the hegemony of political and economic elites in the region, effectively protecting existing market interests over efforts to extend the neoliberal project to the governance of Mapuche territorial demands. In addition to complicating understandings of Chilean governance, these hidden patterns of policy implementation reveal the numerous ways these governance strategies threaten the recognition of Indigenous rights and create limited space for communities to negotiate autonomy.

Kelly Bauer is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Nebraska Wesleyan University, and member of the Red De Politólogas – #NoSinMujeres. Her research and teaching examine state policy and rhetoric about Indigenous rights, irregular migration, and human security regimes in South America. She also researches pedagogy and knowledge production in political science classrooms, and migration politics and rhetoric in Nebraska. Her work has been externally funded by the U.S. Fulbright Program, Inter-American Foundation’s Grassroots Development Fellowship, and APSA Centennial Center.

Lamis Abdelaaty is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty.

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Jennifer Delfino, "Speaking of Race: Language, Identity, and Schooling Among African American Children" (Lexington Book, 2020) Apr 18, 2022

In Speaking of Race: Language, Identity, and Schooling Among African American Children (Lexington Books, 2020), Jennifer Delfino explores the linguistic practices of African American children in an after school program in Washington, DC. Drawing on ethnographic research, Delfino illustrates how students’ linguistic practices are often perceived as barriers to learning and achievement and provides an in-depth look at how students challenge this perception by using language to transform the meaning of race in relation to ideas about academic success.

Jennifer Delfino is assistant professor in the Department of Academic Literacy and Linguistics at Borough of Manhattan Community College, The City University of New York.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020).

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Caits Meissner, ed., "The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer's Life in Prison" (Haymarket Books, 2022) Apr 14, 2022

The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison (Haymarket Books, 2022) is an expansive resource for incarcerated writers. With over 50 contributors like Reginald Dwayne Betts, Randall Horton, and Nicole Shawan Junior, this resource provides the foundations for crafting a vibrant literary life with the carceral state. The guide offers advice including editing, publishing works, and developing prison writing groups while weaving first-person narratives. The Sentences That Create Us will show incarcerated people and allies how to release their stories that prisons caged.

N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.

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Josef Benson and Doug Singsen, "Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes: Whiteness and Its Borderlands in American Comics and Graphic Novels" (UP of Mississippi, 2022) Apr 12, 2022

American comics from the start have reflected the white supremacist culture out of which they arose. Superheroes and comic books in general are products of whiteness, and both signal and hide its presence. Even when comics creators and publishers sought to advance an antiracist agenda, their attempts were often undermined by a lack of awareness of their own whiteness and the ideological baggage that goes along with it. Even the most celebrated figures of the industry, such as Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Jack Jackson, William Gaines, Stan Lee, Robert Crumb, Will Eisner, and Frank Miller, have not been able to distance themselves from the problematic racism embedded in their narratives despite their intentions or explanations.

In Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes: Whiteness and Its Borderlands in American Comics and Graphic Novels (University of Mississippi Press, 2022), Dr. Josef Benson and Dr. Doug Singsen provide a sober assessment of these creators and their role in perpetuating racism throughout the history of comics. They identify how whiteness has been defined, transformed, and occasionally undermined over the course of eighty years in comics and in many genres, including westerns, horror, crime, funny animal, underground comix, autobiography, literary fiction, and historical fiction. This exciting and groundbreaking book assesses industry giants, highlights some of the most important episodes in American comic book history, and demonstrates how they relate to one another and form a larger pattern, in unexpected and surprising ways.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Brandon J. Manning, "Played Out: The Race Man in 21st Century Satire" (Rutgers UP, 2022) Apr 12, 2022

In this episode, Dr. Brandon J. Manning talks about his most recent book, Played Out: The Race Man in 21st Century Satire (Rutgers UP, 2022). Here's a short description: through contemporary examples, including the work of Kendrick Lamar, Key and Peele and the presidency of Barack Obama and many others, Played Out: The Race Man in 21st Century Satire examines how Black satirists create vulnerability to highlight the inner emotional lives of Black men.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Yveline Alexis, "Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte" (Rutgers UP, 2021) Apr 11, 2022

Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte (Rutgers University Press, 2021), by Yveline Alexis is the first US study of the politician and caco leader (guerrilla fighter) who fought against the US occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934. Alexis locates rare multilingual sources from both nations and documents Péralte's political movement and citizens' protests. The interdisciplinary work offers a new approach to studies of the US invasion period by documenting how Caribbean people fought back.

Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany.

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Richard Brent Turner, "Soundtrack to a Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism" (NYU Press, 2021) Apr 08, 2022

In his fascinating and riveting new book Soundtrack to a Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism (NYU Press, 2021), historian Richard Brent Turner tells a moving though rarely discussed narrative of the intersection and cross-pollination between Jazz and African American Islam from the 1940s to the 1970s. How did Islam and conversion to Islam inform the lives, careers, and musical productions of prominent jazz musicians in this period? And how did jazz spaces and culture provide the fodder for important African American Muslim movements and figures, such as the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X? Turner addresses these and other questions with profound historical depth and analytical ingenuity. Over the course of this book, the reader learns about such enormously interesting themes as the landscape of African American politics during the interwar period and beyond in major Northeastern cities (especially Boston), the intimate relationship between Jazz and the Ahmadiyya, the relationship between John Coltrane and Malcolm X, and the encounter of Jazz with Black internationalism. This lucidly written book will also animate great discussions in the classroom.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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Afropessimism Apr 08, 2022

Saronik talks with Diane Enobabor about Afropessimism and Afrofuturism.

Diane is a Ph.D. student at The Graduate Center at CUNY. She studies Black Geographies, social movements, borders, critical theory and migration.

Reading List:

-Diane’s recent article “A Call for Mourning: How To Adapt to Our American Ruins”

-Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism. Norton, 2020.

-Afro-pessimism: An Introduction. Racked & Dispatched, 2017.

Available online for free.

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Kate Clifford Larson, "Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer" (Oxford UP, 2021) Apr 07, 2022

She was born the 20th child in a family that had lived in the Mississippi Delta for generations, first as enslaved people and then as sharecroppers. She left school at 12 to pick cotton, as those before her had done, in a world in which white supremacy was an unassailable citadel. She was subjected without her consent to an operation that deprived her of children. And she was denied the most basic of all rights in America--the right to cast a ballot--in a state in which Blacks constituted nearly half the population.

And so Fannie Lou Hamer lifted up her voice. Starting in the early 1960s and until her death in 1977, she was an irresistible force, not merely joining the swelling wave of change brought by civil rights but keeping it in motion. Working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which recruited her to help with voter-registration drives, Hamer became a community organizer, women's rights activist, and co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She summoned and used what she had against the citadel--her anger, her courage, her faith in the Bible, and her conviction that hearts could be won over and injustice overcome. She used her brutal beating at the hands of Mississippi police, an ordeal from which she never fully recovered, as the basis of a televised speech at the 1964 Democratic Convention, a speech that the mainstream party--including its standard-bearer, President Lyndon Johnson--tried to contain. But Fannie Lou Hamer would not be held back. For those whose lives she touched and transformed, for those who heard and followed her voice, she was the embodiment of protest, perseverance, and, most of all, the potential for revolutionary

change.

Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer (Oxford UP, 2021) is the most complete biography of Hamer ever written, drawing on recently declassified sources on both Hamer and the civil rights movement, including unredacted FBI and Department of Justice files. It also makes full use of interviews with Civil Rights activists conducted by the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, and Democratic National Committee archives, in addition to extensive conversations with Hamer's family and with those with whom she worked most closely. Stirring, immersive, and authoritative, Walk with Me does justice to Fannie Lou Hamer's life, capturing in full the spirit, and the voice, that led the fight for freedom and equality in America at its critical moment.

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Todd R. Clear and Natasha A. Frost, "The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America" (NYU Press, 2015) Apr 07, 2022

Over the last 40 years, the US penal system has grown at an unprecedented rate―five times larger than in the past and grossly out of scale with the rest of the world. In The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America (New York University Press, 2013), criminologists Todd Clear and Natasha Frost argue that America’s move to mass incarceration from the 1960s to the early 2000s was more than just a response to crime or a collection of policies adopted in isolation; it was a grand social experiment. Tracing a wide array of trends related to the criminal justice system, this book charts the rise of penal severity in America and speculates that a variety of force have finally come together to bring this great social experiment to an end.

Todd R. Clear is University Professor of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, Newark. He was also the founder of Rutgers University-Newark’s New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons (NJ-STEP) consortium.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020).

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Shawn Michael Austin, "Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay" (U New Mexico Press, 2020) Apr 07, 2022

In Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay(U New Mexico Press, 2020), historian Shawn Michael Austin traces the history of conquest and colonization in Paraguay during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Emphasizing the social and cultural agency of Guaraní--one of the primary indigenous peoples of Paraguay--not only in Jesuit missions but also in colonial settlements and Indian pueblos scattered in and around the Spanish city of Asunción, Austin argues that interethnic relations and cultural change in Paraguay can only be properly understood through the Guaraní logic of kinship. In the colonial backwater of Paraguay, conquistadors were forced to marry into Guaraní families in order to acquire indigenous tributaries, thereby becoming brothers-in-law (tovajá) to Guaraní chieftains. This pattern of interethnic exchange infused colonial relations and institutions with Guaraní social meanings and expectations of reciprocity that forever changed Spaniards, African slaves, and their descendants. Austin demonstrates that Guaraní of diverse social and political positions actively shaped colonial society along indigenous lines.

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Kate Clifford Larson, "Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer" (Oxford UP, 2021) Apr 07, 2022

She was born the 20th child in a family that had lived in the Mississippi Delta for generations, first as enslaved people and then as sharecroppers. She left school at 12 to pick cotton, as those before her had done, in a world in which white supremacy was an unassailable citadel. She was subjected without her consent to an operation that deprived her of children. And she was denied the most basic of all rights in America--the right to cast a ballot--in a state in which Blacks constituted nearly half the population.

And so Fannie Lou Hamer lifted up her voice. Starting in the early 1960s and until her death in 1977, she was an irresistible force, not merely joining the swelling wave of change brought by civil rights but keeping it in motion. Working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which recruited her to help with voter-registration drives, Hamer became a community organizer, women's rights activist, and co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She summoned and used what she had against the citadel--her anger, her courage, her faith in the Bible, and her conviction that hearts could be won over and injustice overcome. She used her brutal beating at the hands of Mississippi police, an ordeal from which she never fully recovered, as the basis of a televised speech at the 1964 Democratic Convention, a speech that the mainstream party--including its standard-bearer, President Lyndon Johnson--tried to contain. But Fannie Lou Hamer would not be held back. For those whose lives she touched and transformed, for those who heard and followed her voice, she was the embodiment of protest, perseverance, and, most of all, the potential for revolutionary

change.

Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer (Oxford UP, 2021) is the most complete biography of Hamer ever written, drawing on recently declassified sources on both Hamer and the civil rights movement, including unredacted FBI and Department of Justice files. It also makes full use of interviews with Civil Rights activists conducted by the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, and Democratic National Committee archives, in addition to extensive conversations with Hamer's family and with those with whom she worked most closely. Stirring, immersive, and authoritative, Walk with Me does justice to Fannie Lou Hamer's life, capturing in full the spirit, and the voice, that led the fight for freedom and equality in America at its critical moment.

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David Hajdu and John Carey, "A Revolution in Three Acts: The Radical Vaudeville of Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay, and Julian Eltinge" (Columbia UP, 2021) Apr 06, 2022

Too often, vaudeville is seen from the perspective of its decline: it is the corny, messy art form that predated the book musical, or that gave us Chaplin, Keaton, and the Marx Brothers. Rarely is it seen as the populist avant-garde form it was at its height. David Hajdu and John Carey's graphic history, A Revolution in Three Acts: The Radical Vaudeville of Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay, and Julian Eltinge (Columbia University Press, 2021), corrects this misconception, giving us illustrated biographies of three of the genre's most outré and successful stars. Eva Tanguay challenged contemporary gender roles through her outrageous behavior and sexually suggestive songs. Julian Eltinge also subverted gendered expectations of femininity by performing them to the hilt -- but as a man. And Bert Williams, a black man who performed in black face, tried to use his fame to soften the hard edges of Jim Crow bigotry but eventually became exhausted by the racism he encountered within the entertainment industry. These three performers truly were revolutionary, and their stories should be known to any theatre fan or historian.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Jenifer L. Barclay, "The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America" (U of Illinois Press, 2021) Apr 05, 2022

Time and again, antebellum Americans justified slavery and white supremacy by linking blackness to disability, defectiveness, and dependency. In The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (University of Illinois Press, 2021), historian Jenifer L. Barclay examines the ubiquitous narratives that depicted black people with disabilities as pitiable, monstrous, or comical, narratives used not only to defend slavery but argue against it. As she shows, this relationship between ableism and racism impacted racial identities during the antebellum period and played an overlooked role in shaping American history afterward. Barclay also illuminates the everyday lives of the ten percent of enslaved people who lived with disabilities. Devalued by slaveholders as unsound and therefore worthless, these individuals nonetheless carved out an unusual autonomy. Their roles as caregivers, healers, and keepers of memory made them esteemed within their own communities and celebrated figures in song and folklore.

Prescient in its analysis and rich in detail, The Mark of Slavery is a powerful addition to the intertwined histories of disability, slavery, and race.

Jenifer L. Barclay is an Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Buffalo. Her research places African American history in conversation with the “new” disability history, a field that emphasizes disability as a lived human experience embedded in a set of socially constructed ideas that change over time, across cultures, and in relation to other categories of identity such as race, gender, class and sexuality. She earned her Ph.D. in African American History at Michigan State University.

Jerrad P. Pacatte is a Ph.D. candidate and School of Arts and Sciences Excellence Fellow in the Department of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. A social historian of gender, slavery, and emancipation in early America and the Atlantic World, Jerrad is currently completing his dissertation, entitled “The Work of Freedom: African American Women and the Ordeal of Emancipation in New England, 1740-1840” which examines the everyday lives, labors, and emancipation experiences of African-descended women in late-colonial and early republic New England. Jerrad is also increasingly interested in the history of slavery and disability in the context of early America; his research examining the lives and physically-disabling nature of enslavement in early New England will be published in two peer-reviewed anthologies - one of which is co-edited by Jenifer L. Barclay and Stefanie Hunt Kennedy - early next year.

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Yunxiang Gao, "Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century" (UNC Press, 2021) Apr 05, 2022

Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century (UNC Press, 2021) explores the close relationships between three of the most famous twentieth-century African Americans, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, and their little-known Chinese allies during World War II and the Cold War--journalist, musician, and Christian activist Liu Liangmo, and Sino-Caribbean dancer-choreographer Sylvia Si-lan Chen. Charting a new path in the study of Sino-American relations, Gao Yunxiang foregrounds African Americans, combining the study of Black internationalism and the experiences of Chinese Americans with a transpacific narrative and an understanding of the global remaking of China's modern popular culture and politics. Gao reveals earlier and more widespread interactions between Chinese and African American leftists than accounts of the familiar alliance between the Black radicals and the Maoist Chinese would have us believe. The book's multilingual approach draws from massive yet rarely used archival streams in China and in Chinatowns and elsewhere in the United States. These materials allow Gao to retell the well-known stories of Du Bois, Robeson, and Hughes alongside the sagas of Liu and Chen in a work that will transform and redefine Afro-Asia studies.

Clara Iwasaki is an assistant professor in the East Asian Studies department at the University of Alberta.

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Hilda Lloréns, "Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice" (U of Washington Press, 2021) Apr 05, 2022

When Hurricanes Irma and María made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, their destructive force further devastated an archipelago already pommeled by economic austerity, political upheaval, and environmental calamities. To navigate these ongoing multiple crises, Afro-Puerto Rican women have drawn from their cultural knowledge to engage in daily improvisations that enable their communities to survive and thrive. Their life-affirming practices, developed and passed down through generations, offer powerful modes of resistance to gendered and racialized exploitation, ecological ruination, and deepening capitalist extraction. Through solidarity, reciprocity, and an ethics of care, these women create restorative alternatives to dispossession to produce good, meaningful lives for their communities.

Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice (University of Washington Press, 2021) weaves together autobiography, ethnography, interviews, memories, and fieldwork to recast narratives that continuously erase Black Puerto Rican women as agents of social change. In doing so, Lloréns serves as an "ethnographer of home" as she brings to life the powerful histories and testimonies of a marginalized, disavowed community that has been treated as disposable.

Interviewer Byline: Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com.

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Mark Newman, "Desegregating Dixie: The Catholic Church in the South and Desegregation, 1945-1992" (UP of Mississippi, 2018) Apr 01, 2022

In Desegregating Dixie: The Catholic Church in the South and Desegregation, 1945-1992 (UP of Mississippi, 2018), Mark Newman draws on a vast range of archives and many interviews to uncover for the first time the complex response of African American and white Catholics across the South to desegregation. In the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the southern Catholic Church contributed to segregation by confining African Americans to the back of white churches and to black-only schools and churches. However, in the twentieth century, papal adoption and dissemination of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, pressure from some black and white Catholics, and secular change brought by the civil rights movement increasingly led the Church to address racial discrimination both inside and outside its walls.

Far from monolithic, white Catholics in the South split between a moderate segregationist majority and minorities of hard-line segregationists and progressive racial egalitarians. While some bishops felt no discomfort with segregation, prelates appointed from the late 1940s onward tended to be more supportive of religious and secular change. Some bishops in the peripheral South began desegregation before or in anticipation of secular change while elsewhere, especially in the Deep South, they often tied changes in the Catholic churches to secular desegregation.

African American Catholics were diverse and more active in the civil rights movement than has often been assumed. While some black Catholics challenged racism in the Church, many were conflicted about the manner of Catholic desegregation generally imposed by closing valued black institutions. Tracing its impact through the early 1990s, Newman reveals how desegregation shook congregations but seldom brought about genuine integration.

Winner of the 2020 American Studies Network Book Prize from the European Association for American Studies

Allison Isidore is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association and is an Instructor of Record for the Religious Studies department at the University of Alabama. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. Allison is also a Video Editor for The Religious Studies Project, producing videos for the podcast and marketing team. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

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Erin L. Thompson, "Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments" (Norton, 2022) Mar 30, 2022

In the United States, the national debate over public monuments often frames the removal of statutes as a revision of history. But Dr. Thompson suggests that we need to interrogate both the creation and removal of monuments to understand the essential role they play in creating national narratives and determining who is seen as an American. Using a set of remarkable case studies, Dr. Thompson demonstrates the complex ways in which these statutes were suggested, contested, funded, physically created, and used symbolically by future groups. Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments (Norton, 2022) aims to create a toolkit to interrogate how Americans represent what they have built and what they need to rebuild in the American public landscape – and the nation as a whole.

Erin L. Thompson is an associate professor of art crime at John Jay College, City University of New York. She is an expert in the deliberate destruction of art, analyzing the ways in which this destruction has sometimes harmed and sometimes benefited communities. Her first book, Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors (Yale University Press, 2016) was named an NPR Best Book of 2016 and her impressive public facing scholarship includes the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, CNN, NPR, BBC, Freakonomics and Smithsonian Magazine.

In the podcast, Dr. Thompson mentions her article, “Ghosting the Confederacy” and references the Confederate Sailors and Soldiers Monument in Birmingham, AL. Dr. Liebell highlights Howard University’s grant to digitize and archive Black newspapers required for research across disciplines.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Nitasha Tamar Sharma, "Hawai'i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific" (Duke UP, 2021) Mar 30, 2022

Hawai'i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific(Duke UP, 2021) maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands. This ethnography emerges from a decade of fieldwork with both Hawaiʻi-raised Black locals and Black transplants who moved to the Islands from North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Nitasha Tamar Sharma highlights the paradox of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged anti-Black racism. While Black culture is ubiquitous here, African-descended people seem invisible. In this formerly sovereign nation structured neither by the US Black/White binary nor the one-drop rule, non-White multiracials, including Black Hawaiians and Black Koreans, illustrate the coarticulation and limits of race and the native/settler divide. Despite erasure and racism, nonmilitary Black residents consider Hawaiʻi their haven, describing it as a place to "breathe" that offers the possibility of becoming local. Sharma's analysis of race, indigeneity, and Asian settler colonialism shifts North American debates in Black and Native studies to the Black Pacific. Hawaiʻi Is My Haven illustrates what the Pacific offers members of the African diaspora and how they in turn illuminate race and racism in "paradise."

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Steven J. Brady, "Chained to History: Slavery and US Foreign Relations to 1865" (Cornell UP, 2022) Mar 29, 2022

In Chained to History: Slavery and US Foreign Relations to 1865 (Cornell University Press, 2022), Dr. Steven J. Brady places slavery at the centre of the story of America's place in the world in the years prior to the calamitous Civil War. Beginning with the immediate aftermath of the War of the American Revolution, Brady follows the military, economic, and moral lines of the diplomatic challenges of attempting to manage, on the global stage, the actuality of human servitude in a country dedicated to human freedom.

Dr. Brady argues that “slavery was defined by policymakers and laypeople alike as central to US interactions with four continents—whether for good or bad. America’s security, prosperity, and geographical and political reach were all connected, in one way or another, with bonded labour. It is no surprise, then, that Americans looked on, and conducted, their relations with the world with a conviction that slavery was central to the nation’s international role.” He argues that this mindset around the centrality of American slavery therefore “forced the United States to act in the international sphere in ways that it otherwise would not have, and to interact with the Atlantic world in a more dynamic way than its leaders might have preferred.”

Dr. Brady highlights the limitations placed on American policymakers who, working in an international context increasingly supportive of abolition, were severely constrained regarding the formulation and execution of preferred policy. Policymakers were bound to the slave interest based in the Democratic Party and the tortured state of domestic politics bore heavily on the conduct of foreign affairs. As international powers not only abolished the slave trade but banned human servitude as such, the American position became untenable.

The book argues that the “proclivity of slavery to enmesh the nation with the wider world in unwanted ways was manifested again and again throughout the time period up to 1865. From vainly seeking the return of escaped slaves under President George Washington to the failed attempts of President Abraham Lincoln to settle their freed brethren somewhere—anywhere—else, one sees the real limits placed on the nation’s ability to shape and implement a consistent foreign policy…. Slavery was not the only factor that contributed to this frustration of American aims to conduct a largely unilateralist foreign policy in its early years. Nor was it the only reason why America frequently found itself unable to achieve its foreign relations goals. But it was among the most significant reasons.”

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Francesca Morgan, "A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in U.S. History" (UNC Press, 2021) Mar 25, 2022

In A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in U.S. History(University of North Carolina Press, 2021), historian Francesca Morgan tracks Americans’ obsession with tracing family ancestry. Morgan sheds light on the evolution of genealogical knowledge from the early republic to the present day. Although our New Books Network conversation concentrates on African Americans, in her text, she looks explicitly at how Anglo-American white, Mormon, Jewish, African American, and Native American people wrestled with locating and documenting their kin and ultimately shaped the practice of genealogy. A Nation of Descendants also explores the transformation of genealogical practices as it becomes commercialized and commodified.

N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.

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Tia Brown McNair, "From Equity Talk to Equity Walk: Expanding Practitioner Knowledge for Racial Justice in Higher Education" (Jossey-Bass, 2020) Mar 24, 2022

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear:

Why it is so important to have the conversation about “Equity in Higher Education” and why now is the time to do so
What equity means; for whom, and what equity entails in thought and action
What it means to perform equity as a routine practice in higher education
What makes individuals equity minded

Today’s book is: From Equity Talk to Equity Walk: Expanding Practitioner Knowledge for Racial Justice in Higher Education, draws from campus-based research projects sponsored by the AAC&U and the Center for Urban Education at the University of Southern California. The book is a practical guide on the design and application of campus change strategies for achieving equitable outcomes. The authors offer advice on how to build an equity-minded campus culture aligning strategic priorities and institutional missions to advance equity.

Our guest is: Dr. Tia Brown McNair, is the Vice President in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Student Success and Executive Director for the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Centers at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) in Washington, DC. She oversees both funded projects and AAC&U’s continuing programs on equity, inclusive excellence, high-impact practices, and student success. McNair also directs AAC&U’s Summer Institutes on High-Impact Practices and Student Success, and Truth, Racial Healing, & Transformation Campus Centers. McNair currently serves as the project director for several AAC&U initiatives: "Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Campus Centers," "Strengthening Guided Pathways and Career Success by Ensuring Students Are Learning," and “Purposeful Pathways: Faculty Planning and Curricular Coherence.”

Our host is: Dr. Zebulun R. Davenport, Vice President for Student Affairs, West Chester University.

Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:

AAC&U’s Committing to Equity and Inclusive Excellence: Campus Guide for Self-Study and Planning.
AAC&U’s Step Up and Lead for Equity: What Higher Education Can Do to Reverse Our Deepening Divides.
Five principles for enacting equity by design by E.M. Bensimon, A.C. Dowd, and K. Witham in Diversity & Democracy 19 (1)
Engaging the “Race Question”: Accountability and Equity in U.S. Higher Education, Multicultural Education Series by A.C. Dowd and E.M. Bensimon. (Teachers College Press).
Heutsche, A.M. and Hicks, K. (2018). Embedding equity through the practice of real talk. In: A Vision for Equity: Results from AAC&U’s Project: Committing to Equity and Inclusive Excellence: Campus-Based Strategies for Student Success. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges.

You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.

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Elisabeth Ceppi, "Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service in Early New England" (Dartmouth College Press, 2018) Mar 24, 2022

Early American literature scholar Elisabeth Ceppi’s thought-provoking new book, Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service in Early New England(Dartmouth College Press, 2018), rewrites the familiar narrative of the relation between Puritan religious culture and New England’s economic culture as a history of the primary discourse that connected them: service. The understanding early Puritans had of themselves as God’s servants and earthly masters was shaped by their immersion in an Atlantic culture of service and the worldly pressures and opportunities generated by New England’s particular place in it. Concepts of spiritual service and mastery determined Puritan views of the men, women, and children who were servants and slaves in that world. So, too, did these concepts shape the experience of family, labor, law, and economy for those men, women, and children—the very bedrock of their lives. This strikingly original look at Puritan culture will appeal to a wide range of Americanists and historians.

Elisabeth Ceppi is a Professor of English at Portland State University. Professor Ceppi’s research focuses on early American representations of unfreedom and what they reveal about how concepts of liberty, authority, and obedience entwine with hierarchies of gender, race, and class.

Jerrad P. Pacatte is a Ph.D. candidate and School of Arts and Sciences Excellence Fellow in the Department of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. A social historian of gender, slavery, and emancipation in early America and the Atlantic World, Jerrad is currently completing his dissertation, entitled “The Work of Freedom: African American Women and the Ordeal of Emancipation in New England, 1740-1840” which examines the everyday lives, labors, and emancipation experiences of African-descended women in late-colonial and early republic New England.

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Leslie T. Grover, "The Benefits of Eating White Folks" (Jaded Ibis Press, 2022) Mar 22, 2022

Today I talked to Leslie T. Grover about her book The Benefits of Eating White Folks (Jaded Ibis Press, 2022).

The Sickness, a disease with unknown origins, is killing white children in the antebellum South, but Perpetua, a Black enslaved woman, is facing something much more devastating: Her daughter Meenie is missing. What she finds in her search for her child will change her life forever.

By fusing the past and present with the power of prose and poetry, Leslie T. Grover poignantly explores the ripple effect of history and the nature of love and family and the ties that bind.

Leslie T. Grover is a Black History writer and community scholar-activist. She is the founder of a small nonprofit, Assisi House, Inc., which uses the power of story to build the capacity of vulnerable communities. Her work in Narrative Medicine, social justice, and Black History has inspired this book. A native of Charleston, Mississippi, she is an unapologetic Black Southern woman, and this extends itself into her writing. Leslie’s work, which focuses on Black women characters, seeks to reveal the past in a way that honors art, the Black writing tradition, and her own deeply rural voice. She currently lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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John W. I. Lee, "The First Black Archaeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert" (Oxford UP, 2022) Mar 21, 2022

The First Black Archaeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert(Oxford UP, 2022) reveals the untold story of a pioneering African American classical scholar, teacher, community leader, and missionary. Born into slavery in rural Georgia, John Wesley Gilbert (1863-1923) gained national prominence in the early 1900s, but his accomplishments are littleknown today. Using evidence from archives across the U.S. and Europe, from contemporary publications, and from newly discovered documents, this book chronicles, for the first time, Gilbert's remarkable journey. As we follow Gilbert from the segregated public schools of Augusta, Georgia, to the lecture halls of Brown University, to his hiring as the first black faculty member of Augusta's Paine Institute, and through his travels in Greece, western Europe, and the Belgian Congo, we learn about the development of African American intellectual and religious culture, and about the enormous achievements of an entire generation of black students and educators.

Readers interested in the early development of American archaeology in Greece will find an entirely new perspective here, as Gilbert was one of the first Americans of any race to do archaeological work in Greece. Those interested in African American history and culture will gain an invaluable new perspective on a leading yet hidden figure of the late 1800s and early 1900s, whose life and work touched many different aspects of the African American experience.

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K. Stephen Prince, "The Ballad of Robert Charles: Searching for the New Orleans Riot Of 1900" (UNC Press, 2021) Mar 17, 2022

For a brief moment in the summer of 1900, Robert Charles was arguably the most infamous black man in the United States. After an altercation with police on a New Orleans street, Charles killed two police officers and fled. During a manhunt that extended for days, violent white mobs roamed the city, assaulting African Americans and killing at least half a dozen. When authorities located Charles, he held off a crowd of thousands for hours before being shot to death. The notorious episode was reported nationwide; years later, fabled jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton recalled memorializing Charles in song. Yet today, Charles is almost entirely invisible in the traditional historical record. So who was Robert Charles, really? An outlaw? A black freedom fighter? And how can we reconstruct his story?

In The Ballad of Robert Charles: Searching for the New Orleans Riot Of 1900 (UNC Press, 2021), K. Stephen Prince sheds fresh light on both the history of the Robert Charles riots and the practice of history-writing itself. He reveals evidence of intentional erasures, both in the ways the riot and its aftermath were chronicled and in the ways stories were silenced or purposefully obscured. But Prince also excavates long-hidden facts from the narratives passed down by white and black New Orleanians over more than a century. In so doing, he probes the possibilities and limitations of the historical imagination.

Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 202) Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1

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Brian J. Peterson, "Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa" (Indiana UP, 2021) Mar 17, 2022

Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa(Indiana University Press, 2021) by Brian J. Peterson is a thoroughly researched biography of Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso. Peterson sketches Sankara’s rise to power in the early 1980s and focuses specifically on how his military experiences, educational background, and community of mentors, family, and friends shaped his radicalism. Peterson frames Sankara within a second-generation of anti-colonial radicals who both admired anti-colonial luminaries like Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere, but also refined their anti-colonial perspective to critique the limits of their leadership. We learn that during this moment of late-Cold War and decolonization, Sankara used his international platforms to resist and condemn neo-colonialism, imperialism, and European-American networks of surveillance and subterfuge while tackling corruption, poverty, gender discrimination, and environmental issues in Burkina Faso. Sankara’s fierce commitment to revolutionary politics intimated the U.S. and French governments, Western-aligned African nations, and Burkinabé officials who ultimately conspired to assassinate him in 1987. Peterson’s Thomas Sankara examines the powerful legacies of an incredible revolutionary figure and offers a foundation for understanding contemporary anti-imperialist politics in Burkina Faso and beyond.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall.

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Carole Emberton, "To Walk about in Freedom: The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner" (Norton, 2022) Mar 17, 2022

Priscilla Joyner was born into the world of slavery in 1858 North Carolina and came of age at the dawn of emancipation. Raised by a white slaveholding woman, Joyner never knew the truth about her parentage. She grew up isolated and unsure of who she was and where she belonged--feelings that no emancipation proclamation could assuage.

Her life story--candidly recounted in an oral history for the Federal Writers' Project--captures the intimate nature of freedom. Using Joyner's interview and the interviews of other formerly enslaved people, historian Carole Emberton uncovers the deeply personal, emotional journeys of freedom's charter generation--the people born into slavery who walked into a new world of freedom during the Civil War. From the seemingly mundane to the most vital, emancipation opened up a myriad of new possibilities: what to wear and where to live, what jobs to take and who to love.

Although Joyner was educated at a Freedmen's Bureau school and married a man she loved, slavery cast a long shadow. Uncertainty about her parentage haunted her life, and as Jim Crow took hold throughout the South, segregation, disfranchisement, and racial violence threatened the loving home she made for her family. But through it all, she found beauty in the world and added to it where she could.

Weaving together illuminating voices from the charter generation, To Walk about in Freedom: The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner(Norton, 2022) gives us a kaleidoscopic look at the lived experiences of emancipation and challenges us to think anew about the consequences of failing to reckon with the afterlife of slavery.

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E. James West, "Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America" (U of Illinois Press, 2020) Mar 17, 2022

Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (University of Illinois Press, 2020) reveals the previously hidden impact of Ebony magazine as a major producer and disseminator of popular black history during the second half of the twentieth century. Far from dismissing Ebony as a consumer magazine with limited political or educational importance, E. James West highlights the value editors, readers, and advertisers placed upon Ebony's role as a "history book." Benefitting from unprecedented access to new archives at Chicago State and Emory University, West also offers the first substantive biographical account of the writing and philosophy of Lerone Bennett Jr., who used his position at Ebony to emerge as one of the twentieth century's most influential popular black historians. Focusing on Lerone Bennett's role within Johnson Publishing, and assessing Ebony's broader historical coverage, this book uses the magazine as a window into the transition of black history from the margins to the center of American cultural, historical, and political representation. As an important cultural outlet with millions of readers, Ebony played a powerful role in reshaping public representations of African American history. Directed by the efforts of Bennett, the magazine produced militant depictions of black history and connected activism in the present to a longstanding history of radical black protest. However, as a black consumer magazine it also helped to legitimize and facilitate corporate mediation of black history, and to frame and limit discussions of African American history, memory, and identity.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Tessa Murphy, "The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) Mar 16, 2022

In The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean(U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), Tessa Murphy traces how generations of Indigenous Kalinagos, free and enslaved Africans, and settlers from a variety of European nations used maritime routes to forge social, economic, and informal political connections that spanned the eastern Caribbean. Focusing on a chain of volcanic islands, each one visible from the next, whose societies developed outside the sphere of European rule until the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, Murphy argues that the imperial frameworks typically used to analyze the early colonial Caribbean are at odds with the geographic realities that shaped daily life in the region.

Through use of wide-ranging sources including historical maps, parish records, an Indigenous-language dictionary, and colonial correspondence housed in the Caribbean, France, England, and the United States, Murphy shows how this watery borderland became a center of broader imperial experimentation, contestation, and reform. British and French officials dispatched to Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Tobago after 1763 encountered a creolized society that repeatedly frustrated their attempts to transform the islands into productive plantation colonies. By centering the stories of Kalinagos who asserted continued claims to land, French Catholics who demanded the privileges of British subjects, and free people of African descent who insisted on their right to own land and enslaved people, Murphy offers a vivid counterpoint to larger Caribbean plantation societies like Jamaica and Barbados.

By looking outward from the eastern Caribbean chain, The Creole Archipelago resituates small islands as microcosms of broader historical processes central to understanding early American and Atlantic history, including European usurpation of Indigenous lands, the rise of slavery and plantation production, and the creation and codification of racial difference.

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Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, "To Live More Abundantly: Black Collegiate Women, Howard University, and the Audacity of Dean Lucy Diggs Slowe" (U Georgia Press, 2022) Mar 15, 2022

Today I talked to Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant about her book To Live More Abundantly: Black Collegiate Women, Howard University, and the Audacity of Dean Lucy Diggs Slowe (University of Georgia Press, 2022).

How have Black women fostered belonging in higher education institutions that have persisted in marginalizing them? Focusing on the career of Lucy Diggs Slowe, the first trained African American student affairs professional in the United States, this book examines how her philosophy of "living more abundantly" envisioned educational access and institutionalized campus thriving for Black college women.

Born in 1883, Slowe was orphaned at a young age, raised by a paternal aunt, and earned a scholarship to attend Howard University in 1904. As an undergraduate, she helped found Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first African American sorority in the United States, and served as its first president. After graduating valedictorian of her 1908 class, she excelled as a secondary school teacher and administrator and became a national tennis champion. In 1922, she returned to her alma mater as its first full-time dean of women.

Over her fifteen-year tenure at Howard University, Slowe empowered early twentieth-century Black college women to invest in their individual growth, engage in community building, and pursue leadership opportunities. To foster Black women's higher education success, Slowe organized both the National Association of College Women and the National Association of Women's Deans and Advisers of Colored Schools. As she established long-standing traditions and affirming practices to encourage Black women's involvement in the extracurricular life of their campuses, Slowe's deaning philosophy of "living more abundantly" represents an important Black feminist approach to inclusion in higher education.

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Daniel R. Bare, "Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era" (NYU Press, 2021) Mar 11, 2022

As the modernist-fundamentalist controversy came to a head in the early twentieth century, an image of the “fighting fundamentalist” was imprinted on the American cultural consciousness. To this day, the word “fundamentalist” often conjures the image of a fire-breathing preacher―strident, unyielding in conviction . . . and almost always white. But did this major religious perspective really stop cold in its tracks at the color line?

Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era(NYU Press, 2021) challenges the idea that fundamentalism was an exclusively white phenomenon. The volume uncovers voices from the Black community that embraced the doctrinal tenets of the movement and, in many cases, explicitly self-identified as fundamentalists. Fundamentalists of the early twentieth century felt the pressing need to defend the “fundamental” doctrines of their conservative Christian faith―doctrines like biblical inerrancy, the divinity of Christ, and the virgin birth―against what they saw as the predations of modernists who represented a threat to true Christianity. Such concerns, attitudes, and arguments emerged among Black Christians as well as white, even as the oppressive hand of Jim Crow excluded African Americans from the most prominent white-controlled fundamentalist institutions and social crusades, rendering them largely invisible to scholars examining such movements.

Black fundamentalists aligned closely with their white counterparts on the theological particulars of “the fundamentals.” Yet they often applied their conservative theology in more progressive, racially contextualized ways. While white fundamentalists were focused on battling the teaching of evolution, Black fundamentalists were tying their conservative faith to advocacy for reforms in public education, voting rights, and the overturning of legal bans on intermarriage. Beyond the narrow confines of the fundamentalist movement, Daniel R. Bare shows how these historical dynamics illuminate larger themes, still applicable today, about how racial context influences religious expression.

Lane Davis is an Instructor of Religion at Huntingdon College.

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Randall Horton, "Dead Weight: A Memoir in Essays" (Northwestern UP, 2022) Mar 10, 2022

Dead Weight: A Memoir in Essays(Northwestern UP, 2022) chronicles the improbable turnaround of a drug smuggler who, after being sentenced to eight years in state prison, returned to society to earn a PhD in creative writing and become the only tenured professor in the United States with seven felony convictions. Randall Horton's visceral essays highlight the difficulties of trying to change one's life for the better, how the weight of felony convictions never dissipates.

The memoir begins with a conversation between Horton and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man statue in New York City. Their imagined dialogue examines the psychological impact of racism on Black men and boys, including Horton's separation from his mother, immediately after his birth, in a segregated Alabama hospital. From his current life as a professor and prison reformer, Horton looks back on his experiences as a drug smuggler and trafficker during the 1980s-1990s as well as the many obstacles he faced after his release. He also examines the lasting impact of his drug activity on those around him, reflecting on the allure of economic freedom and the mental escapism that cocaine provided, an allure so strong that both sellers and users were willing to risk prison. Horton shares historical context and vivid details about people caught in the war on drugs who became unsuspecting protagonists in somebody else's melodrama.

Lyrical and gripping, Dead Weight reveals the lifelong effects of one man's incarceration on his psyche, his memories, and his daily experience of American society.

Dr. Horton is a Professor of English at the University of New Haven.

Jay Shifman is a vulnerable storyteller, a stigma-destroying speaker, and the founder of Choose Your Struggle podcast. A guy in long-term recovery, Jay is dedicated to ending stigma and promoting fact-based education around Mental Health, Substance Misuse & Recovery, and Drug Use & Policy. You can learn more about Jay at his links here.

For more information, visit: https://jay.campsite.bio/ or find him on your favorite social media platform.

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Joshua Myers, "Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition" (Polity, 2021) Mar 09, 2022

Cedric Robinson – political theorist, historian and activist – was one of the greatest black radical thinkers of the twentieth century, whose work resonates deeply with contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter. In Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition(Polity Press, 2021), the first major book to tell the story of Cedric Robinson, Joshua Myers shows how Robinson's work interrogated the foundations of Western political thought, modern capitalism, and the changing meanings of race. Tracing the course of Robinson's journey from his early days as an agitator in the 60s against the US's reactionary foreign policy to his publication of such seminal works within Black Studies as Black Marxism, Myers frames Robinson's mission as one that aimed to understand and practice resistance to "the terms of order." In so doing, Robinson excavated the Black radical tradition as a form of resistance that imagined that life on wholly different terms was possible. As the USA enters the 20s, the need to continue that resistance is as clear as ever, and Robinson's contribution only gains in importance. This book is essential reading for anyone wanting to learn more about it.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Bill V. Mullen, "James Baldwin: Living in Fire" (Pluto Press, 2019) Mar 08, 2022

In the first major biography of Baldwin in more than a decade, James Baldwin: Living in Fire (Pluto Press, 2019), Bill V. Mullen celebrates the personal and political life of the great African-American writer who changed the face of Western politics and culture. As a lifelong anti-imperialist, black queer advocate, and feminist, Baldwin (1924-1987) was a passionate chronicler of the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, the U.S. war against Vietnam, Palestinian liberation struggle, and the rise of LGBTQ rights. Mullen explores how Baldwin's life and work channel the long history of African-American freedom struggles, and explains how Baldwin both predicted and has become a symbol of the global Black Lives Matter movement.

Bill V. Mullen is Professor of English and American Studies at Purdue University. His specializations are American Literature and Studies, African American Studies, Cultural Studies, Working-Class Studies, Critical Race Theory and Marxist Theory.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.

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Mark Christian Thompson, "Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Mar 04, 2022

Mark Christian Thompson's book, Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory(University of Chicago Press, 2022) examines the changing interdisciplinary investments of key mid-century African American writers and thinkers, showing how their investments in sociology and anthropology gave way to a growing interest in German philosophy and critical theory by the 1960s. Thompson analyzes this shift in intellectual focus across the post-war decades, pinpointing its clearest expression in Amiri Baraka's writings on jazz and blues, in which he insisted on philosophy as the critical means by which to grasp African American expressive culture. More sociologically oriented thinkers, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, had understood blackness as a singular set of socio-historical characteristics. In contrast, writers such as Baraka, James Baldwin, Angela Y. Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X were variously drawn to notions of an African essence, an ontology of Black being. For them, the work of Adorno, Habermas, Marcuse, and German thinkers was a vital resource, allowing for continued cultural-materialist analysis while accommodating the hermeneutical aspects of African American religious thought. Mark Christian Thompson argues that these efforts to reimagine Black singularity led to a phenomenological understanding of blackness--a "Black aesthetic dimension" wherein aspirational models for Black liberation might emerge.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Myisha Cherry, "The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle" (Oxford UP, 2021) Mar 01, 2022

According to a broad consensus among philosophers across the ages, anger is regrettable, counterproductive, and bad. It is something to be overcome or suppressed, something that involves an immoral drive for revenge or a naïve commitment to cosmic justice. Anger is said to involve a corruption of the person – it “eats away” at them, or plunges them into madness.

Maybe anger has been under-appreciated. Perhaps we have failed to make the right distinctions between different varieties of anger – thereby overlooking kinds that are productive and appropriate. In The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle (Oxford University Press 2021), Myisha Cherry argues that we need to give anger a chance. After identifying distinct forms of anger, she defends a kind of anger she calls Lordean Rage, which she argues is central to antiracist social progress.

Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

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William Sites, "Sun Ra's Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Feb 24, 2022

Poet and jazz band musician Sun Ra, born in 1914, is one of the most wildly prolific and unfailingly eccentric figures in the history of music. Renowned for extravagant performances in which his band “Arkestra” appeared in neo-Egyptian garb, this keyboardist and bandleader also espoused an interstellar cosmology and that the planet Saturn was his true home. In his book, Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City(University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. William Sites contextualizes this visionary musician in his home on earth—specifically in Chicago’s South Side, where from 1946 to 1961 Sun Ra lived and relaunched his career.

The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism: Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold “dream-book bibles,” and Elijah Muhammad was building the Nation of Islam. It was also an unruly musical crossroads where the man then still known as Sonny Blount drew from an array of intellectual and musical sources—from radical nationalism, revisionist Christianity, and science fiction to jazz, blues, Latin dance music, and pop exotica—all this to construct a philosophy and performance style that imagined a new identity and future for African Americans. Sun Ra’s Chicago shows that late twentieth-century Afrofuturism emerged from a deep, utopian engagement with the city—and that by excavating the postwar black experience of Sun Ra’s South Side milieu, we can come to see the possibilities of urban life in new ways.

Dr. William Sites is Associate Professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago. His fields of interest include urban and community studies, political economy, social movements, immigration, race, culture, social theory, and historical methods.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca

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Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield, "Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America" (U Illinois Press, 2021) Feb 24, 2022

White publishers and editors used their newspapers to build, nurture, and protect white supremacy across the South in the decades after the Civil War. At the same time, a vibrant Black press fought to disrupt these efforts and force the United States to live up to its democratic ideals.Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America (U Illinois Press, 2021) centers the press as a crucial political actor shaping the rise of the Jim Crow South.

In this interview with co-editor Kathy Roberts Forde, we explore the leading role of the white press in constructing an anti-democratic society by promoting and supporting not only lynching and convict labor but also coordinated campaigns of violence and fraud that disenfranchised Black voters. We also examine the Black press's parallel fight for a multiracial democracy of equality, justice, and opportunity for all — a losing battle with consequences that continue to impact newsrooms today.

Learn more about the book and find resources for educators and newsrooms at journalismandjimcrow.com.

Kathy Roberts Forde is an American journalism historian with research interests in democracy and the public sphere, the Black freedom struggle and the press, the First Amendment, literary journalism, and the history of the book and print culture. She is the Associate Dean of Equity & Inclusion in the College of Social & Behavioral Sciences. She served as Chair of UMass Journalism from 2014-2017; she is past chair of the AEJMC History Division and past associate editor of American Journalism.

Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast.

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Yunxiang Gao, "Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century" (UNC Press, 2021) Feb 22, 2022

Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) explores the close relationships between three of the most famous twentieth-century African Americans, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, and their little-known Chinese allies during World War II and the Cold War--journalist, musician, and Christian activist Liu Liangmo, and Sino-Caribbean dancer-choreographer Sylvia Si-lan Chen. Charting a new path in the study of Sino-American relations, Gao Yunxiang foregrounds African Americans, combining the study of Black internationalism and the experiences of Chinese Americans with a transpacific narrative and an understanding of the global remaking of China's modern popular culture and politics. Gao reveals earlier and more widespread interactions between Chinese and African American leftists than accounts of the familiar alliance between the Black radicals and the Maoist Chinese would have us believe. The book's multilingual approach draws from massive yet rarely used archival streams in China and in Chinatowns and elsewhere in the United States. These materials allow Gao to retell the well-known stories of Du Bois, Robeson, and Hughes alongside the sagas of Liu and Chen in a work that will transform and redefine Afro-Asia studies.

Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history.

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Kristina Wilson, "Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design" (Princeton UP, 2021) Feb 22, 2022

In the world of interior design, mid-century Modernism has left an indelible mark still seen and felt today in countless open-concept floor plans and spare, geometric furnishings. Yet despite our continued fascination, we rarely consider how this iconic design sensibility was marketed to the diverse audiences of its era. Examining advice manuals, advertisements in Life and Ebony, furniture, art, and more, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design(Princeton UP, 2021) offers a powerful new look at how codes of race, gender, and identity influenced—and were influenced by—Modern design and shaped its presentation to consumers.

Taking us to the booming suburban landscape of postwar America, Kristina Wilson demonstrates that the ideals defined by popular Modernist furnishings were far from neutral or race-blind. Advertisers offered this aesthetic to White audiences as a solution for keeping dirt and outsiders at bay, an approach that reinforced middle-class White privilege. By contrast, media arenas such as Ebony magazine presented African American readers with an image of Modernism as a style of comfort, security, and social confidence. Wilson shows how etiquette and home decorating manuals served to control women by associating them with the domestic sphere, and she considers how furniture by George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames, as well as smaller-scale decorative accessories, empowered some users, even while constraining others.

A striking counter-narrative to conventional histories of design, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body unveils fresh perspectives on one of the most distinctive movements in American visual culture.

Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century.

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Kyle T. Mays, "An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States" (Beacon Press, 2021) Feb 18, 2022

Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism, Kyle T. Mays, an Afro-Indigenous historian, argues that the foundations of the US are rooted in anti-blackness and settler colonialism, and that these parallel oppressions continue into the present.

In An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2021), he explores how Black and Indigenous peoples have always resisted and struggled for freedom, sometimes together, and sometimes apart. Whether to end African enslavement and Indigenous removal or eradicate capitalism and colonialism, Mays shows how Black and Indigenous peoples’ calls for justice have consistently sought to uproot white supremacy. Using a wide array of key texts and pop culture touchstones, Mays also covers the civil rights movement and freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, and explores current debates around the use of Native American imagery and the appropriation of Black culture.

John Cable is assistant professor of history at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. He earned the Ph.D. in history at Florida State University in 2020.

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75* Sean Hill Talks about Bodies in Space and Time with Elizabeth Bradfield Feb 17, 2022

This conversation, first aired in July 2021, features Brandeis poet Elizabeth Bradfield, and the poet Sean Hill, author of Blood Ties and Brown Liquor (2008) and Dangerous Goods (2014).

Sean reads his “Musica Universalis in Fairbanks,” (it appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review) and then, like someone seated in an archive turning over the pages of aged and delicate documents, unfolds his ideas about birds, borders, houses and “who was here before me.”

Mentioned in This Episode:

C.S. Giscombe, Into and Out of Dislocation

C.S. Giscombe, Giscome Road

Lorine Neidecker, Lake Superior

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Anne Carson, Plainwater

William Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt

Listen and Read:

Read transcript here: Sean Hill on Bodies in Space and Time

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu.

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David Alston, "Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean" (Edinburgh UP, 2021) Feb 16, 2022

In Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), Dr. David Alston shows how Scots were involved in every stage of the slave trade: from captaining slaving ships to auctioning captured Africans in the colonies and hunting down those who escaped from bondage. This book focuses on the Scottish Highlanders who engaged in or benefitted from these crimes against humanity in the Caribbean Islands and Guyana, some reluctantly but many with enthusiasm and without remorse. Their voices are clearly heard in the archives, while in the same sources their victims’ stories are silenced – reduced to numbers and listed as property.

Dr. Alston gives voice not only to these Scots, but to enslaved Africans and their descendants – to those who reclaimed their freedom, to free women of colour, to the Black Caribs of St Vincent, to house servants, and to children of mixed race who found themselves in the increasingly racist society of Britain in the mid-1800s. The book pays special attention to the new colonies of the southern Caribbean, including Grenada and Guyana, and to Suriname in the years to 1863.

As Scots recover and grapple with their past, this vital history lays bare the enormous wealth generated in the Highlands by slavery and emancipation compensation schemes. This legacy, entwined with so many of our contemporary institutions, must be reckoned with. This book therefore contributes to the debate on reparation by reappraising the idea of Scots complicity in the slave trade.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, "Elegy for Mary Turner: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching" (Verso, 2021) Feb 15, 2022

In late May 1918 in Valdosta, Georgia, ten Black men and one Black woman—Mary Turner, eight months pregnant at the time—were lynched and tortured by mobs of white citizens.

Through hauntingly detailed full-color artwork and collage, Elegy for Mary Turner names those who were killed, identifies the killers, and evokes a landscape in which the NAACP investigated the crimes when the state would not and a time when white citizens baked pies and flocked to see Black corpses while Black people fought to make their lives—and their mourning—matter.

Included are contributions from C. Tyrone Forehand, great-grandnephew of Mary and Hayes Turner, whose family has long campaigned for the deaths to be remembered; abolitionist activist and educator Mariame Kaba, reflecting on the violence visited on Black women’s bodies; and historian Julie Buckner Armstrong, who opens a window onto the broader scale of lynching’s terror in American history.

All royalties from Elegy for Mary Turner: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching (Verso, 2021) go to the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, GA.

Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 202) Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1

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Rachel Pagones, "Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love" (Brevis, 2021) Feb 14, 2022

Many in the global West have heard something about acupuncture as a treatment for pain relief; they may even have learned of its use in treating opioid addiction. But few know that, in the early 1970s, acupuncture was employed as a means of social and political revolution by Black, Latinx, and radical left-wing activists, inspired by the barefoot doctors of Mao Zedong's Communist revolution. Led by Mutulu Shakur, a charismatic member of the Republic of New Afrika, these young and idealistic people learned to apply acupuncture in the gritty confines of Lincoln Hospital, in the South Bronx of New York. The derelict public hospital, long known as "the Butcher Shop," became an unlikely source of energy and hope as the activists successfully helped people from the community recover from heroin addiction. The acupuncturists - some of them recovering from heroin addiction themselves - employed a combination of needling points in the ear with counseling and "political education"; for instance, taking clients to witness the trials of political prisoners (people imprisoned for their political beliefs or activities). By the late 1970s, the activists' radical approach led to their forced removal from Lincoln. But Shakur and others formed the Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America (BAAANA) and founded a college to train a new generation of acupuncturists in the fine art of traditional Chinese medicine.

The fundamental principle was healthcare as a human right. The goal was the liberation of people oppressed by racism. The college had a short life; it was closed after an FBI raid in connection with the lethal armed robbery of a Brink's truck. Yet over three decades, the spirit of revolutionary acupuncture did not die, and neither did the issues that forced its rise, including drug addiction, racism, and social and health care inequities. Inspired by the radical acupuncturists of the 1970s, another group - the People's Organization of Community Acupuncture - founded the community acupuncture movement and took up the mantle of revolution. They, too, proclaim health care as a human right for people marginalized by society - and seek to give back that right through the art of inserting fine needles. Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press Limited, 2021) highlights a little-known intersection of acupuncture, leftist movements of the 1970s, and the global influence on the healthcare of Mao's Communist revolution - and shows how the legacy of that explosive meeting lives on today.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Kurt Edward Kemper, "Before March Madness: The Wars for the Soul of College Basketball" (U Illinois Press, 2020) Feb 14, 2022

Big money NCAA basketball had its origins in a many-sided conflict of visions and agendas. On one side stood large schools focused on a commercialized game that privileged wins and profits. Opposing them was a tenuous alliance of liberal arts colleges, historically black colleges, and regional state universities, and the competing interests of the NAIA, each with distinct interests of their own.

Kurt Edward Kemper tells the dramatic story of the clashes that shook college basketball at mid-century--and how the repercussions continue to influence college sports to the present day. Taking readers inside the competing factions, he details why historically black colleges and regional schools came to embrace commercialization. As he shows, the NCAA's strategy of co-opting its opponents gave each group just enough just enough to play along--while the victory of the big-time athletics model handed the organization the power to seize control of college sports.

An innovative history of an overlooked era, Before March Madness: The Wars for the Soul of College Basketball (U Illinois Press, 2020) looks at how promises, power, and money laid the groundwork for an American sports institution.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University.

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Max Krochmal and Todd Moye, "Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas" (U Texas Press, 2021) Feb 14, 2022

Max Krochmal and Todd Moye’s Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas (University of Texas Press, 2021) is a critical contribution that uncovers histories of activism in the lone state. From El Paso, Dallas, and to the Rio Grande Valley, social justice initiatives were critical for fighting Jim Crow and Juan Crow. The contributors make the case that various towns and cities across the state developed coalitions across Black and Brown racial lines.

In this episode, Tiffany speaks with Drs. Max Krochmal, Katherine Bynum, and Todd Moye about the process for collecting histories of the long liberation struggles in Texas. Moye, Krochmal, and other Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex joined forces to create a coalition of professionals to spearhead the creation of Civil Rights in Black and Brown, a digital oral history project that holds over a hundred oral interviews. As a graduate student at Texas Christian University, Bynum worked alongside Krochmal to document and preserve the oral records of activists and traveled with other peers to learn more about the hidden history of Jim Crow discrimination in the state.

Tiffany González is an Assistant Professor of History at James Madison University. She is a historian of Chicana/Latinx history, American politics and social movements.

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Eric Herschthal, "The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress" (Yale UP, 2021) Feb 11, 2022

In the context of slavery, science is usually associated with slaveholders' scientific justifications of racism. But abolitionists were equally adept at using scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders.

Looking beyond the science of race, The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress(Yale UP, 2021) shows how Black and white scientists and abolitionists drew upon a host of scientific disciplines--from chemistry, botany, and geology, to medicine and technology--to portray slaveholders as the enemies of progress. From the 1770s through the 1860s, scientists and abolitionists in Britain and the United States argued that slavery stood in the way of scientific progress, blinded slaveholders to scientific evidence, and prevented enslavers from adopting labor-saving technologies that might eradicate enslaved labor.

While historians increasingly highlight slavery's centrality to the modern world, fueling the rise of capitalism, science, and technology, few have asked where the myth of slavery's backwardness comes from in the first place. This book contends that by routinely portraying slaveholders as the enemies of science, abolitionists and scientists helped generate that myth.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Jonathan W. White, "A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) Feb 10, 2022

Jonathan W. White, associate professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University, has authored a book that reveals the personability of Abraham Lincoln in the context of meetings he held with African American visitors to the White House. Lincoln met with activists and soldiers and everyday African American citizens during his time as President. In A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) book, White reviews the impressions and importance of those meetings to witnesses and the African Americans who met with Lincoln. In doing so, White examines the political and social culture of the period and reveals how unique Lincoln was in his relations with visitors to the White House.

You can follow Jonathan on Twitter: ‎@CivilWarJon

Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University.

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Katie Rios, "This Is America: Race, Gender, and Politics in America's Musical Landscape" (Lexington Books, 2021) Feb 09, 2022

“This is America”: Race Gender and Politics in America’s Musical Landscapeby Katie Rios (Lexington Books, 2021) examines an eclectic mix of different artists and cultural products, from Laurie Anderson and Childish Gambino to Hamilton. The artists Rios studies confront problems of race and gender that have deep roots in American history, often by championing social movements that have recently swept the nation such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. While a musicologist by training, Rios is concerned with more than the sonic signifiers of political dissent and resistance. She finds a shared language of cultural and political critique in a wide array of music, videos, dance, visual arts, and theater.

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Bruce Iglauer and Patrick A. Roberts, "Bitten by the Blues: The Alligator Records Story" (U Chicago Press, 2018) Feb 08, 2022

It’s time for The Blues! In Bitten by the Blues: The Alligator Records Story(University of Chicago Press, 2018), Alligator Records president and founder Bruce Iglauer and his co-author, Patrick Roberts of Northern Illinois University, tell the tale of fifty years of Chicago Blues. From Delta-born guitar expressionists like Hound Dog Taylor to modern vocalists like Shemekia Copeland, from the South Side to the Norway fjords, Alligator Records has seen it all.

David Hamilton Golland is professor of history and immediate past president of the faculty senate at Governors State University in Chicago's southland. @DHGolland.

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Jonathan Fenderson, "Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s" (U Illinois Press, 2019) Feb 07, 2022

Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s (U Illinois Press, 2019) explores the history of the Black Arts Movement through the experience of activist and organizer, Hoyt W. Fuller (1923-1981). In the first book to document and analyze Fuller's profound influence on the movement, Jonathan Fenderson attends to the paradox between Fuller's central role in the Movement and his marginal place in African-American historiography. Though focused on Fuller, the project is not simply a biographer; it is a series of historical vignettes covering different aspects of Fuller's cultural activism. As it chronicles Fuller's life, the book also address pivotal events and formative moments that grant insight into the ways the Black Arts Movement took shape at the local level; the ways artists shaped the Movement; how race, class, gender, sexuality, and corporate interests impacted the Movement; and, especially, how recovering Hoyt Fuller's work fundamentally alters our knowledge of the Black Arts Movement

Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter

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I'm Possible: A Conversation with Tuba Professor Dr. Richard White Feb 03, 2022

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:

Dr. White’s journey to earn a PhD in tuba
The Baltimore School for the Arts
The importance of having a village
The hidden curriculum
Why teaching and mentoring are equally important for educators to do
A discussion of the book I’m Possible: A Story of Survival, A Tuba, and the Small Miracle of a Big Dream

Today’s book is: I'm Possible: A Story of Survival, a Tuba, and the Small Miracle of a Big Dream (Flatiron Books, 2021), a memoir by Dr. Richard Antoine White. When he and his mother didn’t have a key to a room or a house, they had each other. Richard believed he could look after his mother, even as she struggled with alcoholism and sometimes disappeared, sending Richard into loops of visiting familiar spots until he could find her again. One night, when he almost died searching for her in the snow, he was taken in by his adoptive grandparents. When Richard joined the school band, he discovered a talent and a sense of purpose. He was accepted to the Baltimore School for the Arts, then to the Peabody, where he navigated racial and socioeconomic disparities as one of few Black students in his programs. Richard secured a coveted spot in a symphony orchestra and became the first African American to earn a doctorate in music for tuba performance.

Our guest is: Dr. Richard Antoine White, a professor, mentor, and motivational speaker. He received his bachelor's degree at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, and his master's and doctoral degrees at Indiana University. Dr. White was principal tubist of the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra from 2004 until its untimely demise in 2011. He is now principal tubist of the Santa Fe Symphony and is in his tenth season as principal tubist of the New Mexico Philharmonic. He teaches at the University of Mexico, where he is associate professor of tuba/euphonium. He is the author of I’m Possible.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.

Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:

Information about the documentary referenced in this podcast and the film’s trailer
Baltimore School for the Arts
The Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University
The Santa Fe Symphony
The New Mexico Philharmonic
Dr. White playing tuba

You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.

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Paul Gowder, "The Rule of Law in the United States: An Unfinished Project of Black Liberation" (Hart Publishing, 2021) Feb 02, 2022

In The Rule of Law in the United States: An Unfinished Project of Black Liberation(Hart, 2021), Dr. Paul Gowder focuses on examining the ideals of the American rule of law by asking: how do we interpret its history and the goals of its constitutional framers to see the rule of law ambitions its foundational institutions express? The book considers those constitutional institutions as inextricable from the problem of race in the United States and the tensions between the rule of law as a protector of property rights and the rule of law as a restrictor on arbitrary power and a guarantor of legal equality. In that context, it explores the distinctive role of Black liberation movements in developing the American rule of law. Finally, it considers the extent to which the American rule of law is compromised at its frontiers, and the extent that those compromises undermine legal protections Americans enjoy in the interior. It asks how America reflects the legal contradictions of capitalism and empire outside its borders, and the impact of those contradictions on its external goals.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Lyndsey Ellis, "Bone Broth" (Hidden Timber Books, 2021) Feb 01, 2022

Lyndsey Ellis’s debut novel, Bone Broth (Hidden Timber Books 2021) tells the story of Justine Holmes, who is mourning her husband’s death and grappling with both societal and family tensions. It’s 2015, and the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri are still simmering after the fatal police shooting sparked a national debate about use-of-force law, militarization of police, and the relationship between the police and African Americans. Justine’s adult children, an unemployed former activist who is angry at her mother, a realtor still mourning the loss of her only child, and a defeated politician who struggles with his sexual identity, are all mourning their own losses. Tension builds as Justine faces her activist past, her marriage to an abusive husband, and her unquenched longing for family peace, but the only thing that makes her feel alive is stealing small items from other people’s funerals.

Lyndsey Ellis is a fiction writer, essayist, and novelist. Her work has appeared in Kweli Journal, Catapult, Fiction Writers Review, Electric Literature, Joyland, Entropy, Shondaland, and several anthologies. Ellis was a recipient of the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for her fiction. She’s currently a prose editor for great weather for MEDIA and The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose & Thought. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where she enjoys thrift stores, bike riding and horror films when she’s not reading or writing.

G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com).

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Keith Wailoo, "Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Jan 31, 2022

Police put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold for selling cigarettes on a New York City street corner. George Floyd was killed by police outside a store in Minneapolis known as “the best place to buy menthols.” Black smokers overwhelmingly prefer menthol brands such as Kool, Salem, and Newport. All of this is no coincidence. The disproportionate Black deaths and cries of “I can’t breathe” that ring out in our era — because of police violence, COVID-19, or menthol smoking — are intimately connected to a post-1960s history of race and exploitation.

In Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette (U Chicago Press, 2021), Keith Wailoo tells the intricate and poignant story of menthol cigarettes for the first time. He pulls back the curtain to reveal the hidden persuaders who shaped menthol buying habits and racial markets across America: the world of tobacco marketers, consultants, psychologists, and social scientists, as well as Black lawmakers and civic groups including the NAACP. Today most Black smokers buy menthols, and calls to prohibit their circulation hinge on a history of the industry’s targeted racial marketing. In 2009, when Congress banned flavored cigarettes as criminal enticements to encourage youth smoking, menthol cigarettes were also slated to be banned. Through a detailed study of internal tobacco industry documents, Wailoo exposes why they weren’t and how they remain so popular with Black smokers.

James West is a historian of race, media and business in the modern United States and Black diaspora. Author of "Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America" (Illinois, 2020), "A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago" (Illinois, 2022), "Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (Massachusetts, 2022).

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Kerry L. Haynie et al., "Race, Gender, and Political Representation: Toward a More Intersectional Approach" (Oxford UP, 2020) Jan 31, 2022

How do gender and race interact to affect the election, behavior, and impact of all individuals – raced women and gendered minorities alike? According to our authors, “what we know depends mightily on how we go about obtaining that knowledge.” Political scientists have often assumed that there are no gender differences among minority representatives, and no racial differences among female representatives. Race, Gender, and Political Representation: Toward a More Intersectional Approach(Oxford UP, 2020)examines HOW and to what extent political representation is simultaneously gendered and raced in the context of late 20th and early 21st century US state legislatures. Haynie, Reingold, and Widner examine how gender and race interact to affect the election, behavior, and impact of individual state legislators. The analysis – and their substantive findings – demonstrate how intersectionality, as a critical epistemology, compels us to re-evaluate the study of gender, race, and representation. Without critically evaluating single-axis women-and-politics and race-and-ethnic-politics theories about descriptive representation, we miss the differences in obstacles to election, substantive policy contributions, or policy leadership styles among White women, men of color, and women of color. The book aims to both give us a more nuanced understanding of representation and an intersectional “tool kit” that others can use to answer critical political questions. Winner of the 2021 Richard Fenno, Jr. Prize for the best book in Legislative Studies.

Dr. Kerry L. Haynie is Professor and Chair of Political Science and Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University. His many books and articles interrogate how the underlying theory, structures, and practices of American political institutions affect African Americans’ and women’s efforts to organize and exert influence on the political system.

Dr. Beth Reingold is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Her previous books and articles engage questions about the complex relationships between gender, race, ethnicity, and political representation, primarily in and around legislative institutions in U.S. states.

Dr. Kirsten Widner is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. As a lawyer, she represented children in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and taught in the public policy and legislative advocacy clinics at Emory Law School. She helped advocate for laws in Georgia to address child abuse, human trafficking, and adoption. As a political scientist she focuses on how laws and policies that affect marginalized groups are made with a particular interest in the political representation of people without the right to vote – children, noncitizens, and people disenfranchised due to criminal convictions or mental incapacity. Her work has been published in both political science journals and law reviews.

Thank you to Nadia E. Brown for suggesting the book and Daniella Campos, the senior editorial assistant for New Books in Political Science.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Tyler D. Parry, "Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual" (UNC Press, 2020) Jan 28, 2022

In Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual(UNC Press, 2020), Tyler D. Parry untangles the convoluted history of the "broomstick wedding." Popularly associated with African American culture, Parry traces the ritual's origins to marginalized groups in the British Isles and explores how it influenced the marriage traditions of different communities on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. His surprising findings shed new light on the complexities of cultural exchange between peoples of African and European descent from the 1700s up to the twenty-first century. Drawing from the historical records of enslaved people in the United States, British Romani, Louisiana Cajuns, and many others, Parry discloses how marginalized people found dignity in the face of oppression by innovating and reimagining marriage rituals. Such innovations have an enduring impact on the descendants of the original practitioners. Parry reveals how and why the simple act of "jumping the broom" captivates so many people who, on the surface, appear to have little in common with each other.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Sarah Jane Cervenak, "Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life" (Duke UP, 2021) Jan 21, 2022

In Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life(Duke UP, 2021), Dr. Sarah Jane Cervenak engages with Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from interruption or regulation. Drawing together Black feminist theory, critical theories of ecology and ecoaesthetics, and Black aesthetics, Cervenak shows how novelists, poets, and visual artists such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Clementine Hunter, Samiya Bashir, and Leonardo Drew advance an ecological imagination that unsettles Western philosophical ideas of the earth as given to humans. In their aestheticization and conceptualization of gathering, these artists investigate the relationships among art, the environment, home, and forms of Black togetherness. Cervenak argues that by offering a formal and conceptual praxis of gathering, Black artists imagine liberation and alternative ways of being in the world that exist beyond those Enlightenment philosophies that presume Black people and earth as given to enclosure and ownership.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Kristin Waters, "Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought" (U Mississippi Press, 2021) Jan 21, 2022

Kristin Waters' book Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought(U Mississippi Press, 2021) tells a crucial, almost-forgotten story of African Americans of early nineteenth-century America. In 1833, Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879) told a gathering at the African Masonic Hall on Boston’s Beacon Hill: “African rights and liberty is a subject that ought to fire the breast of every free man of color in these United States.” She exhorted her audience to embrace the idea that the founding principles of the nation must extend to people of color. Otherwise, those truths are merely the hypocritical expression of an ungodly white power, a travesty of original democratic ideals. Like her mentor, David Walker, Stewart illustrated the practical inconsistencies of classical liberalism as enacted in the US and delivered a call to action for ending racism and addressing gender discrimination.

Between 1831 and 1833, Stewart’s intellectual productions, as she called them, ranged across topics from true emancipation for African Americans, the Black convention movement, the hypocrisy of white Christianity, Black liberation theology, and gender inequity. Along with Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, her body of work constitutes a significant foundation for a moral and political theory that is finding new resonance today―insurrectionist ethics.

Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College.

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72 Caryl Phillips Speaks with Corina Stan Jan 20, 2022

Our second January Novel Dialogue conversation is with Caryl Phillips, professor of English at Yale and world-renowned for novels ranging from The Final Passage to 2018’s A View of the Empire at Sunset. He shares his thoughts on transplantation, on performance, on race, even on sports. Joining him here are John and the wonderful comparatist Corina Stan, author of The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in 20th century Literature. If you enjoy this conversation, range backwards through the RtB archives for comparable talks with Jennifer Egan, Helen Garner, Orhan Pamuk, Zadie Smith, Samuel Delany and many more.

It’s a rangy conversation. John begins by raving about Caryl’s italics–he in turn praises Faulkner’s. Corina and Caryl explore his debt (cf. his The European Tribe) to American writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Meeting Baldwin was scary–back in those days before there were “writers besporting themselves on every university campus.” Caryl praises the joy of being a football fan (Leeds United), reflects on his abiding loyalty to his class and geographic origins and his fondness for the moments of Sunday joy that allow people to endure. John raises Orhan Pamuk’s claim (In Novel Dialogue last season) that the novel is innately middle-class; Caryl says that it’s true that as a form it has always taken time and money to make–and to read. But “vicars and middle class people fall in love, too; they get betrayed and let down…a gamut of emotion that’s as wide as anybody else.” He remains drawn to writers haunted by the past: Eliot, W.G. Sebald, the huge influence of Faulkner trying to stitch the past to the present.

Mentioned in the Episode

James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charley, The Fire Next Time
Richard Wright, Native Son
Johnny Pitts, Afropean
Caryl Phillips, Dancing in the Dark
J. M. Coetzee, “What We like to Forget” (On Caryl Phillips)
Graham Greene (e.g Brighton Rock and The Quiet American) wrote in “The Lost Childhood” (1951) that at age 14 ” I took Miss Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan from the library shelf…From that moment I began to write.”
Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom

Read a transcript here

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu.

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Terri Givens, "Radical Empathy: Finding a Path to Bridging Racial Divides" (Policy Press, 2021) Jan 19, 2022

Structural racism has impacted the lives of African Americans in the United States since before the country’s founding. Although the country has made some progress towards a more equal society, political developments in the 21st century have shown that deep divides remain. The persistence of inequality is an indicator of the stubborn resilience of the institutions that maintain white supremacy. To bridge our divides, renowned political scientist Terri Givens calls for ‘radical empathy’ - moving beyond an understanding of others’ lives and pain to understand the origins of our biases, including internalized oppression. In Radical Empathy: Finding a Path to Bridging Racial Divides (Policy Press, 2021), she offers practical steps to call out racism and bring about radical social change.

Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life.

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Marion Thompson, "The Marion Thompson Wright Reader" (Rutgers UP, 2021) Jan 18, 2022

The Marion Thompson Wright Reader, edited by Graham Russell Gao Hodges, the George Dorland Langdon, Jr. Professor of History and Africana and Latin American Studies at Colgate University, and the author of Black New Jersey: 1664 to the Present Day (Rutgers University Press, 2019), is the first book-length text on Marion Thompson Wright—the first African American woman to earn a PhD in history from a U.S. college or university. This Reader includes a seventy plus page biographical essay on Wright, a reviews and notes section, essays and Wright’s The Education of Negroes in New Jersey first published by Columbia University Press in 1941. Hodges utilizes a set of letters written by Wright to friends and family members as well as never published before images of Dr. Wright with family members; including photos of her children. There exists no more comprehensive a text on Wright in terms of the bibliographic sketch contained in this book and coupled with the writings of one of the foremost historians of the early twentieth century: Marion Thompson Wright.

Wright was a prolific writer and scholar. Her dissertation advisor was famed historian Merle Curti with whom she kept up a life-long correspondence. She published widely in the Journal of Negro Education and the Journal of Negro History (now the Journal of African American History) as evidenced with some of the essays in this Reader and was respected as a leading scholar of the history of African Americans and segregation in the public school system—the subject of her dissertation at Columbia. In his autobiographical sketch of Wright, Hodges does not shy away from the more personal aspects of her life including the fact that she lost custody of her children to her first husband after she chose to pursue her academic career and the fact that she suffered from depression, and eventually ended her own life. This book is a powerful and necessary text in the field of Black women’s intellectual history given Wright’s monumental impact on social work, historical studies, education and higher education counseling.

Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history.

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Suzanne Cope, "Power Hungry: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement" (Lawrence Hill Books, 2021) Jan 17, 2022

Today I talked to Suzanne Cope about her new book Power Hungry: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement (Lawrence Hill Books, 2021)

In early 1969 Cleo Silvers and a few Black Panther Party members met at a community center laden with boxes of donated food to cook for the neighborhood children. By the end of the year, the Black Panthers would be feeding more children daily in all of their breakfast programs than the state of California was at that time.

More than a thousand miles away, Aylene Quin had spent the decade using her restaurant in McComb, Mississippi, to host secret planning meetings of civil rights leaders and organizations, feed the hungry, and cement herself as a community leader who could bring people together--physically and philosophically--over a meal.

These two women's tales, separated by a handful of years, tell the same story: how food was used by women as a potent and necessary ideological tool in both the rural south and urban north to create lasting social and political change. The leadership of these women cooking and serving food in a safe space for their communities was so powerful, the FBI resorted to coordinated extensive and often illegal means to stop the efforts of these two women, and those using similar tactics, under COINTELPRO--turning a blind eye to the firebombing of the children of a restaurant owner, destroying food intended for poor kids, and declaring a community breakfast program a major threat to public safety.

But of course, it was never just about the food.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.

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Mercy Romero, "Toward Camden" (Duke UP, 2021) Jan 17, 2022

In Toward Camden(Duke UP, 2021), Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses—her family's house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing juts against idioms of redevelopment. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory. Toward Camden travels between what official reports say and what the city's vacant lots withhold.

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Vivian Kirkfield, "Making Their Voices Heard: The Inspiring Friendship of Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe" (Little Bee Books, 2020) Jan 13, 2022

Today I talked to Vivian Kirkfield about her book Making Their Voices Heard: The Inspiring Friendship of Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe (Little Bee Books, 2020).

Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. On the outside, you couldn't find two girls who looked more different. But on the inside, they were alike--full of hopes and dreams and plans of what might be. Ella Fitzgerald's velvety tones and shube-doobie-doos captivated audiences. Jazz greats like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington couldn't wait to share the stage with her, but still, Ella could not book a performance at one of the biggest clubs in town--one she knew would give her career its biggest break yet. Marilyn Monroe dazzled on the silver screen with her baby blue eyes and breathy boo-boo-be-doos. But when she asked for better scripts, a choice in who she worked with, and a higher salary, studio bosses refused. Two women whose voices weren't being heard. Two women chasing after their dreams and each helping the other to achieve them. This is the inspiring, true story of two incredibly talented women who came together to help each other shine like the stars that they are.

Mel Rosenberg is a professor of microbiology (Tel Aviv University, emeritus) who fell in love with children's books as a small child and now writes his own. He is also the founder of Ourboox, a web platform that allows anyone to create and share awesome flipbooks.

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Warren E. Milteer Jr., "North Carolina's Free People of Color, 1715-1885" (LSU Press, 2020) Jan 05, 2022

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Warren Eugene Milteer, Jr. about his book North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715-1885 (LSU Press, 2020). He is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His publications include two academic books, Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South (UNC Press, 2021) and North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715-1885 (LSU Press, 2020), the independently published Hertford County, North Carolina’s Free People of Color and Their Descendants (2016), as well as articles in the Journal of Social History and the North Carolina Historical Review. Milteer was the recipient of the Historical Society of North Carolina’s R. D. W. Connor Award in 2014 and 2016 for the best journal article in the North Carolina Historical Review.

In North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. examines the lives of free persons categorized by their communities as “negroes,” “mulattoes,” “mustees,” “Indians,” “mixed-bloods,” or simply “free people of color.” From the colonial period through Reconstruction, lawmakers passed legislation that curbed the rights and privileges of these non-enslaved residents, from prohibiting their testimony against whites to barring them from the ballot box. While such laws suggest that most white North Carolinians desired to limit the freedoms and civil liberties enjoyed by free people of color, Milteer reveals that the two groups often interacted—praying together, working the same land, and occasionally sharing households and starting families. Some free people of color also rose to prominence in their communities, becoming successful business people and winning the respect of their white neighbors.

Milteer’s innovative study moves beyond depictions of the American South as a region controlled by a strict racial hierarchy. He contends that although North Carolinians frequently sorted themselves into races imbued with legal and social entitlements—with whites placing themselves above persons of color—those efforts regularly clashed with their concurrent recognition of class, gender, kinship, and occupational distinctions. Whites often determined the position of free nonwhites by designating them as either valuable or expendable members of society. In early North Carolina, free people of color of certain statuses enjoyed access to institutions unavailable even to some whites. Prior to 1835, for instance, some free men of color possessed the right to vote while the law disenfranchised all women, white and nonwhite included.

North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885 demonstrates that conceptions of race were complex and fluid, defying easy characterization. Despite the reductive labels often assigned to them by whites, free people of color in the state emerged from an array of backgrounds, lived widely varied lives, and created distinct cultures—all of which, Milteer suggests, allowed them to adjust to and counter ever-evolving forms of racial discrimination.

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Michael Muhammad Knight, "Metaphysical Africa: Truth and Blackness in the Ansaru Allah Community" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2020) Jan 05, 2022

The Ansaru Allah Community, also known as the Nubian Islamic Hebrews (AAC/NIH) and later the Nuwaubians, is a deeply significant and controversial African American Muslim movement. Founded in Brooklyn in the 1960s, it spread through the prolific production and dissemination of literature and lecture tapes and became famous for continuously reinventing its belief system. In this book, Michael Muhammad Knight studies the development of AAC/NIH discourse over a period of thirty years, tracing a surprising consistency behind a facade of serial reinvention.

It is popularly believed that the AAC/NIH community abandoned Islam for Black Israelite religion, UFO religion, and Egyptosophy. However, Knight sees coherence in AAC/NIH media, explaining how, in reality, the community taught that the Prophet Muhammad was a Hebrew who adhered to Israelite law; Muhammad’s heavenly ascension took place on a spaceship; and Abraham enlisted the help of a pharaonic regime to genetically engineer pigs as food for white people. Against narratives that treat the AAC/NIH community as a postmodernist deconstruction of religious categories, Knight demonstrates that AAC/NIH discourse is most productively framed within a broader African American metaphysical history in which boundaries between traditions remain quite permeable.

Unexpected and engrossing, Metaphysical Africa: Truth and Blackness in the Ansaru Allah Community(Pennsylvania State UP, 2020) brings to light points of intersection between communities and traditions often regarded as separate and distinct. In doing so, it helps move the field of religious studies beyond conventional categories of ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heterodoxy’ challenging assumptions that inform not only the study of this particular religious community but also the field at large.

Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com.

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Trevor Burnard, "Jamaica in the Age of Revolution" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) Jan 04, 2022

Between the start of the Seven Years' War in 1756 and the onset of the French Revolution in 1789, Jamaica was the richest and most important colony in British America. White Jamaican slaveowners presided over a highly productive economic system, a precursor to the modern factory in its management of labor, its harvesting of resources, and its scale of capital investment and output. Planters, supported by a dynamic merchant class in Kingston, created a plantation system in which short-term profit maximization was the main aim. Their slave system worked because the planters who ran it were extremely powerful.

In Jamaica in the Age of Revolution(U Pennsylvania Press, 2020), prize-winning historian Trevor Burnard analyzes the men and women who gained so much from the labor of enslaved people in Jamaica to expose the ways in which power was wielded in a period when the powerful were unconstrained by custom, law, or, for the most part, public approbation or disapproval. Burnard finds that the unremitting war by the powerful against the poor and powerless, evident in the day-to-day struggles slaves had with masters, is a crucial context for grasping what enslaved people had to endure.

Examining such events as Tacky's Rebellion of 1760 (the largest slave revolt in the Caribbean before the Haitian Revolution), the Somerset decision of 1772, and the murder case of the Zong in 1783 in an Atlantic context, Burnard reveals Jamiaca to be a brutally effective and exploitative society that was highly adaptable to new economic and political circumstances, even when placed under great stress, as during the American Revolution. Jamaica in the Age of Revolution demonstrates the importance of Jamaican planters and merchants to British imperial thinking at a time when slavery was unchallenged.

Trevor Burnard is the Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation and Director of the Wilberforce Institute at the University of Hull. Professor Burnard is a scholar of early American, imperial, world and Atlantic history, with a special interest in plantation societies in the New World and their connections to eighteenth-century modernity. He is coauthor, with John Garrigus, of The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Jerrad P. Pacatte is a Ph.D. candidate and School of Arts and Sciences Excellence Fellow in the Department of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. A social historian of gender, slavery, and emancipation in early America and the Atlantic World, Jerrad is currently completing his dissertation, entitled “The Work of Freedom: African American Women and the Ordeal of Emancipation in New England, 1740-1840” which examines the everyday lives, labors, and emancipation experiences of African-descended women in late-colonial and early republic New England.

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Sarah J. Purcell, "Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era" (UNC Press, 2022) Jan 03, 2022

Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era (UNC Press, 2022) examines how the public funerals of major figures from the Civil War era shaped public memories of the war and allowed a diverse set of people to contribute to changing American national identities. These funerals featured lengthy processions that sometimes crossed multiple state lines, burial ceremonies open to the public, and other cultural productions of commemoration such as oration and song. As Sarah J. Purcell reveals, Americans' participation in these funeral rites led to contemplation and contestation over the political and social meanings of the war and the roles played by the honored dead. Public mourning for military heroes, reformers, and politicians distilled political and social anxieties as the country coped with the aftermath of mass death and casualties.

Purcell shows how large-scale funerals for figures such as Henry Clay and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson set patterns for mourning culture and Civil War commemoration; after 1865, public funerals for figures such as Robert E. Lee, Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglass, and Winnie Davis elaborated on these patterns and fostered public debate about the meanings of the war, Reconstruction, race, and gender.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Winfrey Harris, "The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America" (Berrett-Koehler, 2021) Dec 24, 2021

In the second edition of her book, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America (Berrett-Koehler, 2021), Tamara Winfrey Harris interviews over 100 diverse Black women about marriage, motherhood, health, sexuality, beauty, and more. Winfrey Harris examines the Mammy, Sapphire, and Jezebel stereotypes that persist in American popular media and culture.

Winfrey Harris explores the evolution of stereotypes of Black women, with new real-life examples, such as the rise of blackfishing and digital blackface (which help white women rise to fame) and the media’s continued fascination with Black women’s sexuality (as with Cardi B or Megan Thee Stallion).

The second edition includes a new chapter on Black women and power that explores how persistent stereotypes challenge Black women’s recent leadership and achievements in activism, community organizing, and politics. The chapter includes interviews with activists and civic leaders and interrogates media coverage and perceptions of Stacey Abrams, Vice President Kamala Harris, and others.

Winfrey Harris exposes anti–Black woman propaganda and shows how real Black women are pushing back against racist, distorted cartoon versions of themselves. She counters warped prejudices with the straight-up truth about being a Black woman in America.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

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Warren E. Milteer, Jr., "Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South" (UNC Press, 2021) Dec 20, 2021

We often focus on enslaved people of color but Dr. Warren E. Milteer Jr.’s Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South(UNC Press, 2021) directs our attention to the people of color who were free -- and the complex web of intersecting values that led to significant inconsistencies in how they were treated and the institutions they built for themselves. Although many white southerners prized the racial hierarchy, Milteer insists that they also recognized other forms of hierarchy such as “gender, wealth, reputation, occupation, and family connections.” Engaging how these other forms of hierarchy intersected with racial categorization creates a rich history of how free people of color in the South negotiated legal regimes, political ideas, and institutions to carve out as much freedom as possible. Rejecting laws and political rhetoric as the only evidence for discerning the viewpoints of everyday people, Beyond Slavery’s Shadows places everyday people in their wider political and social contexts by drawing from an impressive catalogue of sources. The book accounts for how diverse political and social attitudes could coexist while it provides a remarkable history of law, colonization, taxes, labor, immigration, and gender.

Dr. Warren E. Milteer, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is also the author of North Carolina's Free People of Color, 1715-1885 (LSU Press, 2020).

Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Mary Talusan, "Instruments of Empire: Filipino Musicians, Black Soldiers, and Military Band Music During US Colonization of the Philippines" (UP of Mississippi, 2021) Dec 20, 2021

Instruments of Empire: Filipino Musicians, Black Soldiers, and Military Band Music during US Colonization of the Philippinespublished in 2021 by the University Press of Mississippi by Mary Talusan focuses on the Philippine Constabulary band, a military band organized in 1902 that served the colonial government in the Philippines until World War II. Founded and led for most of its history by Walter Loving, a Black soldier in the American military, the band visited the United States four times between 1904 and 1939 and it is these visits that Talusan examines in Instruments of Empire. Listening with what Talusan calls the imperial ear, American commentators understood the group’s command of the standard band repertory of the period not as a result of the Filipino musician’s training and skill, but as evidence of their so-called natural musical ability which had been tamed by the allegedly civilizing influence of American colonial rule. Tracing the band’s reception over time, Talusan analyzes the cultural, political, and social causes and byproducts of American imperial ambitions.

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Samantha Seeley, "Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States" (UNC Press, 2021) Dec 16, 2021

Samantha Seeley is the author of Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2021. Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain explores the how, at various levels of government and among a variety of people the right to remain and who would be subject to removal was debated. Seeley’s study illustrates how Native Americans and African Americans had to navigate a myriad of challenges to their place both within and outside of the nation. This work reorients the history of U.S. expansion and reconsiders how the early United States was built around the movement and non-movement of people.

Dr. Seeley is an Assistant Professor at the University of Richmond.

Derek Litvak is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland—College Park. His dissertation, "The Specter of Black Citizens: Race, Slavery, and Citizenship in the Early United States," examines how citizenship was used to both bolster the institution of slavery and exclude Black Americans from the body politic.

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Shamira Gelbman, "The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction" (Temple UP, 2021) Dec 16, 2021

Historically, how have marginalized and minority groups pushed the boundaries of representative government to pass legislation that benefits them? Political Scientist Shamira Gelbman, the Daniel F. Evans Associate Professor in Social Sciences at Wabash College, answers this question in her new book, The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction (Temple UP, 2021). Gelbman examines the history of The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) throughout the 1950s and 60s, teasing out the individuals who engaged in lobbying, advocacy, training, and other capacities to push civil rights legislation forward while also helping to block segregationist and white supremacy advocacy in Congress. Gelbman’s case study of the LCCR uses archival and scholarly resources to paint a picture of the Civil Rights Movement’s policy achievements by evaluating the role of lobbying and coalitional building.

The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Second Reconstruction begins by exploring what it takes to create coalitional groups and the uniqueness of the political climate of the 20th century. The arguments about coalitional interest groups are presented alongside the informative history of the LCCR and the policy achievements of the Civil Rights Movement. Gelbman uses interest group theory to explain many of the teachings from this case study. Coalitional groups can often function as a “weapon for the weak,” and Gelbman takes notice of both the benefits of interest group lobbying as well as the setbacks of in-fighting between lobbyists in a broad coalition like the LCCR. The work of structuring the coalition, of working through different goals and approaches, is key in understanding the complicated process for moving forward with civil rights policy creation and implementation. The LCCR was made up of a wide array of groups and members, including a diversity of religious organizations, labor unions, and a constellation of civil rights organizations. Gelbman showcases the LCCR as an organization that mobilized professional and grassroots lobbying by distinguishing commonalities among the members to develop broad-based supports for legislators to pursue civil rights legislation.

Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Adam Hilton, "True Blues: The Contentious Transformation of the Democratic Party" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) Dec 15, 2021

Who governs political parties? Recent insurgent campaigns, such as those of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, have thrust this critical question to the center of political debate for casual observers and scholars alike. Yet the dynamics of modern party politics remain poorly understood. Assertions of either elite control or interest group dominance both fail to explain the Trump victory and the surprise of the Sanders insurgency and their subsequent reverberations through the American political landscape.

In True Blues: The Contentious Transformation of the Democratic Party(U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), Adam Hilton tackles the question of who governs parties by examining the transformation of the Democratic Party since the late 1960s. Reconceiving parties as “contentious institutions,” Hilton argues that Democratic Party change was driven by recurrent conflicts between groups and officeholders to define and control party identity, program, and policy. The outcome of this prolonged struggle was a wholly new kind of party—an advocacy party—which institutionalized greater party dependence on outside groups for legitimacy and organizational support, while also, in turn, fostering greater group dependency on the presidency for the satisfaction of its symbolic and substantive demands. Consequently, while the long conflict between party reformers and counter-reformers successfully opened the Democratic Party to new voices and identities, it also facilitated the growth of presidential power, rising inequality, and deepening partisan polarization.

Tracing the rise of the advocacy party from the fall of the New Deal order through the presidency of Barack Obama, True Blues explains how and why the Democratic Party has come to its current crossroads and suggests a bold new perspective for comprehending the dynamics driving American party politics more broadly.

Adam Hilton is Assistant Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He earned his PhD from the Department of Political Science at York University, Toronto. His current research focuses on the relationship between movements, interest groups, and political parties, and the agency of political entrepreneurs in transforming them. In addition to True Blues, he is also working on an edited book with Jessica Hejny, tentatively titled Placing Parties in American Political Development.

Joe Renouard is Resident Professor of American Studies and Fei Yi-Ming Journalism Foundation Chair of American Government and Comparative Politics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Nanjing, China.

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Lee B. Wilson, "Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660–1783" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Dec 15, 2021

Lee B. Wilson is the author of Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660-1783, published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. Bonds of Empire explores how English law gave the institution of slavery its ability to thieve and grow. By looking at how law was practiced, instead of solely focusing on how it was written, Wilson follows the development of the institution of slavery in South Carolina and the English law of slavery in the colony. The day to day legal life of slavery in the colon shows just how much English law was crucial, and not opposed, to the enslavement of people.

Dr. Wilson is an Associate Professor at Clemson University.

Derek Litvak is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland—College Park. His dissertation, "The Specter of Black Citizens: Race, Slavery, and Citizenship in the Early United States," examines how citizenship was used to both bolster the institution of slavery and exclude Black Americans from the body politic.

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Elizabeth McHenry, "To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship" (Duke UP, 2020) Dec 15, 2021

In To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship(Duke UP 2021), Elizabeth McHenry locates a hidden chapter in the history of Black literature at the turn of the twentieth century, revising concepts of Black authorship and offering a fresh account of the development of "Negro literature" focused on the never published, the barely read, and the unconventional.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelledmonds.com.

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Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, "Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America" (Oxford UP, 2021) Dec 15, 2021

Elizabeth Korver-Glenn's book Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America (Oxford UP, 2021) examines how housing market professionals-including housing developers, real estate agents, mortgage lenders, and appraisers-construct 21st century urban housing markets in ways that contribute to or undermine racial segregation.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic and interview data collected in Houston, Texas, Race Brokers shows that housing market professionals play a key role in connecting people-or refusing to connect people-to housing resources and opportunities. They make these brokering decisions through reference to racist or anti-racist ideas. Typically, housing market professionals draw from racist ideas that rank-order people and neighborhoods according to their perceived economic and cultural housing market value, entwining racism with their housing market activities and interactions. Racialized housing market routines encourage this entwinement by naturalizing racism as a professional tool. Race Brokers tracks how professionals broker racism across the housing exchange process-from the home's construction, to real estate brokerage, mortgage lending, home appraisals, and the home sale closing. In doing so, it shows that professionals make housing exchange a racialized process that contributes to neighborhood inequality and racial segregation. However, in contrast to the racialized status-quo, a small number of housing market professionals draw on anti-racist ideas and strategies to extend equal opportunities to individuals and neighborhoods, de-naturalizing housing market racism. Race Brokers highlights the imperative to interrupt the racism that pervades housing market professionals' work, dismantle the racialized routines that underwrite such racism, and cultivate a truly fair housing market.

Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).

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Bryant Terry, "Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora" (4 Color Books, 2021) Dec 13, 2021

James Beard and NAACP Image Award-winning chef and educator, Bryant Terry calls Black Food a “communal shrine to the shared culinary histories of the African diaspora.” Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora(4 Color Books, 2021) weaves together a diverse collection of more than 100 different contributors, including food writers, chefs, scholars, activists, and leaders exploring the food, experience, and community across the diaspora. As the editor, Terry extends the cookbook genre by curating a stunning gathering of over 50 recipes, song titles, essays, and poems, spanning over 300 pages while discussing issues like land ownership, race and gender, and self-care. Black Food is an impactful and enduring tribute to Black foodways.

N’Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.

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Cassandra Lane, "We Are Bridges: A Memoir" (Feminist Press, 2021) Dec 13, 2021

When Cassandra Lane finds herself pregnant at thirty-five, the knowledge sends her on a poignant exploration of memory to prepare for her entry into motherhood. She moves between the twentieth-century rural South and present-day Los Angeles, reimagining the intimate life of her great-grandparents Mary Magdelene Magee and Burt Bridges, and Burt's lynching at the hands of vengeful white men in his southern town.

We Are Bridges: A Memoir(Feminist Press, 2021) turns to creative nonfiction to reclaim a family history from violent erasure so that a mother can gift her child with an ancestral blueprint for their future. Haunting and poetic, this debut traces the strange fruit borne from the roots of personal loss in one Black family--and considers how to take back one's American story.

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Davarian L Baldwin, "In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities" (Bold Type Press, 2021) Dec 13, 2021

In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering our Cities (Bold Type Books, 2021) by Dr. Davarian Baldwin examines the political economy of the American university over the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries. He brings a Black Studies lens to interrogate the ways that universities hide behind the notion of administering public goods to protect their tax-exempt status while generating astronomical profits off of the backs of working-class people, graduate student teachers and researchers, and underpaid and contingent faculty. We discuss the securitization and development implications of growing university wealth and how it engenders forms of radicalized plunder, racist policing, gentrification, and exploitation by the 1%. With a focus on this and more, we talk about what it means to live in the shadow of ivory tower.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall.

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Mia Bay, "Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance" (Harvard UP, 2021) Dec 09, 2021

Mobility has been central to the American identity—think of the automobile, the perceived freedom that comes with it, the open road—but Black Americans have never possessed the same freedom to move around as whites. From the slave patrols policing the movement of Black Americans in the nineteenth century to the indignities and violence that Blacks suffered on road-trips in the twentieth, Black travelers in the United States have faced violence, indignities, and a confusing and contradictory set of racist rules. This history—the history of the Black experience of travel in the United States—is expertly and beautifully told by Mia Bay in her new book Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance(Harvard UP, 2021)

In addition to examining the white-supremacist restrictions on Black travel, Bay—the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Chair in American History at the University of Pennsylvania—foregrounds how Black Americans coped (The Negro Motorist Green Book is one such example) and even resisted travel segregation. In fact, by putting travel at the center of her analysis, Bay sheds new light on the the civil rights movement. Finally, Bay concludes the book with an epilogue on the continuities into the present, writing that “there's no need to travel back in time to travel Black.”

Dexter Fergie is a doctoral student in US and global history at Northwestern University. His research examines the history of ideas, infrastructure, and international organizations.

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Britt Rusert, "Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture" (NYU Press, 2017) Dec 09, 2021

Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture(NYU Press, 2017), by Professor Britt Rusert (UMass-Amherst), [Insert link] has already earned accolades from the American Studies Association and the MLA following its publication in 2017. Now book is also getting traction in the fields of STS, history of science, and history of medicine. It’s easy to see why.

At the level of documentation, the book chronicles the empirical work, rhetorical strategies, and material worlds of Black and African American scientists (avant la lettre) during the US antebellum period. The book connects a lineage of Black naturalists, ethnologist, and physicians who were creating and circulating empirical evidence of the moral and political equality of Black Americans relative to White people to argue against the institution of slavery, racist discrimination and violent dispossession. And they were pursuing their own empirical research questions—not only working in response to White racist science—about the pasts and potential emancipatory futures of Black Americans. The documentary work of the book is indispensable it its own right.

For scholars in STS and in history of science and medicine the book is important for anyone interested in speculative methods and speculative histories; anyone who takes seriously theories of history and wants to—or already is—practicing transformative justice through their own narrative craft. The book models one way of creating an anticolonial, antiracist “counter-archive” through an intentionally magpie accrual of material culture and through the rigorous use of imagination as interpretive method.

In the interview we also talk about Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation, Donna Haraway’s method of critical speculation, and Marissa Fuentes’ technique of “reading with the archive bias” – as well as why HBCUs are the places where transformative fugitive science is happening in the present day. Rusert also published with Whitney Battle-Baptiste W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America – another important book for STS scholars and historians of science and medicine, enthusiastically reviewed in the New York Review of Books (Aug 2021).

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and STS scholars at Vanderbilt University: Kaelee Belleto, Hannah Crook, Aaron Hunt, Will Krause, Dionne Lucas, Esther Park, Grace Smith, McKenzie Yates, and Jaehyeong Yu. Please email Laura Stark with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process.

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Edward J. Ayers, "Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790-2020" (LSU Press, 2020) Dec 08, 2021

Taking a wide focus, Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790-2020 (LSU Press, 2020) narrates the evolution of southern history from the founding of the nation to the present day by focusing on the settling, unsettling, and resettling of the South. Using migration as the dominant theme of southern history and including indigenous, white, black, and immigrant people in the story, Edward L. Ayers cuts across the usual geographic, thematic, and chronological boundaries that subdivide southern history.

Ayers explains the major contours and events of the southern past from a fresh perspective, weaving geography with history in innovative ways. He uses unique color maps created with sophisticated geographic information system (GIS) tools to interpret massive data sets from a humanistic perspective, providing a view of movement within the South with a clarity, detail, and continuity we have not seen before. The South has never stood still; it is—and always has been—changing in deep, radical, sometimes contradictory ways, often in divergent directions.

Ayers’s history of migration in the South is a broad yet deep reinterpretation of the region’s past that informs our understanding of the population, economy, politics, and culture of the South today. Southern Journey is not only a pioneering work of history; it is a grand recasting of the South’s past by one of its most renowned and appreciated scholars.

Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 202) Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1

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Dave Zirin, "The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World" (New Press, 2021) Dec 08, 2021

In 2016, amid an epidemic of police shootings of African Americans, the celebrated NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began a series of quiet protests on the field, refusing to stand during the U.S. national anthem. By “taking a knee,” Kaepernick bravely joined a long tradition of American athletes making powerful political statements. This time, however, Kaepernick’s simple act spread like wildfire throughout American society, becoming the preeminent symbol of resistance to America’s persistent racial inequality.

Critically acclaimed sports journalist and author of A People’s History of Sports in the United States, Dave Zirin chronicles “the Kaepernick effect” for the first time, through interviews with a broad cross-section of professional athletes across many different sports, college stars and high-powered athletic directors, and high school athletes and coaches. In each case, he uncovers the fascinating explanations and motivations behind a mass political movement in sports, through deeply personal and inspiring accounts of risk-taking, activism, and courage both on and off the field.

A book about the politics of sport, and the impact of sports on politics, The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World(New Press, 2021) is for anyone seeking to understand an essential dimension of the new movement for racial justice in America.

Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Karla FC Holloway, "Gone Missing in Harlem: A Novel" (Northwestern UP, 2021) Dec 07, 2021

Gone Missing in Harlem by Karla FC Holloway (TriQuarterly 2021) tells the story of an African American family trying to survive the early decades of the twentieth century. The Mosbys leave their life in Sedalia within hours after six-year-old Percy loudly notes that his father’s boss has made a mistake in calculating what is owed. Percy’s parents know what would happen if they stayed. They settle in Harlem, but the Spanish flu is raging around the globe, and Percy’s father doesn’t survive. His mother, DeLilah, is pregnant with Selma. Years later, Percy witnesses a murder in New York, and DeLilah sends him back to Sedalia. She does her best to make a home for her daughter, but Selma’s childhood is cut short when a brutal rape leaves her pregnant. After her baby is kidnapped, the city’s first ‘colored policeman’, Weldon Haynie Thomas, vows that this kidnapping will not end like the Lindbergh kidnapping. Gone Missing in Harlem touches upon many things, including African American soldiers coming home from WWI, the Great Migration north, and the world of 1930’s Harlem. Gone Missing in Harlem is historical, African American literary fiction and a mystery, but it’s ultimately a novel about the lengths a mother will go to protect her family.

Karla FC Holloway, Ph.D., M.L.S., is James B. Duke Professor Emerita of English and Professor of Law at Duke University. She is former Dean of Humanities and Social Science Faculty at Duke. Her research and teaching focused on African American cultural studies, bioethics, literature, and law. Her national and institutional board memberships have included the Greenwall Foundation’s Advisory Board in Bioethics, the Trent Center for Bioethics and Humanities, the North Carolina Humanities Council, the College Board, and the Hastings Center. She is a co-founder of Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Center for International and Interdisciplinary Studies and founding co-director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. Professor Holloway is the recipient of national awards and foundation fellowships including the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Residency Fellowship and the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship at Harvard University’s Du Bois Institute. Professor Holloway is the author of over fifty essays and ten books including Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics and the Color of Our Character (1995), Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (2002), BookMarks: Reading in Black and White (2006), and Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature (2014).

In her emerita years she has shifted to fiction and has published A Death in Harlem (2019) and Gone Missing in Harlem (2021) both with Triquarterly. She’s at work on the final book in the “in Harlem” series, A Haunting in Harlem, and tweets on bioethics, law, society, and popular cultures from @ProfHolloway. When she’s not tweeting, or writing, she’s deep into reading fiction or painting miniature acrylic landscapes and abstract compositions. Anything, she says, with colors that swirl into cerulean.

G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes.

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Shoutin’ In the Fire: A Conversation with Graduate Student Dante Stewart Dec 07, 2021

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: Dante Stewart’s path through college and into his current graduate school, playing football for Clemson, why former college athletes need to advocate for current student players’ rights, why he chose to go into the seminary at Emery, his grandmother, and a discussion of Shoutin’ in The Fire: An American Epistle.

Our guest is: Dante Stewart, who is a graduate student, writer, and speaker. His voice has been featured on CNN, The Washington Post, Christianity Today, Sojourners, The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, Comment Magazine, and more. As an up and coming voice, he writes and speaks into the areas of race, religion, and politics. He received his B.A. in Sociology from Clemson University. He is currently studying at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. He is the author of Shoutin’ in The Fire: An American Epistle.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, co-producer of the Academic Life. She is a historian of women and gender.

Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:

--The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou, by Maya Angelou

--The poem Kitchenette Building, by Gwendolyn Brooks

--Cables to Rage, by Audre Lorde

--Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin

--The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin

-- Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

--the Smithsonian Folkway’s recording of The World is Not A Pleasant Place to Be, by Nikki Giovanni

--Salvation: Black People and Love, by bell hooks

--What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, by Toni Morrison

--Breathe: A Letter To My Sons, by Imani Perry

-- Dante Stewart’s articles referenced in this episode can be found here

--The Candler School of Theology at Emory University: http://candler.emory.edu/index.html

--Clemson College Athletics

You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.

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Joseph C. Ewoodzie, "Getting Something to Eat in Jackson: Race, Class, and Food in the American South" (Princeton UP, 2021) Dec 01, 2021

Getting Something to Eat in Jackson(Princeton Press, 2021) uses food—what people eat and how—to explore the interaction of race and class in the lives of African Americans in the contemporary urban South. Dr. Joseph Ewoodzie Jr. examines how “foodways”—food availability, choice, and consumption—vary greatly between classes of African Americans in Jackson, Mississippi, and how this reflects and shapes their very different experiences of a shared racial identity.

Ewoodzie spent more than a year following a group of socioeconomically diverse African Americans—from upper-middle-class patrons of the city’s fine-dining restaurants to men experiencing homelessness who must organize their days around the schedules of soup kitchens. Ewoodzie goes food shopping, cooks, and eats with a young mother living in poverty and a grandmother working two jobs. He works in a Black-owned BBQ restaurant, and he meets a man who decides to become a vegan for health reasons but who must drive across town to get tofu and quinoa. Ewoodzie also learns about how soul food is changing and why it is no longer a staple survival food. Throughout, he shows how food choices influence, and are influenced by, the racial and class identities of Black Jacksonians.

By tracing these contemporary African American foodways, Getting Something to Eat in Jackson offers new insights into the lives of Black Southerners and helps challenge the persistent homogenization of blackness in American life.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University.

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Crystal Webster, "Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North" (UNC Press, 2021) Nov 30, 2021

For all that is known about the depth and breadth of African American history, we still understand surprisingly little about the lives of African American children, particularly those affected by northern emancipation. But hidden in institutional records, school primers and penmanship books, biographical sketches, and unpublished documents is a rich archive that reveals the social and affective worlds of northern Black children. Drawing evidence from the urban centers of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, Crystal Webster's innovative research yields a powerful new history of African American childhood before the Civil War. In Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North (UNC Press, 2021), Webster argues that young African Americans were frequently left outside the nineteenth century's emerging constructions of both race and childhood. They were marginalized in the development of schooling, ignored in debates over child labor, and presumed to lack the inherent innocence ascribed to white children. But Webster shows that Black children nevertheless carved out physical and social space for play, for learning, and for their own aspirations. Reading her sources against the grain, Webster reveals a complex reality for antebellum Black children. Lacking societal status, they nevertheless found meaningful agency as historical actors, making the most of the limited freedoms and possibilities they enjoyed.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Peter Cole, "Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly" (PM Press, 2021) Nov 30, 2021

In the early twentieth century, when many US unions disgracefully excluded black and Asian workers, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) warmly welcomed people of color, in keeping with their emphasis on class solidarity and their bold motto: "An Injury to One Is an Injury to All!" A brilliant union organizer and a humorous orator, Benjamin Fletcher (1890-1949) was a tremendously important and well-loved African American member of the IWW during its heyday. For years, acclaimed historian Peter Cole has carefully researched the life of Ben Fletcher. Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly (PM Press, 2021) includes a detailed biographical sketch of his life and history, reminiscences by fellow workers who knew him, a chronicle of the IWW's impressive decade-long run on the Philadelphia waterfront in which Fletcher played a pivotal role, and nearly all of his known writings and speeches, thus giving Fletcher's timeless voice another opportunity to inspire a new generation of workers, organizers, and agitators. This revised and expanded second edition includes new materials and much more.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Kevin Bruyneel, "Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States" (UNC Press, 2021) Nov 29, 2021

Kevin Bruyneel confronts the chronic displacement of Indigeneity in the politics and discourse around race in American political theory and culture, arguing that the ongoing influence of settler-colonialism has undermined efforts to understand Indigenous politics while also hindering conversation around race itself. By reexamining major episodes, texts, writers, and memories of the political past from the seventeenth century to the present, Bruyneel reveals the power of settler memory at work in the persistent disavowal of Indigeneity.

In Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States(University of North Carolina Press, 2021), he also shows how Indigenous and Black intellectuals have understood ties between racism and white settler memory, even as the settler dimensions of whiteness are frequently erased in our discourse about race, whether in conflicts over Indian mascotry or the white nationalist underpinnings of Trumpism.

Envisioning a new political future, Bruyneel challenges readers to refuse settler memory and consider a third reconstruction that can meaningfully link antiracism and anticolonialism.

John Cable will begin a teaching appointment at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in January 2022. He earned the Ph.D. in history at Florida State University in 2020.

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Clint Smith, "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America" (Little, Brown and Company, 2021) Nov 26, 2021

How do we narrate history, both the troubling past and what we chose to remember? Clint Smith sets out to wrestle with this question and its relationship to enslavement in his first nonfiction book, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown and Company, 2021). From Monticello plantation to Angola Prison to Galveston Island, Smith guides the reader on a journey as he visits domestic and abroad landmarks. In his exploration, he includes the reactions of the people he meets, like tourists, local public historians, and teachers, illuminating how these sites and all of us participate in remembering enslavement in contemporary America.

N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.

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Robin J. Hayes, "Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground" (U Washington Press, 2021) Nov 26, 2021

During the height of the Cold War, passionate idealists across the US and Africa came together to fight for Black self-determination and the antiracist remaking of society. Beginning with the 1957 Ghanaian independence celebration, the optimism and challenges of African independence leaders were publicized to African Americans through community-based newspapers and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Inspired by African independence--and frustrated with the slow pace of civil rights reforms in the US--a new generation of Black Power activists embarked on nonviolent direct action campaigns and built alternative institutions designed as spaces of freedom from racial subjugation.

In Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground (U Washington Press, 2021), Robin Hayes reveals how Black Power and African independence activists created a diaspora underground, characterized by collaboration and reciprocal empowerment. Together, they redefined racial discrimination as an international human rights issue requiring education, sustained collective action, and global solidarity--laying the groundwork for future transnational racial justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter.

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Steven P. Brown, "Alabama Justice: The Cases and Faces That Changed a Nation" (U Alabama Press, 2020) Nov 23, 2021

Steven P. Brown, professor of political science at Auburn University, has written a history of notable U.S. Supreme Cases and justices that hailed from Alabama. In Alabama Justice: The Cases and Faces That Changed a Nation (U Alabama Press, 2020), Brown reviews eight landmark cases which originated in Alabama and were eventually reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Although most of these cases were reflective of the civil rights issues endemic to Alabama and other states in the American South of the mid-twentieth century, not all are race related. For example, a notable gender equity case, Frontiero v. Richardson, which was concerned with benefits discrimination based on gender, was an important decision in the history of women’s rights. Brown also reviews the lives and times of three Supreme Court justices, John McKinley, John Archibald Campbell, and Hugo Black.

Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University.

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Jasmine Mitchell, "Imagining the Mulatta: Blackness in U. S. and Brazilian Media" (U Illinois Press, 2020) Nov 22, 2021

Brazil markets itself as a racially mixed utopia. The United States prefers the term melting pot. Both nations have long used the image of the mulatta to push skewed cultural narratives. Highlighting the prevalence of mixed race women of African and European descent, the two countries claim to have perfected racial representation-all the while ignoring the racialization, hypersexualization, and white supremacy that the mulatta narrative creates.

In Imagining the Mulatta: Blackness in U. S. and Brazilian Media (U Illinois Press, 2020), Jasmine Mitchell investigates the development and exploitation of the mulatta figure in Brazilian and U.S. popular culture. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, she analyzes policy debates and reveals the use of mixed-Black female celebrities as subjects of racial and gendered discussions. Mitchell also unveils the ways the media moralizes about the mulatta figure and uses her as an example of an "acceptable" version of blackness that at once dreams of erasing undesirable blackness while maintaining the qualities that serve as outlets for interracial desire.

Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter

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James G. Cantres, "Blackening Britain: Caribbean Radicalism from Windrush to Decolonization" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) Nov 17, 2021

Covering the period from the interwar years through the arrival of the steamship SS Empire Windrush from Jamaica in 1948 and culminating in the period of decolonization in the British Caribbean by the early 1970s, James Cantres’ Blackening Britain: Caribbean Radicalism from Windrush to Decolonization(Rowman & Littlefield, 2020) situates the development of networks of communication, categories of identification, and Caribbean radical politics both in the metropole and abroad. Cantres explores how articulations of Caribbean identity formation corresponded to the following themes: organic collective action, political mobilization, cultural expressions of shared consciousness, and novel patterns of communication. Blackening Britain shows how colonial migrants developed tools of resistance in the imperial center predicated on their racialized consciousness that emerged from their experiences of alienation and discrimination in Britain.

Blackening Britain interrogates the ways in which prominent West Indian activists, intellectuals, political actors, and artists conceived of their relationship to Britain. Ultimately, this work shows a move away from British identity and a radical, revolutionary consciousness rooted in the West Indian background and forged in the contentious space of metropolitan Britain.

Purchase a copy of Blackening Britain: From Windrush to Decolonization through January 8, 2022, using the Promo code: 21JOYSALE for 35% off at Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the Black-led grassroots movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall

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Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, "The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South" (UNC Press, 2021) Nov 15, 2021

Beginning on the shores of West Africa in the sixteenth century and ending in the U.S. Lower South on the eve of the Civil War, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh traces a bold history of the interior lives of bondwomen as they carved out an existence for themselves and their families amid the horrors of American slavery. With particular attention to maternity, sex, and other gendered aspects of women's lives, she documents how bondwomen crafted female-centered cultures that shaped the religious consciousness and practices of entire enslaved communities. Indeed, gender as well as race co-constituted the Black religious subject, she argues—requiring a shift away from understandings of "slave religion" as a gender-amorphous category.

Women responded on many levels—ethically, ritually, and communally—to southern slavery. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Wells-Oghoghomeh shows how they remembered, reconfigured, and innovated beliefs and practices circulating between Africa and the Americas. In The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South (UNC Press, 2021), she redresses the exclusion of enslaved women from the American religious narrative. Challenging conventional institutional histories, this book opens a rare window onto the spiritual strivings of one of the most remarkable and elusive groups in the American experience.

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Efrén O. Pérez, "Diversity's Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Nov 11, 2021

Political Scientist Efrén Pérez’s new book, Diversity's Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity(U Chicago Press, 2021), explores the term and category “people of color” and how this grouping has been used within politics, but also how it is has been used by those who are classified as people of color. Pérez examines group identity, language and public opinion, and implicit cognition to explain how marginalization of non-white groups can form a collective group identity that is interchangeable for the individual. Diversity’s Child fills in a rather substantial gap in research about racial and ethnic identity in the United States by surveying people of color about how they think and feel about racial disparities that impact them as well as other groups that are often categorized as people of color. Part of what Pérez finds in the multi-method approach is that politics can be seen as a solution to the inequality that many of those within this broad umbrella category experience and understand. Pérez’s training and research in both political science and political psychology allows him to bring together these connected social science threads and frameworks in exploring the understanding of broad group identity as well as intergroup identity.

Diversity’s Child: People of Color and the Politics of identity both conceptualizes and analyzes the identity of people of color by developing meaningful measurements and using Social Identity Theory to examine connections to differing identities. Pérez’s work also thinks through the evolving demographic shifts in the United States, exploring the projection that white Americans will become the minority population by 2050, and what the political ramifications are for the new majority minority. Although the term “people of color” has been used to identify Black, Latino, and other races for some time, Pérez research examines how these groups that are often pulled together under this common identity actually share in this broader category, and whether there are commonalities and concerns across ethnic, racial, and national identities. He does this by gathering data through opinion surveys, experiments, content analysis of newspapers and congressional archives, and in-depth interviews. Pérez’s research indicates that a person’s “color” identity exists and can be measured, and that identifying as a person of color shapes how minorities view themselves and their position within the political system. Diversity’s Child introduces a new perspective into the ongoing conversation about shifting political demographics, and elaborates on how the people of color identity has the capacity to mobilize groups and shape American politics. Pérez’s research also indicates how and where this umbrella category can essentially come undone—how the unifying qualities can be undermined by intergroup antagonisms. As he notes in our discussion, the research that highlights the capacity to bring together African Americans, LatinX Americans, and Asian Americans under the title of “people of color” also has within it the fissures and factions that can disconnect these groups from each other and from shared political pursuits.

Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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David Lester, "Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay, A Graphic Novel" (Beacon Press, 2021) Nov 10, 2021

Who is the most fascinating historical figure that you have never heard of? David Lester and Marcus Rediker make a good case that it was Benjamin Lay. Based on Rediker’s 2017 The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist, Lester has created a moving, engaging, and eye-opening graphic novel. Lay embodied inter-sectional resistance centuries before the term was coined. In the 18th century he not only fought against slavery and condemned racism but supported women’s rights, criticized class disparities, and promoted the human treatment of animals. Lay was a vegetarian who lived in a humble cave with his beloved wife. He condemned the hypocrisy of the slave owning church leadership. The diminutive Lay engaged in powerful acts of guerilla theater that included smashing expensive Chinese porcelain in the public square and splashing fake blood about a Quaker meeting house. Well-known after his death as a founder of the abolitionist movement, post-Civil War white supremacists marginalized Benjamin Lay. Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay(Beacon Press, 2021) will revive the memory of this role model of speaking truth to power.

David Lester is an author and graphic artist. His work includes but is not limited to 1919: A Graphic History of the Winnipeg General Strike, Direct Action Gets the Goods: A Graphic History of the Strike in Canada, Drawn To Change: Graphic Histories of Working Class Struggle, and The Listener, a graphic novel. He is also the guitarist for the underground duo Mecca Normal.

Marcus Rediker is a Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburg and a Guest Curator at the J. M. W. Turner Gallery, Tate Britain. He is the author of numerous books on the history of piracy, the slave trade, and the Atlantic world such as The Many Headed Hydra, The Slave Ship: A Human History, Villains of all Nations, Outlaws of the Atlantic, The Amistad, and The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf who became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Rachel Afi Quinn, "Being La Dominicana: Race and Identity in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo" (U Illinois Press, 2021) Nov 10, 2021

Dominican women being seen--and seeing themselves--in the media Rachel Afi Quinn investigates how visual media portray Dominican women and how women represent themselves in their own creative endeavors in response to existing stereotypes. Delving into the dynamic realities and uniquely racialized gendered experiences of women in Santo Domingo, Quinn reveals the way racial ambiguity and color hierarchy work to shape experiences of identity and subjectivity in the Dominican Republic. She merges analyses of context and interviews with young Dominican women to offer rare insights into a Caribbean society in which the tourist industry and popular media rewards, and rely upon, the ability of Dominican women to transform themselves to perform gender, race, and class. Engaging and astute, Being La Dominicana: Race and Identity in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo (University of Illinois Press, 2021) reveals the little-studied world of today's young Dominican women and what their personal stories and transnational experiences can tell us about the larger neoliberal world.

Rachel Afi Quinn is an associate professor in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Comparative Culture Studies at the University of Houston.

Reighan Gillam is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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Alaina E. Roberts, "I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) Nov 09, 2021

Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of 40 acres and a mule--the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land(U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from.

In nineteenth-century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), a story unfolds that ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction, in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and whites from the eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land that had been taken from others.

Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction. She connects debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. As Black, white, and Native people constructed ideas of race, belonging, and national identity, this part of the West became, for a short time, the last place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights, until Oklahoma statehood in 1907.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Zakiya Luna, "Reproductive Rights as Human Rights: Women of Color and the Fight for Reproductive Justice" (NYU Press, 2020) Nov 05, 2021

How did reproductive justice—defined as the right to have children, to not have children, and to parent—become recognized as a human rights issue? In Reproductive Rights as Human Rights: Women of Color and the Fight for Reproductive Justice (New York University Press, 2020), Zakiya Luna highlights the often-forgotten activism of women of color who are largely responsible for creating what we now know as the modern-day reproductive justice movement.

Focusing on SisterSong, an intersectional reproductive justice organization, Luna shows how, and why, women of color mobilized around reproductive rights in the domestic arena. She examines their key role in re-framing reproductive rights as human rights, raising this set of issues as a priority in the United States, a country hostile to the concept of human rights at home.

An indispensable read, Reproductive Rights as Human Rights provides a much-needed intersectional perspective on the modern-day reproductive justice movement.

Dr. Nicole Bourbonnais is an Associate Professor of International History and Politics and Co-Director of the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her research explores reproductive politics and practice from a transnational historical perspective. More info here. Twitter: @iheid_history and @GC_IHEID

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Jovan Scott Lewis, "Scammer's Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica" (U Minnesota Press, 2020) Nov 05, 2021

There is romance in stealing from the rich to give to the poor, but how does that change when those perceived rich are elderly white North Americans and the poor are young Black Jamaicans? In this innovative ethnography, Jovan Scott Lewis tells the story of Omar, Junior, and Dwayne. Young and poor, they strive to make a living in Montego Bay, where call centers and tourism are the two main industries in the struggling economy. Their experience of grinding poverty and drastically limited opportunity leads them to conclude that scamming is the best means of gaining wealth and advancement. Otherwise, they are doomed to live in “sufferation”—an inescapable poverty that breeds misery, frustration, and vexation.

In the Jamaican lottery scam run by these men, targets are told they have qualified for a large loan or award if they pay taxes or transfer fees. When the fees are paid, the award never arrives, netting the scammers tens of thousands of U.S. dollars. Through interviews, historical sources, song lyrics, and court testimonies, Lewis examines how these scammers justify their deceit, discovering an ethical narrative that reformulates ideas of crime and transgression and their relationship to race, justice, and debt.

Scammer's Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (U Minnesota Press, 2020) describes how these young men, seeking to overcome inequality and achieve autonomy, come to view crime as a form of liberation. Their logic raises unsettling questions about a world economy that relegates postcolonial populations to deprivation even while expecting them to follow the rules of capitalism that exacerbate their dispossession. In this groundbreaking account, Lewis asks whether true reparation for the legacy of colonialism is to be found only through radical—even criminal—means.

Jovan Scott Lewis is Associate Professor and Chair of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.

Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography.

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Ruby Hamad, "White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color" (Catapult, 2020) Nov 03, 2021

Called “powerful and provocative" by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, author of the New York Times bestselling How to be an Antiracist, Ruby Hamad's White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color (Catapult, 2020) is a breakthrough work of history and cultural criticism. The book reveals how white feminism has been used as a weapon of white supremacy and patriarchy deployed against Black and Indigenous women, and women of color.

Taking us from the slave era, when white women fought in court to keep “ownership” of their slaves, through the centuries of colonialism, when they offered a soft face for brutal tactics, to the modern workplace, White Tears/Brown Scars tells a charged story of white women’s active participation in campaigns of oppression. It offers a long overdue validation of the experiences of women of color. Discussing subjects as varied as The Hunger Games, Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, the viral BBQ Becky video, and 19th century lynchings of Mexicans in the American Southwest, Ruby Hamad undertakes a new investigation of gender and race. She shows how the division between innocent white women and racialized, sexualized women of color was created, and why this division is crucial to confront.

Connect with Ruby Hamad (she/hers) @rubyhamadwriter on Instagram and click here to read Ruby's breakaway opinion piece for The Guardian.

Connect with your host Lee Pierce (they/them) @rhetoriclee on Instagram and Twitter.

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Habiba Ibrahim, "Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life" (NYU Press, 2021) Nov 03, 2021

Although more than fifty years apart, the murders of Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin share a commonality: Black children are not seen as children. Time and time again, excuses for police brutality and aggression—particularly against Black children— concern the victim “appearing” as a threat. But why and how is the perceived “appearance” of Black persons so completely separated from common perceptions of age and time?

Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life (NYU Press, 2021) posits age, life stages, and lifespans as a central lens through which to view Blackness, particularly with regard to the history of transatlantic slavery. Focusing on Black literary culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Habiba Ibrahim examines how the history of transatlantic slavery and the constitution of modern Blackness has been reimagined through the embodiment of age. She argues that Black age—through nearly four centuries of subjugation— has become contingent, malleable, and suited for the needs of enslavement. As a result, rather than the number of years lived or a developmental life stage, Black age came to signify exchange value, historical under-development, timelessness, and other fantasies borne out of Black exclusion from the human.

Ibrahim asks: What constitutes a normative timeline of maturation for Black girls when “all the women”—all the canonically feminized adults—“are white”? How does a “slave” become a “man” when adulthood is foreclosed to Black subjects of any gender? Black Age tracks the struggle between the abuses of Black exclusion from Western humanism and the reclamation of non-normative Black life, arguing that, if some of us are brave, it is because we dare to live lives considered incomprehensible within a schema of “human time.”

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelledmonds.com.

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Imani Perry on a Life in African American Studies Oct 26, 2021

On today’s podcast, I am chopping it up with my dear friend and play cousin Dr. Imani Perry, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Dr. Perry is on the program today to discuss her intellectual and political foundations, her mother, AKA, the person that trained yours truely at Simmons University, none other than, Dr. Theresa Perry, her affection for Black Studies, and much much more, enjoy the conversation, family!

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Alice L Baumgartner, "South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War" (Basic Books, 2020) Oct 21, 2021

For some enslaved Americans, the path to freedom led not north, but south, argues Dr. Alice Baumgardner, an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California. In South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War(Basic Books, 2020), Baumgartner reveals an untold story of enslaved African Americans finding redemption from slavery in Mexico, which had abolished slavery in many of its territories decades before the American Civil War. Indeed, it was concern by Texas slaveholders that their human property may have been threatened that led them to revolt against Mexico and eventually join the United States and, in time, the Confederate States of America. For those who escaped, Mexico could be far from an anti-slavery paradise, but Mexican officials were loathe to return runaway former slaves back to the United States, a fact which was one of the many reasons why the United States went to war with Mexico in the 1840s. South to Freedom is a fresh look at America's slavery crisis and Civil War, and one which places enslaved people themselves and their own quest for freedom at the heart of the story.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Lindsey Stewart, "The Politics of Black Joy: Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism" (Northwestern UP, 2021) Oct 20, 2021

What can southern Black joy teach us about agency? What role does refusal have in liberation? What more might there be to root work than resistance? In The Politics of Black Joy: Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism (Northwestern UP, 2021), Lindsey Stewart explores Hurston’s contributions to political theory and philosophy of race to develop a politics of joy that owes much to indifference, refusal, and tactical misrecognition. Contending with white supremacy and countering neo-abolitionist approaches that reduce southern Black life to tales of tragedy, Stewart suggests how a politics of Black joy can broaden our imaginations to think emancipation anew.

Sarah Tyson is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver.

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Catherine Knight Steele, "Digital Black Feminism" (NYU Press, 2021) Oct 18, 2021

How have Black women lead a digital revolution? In Digital Black Feminism(NYU Press, 2021), Catherine Knight Steele, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Maryland, places digital Black feminism within the longer-term context of Black feminism and Black women’s experiences in America. The book considers examples from the Black feminist blogosphere and offers a comparative analysis of early Black feminist pioneers and key contemporary voices. Posing questions as to the dangers of commodification and the limits of the digital sphere, as well as celebrating Black feminist success, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences and for anyone interested in digital life today.

Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art.

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P. Gabrielle Foreman and Jim Casey, "The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century" (UNC Press, 2021) Oct 18, 2021

P. Gabrielle Foreman and Jim Casey's edited volume The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2021) is the first to focus on the Colored Conventions movement, the nineteenth century's longest campaign for Black civil rights. Well before the founding of the NAACP and other twentieth-century pillars of the civil rights movement, tens of thousands of Black leaders organized state and national conventions across North America. Over seven decades, they advocated for social justice and against slavery, protesting state-sanctioned and mob violence while demanding voting, legal, labor, and educational rights. While Black-led activism in this era is often overshadowed by the attention paid to the abolition movement, this collection centers Black activist networks, influence, and institution building. Collectively, these essays highlight the vital role of the Colored Conventions in the lives of thousands of early organizers, including many of the most famous writers, ministers, politicians, and entrepreneurs in the long history of Black activism. Explore accompanying exhibits and historical records at The Colored Conventions Project website.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Erica R. Edwards, "The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire" (NYU Press, 2021) Oct 14, 2021

Dr. Erica R. Edwards's The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire(New York University, 2021) reveals the troubling intimacy between Black women and the making of US global power.

The year 1968 marked both the height of the worldwide Black liberation struggle and a turning point for the global reach of American power, which was built on the counterinsurgency honed on Black and other oppressed populations at home. The next five decades saw the consolidation of the culture of the American empire through what Erica R. Edwards calls the “imperial grammars of blackness.” This is a story of state power at its most devious and most absurd, and, at the same time, a literary history of Black feminist radicalism at its most trenchant. Edwards reveals how the long war on terror, beginning with the late–Cold War campaign against organizations like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the Black Liberation Army, has relied on the labor and the fantasies of Black women to justify the imperial spread of capitalism. Black feminist writers not only understood that this would demand a shift in racial gendered power, but crafted ways of surviving it. The Other Side of Terror offers an interdisciplinary Black feminist analysis of militarism, security, policing, diversity, representation, intersectionality, and resistance, while discussing a wide array of literary and cultural texts, from the unpublished work of Black radical feminist June Jordan to the memoirs of Condoleezza Rice to the television series Scandal. With clear, moving prose, Edwards chronicles Black feminist organizing and writing on “the other side of terror”, which tracked changes in racial power, transformed African American literature and Black studies, and predicted the crises of our current era with unsettling accuracy.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelledmonds.com.

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Kalle Kananoja, "Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Oct 11, 2021

In Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa (Cambridge UP, 2021), Kalle Kananoja tells the story of how pre-colonial communities throughout the west coast of Africa employed a wide range of medical and spiritual strategies to treat all kinds of diseases. In the sixteenth century, the arrival of European traders and colonists initiated an exchange of healing knowledge that moved across the Atlantic for the next three-hundred years. The initial links in this chain of exchanges were established by European settlers or visitors who, given the limited number of European doctors and medications available, sought the services of African healers whose methods were often seen as more suited and efficacious in the local environments. Missionaries, travelers and botanists also added to these exchanges by collecting and systematizing some of the knowledge they acquired from African informants.

By documenting the richness and mobility of African healing knowledge, Kananoja points that even though plants, remedies and practices from the Americas and Asia have been more widely studied, African contributions were equally significant. Africans also sought to learn from the practices, institutions and remedies that travelers brought back from Europe and other parts of the Atlantic world, and incorporated them into what was an already rich and diverse body of healing knowledge. Ultimately the prevalence of these exchanges illustrates not just the differences that existed between European and African understandings of disease and the human body, but also how much common ground there was between them. Kananoja compellingly argues that African healing knowledge should be seen as a rich and dynamic system, which was central to the emergence of an Atlantic world.

Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University.

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Anne Pollock, "Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States" (U Minnesota Press, 2021) Oct 11, 2021

An event-by-event look at how institutionalized racism harms the health of African Americans in the twenty-first century A crucial component of anti-Black racism is the unconscionable disparity in health outcomes between Black and white Americans. Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States (U Minnesota Press, 2021) examines this institutionalized inequality through dramatic, concrete events from the past two decades, revealing how unequal living conditions and inadequate medical care have become routine. From the spike in chronic disease after Hurricane Katrina to the lack of protection for Black residents during the Flint water crisis--and even the life-threatening childbirth experience for tennis star Serena Williams--author Anne Pollock takes readers on a journey through the diversity of anti-Black racism operating in healthcare. She goes beneath the surface to deconstruct the structures that make these events possible, including mass incarceration, police brutality, and the hypervisibility of Black athletes' bodies. Ultimately, Sickening shows what these shocking events reveal about the everyday racialization of health in the United States. Concluding with a vital examination of racialized healthcare during the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter rebellions of 2020, Sickening cuts through the mind-numbing statistics to vividly portray healthcare inequalities. In a gripping and passionate style, Pollock shows the devastating reality and consequences of systemic racism on the lives and health of Black Americans.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Robert C. Schwaller, "African Maroons in Sixteenth-Century Panama: A History in Documents" (U Oklahoma Press, 2021) Oct 08, 2021

From the 1520s through the 1580s, thousands of African slaves fled captivity in Spanish Panama and formed their own communities in the interior of the isthmus. African Maroons in Sixteenth-Century Panama (U Oklahoma Press, 2021), a primary source reader, edited by Robert C. Schwaller, documents this marronage in the context of five decades of African resistance to slavery.

The self-sufficiency of the Maroons, along with their periodic raids against Spanish settlements, sparked armed conflict as Spaniards sought to conquer the maroon communities and kill or re-enslave their populations. After decades of struggle, Maroons succeeded in negotiating a peace with Spanish authorities and establishing the first two free Black towns in the Americas. The little-known details of this dramatic history emerge in these pages, traced through official Spanish accounts, reports, and royal edicts, as well as excerpts from several English sources that recorded alliances between Maroons and English privateers in the region. The contrasting Spanish and English accounts reveal Maroons' attempts to turn European antagonism to their advantage; and, significantly, several accounts feature direct testimony from Maroons. Most importantly, this reader includes translations of the first peace agreements made between a European empire and African Maroons, and the founding documents of the free-Black communities of Santiago del Príncipe and Santa Cruz la Real—the culmination of the first successful African resistance movement in the Americas.

Schwaller has translated all the documents into English and presents each with a short introduction, thorough annotations, and full historical, cultural, and geographical context, making this volume accessible to undergraduate students while remaining a unique document collection for scholars.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Takkara K. Brunson, "Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba" (U Florida Press, 2021) Oct 04, 2021

In Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba (University of Florida Press, 2021), Dr. Takkara Brunson examines the political strategies used by Afro-Cuban women between 1886 and 1959 to call for greater rights and opportunities for Afro-Cubans. Afro-Cuban women channeled their energy for Black rights through letter writing, sitting for photographs and comportment, founding their own organizations, and seeking and winning political offices in the Communist Party, to name a few of their strategies. While pursuing the political avenues available to them, Black women also navigated and had to contend with patriarchy and racelessness. In putting together this compelling story, Brunson undertook research in archives in Cuba and the United States. She hones in on the lives of particular women in each chapter to show how they advanced calls for Black citizenship and rights. Brunson builds on the work of Latin American and Cuban history as well as Black feminist scholarship to center Black women as critical protagonists in the struggle for Black rights and freedom.

Dr. Takkara Brunson is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Texas A&M University.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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Pamela J. Prickett, "Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in the City of Angels" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Oct 01, 2021

Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in the City of Angels (University of Chicago Press, 2021) by Pamela J. Prickett is an ethnographic study of an African American Muslim community in South Central Los Angeles. The accessible study follows the believers of Masjid al-Quran (MAQ) as they live their Islam in and around the mosque community, such as during prayers or Ramadan, but also while conducting business or interacting with one another. Masjid al-Quran’s institutional history dates back to the Nation of Islam, which then later transitioned to Sunni Islam through the leadership of W. D. Mohammad. MAQ is also located in South Central, a community that has changed demographically and socio-economically overtime. Embedded in this complex urban geography, Prickett's study masterfully illuminates the deep entanglements of class, race, and gender in the defining of faith and ritual for members of MAQ. The study interrogates tenuous realities of giving and receiving charity, the intricate agentic Muslim expressions of African American femininity and womanhood, and the positionality of African American Muslims and diasporic Muslim Americans. This book is also a stunning ethnography. It is attentive to many methodological concerns of positionality, access, and immersive fieldwork, but it is also a story of friendship, love, and loss. This book will be of interest to those who think and reflect on Islam in America, African American Islam, and race, gender, class, and lived religion, but it will also be a productive text to incorporate into methods courses, especially on ethnography.

Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier.

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Vanessa M. Holden, "Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community" (U Illinois Press, 2021) Sep 24, 2021

The local community around the Nat Turner rebellion The 1831 Southampton Rebellion led by Nat Turner involved an entire community. Vanessa M. Holden rediscovers the women and children, free and enslaved, who lived in Southampton County before, during, and after the revolt. Mapping the region's multilayered human geography, Holden draws a fuller picture of the inhabitants, revealing not only their interactions with physical locations but also their social relationships in space and time.

In Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community (U Illinois Press, 2021), Holden recasts the Southampton Rebellion as one event that reveals the continuum of practices that sustained resistance and survival among local Black people. Holden follows how African Americans continued those practices through the rebellion's immediate aftermath and into the future, showing how Black women and communities raised children who remembered and heeded the lessons absorbed during the calamitous events of 1831. A bold challenge to traditional accounts, Surviving Southampton sheds new light on the places and people surrounding Americas most famous rebellion against slavery.

Purchase a copy of Surviving Southampton through the University of Illinois Press until September 30, 2021, using the Promo Code: ASALH21 in recognition of the 2021 Association for the Study of African American Life and History Annual Meeting and Conference!

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Priya Kandaswamy, "Domestic Contradictions: Race and Gendered Citizenship from Reconstruction to Welfare Reform" (Duke UP, 2021) Sep 24, 2021

In Domestic Contradictions: Race and Gendered Citizenship from Reconstruction to Welfare Reform(Duke UP, 2021), Priya Kandaswamy analyzes how race, class, gender, and sexuality shaped welfare practices in the United States alongside the conflicting demands that this system imposed upon Black women. She turns to an often-neglected moment in welfare history, the advent of the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction, and highlights important parallels with welfare reform in the late twentieth century. Kandaswamy demonstrates continuity between the figures of the "vagrant" and "welfare queen" in these time periods, both of which targeted Black women. These constructs upheld gendered constructions of domesticity while defining Black women's citizenship in terms of an obligation to work rather than a right to public resources. Pushing back against this history, Kandaswamy illustrates how the Black female body came to represent a series of interconnected dangers-to white citizenship, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist ideals of productivity -and how a desire to curb these threats drove state policy. In challenging dominant feminist historiographies, Kandaswamy builds on Black feminist and queer of color critiques to situate the gendered afterlife of slavery as central to the historical development of the welfare state.

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Karla Slocum, "Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West" (UNC Press, 2019) Sep 17, 2021

Oklahoma's Black towns aren't just places of the past - they maintain an enduring allure, and look toward the future, argues Karla Slocum in her new book, Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West (UNC Press, 2019). Dr. Slocum, the Thomas Willis Lambeth Chair of Public Policy and a professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, traveled extensively through Oklahoma and conducted many interviews in researching this book, and the result is a vibrant and at times personal look at the past, present, and future of Black places in Oklahoma and the West. From rodeos to heritage tourism, these towns offer a fascinating case study in the relationship between storytelling, Blackness, and Americanness in the 21st century West, and affirm the place of Black communities in the region's history.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Minna Salami, "Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone" (Amistad, 2021) Sep 17, 2021

Minna Salami's book Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone(Amistad/HarperCollins, 2021)is a collection of thought provoking essays that explore questions central to how we see ourselves, our history, and our world.

-What does it mean to be oppressed?

-What does it mean to be liberated?

-Why do women choose to follow authority even when they can be autonomous?

-What is the cost of compromising one’s true self?

-What narratives particularly subjugate women and people of African heritage?

-What kind of narrative can heal and empower?

As she considers these questions, Salami offers fresh insights on key cultural issues that impact women’s lives, including power, beauty, and knowledge. She also examines larger subjects, such as Afrofuturism, radical Black feminism, and gender politics, all with a historical outlook that is also future oriented. Combining a storyteller’s narrative playfulness and a social critic’s intellectual rigor, Salami draws upon a range of traditions and ideologies, feminist theory, popular culture—including insights from Ms. Lauryn Hill, Beyoncé, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and others—science, philosophy, African myths and origin stories, and her own bold personal narrative to establish a language for change and self-liberation.

Sensuous Knowledge inspires reflection and challenge us to formulate or own views. Using ancestral knowledge to steer us toward freedom, Salami reveals the ways that women have protested over the years in large and small ways—models that inspire and empower us to define our own sense of womanhood today.

In this riveting meditation, Salami ask women to break free of the prison made by ingrained male centric biases, and build a house themselves—a home that can nurture us all.

Learn more about author Minna Salami at the MsAfropolitan blog.

Lee M. Pierce (she/they) is an Assistant Professor at SUNY Geneseo specializing in rhetoric, race, and U.S. political culture. They also host the Media & Communications and Language channels for New Books Network and their own podcast titled RhetoricLee Speaking.

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Luke Epplin, "Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball" (Flatiron Books, 2021) Sep 16, 2021

In July 1947, not even three months after Jackie Robinson debuted on the Brooklyn Dodgers, snapping the color line that had segregated Major League Baseball, Larry Doby would follow in his footsteps on the Cleveland Indians. Though Doby, as the second Black player in the majors, would struggle during his first summer in Cleveland, his subsequent turnaround in 1948 from benchwarmer to superstar sparked one of the wildest and most meaningful seasons in baseball history.

In intimate, absorbing detail, Luke Epplin's Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball (Flatiron Books, 2021) traces the story of the integration of the Cleveland Indians and their quest for a World Series title through four key participants: Bill Veeck, an eccentric and visionary owner adept at exploding fireworks on and off the field; Larry Doby, a soft-spoken, hard-hitting pioneer whose major-league breakthrough shattered stereotypes that so much of white America held about Black ballplayers; Bob Feller, a pitching prodigy from the Iowa cornfields who set the template for the athlete as businessman; and Satchel Paige, a legendary pitcher from the Negro Leagues whose belated entry into the majors whipped baseball fans across the country into a frenzy.

Together, as the backbone of a team that epitomized the postwar American spirit in all its hopes and contradictions, these four men would captivate the nation by storming to the World Series - all the while rewriting the rules of what was possible in sports.

Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in September 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Farah Jasmine Griffin, "Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature" (Norton, 2021) Sep 14, 2021

Before Farah Jasmine Griffin’s father died, he wrote to her a note ending with a line “read until you understand.” He would die years later when she was nine, and that line has guided her literary curiosity. In Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature(Norton, 2021), Griffin shares the indispensable lessons of Black wisdom that rooted her from the searing rhetoric of David Walker and Frederick Douglass to compelling Black prose of Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, to the Black soul sounds of Gladys Knight and the Pips and Marvin Gaye. Weaving memoir, history, and culture, Griffin explores the themes such as mercy, love, death, beauty, and grace to help readers wrestle with the continuing struggle for freedom and American democracy.

N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.

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Gene Slater, "Free to Discriminate: How the Nation's Realtors Created Housing Segregation and the Conservative Vision of American Freedom" (Hayday Books, 2021) Sep 14, 2021

Gene Slater's book Free to Discriminate: How the Nation's Realtors Created Housing Segregation and the Conservative Vision of American Freedom (Hayday Books, 2021) uncovers realtors' definitive role in segregating America and shaping modern conservative thought. Gene Slater follows this story from inside the realtor profession, drawing on many industry documents that have remained unexamined until now. His book traces the increasingly aggressive ways realtors justified their practices, how they successfully weaponized the word "freedom" for their cause, and how conservative politicians have drawn directly from realtors' rhetoric for the past several decades. Much of this story takes place in California, and Slater demonstrates why one of the very first all-white neighborhoods was in Berkeley, and why the state was the perfect place for Ronald Reagan's political ascension.

The hinge point in this history is Proposition 14, a largely forgotten but monumentally important 1964 ballot initiative. Created and promoted by California realtors, the proposition sought to uphold housing discrimination permanently in the state's constitution, and a vast majority of Californians voted for it. This vote had explosive consequences--ones that still inform our deepest political divisions today--and a true reckoning with the history of American racism requires a closer look at the events leading up to it. Freedom to Discriminate shatters preconceptions about American segregation, and it connects many seemingly disparate aspects of the nation's history in a novel and galvanizing way.

Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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Thomas Aiello, "The Life and Times of Louis Lomax: The Art of Deliberate Disunity" (Duke UP, 2021) Sep 10, 2021

In The Life and Times of Louis Lomax: The Art of Deliberate Disunity(Duke University Press, 2021), Thomas Aiello traces the complicated and fascinating life of a pioneering Black journalist and media personality. A witness to some of the most iconic moments of the 1960s, Lomax remains an important yet overlooked civil rights figure, who emerged as one of the most influential voices of the movement despite his past as an ex-con, serial liar, and publicity-seeking provocateur.

Thomas Aiello is a professor of history, and Africana studies at Valdosta State University. He is the author of more than twenty books and dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles. His work helped amend the Louisiana constitution to make nonunanimous juries illegal and was cited in the United States Supreme Court as part of its decision ruling them unconstitutional. His work was also part of the effort that led Major League Baseball to include Negro Leagues statistics in its historical record. He holds PhDs in history and anthrozoology and lives in Valdosta, Georgia. Learn more at www.thomasaiellobooks.com.

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Teresa Irene Gonzales, "Building a Better Chicago: Race and Community Resistance to Urban Redevelopment" (NYU Press, 2021) Sep 06, 2021

Despite promises from politicians, nonprofits, and government agencies, Chicago's most disadvantaged neighborhoods remain plagued by poverty, failing schools, and gang activity. In Building a Better Chicago: Race and Community Resistance to Urban Redevelopment, Dr. Teresa Irene Gonzales shows us how, and why, these promises have gone unfulfilled, revealing tensions between neighborhood residents and the institutions that claim to represent them.

Focusing on Little Village, the largest Mexican immigrant community in the Midwest, and Greater Englewood, a predominantly Black neighborhood, Gonzales gives us an on-the-ground look at Chicago’s inner city. She shows us how philanthropists, nonprofits, and government agencies struggle for power and control—often against the interests of residents themselves—with the result of further marginalizing the communities of color they seek to help. But Gonzales also shows how these communities have advocated for themselves and demanded accountability from the politicians and agencies in their midst. Building a Better Chicago explores the many high-stakes battles taking place on the streets of Chicago, illuminating a more promising pathway to empowering communities of color in the twenty-first century.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Tug Cities: Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at a Tug of War Festival. This book is about the media representations of place and identity at an annual interstate tug of war festival where cities in two states across the Mississippi River from each other come together one week during the summer as rivals to duke it out on the rope. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, following him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus, "Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel" (LSU Press, 2020) Sep 06, 2021

From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to dominant and pejorative ideas about blackness. In Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel (LSU Press, 2020), Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus uncovers how black and white writers experimented with innovative narrative strategies to revise static and stereotypical views of black identity and experience. In this provocative and challenging book, Daniels-Rauterkus contests the long-standing idea that African Americans did not write literary realism, along with the inverse misconception that white writers did not make important contributions to African American literature. Taking up key works by Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, Daniels-Rauterkus argues that authors blended realism with romance, often merging mimetic and melodramatic conventions to advocate on behalf of African Americans, challenge popular theories of racial identity, disrupt the expectations of the literary marketplace, and widen the possibilities for black representation in fiction. Combining literary history with close textual analysis, Daniels-Rauterkus reads black and white writers alongside each other to demonstrate the reciprocal nature of literary production. Moving beyond discourses of racial authenticity and cultural property, Daniels-Rauterkus stresses the need to organize African American literature around black writers and their meditations on blackness, but she also proposes leaving space for nonblack writers whose use of comparable narrative strategies can facilitate reconsiderations of the complex social order that constitutes race in America. With Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Daniels-Rauterkus expands critical understandings of American literary realism and African American literature by destabilizing the rigid binaries that too often define discussions of race, genre, and periodization.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Lettie Gay, "Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking" ( U South Carolina Press, 2021) Sep 01, 2021

Southern Food Historian Rebecca Sharpless discusses a new edition of Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cookingreleased in 2021 by University of South Carolina Press. Sharpless added a new critical introduction to the historic cookbook, first published in 1930 from a New York press as a collaboration between Blanche Rhett, Helen Woodward, and Lettie Gay. Woodward had married into a family with South Carolina ties and for a time rented a home that shared a courtyard with Rhett. As Woodward tells the story, she wanted to send some recipes back to her Northern connections, and Rhett suggested she write a book of recipes instead. Gay tested the recipes in a New York kitchen, standardizing measurements and translating them to a wider audience.

Sharpless immediately foregrounds the Northern sensibility that informs the rhetorical situation of the book. Published just a few years before Gone With the Wind, the cookbook represented a version of Charleston’s sumptuous antebellum past to an audience with an appetite for consuming moonlight and magnolias.

Sharpless’s 2021 introduction asks the question, “What do readers today need to know to put the book in context?” Sharpless uses most of the limited space of the foreword acknowledging the uncredited contributors to the cookbook and offering more information about those named in the book. Sharpless is especially – and rightly – critical of the ways that Two Hundred Years erases the contributions of enslaved people, and when it does offer credit, it is usually demeaning and patronizing in its depictions of African American domestic cooks as “magical” and unscientific. Sharpless reminds today’s readers that “It is a book of white nostalgia, not black.” And the final words of the foreword could not be any clearer: “Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking stands as a double monument: to the rich foodways of the Lowcountry and the efforts of White Charlestonians to put a pretty face on White Supremacy.” With this caveat, Sharpless does acknowledge some extraordinary women from Charleston’s elite classes who make significant contributions to the book and have remarkable stories of their own, still waiting to be told.

Sharpless encourages 21st century readers to use the cookbook in their own kitchens; the instructions and ingredients are as accessible today as they would have been in 1930. However, she cautions readers to read the nostalgic textual interludes between recipes with skepticism, and to maintain an attitude of respect for the enslaved and anonymous contributors who made Low Country cuisine into the hot cultural commodity it is today.

Rebecca Sharpless is professor of history at Texas Christian University. She is author of Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms and Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960. Her newest book, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South, is forthcoming from University of North Carolina Press in Spring 2022.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

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Caseen Gaines, "Footnotes: The Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way" (Sourcebooks, 2021) Aug 31, 2021

Caseen Gaines' Footnotes: The Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way (Sourcebooks, 2021) is a rollicking, entertaining, and fascinating cultural history of the 1921 Broadway musical Shuffle Along. Created by Black writers and composers and performed by an all-Black cast, Shuffle Along was one of the early cultural milestones of the Harlem Renaissance, not least because it launched the career of Josephine Baker. While it was beloved in its time, the humor of Shuffle Along came to be seen as offensive in subsequent decades, and it has not been staged in its original form since it closed almost 100 years ago. Gaines makes a compelling case for Shuffle Along's place in the American musical theatre canon as a flawed but inspired work of Black creativity.

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Barrett Holmes Pitner, "The Crime Without a Name: Combatting Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America" (Counterpoint, 2021) Aug 26, 2021

Can new language reshape our understanding of the past and expand the possibilities of the future? The Crime Without a Name: Combatting Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America (Counterpoint, 2021) follows Pitner’s journey to identify and remedy the linguistic void in how we discuss race and culture in the United States. Ethnocide, first coined in 1944 by Jewish exile Raphael Lemkin (who also coined the term “genocide”), describes the systemic erasure of a people’s ancestral culture. For Black Americans, who have endured this atrocity for generations, this erasure dates back to the transatlantic slave trade and reached new resonance in a post-Trump world.

Just as the concept of genocide radically reshaped our perception of human rights in the twentieth century, reframing discussions about race and culture in terms of ethnocide can change the way we understand our diverse and rapidly evolving racial and political climate in a time of increased visibility around police brutality and systemic racism. The Crime Without a Name traces the historical origins of ethnocide in the United States, examines the personal, lived consequences of existing within an ongoing erasure, and offers ways for readers to combat and overcome our country’s ethnocidal foundation.

Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC.

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Ella L. J. Bell Smith and Stella M. Nkomo, "Our Separate Ways: Black and White Women and the Struggle for Professional Identity" (Harvard Business Press, 2021) Aug 26, 2021

Ella L. J. Bell Smith and Stella M. Nkomo, Our Separate Ways: Black and White Women and the Struggle for Professional Identity (Harvard Business Press, 2021)

Ella Bell Smith is a professor of business administration at the Tuck School of Business. She’s also the founder and president of ASCENT: Leading Multicultural Women to the Top. Stella M. Nkomo is a professor in the Department of Human Resource Management at the University of Pretoria. She was the founding president of the Africa Academy of Management.

A “glass ceiling” that holds women back from attaining the top levels of management within a company is a familiar term. But how about a “cement wall”? That’s how these two authors describe the struggle that confronts women of color and often African-American women particularly as they try to rise through the ranks. What black women must deal with is often a lack of both visibility and authority. This episode explores why it is that so little progress has been made so far in the 21st century. While white female professionals now occupy about 1/3rd of all management roles (still not enough), black women’s share amounts to 4%. How can diversity be realized more organically, rather than through a series of lectures that likely won’t “move the needle”? Listen to this episode to find out.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Politics. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Pamela Ayo Yetunde on being Black and Buddhist Aug 25, 2021

What does it mean to be black and Buddhist, and what does that have to do with Life Wisdom? This episode of Life Wisdom features the dynamic work of Pamela Ayo Yetunde, Pastoral Counsellor, Co-Founder of Centre of the Heart, Buddhist Justice Reporter and co-editor of Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Race, Resilience, Transformation, and Freedom.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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LaFleur Stephens-Dougan, "Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Aug 23, 2021

In Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics (U Chicago Press, 2020), LaFleur Stephens-Dougan argues that we focus on the use of negative racial appeals by the Republican Party, while ignoring the incentives that exist for some Democratic candidates to use race as much as, if not more than Republican candidates. The conventional wisdom is that a Democratic candidate would never be incentivized to invoke race and activate negative racial predispositions. Yet, according to the author, Democratic politicians regularly invoke negative stereotypes about African Americans. On numerous occasions President Obama, for example, publicly chastised black audiences. And, while it might seem surprising that a Democratic politician would use rhetoric that disparages their most loyal constituency, Obama is just one of many Democratic politicians who have been criticized for invoking negative stereotypes about African Americans for political gain. Stephens-Dougan explores when and why politicians of both parties will use negative racial appeals.

LaFleur Stephens-Dougan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Princeton University. Her book Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics won the 2021 David O. Sears Best Book on Mass Politics Award from the International Society for Political Psychology, and the 2021 Ralph J. Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association.

Host Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her Cambridge University Press book America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State won the 2021 Education Politics and Policy Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills. She tweets @UrsulaBHackett.

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Carol Anderson, "The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America" (Bloomsbury, 2021) Aug 20, 2021

Throughout American history to the twenty-first century, regardless of the laws, court decisions, and changing political environment, the Second Amendment has consistently meant this: That the second a Black person exercises this right, the second they pick up a gun to protect themselves (or the second that they don't), their life--as surely as Philando Castile's, Tamir Rice's, Alton Sterling's--may be snatched away in that single, fatal second.

In The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America(Bloomsbury, 2021) historian Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second is neither a “pro-gun” nor an “anti-gun” book; the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans.

Through compelling historical narrative merging into the unfolding events of today, Anderson's penetrating investigation shows that the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness, shedding shocking new light on another dimension of racism in America.

Dr. Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of One Person, No Vote, longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award; White Rage, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Bourgeois Radicals; and Eyes off the Prize. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow for Constitutional Studies. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Connect on Twitter @ProfCAnderson

Dr. Lee Pierce (they & she) is Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Communication at State University of New York at Geneseo and host of the podcast RhetoricLee Speaking. Connect with Lee on Twitter, Instagram, and Gmail @rhetoriclee

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Michael Twitty, "Rice: A Savor the South Cookbook" (UNC Press, 2021) Aug 20, 2021

Rice is a central ingredient to Southern foodways, and it is one of the most versatile grains served around the world. It could be prepared as a side dish, an entrée, and dessert; pair it with sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla for a sweet dish or add tomatoes, onions, and peas for a savory meal. In Rice: A Savor the South Cookbook (UNC Press, 2021), Michael Twitty explores the culinary history of rice as he offers 51 recipes of how this grain is found in many culinary cultures including Creole, Acadian, soul food, Low Country, and Gulf Coast. As Twitty states, connects us to everyone and “no other ingredient tastes this much like home.”

N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.

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Adam Henig, "Watergate's Forgotten Hero: Frank Wills, Night Watchman" (McFarland, 2021) Aug 18, 2021

In his new book, Watergate's Forgotten Hero: Frank Wills, Night-Watchman(McFarland & Co., 2021), Adam Henig sheds new light on a widely forgotten but vital actor in the Watergate saga: the twenty-four-year-old security guard was on duty at the Watergate Office Building when he detected a break-in. A high school dropout with only a few hours of formal guard training, Frank Wills alerted the police who caught five burglars, ultimately igniting a national political scandal that ended with the resignation of President Richard Nixon. The only African American identified with the Watergate affair, Wills enjoyed a brief moment in the limelight, but was unable to cope with his newfound fame, living the remainder of his life in obscurity and poverty. Through exhaustive research and numerous interviews, the story of America's most famous night watchman finally has been told.

Adam Henig is an experienced writer and public speaker. His previous books include Alex Haley's Roots: An Author's Odyssey (2014) and Baseball Under Seige: The Yankees, The Cardinals, and a Doctor's Battle to Integrate Spring Training (2016).

E. James West is a research fellow at Northumbria University Newcastle. He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (2020) and the forthcoming A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago (2022).

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Kevin McGruder, "Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem" (Columbia UP, 2021) Aug 13, 2021

What was Harlem before its Renaissance, and how did it come to be? In Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem(Columbia University Press, 2021), historian Kevin McGruder, Associate Professor at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, explores the life of the remarkable Philip Anthony Payton Jr., a real estate entrepreneur who bought building after building at the turn of the 20th century in the core of Harlem, defined as 125th St. to 135th St. between 5th and 8th Avenues. In doing so, McGruder uncovers much about Black life in New York during the period between the Civil War and the Great Migration and makes an important contribution to the history of housing segregation in the United States.

David Hamilton Golland is professor of history, coordinator of humanities, and president of the faculty senate at Governors State University in Chicago's southland. @DHGolland.

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Richard Alba, "The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream" (Princeton UP, 2020) Aug 12, 2021

Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has written an intriguing new book on our understanding of American demographic data, and how we, as citizens, see each other as part of the fabric of the United States. The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream (Princeton UP, 2020) examines the long historical narrative of the experience of immigrants to the United States while also mapping out various forms of data to help us understand the actual experience of immigrants, over time, in the U.S. Part of Alba’s research in this project is highlighting the issue of what kind of assimilation actually happened in the U.S., especially in the post-World War II period. He explains that there was mass assimilation, after World War II, of the children of immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. in the earlier waves of immigration, prior to WWII. But Alba is not only interested in the immigrant experience, what he is really digging into is the experience of those who are not white, or who were not considered white initially but subsequently were seen as white citizens of the U.S. Alba is examining the reality and interrogating the narrative that has come to be associated with particular waves of immigrants to the U.S. In order to unpack the reality of these immigration narratives, Alba is also digging into the demographic data about where people live, who they marry, and the way that children are categorized according to the United States’ census.

The census generates a lot of data, which is used in a host of different ways, including in a traditional political fashion, in the allocation of goods and services. This is not the story that Alba is telling in The Great Demographic Illusion, which is mining the census data to determine what assimilation actually looks like in the U.S., and how citizens perceive themselves, and how they go on to raise their children, where they choose to live, and the kinds of communities to which they are connected. The Great Demographic Illusion also highlights the problems with the census data, in the aggregation of the data that is compiled in the survey, especially in regard to the questions of racial identification. While the census has innovated by expanding the capacity for individuals to indicate more than one race, thus adapting to the individuals who have parents of different races. In order to tease out the problems in the ways that the census data is reported, Alba compared the information from the census in terms of racial identification with what birth certificates indicate about the racial identity of parents of the child; he also compared the census data to the Pew Research data on intermarriage. This really gets at the heart of what Alba is calling the “great demographic illusion” – since the reporting of the census data is indicative of a greater and faster racial change in the country, which Alba has noted is not exactly accurate. Another dimension of the research that Alba finds particularly engaging is the sociological position of these individuals who come from mixed backgrounds, since they are socially flexible in ways that their parents and grandparents were unable to be. This is a sophisticated and multi-dimensional study of what we know, assume, and possibly are misguided about, in regard to the tapestry of the American citizenry and all those who live in the U.S.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Alison Rose Jefferson, "Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites during the Jim Crow Era" (U Nebraska Press, 2020) Aug 09, 2021

Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites During the Jim Crow Era (Nebraska, 2020) is about the places where the past and future meet. Throughout the early twentieth century, African Americans moved to California for jobs, for the beautiful weather and landscapes, and to start futures for themselves and their families. Like their white neighbors, they found sites of play and fun across the Southern California environment, from lakes to beaches to country clubs. Dr. Alison Rose Jefferson, an independent scholar and conservation consultant, describes several instance of place making - imbuing beaches and other locations with meaning and memories for the African Americans across the region - and how whites in Southern California reacted with racist backlash against Black leisure in public places. Jefferson, who has worked closely with various groups in greater Los Angeles to promote public memory of the sites covered in the book, describes how contestation over the meaning of these places has continued into the present day. At its core, this is a book about people having fun, and how people have made meaning, or resisted those meanings, at places where people have always flocked for a good time.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Mark A. Johnson, "Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877-1932" (UP of Mississippi, 2021) Aug 05, 2021

During the nadir of race relations in the United States South from 1877 to 1932, African Americans faced segregation, disfranchisement, and lynching. Among many forms of resistance, African Americans used their musical and theatrical talents to challenge white supremacy, attain economic opportunity, and transcend segregation. In Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877-1932(University Press of Mississippi, 2021), Dr. Mark A. Johnson argues that African Americans, especially performers, retooled negative stereotypes and segregation laws to their advantage. From 1877 to 1932, African Americans spoke at public rallies, generated enthusiasm with music, linked party politics to the memory of the Civil War, honored favorable candidates, and openly humiliated their opposition.

Dr. Mark A. Johnson is Lecturer at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations.

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Ben Railton, "Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) Jul 30, 2021

Ben Railton's book Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) is a cogently written history of the idea of American patriotism. Railton argues that there are four distinct forms of patriotism as practiced in the United States (U.S.) including (1) celebratory, or the communal expression of an idealized America, (2) mythic as based on national myths that exclude specific communities, (3) active, or acts of service and sacrifice for the nation, and (4) critical as expressed in arguments about how the nation has fallen short of its ideals in the interest of bringing the nation towards a more perfect union. He uses the four verses of “America the Beautiful” as a backdrop to illustrate the four versions of American patriotism while tracing the history of the idea from the American Revolution to the 1980s. Railton’s text includes an “Introduction,” eight concise chapters, and a “Conclusion” section.

In the “Introduction,” a robust argument is made for the existence of competing visions of American patriotism. Railton begins here with the story of Army Lt. Colonel and National Security official Alexander Vindman who provided damaging testimony against Donald Trump regarding a call Trump had with the president of the Ukraine. Vindman and his brother were subsequently criticized by Trump and his supporters and removed from their prestigious positions. This story is used as an example to demonstrate the competing forms of patriotism that are at times predicated on acts of service to the nation (such as with military service) or defined by a celebratory patriotism as the author notes, “What underlies such attacks on Vindman’s truth telling as unpatriotic is a definition of patriotism that equates it with a celebration of the nation.” Railton further argues that this “celebratory patriotism in embodied in shared communal rituals” such as with the singling of the national anthem, with hand on heart and hat in hand, reciting the pledge of allegiance, and closing speeches with phrases like “God bless the United States of America.” These are acts that “require from their participants an endorsement of the celebratory vison of the nation.” The remaining chapters outline the various forms of American patriotism over time.

In the first three chapters, the origins of celebratory patriotism in the era of the Revolutionary War, the rise of mythic patriotism in the early nineteenth century, and the emergence of active patriotism in the Civil War Era are discussed. Expressions of celebratory patriotism were produced by Revolutionary Era writers such as Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin who communicated “foundational visions of an ideal America worth fighting for.” During the nineteenth century, mythic patriotism expanded out of events such as the War of 1812 and the creation of the national anthem. This was also a time of reform and “critical patriots” such as David Walker, William Apess, and Maria Sedgwick took the nation to task over issues such as slavery in an attempt to forge a “more inclusive vision of America.” The Civil War Era ensured the further development of critical patriotism as expressed by Frederick Douglass, Lucy Larcom, and Martin Delany.

Ben Railton is Professor of English and Coordinator of American Studies at Fitchburg State, and the author of We the People: The 500 Year Battle of Who is American (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).

Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history.

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Kevin McGruder, "Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem" (Columbia UP, 2021) Jul 29, 2021

Today I talked to Kevin McGruder about his new book Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem (Columbia UP, 2021)

In a moment of hope, even faith, African-Americans inspired by Booker T. Washington believed at the start of the 21st century that prospering financially would lead them to fair and even-standing with their fellow white citizens in America. In that vein, Philip Payton launched the Afro-American Realty Company in 1904 and in doing so took on the big-money crowd. Up against him, for instance, was the Hudson Realty Company that numbered among its backers the Bloomingdale family. To an amazing extent, Payton managed in his short life to engineer real estate deals that made Harlem the home base for many of the African-Americans coming north in the Great Migration of the World War One era. Was it an entirely smooth journey for Payton? No, it wasn’t—as McGruder points out in this episode that brings into account “racial capitalism” and the looming shadow of Woodrow Wilson’s divisive approach to race relations.

Kevin McGruder is an associate professor of history at Antioch College. He’s also the author of Race and Real Estate and in the 1990s was the director of real estate development for the Abyssinian Development Corporation, a nonprofit church-based organization in Harlem.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Christopher J. Lee, "Kwame Anthony Appiah" (Routledge, 2021) Jul 28, 2021

Kwame Anthony Appiah is among the most respected philosophers and thinkers of his generation. In Kwame Anthony Appiah (Routledge, 2021), Christopher Lee introduces the reader not only to the contributions that Appiah has made to some central debates of our time, but also to the complex personal and intellectual history that shaped his ideas. Born in Ghana to an African father and a British mother, Appiah has spent his life straddling multiple worlds. He was educated as a philosopher at Cambridge University and later moved to the United States where he has occupied several prestigious academic positions. As Lee explains, Appiah’s major contribution has been to critically question the ideologies and identities that may enable or prevent individuals to operate in a world where one is constantly moving across geographic and cultural boundaries. What is identity? What are the historical and ideological underpinnings of concepts such as race and culture? How do they affect our decisions about how to live in the world? What do we owe people who are not like us? In addition to being a clear and concise guide through Appiah’s ideas, Lee offers a rich and nuanced intellectual biography, locating Appiah in the broader history of African thinkers, moral philosophy and liberalism.

Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University.

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Anthony Q. Hazard, "Boasians at War: Anthropology, Race, and World War II" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) Jul 28, 2021

The realities of race that continue to plague the United States have direct ties to the anthropology. Anthropologists often imagine their discipline as inherently anti-racist and historically connected to social justice movements. But just how true is that? In Boasians at War: Anthropology, Race, and World War II(Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) Anthony Hazard examines the work of Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Ashley Montagu, Margaret Mead, and Melville Herskovits to examine the ways they did -- or didn't -- theorize the emergence of racism as both systemic and interpersonal. Putting their work in the context of the black freedom struggle, Hazard evaluates the ways in which these anthropologists engaged racism both in the discipline of anthropology and in the wider world.

In this episode of the podcast, hose Alex Golub sits down with Tony and has a frank talk about the strengths and weaknesses of some of American cultural anthropology's key figures. They also discuss some 'meta' questions, including how we should judge people who lived in a different time and different context from us, and where the line between 'ally' and 'co-conspirator' as anthropologists and other academics take their moral sensibilities outside the academy and into the broader world.

Associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

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Jeffery A. Jenkins and Justin Peck, "Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861-1918" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Jul 26, 2021

Jeffrey Jenkins and Justin Peck’s new book Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861-1918 (U Chicago Press, 2021) explores how Congressional Republicans enacted laws aimed at establishing an inclusive, multiracial democracy. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, Congress crafted a civil rights agenda -- including laws, strict enforcement mechanisms, and Constitutional amendments that (for a brief time) enabled Black Americans to vote, sit on juries, and exercise other civil rights. Using a rich collection of data, the book documents how the Republican coalitions that passed and enforced civil rights weakened because of GOP political weakness in the South, shifts in the political preferences of Northern voters, and lack of GOP unity over core assumptions. Jenkins and Peck offer a Congress-centered American political development perspective to understand how Republicans built civil rights yet subsequently undermined the nascent multiracial democracy that their civil rights agenda helped make possible. The book focuses on the conflict within the Republican Party and electoral trends to argue that “policy enactments are a consequence of, and a window into, evolving attitudes about civil rights.” The book’s granular political history demonstrates how legal institutions -- created by majoritarian bodies like Congress -- liberated and protected an oppressed class of citizens but also reasserted the power of the white majority.

Dr. Jeffery A. Jenkins is Provost Professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Law, Judith & John Bedrosian Chair of Governance and the Public Enterprise, Director of the Bedrosian Center, and Director of the Political Institutions and Political Economy (PIPE) Collaborative at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy.

Dr. Justin Peck is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Wesleyan University. In addition to his work on Congress and Civil Rights, he is engaged in a project that seeks to understand how the United States’ role in international affairs leads to the production of new political ideas and to the reform of domestic political institutions.

Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. “BLM versus #BLM:The Dangers of the New Armed Rebellion Narrative” was recently published as part of the Brennan Center for Justice’s series on Protest, Insurrection, and the Second Amendment and “Sensitive Places: Originalism, Gender, and the Myth Self-Defense in District of Columbia v. Heller” appeared in July 2021’s Polity. Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

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Adam Lee Cilli, "Canaan, Dim and Far: Black Reformers and the Pursuit of Citizenship in Pittsburgh, 1915-1945" (U Georgia Press, 2021) Jul 26, 2021

Adam Lee Cilli's book Canaan, Dim and Far: Black Reformers and the Pursuit of Citizenship in Pittsburgh, 1915-1945(U Georgia Press, 2021) is an assiduously researched book about the activism of African American reformers and migrants in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from 1915 to 1945. Adam Cilli argues that Pittsburgh is central to the story of the Black freedom struggle in the North and the nation as a whole. “Pittsburgh represents a crucial site for illuminating how reformers maneuvered within a political culture driven by industrial capitalism and informed by white supremacist rhetorics,” states Cilli in the opening section of his narrative. Migrants also played a significant role in this story and they made up “two-thirds of all African Americans in Pittsburgh by 1930.” Cilli further argues that although the middle-class reformers defined the “major social justice campaigns of the day,” it was the Black migrants who gave these initiatives “shape and force.” In this text, the author illustrates how a host of journalists, trade unionists, workers, lawyers, scholars and medical professionals advanced the struggle for Black equality in an urban setting. With an “Introduction,” more than thirty illustrations, seven chapters, and a “Conclusion” section, Cilli traces the social, intellectual and cultural history of Black Pittsburgh.

The first two chapters “The Ugliest, Deadest Town: Migrants and Reformers in the Steel City, 1915-1929” and “A Healthy and Prosperous Race: The Urban League of Pittsburgh and the Struggle for Jobs, Housing, and Health, 1915-1929” cover the Great Migration to Pittsburgh, housing and settlement patterns of the Black community in Pittsburgh, and the role of the National Urban League in Black middle-class reform. Cilli introduces a cast of characters and associations in these first two chapters key to his narrative including Reverend James Simmons, Bartow Tipper, and Robert L. Vann. Pittsburgh’s Urban League was critical in supporting the social needs of the new Black migrants as assessed in Chapter Two.

Chapter Three “The Weapons of Legal Defense: The Pittsburgh NAACP and the Criminal Justice System, 1924-1934” and Chapter Four “The Ranks of the New Army: The Pittsburgh Courier and the Fight for Political Power and National Recognition, 1929-1933” focus on the strategy of legal defense as espoused by the NAACP and the work of newspaperman Robert L. Vann respectively. Chapter Three opens with a discussion of the mass arrest of Black migrants at a house party. These migrants were asked to pay a sum of $2.50 per person to the police but some like Joe Williams and his wife Mildred did not pay and were carted off to jail. These were the type of cases that interested the Pittsburgh NAACP. While in Chapter Four, Cilli concentrates on the key role of Vann in using the Pittsburgh Courier to advance Black social justice claims.

The final three chapters focus on educational reform, the labor movement, and Black equality in the New Deal Era. Pittsburgh’s Urban League continued to play a role in providing “educational outreach services” for African American students in city schools as detailed in Chapter Five. Black trade unionists began to organize in earnest during the 1930s and began to meet and strategize in Pittsburgh as Cilli notes in Chapter Six. While in Chapter Seven, the assessment of African Americans and their quest for equal employment equity is further analyzed.

In Canaan, Dim and Far, Cilli presents his readers with a comprehensive survey of the centrality of Pittsburgh in the Black freedom struggle while offering a more nuanced interpretation of the Black elite and racial uplift ideology in the process. This text is an important historical intervention in African American history in terms of the author’s coverage of key associations such as the NAACP and Urban League, labor activism, and Black newspaper history.

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Andre E. Johnson, "No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry Mcneal Turner" (U Mississippi Press, 2020) Jul 26, 2021

No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner(U Mississippi Press, 2020) is a history of the career of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (1834–1915), specifically focusing on his work from 1896 to 1915. Drawing on the copious amount of material from Turner’s speeches, editorial, and open and private letters, Dr. Andre E. Johnson tells a story of how Turner provided rhetorical leadership during a period in which America defaulted on many of the rights and privileges gained for African Americans during Reconstruction. Unlike many of his contemporaries during this period, Turner did not opt to proclaim an optimistic view of race relations. Instead, Johnson argues that Turner adopted a prophetic persona of a pessimistic prophet who not only spoke truth to power but, in so doing, also challenged and pushed African Americans to believe in themselves.

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Andre E. Johnson, PhD is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies in the Department of Communication and Film and the Scholar in Residence at the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis. Connect on Twitter @aejohnsonphd

Lee M. Pierce, PhD is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of Communication at SUNY Geneseo and host of the RhetoricLee Speaking podcast. Connect on Twitter @rhetoriclee

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Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, "Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games" (UP of Mississippi, 2021) Jul 22, 2021

Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote that “the silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world.” Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall’s Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games (University Press of Mississippi, 2021) illustrates how this holds true not just in the writing of historical narratives but also the history of film. The book shows how one of the most important revolutions in world history, a revolt in which enslaved people fought for their freedom and created the first majority Black and post-slavery republic, has been silenced, ridiculed, or whitewashed by American and European film makers. She introduces us to Haitian directors such as Raoul Peck who want to tell their own story, free of white saviors but with the full horrors of slavery. The book takes some surprising turns. It turns out video games such as Assassins’ Creed do a better job at recreating the resistance of enslaved people than most films. Sepinwall also finds an unexpected hero in comedian Chris Rock. His Top Five contains a subplot about a fictionalized version of Rock trying to promote his film about the Haitian Revolution to white journalists who can't even understand the concept of a slave revolt.

Dr. Sepinwall, who earned her doctorate at Stanford, is a professor of history at California State University San Marcos. Her previous books include The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism and Haitian History: New Perspectives. She also has a number of articles in journals and edited collections such as Journal of Modern History, Journal of Haitian Studies, Journal of American Culture, and Raoul Peck: Power, Politics, and the Cinematic Imagination. In the interests of full disclosure, she is one of my favorite collaborators and we co-edited a volume of the World History Bulletin on France in world history.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Theodore W. Cohen, "Finding Afro-Mexico: Race and Nation after the Revolution" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Jul 21, 2021

In Finding Afro-Mexico: Race and Nation after the Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020) Theodore Cohen examines the ways in which different protagonists sought to incorporate Blackness into Mexican national identity. After the Revolution in 1910, a group of intellectuals, researchers, and cultural producers elaborated on the meanings of Blackness as an important component through which to unite Mexico as a democratic society. These figures focused on creating music, images, ethnographic accounts, and performances to render Blackness spatially, socially, culturally, and physically in the Mexican imagination. Yet, the book moves beyond national boundaries by tying Mexico to larger transnational networks of the African Diaspora. Overall, Finding Afro-Mexico moves beyond a narrative of Black disappearance or invisibility to illuminate the many figures who sought to unearth, articulate, and insist on the presence of Black people, history, and culture in Mexico and its national identity.

Theodore W. Cohen is an Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Southern Illinois University.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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Deborah Willis, "The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship" (NYU Press, 2021) Jul 21, 2021

Photography emerged in the 1840s in the United States, and it became a visual medium that documents the harsh realities of enslavement. Similarly, the photography culture grew during the Civil War, and it became an important material that archived this unprecedented war. Deborah Willis's The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (New York University Press, 2021) contains rarely seen letters and diary notes from Black men and women and photographs of Black soldiers who fought and died in this war. These ninety-nine images reshape African American narratives. The Black Civil War Soldier offers an opportunity to experience the war through their perspectives.

N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.

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Philip Butler, "Critical Black Futures: Speculative Theories and Explorations" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) Jul 21, 2021

Critical Black Futures: Speculative Theories and Explorations(Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), edited by Dr. Philip Butler, imagines worlds, afrofutures, cities, bodies, art and eras that are simultaneously distant, parallel, present, counter, and perpetually materializing. From an exploration of W. E. B. Du Bois’ own afrofuturistic short stories, to trans* super fluid blackness, this volume challenges readers—community leaders, academics, communities, and creatives—to push further into surreal imaginations. Beyond what some might question as the absurd, this book is presented as a speculative space that looks deeply into the foundations of human belief. Diving deep into this notional rabbit hole, each contributor offers a thorough excursion into the imagination to discover ‘what was’, while also providing tools to push further into the ‘not yet’.

Nicole Powell is a J.D. Candidate in the Critical Race Studies specialization at the UCLA School of Law.

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Kevin Waite, "West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire" (UNC Press, 2021) Jul 21, 2021

The geography of American slavery was continental, argues Dr. Kevin Waite, an assistant professor at Durham University, in West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire (UNC Press, 2021). Rather than being confined to the South, the institution of slavery infected North America as the American empire expanded across the Mississippi River, including places often thought of as "free" states, such as California. Slaveholders saw territories in the far West as zones of political control, supportive of slavery in the South even when relatively small numbers of people were actually held in bondage in these places. Waite's history shifts how historians view the coming of the Civil War and the expansion of slavery - rather than quarantined, the "slave power" moved along railroads and roads, through networks of patronage and through alternate forms of unfreedom, such as peonage. The Civil War and Reconstruction are similarly continental events when viewed through this lens. Waite's book is a comprehensive examination of how southern elites saw their future, and in this way is an excellent example of historical contingency put into action.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Syl Sobel and Jay Rosenstein, "Boxed Out of the NBA: Remembering the Eastern Professional Basketball League" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021) Jul 16, 2021

The Eastern Professional Basketball League (1946-78) was fast and physical, often played in tiny, smoke-filled gyms across the northeast and featuring the best players who just couldn’t make the NBA—many because of unofficial quotas on Black players, some because of scandals, and others because they weren’t quite good enough in the years when the NBA had less than 100 players.

In Boxed out of the NBA: Remembering the Eastern Professional Basketball League (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), Syl Sobel and Jay Rosenstein tell the fascinating story of a league that was a pro basketball institution for over 30 years, showcasing top players from around the country. During the early years of professional basketball, the Eastern League was the next-best professional league in the world after the NBA. It was home to big-name players such as Sherman White, Jack Molinas, and Bill Spivey, who were implicated in college gambling scandals in the 1950s and were barred from the NBA, and top Black players such as Hal “King” Lear, Julius McCoy, and Wally Choice, who could not make the NBA into the early 1960s due to unwritten team quotas on African-American players.

Featuring interviews with some 40 former Eastern League coaches, referees, fans, and players—including Syracuse University coach Jim Boeheim, former Temple University coach John Chaney, former Detroit Pistons player and coach Ray Scott, former NBA coach and ESPN analyst Hubie Brown, and former NBA player and coach Bob Weiss—this book provides an intimate, first-hand account of small-town professional basketball at its best.

Paul Knepper used to cover the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in September 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Ariana Brown, "We Are Owed." (Grieveland Press, 2021) Jul 16, 2021

Poet Ariana Brown searches for new origins in her debut book We Are Owed.(Grieveland Press, 2021).Brown has had over ten years of experience writing, performing, and teaching poetry that struggles towards freedom for all Black peoples. She identifies on her website as a “queer Black Mexican American poet” whose lived experiences within anti-Black cultures and societies have forced her to spin language into liberation. We Are Owed. achieves that goal by centering scenes of Black Mexican American life, history, and feeling. The title is a call to action, a demand, a recognition, a reparation, a reorientation, and a reclamation. Brown ushers in a new grammar that reaches beyond nation and builds from the foundational understanding that colonial and neocolonial nation-states, and the theory of borderlands set forth by Anzaldúa, are limiting to Black peoples.

Jonathan Cortez is currently the 2021-2023 César Chávez Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College.

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Ken Ellingwood, "First to Fall: Elijah Lovejoy and the Fight for a Free Press in the Age of Slavery" (Pegasus Books, 2021) Jul 16, 2021

In First to Fall: Elijah Lovejoy and the Fight for a Free Press in the Age of Slavery (Pegasus Books, 2021), Ken Ellingwood takes readers back to the first true test of the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech and a free press through the story of abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy. The story unfolds during the 1830s, a period known for legal efforts to silence the abolitionist movement by states across the South and violent mobs who picked up that charge when the government could not. Lovejoy pushed back against both of those forces and ultimately succumbed to them, becoming a martyr for the abolitionist movement and a wakeup call about how essential a free press was to a free country and a thriving democracy in America.

Lovejoy's story is worth revisiting now at time when attacks against journalists are again on the rise and the press is considered by some to be the "enemy of the people." Ellingwood does a wonderful job of capturing it in this book and bringing this important time in American history to light.

Ken Ellingwood is an award-winning journalist, Ken Ellingwood has been posted in the San Diego, Mexico City, Jerusalem, and Atlanta bureaus of the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of the critically acclaimed (and prescient) work of investigative journalism Hard Line: Life and Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border. He currently lives in Abu Dhabi.

Jenna Spinelle is an instructor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast.

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Sebastian N. Page, "Black Resettlement and the American Civil War" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Jul 12, 2021

Based on sweeping research in six languages, Sebastian N. Page's Black Resettlement and the American Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2021) offers the first comprehensive, comparative account of nineteenth-century America's greatest road not taken: the mass resettlement of African Americans outside the United States. Building on resurgent scholarly interest in the so-called 'colonization' movement, the book goes beyond tired debates about colonization's place in the contest over slavery, and beyond the familiar black destinations of Liberia, Canada, and Haiti. Striding effortlessly from Pittsburgh to Panama, Toronto to Trinidad, and Lagos to Louisiana, it synthesizes a wealth of individual, state-level, and national considerations to reorient the field and set a new standard for Atlantic history. Along the way, it shows that what haunted politicians from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln was not whether it was right to abolish slavery, but whether it was safe to do so unless the races were separated.

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Martin Summers, "Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions" (Oxford UP, 2019) Jul 07, 2021

From the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, Saint Elizabeths Hospital was one of the United States' most important institutions for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Founded in 1855 to treat insane soldiers and sailors as well as civilian residents in the nation's capital, the institution became one of the country's preeminent research and teaching psychiatric hospitals. From the beginning of its operation, Saint Elizabeths admitted black patients, making it one of the few American asylums to do so.

Martin Summers' book Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions (Oxford UP, 2019) is a history of the hospital and its relationship to Washington, DC's African American community. It charts the history of Saint Elizabeths from its founding to the late-1980s, when the hospital's mission and capabilities changed as a result of deinstitutionalization, and its transfer from the federal government to the District of Columbia. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including patient case files, the book demonstrates how race was central to virtually every aspect of the hospital's existence, from the ways in which psychiatrists understood mental illness and employed therapies to treat it to the ways that black patients experienced their institutionalization. The book argues that assumptions about the existence of distinctive black and white psyches shaped the therapeutic and diagnostic regimes in the hospital and left a legacy of poor treatment of African American patients, even after psychiatrists had begun to reject racialist conceptions of the psyche. Yet black patients and their communities asserted their own agency and exhibited a "rights consciousness" in large and small ways, from agitating for more equal treatment to attempting to manage the therapeutic experience.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Erin R. Pineda, "Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement" (Oxford UP, 2021) Jul 07, 2021

There are few movements more firmly associated with civil disobedience than the Civil Rights Movement. In the mainstream imagination, civil rights activists eschewed coercion, appealed to the majority's principles, and submitted willingly to legal punishment in order to demand necessary legislative reforms and facilitate the realization of core constitutional and democratic principles. Their fidelity to the spirit of the law, commitment to civility, and allegiance to American democracy set the normative standard for liberal philosophies of civil disobedience.

This narrative offers the civil disobedience of the Civil Rights Movement as a moral exemplar: a blueprint for activists who seek transformative change and racial justice within the bounds of democracy. Yet in this book, Erin R. Pineda shows how it more often functions as a disciplining example—a means of scolding activists and quieting dissent. As Pineda argues, the familiar account of Civil Rights disobedience not only misremembers history; it also distorts our political judgments about how civil disobedience might fit into democratic politics.

Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement(Oxford UP, 2021) charts the emergence of this influential account of civil disobedience in the Civil Rights Movement, and demonstrates its reliance on a narrative about black protest that is itself entangled with white supremacy. Liberal political theorists whose work informed decades of scholarship saw civil disobedience "like a white state": taking for granted the legitimacy of the constitutional order, assuming as primary the ends of constitutional integrity and stability, centering the white citizen as the normative ideal, and figuring the problem of racial injustice as limited, exceptional, and all-but-already solved. Instead, this book "sees" civil disobedience from the perspective of an activist, showing the consequences for ideas about how civil disobedience ought to unfold in the present. Building on historical and archival evidence, Pineda shows how civil rights activists, in concert with anticolonial movements across the globe, turned to civil disobedience as a practice of decolonization in order to emancipate themselves and others, and in the process transform the racial order. Pineda recovers this powerful alternative account by adopting a different theoretical approach—one which sees activists as themselves engaged in the creative work of political theorizing.

Tejas Parasher is Junior Research Fellow in Political Thought and Intellectual History at King’s College, University of Cambridge.

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Funké Aladejebi, "Schooling the System: A History of Black Women Teachers" (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021) Jul 07, 2021

In post-World War II Canada, black women’s positions within the teaching profession served as sites of struggle and conflict as the nation worked to address the needs of its diversifying population. From their entry into teachers’ college through their careers in the classroom and administration, black women educators encountered systemic racism and gender barriers at every step. So they worked to change the system.

Using oral narratives to tell the story of black access and education in Ontario between the 1940s and the 1980s, Schooling the System provides textured insight into how issues of race, gender, class, geographic origin, and training shaped women’s distinct experiences within the profession.

In Schooling the System: A History of Black Women Teachers (McGill-Queen's UP, 2021), Funké Aladejebi illustrates that black women, as a diverse group, made vital contributions to the creation and development of anti-racist education in Canada. As cultural mediators within Ontario school systems, these women circumvented subtle and overt forms of racial and social exclusion to create resistive teaching methods that centred black knowledges and traditions. Within their wider communities and activist circles, they fought to change entrenched ideas about what Canadian citizenship should look like.

As schools continue to grapple with creating diverse educational programs for all Canadians, Schooling the System is a timely excavation of the meaningful contributions of black women educators who helped create equitable policies and practices in schools and communities.

Pamela Fuentes is an Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Pace University-NYC campus

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Elizabeth Hinton, "America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since The 1960s" (Liveright, 2021) Jul 06, 2021

In America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellions since the 1960s (Liveright, 2021) Dr. Elizabeth Hinton asserts the significance of Black rebellions in post-civil rights America, arguing that the riots were indeed rebellions or political acts in response to the failures and unfulfilled promises of the Civil Rights period. She investigates an overlooked trend of Black uprisings emanating from poor and working-class Black neighborhoods, towns, and cities often sparked by police terror between 1964 and 1972. In refuting the racist pathologies that community violence in response to racist policing and economic disinvestment has been assigned by commissions, politicians, liberals and conservatives alike, Hinton presents a redefinition through the analytic of rebellion that enhances our understanding of resistance to anti-Blackness and policing today.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the grassroots movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall

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Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs, "The Digital Black Atlantic" (U Minnesota Press, 2021) Jul 05, 2021

How can scholars use digital tools to better understand the African diaspora across time, space, and disciplines? And how can African diaspora studies inform the practices of digital humanities? These questions are at the heart of this timely collection of essays about the relationship between digital humanities and Black Atlantic studies, offering critical insights into race, migration, media, and scholarly knowledge production.

The Digital Black Atlantic (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) spans the African diaspora’s range—from Africa to North America, Europe, and the Caribbean—while its essayists span academic fields—from history and literary studies to musicology, game studies, and library and information studies. This transnational and interdisciplinary breadth is complemented by essays that focus on specific sites and digital humanities projects throughout the Black Atlantic. Covering key debates, The Digital Black Atlantic asks theoretical and practical questions about the ways that researchers and teachers of the African diaspora negotiate digital methods to explore a broad range of cultural forms including social media, open access libraries, digital music production, and video games. The volume further highlights contributions of African diaspora studies to digital humanities, such as politics and representation, power and authorship, the ephemerality of memory, and the vestiges of colonialist ideologies.

Grounded in contemporary theory and praxis, The Digital Black Atlantic puts the digital humanities into conversation with African diaspora studies in crucial ways that advance both.

Digital Black Atlantic projects and a journal referenced in the interview:

sx: a small literary salon
Sonya Donaldson's Singing into the Nation
Kaiama Glover and Alex Gil's In the Same Boats
Schuler Espirit's Create Caribbean
Roopika Risam's The Global Du Bois Project

Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis and the author of The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

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Luiz Valerio de Paula Trindade, "No Laughing Matter: Race Joking and Resistance in Brazilian Social Media" (Vernon Press, 2020) Jul 02, 2021

No Laughing Matter: Race Joking and Resistance in Brazilian Social Media (Vernon Press, 2020) examines the social phenomenon of construction and dissemination of colonial-like racist discourses fostered against upwardly-mobile black women through disparagement humour on social media platforms, adopting a fresh and innovative perspective. In this book, Luiz Valério P. Trindade explores the idea that disparagement humour might not be as exempt of social impact as the jokers might believe, and that, in fact, this kind of humour reveals the hidden facet of deep-seated colonial ideologies still present in Brazilian society despite being hailed as a unique model of a post-racial society. The author argues that these ideologies establish and naturalise superior social positions and symbolic privileges to whites while undermining and delegitimising black women's upward social mobility. Social media platforms enable the proponents of these beliefs not only to engage in the practice of online hate speech but also to attract a considerable number of like-minded people, creating a long-lasting echo chamber effect in the cyberspace. This way, they manage to amplify the reach and reverberation of their racist discourses in the online environment in ways not commonly seen in Brazilian offline social contexts.

Candela Marini is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Spanish at MSOE University.

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Kevin Quashie, "Black Aliveness, Or a Poetics of Being" (Duke UP, 2021) Jun 30, 2021

In Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (Duke University Press, 2012), Kevin Quashie imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in the face of the persistence of death in Black life and Black study. Centrally, Quashie theorizes aliveness through the aesthetics of poetry, reading poetic inhabitance in Black feminist literary texts by Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Evie Shockley, among others, showing how their philosophical and creative thinking constitutes worldmaking. This worldmaking conceptualizes Blackness as capacious, relational beyond the normative terms of recognition—Blackness as a condition of oneness. Reading for poetic aliveness, then, becomes a means of exploring Black being rather than nonbeing and animates the ethical question “how to be.” In this way, Quashie offers a Black feminist philosophy of being, which is nothing less than a philosophy of the becoming of the Black world.

Dr. Kevin Quashie (he/his) is a professor in the department of English at Brown University. He is the author or editor of four books, including Black Aliveness and The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2012). His studying now is organized by the phrase "a book of black ideas."

Dr. Lee Pierce (they & she) is Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Communication at State University of New York at Geneseo and host of the podcast RhetoricLee Speaking. Connect with Lee on Twitter, Instagram, and Gmail @rhetoriclee

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Van Gosse, "The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2021) Jun 30, 2021

It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential black electoral politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War, for as of 1860, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily increased their influence in electoral politics over the course of the early American republic. Despite efforts to disfranchise them, black men voted across much of the North, sometimes in numbers sufficient to swing elections. In The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (UNC Press, 2021), Van Gosse offers a sweeping reappraisal of the formative era of American democracy from the Constitution's ratification through Abraham Lincoln's election, chronicling the rise of an organized, visible black politics focused on the quest for citizenship, the vote, and power within the free states.

Full of untold stories and thorough examinations of political battles, this book traces a First Reconstruction of black political activism following emancipation in the North. From Portland, Maine and New Bedford, Massachusetts to Brooklyn and Cleveland, black men operated as voting blocs, denouncing the notion that skin color could define citizenship.

Jessica Georges is a third year history PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center.

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Badia Ahad-legardy, "Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture" (U Illinois Press, 2021) Jun 23, 2021

Nostalgia has received increasing attention for its role in shaping contemporary social and political life in the United States. Dr. Badia Ahad-Legardy distinguishes Afro-Nostalgia as a framework to think about the relationship between affect, black historical memory, and joy. Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2021) mines black aesthetic practices that return to the past to generate good feelings for black audiences and makers. The past is not always available for black people as a site of good feelings, when one considers the realities of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and racial inequality. Yet, contemporary cultural producers explore nostalgia through the subjects of slavery, food, visual culture, and music. Ahad-Legardy weaves together personal reflections and analyzes an eclectic archive to show how black people can turn to the past as a foundation from which to build hope for the present and future. She shows that despite the real traumas of the past and present for African Americans, nostalgia has the capacity to produce black joy.

Dr. Badia Ahad-Legardy is a Professor in the Department of English and Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at Loyola University Chicago. She is also the author of Freud Upside Down: African American Literature and Psychoanalytic Culture from the University of Illinois Press.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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Timothy D. Walker, "Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021) Jun 22, 2021

More than 70 percent of the 103 pre-Emancipation slave narratives acknowledged using waterways as their method for escaping enslavement. However, much of the scholarship on the Underground Railroad has centered on land routes. Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021) convincing asserts the role of maritime escapes as part of the Underground Railroad during the antebellum era. The ten essays in this volume bring together scholars at various stages of their careers, examines how enslaved people traveled by sea to seek freedom. This critical volume offers a new component to escape routes, recasting Underground Railroad scholarship

Readers interested in the book may use the promo code MAS022, which is good for 30 percent off the book’s cover price and free shipping when purchased through the University of Massachusetts Press website.

N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.

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Sean Guynes and Martin Lund, "Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics" (Ohio State UP, 2020) Jun 17, 2021

In Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics (Ohio State UP, 2020), Sean Guynes and Martin Lund have assembled more than fifteen chapters that interrogate our thinking about superheroes, especially those written and created in the United States, and how those heroes participate in reifying the whiteness of American politics, culture, and worldview. Even as we have seen attempts to diversify the representation within the superhero genre, there is a continued reinscribing of the normative whiteness that frames not only the narratives themselves, but the ideas and images conveyed by the authors, artists, and producers of these works. As Lund and Guynes note, much analysis has been done about the superheroes, especially paying attention to those heroes who deviate from the norm in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. But what has been missing in a great deal of the scholarship is an analysis of the predominant whiteness of superheroes and how the constructed narrative of the genre, of defeating a threat to a particular way of life, country, people, continues to reaffirm the overarching whiteness of this genre. As Lund noted in conversation, the marquee superheroes are unhyphenated, they are simply the normal, everyday superhero, and they are also, by default, white. Whereas Black, or LatinX superheroes are classified as such, and they are thus distinguished from the “normal” superhero.

It is not only the characters themselves, in the panels, but also the structure of the story that complies with an understanding of whiteness, and a hierarchy that is often racially structured. The superhero is tasked with fighting for the “good” – but who defines that good, and who benefits from that preserved good? This very understanding of the job of the superhero, to fight for “truth, justice, and the American way” builds on the basis that truth is the same for all members of the society, justice is equally distributed, and the American way is quite clear. Except that none of these are accurate depictions of the reality for those living in the United States (or elsewhere). How we discuss the goals that the superheroes pursue is tied into what it is that we anticipate being restored by a superhero who confronts an enemy. The chapters in Unstable Masks explore this dynamic, focusing on the exceptions as well as those who make up the vast majority of this imaginary space, examining how whiteness informs the understanding of the superhero. The contributing authors not only examine different superheroes at different periods, but they also reach back to examine the way that the superhero genre fits within the American cultural and literary tradition of the western, detective fiction, and the conquest of the frontier where individuals imposed “law and order” on “ungoverned” or “unstable” parts of the continent.

This is a fascinating collection; taken together, this edited volume an impressive consideration of the superhero genre, those who created these characters, and the audiences who consume and interact with these ideas.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Todne Thomas, "Kincraft: The Making of Black Evangelical Sociality" (Duke UP, 2021) Jun 16, 2021

Kincraft: The Making of Black Evangelical Sociality (Duke University Press, 2021) by Todne Thomas takes a deep dive into the social and religious lives of two black evangelical churches in the Atlanta metro area. Thomas ethnographically renders the ways in which black evangelicals engage in a process of producing kin or crafting relatedness through bible study, socializing, talking, and forming prayer partnerships. She argues that they produce kincraft or construct themselves as brothers and sisters in Christ. In so doing, they "closed the gap between the presumably 'real' family relationships of biology and those of spiritual kin" (3). Examining the lives and activities of black evangelicals illuminates these communities which are often obscured by evangelicals who are racialized as white and the protestant orientation associated with the black church. Outlining the processes through which black evangelicals make kin, calls into question ideas of fictive kinship, a concept commonly used to characterize kinship ties that are not biological or through marriage. Kincraft locates black evangelicals and their practices of kinship formation at the center of their own story.

Todne Thomas is an Assistant Professor of African American Religions in the Harvard Divinity School.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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Claudrena N. Harold, "When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras" (U Illinois Press, 2020) Jun 16, 2021

Gospel music evolved in often surprising directions during the post-Civil Rights era. Claudrena N. Harold's in-depth look at late-century gospel, When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras (U Illinois Press, 2020), focuses on musicians like Yolanda Adams, Andraé Crouch, the Clark Sisters, Al Green, Take 6, and the Winans, and on the network of black record shops, churches, and businesses that nurtured the music. Harold details the creative shifts, sonic innovations, theological tensions, and political assertions that transformed the music, and revisits the debates within the community over groundbreaking recordings and gospel's incorporation of rhythm and blues, funk, hip-hop, and other popular forms. At the same time, she details how sociopolitical and cultural developments like the Black Power Movement and the emergence of the Christian Right shaped both the art and attitudes of African American performers. Weaving insightful analysis into a collective biography of gospel icons, When Sunday Comes explores the music's essential place as an outlet for African Americans to express their spiritual and cultural selves.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Bob Kuska and Archie Clark, "Shake and Bake: The Life and Times of NBA Great Archie Clark" (U Nebraska Press, 2021) Jun 14, 2021

Shake and Bake is the story of Archie Clark, one of the top playmaking guards in the 1970s pre-merger NBA. While not one of the game’s most recognized superstars, Clark was a seminal player in NBA history who staggered defenders with the game’s greatest crossover dribble (“shake and bake”) and is credited by his peers as the originator of today’s popular step-back move.

Signed as the Lakers third-round draft pick in 1966, Clark worked his way into the starting lineup in his rookie year. But Clark was more than a guaranteed double-double whenever he stepped on the floor. He was a deep-thinking trailblazer for players’ rights. Clark often challenged coaches and owners on principle, much to the detriment of his career and NBA legacy, signing on as a named litigant in the seminal Robertson v. NBA antitrust case that smashed the player reserve system and jump-started the modern NBA.

Paul Knepper used to cover the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in September 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Amaka Okechukwu, "To Fulfill These Rights: Political Struggle Over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions" (Columbia UP, 2019) Jun 11, 2021

In 2014 and 2015, students at dozens of colleges and universities held protests demanding increased representation of Black and Latino students and calling for a campus climate that was less hostile to students of color. Their activism recalled an earlier era: in the 1960s and 1970s, widespread campus protest by Black and Latino students contributed to the development of affirmative action and open admissions policies. Yet in the decades since, affirmative action has become a magnet for conservative backlash and in many cases has been completely dismantled.

In To Fulfill These Rights: Political Struggle Over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions (Columbia University Press, 2019), Amaka Okechukwu offers a historically informed sociological account of the struggles over affirmative action and open admissions in higher education. Through case studies of policy retrenchment at public universities, she documents the protracted―but not always successful―rollback of inclusive policies in the context of shifting race and class politics. To Fulfill These Rights provides a new analysis of the politics of higher education, centering the changing understandings and practices of race and class in the United States.

Amaka Okechukwu is an Assistant Professor of sociology at George Mason University.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Jamila Lyiscott, "Black Appetite. White Food. Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom" (Routledge, 2019) Jun 10, 2021

One year to the day after George Flloyd’s murder, Dr. Jamila Lyiscott discusses her book on racial justice in education: Black Appetite. White Food. Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom(Routledge, 2019)A community-engaged scholar-activist, nationally renowned speaker and spoken word artist, Assistant Professor of Social Justice Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and founding co-director of its new Center for Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research, Lyiscott—who may also invite you to call her Dr. J, if you’re cool—offers educators support for thinking and acting on issues of race, language, and the colonial logics that maintain white supremacy at the expense of Black wholeness through the lens of what she calls “Vision-Driven Justice.”

Personal stories, scholarly citations, original poetry, choice excerpts of literature, and theoretical as well as applied analyses are written in the author’s flow of American Standard English, American Black English, and Carribbean Creolized English to manifest Black Appetite. White Food. The result is a material yet breathing example of what Lyiscott (and others) call fugitive literacies: a book that evades replicating multiple facets of the white supremacy enmeshed in education systems and products. The book invites readers to reflect thoroughly and continuously, but also expects us to move beyond those realms and into action. As Lyiscott writes, “The authority to author new, more equitable social realities belongs to each of us.”

Christina Bosch is an assistant professor of special education at California State University at Fresno.

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Cécile Fromont, "Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition" (Penn State, 2019) Jun 09, 2021

Edited by Dr. Cécile Fromont, Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition(Penn State University Press, 2019), demonstrates how, from the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, enslaved and free Africans in the Americas used Catholicism and Christian-derived celebrations as spaces for autonomous cultural expression, social organization, and political empowerment. Their appropriation of Catholic-based celebrations calls into question the long-held idea that Africans and their descendants in the diaspora either resignedly accepted Christianity or else transformed its religious rituals into syncretic objects of stealthy resistance. In cities and on plantations throughout the Americas, men and women of African birth or descent staged mock battles against heathens, elected Christian queens and kings with great pageantry, and gathered in festive rituals to express their devotion to saints. The contributors to this volume draw connections between these Afro-Catholic festivals—observed from North America to South America and the Caribbean—and their precedents in the early modern kingdom of Kongo, one of the main regions of origin of men and women enslaved in the New World.

Dr. Cécile Fromont is Associate Professor of History of Art at Yale University.

Other contributors to Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas include Jeroen Dewulf, Kevin Dawson, Miguel A. Valerio, Lisa Voigt, Junia Ferreira Furtado, Dianne M. Stewart, and Michael Iyanaga.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations.

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Katrinell M. Davis, "Tainted Tap: Flint's Journey from Crisis to Recovery" (UNC Press, 2021) Jun 09, 2021

After a cascade of failures left residents of Flint, Michigan, without a reliable and affordable supply of safe drinking water, citizens spent years demanding action from their city and state officials. Complaints from the city's predominantly African American residents were ignored until independent researchers confirmed dangerously elevated blood lead levels among Flint children and in the city's tap water. Despite a 2017 federal court ruling in favor of Flint residents who had demanded mitigation, those efforts have been incomplete at best.

Assessing the challenges that community groups faced in their attempts to advocate for improved living conditions, Tainted Tap: Flint's Journey from Crisis to Recovery(UNC Press, 2021) offers a rich analysis of conditions and constraints that created the Flint water crisis. Katrinell Davis contextualizes the crisis in Flint's long and troubled history of delivering essential services, the consequences of regional water-management politics, and other forms of systemic neglect that impacted the working-class community's health and well-being. Using ethnographic and empirical evidence from a range of sources, Davis also sheds light on the forms of community action that have brought needed changes to this underserved community.

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Neil Altman, "White Privilege: Psychoanalytic Perspectives" (Routledge, 2020) Jun 08, 2021

Neil Altman’s White Privilege: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (Routledge, 2020) is a slip (80 pages including references and the index) of a book that reads as both addendum and antidote to some of the literature aimed at waking white people (Ta-Nahesi-Coates’ “dreamers”) up to the realities of racism. I say antidote as some of that literature (the work of Robin Di Angelo and Ibram X. Kendi come to mind) seems to depend on commands from the super ego to shed the scales from white eyes. On finishing Di Angelo’s White Fragility (which was required reading last summer) I felt both paranoid and ashamed and had to wonder how self-policing was going diminish my racism? Altman’s book intervenes precisely in this potentially deleterious cycle arguing that anti-racist thinking that relies on “should” and “oughts”, are potentially doomed to fail. By attacking the defenses rather than softening them, such efforts run the risk of hardening the racism they set out to transform.

Humans hate. Freud tells us it is our first feeling. Undeniably, hating can fill us with great and solidifying pleasure. Racism is one form of hatred. When acted on, it can and does destroy lives. Fully loaded with white privilege, white people are apt to act on our racism, and also to shudder, deny or dissociate when encountering our racist thoughts and feelings. When confronted with our racism and its impact, with our awareness that we in fact rely on denigrating stereotypes to feel a little better about ourselves, states of mortification (deathliness) emerge that do no one any good. Such a state is a purely narcissistic one where the other has been snuffed out. If you are white, as I am, you have likely found yourself more than once tossing the hot potato of your own racism as far away as from yourself as you can. And some part of you feels weakened by being this way but it is practically an involuntary reflex.

Thinking about this reflex, Altman employs Melanie Klein’s thinking about what it means to be human, which highlights our ineluctable destructiveness. If hate is a human feeling, not one to be gotten rid of but rather one to be accepted and contended with, there may be a way for us to take responsibility for being hurtful, for being racist. Hating hate or hating our racism can maintain the status quo. In fact, hidden hateful feelings seek justification and become reified, rather than being fleeting—as all feelings truly are.

Altman highlights the difference between making reparations based on guilt versus the descent into guiltiness. Guilt implies that one is interested in our impact on others because we know that in living, we will hurt many people along the way. Guiltiness, which we can see in white virtue signaling around racism, has much more to do with returning the self that has harmed to its happy and perfect place without addressing the harm done. While white people are primed, particularly in an American context, to say and do horrible and hurtful racist things, it is the disavowal of the destructiveness that perhaps does, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the most harm in the end. Altman quotes the journalist Leonard Pitts who captures the experience of white negation succinctly, writing, “If people who hate you would stand up and declare it you would not have to go through with your day on guard against the world.”

The refusal to take responsibility for the harm we do—and Altman makes the strong point that whiteness can be defined as an identity that is principally based on dehumanization—keeps white people on the run from reality. When we depend on delusions to shore us up, a part of us knows we are in real bad shape.

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The Social Constructions of Race: A Discussion with Brigitte Fielder Jun 07, 2021

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler05(at)gmail.com or dr.danamalone(at)gmail.com or find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.

In this episode you’ll hear about: the importance of expanding the boundaries of academic theory through interdisciplinary studies, why you need to build and acknowledge your own support network, the social construction of race and racism, and a discussion of the book Relative Races.

Our guest is: Dr. Brigitte Fielder, an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is (with Jonathan Senchyne) co-editor of Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African-American Print and author of Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America. Her work has been published in various journals and edited collections. She is currently writing a book on racialized human-animal relationships in the long nineteenth century, which shows how childhood becomes a key site for (often simultaneous) humanization and racialization.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.

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Cat M. Ariail, "Passing the Baton: Black Women Track Stars and American Identity" (U Illinois Press, 2020) Jun 02, 2021

At almost any international sporting event in which the US competes, it is now common (and appropriate) to remark on the composition of the American team’s ethnic and racial diversity. It is now accepted that a competitor with “USA” on their jersey/uniform does not have to “look” a certain way in order to represent the country . They can be African American, Latino/a, Asian American, Native American, or any other racial or ethnic background.

For many decades of Olympic/international competition, this was not the case. It is the challenge to these limitations that Cat Ariail discusses in her work, Passing the Baton: Black Women Track Stars and American Identity (University of Illinois Press, 2020). Here, by examining the careers and importance of women such as Alice Coachman, Mae Faggs, and Wilma Rudolph, the author demonstrates the tensions and opportunities created by the US’ desire to triumph against Eastern-bloc foes (both on the field of athletic competition, as well as in international diplomacy). Ultimately, it was the talent of these competitors that overcame many discriminatory assumptions and forced the nation’s sports cultures (both white and African American) to broaden the notion of who could don the USA moniker in Olympic venues such as Melbourne and Rome.

While eventually coming to accept, grudgingly, the notion that African American women should compete on behalf of the USA, not all barriers fell, as Ariail argues in her chapters on Wilma Rudolph. Here, she focuses on the fact that Rudolph “looked” the way a US female athlete should. Further, her “performance” closely mirrored what was expected of white female athletes (this, in turned, required the covering up of Rudolph being an unwed mother). Still, she looked the part, and this made it possible for more African American women, and eventually white females, to gain acceptance so as to be able to compete for the US in track and field.

This work provides an excellent overview of the talent and determination it took for female athletes from schools such as Tennessee State University to challenge, and surmount, many, though not all, of the limitations that the sporting culture of post-World War II US society placed on them.

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Democracy and Social Critique with Cornel West Jun 01, 2021

Cornel West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor at Union Theological Seminary. Professor West is among the nation’s most distinguished philosophers. For several decades running, Cornel West has infused into public life reflections on love, justice, grace, liberation, beauty, dignity, and truth. He can be followed on Twitter at @CornelWest.

The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Future of Truth project.

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Nadia E. Brown and Danielle Casarez Lemi, "Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites" (Oxford UP, 2021) May 24, 2021

All political candidates make strategic choices about how to present themselves to voters but not all candidates have to “weigh decisions about their self-presentation alongside stereotypical tropes, culture norms that denigrate Blackness, and European beauty standards, in addition to the historical legacies of racism, colorism, sexism, and heteropatriarchy.” Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites (Oxford UP, 2021) interrogates the “everyday politicization of Black women’s bodies and its ramifications for politics.” Hair is not simply hair.

Drs. Brown and Lemi use a wide-range of qualitative and quantitative methods, including focus groups with Black women candidates and elected officials to argue that “Black women's political experience and the way that voters evaluate them is shaped overtly by their skin tone and hair texture, with hair being a particular point of scrutiny.” Sister Style explores “what the politics of appearance for Black women means for Black women politicians and Black voters, and how expectations about self-presentation differ for Black women versus Black men, White men, and White women.” For many black women in politics, racist and sexist cultural ideas have been used to “demean and fetishize” them based on their physical appearance. They are oftentimes pressured into changing their appearance to look more like their white female counterparts. But Brown and Lemi highlight the agency of Black women candidates and the book reconceptualizes how “Black women political elites are thought about, assessed, measured, and evaluated.”

The book is organized around several questions. What are the origins of the contemporary focus on Black women’s bodies in public life? How do Black women politicians make sense of the politics of appearance? Is there a phenotypic profile in who which most Black women politicians fit? How do voters process the appearances of Black women candidates?

Dr. Nadia Brown is an Associate Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at Purdue University. Beginning in July 2021, Dr. Brown will be a professor of Government and director of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at Georgetown University. Dr. Brown is also the author of Sisters in the Statehouse: Black Women and Legislative Decision Making (Oxford, 2014) and editor of three books: Distinct Identities: Minority Women in U.S. Politics (Routledge, 2016), Body Politics (Routledge, 2019), and Me Too Political Science (Routledge, 2019). She edits Politics, Groups, and Identities and is a founding board member of @WomenAlsoKnowStuff. Her most recent public facing publication is “Here’s how to teach Black Lives Matter: We’ve developed a short course” Washington Post’s Monkey Cage with Ray Block, Jr. and Christopher Stout.

Dr. Danielle Casarez Lemi is a Tower Center Fellow at the John G. Tower Center for Political Science at Southern Methodist University. Her specialization is representation in American politics with a focus on gender, race, and identity. Her research has appeared in Politics, Groups, and Identities, Du Bois Review, Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and Perspectives on Politics.

Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Sensitive Places: Originalism, Gender, and the Myth Self-Defense in District of Columbia v. Heller” can be found in July 2021’s Polity. Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

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Christine Walker, "Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain's Atlantic Empire" (UNC Press, 2020) May 21, 2021

Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain's Atlantic Empire(Omohundro Institute/University of North Carolina Press, 2020) is the first systematic study of the free and freed women of European, Euro-African, and African descent who perpetuated chattel slavery and reaped its profits in the British Empire. Their actions helped transform Jamaica into the wealthiest slaveholding colony in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Starting in the 1670s, a surprisingly large and diverse group of women helped secure English control of Jamaica and, crucially, aided its developing and expanding slave labor regime by acquiring enslaved men, women, and children to protect their own tenuous claims to status and independence.

Female colonists employed slaveholding as a means of advancing themselves socially and financially on the island. By owning others, they wielded forms of legal, social, economic, and cultural authority not available to them in Britain. In addition, slaveholding allowed free women of African descent, who were not far removed from slavery themselves, to cultivate, perform, and cement their free status. Alongside their male counterparts, women bought, sold, stole, and punished the people they claimed as property and vociferously defended their rights to do so. As slavery's beneficiaries, these women worked to stabilize and propel this brutal labor regime from its inception.

Christine Walker is assistant professor of history at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

Jerrad P. Pacatte is a doctoral candidate and School of Arts and Sciences Excellence Fellow in the Department of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. His research and teaching interests examine the lives, labors, and emancipation experiences of African and African American women in early America.

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Joshua D. Rothman, "The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America" (Basic Book, 2021) May 20, 2021

Joshua Rothman’s The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America was published by Basic Books in 2021, and tells a sprawling history of slave traders in America. Often presented as outcasts and social pariahs, slave traders were often instead wealthy and respected members of their communities. Rothman explores the lives and careers of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard to show just what the work of a domestic slave trader looked like and the devastating affects their actions had on enslaved people. By weaving together a history the lives of men who created one of the most powerful slave trading operations in America, Rothman is able to show how slavery’s expansion and growth occurred up to the Civil War.

Joshua Rothman is a professor of history at the University of Alabama.

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Justene Hill Edwards, "Unfree Markets: The Slaves' Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina" (Columbia UP, 2021) May 19, 2021

Justene Hill Edwards is the author of Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina(Columbia University Press, 2021). Unfree Markets focuses in on an area of slavery’s history that has seldom been explore: the economic lives of enslaved people, and its meaning for them, enslavers, non-enslavers, and the institution of slavery itself. Hill Edwards explores how the complicated history of the slaves’ economy from the colonial period to the Civil War, showing the relationship between it and the development of capitalism in the nation. Through a history of enterprise, cultivation, markets, and people, Hill Edwards shows just how much the tenuous the connection between economic activity and freedom for the enslaved became throughout this time period, and what that meant for everyone involved.

Justene Hill Edwards is an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia.

Derek Litvak is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland—College Park.

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Kathryn Benjamin Golden, "Armed in the Great Swamp': Fear, Maroon Insurrection, and the Insurgent Ecology of the Great Dismal Swamp" (2021) May 19, 2021

In 2021, we are inundated with daily images of racial terror, state violence, and technologies of punishment showing pictures of broken down, beleaguered, and deceased Black people’s bodies, especially in Virginia and North Carolina. But state approved terror never gets the last word. In Kathryn Benjamin Golden’s 2021 Journal of African American History article "'Armed in the Great Swamp': Fear, Maroon Insurrection, and the Insurgent Ecology of the Great Dismal Swamp", we learn how enslaved people in Southeast Virginia and Northeast North Carolina utilized the “insurgent ecology” of the Great Dismal Swamp as a critical site to strategize for and enact rebellion. Enjoy the conversation!

Dr. Kathryn Benjamin Golden is an assistant professor of Africana Studies at the University of Delaware.

Adam Xavier McNeil is a PhD Candidate in Early African American History at Rutgers University.

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Matthew Clair, "Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court" (Princeton UP, 2020) May 18, 2021

Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court(Princeton UP, 2020) by Matthew Clair is a powerful ethnographic study of the experiences and perspectives of criminal defendants. While many studies have demonstrated the existence of race and class disparities in the criminal justice system, Clair conducted a rare and compelling study that puts heart and emotion into these disparities. As he argues and shows, not only should we care about quantitative inequalities in criminal justice, but "[w]e should [also] be concerned about differences in the quality of the court experience" for so many defendants.

Clair did extensive interviews with and observed criminal defendants, defense lawyers, judges, police officers, and others interact with each other in the Boston court system. What he shows is a system that operates differently for people of privilege compared to people without. While many criminal defendants face struggles of alienation from societal structures, the underprivileged often resort to crime out of necessity, whereas privileged defendants were more likely to enter the system because of pleasure-seeking or to avoid pain.

Once in courtrooms, underprivileged defendants, especially racial minorities, develop profound mistrust of their court-appointed attorneys. These defendants face, and have often repeatedly been represented by overworked lawyers who often refuse to listen or to develop relationships of trust with their clients, which led many of these defendants to "withdraw," as Clair coins it, from the attorney-client relationship. Some resisted the lawyer or the court: complaining openly about the lack of diligence, asking the court to appoint new counsel, or taking it upon themselves (often with group support) to learn the law and make the arguments their lawyers refused to make. Others developed what Clair calls an attitude of resignation, recognizing the futility of their situation, and essentially giving up the fight.

The experience is fundamentally different for privileged defendants. These defendants often have broad social circles that include the police or lawyers. Because of those connections, they are able to obtain counsel of their choice. The payment of fees engenders trust in the relationship. These defendants defer to their lawyers, trust their judgment, and feel genuinely satisfied with the representation.

Clair argues that courts punish those defendants who withdraw from their lawyers and reward those who defer to them. He calls on lawyers to develop more trusting relationships with their clients and to work toward a more holistic style of defense that considers more than just the legal issues in the case. He encourages courts to allow defendants to choose their court-appointed attorney and to encourage a more participatory legal system in which defendants are not punished for expressing dissatisfaction with their lawyer.

Clair's study is replete with compelling and personal examples. The narrative is what makes this study especially moving. Clair gives voice to those who repeatedly tried, but failed to get their lawyers and courts to listen. Because of Clair's work, we can now hear them.

Samuel P. Newton is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Idaho.

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Moya Bailey, "Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance" (NYU Press, 2021) May 17, 2021

Where racism and sexism meet—an understanding of anti-Black misogyny. When Moya Bailey first coined the term misogynoir, she defined it as the ways anti-Black and misogynistic representation shape broader ideas about Black women, particularly in visual culture and digital spaces. She had no idea that the term would go viral, touching a cultural nerve and quickly entering into the lexicon. Misogynoir now has its own Wikipedia page and hashtag, and has been featured on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time.

In Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (NYU Press, 2021), Bailey delves into her groundbreaking concept, highlighting Black women’s digital resistance to anti-Black misogyny on YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, and other platforms. At a time when Black women are depicted as more ugly, deficient, hypersexual, and unhealthy than their non-Black counterparts, Bailey explores how Black women have bravely used social-media platforms to confront misogynoir in a number of courageous—and, most importantly, effective—ways. Focusing on queer and trans Black women, she shows us the importance of carving out digital spaces, where communities are built around queer Black webshows and hashtags like #GirlsLikeUs. Bailey shows how Black women actively reimagine the world by engaging in powerful forms of digital resistance at a time when anti-Black misogyny is thriving on social media. A groundbreaking work, Misogynoir Transformed highlights Black women’s remarkable efforts to disrupt mainstream narratives, subvert negative stereotypes, and reclaim their lives.

Dr. Moya Bailey she/her/hers is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University and is currently an MLK Visiting Professor at MIT. Connect with Moya on Instagram @transformisogynoir and on Twitter @moyazb

Dr. Lee Pierce (they & she) is Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Communication at State University of New York at Geneseo and host of the podcast RhetoricLee Speaking. Connect with Lee on Twitter, Instagram, and Gmail @rhetoriclee

Also mentioned in this episode is Zakiyyam Iman Jackson's interview with New Books Network about Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

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John Murillo III, "Impossible Stories: On the Space and Time of Black Destructive Creation" (Ohio State UP, 2021) May 14, 2021

In Impossible Stories: On the Space and Time of Black Destructive Creation(Ohio State UP, 2021), John Murillo offers bold new readings of recent and canonical Black creative works within an Afro-pessimistic framework to excavate how time, space, and blackness intersect—or, rather, crash. Building on Michelle Wright’s ideas about dislocation from time and space as constitutive to being Black in America, as well as on W. E. B. DuBois’s theories of temporalization, he reconsiders the connections between physical phenomena and principles, literature, history, and the fragmented nature of Black time and space.

Taking as his lens the fragment—fragmented bodies, fragments of memories, fragments of texts—Murillo theorizes new directions for Black identity and cultural production. Combining a critical engagement of physics and metaphysics with innovative readings of Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Kiese Laymon’s Long Division, Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, he offers new ways to think about anti-Black racism and practice Black creativity. Ultimately, in his equally creative and analytical responses to depictions of Black people left out of history and barred from spaces, Murillo argues that through Afro-pessimism, Black people can fight the anti-Black cosmos.

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João José Reis, "Ganhadores: A greve negra de 1857 na Bahia" (Companhia das Letras, 2019) May 12, 2021

Um retrato original da Bahia no século XIX, num livro cheio de movimento e vozes, sobretudo da gente negra. Em Ganhadores: A Greve Negra de 1857 na Bahia(Companhia das Letras, 2019), o historiador João José Reis reconstitui a história dos negros de ganho, ou ganhadores, protagonistas de uma insólita greve que paralisou o transporte na capital baiana durante vários dias em 1857. Esses trabalhadores escravizados, libertos ou livres, todos africanos ou seus descendentes, se organizavam em grupos de trabalho e percorriam a cidade de cima a baixo fazendo todo tipo de serviço, sobretudo o carrego de pessoas e objetos ou a venda de alimentos e outras mercadorias. Em 1857, porém, a Câmara Municipal baixou uma postura impondo-lhes medidas que combinavam arrocho fiscal e controle policial. Mas os ganhadores, que já viviam dia e noite sob a vigilância e a violência de autoridades, senhores e "cidadãos de bem", não se deixariam abater. O resultado foi a primeira mobilização grevista no Brasil a paralisar todo um setor vital da economia urbana. Baseado em ampla investigação em documentos escritos, impressos e iconográficos, Ganhadores é um livro revelador e essencial para se compreender a intrincada rede de relações sociais, econômicas e culturais que estruturava a sociedade baiana do século XIX, ancorada na instituição da escravidão e caracterizada por um sistema de controle baseado numa economia de favores e domínio paternalista. Se o episódio de resistência aqui narrado trata mais especificamente da Bahia do século XIX, ele tem muito a dizer sobre as relações e opressões sociais e raciais no Brasil de hoje. O livro foi um dos finalistas para o prêmio Jabuti de 2020 na categoria Ciências Humanas.

Referência nos estudos Afro-Atlânticos, e um dos mais importantes historiadores brasileiros, João José Reis é professor do Programa de Pós-graduação em História da Universidade Federal da Bahia e foi em diversas ocasiões membro do Comitê Assessor de História do CNPq, do qual é Pesquisador 1A.

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Jordana M. Saggese, "The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader" (U California Press, 2021) May 12, 2021

In The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader (University of California Press, 2021), Jordana Moore Saggese provides the first comprehensive sourcebook on the artist, closing gaps that have until now limited the sustained study and definitive archiving of his work and its impact. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) burst onto the art scene in the summer of 1980 as one of approximately one hundred artists exhibiting at the 1980 Times Square Show in New York City. By 1982, at the age of twenty-one, Basquiat had solo exhibitions in galleries in Italy, New York, and Los Angeles. Basquiat's artistic career followed the rapid trajectory of Wall Street, which boomed from 1983 to 1987. In the span of just a few years, this Black boy from Brooklyn had become one of the most famous American artists of the 1980s.

Eight years after his first exhibition, Basquiat was dead, but his popularity has only grown. Through a combination of interviews with the artist, criticism from the artist's lifetime and immediately after, previously unpublished research by the author, and a selection of the most important critical essays on the artist's work, this collection provides a full picture of the artist's views on art and culture, his working process, and the critical significance of his work both then and now.

Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

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Alison M. Parker, "Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell" (UNC Press, 2020) May 10, 2021

Dr. Alison M. Parker’s new book Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell(University of North Carolina Press, 2020) explores the life of civil rights activist and feminist, Mary Church Terrell. Born into slavery at the end of the Civil War, Terrell (1863-1954) became one of the most prominent activists of her time -- working at the intersection of rights for women and African Americans, anti-colonialism, criminal justice reform, and beyond. Her career stretched from the late nineteenth century to the civil rights movement of the 1950s -- and she was able to see the result of the NAACP’s efforts in Brown v. Board of Education before she died. The first president of the National Association of Colored Women and a founding member of the NAACP, Terrell collaborated closely with other leaders such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Mary McLeod Bethune -- but she also was unafraid to disagree on principle and political strategy.

Unceasing Militant, the first full-length academic biography of Terrell, integrates her extraordinary public activism with her romantic, reproductive, parental, economic, and mental health challenges. Understanding what she called the double handicap of sexism and racism, Terrell offered a nuanced and intersectional Black feminist political theory. Terrell insisted upon African American women’s “full humanity and equality” and -- honoring that legacy -- Alison Parker deftly weaves resources of all kinds, including privately held letters and diaries, to provide an account of a woman dedicated to changing the culture and institutions that perpetuated inequality throughout the United States -- but also a breathing, loving, nuanced woman navigating life.

Alison M. Parker is Richards Professor of American History and Chair of the History of the Department at the University of Delaware. She researches and teaches at the intersections of gender, race, disability, citizenship and the law in U.S. history. Her earlier works include two books, Articulating Rights: Nineteenth- Century American Women on Race, Reform and the State (Cornell University Press, 2010) and Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873-1933 (Northern Illinois University Press,1997). Her most recent public facing scholarship is the 2020 New York Times op-ed, “When White Women Wanted a Monument to Black Mammies.”

Madeline Jones assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

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Kate Dossett, "Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal" (UNC Press, 2020) May 10, 2021

Kate Dossett's book Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal (UNC Press, 2020) turns conventional understandings of the Federal Theatre Project on its head. This book shines a light on the extraordinary work done by the FTP's Negro Units, which staged classic plays with Black casts as well as new plays by Black writers like Theodore Ward. These works reflected contemporary conflicts within the Black community, including the competing radicalisms of Garveyism and Marxism, the place of the folk tradition in contemporary Black culture, and the role of woman as leaders in the Black community. Far from dry propaganda pieces, these plays were a vital response to a period of profound upheaval.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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David Alan Sklansky, "A Pattern of Violence: How the Law Classifies Crimes and What it Means for Justice" (Harvard UP, 2020) May 07, 2021

In the wake of the George Floyd killing, many Americans are engaging in a renewed debate about the role violence and especially police violence, plays in American society. In A Pattern of Violence: How the Law Classifies Crimes and What it Means for Justice (Harvard UP, 2020), David Alan Sklansky, the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, argues that in order to think sensibly about criminal justice, we must consider how we think about violence and the criminal law’s role in shaping our perceptions.

Sklansky argues that the criminal law’s definitions of violence have proven “slippery” and have been used in highly inconsistent ways. We talk about offenders as being characterologically violent, but contrastingly talk about the police, gun owners, or free speech activists in nonviolent terms. For example, police officers use “force” to subdue “vicious” criminals. Or they “stop and frisk” suspects instead of violently violating a person’s bodily integrity. While the police have increasingly militarized and have become more insular and reactionary, Sklansky argues that police institutions themselves have also played a role in creating many of the situations in which the police find themselves. Additionally, Sklansky significantly details how our conversations of violence regarding rape and domestic violence, the treatment of juvenile offenders, and free speech and gun rights, suffer from the same inconsistencies, especially as they tend to exaggerate and perpetuate race, gender, and class differences.

Sklansky argues that the law has not always drawn consistent boundaries between violent and non-violent offenses. Burglary, while labeled a violent felony, requires no act of interpersonal violence. Assault or battery, on the other hand, are often misdemeanors, though they require physical violence.

In addition to thinking inconsistently about violence, most Americans accept and even celebrate forms of societal violence. For example, American prisons, while not officially condoning violence, allow and sometimes encourage violence against prisoners as forms of discipline and retribution. As Sklansky argues, violence in these institutions is often treated as a form of entertainment, a “morbid parody of combat sports.”

Sklansky prompts us to confront our overly simplistic definitions and assumptions about violence in the American law. He encourages us to take advantage of an increased awareness of violence and to work toward more just and consistent definitions.

Samuel P. Newton is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Idaho College of Law.

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Susan M. Reverby, "Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy" (UNC Press, 2013) May 05, 2021

Some books are new, others are newly relevant – and so worth looking at from a new, contemporary perspective. Such is the case with Susan Reverby’s book Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy (UNC Press, 2013). When the book was published in 2009, our world was reeling from a global financial crisis that exposed how subprime mortgages disproportionately affected Black homeowners; today we reel from a global pandemic that has starkly exposed how Black Americans and other people of color are disproportionately affected by the virus SARS-CoV-2 and its effects. Another inequity connected to the pandemic relates to vaccine distribution and uptake: they are much lower among Black (and Latinx) than white Americans.

Examining Tuskegee is a deeply researched work that ranges from the trial’s origins within a public health partnership between the Tuskegee Institute and the Public Health Service, to portraits of its protagonists – the researchers, the men who were its subjects, the complex Nurse Rivers, and the persistent Peter Buxton, whose efforts eventually exposed the full truth of the study after it ran for 40 years – to the ways it was portrayed in popular culture and the media, to matters of bioethics and presidential apologies. In our conversation, Susan Reverby explains what actually happened in the study – no, the men were not injected by the researchers with syphilis – what it meant 50 years ago, and how it pertains, or not, to issues such as vaccine hesitancy among African Americans today.

Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego and a licensed acupuncturist. Her third book, an examination of the history of acupuncture as a means of social and political revolution, is under contract with the University of Michigan Press.

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Maureen Mahon, "Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll" (Duke UP, 2020) May 04, 2021

Maureen Mahon’s book, Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll (Duke University Press, 2020), focuses on the contributions to rock and roll by African American women from Big Mama Thornton to Tina Turner, and the erasure and marginalization of most of these women in other histories of popular music. Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history of African American women in rock and roll and puts them back into a narrative that generally emphasizes the role of white male guitar players in the development of the genre. She considers how the racialized vocal timbre of African American women’s voices has shaped rock from the girl groups of the early 1960s to the background singers who created the sound of some of the most iconic tracks recorded by the bands of the British invasion. Running throughout the book is a deep analysis of how the stereotypes about Black women crashed into the lived experiences of her subjects, affecting their careers, their relationships, and their music. By uncovering this hidden history, Mahon reveals a powerful sonic legacy that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century.

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Tara T. Green, "Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song" (Ohio State UP, 2018) Apr 30, 2021

From ships and novels to Mardi Gras, water, and television, how does the legacy of the Middle Passage, the leg of the Atlantic through which African people were trafficked as slaves, reverberate through the creations of writers and authors of the African diaspora? In this episode of New Books Network, Dr. Lee M. Pierce interviews Dr. Tara G. Green about her latest book on the Middle Passage, rebirth, trauma, water, social death, and resistance.

In Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song(Ohio State UP, 2018), Tara T. Green turns to twentieth- and recent twenty-first-century representations of the Middle Passage created by African-descended artists and writers. Examining how these writers and performers revised and reimagined the Middle Passage in their work, Green argues that they recognized it as a historical and geographical site of trauma as well as a symbol for a place of understanding and change. Their work represents the legacy African captives left for resisting “social death” (the idea that Black life does not matter), but it also highlights strong resistance to that social death (the idea that it does matter).

Dr. Tara T. Green is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at UNC Greensboro where she is also the Linda Arnold Carlisle Excellence Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies.

Dr. Lee M. Pierce is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo and host of the RhetoricLee Speaking podcast. Connect on Gmail and social media @rhetoriclee.

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Karlos K. Hill, "The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History" (U Oklahoma Press, 2021) Apr 30, 2021

On the evening of May 31, 1921, thousands of white Oklahomans assaulted the Greenwood District of the city of Tulsa. In what would come to be known as the Tulsa Race Massacre, dozens of Black residents were killed and thousands more displaced as armed whites looted their homes and businesses before burning them to the ground.

Karlos K. Hill’s The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History (University of Oklahoma Press, 2021) provides a visual record of the attack upon the community and the destruction it wrought upon the neighborhood, along with pictures of the aftermath and the testimony of the survivors.

As Hill’s images reveal, Greenwood had established itself as the most prosperous Black community in the United States prior to the massacre. This prosperity was a source of resentment for many whites, and fueled much of the anger reflected in the massacre. Yet Hill’s photos also reveal the resilience of a community, as in the aftermath of the devastation the residents of Greenwood rallied to rebuild much of what had been destroyed, serving as a foundation for further prosperity in the decades that followed.

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E. Patrick Johnson, "Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South" (U of North Carolina Press, 2011) Apr 30, 2021

E. Patrick Johnson's Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (University of North Carolina Press, 2011) has been a monograph, a documentary film, a stage play, and now a published script from Northwestern University Press.

This play weaves together interviews Johnson conducted with gay Black men from the South with Johnson's own recollections of growing up young, gifted, gay, and Black in Hickory, North Carolina. These stories are funny, heart-breaking, and inspiring, and reveal a collective portrait of gay Black Southern life that is much more complex than the simple narrative of repression and escape so often associated with this community.

In this interview we discuss what keeps Johnson returning to these stories, his relationship to Black spirituality, and the techniques he used to embody these men when he performed Sweet Tea as a one man show.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Nikki Lane, "The Black Queer Work of Ratchet: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the (Anti)Politics of Respectability" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) Apr 29, 2021

Nikki Lane's The Black Queer Work of Ratchet: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the (Anti)Politics of Respectability (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) enters as a corrective to the tendency to trivialize and (mis)appropriate African American language practices. The word ratchet has entered into a wider (whiter) American discourse the same way that many words in African American English have--through hip-hop and social media. Generally, ratchet refers to behaviors and cultural expressions of Black people that sit outside of normative, middle-class respectable codes of conduct. Ratchet can function both as a tool for critiquing bad Black behavior, and as a tool for resisting the notion that there are such things as "good" and "bad" behavior in the first place. This book takes seriously the way ratchet operates in the everyday lives of middle-class and upwardly mobile Black Queer women in Washington, DC who, because of their sexuality, are situated outside of the norms of (Black) respectability. The book introduces the concept of "ratchet/boojie cultural politics" which draws from a rich body of Black intellectual traditions which interrogate the debates concerning what is and is not "acceptable" Black (middle-class) behavior. Placing issues of non-normative sexuality at the center of the conversation about notions of propriety within normative modes of Black middle-class behavior, this book discusses what it means for Black Queer women's bodies to be present within ratchet/boojie cultural projects, asking what Black Queer women's increasing visibility does for the everyday experiences of Black queer people more broadly.

This work makes reference to a few songs that really give a depth of understanding the concept of boujee and ratchet. I suggest listeners who are not familiar go and check out Migos and Kanye West - I Don't Like ft.

Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers.

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Susan Ware, "American Women's Suffrage: Voices from the Long Struggle for the Vote, 1776-1965" (Library of America, 2020) Apr 28, 2021

The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which granted women the right to vote nationwide, was the culmination of a long and oftentimes contentious campaign that had its origins in the beginnings of the nation itself. In American Women’s Suffrage: Voices from the Long Struggle for the Vote, 1776-1965 (Library of America, 2020) Susan Ware provides readers with a sampling of the letters, articles, speeches, and other contemporary documents that reflect both the ideas of the movement and the arguments deployed against it. Her selections demonstrate how the battle of women’s suffrage was itself a part of a broader campaign for women’s rights in the early 19th century. Though it was galvanized by the activism of women from the abolitionist movement, the solidarity born of common oppression was shattered after the Civil War, when many suffragists expressed frustration with their exclusion from the voting rights being granted to Blacks. While a corps of dedicated activists continued their campaign into the 20th century, it was only in the 1910s that momentum shifted decisively in their direction. As Ware demonstrates, their success in gaining ratification in 1920 was less the conclusion of women’s efforts for political quality than it was the end of one stage and the beginning of a new effort to turn the newly-won franchise into political power – an effort that continues down to the present day.

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Alfred L. Martin, Jr., "The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom" (Indiana UP, 2021) Apr 27, 2021

How do race and sexuality intersect in the American sitcom? In The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom (Indiana University Press, 2021), Alfred L Martin, an assistant professor of communication studies at The University of Iowa, explores the production and reception of Black-cast sitcoms, along with a detailed analysis of the representations of gay men within this genre. At the centre of the book is a theorisation of the generic closet, both as a way to explain the absence of nuanced and complex representations of Black gay men on screen, and to account for the limited, decentred, and peripheral place offered to Black gay men in the Black-cast sitcom. Offering detailed engagement with the history and political economy of television, along with insights into writers’ rooms, production decisions, and audience responses, the book is essential reading across humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding contemporary culture.

Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art.

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Hari Ziyad, "Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir" (Little a, 2021) Apr 27, 2021

One of nineteen children in a blended family, Hari Ziyad was raised by a Hindu Hare Kṛṣṇa mother and a Muslim father. Through reframing their own coming-of-age story, Ziyad takes readers on a powerful journey of growing up queer and Black in Cleveland, Ohio, and of navigating the equally complex path toward finding their true self in New York City. In Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir (Little a, 2021), Ziyad investigates what it means to live beyond the limited narratives Black children are given and challenges the irreconcilable binaries that restrict them.

Heartwarming and heart-wrenching, radical and reflective, Hari Ziyad's vital memoir is for the outcast, the unheard, the unborn, and the dead. It offers us a new way to think about survival and the necessary disruption of social norms. It looks back in tenderness as well as justified rage, forces us to address where we are now, and, born out of hope, illuminates the possibilities for the future.

Dr. Christina Gessler is a historian of women, gender, and sexuality.

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Jarvis R. Givens, "Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching" (Harvard UP, 2021) Apr 26, 2021

Welcome to New Books in African American Studies, a channel on the New Books Network. I am your host, Adam McNeil. On today’s podcast, I am interviewing Dr. Jarvis R. Givens, Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Dr. Givens joins us to discuss Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, published by our friends at Harvard University Press in 2021. In our discussion we chopped it up about Carter G. Woodson, Black educational history, the origin story behind "fugitive pedagogy" as a term, his journey from grad school at Berkeley, to his post at Harvard, and much much more. Enjoy the conversation family!

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Fatima Shaik, "Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood" (HNOC, 2021) Apr 23, 2021

Fatima Shaik's book Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood (Historic New Orleans Collections, 2021) tells the story of the Sociâetâe d'Economie et d'Assistance Mutuelle, a New Orleans mutual aid society founded by free men of color in 1836. The group was one of the most important multiethnic, intellectual communities in the US South: educators, world-traveling merchants, soldiers, tradesmen, and poets who rejected racism and colorism to fight for suffrage and education rights for all. The author drew on the meeting minutes of the Sociâetâe d'Economie as well as census and civil records, newspapers, and numerous archival sources to write a narrative stretching from the Haitian Revolution through the early jazz age.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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James Doucet-Battle, "Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes" (U Minnesota Press, 2021) Apr 23, 2021

Decades of data cannot be ignored: African American adults are far more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than white adults. But has science gone so far in racializing diabetes as to undermine the search for solutions? In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes(University of Minnesota Press, 2021) provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology’s framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race and, importantly, offers a critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research.

James Doucet-Battle begins with a historical overview of how diabetes has been researched and framed racially over the past century, chronicling one company’s efforts to recruit African Americans to test their new diabetes risk-score algorithm with the aim of increasing the clinical and market value of the firm’s technology. He considers African American reticence about participation in biomedical research and examines race and health disparities in light of advances in genomic sequencing technology. Doucet-Battle concludes by emphasizing that genomic research into sub-Saharan ancestry in fact underlines the importance of analyzing gender before attempting to understand the notion of race. No disease reveals this more than Type 2 diabetes.

Sweetness in the Blood challenges the notion that the best approach to understanding, managing, and curing Type 2 diabetes is through the lens of race. It also transforms how we think about sugar, filling a neglected gap between the sugar- and molasses-sweetened past of the enslaved African laborer and the high-fructose corn syrup- and corporate-fed body of the contemporary consumer-laborer.

Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego and a licensed acupuncturist. Her book about acupuncture as a tool of medical, social, and political revolution in the United States is under contract with University of Michigan Press.

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Andrew Maraniss, "Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke" (Philomel Books, 2021) Apr 23, 2021

On October 2nd, 1977, Glenn Burke, outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers, made history without even swinging a bat. When his teammate Dusty Baker hit a historic home run, Glenn enthusiastically congratulated him with the first ever high five.

But Glenn also made history in another way--he was the first openly gay MLB player. While he did not come out publicly until after his playing days were over, Glenn's sexuality was known to his teammates, family, and friends. His MLB career would be cut short after only three years, but his legacy and impact on the athletic and LGBTQIA+ community would resonate for years to come.

New York Times bestselling author Andrew Maraniss tells the story of Glenn Burke: from his childhood growing up in Oakland, his journey to the MLB and the World Series, the joy in discovering who he really was, to more difficult times: facing injury, addiction, and the AIDS epidemic.

Packed with black-and-white photographs and thoroughly researched, never-before-seen details about Glenn's life, Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke(Philomel Books, 2021) is the fascinating story of a trailblazer in sports--and the history and culture that shaped the world around him.

Paul Knepper used to cover the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in September 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Tamika Y. Nunley, "At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C." (UNC Press, 2021) Apr 22, 2021

The capital city of a nation founded on the premise of liberty, nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., was both an entrepot of urban slavery and the target of abolitionist ferment. The growing slave trade and the enactment of Black codes placed the city's Black women within the rigid confines of a social hierarchy ordered by race and gender. At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. (UNC Press, 2021) reveals how these women--enslaved, fugitive, and free--imagined new identities and lives beyond the oppressive restrictions intended to prevent them from ever experiencing liberty, self-respect, and power.

Consulting newspapers, government documents, letters, abolitionist records, legislation, and memoirs, Tamika Y. Nunley traces how Black women navigated social and legal proscriptions to develop their own ideas about liberty as they escaped from slavery, initiated freedom suits, created entrepreneurial economies, pursued education, and participated in political work. In telling these stories, Nunley places Black women at the vanguard of the history of Washington, D.C., and the momentous transformations of nineteenth-century America.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Joshua Bennett, "Owed" (Penguin, 2020) Apr 19, 2021

Owed (Penguin, 2020) is the second collection of poems by Dr. Joshua Bennett, poet, professor, and artist. This volume is a wide-ranging, celebratory book focused on what Bennett calls "the Black quotidian," including the poetry of the barbershop, plastic slip-covers on couches, and the benign struggle between a father and a son over a pair of long johns. Throughout the book, Bennett's attention to detail and gift for both sound and sense are on dazzling display. In this conversation we discuss Owed, as well as Bennett's evolving relationship to spirituality, his process of learning to write out loud through poetry slams, and his experience of being a new father. Bennett is also the author of the poetry volume The Sobbing School, the monograph Being Property Once Myself, and the upcoming Spoken Word: A Cultural History.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Richard Jean So, "Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction" (Columbia UP, 2020) Apr 16, 2021

What is the story of race in American fiction? In Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction(Columbia University Press, 2020), Richard Jean So, an assistant professor of English in the Department of English at McGill University, uses computational and quantitative methods, alongside close textual analysis, to demonstrate the institutional whiteness of the US publishing industry. Even as the rise of multiculturalism has been celebrated in American fiction, So shows how publishing houses, reviewers, prize givers, and audiences still focused on a minority of Minority authors, with little evidence of change during the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, although as the struggle for recognition seemed to be won within universities, the literary world continued to exclude authors of colour. In addition, the book engages with, and draws inspiration from, the work and career of Toni Morrison, offering findings that will engage across both the humanities and social sciences. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in race and literature, along with anyone interested in explaining and understanding why race continues to be essential to understanding contemporary culture.

Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art.

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B. K. Mitchell, et al., "Monumental: Oscar Dunn and His Radical Fight in Reconstruction Louisiana" (HNOC, 2021) Apr 12, 2021

Dr. Brian K. Mitchell describes Reconstruction as the most misunderstood period in American history. In the Jim Crow era, there was a concerted effort to reverse the achievements of African Americans. White supremacists also removed the history of figures such as Louisiana’s Oscar Dunn, the first Lieutenant Governor and acting governor, from the official narrative. Since the second grade, when he learned he was related to Oscar Dunn, Mitchell has been pushing against this historical amnesia.

Mitchell’s graphic history Monumental: Oscar Dunn and His Radical Fight in Reconstruction Louisiana was published by The Historic New Orleans Collection in 2021. He worked on Monumental with Nick Weldon, an associate editor at The Historic New Orleans Collection. Barrington S. Edwards of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design illustrated the book.

Dr. Brian K. Mitchell is an assistant professor of history at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock and an associate faculty member at the Anderson Institute on Race and Ethnicity. He earned his Ph.D. in urban studies with a concentration in public history at the University of New Orleans, his hometown. His research on race, violence, and the Elaine Massacre has been covered by CNN, NPR, Atlas Obscura, The Guardian, and the Associated Press. Previously he was a senior federal investigator for Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.

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Michael Rosino, "Debating the Drug War: Race, Politics, and Media in the War on Drugs Debate" (Routledge, 2021) Apr 09, 2021

Since President Nixon coined the phrase, the "War on Drugs" has presented an important change in how people view and discuss criminal justice practices and drug laws. The term evokes images of militarization, punishment, and violence, as well as combat and the potential for victory. It is no surprise then that questions such as whether the "War on Drugs" has "failed" or "can be won" have animated mass media and public debate for the past 40 years.

Through analysis of 30 years of newspaper content, Debating the Drug War: Race, Politics, and Media in the War on Drugs Debate (Routledge, 2021) examines the social and cultural contours of this heated debate and explores how proponents and critics of the controversial social issues of drug policy and incarceration frame their arguments in mass media. Additionally, it looks at the contemporary public debate on the "War on Drugs" through an analysis of readers' comments drawn from the comments sections of online news articles.

Through a discussion of the findings and their implications, the book illuminates the ways in which ideas about race, politics, society, and crime, and forms of evidence and statistics such as rates of arrest and incarceration or the financial costs of drug policies and incarceration are advanced, interpreted, and contested. Further, the book will bring to light how people form a sense of their racial selves in debates over policy issues tied to racial inequality such as the "War on Drugs" through narratives that connect racial categories to concepts such as innocence, criminality, free will, and fairness. Debating the Drug War offers readers a variety of concepts and theoretical perspectives that they can use to make sense of these vital issues in contemporary society.

Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers.

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Elyssa Ford, "Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion: Race, Gender, and Identity in the American Rodeo" (UP of Kansas, 2020) Apr 09, 2021

Imagine a rodeo rider atop a bucking bronco, hat in hand, straining to remain astride. Is the rider in your mind's eye white? Is the person male? Popular imaginings and high level, televised, professional rodeo circuits have created a stereotyped image of who rodeo is by and for, but it is far too limited an image, and one that does not reflect reality.

In Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion: Race, Gender, and Identity in the American Rodeo(University Press of Kansas, 2020), Dr. Elyssa Ford, an associate professor of history at Northwest Missouri State University, paints a very different image of rodeo than what Western myth would have one believe. Ford argues that rodeo has, from its creation, both a vehicle for rebellion and a place of refuge for groups of people told they didn't belong in the American West, let alone in Western rodeo. From Hawaiian ranching culture to Black and gay rodeo, men and women have used professional riding as a powerful expression of self in a nation that has often tried to deny their very personhood.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Bertram Levine and Grande Lum, "America's Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights" (U Missouri Press, 2020) Apr 08, 2021

The Community Relations Service (CRS) came into being alongside the Voting Rights Act—as part of the Act itself. And this organization was integrated into the Voting Rights Act in 1964 because President Lyndon Johnson wanted it to be included in that landmark legislation, in part because Johnson, as an adept politician and negotiator, saw the importance of establishing a means for mediation and negotiation on the local level in many places throughout the United States. The initial portfolio of the CRS was focused solely on issues around race and racial disputes, though it has since been formally extended to include issues around ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc. The CRS is housed in the Department of Justice, but operates as an independent entity, and does not work as part of the FBI or the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice. Grande Lum, who is currently provost and vice president for Academic Affairs at Menlo College, had served as the Director of the CRS from 2012-2016, and he has taken the original edition of

America's Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights(U Missouri Press, 2020),written by Bertram Levine, and updated it with another twenty years of the history of the CRS. This is a fascinating history of this often- overlooked governmental institution, and in our podcast conversation, Grande and I also discuss the process of updating the book itself, since he had made such great use of the original edition when he first became Director of the CRS. In taking the original text and adding in another two decades of history, Grande Lum worked with Bertram Levine’s children to make sure his work was also in the spirit of their father’s work, since Levine had written the original edition of the book. This podcast is an engaging discussion about the history of the Community Relations Service itself, the book that incorporates that history, highlighting the many successes of these domestic mediators and peacemakers, and the process for collaboratively updating this kind of a book. Lum also discusses some of the projects that have come out of the CRS, including the Divided Community Project at the Moritz School of Law at the Ohio State University (https://moritzlaw.osu.edu/dividedcommunityproject/), and other community mediation centers in different states and localities around the United States. These local and national organizations, along with the CRS, have been pursuing many of the ideas that are currently being discussed about law enforcement reform. America’s Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights, co-authored by Bertram Levine and Grande Lum, is a fascinating history of the organization that has, for more than fifty years, been working to bring divided communities together, in peaceful dialogue, in an effort to defuse situations without violence or indictments.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Danielle Fuentes Morgan, "Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the 21st Century" (U Illinois Press, 2020) Apr 08, 2021

The election of Barack Obama propelled the idea of a post-racial United States, or that the country had moved beyond race as a defining feature of social difference and beyond racism as an everyday reality.

Dr. Danielle Fuentes Morgan examines the ways in which African American comedians and cultural producers took aim at such claims through the lens of satire. In her book, Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty First Century(University of Illinois Press, 2020), Morgan demonstrates and argues for satire’s capacity for social justice through its expression of Black interiority and individuality that troubles simplistic renderings of Black people. Morgan examines texts such as Insecure, Get Out, and comedy by Chris Rock and Dave Chapelle, to show how African American satire fulfills or stymies possibilities for liberation. In expressing Black interiority, satire not only provokes revolutionary laughter but aids in African American psychic and physical survival. During the interview we discussed the main concepts in the book, a range of satirical texts, and Dr. Morgan’s approach to teaching and writing about African American satire. Laughing to Keep from Dying probes satire’s potential for liberation and survival embedded within Black laughter, giving new meaning to the term seriously funny.

Danielle Fuentes Morgan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Santa Clara University.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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Jack Glazier, "Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race" (MSU Press, 2020) Apr 06, 2021

Paul Radin was one of the founding generation of American cultural anthropologists: A student of Franz Boas, and famed ethnographer of the Winnebago. Yet little is known about Radin's life. A leftist who was persecuted by the FBI and who lived for several years outside of the United States, and a bohemian who couldn't keep an academic job, there are many chapters in Radin's life which have not been told.

In Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race(Michigan State University Press, 2020), Jack Glazier tells the story of Radin's work at Fisk University in the late 1920s. During his three-year appointment, he and graduate student Andrew Polk Watson collected autobiographies and religious conversion narratives from elderly African Americans. That innovative, subject-centered research complemented like-minded scholarship by African American historians reacting against the disparaging portrayals of black people by white historians. In this book, Glazier describes Radin's commitment to documenting people's own stories as they told them and his respect for them as people as a form of 'radical humanism' and sets Paul Radin's findings within the broader context of Boasian anti-racism, African American culture, and his career-defining work among the Winnebago.

In this episode of the podcast Jack Glazier talks to host Alex Golub about Radin and the Boasians, the influence of Charles S. Johnson at Fisk, and how contemporary activists might view the strengths and limitations of Radin's radical humanism.

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

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Thomas C. Holt, "The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights" (Oxford UP, 2021) Apr 01, 2021

The civil rights movement was among the most important historical developments of the twentieth century and one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history. Not only did it decisively change the legal and political status of African Americans, but it prefigured as well the moral premises and methods of struggle for other historically oppressed groups seeking equal standing in American society. And, yet, despite a vague, sometimes begrudging recognition of its immense import, more often than not the movement has been misrepresented and misunderstood. For the general public, a singular moment, frozen in time at the Lincoln Memorial, sums up much of what Americans know about that remarkable decade of struggle.

In The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights(Oxford UP, 2021), Thomas C. Holt provides an informed and nuanced understanding of the origins, character, and objectives of the mid-twentieth-century freedom struggle, privileging the aspirations and initiatives of the ordinary, grassroots people who made it. Holt conveys a sense of these developments as a social movement, one that shaped its participants even as they shaped it. He emphasizes the conditions of possibility that enabled the heroic initiatives of the common folk over those of their more celebrated leaders. This groundbreaking book reinserts the critical concept of "movement" back into our image and understanding of the civil rights movement.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com

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Daina R. Berry and Kali N. Gross, "A Black Women's History of the United States" (Beacon Press, 2020) Apr 01, 2021

Today I talked to Kali Nicole Gross about her new book (co-authored with Daina Ramey Berry) A Black Women's History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2020).

This episode covers a litany of instances in which black women have shown remarkable courage and resiliency. Yes, the episode starts with Meghan Markle, Harry, their son Archie, and how the Royals are emblematic of British society’s troubled history with racism. But the episode also covers Ida B. Wells campaigning against black suppression after the Civil War in Memphis; how the Great Migration was spurred in no small part by black domestic servants being subject to rape in the households where they served; and how Anita Hill and Pauli Murray are among a long list of black heroines who had to battle both racism and sexism at the hands of black leaders. From “Jane Crow” to the fact that the Statue of Liberty was meant to celebrate the abolitionist cause, the episode is full of surprises.

Kali Nicole Gross is Acting Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Her previous books include Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso, winner of the 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for nonfiction.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner, "African American Political Thought: A Collected History" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Apr 01, 2021

Political theorists Melvin Rogers and Jack “Chip” Turner have produced a truly magisterial edited volume centering the work by African American thinkers over the past centuries. With thirty contributed chapters, ranging across time, place, and person, this Collected History opens up the dialogue among theorists, writers, students, and scholars to explore the work that has often been considered vital to understanding African American political thought specifically, and American political thought in general. As the authors note in their introduction, they intentionally chose to focus each chapter on an individual and that individual’s work as a thinker, moving away from other approaches that often pull together thinkers and activists under broad topics or approaches.

African American Political Thought: A Collected History (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is both a reference, providing insight into one or more African American thinkers, and also an education, since the depth and span of the included work are so substantial. Rogers and Turner, and their contributing authors, wanted to bring out the complexity of individual black thinkers, thus the organization of the collection is one that provides the reader with an overview of each thinker, an analysis of their work, and the context in which to consider that work. In their introduction and in our conversation, Rogers and Turner explain the way that many of the black intellectuals and thinkers included in the collection act, in certain ways, like the original truth teller, Socrates, who emphasized the ugliness of truth, especially within democracy, but also the important need to know and understand the truth. Many of the thinkers included in this volume are truth tellers, but they are thinking and writing with great beauty, through their words, their poetry, even their music. As the editors note, this is a keen paradox of black political thought, ugly truths explained or expressed through great beauty. This extraordinary collected history will be of interest to many students, scholars, and researchers, across myriad disciplines.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Elizabeth L. Jemison, "Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Post-Emancipation South" (UNC Press, 2020) Mar 30, 2021

Elizabeth L. Jemison, who teaches American religious history at Clemson University, South Carolina, has written an outstanding new book, Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Post-Emancipation South(University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Focusing on the Lower Mississippi River Valley, and working from the 1860s to 1900, Jemison explains how white and African-American protestants developed strikingly different accounts of Christian citizenship. Paying attention to the variety of perspective within and between the Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian and Episcopalian denominations, and to the perspectives of men and women, Jemison asks troubling questions about white violence and the religious character of the segregated society to which the white protestant counter-revolution eventually led.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast.

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Zach Sell, "Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital" (UNC Press, 2021) Mar 29, 2021

The middle decades of the 19th century witnessed the expansion of slavery and white settlement and dispossession of Indigenous lands west of the Mississippi River, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire followed by the importation of indentured laborers from India and China into the West Indies, the consolidation of British rule in India followed by the so-called Indian Mutiny, and the expansion of settler colonialism in Australia. These processes were all tied together by commerce, empire, and the spread of racial ideologies, yet their histories have largely been written separately. Until now.

Zach Sell’s new book Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital(University of North Carolina Press, 2021) highlights the connections between the “second slavery” in the Deep South of the United States, efforts to socially engineer mono-crop agriculture in India by a British colonial state that lip service to laissez-faire and free labor even as it tried to import plantation management techniques from the US south, how the attempt to create plantation-style agriculture in Queensland, Australia bumped up against the logic of white settler colonialism and attempts to expand plantation agriculture in Belize in the age of so-called “free” labor using indentured labor from Asia. This is a story of racial formation on a global scale, and of the limits of capital’s ability to remake social relations and environments in its own image, despite the capacity for organized brutality that it had at its disposal. This book is particularly important at a time when many American, British and French commentators have tried to downplay the violence of expansion and colonialism and to portray white supremacy as some sort of American peculiarity and relic of the past.

Zach is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Drexel University and was previously Ruth J. Simmons Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Slavery and Justice at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.

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Nate Chinen, "Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century" (Vintage, 2019) Mar 26, 2021

Nate Chinen's Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century (Vintage, 2019) is an essential guide to 21st century jazz. Named a best book of the year by NPR, GQ, Billboard, JazzTimes and many more, Chinen's book profiles many of the most exciting voices in jazz, from Kamasi Washington to Henry Threadgill to Cécile McLorin Salvant. Chinen shows that contemporary jazz thrives off its interplay with genres including classical, hip-hop, R&B, and rock. Jazz, now as always, is an ever-evolving polyglot genre, not a set of canonical works captured in amber. This is a great book for jazz aficionados looking to expand their knowledge of today's foremost players or for general music fans looking for a window into the diverse and exciting world of jazz.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Karen Woods Weierman, "The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston" (U Massachusetts Press, 2019) Mar 26, 2021

In 1836, an enslaved six-year-old girl named Med was brought to Boston by a woman from New Orleans who claimed her as property. Learning of the girl's arrival in the city, the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) waged a legal fight to secure her freedom and affirm the free soil of Massachusetts. While Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw ruled quite narrowly in the case that enslaved people brought to Massachusetts could not be held against their will, BFASS claimed a broad victory for the abolitionist cause, and Med was released to the care of a local institution. When she died two years later, celebration quickly turned to silence, and her story was soon forgotten. As a result, Commonwealth v. Aves is little known outside of legal scholarship. In The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019), Karen Woods Weierman complicates Boston's identity as the birthplace of abolition and the cradle of liberty, and restores Med to her rightful place in antislavery history by situating her story in the context of other writings on slavery, childhood, and the law.

Karen Woods Weierman is Professor of English and the former director of the Commonwealth Honors Program at Worcester State University. She is the author of One Nation, One Blood: Interracial Marriage in American Fiction, Scandal, and Law, 1820–1870, published in 2005 by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Jerrad P. Pacatte is a Ph.D. candidate and School of Arts and Sciences Excellence Fellow in the Department of History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-New Brunswick. His teaching and research interests examine eighteenth and nineteenth century African American women’s history and the history of slavery and emancipation in early America and the Atlantic world. Follow him on Twitter @Jerrad_Pacatte!

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David A. Less, "Memphis Mayhem: A Story of the Music That Shook Up the World" (ECW Press, 2020) Mar 25, 2021

Today I talked to David A. Lees about his bookMemphis Mayhem: A Story of the Music That Shook Up the World(ECW Press, 2020)

David Less has studied Memphis music for over 40 years, including work done for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Gibson Guitar Foundation. He’s been published in Rolling Stone and DownBeat, among other places.

This episode seizes first on three major events that happened in Memphis: the formal start of the blues (W.C. Handy 1909), the start of rock n’ roll (Elvis Presley 1954), and the tragic assassination of Martin Luther King (1968). Along the way, this episode explores everything from the impact of yellow fever epidemics on Memphis racial dynamics, including the rise of the South’s first (black) millionaire; and later the development of Beale Street into “Black America’s Main Street.” Other highlights include: the creation of America’s first all-female radio station (WHER, 1955) by Sam Phillips of Sun Studio fame; and the wealth of independent studios from Stax to Ardent that made Memphis the 3rd largest center for recording music in America for over a decade from the early 1960s onward.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Jelani Favors, "Shelter in A Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism" (U of North Carolina Press, 2020) Mar 23, 2021

Shelter in A Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) by Dr. Jelani Favors fills the “missing pages” of history by highighting the enduring role that Black colleges have played in African American freedom movements in the long-twentieth century.

Favors shows that Black colleges created freedom fighters whose organizing, dedication, and fearlessness made the Black Freedom Struggle’s most pivotal moments possible. Favors also argues that Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were fortified interstitial spaces for consciousness-raising and solidarity-building among race women and race men. HBCU students, faculty, and administrators were vital players in fashioning blueprints for Black liberation and ensuring the inter-generational transmission of resistance wisdom.

Taking the long view and moving through a tour of Black higher education, Favors theorizes that a hidden second curriculum and a Black college communitas thrived on each campus, making them both seedbeds of racial justice and shelter in a time of storm.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall.

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Erica Ball et al., "As if She Were Free" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Mar 22, 2021

Edited by Drs. Erica Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri L. Snyder, As if She Were Free (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a collective biography of African and African-descended women across the Americas.

This collection of twenty-four beautifully crafted chapters, spans across centuries and geographies, giving us a varied and textured reading of women’s lives and experiences. More importantly than that, and herein lies the revolutionary character of this book, As If She Were Free changes our ways of understanding and conceptualizing freedom and emancipation, ultimately transforming how we narrate the past of our societies and understand our present.

As the editors of the book tell us in this interview, this is a feminist project at its core, a useful history for today because African and African-descended women in the Americas, both in the past and present, have crafted their own understandings of freedom, advocated for new ways of defining and living freely, and achieved revolutionary changes in our societies. Enjoy this wonderful conversation!

PS. By the end of the interview, you may notice Tatiana Seijas does not answer some questions. The recording of this episode occurred during the Texas Winter storms, and she had to rush home before sunset. Her commitment to this interview, even under such circumstances, was remarkable even if not surprising for those of us who know her and her love for history.

Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron

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R. A. Judy, "Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black" (Duke UP, 2020) Mar 16, 2021

In this episode, I interview R.A. Judy, professor of Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, about his book Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black, which was published by Duke University Press in 2020. In Sentient Flesh R. A. Judy takes up freedman Tom Windham’s 1937 remark “we should have our liberty 'cause . . . us is human flesh" as a point of departure for an extended meditation on questions of the human, epistemology, and the historical ways in which the black being is understood. Drawing on numerous fields, from literary theory and musicology, to political theory and phenomenology, as well as Greek and Arabic philosophy, Judy engages literary texts and performative practices such as music and dance that express knowledge and conceptions of humanity appositional to those grounding modern racialized capitalism. Operating as critiques of Western humanism, these practices and modes of being-in-the-world—which he theorizes as “thinking in disorder,” or “poiēsis in black”—foreground the irreducible concomitance of flesh, thinking, and personhood. As Judy demonstrates, recognizing this concomitance is central to finding a way past the destructive and dominative force of the ontology of racial capitalism that still holds us in thrall.

Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email.

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Jonathan S. Holloway, "The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans" (Oxford UP, 2021) Mar 15, 2021

What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. If being "American" means living in a land of freedom and opportunity, what are we to make of those Americans who were enslaved and who have suffered from the limitations of second-class citizenship throughout their lives? African American history illuminates the United States' core paradoxes, inviting profound questions about what it means to be an American, a citizen, and a human being.

Jonathan S. Holloway's The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, 2021) considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called "the cause of freedom." It begins in Jamestown in 1619, when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement. It narrates the creation of a system of racialized chattel slavery, the eventual dismantling of that system in the national bloodletting of the Civil War, and the ways that civil rights disputes have continued to erupt in the more than 150 years since Emancipation. The Cause of Freedom carries forward to the Black Lives Matter movement, a grass-roots activist convulsion that declared that African Americans' present and past have value and meaning. At a moment when political debates grapple with the nation's obligation to acknowledge and perhaps even repair its original sin of racialized slavery, The Cause of Freedom tells a story about our capacity and willingness to realize the ideal articulated in the country's founding document, namely, that all people were created equal.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network.

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William C. Kashatus, "William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia" (U Notre Dame Press, 2021) Mar 12, 2021

William Still looms large in the history of the Underground Railroad, both for his role coordinating the Eastern Line and the records he maintained of the fugitives he saved. In William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), William C. Kashatus provides his readers with both an account of Still’s life and a comprehensive database compiled from the many interviews his subject conducted with the runaway slaves he assisted. Himself the son of former slaves, Still grew up in the free black community of Philadelphia, at that time the largest in America. Employed by the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society (PASS), Still worked alongside many of the leading figures of the abolitionist movement throughout the 1850s, playing a vital role in helping people escape from bondage. Though Still left PASS in 1861 for a successful career in business and philanthropy he remained a prominent figure in the postwar civil rights movement, while his authorship of the first published history of the Underground Railroad provided subsequent generations with a priceless resource about the hundreds of people he aided.

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Christopher T. Stout, "The Case for Identity Politics: Polarization, Demographic Change, and Racial Appeals" (U Virginia Press, 2020) Mar 11, 2021

The Case for Identity Politics: Polarization, Demographic Change, and Racial Appeals (University of Virginia Press, 2020) dives into the discussion and debate surrounding the 2016 primary and how Donald Trump was ultimately nominated by the Republican Party to be their standard bearer and then elected president. But this is not the center of the book—though it is a very important data point. Christopher Stout, Associate Professor of Political Science at Oregon State University, came to this question about identity politics and how this understanding of rhetorical and political levers is at play with different groups of voters in the United States, through the work of Charles Hamilton and considerations of the idea of deracialized strategies in American politics. Hamilton, who has written a forward to The Case for Identity Politics, co-authored, with Kwame Toure, the 1967 text Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, bringing forward this deracialization thesis that provides the jumping off point for Stout’s research and analysis. Stout discusses this concept of the deracialization of political rhetoric and campaigns, especially by Democratic presidential candidates over the past thirty or forty years. The Case for Identity Politics explores the nuances of policy appeals that center on race and policy appeals that deracialize the policy itself. Stout, in examining these different paths over the past decades, also traces some of the changes within American political parties, most particularly within the parties themselves and whom the parties see and respond to as their base supporters. This is a rich, detailed, and methodologically diverse study of identity politics, and how identity, particularly racial identity, has worked within politics in the United States, operating differently at state/local levels and national levels.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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B. Brian Foster, "I Don't Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life" (UNC Press, 2020) Mar 11, 2021

Brian Foster, self-identified Black boy from rural Mississippi, joins us today for a conversation about his book, I Don't Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life(The University of North Carolina Press, 2020). In this interview, he shares with us how his experiences growing up in, leaving and returning home to Mississippi shaped his storytelling. Foster first began this ethnographic project as a doctoral student in Sociology at UNC Chapel Hill. As he tells us, the project started as an exploration of educational inequality and race. It became something very different as he let himself be guided by the stories and experiences of the community he was researching. Brian tells us about a few of the folks he met while living in Clarksdale who shaped the direction and core ideas of this book; their stories highlighted perplexing and sometimes uncomfortable contradictions about what it meant to love and not like the Blues. We learn about Clarksdale, MI and the unique history of the Mississippi Delta, the development of the Blues Commission and Blues tourism as an effort to combat declining manufacturing and agricultural industries, the significance of the Blues to the Delta region, and the contradictions between investing in the Blues and investing in Black communities. We discuss storytelling, examining positionality in ethnographic research and how Foster sees Blues Epistemology as a lens to prioritize seeing Black Southerners as complex human rather than constructed caricatures.

I Don’t Like the Blues tells us an often-overlooked history of a community who has come to be defined as just one thing – Black Southerners – by just one thing – the Blues. By taking us into the homes, cars, backyards and neighborhoods of Black Clarksdalians, Foster gives us the stories and the framework for thinking about how race, place and community development has shaped the lives of Black folks in contemporary Mississippi.

Recently, his public writing “How We Got Here” on his Mississippian family and the tradition of hog slaughter, was developed into an award-winning short film. You can learn more about Brian’s ongoing work on his website.

Nafeesa Andrabi a 4th year Sociology PhD student with specialization in Race/Ethnicity and Health/Illness. I am currently a Biosocial Fellow at Carolina Population Center.

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Amanda Brickell Bellows, "American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination" (UNC Press, 2020) Mar 10, 2021

This ambitious work explores the literary and cultural production about Russian peasants and African Americans in the post-emancipation period. Brickell Bellows draws on visual images from advertisements to oil paintings as well as novellas, novels, pamphlets, and reports in English and Russian.

The abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865 transformed both nations as Russian peasants and African Americans gained new rights as subjects and citizens. During the second half of the long nineteenth century, Americans and Russians responded to these societal transformations through a fascinating array of new cultural productions. Analyzing portrayals of African Americans and Russian serfs in oil paintings, advertisements, fiction, poetry, and ephemera housed in American and Russian archives, Amanda Brickell Bellows argues that these widely circulated depictions shaped collective memory of slavery and serfdom, affected the development of national consciousness, and influenced public opinion as peasants and freedpeople strove to exercise their newfound rights. While acknowledging the core differences between chattel slavery and serfdom, as well as the distinctions between each nation's post-emancipation era, Bellows highlights striking similarities between representations of slaves and serfs that were produced by elites in both nations as they sought to uphold a patriarchal vision of society. Russian peasants and African American freedpeople countered simplistic, paternalistic, and racist depictions by producing dignified self-representations of their traditions, communities, and accomplishments. American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination(UNC Press, 2020) provides an important reconsideration of post-emancipation assimilation, race, class, and political power.

Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis and the author of The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

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Amanda Brickell Bellows, "American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination" (UNC Press, 2020) Mar 10, 2021

This ambitious work explores the literary and cultural production about Russian peasants and African Americans in the post-emancipation period. Brickell Bellows draws on visual images from advertisements to oil paintings as well as novellas, novels, pamphlets, and reports in English and Russian.

The abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865 transformed both nations as Russian peasants and African Americans gained new rights as subjects and citizens. During the second half of the long nineteenth century, Americans and Russians responded to these societal transformations through a fascinating array of new cultural productions. Analyzing portrayals of African Americans and Russian serfs in oil paintings, advertisements, fiction, poetry, and ephemera housed in American and Russian archives, Amanda Brickell Bellows argues that these widely circulated depictions shaped collective memory of slavery and serfdom, affected the development of national consciousness, and influenced public opinion as peasants and freedpeople strove to exercise their newfound rights. While acknowledging the core differences between chattel slavery and serfdom, as well as the distinctions between each nation's post-emancipation era, Bellows highlights striking similarities between representations of slaves and serfs that were produced by elites in both nations as they sought to uphold a patriarchal vision of society. Russian peasants and African American freedpeople countered simplistic, paternalistic, and racist depictions by producing dignified self-representations of their traditions, communities, and accomplishments. American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination(UNC Press, 2020) provides an important reconsideration of post-emancipation assimilation, race, class, and political power.

Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis and the author of The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

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Theodore D. Segal, "Point of Reckoning: The Fight for Racial Justice" (Duke UP, 2021) Mar 08, 2021

Duke University officially integrated its student body in the early 1960s, but the University itself did little to make students of color feel as though Duke was their academic home. During this decade, black students organized, agitated, protested, and finally took the bold step of occupying the University's main administrative building for one harrowing day, all in an effort to bring equality and rights to this historically white university campus.

In his deeply researched book, Point of Reckoning: The Fight for Racial Justice (Duke University Press, 2021) Theodore D. Segal tells the story of the students, administrators, and activists who forced Duke to acknowledge and address its segregation and disparity.

Lane Davis is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University where he studies American religious history. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis

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JeVon McCormick: Entrepreneur, Author and Speaker Mar 08, 2021

JeVon McCormick was born the son of a black pimp father and a white orphan mother. Hear how, as a nine year old, he critiqued the way his father managed prostitutes, to his rejection of concepts such as “hope” and “luck”. When he was in juvenile detention neither of his parents knew where he was. His journey from toughest of upbringings to fame and fortune is unforgettable and inspiring. Kimon and Richard never spoke to an entrepreneur with a history like his. We are sure you will find it as compelling as we did.

The lessons that he shares from his journey about saving, adaptation, learning by doing, the power of asking questions, accountability, and responsibility can benefit entrepreneurs and leaders the world over. McCormick’s book I Got There: How a Mixed-Race Kid Overcame Racism, Poverty, and Abuse to Achieve the American Dream tells his story.

About our guest JeVon McCormick is the son of a black pimp and a white mother, and was raised in the most dreadful conditions, three times jailed before he was an adult. His book, I Got There, tells the harrowing story of his struggle to succeed despite the over whelming odds stacked against him Today, he’s the CEO of a multi-million dollar publishing company that was recently ranked the #1 Top Company Culture inAmerica by Entrepreneur Magazine. JeVon is the President and CEO of Scribe Media, a publishing company that helps individuals from a variety of backgrounds write, publish, and market their books. Scribe Media has worked with more than 1700 authors, including members of The Nobel Peace Prize Committee, Nassim Taleb and David Goggins, whose blockbuster book Can’t Hurt Me has sold over 2 million copies. JeVon is an author and highly sought after keynote speaker, delivering the message that “Everyone Has A Story” to enthusiastic audiences across the country. JeVon is passionate about conscious entrepreneurship and creating opportunities for at-risk youth. He has mentored young men and women in the juvenile justice system, as well as those in lower economic communities. JeVon currently serves as a board member for Conscious Capitalism and the StartEdUp Foundation. His story and work have been featured on CNBC, and in Entrepreneur, Forbes, and Inc. magazines.https://scribemedia.com/https:...

The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal story of our carefully selected guests aiming for the atmosphere of an informal conversation in a bar or over a cup of coffee. Follow our channels on Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.

View the episode on Youtube here. You can listen to the episode on the NBN here.

About Kimon Fountoukidis Twitter Linkedin

Kimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. Both companies were founded in the mid 90s with zero capital and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. Listen to his story here.

About Richard Lucas Twitter Linkedin

Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including investments in Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre- to business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Listen to his story in an autobiographical TEDx talk here.

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Evan Rapport, "Damaged: Musicality and Race in Early American Punk" (UP of Mississippi, 2020) Mar 01, 2021

Damaged: Musicality and Race in Early American Punk(University Press of Mississippi, 2020) is the first book-length portrait of punk as a musical style with an emphasis on how punk developed in relation to changing ideas of race in American society from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Drawing on musical analysis, archival research, and new interviews, Damaged provides fresh interpretations of race and American society during this period and illuminates the contemporary importance of that era.

Evan Rapport outlines the ways in which punk developed out of dramatic changes to America’s cities and suburbs in the postwar era, especially with respect to race. The musical styles that led to punk included transformations to blues resources, experimental visions of the American musical past, and bold reworkings of the rock-and-roll and rhythm-and-blues sounds of the late 1950s and early 1960s, revealing a historically oriented approach to rock that is strikingly different from the common myths and conceptions about punk.

Following these approaches, punk itself reflected new versions of older exchanges between the US and the UK, the changing environments of American suburbs and cities, and a shift from the expressions of older baby boomers to that of younger musicians belonging to Generation X. Throughout the book, Rapport also explores the discourses and contradictory narratives of punk history, which are often in direct conflict with the world that is captured in historical documents and revealed through musical analysis.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

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Candacy Taylor, "Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America" (Abrams Press, 2020) Feb 25, 2021

Today I talked to Candacy Taylor about her book Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America (Abrams Press, 2020).

Taylor is an award-winning author, photographer and cultural documentarian. She’s been a fellow at Harvard University under the direction of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and her projects have been funded by organizations ranging from National Geographic to The National Endowment for the Humanities. Her work has received extensive media coverage in places like the PBS Newshour and The New Yorker.

This episode covers the African-American travel guidebook made famous by the Academy-award-winning movie Green Book. Taylor’s book more accurately and completely covers the more than 10,000 former black- and white-owned businesses establishments that served black travelers during the era from 1936-1967, when editions of the guidebook helped black motorists find gas stations, restaurants and lodging that catered to them in segregated America. The episode also addresses the reasons why 75% of those sites are now gone, falling victim to everything from urban renewal and redlining to soaring incarceration rates that have devasted black communities across America.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Daphne A. Brooks, "Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound" (Harvard UP, 2021) Feb 23, 2021

Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound(Harvard University Press, 2021) by Dr. Daphne Brooks is a lyrical masterpiece that takes readers on an exhilarating journey through a century of Black sound from Bessie Smith to Beyoncé. In writing alongside the sistas who cared for Black women's musicianship like Pauline Hopkins and Janelle Monaé, Brooks casts contemporary performers as archivists, acclaimed writers as sound theorists, record label originators as music critics, and fans as the vital keepers of Black sound. Brooks’ liner notes are a “requiem” for the oversight of Black women musicians and their intellectual resonance, powerfully uncovering their sonic, visual, and kinesthetic innovations through a Black feminist conceptual lens. On each step of the journey, Brooks presents Black sound women as radical intellectuals, as the creators of modernity, and as the fierce leaders of revolutionary world-making.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall.

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Stephanie McCurry, "Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War" (Harvard UP, 2019) Feb 23, 2021

In Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War (Harvard UP, 2019), the award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning challenges the idea that women are outside of war, through a trio of dramatic stories revealing women's transformative role in the American Civil War. We think of war as a man's world, but women have always played active roles in times of violence and been left to pick up the pieces in societies decimated by war. In this groundbreaking reconsideration of the Civil War, the award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning invites us to see America's bloodiest conflict not just as pitting brother against brother but as a woman's war. When the war broke out, Union soldiers assumed Confederate women would be innocent noncombatants. Experience soon challenged this simplistic belief.

Through a trio of dramatic stories, Stephanie McCurry reveals the vital and sometimes confounding roles women played on and off the battlefield. We meet Clara Judd, a Confederate spy whose imprisonment for treason sparked heated controversy, defying the principle of civilian immunity and leading to lasting changes in the laws of war. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved women escaped across Union lines, upending emancipation policies that extended only to enslaved men. The Union's response was to classify fugitive black women as "soldiers' wives," regardless of whether they were married--offering them some protection but placing new obstacles on their path to freedom. In the war's aftermath, the Confederate grande dame Gertrude Thomas wrestled with her loss of status and of her former slaves. War, emancipation, and economic devastation affected her family intimately, and through her life McCurry helps us see how fundamental the changes of Reconstruction were. Women's War dismantles the long-standing fiction that women are outside of war and shows that they were indispensable actors in the Civil War, as they have been--and continue to be--in all wars.

Jerrad P. Pacatte is a doctoral candidate and School of Arts and Sciences Excellence Fellow in the Department of History at Rutgers.

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Robert L. Stone, "Can’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus! Photographs from the Sacred Steel Community" (U of Mississippi Press, 2020) Feb 23, 2021

Folklorist Robert L. Stone presents a rare collection of high-quality documentary photos of the sacred steel guitar musical tradition and the community that supports it. The introductory text and extended photo captions in Can’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus! Photographs from the Sacred Steel Community(University of Mississippi Press, 2020) offer the reader an intimate view of this unique tradition of passionately played music that is beloved among fans of American roots music and admired by folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and other scholars.

In 1992, a friend in Hollywood, Florida, introduced Stone to African American musicians who played the electric steel guitar in the African American Holiness-Pentecostal churches House of God and Church of the Living God. With the passion, skill, and unique voice they brought to the instruments, these musicians profoundly impressed Stone. He produced an album for the Florida Folklife Program, which Arhoolie Records licensed and released worldwide. It created a roots music sensation.

In 1996, Stone began to document the tradition beyond Florida. He took the photos in this book from 1992 to 2008 in Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Mississippi, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida, and at concerts in Italy. The images capture musicians as they play for worship services before spirit-filled believers singing, dancing, shouting, praying, and testifying. Stone gives the viewer much to witness, always presenting his passionate subjects with dignity. His sensitive portrayal of this community attests to the ongoing importance of musical traditions in African American life and worship.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

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Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, "Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature" (Northwestern UP, 2020) Feb 18, 2021

Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez pens towards decolonial freedom. Her recently published book, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature(Northwestern University Press, 2020), uses peripheralized (5) novels, visual/sonic works, poetry, essays, and short stories by diasporic and exiled Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone writers and artists towards “render[ing] legible what these texts offer to subjects who resist ongoing forms of colonialism…” (1). By centering the relationality of Equatorial Guinea, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic from the foundations of Ethnic Studies and Women of Color Feminist methodologies, Figueroa-Vásquez holds space for the different ways Afro-descendant peoples are racialized across the Atlantic while simultaneously attending to the anti-Blackness seemingly endemic to the modern world.

But what does it mean to decolonize? For Figueroa-Vásquez, “In the contexts of the literature outlined in the texts, I pose that the lifeblood of these worlds takes the shape of decolonizing diasporas – radical Afro-diasporic imaginaries that subvert coloniality and usher in new ways of knowing and being, and interrogate and excavate location and dislocation” (25). By linking the diasporic Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa to the works of Black, Indigenous, and women of color thinkers, the world of decolonial thought emerges through the pages of Decolonizing Diasporas. It is through the literary poetics and artwork made under conditions of destierro – a theory and methodological formulation set out by the author – which become forces that challenge structures of power that give rise to possibilities of subverting colonial mentalities.

Decolonizing Diaspora reads like a detailed manual for decolonization specifically designed for Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone diasporic subjects on their journey of reimaging and creating other worlds. Each chapter builds on the next. Recognizing the intimate impacts of dictatorship, occupation, and coloniality of gender opens up sites of resistance (Ch. 1) that require faithful witnessing (Ch. 2). Faithful witnessing is a necessary action in Figueroa-Vásquez’s conception of destierro as a decolonial method (Ch.3) and in turn, reveals the condition for demanding reparations and reparations of the imagination (Ch. 4). With an emphasis on decolonial love and relations across difference, the possibilities of Afro-Atlantic resistance and futurities beyond coloniality come into clear view (Ch.5). Even then, Dr. Figueroa-Vásquez guides us back to the Introduction of the book with her last vignette “Relations Again,” in which she underscores the relationships between Equatorial Guinea and the Latinx Caribbean islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. The reader has no choice but to begin again.

Jonathan Cortez is a Ph.D. candidate of American Studies at Brown University. They are a historian of 20th-century issues of race, labor, (im)migration, surveillance, space, relational Ethnic Studies, and Latinx Studies.

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Alison Phipps, "Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism" (Manchester UP, 2020) Feb 16, 2021

We are joined today by Alison Phipps, Professor in Gender Studies and the University of Sussex to talk about her newest book, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism(Manchester University Press, 2020).

The Me Too movement, started by Black feminist Tarana Burke in 2006, went viral as a hashtag eleven years later after a tweet by white actor Alyssa Milano. Mainstream movements like #MeToo have often built on and co-opted the work of women of colour, while refusing to learn from them or centre their concerns. Far too often, the message is not ‘Me, Too’ but ‘Me, Not You’. Alison Phipps argues that this is not just a lack of solidarity. Privileged white women also sacrifice more marginalised people to achieve their aims, or even define them as enemies when they get in the way. Me, not you argues that the mainstream movement against sexual violence expresses a political whiteness that both reflects its demographics and limits its revolutionary potential. Privileged white women use their traumatic experiences to create media outrage, while relying on state power and bureaucracy to purge ‘bad men’ from elite institutions with little concern for where they might appear next. In their attacks on sex workers and trans people, the more reactionary branches of this feminist movement play into the hands of the resurgent far-right.

Dr. Phipps is the author of Women in Science, Engineering and Technology: Three Decades of UK Initiatives (Trentham Books, 2008), an examination of the mixed results of the UK’s attempts to address gender disparity STEM fields through policy and The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age (Polity Press, 2014) an award-winning look at the way feminists find themselves negotiating a very tight passage between the Scylla and Charybdis of neoconservatives and neoliberals, as well as a bevy or articles on similar issues.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy: A Discussion with Michael Hanchard Feb 15, 2021

As right-wing nationalism and authoritarian populism gain momentum across the world, liberals, and even some conservatives, worry that democratic principles are under threat. In The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (Princeton UP, 2018), Michael Hanchard argues that the current rise in xenophobia and racist rhetoric is nothing new and that exclusionary policies have always been central to democratic practices since their beginnings in classical times. Contending that democracy has never been for all people, Hanchard discusses how marginalization is reinforced in modern politics, and why these contradictions need to be fully examined if the dynamics of democracy are to be truly understood.

Hanchard identifies continuities of discriminatory citizenship from classical Athens to the present and looks at how democratic institutions have promoted undemocratic ideas and practices. The longest-standing modern democracies —France, Britain, and the United States—profited from slave labor, empire, and colonialism, much like their Athenian predecessor. Hanchard follows these patterns through the Enlightenment and to the states and political thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and he examines how early political scientists, including Woodrow Wilson and his contemporaries, devised what Hanchard has characterized as “racial regimes” to maintain the political and economic privileges of dominant groups at the expense of subordinated ones. Exploring how democracies reconcile political inequality and equality, Hanchard debates the thorny question of the conditions under which democracies have created and maintained barriers to political membership.

Showing the ways that race, gender, nationality, and other criteria have determined a person’s status in political life, The Spectre ofRace offers important historical context for how democracy generates political difference and inequality.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com

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Cathleen D. Cahill, "Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement" (U North Carolina Press, 2020) Feb 15, 2021

We think we know the story of women's suffrage in the United States: women met at Seneca Falls, marched in Washington, D.C., and demanded the vote until they won it with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

But the fight for women's voting rights extended far beyond these familiar scenes. From social clubs in New York's Chinatown to conferences for Native American rights, and in African American newspapers and pamphlets demanding equality for Spanish-speaking New Mexicans, a diverse cadre of extraordinary women struggled to build a movement that would truly include all women, regardless of race or national origin.

In Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement(The University of North Carolina Press, 2020), Cathleen D. Cahill tells the powerful stories of a multiracial group of activists who propelled the national suffrage movement toward a more inclusive vision of equal rights. Cahill reveals a new cast of heroines largely ignored in earlier suffrage histories: Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša), Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Carrie Williams Clifford, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, and Adelina "Nina" Luna Otero-Warren. With these feminists of color in the foreground, Cahill recasts the suffrage movement as an unfinished struggle that extended beyond the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

As we celebrate the centennial of a great triumph for the women's movement, Cahill's powerful history reminds us of the work that remains.

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Tavia Nyong’o, "Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life" (NYU Press, 2028) Feb 05, 2021

Tavia Nyong’o's Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (NYU Press, 2018), examines a broad range of artists and disciplines, from Adrian Piper to Kara Walker to the meaning of the auroch's in the film Beasts of the Southern Wild. Throughout the book, Nyong’o draws the reader's attention to the ways Black and queer artists construct alternative worlds in a context of brutality and discrimination. Negotiating between the twin poles of Afro-futurism and Afro-pessimism, Nyong’o summons the poetic powers of queer world-making that have always been immanent to the fight and play of black life.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Kimberly Mack, "Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White" (U Mass Press, 2020) Feb 05, 2021

The familiar story of Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, who sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads in exchange for guitar virtuosity, and the violent stereotypes evoked by legendary blues "bad men" like Stagger Lee undergird the persistent racial myths surrounding "authentic" blues expression.

Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020) unpacks the figure of the American blues performer, moving from early singers such as Ma Rainey and Big Mama Thornton to contemporary musicians such as Amy Winehouse, Rhiannon Giddens, and Jack White to reveal that blues makers have long used their songs, performances, interviews, and writings to invent personas that resist racial, social, economic, and gendered oppression.

Using examples of fictional and real-life blues artists culled from popular music and literary works from writers such as Walter Mosley, Alice Walker, and Sherman Alexie, Kimberly Mack demonstrates that the stories blues musicians construct about their lives (however factually slippery) are inextricably linked to the "primary story" of the narrative blues tradition, in which autobiography fuels musicians' reclamation of power and agency.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Mical Raz, "Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way" (UNC Press Books, 2020) Feb 05, 2021

In the early 1970s, a new wave of public service announcements urged parents to help end an American tradition of child abuse. The message, relayed repeatedly over television and radio, urged abusive parents to seek help.

Support groups for parents, including Parents Anonymous, proliferated across the country to deal with the seemingly burgeoning crisis. At the same time, an ever-increasing number of abused children were reported to child welfare agencies, due in part to an expansion of mandatory reporting laws and the creation of reporting hotlines across the nation.

In Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way(University of North Carolina Press Books, 2020), Mical Raz examines this history of child abuse policy and charts how it changed since the late 1960s, specifically taking into account the frequency with which agencies removed African American children from their homes and placed them in foster care. Highlighting the rise of Parents Anonymous and connecting their activism to the sexual abuse moral panic that swept the country in the 1980s, Raz argues that these panics and policies--as well as biased viewpoints regarding race, class, and gender--played a powerful role shaping perceptions of child abuse. These perceptions were often directly at odds with the available data and disproportionately targeted poor African American families above others.

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Earl Wright II, "Jim Crow Sociology: The Black and Southern Roots of American Sociology" (University of Cincinnati Press, 2020) Feb 05, 2021

Jim Crow Sociology: The Black and Southern Roots of American Sociology(U Cincinnati Press, 2020)is an extraordinary new volume that examines the origin, development, and significance of Black Sociology through the accomplishments of early African American sociologists at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) such as Atlanta University, Tuskegee Institute, Fisk University, and Howard University. Black Sociology is a concept that weaponizes the discipline for that which is “right and good" and prioritizes scholar-activist inspired research directed at impacting real world conditions of African Americans.

Guided by this approach, this book debunks the idea that the sociology practiced by early African Americans does not exemplify scholarly excellence. Instead, Earl Wright II demonstrates that Tuskegee Institute, under the leadership of Booker T. Washington, established the first applied program of rural sociology. Fisk University, first under the guidance of George Edmund Haynes then Charles S. Johnson, developed one of the earliest and most impactful programs of applied urban sociology. Wright extends our understanding of W. E. B. Du Bois's Atlanta Sociological Laboratory with an articulation of the contributions of women to the first American school of sociology.

Jim Crow Sociology forces contemporary scholars to grapple with who are and who are not included in the disciplinary canon. Specifically, this book forces us to ask why early African American sociologists and HBCUs are not canonized. What makes this book most consequential is that it provides evidence supporting the proposition that sociology began in earnest in the United States as a Black and southern enterprise.

C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego.

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Gretchen Sorin, "Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights" (Liveright, 2020) Feb 04, 2021

Gretchen Sorin’s book, Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights(Liveright, 2020) is Sorin’s ode to a part of history that has not been told to its fullest. Its pages include 75 powerful images that together, demonstrate that the car—the ultimate symbol of independence and possibility—has always held particular importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the dangers presented them by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. Melding new archival research with her family’s story, Sorin recovers a lost history and shows how, when combined with black travel guides, including the famous Green Book, the automobile encouraged a new way of resisting oppression.

Gretchen Sorin is the director and a distinguished professor of the State University of New York (SUNY) Oneonta Cooperstown Graduate Program in Museum Studies—one of the oldest museum studies programs in the United States and still “at the forefront of the profession today.” She holds a bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Rutgers University, a master’s degree in Museum Studies from SUNY Oneonta, and a Ph.D. in History from SUNY Albany and has for over thirty years curated innumerable exhibits for organizations like the Smithsonian, the Jewish Museum, and the New York State Historical Association.

One can find Dr. Sorin’s book in print, digital, and audio formats. Its Steeplechase Films documentary, directed by Ric Burns, Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America, can be streamed online on PBS for free via a link on its documentary page: http://www.dwbfilm.com/.

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Sheldon George, "Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity" (Baylor UP, 2016) Feb 03, 2021

In his book, Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity (Baylor UP, 2016), Sheldon George treats an old idea--that African Americans must transform their relationship to the history of slavery and to their identification with race—in an entirely new way.

What follows is a quite truncated encapsulation of the book’s central argument which I will attempt if only because it struck me as a very original use of Lacanian thought. It also produced something I value very much: the development of fresh ideas for this psychoanalyst to ponder.

George argues that owning human property, slaves, offered a surplus of "jouissance" to slave owners. Meanwhile the enslaved, denuded of family, of history and claims to nationality, were often valued solely for muscle mass and fecundity. Psychically emptied--seen only for their capacity to serve the master's needs, and I want to add, also emptying preemptively, and defensively their psychic lives, enslaved people were forbidden access to being, from which flows, following Lacan, crucial early fantasies of a wholeness that must be shattered if one is to become subjectivized. Fantasies of repletion provide a kind of protective “crested shield" with which to endure the rough first brush with the Symbolic.

Living under a racist, white animating Master Signifier, slaves were often absent of the requisite psychic buffering with which to enter the Symbolic without undue suffering. Barred from the rudiments of being and lacking a constructive Master Signifier from which to generate vitalizing associations, the gaze of the enslaved was horrifyingly riveted to the “very lack that is masked in the Lacanian subject,” (p.21). Here George offers an apt description of what the sociologist of slavery, Orlando Patterson, refers to as "social death."

Rather than celebrate the ways in which the burden of “double consciousness” aided African Americans in generating new linguistic vistas, we find no fan of Henry Louis Gates Jr’s “signifying monkey” here. George declares the project of "resignification" as not going far enough, and crucially, as missing the impact of the unconscious on language. Arguing against a powerful trend in African-American studies to value African-American racial identity as such, George boldly declares, “insistences on race perform a rite, an endless repeated act as a means to commemorate the not very memorable encounter that I call the trauma of slavery.” (p.42) How, George asks, can one have an identity based on insult, negation, and injury? Following his argument, the lure of racial pride loses its force majeur. Suddenly we see it as but papering over a potentially productive encounter with lack. And if it is lack that must be faced so as to open the door to a life driven by enlivening, elusive yet worthwhile desire, at what cost is it avoided?

The idea of having love of the race and “the race man” become rather quickly tragic in George’s intellectual hands. Furthermore, embracing the narrative that “we come from slavery”, like Sethe in Toni Morrison's Beloved, (a novel George writes beautifully about in this text) one is quickly cornered, metonymically, by the suffocating relationship between race and enslavement. The need for the space to metaphorize is undeniable.

To learn more about the work of Sheldon George, please go here.

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Roundtable on W. E. B. Du Bois' "Black Reconstruction in America" (1935) Feb 01, 2021

I am delighted to have y’all listen to the conversation I had with three of my favorite historians in all the dad-gum world. January 2021 has been a wild one. Not only did we transition from the Trump era to the Biden era, an attempted coup took place in the US Capitol building that attempted to disrupt the transition of power. In a moment of white supremacist terror, W. E. B. Du Bois’ 1935 Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 was the book I thought appropriate to not only chat about, but see what parallels we can draw from Du Bois’ text to our own era. Along with the process it took to birth Black Reconstruction into the world during the Great Depression AND knee-deep in the Jim Crow era. Welp, I had to ring the A-Team to chat about Du Bois’ gem. The team I assembled consists of Dr. Hilary Green, Dr. Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, and Dr. Robert Greene II.

Dr. Hilary N. Green is an Associate Professor of History in the Department of Gender and Race Studies and serves as the co-program director of the African American Studies program. She also has a partial appointment in American Studies. Dr. Green’s research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, Civil War Memory, the US South, 19th Century America, and the Black Atlantic.

Dr. Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders is an Assistant Professor of African American history. She holds a Ph.D. in History from the greatest program in African American History in the dadgum land, Rutgers University, where she concentrated in African American and United States history. Dr. Lawrence-Sanders teaches courses in U.S. history, historical memory, African American history and African American women's history.

Dr. Robert Greene II is Assistant Professor of History at Claflin University. Dr. Greene II’s research interests include African American history, American intellectual history since 1945, and Southern history since 1945. Recently, Dr. Greene II also assumed the Lead Associate Editor position of Black Perspectives, the award-winning academic blog of the African American Intellectual History Society.

I hope y’all enjoy the conversation.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Tyler Stovall, "White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea" (Princeton UP, 2021) Feb 01, 2021

The era of the Enlightenment, which gave rise to our modern conceptions of freedom and democracy, was also the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. America, a nation founded on the principle of liberty, is also a nation built on African slavery, Native American genocide, and systematic racial discrimination. White Freedom traces the complex relationship between freedom and race from the eighteenth century to today, revealing how being free has meant being white.

Tyler Stovall explores the intertwined histories of racism and freedom in France and the United States, the two leading nations that have claimed liberty as the heart of their national identities. He explores how French and American thinkers defined freedom in racial terms and conceived of liberty as an aspect and privilege of whiteness. He discusses how the Statue of Liberty—a gift from France to the United States and perhaps the most famous symbol of freedom on Earth—promised both freedom and whiteness to European immigrants. Taking readers from the Age of Revolution to today, Stovall challenges the notion that racism is somehow a paradox or contradiction within the democratic tradition, demonstrating how white identity is intrinsic to Western ideas about liberty. Throughout the history of modern Western liberal democracy, freedom has long been white freedom.

A major work of scholarship that is certain to draw a wide readership and transform contemporary debates, White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea(Princeton UP, 2021) provides vital new perspectives on the inherent racism behind our most cherished beliefs about freedom, liberty, and human rights.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com

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Andratesha Fritzgerald, "Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning" (Cast, 2020) Jan 27, 2021

In the wake of 2020’s movements for Black Lives and exposed racial disparities in working-class deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutions are grappling on a massive level with their role in either reproducing or disrupting entrenched systems of exploitative power. While individual agency in enacting inclusive practices can be limited by these massive, intersecting forces, educators also wield tremendous influence over the forces within the learning environments they create for all students—particularly those who have been historically marginalized in society and schools alike.

In Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning: Building Expressways to Learning Success(CAST Professional Publishing, 2020), Andratesha Fritzgerald pairs Universal Design for Learning (UDL)—a framework for embedding options in the methods, materials, assessments and instructional goals that anticipate inevitable learner variability in the classroom—with antiracism, to support educators in effectively honoring the brilliance of Black and Brown children. Drawing vivid portraits of classroom instruction, Fritzgerald shows how teachers committed to antiracist environments can open new roads of communication, engagement, and skill-building so that students feel honored and loved.

Andratesha Fritzgerald, EdS, brings draws on nearly two decades of experience as a teacher, curriculum specialist, administrator and director in urban schools to synthesize these two schools of thought/action through this book. She has been published in What Really Works with Universal Design for Learning (Corwin Press), and on Think Inclusive’s blog. Currently, Fritzgerald serves as Director of Teaching, Learning and Innovation for the East Cleveland, Ohio City School Districts, and is the founder of Building Blocks of Brilliance.

Christina Anderson Bosch is a doctoral student in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She reads widely in inclusive education scholarship, comparative special education research, and Universal Design for Learning practices to advance intellectual clarity and abolitionist imaginings about the school-prison nexus.

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GerShun Avilez, "Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire" (U Illinois Press, 2020) Jan 26, 2021

Whether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomic injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists’ work throughout the black diaspora.

In Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire (U Illinois Press, 2020), GerShun Avilez analyzes the work of diasporic artists who, denied government protections, have used art to create spaces for justice. He first focuses on how the state seeks to inhibit the movement of black queer bodies through public spaces, whether on the street or across borders. From there, he pivots to institutional spaces--specifically prisons and hospitals--and the ways such places seek to expose queer bodies in order to control them. Throughout, he reveals how desire and art open routes to black queer freedom when policy, the law, racism, and homophobia threaten physical safety, civil rights, and social mobility.

Order this book through University of Illinois Press and use this code to get a discount: F20UIP

GerShun Avilez is an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism.

John Marszalek III is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University. John is on Twitter at @marsjf3.

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Cedric Burrows, "The Construction of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X in Composition Textbooks: Rereading Readers" (2011) Jan 26, 2021

This is part of our Special Series on Malcolm X and Black Nationalism. In this series, we delve into the background of Malcolm X's action and thought in the context of Black Nationalism, correcting the fundamentally mistaken notion that Malcolm X was a civil rights leader. He certainly did not see himself in that way, and explicitly argued otherwise. This helps us place the Afro-American struggle in its dimensions beyond the current American nation-state, including the Black Atlantic, and beyond.

Today, our guest is Cedric Burrows, author of The Construction of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X in Composition Textbooks: Rereading Readers, which was his Ph.D. Dissertation at the University of Kansas, available online.

While scholars have written about the use of textbooks in writing courses, little attention is paid to how textbooks anthologize writers, especially women and people of color. This study examines the portrayal of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X in composition textbook anthologies known as Readers, and sheds light on the ways Readers incorporate writers from African-American backgrounds.

Through qualitative methods, Burrows analyzes how King and Malcolm X are anthologized in five popular Readers: The Bedford Reader, Rereading America, Patterns for College Writing, The Conscious Reader, and A World of Ideas.

By intertwining the historical-critical method and narratives from my own experiences teaching Malcolm X and King from a Reader, Burrows analyzes the embedded cultural meanings in the biographical headnotes, the selection, and the discussion questions in the Readers.

The results show that Readers tend to: (1) narrate King's and Malcolm X's biographies according to popular narratives in society; (2) provide little or inaccurate historical context to ground the selections; (3) alter the original sources of King and Malcolm X's text; and (4) format King and Malcolm X's rhetoric according to the Western rhetorical tradition while ignoring the African-American dimensions in their rhetoric.

Burrows concludes by discussing how Readers are part of a larger issue within the educational system.

Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades.

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Maya Stovall, "Liquor Store Theatre" (Duke UP, 2020) Jan 25, 2021

For six years, anthropologist and artist Maya Stovall enacted a series of dance performances outside of liquor stores in the McDougall-Hunt neighborhood on Detroit’s east side. Stovall conceptualized these performances as prompts for people that may pass by and as a means to open up space for conversation with Detroit residents.

These filmed performances and the interviews that followed make up Liquor Store Theatre (Duke University Press, 2020). In the book, Stovall probes the historic, economic, and political forces that constructed and shape the city of Detroit. Liquor Store Theatre attends closely to the methods of performance and interviews as they unfold in the author’s pursuit of this project. Stovall’s interlocuters share their perspectives on the changes in the city, the challenges the city faces, as well as their hopes for a future in which they can enjoy the benefits of the city. A native Detroiter herself, Stovall’s artistic ventures turn the lens back on the city itself and center the voices of Detroiters, whose awareness of the city’s challenges mixes with their pursuit of opportunity. Liquor Store Theatre videos have been screened at the 2017 Whitney Biennial and at the Cranbrook Art Museum. Stovall brings together ethnography, contemporary art and performance, and geography to offer an innovative method for troubling the relationship between the observed and the observer of city life.

Maya Stovall is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Stovall’s exhibition for 1526 appears at the Reyes Finn gallery. Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations.

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Careers: A Discussion with Dorothy Berry, Digital Archivist Jan 22, 2021

On today’s podcast, I am chatting with Dorothy Berry, Houghton Library's Digital Collections Program Manager. In it, we discuss why she became an archivist, what digital archivists do, and about the great project she created and is leading at Houghton: Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom: Primary Sources from Houghton Library.

Dorothy Berry received her MLS from Indiana University, as well as an MA in Ethnomusicology from the same institution, following a BA in Music Performance from Mills College. Previously she worked as the Metadata and Digitization Lead for Umbra Search African American History at University of Minnesota, as a Mellon Fellow at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and also as a graduate assistant at the Black Film Center/Archive and the Archives of African American Music and Culture.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Richard J. Boles, "Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Segregated Churches in the Early American North" (NYU Press, 2020) Jan 19, 2021

In Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Segregated Churches in the Early American North(NYU Press, 2020), Richard J. Boles argues that, contrary to traditional American religious historiography, interracial worship was a common and accepted practice in many northern Protestant churches in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As Northern states outlawed slavery, Christians hardened their stances on segregation and discrimination, leading to racially divided Protestantism in the nineteenth century. Using archival sources from over four hundred congregations, Boles illuminates the complex racial and religious dynamics of the early American north and adds significant understanding to our knowledge of race in American religious history.

Lane Davis is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University where he studies American religious history. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis

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Jeffrey B. Perry, "Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918–1927" (Columbia UP, 2020) Jan 18, 2021

Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918-1927 (Columbia University 2020) by Jeffrey B. Perry, independent scholar and archivist, is an extensive intellectual history of the life and work of Black radical and autodidact Hubert Harrison. Perry is also editor of A Hubert Harrison Reader (Wesleyan, 2001) and author of Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 (Columbia, 2008). He is the chief biographer of Hubert Harrison and Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality is a follow up to his aforementioned text on Harrison. (these two volumes can be ordered from Columbia University Press at 20% discount by using Code CUP20). Perry’s volume on Harrison’s life from 1883 to 1918 is considered to be the first volume of an Afro-Caribbean “and only the fourth of an African American after those of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes” (1). This current text is a continuation of the argument advanced in Perry’s initial text on Harrison. Harrison is often left out of major surveys of the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Era, as Perry notes, and this is likely because the Renaissance is often viewed as a movement of Black intellectual elites with formal higher education. That said, Harrison was a working-class self-taught man who wrote reviews, essays, orations and was recognized by intellectual elites of his day and a member of the Socialist Party of America.

Harrison was born in Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands in 1883 but relocated to the Harlem section of New York City in 1900, at age seventeen, where he eventually became a recognized writer, cultural critic, orator, editor and political activist including working with Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Perry defines Harrison as “the voice” of Harlem radicalism and also a “radical internationalist.” This is a challenge to standard views of the New Negro Era that tend to place intellectuals such as Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois at the helm of Black thought and culture during the Harlem Renaissance moment in African American history. That said, Harrison was also involved with Garvey’s UNIA as editor of the Negro World and in labor activism. Harrison formed the Liberty League in 1917 and The Voice that helped to lay the foundation of the Garvey Movement and the Rise of the UNIA. He was involved in the major debates of his day including discussions about class consciousness, Black nationalism, internationalism, freethought and trade unionism. This second volume by Perry is very necessary given Harrison’s extensive engagement with the ideas and the production of knowledge as a self-taught organic intellectual with deep concerns about human liberation across class and race.

Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Black Equality is organized into four major sections divided by twenty chapters including an “Epilogue.” It is a far-reaching text of more than 700 pages. Part I focuses on Harrison’s work with The Voice and his political activities in places such as Washington, D.C. and Virginia, In Part II, Harrison’s role as editor of the Negro World is assessed with a discussion of his debates and writings. Part III concerns Harrison’s work as a “freelance educator” and his work as a writer and speaker, while the final part of the text Part IV covers his role as a Black radical internationalist. This is a critically important text. Scholars of the Harlem Renaissance will find it difficult to dismiss Hubert Harrison as a major voice of the New Negro Era with the publication of this text. Perry’s painstaking coverage of Harrison gives him his rightful place in history as “the voice of Harlem radicalism.”

Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history.

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Careers: A Discussion with Charisse Burden-Stelly, Black Studies Scholar Jan 18, 2021

Today on New Books in African American Studies I am chatting with Carleton College Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly. Dr. Burden-Stelly is a critical Black Studies scholar of political theory, political economy, intellectual history, and historical sociology. On today's episode we discuss Dr. Burden-Stelly's path from graduate school through, teaching, and scholarship as a committed scholar of Black Studies. We also discuss how she plans out her research and writing agenda. Dr. Burden-Stelly is one of my favorite thinkers in Blackademia, and by the end of this episode, you might just say the same thing. Enjoy, New Books in African American Studies family.

Adam McNeil is a third-year PhD Student in colonial and American Revolutionary Era Black Women's History at Rutgers University.

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Bruce Haynes, "Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family" (Columbia UP, 2019) Jan 15, 2021

Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family(Columbia UP, 2019) tells the story of one Harlem family across three generations, connecting its journey to the historical and social forces that transformed Harlem over the past century. Bruce D. Haynes and Syma Solovitch capture the tides of change that pushed blacks forward through the twentieth century--the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the early civil rights victories, the Black Power and Black Arts movements--as well as the many forces that ravaged black communities, including Haynes's own. As an authority on race and urban communities, Haynes brings unique sociological insights to the American mobility saga and the tenuous nature of status and success among the black middle class.

In many ways, Haynes's family defied the odds. All four great-grandparents on his father's side owned land in the South as early as 1880. His grandfather, George Edmund Haynes, was the founder of the National Urban League and a protégé of eminent black sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois; his grandmother, Elizabeth Ross Haynes, was a noted children's author of the Harlem Renaissance and a prominent social scientist. Yet these early advances and gains provided little anchor to the succeeding generations. This story is told against the backdrop of a crumbling three-story brownstone in Sugar Hill that once hosted Harlem Renaissance elites and later became an embodiment of the family's rise and demise. Down the Up Staircase is a stirring portrait of this family, each generation walking a tightrope, one misstep from free fall.

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Rachel Berenson Perry, "The Life and Art of Felrath Hines: From Dark to Light" (Indiana UP, 2019) Jan 15, 2021

Today I talked to Rachel Berenson Perry about her book The Life and Art of Felrath Hines: From Dark to Light (Indiana University Press, 2019). Felrath Hines (1913–1993), the first African American man to become a professional conservator for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, was born and raised in the segregated Midwest. Leaving their home in the South, Hines's parents migrated to Indianapolis with hopes for a better life. While growing up, Hines was encouraged by his seamstress mother to pursue his early passion for art by taking Saturday classes at Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis. He moved to Chicago in 1937, where he attended the Art Institute of Chicago in pursuit of his dreams.

Kirstin L. Ellsworth holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art from Indiana University and is Associate Professor of Art History at California State University Dominguez Hills.

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B. R. Roberts and K. Foulcher, "Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference" (Duke UP, 2016) Jan 12, 2021

This is a Special Series on Third World Nationalism.

In the wake of a rise in nationalism around the world, and its general condemnation by liberals and the left, in addition to the rise of China and Russia, we have put together this series on Third World Nationalism to nuance the present discourse on nationalism, note its centrality to anti-imperial, anti-colonial politics around the world, the reconfiguration of global power, and its inextricability from mainstream politics in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Today my guests are Brian Roberts and Keith Foulcher, editors of Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference (Duke UP, 2016).

While Richard Wright's account of the 1955 Bandung Conference has been key to shaping Afro-Asian historical narratives, Indonesian accounts of Wright and his conference attendance have been largely overlooked.

Indonesian Notebook contains myriad documents by Indonesian writers, intellectuals, and reporters, as well as a newly recovered lecture by Wright, previously published only in Indonesian. Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher introduce and contextualize these documents with extensive background information and analysis, showcasing the heterogeneity of postcolonial modernity and underscoring the need to consider non-English language perspectives in transnational cultural exchanges. This collection of primary sources and scholarly histories is a crucial companion volume to Wright'sThe Color Curtain.

This, then, is a very interesting exploration of the congruences and contradictions between Third World Nationalism and African-American struggles.

Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com.

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David A. Varel, "The Scholar and the Struggle: Lawrence Reddick's Crusade for Black History and Black Power" (UNC Press, 2020) Jan 08, 2021

One of the most notable African American intellectuals of his generation, Lawrence Reddick helped to spearhead the early Black history movement, served as the second curator of the Schomburg Library during the 1930s, guided the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the Cold War, mentored Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. throughout his entire public life, and played a major role in the Black Studies movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A lifelong Pan-Africanist, Reddick also fought for decolonization and Black self-determination alongside key Black diasporic politicians and critical thinkers such as Kwame Nkrumah, Nnamdi Azikiwe, and W.E.B Du Bois. Beyond participating in these interconnected struggles, Reddick helped to document and interpret them for Black and white audiences alike.

In The Scholar and the Struggle: Lawrence Reddick's Crusade for Black History and Black Power (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), David A. Varel recovers Reddick's compelling story and reveals the many essential but underappreciated roles played by Black intellectuals during the long Black freedom struggle.

David A. Varel is an affiliate faculty member at Metropolitan State University, Denver.

James West is a historian of Black activism and print culture in the United States and diaspora.

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Jodi Rios, "Black Lives and Spatial Matters: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis" (Cornell UP, 2020) Jan 05, 2021

In Black Lives and Spatial Matters: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis (Cornell University Press, 2020), Dr. Jodi Rios examines relationships between blackness, space, and racism, in the northern suburbs of St. Louis. She argues that the “double bind of living as Black in North St. Louis County means that Black residents both suffer from, and pay for, the loss of economic and political viability that occurs when they simply occupy space” (1). Rios theorizes “Blackness-as-risk” as foundational to the historical and contemporary construction of metropolitan space. She documents the ways in which Black residents in the north St. Louis suburbs are subject to excessive ordinances and constant policing. Yet, these residents also resist such constraints. After the murder of Michael Brown in August 2014, Black Lives Matter protests erupted throughout St. Louis as well as across the country. Through the lens of such protests, Rios theorizes “Blackness-as-freedom” as “the unique capacity of blackness to embody freedom in the face of death and to imagine other worlds, other futures” (5). Black Lives and Spatial Matters is a transdisciplinary work that draws from history, ethnography, geography, as well as architecture and design, to show how anti-blackness is produced and contested when Black people occupy space.

Jodi Rios is a scholar, designer, and educator whose work is located at the intersection of physical, social, and political space.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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Norah L. A. Gharala, "Taxing Blackness: Free Afromexican Tribute in Bourbon New Spain" (U of Alabama Press, 2019) Jan 04, 2021

During the eighteenth century, hundreds of thousands of free descendants of Africans in Mexico faced a highly specific obligation to the Spanish crown, a tax based on their genealogy and status. This royal tribute symbolized imperial loyalties and social hierarchies. As the number of free people of color soared, this tax became a reliable source of revenue for the crown as well as a signal that colonial officials and ordinary people referenced to define and debate the nature of blackness.

Taxing Blackness: Free Afromexican Tribute in Bourbon New Spain(University of Alabama Press, 2019) examines the experiences of Afromexicans and this tribute to explore the meanings of race, political loyalty, and legal privileges within the Spanish colonial regime. Norah L. A. Gharala focuses on both the mechanisms officials used to define the status of free people of African descent and the responses of free Afromexicans to these categories and strategies. This study spans the eighteenth century and focuses on a single institution to offer readers a closer look at the place of Afromexican individuals in Bourbon New Spain, which was the most profitable and populous colony of the Spanish Atlantic.

As taxable subjects, many Afromexicans were deeply connected to the colonial regime and ongoing debates about how taxpayers should be defined, whether in terms of reputation or physical appearance. Gharala shows the profound ambivalence, and often hostility, that free people of African descent faced as they navigated a regime that simultaneously labeled them sources of tax revenue and dangerous vagabonds. Some free Afromexicans paid tribute to affirm their belonging and community ties. Others contested what they saw as a shameful imposition that could harm their families for generations. The microhistory includes numerous anecdotes from specific cases and people, bringing their history alive, resulting in a wealth of rural and urban, gender, and family insight.

Rachel Grace Newman is Lecturer in the History of the Global South at Smith College. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and she writes about elite migration, education, transnationalism, and youth in twentieth-century Mexico. She is also the author of a book on a binational program for Mexican migrant children. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew).

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Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History" (Beacon Press, 1995) Dec 31, 2020

Placing the West's failure to acknowledge the Haitian Revolution--the most successful slave revolt in history--alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a stunning meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history.

Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1995) is a modern classic. It resides at the intersection of history, anthropology, Caribbean, African-American, and post-colonial studies, and has become a staple in college classrooms around the country. In a new foreword, Hazel Carby explains the book's enduring importance to these fields of study and introduces a new generation of readers to Trouillot's brilliant analysis of power and history's silences.

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Marjoleine Kars, "Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast" (New Press, 2020) Dec 29, 2020

In Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (New Press, 2020),historian Marjoleine Kars tells the story of a massive eighteenth-century slave rebellion in the Dutch colony of Berbice (in present-day Guyana). Drawing on some nine hundred pages of interrogation transcripts and letters that provide rare first person accounts from enslaved African-born rebels, Kars chronicles how nearly 5,000 of the total enslaved population held onto Berbice for over a year holding onto 135 plantations. Sorting through the competing political visions of the various African-born slave rebels, Kars provides an intimate look into a people demanding freedom and trying to figure out what that can mean to them.

Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis and the author of The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

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Jean Casimir. "The Haitians: A Decolonial History" (UNC Press, 2020) Dec 28, 2020

In The Haitians: A Decolonial History (UNC Press, 2020), leading Haitian intellectual Jean Casimir argues that the story of Haiti should not begin with the usual image of Saint-Domingue as the richest colony of the eighteenth century. Rather, it begins with a reconstruction of how individuals from Africa, in the midst of the golden age of imperialism, created a sovereign society based on political imagination and a radical rejection of the colonial order, persisting even through the U.S. occupation in 1915. The Haitians (UNC Press, 2020) also critically retheorizes the very nature of slavery, colonialism, and sovereignty. Here, Casimir centers the perspectives of Haiti's moun andeyo--the largely African-descended rural peasantry. Asking how these systematically marginalized and silenced people survived in the face of almost complete political disenfranchisement, Casimir identifies what he calls a counter-plantation system. Derived from Caribbean political and cultural practices, the counter-plantation encompassed consistent reliance on small-scale landholding. Casimir shows how lakou, small plots of land often inhabited by generations of the same family, were and continue to be sites of resistance even in the face of structural disadvantages originating in colonial times, some of which continue to be maintained by the Haitian government with support from outside powers.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Simon J. Gilhooley, "The Antebellum Origins of the Modern Constitution: Slavery and the Spirit of the American Founding" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Dec 28, 2020

The Antebellum Origins of the Modern Constitution: Slavery and the Spirit of the American Founding (Cambridge University Press, 2020) argues that conflicts over slavery and abolition in the early American Republic generated a mode of constitutional interpretation that remains powerful today: the belief that the historical spirit of founding holds authority over the current moment. Simon J. Gilhooley traces how debates around the existence of slavery in the District of Columbia gave rise to the articulation of this constitutional interpretation, which constrained the radical potential of the constitutional text. To reconstruct the origins of this interpretation, Gilhooley draws on rich sources that include historical newspapers, pamphlets, and congressional debates. Examining free black activism in the North, abolitionism in the 1830s, and the evolution of pro-slavery thought, this book shows how in navigating the existence of slavery in the District and the fundamental constitutional issue of the enslaved's personhood, antebellum opponents of abolition came to promote an enduring but constraining constitutional imaginary.

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Isar P. Godreau, "Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism, and U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico" (U Illinois Press, 2015) Dec 23, 2020

This is part of our Special Series on Third World Nationalism. In the wake of a rise in nationalism around the world, and its general condemnation by liberals and the left, in addition to the rise of China and Russia, we have put together this series on Third World Nationalism to nuance the present discourse on nationalism, note its centrality to anti-imperial, anti-colonial politics around the world, the reconfiguration of global power, and its inextricability from mainstream politics in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Today my guest is Isar Godreau, author of Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism, and U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico(University of Illinois Press, 2015).

The geopolitical influence of the United States informs the processes of racialization in Puerto Rico, including the construction of black places. In Scripts of Blackness, Isar P. Godreau explores how Puerto Rican national discourses about race--created to overcome U.S. colonial power--simultaneously privilege whiteness, typecast blackness, and silence charges of racism.

Based on an ethnographic study of the barrio of San Antón in the city of Ponce, Scripts of Blackness examines institutional and local representations of blackness as developing from a power-laden process that is inherently selective and political, not neutral or natural. Godreau traces the presumed benevolence or triviality of slavery in Puerto Rico, the favoring of a Spanish colonial whiteness (under a hispanophile discourse), and the insistence on a harmonious race mixture as discourses that thrive on a presumed contrast with the United States that also characterize Puerto Rico as morally superior. In so doing, she outlines the debates, social hierarchies, and colonial discourses that inform the racialization of San Antón and its residents as black.

Mining ethnographic materials and anthropological and historical research, Scripts of Blackness provides powerful insights into the critical political, economic, and historical context behind the strategic deployment of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture.

Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com.

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Ashon T. Crawley, "The Lonely Letters" (Duke UP, 2020) Dec 22, 2020

In The Lonely Letters (Duke UP, 2020), A tells Moth: “Writing about and thinking with joy is what sustains me, daily. It nourishes me. I do not write about joy primarily because I always have it. I write about joy, Black joy, because I want to generate it, I want it to emerge, I want to participate in its constant unfolding.” But alongside joy, A admits to Moth, come loneliness, exclusion, and unfulfilled desire. The Lonely Letters is an epistolary blackqueer critique of the normative world in which Ashon T. Crawley—writing as A—meditates on the interrelation of blackqueer life, sounds of the Black church, theology, mysticism, and love. Throughout his letters, A explores blackness and queerness in the musical and embodied experience of Blackpentecostal spaces and the potential for platonic and erotic connection in a world that conspires against blackqueer life. Both a rigorous study and a performance, The Lonely Letters gestures toward understanding the capacity for what we study to work on us, to transform us, and to change how we inhabit the world.

Ashon T. Crawley is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia and author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility.

John Marszalek III is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University.

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J. A. Ball and T. Burroughs, "A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X" (Black Classic Press, 2015) Dec 22, 2020

This is part of our Special Series on Malcolm X and Black Nationalism. In this series, we delve into the background of Malcolm X's action and thought in the context of Black Nationalism, correcting the fundamentally mistaken notion that Malcolm X was a civil rights leader. He certainly did not see himself in that way, and explicitly argued otherwise. This helps us place the Afro-American struggle in its dimensions beyond the current American nation-state, including the Black Atlantic, and beyond.

Today, our guest is Jared Ball, co-editor of A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X (Black Classic Press, 2012).

A Lie of Reinvention is a response to Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X, A Life of Reinvention. Marable’s book was controversially acclaimed by some as his magnum opus. At the same time, it was denounced and debated by others as a worthless read full of conjecture, errors, and without any new factual content. In this collection of critical essays, editors Jared Ball and Todd Steven Burroughs lead a group of established and emerging Black scholars and activists who take a clear stance in this controversy: Marable’s biography is at best flawed and at worst a major setback in American history, African American studies, and scholarship on the life of Malcolm X.

In the tradition of John Henrik Clarke’s classic anthology “William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond,” this volume provides a striking critique of Marable’s text. In 1968, Clarke and his assembled writers felt it essential to respond to Styron’s fictionalized and ahistorical Nat Turner, the heroic leader of one of America’s most famous revolts against enslavement. In A Lie of Reinvention, the editors sense a different threat to an African American icon, Malcolm X. This time, the threat is presented as an authoritative biography. To counter the threat, Ball and Burroughs respond with a barbed collection of commentaries of Marable’s text.

The essays come from all quarters of the Black community. From behind prison walls, Mumia Abu-Jamal revises his prior public praise of Marable’s book with an essay written specifically for this volume. A. Peter Bailey, a veteran journalist who worked with Malcolm X’s Organization for Afro-American Unity, disputes how he is characterized in Marable’s book. Bill Strickland, who also knew Malcolm X, provides what he calls a “personal critique” of the biography. Younger scholars such as Kali Akuno, Kamau Franklin, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Christopher M. Tinson, Eugene Puryear and Greg Thomas join veterans Rosmari Mealy, Raymond Winbush, Amiri Baraka and Karl Evanzz in pointing out historical problems and ideological misinterpretations in Marable’s work.

Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com.

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Kim T. Gallon, "Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press" (U Illinois Press, 2020) Dec 22, 2020

In Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020), Dr. Kim Gallon examines how Black newspaper editors and journalists created and fostered Black sexual publics during the 1920s and 1930s. She demonstrates that editors strategically elected to publish stories about marital scandals, divorces, homosexuality, and gender non-conformity, imagining that this coverage was a source of pleasure and debate for Black readers. Gallon argues that this editorial practice actually exposed class, gender, and sexuality divisions between different groups of African Americans. At the same time, this coverage revealed the tenuous position of lesbians, gay men, and female impersonators in a public sphere that sometimes silenced and marginalized their voices. Along with advancing racial solidarity, which Gallon takes as the Black presses’ starting point, the press revealed the diversity of Black people and created a discursive space in which sexual knowledge was produced, debated, and enjoyed.

To learn more about Professor Gallon’s digital scholarship and stay informed about how her work is meeting the demands of our moment, follow @BlackDigitalHum and @COVIDBlk on Twitter.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall.

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Michael E. Sawyer, "Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X" (Pluto Press, 2020) Dec 17, 2020

This episode is part of a Special Series on Malcolm X and Black Nationalism.

In this series, we delve into the background of Malcolm X's action and thought in the context of Black Nationalism, correcting the fundamentally mistaken notion that Malcolm X was a civil rights leader. He certainly did not see himself in that way, and explicitly argued otherwise. This helps us place the Afro-American struggle in its dimensions beyond the current American nation-state, including the Black Atlantic, and beyond.

Known as 'the angriest black man in America', Malcolm X was one of the most famous activists to ever live. Going beyond biography,Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X(Pluto Press, 2020) examines Malcolm X's philosophical system, restoring his thinking to the pantheon of Black Radical Thought.

Michael Sawyer argues that the foundational concepts of Malcolm X's political philosophy - economic and social justice, strident opposition to white supremacy and Black internationalism - are often obscured by an emphasis on biography. The text demonstrates the way in which Malcolm X's philosophy lies at the intersection of the thought of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon and is an integral part of the revolutionary politics formed to alleviate the plight of people of African descent globally.

Exploring themes of ontology, the body, geographic space and revolution, Black Minded provides a much-needed appraisal of Malcolm X's political philosophy.

Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com.

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Martha S. Jones, "Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All" (Basic Books, 2020) Dec 16, 2020

The epic history of African American women's pursuit of political power-and how it transformed America In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women's movement did not win the vote for most black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own. In Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All(Basic Books, 2020), acclaimed historian Dr. Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of black women-Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more-who were the vanguard of women's rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Erica Armstrong Dunbar, "Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge" (Simon and Schuster, 2017) Dec 16, 2020

A startling and eye-opening look into America’s First Family, Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge(Simon and Schuster, 2017) is the powerful narrative of Ona Judge, George and Martha Washington’s runaway slave who risked everything to escape the nation’s capital and reach freedom.

When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left his beloved Mount Vernon to serve in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the nation’s capital. In setting up his household he took Tobias Lear, his celebrated secretary and eight slaves, including Ona Judge, about whom little has been written. As he grew accustomed to Northern ways, there was one change he couldn’t get his arms around: Pennsylvania law required enslaved people be set free after six months of residency in the state. Rather than comply, Washington decided to circumvent the law. Every six months he sent the slaves back down south just as the clock was about to expire.

Though Ona Judge lived a life of relative comfort, the few pleasantries she was afforded were nothing compared to freedom, a glimpse of which she encountered first-hand in Philadelphia. So, when the opportunity presented itself, Judge left everything she knew to escape to New England. Yet freedom would not come without its costs.

At just twenty-two-years-old, Ona became the subject of an intense manhunt led by George Washington, who used his political and personal contacts to recapture his property.

With impeccable research, historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar weaves a powerful tale and offers fascinating new scholarship on how one young woman risked it all to gain freedom from the famous founding father.

Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. She seeks the extraordinary in the ordinary, and reinterprets the historical narrative in both traditional and creative forms. She supports her work-life balance with long walks and her love of photography, which you can find here.

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Brandon Mills, "The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) Dec 14, 2020

Brandon Mills is the author of The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2020. The World Colonization Made explores the beginnings and ends of the colonization movement from the late-18th century to the coming of the Civil War. Mills uses African colonization to explore how ideas of American empire developed during the country’s formative years. From politics to racial ideology, Mills is able to chart a clear history of what the colonization movement in America meant for a diverse group of people in the United States, and how this vision ultimately could not create a nation many hoped it would.

Brandon Mills teaches in the Department of History at the University of Colorado Denver.

Derek Litvak is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland—College Park. His dissertation, "The Specter of Black Citizens: Race, Slavery, and Citizenship in the Early United States," examines how citizenship was used to both bolster the institution of slavery and exclude Black Americans from the body politic.

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Tony Bolden, "Groove Theory: The Blues Foundation of Funk" (UP of Mississippi, 2020) Dec 14, 2020

Groove Theory: The Blues Foundation of Funk (University Press of Mississippi, 2020) by Tony Bolden, an Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas, and author of Afro-Blue: Improvisation in African American Poetry and Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2003), is a history of funk artists such as George Clinton who developed a new aesthetic style through the Black Arts Era of the 1960s and 1970s. Bolden defines these artists such as Clinton as Gil Scot Heron of the band The Last Poets as “organic intellectuals” who helped fashion a new Black aesthetic in their development of funk music and culture. The book has an “Introduction” section, six concise chapters, including an extensive notes section and selected bibliography.

Bolden’s main premise is that “blues and funk are not just musical forms; they are interrelated concepts. And blues is “like the nucleus” of rock as well as rhythm and blues, which includes soul and funk” (4). In many respects, the text is a history of the variant interrelated Black vernacular forms that flourished during the twentieth century that overlap and are intermingled within the funk aesthetic. Groove Theory is interdisciplinary in scope in that it engages a broad spectrum of academic disciplines including history, literary studies, and musicology to advance an argument about the meaning, style, and structure of funk as type of aesthetical practice in the history of African Americans. Bolden uses a myriad of sources such as poetry, literature, memoirs, interviews, and song lyrics to support his analysis.

The first part of the book contains three chapters that discusses both the historical and theoretical foundations of funk as a genre of music and cultural style. Chapter One titled “Groove Theory: Liner Notes on Funk Aesthetics” discusses how the funk “operates as a distinct form of black vernacular epistemology” and the Chapter Two “Blue Funk: The Ugly Beauty of Stank” focuses on the development of funk as an idea in the blues era. The last chapter in this part of the text Chapter Three “Sly Stone and the Gospel of Funk” concerns the impact of Sly Stone on the development of the funk sound.

Part two of Groove Theory contains three chapters that consider the relationship between blue funk and the black fantastic. This section also brings into the discussion the role of women in the development of the funk genre. In Chapter Four, Chaka Khan’s impact on funk music and culture while the following Chapter Five “Funky Bluesology: Gil Scott Heron As Black Organic Intellectual” considers the role of Heron in the advancement of the funk aesthetic. The final chapter “The Kinkiness of Turquoise: Betty Davis’s Liberated Funk-Rock” concerns the legacy of Betty Davis the famed Black woman rocker of the funk era. Bolden ends his text with an “Outro” that considers the lasting impact of funk music on American music culture.

Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. She has published book chapters, essays, and edited/authored five books. Her latest publications include Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger, 2017) and, with Dr. G. Reginald Daniel, professor of historical sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union (University Press of Mississippi 2014). Follow me on twitter: @DrHettie2017

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Erica Fretwell, "Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling" (Duke UP, 2020) Dec 11, 2020

We so often take our senses as natural, but perhaps we should understand them as historically situated. Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Duke University Press, 2020) allows us to reconsider the history of psychophysics and psychology through the lens of sensory studies and to rethinking science in the context of racial capitalism. Breathing new life into nineteenth century psychophysics, Erica Fretwell presents a history of how science, technology, and literature came together to both reinforce and challenge racial boundaries.

While each central chapter of Sensory Experiments deals with the recognized five senses, Fretwell also writes short intervals, or what she calls intervals, on the synthesis of particular senses (for instance, color and sound or mouthfeel). The synthesia assumed in these intervals challenge the hierarchy of senses often assumed by scientists during this time period. Through examining these scientific models of sense and sensitivity, Fretwell provides the reader with the nineteenth and early twentieth century evolutionary frameworks of Lamarckism and Darwinism, alongside Galton’s eugenics program. Fretwell contrasts these theories with psychophysics, including the spiritually motivated psychophysicist, Gustav Fechner, as well as many media and literature that focuses on sensitivity. Spirit photography provides one such example, a visual medium intended to provide some healing to family members who lost loved ones during the American Civil War. Through these images sight is transformed into a sense of loss; this was particularly the case for white bodies, which were more likely to have their pictures taken and more likely to be seen as “particularly capable of feeling loss.”

To help us understand the racial politics of sound, Fretwell not only turns to the nascent field of psychoacoustics led by Hermann Helmholtz, but also the utopian fiction stories of Pauline Hopkins and Edward Bellamy. Each of these writers thought that differences in tonal sensitivity renders difference as racialized, and thus promoted segregated forms of social harmony from the most sensitive, civilized ear to the least sensitive, “primitive” ear. Meanwhile, inventions in chemistry and manufacturing of perfume performed functions of designating socially appropriate odors, which often segregated individuals by race and gender, while at other times challenging such segregation. In her taste chapter, Fretwell positions gastronomy and culinary science as ostensibly racial uplift projects. This can be further seen in Fretwell’s discussion of the racial framing of sweetness and black cake (the latter of which is taken up in the work of Emily Dickinson). In her penultimate chapter, Fretwell explores the relationality of touch through some of Helen Keller’s biography. While figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois thought that Keller could be an example of going beyond the sight of racial differences, as Fretwell points out, Keller, a deaf-blind woman, was actually attentive to the sensation of racial difference. In the Coda, Fretwell implores humanities and social science scholars to think about the historical dimensions of our sensory experiences. Overall, Sensory Experiments delivers a much needed history of senses that can provide important context for the racial politics of today.

C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. CJ’s research interests include the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and digital wellness culture.

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Justin Gifford, "Revolution Or Death: The Life of Eldridge Cleaver" (Lawrence Hill, 2020) Dec 11, 2020

Revolution Or Death: The Life of Eldridge Cleaver (Lawrence Hill Books, 2020) is a remarkable biography that examines the notorious Black revolutionary meticulously within the context of his changing times.

Charismatic, brilliant, and courageous, Eldridge Cleaver built a base of power and influence that struck fear deep in the heart of White America. It was therefore shocking to many left-wing radicals when Cleaver turned his back on Black revolution, the Nation of Islam, and communism in 1975.

How can we make sense of Cleaver's precipitous decline from a position as one of America's most vibrant Black writers and activists? And how do his contradictory identities as criminal, party leader, international diplomat, Christian conservative, and Republican politician reveal that he was more than just a traitor to the advancement of civil rights?

Author Justin Gifford obtained exclusive access to declassified files from the French police, the American embassy, and the FBI, as well as Kathleen Cleaver’s archive, to answer these questions about a man far more compelling and complex than anyone has given him credit for.

In a country defined by its extreme political positions on the right and left, Cleaver embodied both ideologies in pursuit of his conflicting ideals.

Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com.

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Quito J. Swan, "Pauulu's Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice" (UP of Florida, 2020) Dec 04, 2020

Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (University Press of Florida, 2020) by Quito Swan is an enchanting, magisterial, broadly researched monograph that illuminates the social life of Black Power politics across the African diaspora from the 1950s through the 1980s. Told through Bermudian activist and engineer Pauulu Kamarakafego’s life, Swan takes readers on a journey through Black radical diaspora in the Caribbean, the United States, western, eastern, and southern Africa, and Oceania. A global history of Pan-African organizing, Swan examines various dimensions of Black radicalism, and importantly demonstrates the centrality of environmental activism to Black Power and anticolonial politics. As Swan reconstructs this complex web of global Black radicalism, he also uncovers the ways that Black activists and organizations pivoted in response to international networks of Western surveillance and subterfuge. Readers come to appreciate how Black radicalism shaped anticolonial independence struggles in Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, for instance, while evaluating how those struggles in turn, reformulated global Black Power. Scholars seeking to understand the enduring and far-reaching entailments of Black radical politics should study this path-breaking book on Black internationalism.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall

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Caroline H. Yang, "The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form" (Stanford UP, 2020) Dec 04, 2020

The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form(Stanford University Press, 2020) explores how antiblack racism lived on through the figure of the Chinese worker in US literature after emancipation. Drawing out the connections between this liminal figure and the formal aesthetics of blackface minstrelsy in literature of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, Caroline H. Yang reveals the ways antiblackness structured US cultural production during a crucial moment of reconstructing and re-narrating US empire after the Civil War.

Ultimately, The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery shows how the Chinese worker manifests the inextricable links between US literature, slavery, and empire, as well as the indispensable role of antiblackness as a cultural form in the United States.

Dr. Caroline Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations.

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D. T. Lawrence and E. J. Lawless, "When They Blew the Levee: Race, Politics, and Community in Pinhook, Missouri" (UP of Mississippi, 2018) Dec 04, 2020

The town of Pinhook in Missouri was founded in the 1940s by southern Black farmers who were looking for land that they could purchase and own in the face of limited options. It was low land that was often flooded, but the farmers were able to clear it and successfully farm it for decades to come while building up a small town. However, in 2011, after heavy rains and historic flooding, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to breach the Birds Point levee. Pinhook, directly in the flood zone, was completely destroyed.

David Todd Lawrence and Elaine Lawless, in their book When They Blew the Levee: Race, Politics, and Community in Pinhook, Missouri (University Press of Mississippi, 2018), document the narratives of the town’s former residents which counter the official story from the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers - that the levee breach was a success story of saved lives and property. Winner of the 2019 Chicago Folklore Prize, the book offers a vivid portrait of the town’s efforts to rebuild and maintain their community ties, and theorizes the destruction and government neglect of this town.

In our conversation, Dr. Lawrence and Dr. Lawless discuss the events that led to the flooding of Pinhook and the question of historical racism in overlooking the town when the decision was made to breach the levee. The authors describe life and community in the town of Pinhook and what happened after the flood. We also talk about the role and responsibilities of the researcher when collaborating with communities. Lastly, we hear about Debra Robinson-Tarver who organized the evacuation of the residents and continued to keep the Pinhook community together as they pursued recompense.

You can learn more about the efforts to rebuild Pinhook here and the documentary film Taking Pinhook can be viewed here.

Dr. David Todd Lawrence is an Associate Professor who teaches folklore and African American literature and culture at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is currently working with the Urban Art Mapping Project on street art in the Twin Cities. Since the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, they have been collecting images of street art related to the movement for the George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art database. If you would like to contribute images, please submit them here or email Dr. Lawrence directly at DTLAWRENCE@stthomas.edu.

Dr. Elaine Lawless is Professor Emerita at the University of Missouri where she taught folklore and Women’s and Gender Studies. She is the author of six books, including Troubling Violence: A Performance Project (University Press of Mississippi, 2010). Dr. Lawless is currently based in North Carolina.

Nancy Yan received her PhD in folklore from The Ohio State University and taught First Year Writing, Comparative Studies, and Asian American studies for several years before returning to organizing work.

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Anjali Vats, "The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans" (Stanford UP, 2020) Dec 01, 2020

The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans (Stanford University Press, 2020) by Anjali Vats is an intricate and meticulously researched text on intellectual property history, race, and citizenship from the 1790s to the present. This is a complex narrative that engages multiple fields of knowledge including rhetoric, history, communication studies, law, and critical race theory. With a focus on race and neo-coloniality in American intellectual property law, Vats argues that intellectual property and citizenship “have evolved and continue to evolve—in deeply intertwined and raced ways” as demonstrated in racial scripts or narratives about creators and infringers (2).

In her history of intellectual property, Vats focuses on copyright, patent, and trademark discourses in her intricate analysis of how ideas about creator, citizenship, race and nation unfold over time. The text includes an “Introduction” that discusses intellectual property as “a set of rhetorics” about citizenship and how “race and coloniality structure doctrinal practices in copyright, patent, and trademark law” (3). She uses the phrase “intellectual property citizen” to organize the text into four neat chapters that discuss how whiteness and property interests shape intellectual property law at times in the “guise of equality” and race neutral language.

The first two chapters cover the development of ideas about intellectual property from the early Republic to the mid-twentieth century. Chapter One is titled “The Intellectual Property Citizen” and it focuses on how whiteness became more formally linked with citizenship in the 1700s including some analysis of how the production of knowledge marked the boundaries of American citizenship. This is the era in which creatorship is cast as “fundamentally white” according to the author. Chapter Two is titled “The Race Liberal Intellectual Property Citizen” and it concerns a discussion of how race liberal citizenship emerged in the post-World War II Era.

In Chapter Three, “The Post Racial Intellectual Property Citizen” Vats notes that the administration of Barack H. Obama passed a series of laws that helped to maintain a notion of white creatorship ultimately producing a post racial intellectual property citizen. The color of creatorship essentially remained white during the Obama Era. Lastly, in the final Chapter “Rescripting Creatorship, Rescripting Citizenship” creators of color such as Prince Rogers Nelson pushed back against the racialist narratives in intellectual property law through performative acts of resistance and in the process contributed to the remaking of capitalism more generally.'

Anjali Vats is Assistant Professor of Communication and African and African Diaspora Studies and Assistant Professor of Law (by courtesy) at Boston College.

Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. She has published book chapters, essays, and edited/authored five books. Her latest publications include Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger, 2017) and, with Dr. G. Reginald Daniel, professor of historical sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union (University Press of Mississippi 2014). Follow me on twitter: @DrHettie2017

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College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom: A Conversation with Eddie R. Cole Dec 01, 2020

Some of America's most pressing civil rights issues--desegregation, equal educational and employment opportunities, housing discrimination, and free speech--have been closely intertwined with higher education institutions. Although it is commonly known that college students and other activists, as well as politicians, actively participated in the fight for and against civil rights in the middle decades of the twentieth century, historical accounts have not adequately focused on the roles that the nation's college presidents played in the debates concerning racism. Based on archival research conducted at a range of colleges and universities across the United States, The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom (Princeton UP, 2020) sheds light on the important place of college presidents in the struggle for racial parity.

Focusing on the period between 1948 and 1968, Eddie Cole shows how college presidents, during a time of violence and unrest, strategically, yet often silently, initiated and shaped racial policies and practices inside and outside of the educational sphere. With courage and hope, as well as malice and cruelty, college presidents positioned themselves--sometimes precariously--amid conflicting interests and demands. Black college presidents challenged racist policies as their students demonstrated in the streets against segregation, while presidents of major universities lobbied for urban renewal programs that displaced Black communities near campus. Some presidents amended campus speech practices to accommodate white supremacist speakers, even as other academic leaders developed the nation's first affirmative action programs in higher education.

The Campus Color Line illuminates how the legacy of academic leaders' actions continues to influence the unfinished struggle for Black freedom and racial equity in education and beyond.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Clayborne Carson, "Malcolm X: The FBI File" (Skyhorse, 2012) Nov 30, 2020

This is a Special Series on Malcolm X and Black Nationalism. We delve into the background of Malcolm X's action and thought in the context of Black Nationalism, correcting the fundamentally mistaken notion that Malcolm X was a civil rights leader. He certainly did not see himself in that way, and explicitly argued otherwise. This helps us place the Afro-American struggle in its dimensions beyond the current American nation-state, including the Black Atlantic, and beyond.

Today, our guest is Clayborne Carson, author of Malcolm X: The FBI File, originally published in 1991, with the 2nd edition republished in 2012 by Skyhorse Publishing.

The FBI has made possible a reassembling of the history of Malcolm X that goes beyond any previous research. From the opening of his file in March of 1953 to his assassination in 1965, the story of Malcolm X’s political life is a gripping one.

Shortly after he was released from a Boston prison in 1953, the FBI watched every move Malcolm X made. Their files on him totaled more than 3,600 pages, covering every facet of his life. Viewing the file as a source of information about the ideological development and political significance of Malcolm X, historian Clayborne Carson examines Malcolm’s relationship to other African-American leaders and institutions in order to define more clearly Malcolm’s place in modern history.

With its sobering scrutiny of the FBI and the national policing strategies of the 1950s and 1960s, Malcolm X: The FBI File is one of a kind: never before has there been so much material on the assassination of Malcolm X in one conclusive volume.

Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com.

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Jill Watts, "The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt" (Grove Press, 2020) Nov 30, 2020

When did Black Americans move from stalwart party of Lincoln Republicans to dedicated New Deal Democrats? How did a group of self-organized Black economists, lawyers, sociologists, and journalists call out inequality in the New Deal and push President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to consider the relief of Black Americans? Dr. Jill Watt’s The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt (Grove Press, 2020) traces the origins of a group of self-organized Black men led by a remarkable Black woman to answer these questions and help readers reflect on parties, policy, data, and diversity in American politics.

The book is divided into three periods – tracing two versions of the Black Cabinet.

Early in the century, a group of African-American office holders who had come to Washington, DC as appointees of President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt) began meeting regularly for “talkfests” at an upscale black-owned DC restaurant. When they started meeting in 1908, most Black Americans lived in the South: disenfranchised and denied equal access to the criminal justice system. Despite the power and violence of White supremacy, a group of highly educated men had secured positions in the federal government. They included Ralph W. Tyler (auditor of the Department of the Navy), James A. Cobb (special assistant to Washington, DC’s district attorney); Robert H. Terrell, Washington’s first Black judge), John C. Dancy (DC’s recorder of deeds), Calvin Chase (newspaper editor), and Kelly Miller (Howard University professor. As men who had come of age during Reconstruction, they were Republicans who associated Democrats with blocking access to the polls and vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Although Republicans abandoned Black voters and Reconstruction, President Rutherford B. Hayes nevertheless appointed Frederick Douglas and other Black men federal positions and President Teddy Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House (the first Black American ever to be a dinner guest). Washington subsequently provided Roosevelt with recommendations for appointments to federal posts.

But these appointments were often without sufficient power and national conflicts demonstrated that Republican presidents would not protect Black citizens (e.g., in Atlanta, Teddy Roosevelt refused to send in troops to protect the black population from white mobs and Brownsville, Texas Roosevelt dishonorably discharged Black veterans after false, racially-motivated charges). Although widely covered by the Black press throughout the country, the Black Cabinet was unable to thwart the segregation of federal employees (particularly once Woodrow Wilson became president) and, by 1915, the Black Cabinet folded – even as individuals fought the virulent racism in the GOP and Democratic parties.

By 1932, many of the original members of the Black Cabinet were dead but a new group of leaders – Mary McLeod Bethune, Robert Vann, Robert Weaver, Alfred Edgar Smith, Bill Hastie – ambitiously moved to ask Black voters to turn the picture of Lincoln to the wall. In the election of 1932, a small minority of voters moved from the GOP to the Democratic party to vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936, a significant number of Black voters (many who consider themselves Republicans) vote for Roosevelt.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Nicholas Guyatt, "Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation" (Basic Books, 2016) Nov 20, 2020

Why did the Founding Fathers fail to include blacks and Indians in their cherished proposition that “all men are created equal”? Racism is the usual answer. Yet Nicholas Guyatt argues in Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (Basic Books, 2016) that white liberals from the founding to the Civil War were not confident racists, but tortured reformers conscious of the damage that racism would do to the nation. Many tried to build a multiracial America in the early nineteenth century, but ultimately adopted the belief that non-whites should create their own republics elsewhere: in an Indian state in the West, or a colony for free blacks in Liberia. Herein lie the origins of “separate but equal.” Essential reading for anyone hoping to understand today's racial tensions, Bind Us Apart reveals why racial justice in the United States continues to be an elusive goal: despite our best efforts, we have never been able to imagine a fully inclusive, multiracial society.

1619, Revisited by Nicholas Guyatt.

How Proslavery Was the Constitution? by Nicholas Guyatt.

1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones

Adam McNeil is a third-year PhD Student in early African American Women's History at Rutgers University.

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Andre E. Johnson, "No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner' (UP Mississippi, 2020) Nov 19, 2020

No Future in this Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner by Andre E. Johnson, an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies at the University of Memphis, and Director of the Henry McNeal Turner digital humanities project, is a rhetorical history that details the public career of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner with an emphasis on the trajectory of Turner’s thinking as a pessimistic prophetic persona “within the lament tradition of prophecy” (14). Turner’s role as a Bishop in the African American Episcopal Church and his political leadership in the African American community from 1896 to 1915 is the focus of Johnson’s narrative. This text is a follow up to the author’s previous work The Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition (Lexington Books, 2014). Johnson’s book begins with an “Introduction” section and includes six chapters with a “Conclusion.”

In this rhetorical history, Johnson contextualizes and analyzes some of Turner’s key speeches and writings delivered between 1896 and 1915 amid the rise of Jim Crow segregation and the first Great Migration. Turner through his speeches, writings, and activism laid much of the intellectual groundwork for Black protest ideologies of the twentieth century from Black nationalism to Afro pessimism. Turner was a prominent figure throughout much of the nineteenth century. Born free in 1834 Newberry Courthouse, South Carolina, Turner, an autodidact, was self-taught who eventually joined the A.M.E. Church after becoming a licensed minister in 1853. He became pastor at Union Baptist Church in Washington D.C. in 1860 and served as a Chaplain with the Union Army during the American Civil War. Turner relocated to Georgia after the war and became involved in Reconstruction politics but he soon grew pessimistic about Black equality in America with the retreat from Reconstruction. In the 1880s, he became a supporter of Black emigration to Africa while expounding on the idea of a Black Christ. The Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 only compounded Turner’s pessimism.

Turner’s skepticism about “the goodness of America” and its status as a “civilized nation” juxtaposed with his use of the invective, to criticize White institutions, and complacent Black leaders, is at the core of Johnson’s argument. For Johnson, Turner’s use of language “that was meant to shock and provoke” help to demonstrate his status as a prophetic persona who utilized prophetic rhetoric to guide, instruct, and lead on important questions about Black equality. Johnson situates Turner within the framework of a distinctive African American prophetic tradition “with origins not in freedom, but in slavery” that was both hopeful and pessimistic (11). Turner as a public intellectual contributed greatly to the development of Black Nationalism as a champion of Black emigration to Africa, Black theology with his ideas about a Black Christ, and Afro pessimism by “demining” America as a place that increasingly was a land that had no future for African Americans. No Future in this Country is a pivotal text in African American intellectual history.

Hettie V. WilliamsPh.D., is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. She has published book chapters, essays, and edited/authored five books. Her latest publications include Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger, 2017) and, with Dr. G. Reginald Daniel, professor of historical sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union (University Press of Mississippi 2014). Follow me on twitter: @DrHettie2017

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Saladin Ambar, "Malcolm X at Oxford Union: Racial Politics in a Global Era" (Oxford UP, 2014) Nov 17, 2020

In 1964, Malcolm X was invited to debate at the Oxford Union Society at Oxford University. The topic of debate that evening was the infamous phrase from Barry Goldwater's 1964 Republican Convention speech: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

His response to this topic stands out as one of the great addresses of the civil rights era. In Malcolm X at Oxford Union: Racial Politics in a Global Era(Oxford University Press), Saladin Ambar offers the first in-depth analysis of this important speech, illuminating its context and consequences.

Delivered just months before Malcolm's assassination, the speech followed a period in which Malcolm had traveled throughout Africa and much of the Muslim world, advocating on behalf of blacks in America and other nations. The journey broadened his political thought to encompass decolonization and the revolutions underway in the developing world. His travels culminated in a revolutionary speech that tackled a staggering array of issues: the nature of national identity; US foreign policy in the developing world; racial politics at home; the experiences of black immigrants in England; and the nature of power in the contemporary world.

The speech represented the most advanced stage of his thought, proffering a global and humanist approach to ushering in social change. Malcolm X at Oxford Union reshapes our understanding not only of the man himself, but world politics both then and now.

Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com.

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Eithne Quinn, "A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood" (Columbia UP, 2019) Nov 16, 2020

What is the history of equal rights in Hollywood? In A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood (Columbia UP, 2019), Eithne Quinn, a senior lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester, explores the transitional years following the civil rights movement of the 1960s, in order to chart the struggle by Black film makers for rights, recognition and representation. The book combines analysis of on-screen representations, with research on both the production and political economy of Hollywood films. Attentive to questions of gender and race, alongside a critical perspective on Hollywood’s myths of equality and diversity, the book will be essential reading across arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding why inequality persists in Hollywood today.

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Lucas A. Dietrich, "Writing Across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020) Nov 12, 2020

In Writing Across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), Lucas A. Dietrich investigates how ethnic literatures took shape in the U.S. context and how writers of color intervened in the “mainstream” writing. Interestingly, this intervention was framed through specific genres and techniques, including satire and parody towards the mainstream narratives. The book brings our attention to the most prominent ethnic writings of the second half of the nineteenth century while taking into consideration the negotiations in which both the writers and the publishers participated. What is compelling about this research is the dialogical approach that Dietrich undertakes to explore the ways in which the ethnic writers were, in fact, accepted into what could be described as the dominant mainstream writing of white writers. Writing Across the Color Line contains rich materials which demonstrate not only how the writers of color established dialogue with the leading publishing venues, but also how their works shaped the American readership of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Dietrich also offers his insights concerning the influences of the nineteenth-century ethnic writers on their counterparts of the twentieth century. In this regard, Writing Across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920 is a thought-provoking commentary on multiethnic literature in the U.S.

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Jeremy M. Glick, "The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution" (NYU Press, 2016) Nov 10, 2020

What if the Haitian Revolution, perhaps the only “successful” Black revolution in history, weren’t over?

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Jeremy Matthew Glick (h/h) about how and why the Haitian Revolution, which was the only slave rebellion to achieve state sovereignty, remains an inspired site of investigation for artists and activist-intellectuals in the African Diaspora.

In The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution (NYU Press, 2016), Dr. Glick examines twentieth-century performances engaging the revolution as laboratories for political thinking. Asking readers to consider the revolution less a fixed event than an ongoing and open-ended history resonating across the work of Atlantic world intellectuals, Glick argues that these writers use the Haitian Revolution as a watershed to chart their own radical political paths, animating, enriching, and framing their artistic and scholarly projects. Spanning the disciplines of literature, philosophy, and political thought, The Black Radical Tragic explores work from Lorraine Hansberry, Sergei Eisenstein, Edouard Glissant, Malcolm X, and others, ultimately enacting a speculative encounter between Bertolt Brecht and C.L.R. James to reconsider the relationship between tragedy and revolution. In its grand refusal to forget, The Black Radical Tragic demonstrates how the Haitian Revolution has influenced the ideas of freedom and self-determination that have propelled Black radical struggles throughout the modern era.

Read Slavoj Zizek’s review of The Black Radical Tragic in the Los Angeles Review of Books: “A Prophetic Vision of Haiti’s Past”

We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts.

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Julia S. Charles, "That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing" (UNC Press, 2020) Nov 09, 2020

In this chronologically and thematically ambitious study of racial passing literature, Julia Charles highlights how mixed-race subjects invent cultural spaces for themselves—a place she terms that middle world. Charles, an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Auburn University, focuses on the construction and performance of racial identity in works by writers from the antebellum period through Reconstruction, connecting these passing or crossing narratives to more contemporary examples of racial performativity - including Rachel Dolezal and her Black-passing controversy, the FX show Atlanta, and the musical Show Boat.

Provocative and theoretically innovative, Charles’s That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing (UNC Press, 2020) offers a nuanced approach to African American passing literature and examines how mixed-race performers articulated their sense of selfhood and communal belonging in both past and present.

James West is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at Northumbria University, UK. He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (University of Illinois Press, 2020)

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Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, "Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean" (U Illinois Press, 2020) Nov 06, 2020

Long before the English became involved in the African slave trade, they imagined Africans as monstrous and deformed beings. The English drew on pre-existing European ideas about monstrosity and deformity to argue that Africans were a monstrous race, suspended between human and animal, and as such only fit for servitude. Joining blackness to disability transformed English ideas about defective bodies and minds. It also influenced understandings of race and ability even as it shaped the embodied reality of people enslaved in the British Caribbean.

Dr. Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy provides a three-pronged analysis of disability in the context of Atlantic slavery. First, she examines the connections of enslavement and representations of disability and the parallel development of English anti-black racism. From there, she moves from realms of representation to reality in order to illuminate the physical, emotional, and psychological impairments inflicted by slavery and endured by the enslaved. Finally, she looks at slave law as a system of enforced disablement.

Audacious and powerful, Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (University of Illinois Press, 2020) is a groundbreaking journey into the entwined histories of racism and ableism.

Adam McNeil is a third-year PhD Student in the Department of History at Rutgers University. McNeil regularly contributes to the academic blogs Black Perspectives and The Junto.

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John Garrison Marks, "Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery: Race, Status, and Identity in the Urban Americas" (U of South Carolina Press, 2020) Nov 05, 2020

Prior to the abolition of slavery, thousands of African-descended people in the Americas lived in freedom. Their efforts to navigate daily life and negotiate the boundaries of racial difference challenged the foundations of white authority—and linked the Americas together.

In Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery: Race, Status, and Identity in the Urban Americas (U of South Carolina Press, 2020), John Garrison Marks examines how these individuals built lives in freedom for themselves and their families in two of the Atlantic World's most important urban centers: Cartagena, along the Caribbean coast of modern-day Colombia, and Charleston, in the low country of North America's Atlantic coast. Marks reveals how skills, knowledge, reputation, and personal relationships helped free people of color improve their fortunes and achieve social distinction in ways that undermined whites' claims to racial superiority.

Built upon research conducted on three continents, this book takes a comparative approach to understanding the contours of black freedom in the Americas. It reveals in new detail the creative and persistent attempts of free black people to improve their lives and that of their families. It examines how various paths to freedom, responses to the Haitian Revolution, opportunities to engage in skilled labor, involvement with social institutions, and the role of the church all helped shape the lived experience of free people of color in the Atlantic World.

As free people of color worked to improve their individual circumstances, staking claims to rights, privileges, and distinctions not typically afforded to those of African descent, they engaged with white elites and state authorities in ways that challenged prevailing racial attitudes. While whites across the Americas shared common doubts about the ability of African-descended people to survive in freedom or contribute meaningfully to society, free black people in Cartagena, Charleston, and beyond conducted themselves in ways that exposed cracks in the foundations of American racial hierarchies. Their actions represented early contributions to the long fight for recognition, civil rights, and racial justice that continues today.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Koritha Mitchell, "From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture" (U Illinois Press, 2020) Nov 05, 2020

Koritha Mitchell, Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University, has written a complex, interdisciplinary, and important analysis focusing on black women as the lens to explore the intersection of racism and sexism and the strategies that black women have used to persevere and succeed, over 400 years, in the United States. Mitchell’s expertise in American literature and culture is essential to the exploration in From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture (U Illinois Press, 2020), since she turns to the work of writers, playwrights, artists, and celebrated black women to weave together her thesis about how black women have been seen as house slaves, house keepers, but not homemakers. This thesis, which is central to the discussion in From Slave Cabins to the White House, uses a number of cultural texts to examine this idea of “homemade citizenship” that has been constructed by black and brown women who are often in the complicated situation of experiencing success, achievement, pursuing citizenship, and yet, equally as often, facing violence in response to these successes, achievements, and quests for citizenship and belonging within the United States.

In concentrating on the experience of black women in the United States, and their successes, in the construction of full and diverse lives with family and professional achievement, Mitchell examines how black women have created and achieved the very epitome of what is deemed success in the United States and have only found that they continue to be erased from this idealized conception of the American dream. The idea of homemaking, a place where the home and all it contains—family, property, food, safety, etc.—has often been the center of the general concept of the American dream. But as Mitchell highlights throughout this fascinating and nuanced analysis, black women have achieved this goal, this idealized form of citizenship, especially for women in the United States, only to continue to find themselves outside of this domestic space because of the way that African Americans are marginalized and often attacked. This is the thesis—the subversion of achievement—that frames the investigation of so many cultural texts that demonstrate the validity of this thesis. Mitchell is guided through her research by Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, Lorraine Hansberry, and finally, Michelle Obama, and so many others, as the book weaves together different cultural voices and examples of this quest towards feminine achievement and the recurring response of erasure, disrespect, and violence.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

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Tera W. Hunter, "Bound In Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century" (Harvard UP, 2017) Nov 05, 2020

Americans have long viewed marriage between a white man and a white woman as a sacred union. But marriages between African Americans have seldom been treated with the same reverence. This discriminatory legacy traces back to centuries of slavery, when the overwhelming majority of black married couples were bound in servitude as well as wedlock. Though their unions were not legally recognized, slaves commonly married, fully aware that their marital bonds would be sustained or nullified according to the whims of white masters.

Bound In Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Harvard UP, 2017) is the first comprehensive history of African American marriage in the nineteenth century. Uncovering the experiences of African American spouses in plantation records, legal and court documents, and pension files, Tera W. Hunter reveals the myriad ways couples adopted, adapted, revised, and rejected white Christian ideas of marriage. Setting their own standards for conjugal relationships, enslaved husbands and wives were creative and, of necessity, practical in starting and supporting families under conditions of uncertainty and cruelty.

After emancipation, white racism continued to menace black marriages. Laws passed during Reconstruction, ostensibly to secure the civil rights of newly freed African American citizens, were often coercive and repressive. Informal antebellum traditions of marriage were criminalized, and the new legal regime became a convenient tool for plantation owners to discipline agricultural workers. Recognition of the right of African Americans to enter into wedlock on terms equal to whites would remain a struggle into the Jim Crow era, and its legacy would resonate well into the twentieth century.

Tera W. Hunter is the Edwards Professor of American History and Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University. A specialist in 19th and 20th century African American history, her research focuses on gender, race, labor, and Southern histories.

Jerrad P. Pacatte is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-New Brunswick studying eighteenth and nineteenth century African American women’s history, slavery and emancipation in colonial America and the Atlantic world, and the history of slavery and capitalism. Follow him on Twitter @Jerrad_Pacatte!

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Brandi T. Summers, "Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City" (UNC Press, 2019) Nov 04, 2020

While Washington, D.C., is still often referred to as “Chocolate City,” it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade. In D.C., no place represents this shift better than the H Street corridor. In Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press, 2019), Brandi Thompson Summers documents D.C.’s shift to a “post-chocolate” cosmopolitan metropolis by charting H Street’s economic and racial developments. In doing so, she offers a theoretical framework for understanding how blackness is aestheticized and deployed to organize landscapes and raise capital. Summers focuses on the continuing significance of blackness in a place like the nation’s capital, how blackness contributes to our understanding of contemporary urbanization, and how it laid an important foundation for how Black people have been thought to exist in cities. Summers also analyzes how blackness—as a representation of diversity—is marketed to sell a progressive, “cool,” and authentic experience of being in and moving through an urban center.

Using a mix of participant observation, visual and media analysis, interviews, and archival research, Summers shows how blackness has become a prized and lucrative aesthetic that often excludes D.C.’s Black residents.

This conversation covers gentrification, aesthetics of Blackness, containment, and mobility across urban space. Dr. Summers’ New York Times op-ed on mobility, race, and the COVID-19 pandemic mentioned in the episode, can be accessed here.

This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.”

Brandi Thompson Summers is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on race, urban cultural landscapes, and aesthetics.

Alize Arıcan is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured on City & Society, entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography, and Anthropology News.

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Connor Towne O’Neill, "Down Along with That Devil’s Bones" (Algonquin Books, 2020) Nov 04, 2020

In Down Along with That Devil’s Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy (Algonquin Books, 2020), journalist Connor Towne O’Neill takes a deep dive into American history, exposing the still-raging battles over monuments dedicated to one of the most notorious Confederate generals, Nathan Bedford Forrest. Through the lens of these conflicts, O’Neill examines the legacy of white supremacy in America, in a sobering and fascinating work sure to resonate with readers of Tony Horwitz, Timothy B. Tyson, and Robin DiAngelo.

When O’Neill first moved to Alabama, as a white Northerner, he felt somewhat removed from the racism Confederate monuments represented. Then one day in Selma, he stumbled across a group of citizens protecting a monument to Forrest, the officer who became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and whom William Tecumseh Sherman referred to as “that devil.” O’Neill sets off to visit other disputed memorials to Forrest across the South, talking with men and women who believe they are protecting their heritage, and those who have a different view of the man’s poisonous history.

O’Neill’s reporting and thoughtful, deeply personal analysis make it clear that white supremacy is not a regional affliction but is in fact coded into the DNA of the entire country. Down Along with That Devil’s Bones presents an important and eye-opening account of how we got from Appomattox to Charlottesville, and where, if we can truly understand and transcend our past, we could be headed next.

Connor Towne O’Neill’s writing has appeared in New York magazine, Vulture, Slate, RBMA, and the Village Voice, and he works as a producer on the NPR podcast White Lies, which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting. Originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and teaches at Auburn University and with the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project. This is his first book.

Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in American women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural women in the 19th century. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature.

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Kathryn A. Mariner, "Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States" (U California Press, 2019) Nov 03, 2020

Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States (University of California Press, 2019) offers an ethnography of adoption processes in the United States through the inner workings of a private adoption agency in Chicago, IL. Through participant observation with social workers and at other sites, Dr. Kathryn A. Mariner emphasizes adoption and its processes of family formation as uncertain or subject to possible failures along the way. Mariner focuses particularly on transracial adoption, here constituted as the adoption of Black babies by White couples. Often seen as a means of providing these children with a better life and transcending racial boundaries, Mariner shows that conditions of racial inequality and the devaluation of Black families make these kinds of adoptions possible. The process of adoption can fail to deliver a baby to an eager adoptive family through various uncertainties that can involve the expectant mother and father or the suitability of the adoptive couple for receiving a child. Social workers must manage these contingencies through various means of communication, interaction, and speculation about expectant mothers and couples seeking adoption. Mariner theorizes this process through the idea of intimate speculation, “a set of practices mobilized by adoption professionals (social workers, clinicians, educators, attorneys), prospective adoptive parents, and expectant mothers that involve differential investment in an imagined future child” (7). Orienting our gaze away from the adoptive family as the logical outcome of adoption, the book argues for understanding adoption as a future oriented process with various possible outcomes.

Kathryn A. Mariner is the Wilmot Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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Zakkiyah Iman Jackson, "Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World" (NYU Press, 2020) Nov 03, 2020

In a world where black(ened) flesh, particularly feminine flesh, is considered the ontological zero of humanness, what interventions and complications are available from art and speculative fiction of the African diaspora? On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Zakkiyah Iman Jackson about the imaginative interventions of African cultural production into the racial logics of the so-called “Enlightenment,” past and present.

Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (NYU Press, 2020) breaks open the rancorous debate between black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo (NOW-LO) Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae (La-Hi), and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Dr. Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. Becoming Human demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically antiblackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism.

Jackson argues that African diasporic cultural production alters the meaning of being human and engages in imaginative practices of world-building against a history of the bestialization and thingification of blackness—the process of imagining the black person as an empty vessel, a non-being, an ontological zero—and the violent imposition of colonial myths of racial hierarchy. She creatively responds to the animalization of blackness by generating alternative frameworks of thought and relationality that not only disrupt the racialization of the human/animal distinction found in Western science and philosophy but also challenge the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority. What emerges is a radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of "the human."

Becoming Human is forthcoming as an audio book version in early January 2021. Keep an eye out if you prefer to listen to your new books!

We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts.

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Emily J. Lordi, "The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s" (Duke UP, 2020) Oct 30, 2020

Soul is one of those concepts that is often evoked, but rarely satisfactorily defined. In The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s (Duke University Press 2020), Emily J. Lordi takes on the challenge of explaining “soul,” through a book that zooms in and out between sweeping ideas about suffering and resilience in Black culture and fine-grained, close readings of individual performances by soul musicians. Rather than centering big musical gestures and major popular hits, Lordi pays close attention to musical practices like falsetto, ad-libs, and false endings to ground her analysis. She focuses on artists that are some of the most recognizable Black singers in the United States such as Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, and James Brown, but she also spends a lot of time with more obscure figures including Donny Hathaway and Minnie Riperton. She ends the book with a powerful contemplation of how the logic of soul, born in the political and social tumult of the late 1960s, still resonates with some of today’s most popular women singers.

Emily J. Lordi is an Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. The Meaning of Soul is her third book. In addition to her scholarly work, she is an active cultural critic and music journalist published in venues such as Billboard, The Atlantic, and NPR.

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Eddie Cole, "The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom" (Princeton UP, 2020) Oct 30, 2020

Some of America’s most pressing civil rights issues—desegregation, equal educational and employment opportunities, housing discrimination, and free speech—have been closely intertwined with higher education institutions. Although it is commonly known that college students and other activists, as well as politicians, actively participated in the fight for and against civil rights in the middle decades of the twentieth century, historical accounts have not adequately focused on the roles that the nation’s college presidents played in the debates concerning racism. Based on archival research conducted at a range of colleges and universities across the United States, The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom (Princeton UP, 2020) sheds light on the important place of college presidents in the struggle for racial parity.

Focusing on the period between 1948 and 1968, Eddie Cole shows how college presidents, during a time of violence and unrest, strategically, yet often silently, initiated and shaped racial policies and practices inside and outside of the educational sphere. With courage and hope, as well as malice and cruelty, college presidents positioned themselves—sometimes precariously—amid conflicting interests and demands. Black college presidents challenged racist policies as their students demonstrated in the streets against segregation, while presidents of major universities lobbied for urban renewal programs that displaced Black communities near campus. Some presidents amended campus speech practices to accommodate white supremacist speakers, even as other academic leaders developed the nation’s first affirmative action programs in higher education.

The Campus Color Line examines how the legacy of academic leaders’ actions continues to influence the unfinished struggle for Black freedom and racial equity in education and beyond.

Eddie Cole is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Organizational Change at UCLA.

Matthew Johnson is Associate Professor of History at Texas Tech University and author of Undermining Racial Justice: How One University Embraced Inclusion and Inequality.

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Warren Hoffman, "The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical", 2nd edition (Rutgers UP, 2020) Oct 28, 2020

Warren Hoffman’s The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical, 2nd edition (Rutgers UP, 2020) explores the ways that race and racism have shaped the American musical from Show Boat to Hamilton. Perhaps surprisingly, Hoffman’s analysis isn’t limited to shows with characters of color like West Side Story; he writes about how the assumption of whiteness shapes apparently race-free musicals like The Music Man and Oklahoma! His book also includes a fascinating discussion of how diverse casting has created both opportunity and controversy, from an all-black Hello, Dolly! to Book of Mormon. This is a book equally valuable to theatre scholars and to fans of the Broadway musical who want to engage more critically with this rich and multi-faceted art form.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.com.

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Karlos K. Hill, "The Murder of Emmett Till: A Graphic History" (Oxford UP, 2020) Oct 27, 2020

The image of Emmett Till’s open coffin, revealing the 14-year old’s horrifically disfigured face, is one of the most heart-wrenching images of the Civil Rights Era. The Chicago teenager was murdered while visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta in the summer of 1955. Enraged white men kidnapped, tortured, and killed him for having dared to have whistled at a white woman. In an equally horrific miscarriage of justice, only two men stood trial and the all-white jury quickly found them not guilty. The photograph of Emmett Till served to mobilize a campaign against the violence of the late Jim Crow South. Professor Karlos K. Hill’s The Murder of Emmett Till: A Graphic History (Oxford UP, 2020) tells the story of this crime, placing it in the context of both the African American experience and the practice of white supremacy. As part of Oxford University Press’ acclaimed Graphic History Series, Hill’s book is a comic rendering of Emmett Till’s death and the frustrating struggle for justice. The book captures Emmett Till’s humanity in the face of inhumane evil.

Dr. Karlos K. Hill is an Associate Professor and Department Chair of African and African-American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009 and has taught at St. Olaf College, Luther College, and Texas A&M. Professor Hill specializes in the history of anti-Black violence and its legacies. In addition to scores of articles, he is the author of Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory, out in 2016 with Cambridge University Press. He is also the author of a forthcoming book The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History, out next year with the University of Oklahoma Press.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Felicia Angeja Viator, "To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America" (Harvard UP, 2020) Oct 26, 2020

In 1985, Greg Mack, a DJ working for Los Angeles radio station KDAY, played a song that sounded like nothing else on West Coast airwaves: Toddy Tee’s “The Batteram,” a hip hop track that reflected the experiences of a young man growing up in 1980s Compton. The song tells about the Los Angeles Police Department’s battering ram truck, an emblem of the city under Police Chief Daryl Gates, and which terrorized largely African American neighborhoods across Los Angeles under his watch. In To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America (Harvard UP, 2020), historian at San Francisco State University Felicia Angeja Viator describes how rap leapt across the continent from its New York roots in the mid-1980s and took hold in Los Angeles. Often gaining popularity by word of mouth and mobile DJ parties, local groups like NWA pioneered a new, harder-edged, style of hip hop music that reflected their experiences as youth growing up in Gates era LA. Viator explains how the rapid rise of West Coast rap became engulfed in the culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s and shaped perceptions of the 1992 LA uprising. When gangsta rap hit the American mainstream in the early 90s, the artform changed the face of popular music and American culture forever.

For a playlist of songs featured in To Live and Defy in LA, see the following link.

Stephen Hausmann is an Assistant Professor of US History at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and Indigenous history and is currently working on his book manuscript, an environmental history of the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming.

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Lisa B. Thompson, "Underground, Monroe, and the Mamalogues: Three Plays" (Northwestern UP, 2020) Oct 23, 2020

Lisa B. Thompson is equally renowned as a scholar of African and African-American studies and as a playwright. Her latest book Underground, Monroe, and the Mamalogues: Three Plays (Northwestern University Press 2020) collects plays from throughout her two decades as a playwright. "Underground" is a tense two-hander exploring themes of race, class, and masculinity through the story of two friends with very different ideas about how to change the world. Monroe draws on Thompson’s family’s history as part of the Great Migration of Blacks from the South to the urban north and west. "The Mamalogues" is the funniest and most personal play in this collection: it is a love letter to unpartnered Black mothers and a spiritual sequel to Thompson’s earlier play "Single Black Female."

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.com.

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Simone C. Drake, "Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century" (Duke UP, 2020) Oct 22, 2020

Simone C. Drake and Dwan K. Henderson's Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Duke UP, 2020) is an engaging and interdisciplinary exploration of contemporary black popular culture and how to think about this broad and diverse landscape, especially in relation to power, capitalism, gender identity, and presidential politics. Simone C. Drake and Dwan K. Henderson have pulled together a fascinating array of scholars of popular culture, cultural critics, as well as those who have produced popular artifacts. A number of the cultural voices in Are You Entertained? are presented in interviews at the end of each section of the book, with artists thinking through questions about black popular culture from an expansive perspective as a maker of art and as someone who creates within the context of politics, economics, and culture. Are You Entertained? is a dynamic, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary analysis of contemporary shifts, trends, and debates within the context of seeing and understanding black popular culture.

The book is divided into four thematic sections that pull together chapters that speak across academic disciplines and cultural artifacts to focus on the topics of “Performing Blackness,” “Politicizing Blackness,” “Owning Blackness,” and “Loving Blackness.” This approach weaves together the conversations in each chapter in an organic fashion, pulling together conceptual ideas as well as providing the reader with deep dives into films, music, television, visual art, theater, advertising, fashion, web series, and more. Embedded within the book are not only scholarly analyses of different kinds and sites of popular culture, but also images of fine art that are critiqued in context and extend the discussion of what the “pop” in popular culture means when discussing different forms of art and culture. Drake and Henderson have assembled authors and analysis that take the reader on an enlightening journey not only through popular culture artifacts, but also complex conversations about commodification, capitalism, and consumerism, and the tension between art and profit. The idea for this edited volume was to trace how and where black culture (high, low, popular) has moved from the margins to the mainstream, and what this means in terms of artistic ownership. Within this stream of analysis, there is the enduring dynamic that often surrounds black art and production, which centers around the unequal treatment and consumption, in all dimensions, of black art. This book not only takes up the question of black popular culture in the 21st century, but also provides the reader with actual engagement with art and critique, an experiential and academic undertaking for both the reader and the authors/editors.

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Nadia Nurhussein, "Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America" (Princeton UP, 2019) Oct 21, 2020

In Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America (Princeton University Press, 2019), Nadia Nurhussein explores late nineteenth and twentieth century African American cultural engagement with and literary depictions of imperial Ethiopia. Widely celebrated as one of two African nations to resist European colonization in the age of modern imperialism, Ethiopia captured the attention of a host of African American journalists, artists, writers, adventurers, and even financiers. Drawing on an array of images, plays, and texts from well-known figures such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and George Schuler to lesser known figures such as Harry Foster Dean and William Henry Ellis, Nurhussein shows how some African Americans came to embrace and others later critiqued an imperial Ethiopia.

This work provides an innovative approach to the study of Ethiopianism as more than a concept but a concrete place.

Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.

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Dan Royles, "To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle Against HIV/AIDS" (UNC Press, 2020) Oct 21, 2020

In the decades since it was identified in 1981, HIV/AIDS has devastated African American communities. Members of those communities mobilized to fight the epidemic and its consequences from the beginning of the AIDS activist movement. They struggled not only to overcome the stigma and denial surrounding a "white gay disease" in Black America, but also to bring resources to struggling communities that were often dismissed as too "hard to reach." To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle Against HIV/AIDS (UNC Press, 2020) offers the first history of African American AIDS activism in all of its depth and breadth. Dan Royles introduces a diverse constellation of activists, including medical professionals, Black gay intellectuals, church pastors, Nation of Islam leaders, recovering drug users, and Black feminists who pursued a wide array of grassroots approaches to slow the epidemic's spread and address its impacts. Through interlinked stories from Philadelphia and Atlanta to South Africa and back again, Royles documents the diverse, creative, and global work of African American activists in the decades-long battle against HIV/AIDS.

Dan Royles is an assistant professor of history at Florida International University.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine.

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Chinua Thelwell, "Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020) Oct 20, 2020

Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond (U Massachusetts Press, 2020) by Dr. Chinua Thelwell is a rich, well-researched, and sobering investigation of blackface minstrelsy as the “visual bedrock of a transcolonial cultural imaginary.” In tracing minstrel globalization across the Anglo-colonial and British imperial worlds beginning in the 1800s, Thelwell explores the ways that blackface minstrelsy helped to construct and maintain notions of exclusionary citizenship in racial states throughout the Atlantic, Indian, Pacific Ocean worlds.

Thelwell shows that the South African Cape Colony became the minstrel nexus of these globalizing performance circuits. Putting this history in conversation with ongoing white settler colonialism and attendant plunder, annexation, and resource extraction, Thelwell argues that minstrel performances discursively strengthened the economic, social, and political cornerstones of the South African racial state, a state that ultimately developed into an apartheid state in the twentieth century. Through archival research and close readings of cultural artifacts, Thelwell shows that minstrel performances reflected gendered and racialized white fantasies of idealized Black laborers in events that normalized practices of racially exclusionary citizenship and reinforced labor exploitation. Exporting Jim Crow also significantly investigates subversive forms of Black resistance to these anti-black racial projects. For example, Thelwell interrogates how African American minstrels and Cape Coloureds attempted to change the terms of minstrel performance by creating shows that celebrated their own cultures and broadcasted images of equal citizenship. An important and critical study, Exporting Jim Crow enriches scholarship on blackface minstrelsy, South Africa, empire and colonialism, racial capitalism, and performance studies.

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Tamura Lomax, “Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture” (Duke UP, 2018) Oct 19, 2020

One of the central threads in the public discourse on Black womanhood is the idea of the “Jezebel.” This trope deems Black women and girls as dishonorable and sexually deviant and the stereotype is circulated from the big screen to the pulpit. Tamura Lomax, Associate Professor at Michigan State University, outlines a historical genealogy of the discursive “Jezebel” and reveals its contemporary legacy in Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture (Duke University Press, 2018). Lomax brings together theoretical strands from medieval thinkers, Biblical narratives, Enlightenment theories of race, and American cultural productions to demonstrate how gender hierarchy and patriarchy have been constructed in Black communities. These systems can be reinforced through the relationship between Hip Hop culture and the Black church or be challenged by Womanist interpreters. In our conversation we discuss girlhood in the the Black Church, racial theories, the Biblical Jezebel, Womanist criticism, formations of respectability, female sexuality and femininity, Bishop T. D. Jakes, and the work of Tyler Perry.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.

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Alexandra J. Finley, "An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade" (UNC Press, 2020) Oct 16, 2020

Alexandra J. Finley is the author of An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. An Intimate Economy examines the history of American slavery and capitalism by foregrounding women’s labor in the Antebellum slave trade. Finley explores a variety of topics included, domestic, reproductive, and sexual labor enslaved and free Black women performed at various points in the slave trade. This work adds to our knowledge on how central women were to the extension and growth of the domestic slave trade throughout the Antebellum period.

Alexandra J. Finley is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburg.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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Why are Blacks Democrats?: An Interview with Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird Oct 15, 2020

Black Americans are by far the most unified racial group in American electoral politics, with 80 to 90 percent identifying as Democrats—a surprising figure given that nearly a third now also identify as ideologically conservative, up from less than 10 percent in the 1970s. Why has ideological change failed to push more black Americans into the Republican Party? Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior (Princeton University Press, 2020) answers this question with a pathbreaking new theory that foregrounds the specificity of the black American experience and illuminates social pressure as the key element of black Americans’ unwavering support for the Democratic Party.

Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird argue that the roots of black political unity were established through the adversities of slavery and segregation, when black Americans forged uniquely strong social bonds for survival and resistance. White and Laird explain how these tight communities have continued to produce and enforce political norms—including Democratic Party identification in the post–Civil Rights era. The social experience of race for black Americans is thus fundamental to their political choices. Black voters are uniquely influenced by the social expectations of other black Americans to prioritize the group’s ongoing struggle for freedom and equality. When navigating the choice of supporting a political party, this social expectation translates into affiliation with the Democratic Party. Through fresh analysis of survey data and original experiments, White and Laird explore where and how black political norms are enforced, what this means for the future of black politics, and how this framework can be used to understand the electoral behavior of other communities.

An innovative explanation for why black Americans continue in political lockstep, Steadfast Democrats sheds light on the motivations consolidating an influential portion of the American electoral population.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Hannah L. Walker, "Mobilized by Injustice: Criminal Justice Contact, Political Participation, and Race" (Oxford UP, 2020) Oct 08, 2020

Hannah Walker’s new book, Mobilized by Injustice: Criminal Justice Contact, Political Participation, and Race(Oxford UP, 2020), brings together the political science and criminal justice disciplines in exploring how individuals are mobilized to engage in political participation by their connection to the criminal justice system in the United States. The fusion between these two academic disciplines, and the focus of their respective studies in this area, answers some questions that are often omitted or passed over by the individual disciplines given the kinds of questions posed by each discipline. Thus, the topics and issues explored in Mobilized by Injustice focuses on political mobilization, advocacy, and activism, often beyond the issue of voting, to tease out how individuals who have been incarcerated or their friends and relatives are involved in the political system. The American criminal justice system is often seen as imposing the “prison beyond the prison” in how formerly incarcerated individuals are constrained and limited in their lives after they leave prison, including limits on voting rights in many states, limits on access to federal policies, and the myriad other ways in which these citizens are essentially marginalized with our society. Walker’s research digs into these constraints and also the stigmatization that individuals experience because of incarceration. At the same time that she is trying to discern how these individuals respond within the political system itself, Walker is also trying to get at how communities are impacted by the criminal justice system, exploring the ways in which this system can be particularly corrosive in certain communities.

The research explores political participation by a number of different and often intersecting groups, specifically the individuals who have been incarcerated or directly experienced the criminal justice system, and those who have proximate contact with that system, through their family member’s direct experience. Within these two umbrella groups, Walker also digs into distinctions across racial groups (white, black, Latinx) and across socio-economic categories (examining class distinctions in this context). Mobilized by Injustice finds interesting results in the multi-method research approach, discerning different kinds of political involvement that is not captured by questions about whether an individual does vote or can vote. Rather, the research highlights that those with proximal contact with the criminal justice system have lower barriers to political engagement, which may lead them more naturally into politics because these individuals find themselves working as advocates for their family member who is incarcerated. Those who have been incarcerated face a variety of higher barriers, both structural and psychological, and they often need more support to engage in politics, because of the “dignity deficit” they may suffer because of societal stigmatization.

Mobilized by Injustice: Criminal Justice Contact, Political Participation, and Race will likely be of interest to those who study political science, criminal justice, sociology, public policy, social science methodology, and race and class.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

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Jerry Gershenhorn, "Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle" (UNC Press, 2018) Oct 07, 2020

Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) by Jerry Gershenhorn is a history of the struggle for Black equality in North Carolina from 1927 to 1971 as told through the life and activism of Black newspaperman Louis Austin. Austin, as editor of the Carolina Times, was involved in nearly every facet of the long Black freedom struggle in North Carolina. He was an outspoken editor and a staunch social justice advocate who championed Black voter’s rights, school desegregation, and economic equality for nearly fifty years. Gershenhorn utilizes the phrase “long black freedom struggle” instead of the customary “long civil rights movement” in his narrative noting that in the 1930s and 1940s many of the customary characteristics of the Civil Rights Movement had not matured at this time in North Carolina and that during this time “mass direct action was the exception not the norm” (3).

This text contains an “Introduction” section, seven concise chapters, and an “Epilogue.” In his “Introduction,” Gershenhorn makes the case that Austin supported and engaged in the type of activism that ultimately came to define the Civil Rights Era, including embracing the sit-ins and school desegregation, unlike several other Black newspapermen in the South who were more accommodationist in their approaches. The first few Chapters trace Austin’s formative years as “the grandson of slaves” who grew up in a home that emphasized Black respectability and dignity. These Chapters also highlight the emergence of Austin as an “advocacy journalist” in North Carolina. Louis Austin and the Carolina Times is a critical text in helping us to understand the history of the Black freedom struggle in the South, Black journalism, and the integral role of the Black press in advancing racial equality for African Americans.

Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. She has published book chapters, essays, and edited/authored five books. Her latest publications include Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger, 2017) and, with Dr. G. Reginald Daniel, professor of historical sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union (University Press of Mississippi 2014). Follow me on twitter: @DrHettie2017

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Armstrong Williams, "What Black and White America Must Do Now: A Prescription to Move Beyond Race" (Hot Books, 2020) Oct 02, 2020

What Black and White America Must Do Now: A Prescription to Move Beyond Race (Hot Books, 2020) explores the complexity of race and culture in the United States. In his third book, renowned conservative entrepreneur, author, and philanthropist Armstrong Williams discusses his prescription for healing and atonement amidst today’s current social upheaval.

Race and racism are America's original sin, and four hundred years later, they still plague the nation, pitting groups against each other. Despite how much time has elapsed, many Americans remain befuddled by how to move forward; however, the time for solutions has come.

In this book, Armstrong Williams recounts his personal story and journey growing up working on his family farm in rural South Carolina, leading to an unexpected meeting with the late Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, which turned into an unlikely relationship that led him to the halls of power in Washington, D.C.

Williams calls for all Americans to stand up to represent America’s highest virtues and ideals, and he challenges us to look beyond the pale of race for something much deeper.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom

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Laura J. Arata, "Race and the Wild West" (U Oklahoma Press, 2020) Oct 01, 2020

After Laura Arata first visited Virginia City, Montana in graduate school, she became fascinated by the story of one historical figure—Sarah Bickford, a former slave, who migrated to this frontier, mining town in the late 1860s, and became a prominent business owner who promoted tourism at the site of a famous lynching of white “lawbreakers” by the Montana Vigilantes.

In Race and the Wild West: Sarah Bickford, the Montana Vigilantes, and the Tourism of Decline, 1870–1930 (University of Oklahoma Press), a fascinating work of historical recovery, Arata provides a compelling biography of Sarah Bickford and the larger story of black life in the rural West.

Ryan Driskell Tate holds a Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University. @rydriskelltate

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Ariella Rotramel, "Pushing Back: Women of Color-Led Grassroots Activism in New York City" (U Georgia Press, 2020) Sep 29, 2020

Pushing Back: Women of Color–Led Grassroots Activism in New York City (U Georgia Press, 2020) explores women of color’s grassroots leadership in organizations that are not singularly identified with feminism. Centered in New York City, Pushing Back brings an intersectional perspective to communities of color as it addresses injustices tied to domestic work, housing, and environmental policies and practices. Ariella Rotramel shows how activists respond to injustice and marginalization, documenting the ways people of color and the working class in the United States recognize identity as key to the roots of and solutions to injustices such as environmental racism and gentrification.

Rotramel further provides an in-depth analysis of the issues that organizations representing transnational communities of color identify as fundamental to their communities and how they frame them. Introducing the theoretical concept of “queer motherwork,” Rotramel explores the forms of advocacy these activists employ and shows how they negotiate internal diversity (gender, race, class, sexuality, etc.) and engage broader communities, particularly as women-led groups.

Pushing Back highlights case studies of two New York–based organizations, the pan-Asian/American CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities (formerly the Committee Against Anti- Asian Violence) and South Bronx’s Mothers on the Move/ Madres en Movimiento (MOM). Both organizations are small, women-led community organizations that have participated in a number of progressive coalitions on issues such as housing rights, workers’ rights, and environmental justice at the local, national, and global levels.

Hongdeng Gao is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of History at Columbia University.

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Laura Briggs, "Taking Children: A History of American Terror" (U California Press 2020) Sep 29, 2020

Laura Briggs’s Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press 2020) is a forceful and captivating book that readers won’t be able to put down, and that listeners from all sort of backgrounds will definitely want to hear more about. Weaving together histories of Black communities (in the US and the Americas more broadly), Native Americans, and multiple Latin Americans countries, Briggs tells us how taking of children has been used as a strategy to terrorize communities that demand social justice and change. This book, timely as no other, asks readers to question the narrative that portrays taking children as something that is done in the benefit of the child, and instead to see it as a strategy that seeks to control and dominate communities that are deem dangerous to the social order. As Prof. Briggs tells us by the end of the interview, in this summer of racial reckoning the BLM movement has asked to eliminate the foster care system for this has been another vehicle for the policing and criminalization of African American communities in the United States. This demand has everything to do with the long history of talking children that is so thoroughly documented in this book.

Yet this is not only a “History of American Terror” as the title suggests, it is also a history about how individuals, families, communities and organizations have resisted this terrorizing strategy. Make no mistake: this is not a story with a happy ending, still, it is one that teaches us that in our past lies both the ghostly hauntings that explain why taking children has been a strategy used for terror, but also why therein we can find the seeds to resistance and transformation. Definitely a must for these troubling and convoluted times.

Bonus: Prof. Briggs’s son makes a short but hilarious appearance in our conversation. We have decided not to delete this portion of the interview because it demonstrates one of Prof. Briggs main scholarly arguments: the distinction between the private and public is illusory. As with many other topics, the COVID-19 pandemic has only rendered visible the realities that were already there.

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William L. Patterson, "We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People" (International Publishers, 2017) Sep 25, 2020

In 2017, We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People, the historic petition authored by William L. Patterson, was published in its third edition. It has been nearly 70 years since Patterson, who passed away in 1980, and Paul Roberson, who passed away in 1976, presented the petition to the United Nations General Assembly, charging the United States government with genocide under the United National Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

William L. Patterson was born in San Francisco on August 27th, 1891. He died in New York City in 1980.

Jarvis Tyner, executive vice chair of the Communist Party USA, and active public spokesperson against racism, imperialism and war, joins me to discuss his prologue to the third edition of We Charge Genocide, as well as its history and ongoing relevance today.

Jeff Bachman is a Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. He is the author of The United States and Genocide: (Re)Defining the Relationship and editor of the volume Cultural Genocide: Law, Politics, and Global Manifestations. He is currently working on a new book, The Politics of Genocide: From the Genocide Convention to the Responsibility to Protect, contracted by Rutgers University Press for its Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights series.

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Jennifer Cobbina, "Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: Why the Protests in Ferguson and Baltimore Matter, and How They Changed America" (NYU Press, 2019) Sep 24, 2020

Following the high-profile deaths of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, both cities erupted in protest over the unjustified homicides of unarmed black males at the hands of police officers. These local tragedies—and the protests surrounding them—assumed national significance, igniting fierce debate about the fairness and efficacy of the American criminal justice system. Yet, outside the gaze of mainstream attention, how do local residents and protestors in Ferguson and Baltimore understand their own experiences with race, place, and policing?

In Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: Why the Protests in Ferguson and Baltimore Matter, and How They Changed America (NYU Press), Jennifer Cobbina draws on in-depth interviews with nearly two hundred residents of Ferguson and Baltimore, conducted within two months of the deaths of Brown and Gray.

She examines how protestors in both cities understood their experiences with the police, how those experiences influenced their perceptions of policing, what galvanized Black Lives Matter as a social movement, and how policing tactics during demonstrations influenced subsequent mobilization decisions among protesters.

Ultimately, she humanizes people’s deep and abiding anger, underscoring how a movement emerged to denounce both racial biases by police and the broader economic and social system that has stacked the deck against young black civilians.

Hands Up, Don’t Shoot is a remarkably current, on-the-ground assessment of the powerful, protestor-driven movement around race, justice, and policing in America.

Jennifer E. Cobbina is Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University.

Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in American women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural women in the 19th century. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature.

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Teresa A. Goddu, "Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) Sep 16, 2020

Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America (University of Pennsylvania Press) is a richly illustrated history of the American Anti-Slavery Society and its print, material, and visual artifacts. Beginning with its establishment in the early 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) recognized the need to reach and consolidate a diverse and increasingly segmented audience.

To do so, it produced a wide array of print, material, and visual media: almanacs and slave narratives, pincushions and gift books, broadsides and panoramas. Building on the distinctive practices of British antislavery and evangelical reform movements, the AASS utilized innovative business strategies to market its productions and developed a centralized distribution system to circulate them widely.

In Selling Antislavery, Teresa A. Goddu shows how the AASS operated at the forefront of a new culture industry and, by framing its media as cultural commodities, made antislavery sentiments an integral part of an emerging middle-class identity. She contends that, although the AASS's dominance waned after 1840 as the organization splintered, it nevertheless created one of the first national mass markets.

Goddu maps this extensive media culture, focusing in particular on the material produced by AASS in the decade of the 1830s. She considers how the dissemination of its texts, objects, and tactics was facilitated by the quasi-corporate and centralized character of the organization during this period and demonstrates how its institutional presence remained important to the progress of the larger movement. Exploring antislavery's vast archive and explicating its messages, she emphasizes both the discursive and material aspects of antislavery's appeal, providing a richly textured history of the movement through its artifacts and the modes of circulation it put into place.

Featuring more than seventy-five illustrations, Selling Antislavery offers a thorough case study of the role of reform movements in the rise of mass media and argues for abolition's central importance to the shaping of antebellum middle-class culture.

Teresa A. Goddu is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Vanderbilt University and author of Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation.

Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural American women in the 19th century. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature.

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Postscript: A Discussion of Race, Anger and Citizenship in the USA Sep 14, 2020

How do we have a serious conversation about race that moves beyond the brevity of Twitter or an op-ed? In this episode of Post-Script (a New Books in Political Science series from Lilly Goren and Susan Liebell), three scholars engage in a nuanced and fearless discussion grounded in history, data, and theory. There is no way to summarize this hour of engaged and enraged conversation about racism in the United States. The scholars present overlapping narratives with regards to racial violence and unequal citizenship – but they also openly challenge each other on first assumptions, definitions, and the contours of racism in the United States.

Dr. Davin Phoenix (Associate Professor, Political Science Department, University of California, Irvine ) focuses on anger and black politics as the “politics of bloodshed”– in which all forms of violence are used to destroy the political standing, well-being, and equal citizenship of Black Americans.

Dr. Frank B. Wilderson III (professor and chair of the African American Studies Program, University of California, Irvine) thoughtfully challenges the assumption that citizenship can be equal for Black Americans – even with radical reform.

Dr. Cristina Beltrán (associate professor and director of graduate studies in the department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU) interrogates whether American ideals rely upon uninterrogated violence and oppression.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

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Edward C. Valandra, "Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities" (Living Justice Press, 2020) Sep 11, 2020

Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities (Living Justice Press, 2020) consists of stories that have arisen from the lived experiences of a broad range of seasoned, loving restorative justice practitioners of color—mostly women—who have fiercely unearthed realities about devastation caused by white practitioners who have unthinkingly worked without a racial or social justice consciousness. This book is thus a wake-up call for European-descended restorative justice practitioners as it is validating for Indigenous practitioners and practitioners of color and enlightening for anyone wishing to explore the intersections of indigeneity, racial justice, and restorative justice.

The authors of Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities are Desirée Anderson, Rochelle Arms Almengor, Michelle Armster, Belinda Dulin, Leon Dundas, Sharon Goens-Bradley, Janice Jerome, Gaye Lang, Erica Littlewolf, Shameeka Mattis, Abdul-Malik Muhammad, Christianne Paras, Christina Parker, Gilbert Salazar, Victor Jose Santana, Barbara Sherrod, Johonna Turner, Edward C Valandra, Waŋbli Wapȟáha Hokšíla, Anita Wadhwa, Sheryl R. Wilson, and Robert G. Yazzie.

Dr. Edward C Valandra, Waŋbli Wapȟáha Hokšíla is Sičáŋǧu Thitȟuŋwaŋ and was born and raised on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation. He has served his Sičáŋǧu Thitȟuŋwaŋ Oyáte nation on the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Council, as an Inter-Tribal Bison Cooperative (ITBC) Board of Directors representative, and as his nation’s seven-member Constitutional Task Force.

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Roundtable Discussion of Jennifer Morgan's "Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery" (UPenn Press, 2004) Sep 10, 2020

Welcome to New Books in African American Studies, a channel on the New Books Network. I am your host Adam McNeil. Today is part 2 of my discussion about Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan’s 2004 Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Instead of Dr. Morgan, who was featured in part 1 of the discussion, I enlisted a few #Blktwitterstorians to pull up to the pod and discuss the importance of Dr. Morgan’s Laboring Women to the field of slavery studies, gender and sexuality studies, and other fields, along with why Laboring Women is so important to each scholar, and also where the field of slavery studies is going.

My guests are:

Dr. Natasha Lightfoot, associate professor of history at Columbia University, a historian of slavery and emancipation studies, and black identities, politics, and cultures in the fields of Caribbean, Atlantic World, and African Diaspora History.

Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson, assistant professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University, a historian of black diasporic freedom struggles from slavery to emancipation + as a digital humanist, Johnson explores ways digital and social media disseminate and create historical narratives, in particular, comparative histories of slavery and people of African descent.

Halle Ashby, PhD Student in History at the Johns Hopkins University. Ashby is a historian of Caribbean slavery and emancipation, and her research concerns questions about gender, reproduction, and sexuality. Let me tell y’all, the conversation you are about to witness, is…. *chef’s kiss. Sit back, and enjoy the ride y’all!

Adam McNeil is a third-year PhD Student in History at Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey. McNeil is a historian of Black women’s political histories during the American Revolutionary era.

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Hettie V. Williams, "Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History" (Praeger, 2018) Sep 10, 2020

Black women intellectuals have traditionally been overlooked in the academic study of American intellectual history. Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger) highlights the important contributions of both well- and lesser-known abolitionists, civil rights activists, preachers, writers, and artists to all spheres of American life and culture, arguing that Black women and their ideas were central to some of the most important social and political campaigns of the 19th and 20th centuries.

In this conversation Dr. Hettie V. Williams (Assistant Professor of African American History at Monmouth University), editor, discusses defining and redefining the public intellectual, the various pathways that Black women took into public life, the African American women’s club movement, the impact of bell hooks and Audre Lorde on scholarship around Black sexuality, and bringing Black women’s history into the college classroom.

Diana Dukhanova is Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Her work focuses on religion and sexuality in Russian cultural history, and she is currently working on a monograph about Russian religious philosopher Vasily Rozanov. Diana tweets about contemporary events in the Russian religious landscape at https://twitter.com/RussRLGNWatch.

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B. Heersink and J. A. Jenkins, "Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865-1968" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Sep 10, 2020

Prior to the 1960s, Democrats were seen as having a lock on the South in national and local electoral politics, while Republicans had strengths in other parts of the country. While this was the case for some time, Boris Heersink and Jeffrey A. Jenkins, in their new book,Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865-1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), look a bit more deeply into the role of the Republican Party in the Southern states following the Civil War, and they find some interesting dynamics at play across the next hundred years. Heersink and Jenkins argue that the overly simplified view of the “solid Democratic South” creates an incomplete narrative. Outlining the role of the Republican Party in the former states of the Confederacy, they explain how Southern Republicans had meaningful roles in selecting Republican presidential candidates even if few of those candidates carried any electoral college votes from Southern states.

Heersink and Jenkins describe how Southern Republicans, despite their unpopularity in the South, remained nationally important through their regular participation at the Republican national conventions. They explain that Southern delegates made up a sizable portion of the conventions, and candidates often vied for support from these delegates. Southern delegates were so valuable that candidates often turned to corrupt practices, including bribery, to win over these delegates. As a result, many GOP delegates were able to leverage their support for candidates for patronage appointments back home, even if they couldn’t produce broad-based state support for Republican presidential candidates. Heersink and Jenkins created a complex data set that came from census records, delegate rosters, local newspaper articles from the time, and information about patronage appointments. This is a fascinating multi-methods analysis, and they are continuing to expand the analysis to look more closely at these questions of patronage appointments.

Additionally, Heersink and Jenkins discuss electoral strategies of the Republican Party over the century that followed the Civil War. They recount the different ways that the GOP, in different states, approached party building and political engagement. This dimension of the research and the book is particularly rich since it dives into how the parties operated at the state level and how the approach of those operations also changed and shifted over time. As Reconstruction ended and as Southern states began to institute laws and regulations that would come to form the Jim Crow era, the various state-level Republican parties (and Democratic Parties) pursued support among voters, especially white voters as Black voters were pushed out of active political participation in the South. This hundred-year span is both nuanced and complex, and Heersink and Jenkins guide the reader through the evolution of the Republican Party, how this paved the way for Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy and partisan realignment of the South in the latter part of the 20th century.

Adam Liebell-McLean assisted with this podcast.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

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Jennifer L. Morgan, "Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2004) Sep 09, 2020

In 2004, Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press) was published. Sixteen years later, Morgan’s Laboring Women stands tall as one of the most important historical texts in the history of the academy.

Building on Dr. Deborah Gray White’s literal field building and seminal 1985 monograph, Ar’n’t I A Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, Laboring Women clearly added to White’s tradition, but also helped blaze a trail in her own right. Laboring Women was the first historical text to focus on Black women’s reproductive labor under New World slavery in the early modern period.

Laboring Women is also critically important to scholarly understandings about African and African American history, reproduction, gender, sexuality, capitalism, and MORE! To say the least, since 2004, the game wasn’t the same, anymore! Learn why by listening to the conversation! Enjoy New Books in African American Studies listeners.

Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan is Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis & History; Chair of the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis where she focuses on the history of the Black Atlantic World; comparative slavery, gender and sexuality studies.

Adam McNeil is a third-year PhD Student in the Department of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Adam also regularly contributes to academic blogs Black Perspectives and The Junto, and co-convenes Rutgers’ Center for Cultural Analysis’ Slavery and Freedom Studies Working Group. You can find Adam on Twitter at @CulturedModesty

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Muhammed Fraser-Rahim, "America’s Other Muslims" (Lexington Books, 2020) Sep 09, 2020

America's Other Muslims: Imam W.D. Mohammed, Islamic Reform, and the Making of American Islam explores the oldest and perhaps the most important Muslim community in America, whose story has received little attention in the contemporary context.

Muhammad Fraser-Rahim explores American Muslim Revivalist, Imam W.D. Mohammed (1933–2008) and his contribution to the intellectual, spiritual, and philosophical thought of American Muslims as well as the contribution of Islamic thought by indigenous American Muslims. The book details the intersection of the Africana experience and its encounter with race, religion, and Islamic reform. Fraser-Rahim spotlights the emergence of an American school of Islamic thought, which was created and established by the son of the former Nation of Islam leader.

Imam W.D. Mohammed rejected his father’s teachings and embraced normative Islam on his own terms while balancing classical Islam and his lived experience of Islam in the diaspora. Likewise his interpretations of Islam were not only American – they were also modern and responded to global trends in Islamic thought. His interpretations of Blackness were not only American, but also diasporic and pan-African.

Muhammad Fraser-Rahim is executive director of Quilliam International and assistant professor at the Citadel. Muhammed Fraser-Rahim on twitter: @mfraserrahim

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

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Catherine Adel West, "Saving Ruby King: A Novel" (Park Row Books, 2020) Sep 08, 2020

Two south side Chicago families are bound together by a violence-infused past. Ruby’s mother, Alice King, has been murdered. Her father, Lebanon King, is an abusive man who endured a terrible childhood. Her best friend, Layla, has always tried to protect Ruby from Lebanon even though her own father and Ruby’s father have been close friends since childhood. And their mothers were friends before them.

In this moving debut novel, Saving Ruby King (Park Row Books), Catherine Adel West gives each character a voice, but the voice that binds all of their lives together is that of the Calvary Hope Christian Church, objective witness to the complex ties between Ruby’s grandmother and her two friends, between Ruby’s father and Layla’s father, and between Ruby and Layla. In precise, lyrical writing, West delves into each of their secrets while exploring intergenerational trauma, racial injustice in Chicago, and the power of friendship.

Catherine Adel West was born and raised in Chicago, IL where she currently resides. She graduated with both her Bachelors and Masters of Science in Journalism from the University of Illinois - Urbana. Her work is published in Black Fox Literary Magazine, Five2One, Better than Starbucks, Doors Ajar, 805 Lit + Art, The Helix Magazine, Lunch Ticket and Gay Magazine. In between writing and traveling, Catherine works as an editor and is currently obsessed with watching old episodes of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, especially the ones with Vincent D’Onofrio.

If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join

G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes.

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Postscript: Shirley Chisholm as Principled Political Strategist Sep 07, 2020

“I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America.

“I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud.

“I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that.” – Shirley Chisholm, January 25, 1972, Announcement of Run for the Presidency

What is the political and intellectual legacy of Shirley Chisholm? Recent coverage of Chisholm – especially after the announcement of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s choice of Vice-Present – emphasizes ‘trailblazer talk.’ Chisholm’s extraordinary career included being both the first African-American woman elected to the United States congress and the first to run for the U.S. presidency. But emphasizing these “firsts” obscures Shirley Chisholm’s political and intellectual significance. She was a brilliant political strategist who deftly cultivated relationships that allowed her to accomplish her principled and wide-ranging political agenda. Shirley Chisholm said of herself that her achievement was having the "audacity and nerve" to run for the presidency of the United States: "I want history to remember me not as the first black woman to have be elected to the Congress, not as the first black woman to have made a bid for the presidency of the united states, but as a black woman who lived in the 20th century and who dared to be herself." Chisholm spoke and acted forcefully throughout her long career – Her slogan was “unbought and unbossed” – and she defined empowerment in the second half of the 20th century. She is better understood in the context of #BLM and than Kamala Harris.

POSTSCRIPT, a new series from New Books in Political Science, invites authors to react to contemporary political developments that engage their scholarship. Dr. Anastasia Curwood and Dr. Zinga A. Fraser – imminent scholars of Shirley Chisholm’s political strategies and ideals – engage in a remarkable dialogue.

Shirley Chisholm is often “disremembered” and Drs. Curwood and Fraser emphasize the importance of evaluating her work in the context of the Black Power movement of the 1970s, Black Women’s history, and Black feminism. Chisholm’s feminism was central to both her principles and her practice. She spoke the language of intersectionality – emphasizing the overlapping identities of gender, race, and class – decades before it was a popular term in Critical Race Theory. She had a majority woman staff with a woman as her top legislative aid. Political Science often equates political strategy with masculinity – failing to adequately explore Chisholm’s brilliant strategy of cultivating relationships that allowed her to deftly construct cross-cutting alliances. Her understanding of power was complex. She did not care who got credit and artfully created unlikely coalitions that allowed her to accomplish her political goals – always her priority.

Dr. Anastasia Curwood is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Kentucky and the Director of African-American and Africana Studies in the University of Kentucky’s College of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Zinga A. Fraser is an Assistant Professor in the Africana Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Brooklyn College. In addition to her academic responsibilities she is also the Director of the Shirley Chisholm Project on Brooklyn Women’s Activism at Brooklyn College.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

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Stooges Brass Band, "Can’t Be Faded: Twenty Years in the New Orleans Brass Band Game" (U Mississippi Press, 2020) Sep 07, 2020

Can’t Be Faded: Twenty Years in the New Orleans Brass Band Game (University of Mississippi Press, 2020) is a collaboration between musician and ethnomusicologist Kyle DeCoste and more than a dozen members of the Stooges Brass Band, past and present. It is the culmination of five years of interviews, research, and writing. Told with humor and candor, it’s as much a personal account of the Stooges’ careers as it is a story of the city’s musicians and, even more generally, a coming-of-age tale about Black men in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century.

DeCoste and the band members take readers into the barrooms, practice rooms, studios, tour vans, and streets where the music is made and brotherhoods are shaped and strengthened. Comprised of lively firsthand accounts and honest dialogue, Can’t Be Faded is a dynamic approach to collaborative research that offers a sensitive portrait of the humans behind the horns.

The Stooges Brass Band is based in New Orleans, Louisiana. They are known for incorporating elements of hip-hop, funk, and R&B into a more traditional brass band framework. In April 2011, the Stooges Brass Band won the Best Contemporary Brass Band award from the Big Easy Music Awards.

This episode features four members of the Stooges Brass Band: Walter Ramsey, tuba player, trombonist, and leader of the group; Al Growe, trombonist; Garfield Bogan, trombonist, drummer, and vocalist; and Andrew Baham, trumpet player and producer.

Alongside the Stooges Brass Band is co-author Kyle DeCoste, a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at Columbia University. His dissertation explores the cultural politics of childhood in Black popular music in the United States.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations.

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Simon Hall, "Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s" (Faber and Faber, 2020) Sep 02, 2020

In his new book Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s (Faber, 2020), Simon Hall, a Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds, colorfully details an extraordinary visit by Fidel Castro to New York in the Autumn of 1960 for the opening of the UN General Assembly.

Holding court from the iconic Hotel Theresa in Harlem, Castro's riotous stay in New York saw him connect with leaders from within the local African American community, as well as political and cultural luminaries such as Gamal Abdel Nasser, Nikita Khrushchev, Kwame Nkrumah and Allen Ginsberg. Through exploring the local and global impact of these ten days, Hall recovers Castro's visit as a critical turning point in the trajectory of the Cold War and the development of the 'The Sixties.'

E. James West is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in American History at Northumbria University. He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (Illinois, 2020).

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Charisse Burden-Stelly, "W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History" (ABC-CLIO, 2019) Aug 31, 2020

Why is the scholarship and advocacy work of W.E.B. Du Bois so relevant for 21st century politics? Does his unique combination of both serve as a possible template for today’s freedom movements?

Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly (assistant professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College and 2020-2021 Visiting Scholar with the Race and Capitalism Project at the University of Chicago) new book in called W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History (ABC-CLIO, 2019). In it, she argues that the application of Du Bois’s ideology, epistemology, and theory to practical action elucidates a road map for struggle against myriad forms of exploitation – and enduring features of his praxis provide lessons for our contemporary understanding and our ability to potential challenging of imperialism and racism.

Dr. Burden-Stelly works at the intersection of Critical Theory, Africana Studies, political theory, and political economy – and her analysis of Du Bois’s political and methodological contributions reflect these deep and broad scholarly traditions. She has revised Dr. Gerald Horne’s 2009 book substantively by refocusing on how Du Bois is part of and helps frame black radical history. He should be understood as a “veritable entrepôt of African-American, Pan-African, and radical Black History.” In order to create a book more accessible to those who do not specialize in Du Bois, political thought, or black history, Dr. Burden-Stelly has crafted helpful side-bars that help contextualize Du Bois’s political legacy, included and edited superb excerpts, and created a comprehensive chronology.

The most remarkable chapter of the book is “Why W.E.B. Du Bois Matters” in which she presents Du Bois as one of the “greatest activist-scholars in modern history” who took advantage of the best political-intellectual tools of his times – in a life that spanned almost 100 years and included 8 decades of political engagement. Du Bois’s “persistent engagement with the most pressing issues during his lifetime offers a template for scholar-activism that is still instructive today; his combination of ideological acumen and liberatory striving remains relevant to contemporary freedom movements.”

The podcast begins with some highlights of the intellectual biography including Dr. Burden-Stelly’s framing of Du Bois as a militant liberal and a militant anti-sexist (personally and professionally) who was able to simultaneously interrogate race, gender, and class. Engaging Du Bois’s work on Reconstruction allows Dr. Burden-Stelly to reveal the extent to which Du Bois should be understood as part of the Black Marxist tradition given that he analyzed the Civil War and beyond as “phases of capitalist exploitation, U.S. imperialism, global white supremacy, and Black labor insurgency.” Likewise, Du Bois shaped modern Pan Africanism such that Burden-Stelly considers him a father of modern Pan Africanism. Throughout all his scholar-activism, Du Bois nurtured deep and nuanced relationship that allowed him to both forge personal bonds and create institutions of enduring importance.

The podcast concludes with Dr. Burden-Stelly connecting Du Bois to the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement focusing on political mobilization as a tool of liberation and analyzing the code that is being used to delegitimatize new liberatory projects.

Dr. Burden-Stelly is a veteran of the New Books Network and you can hear her earlier interview with me and her co-authors as we discussed Black Political Thought: From David Walker to the Present in June 2020.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

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Jessica Marie Johnson, "Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) Aug 28, 2020

The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent. And it pivots on the self-conscious choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Slavery's rise in the Americas was institutional, carnal, and reproductive. The intimacy of bondage whet the appetites of slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials with fantasies of domination that trickled into every social relationship—husband and wife, sovereign and subject, master and laborer. Intimacy—corporeal, carnal, quotidian—tied slaves to slaveowners, women of African descent and their children to European and African men. In Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), Jessica Marie Johnson explores the nature of these complicated intimate and kinship ties and how they were used by black women to construct freedom in the Atlantic world.

Johnson draws on archival documents scattered in institutions across three continents, written in multiple languages and largely from the perspective of colonial officials and slave-owning men, to recreate black women's experiences from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue to Spanish Cuba to the swampy outposts of the Gulf Coast. Centering New Orleans as the quintessential site for investigating black women's practices of freedom in the Atlantic world, Wicked Flesh argues that African women and women of African descent endowed free status with meaning through active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practices. Their stories, in both their successes and their failures, outline a practice of freedom that laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century and reshaped the New World.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Dan Edelstein, "On the Spirit of Rights" (U Chicago Press, 2018) Aug 28, 2020

By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures?

In On the Spirit of Rights (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the rights regimes enshrined in the American and French Revolutions. With a lively attention to detail, he surveys a sprawling series of debates among rulers, jurists, philosophers, political reformers, writers, and others, who were all engaged in laying the groundwork for our contemporary systems of constitutional governance. Every seemingly new claim about rights turns out to be a variation on a theme, as late medieval notions were subtly repeated and refined to yield the talk of “rights” we recognize today. From the Wars of Religion to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, On the Spirit of Rights is a sweeping tour through centuries of European intellectual history and an essential guide to our ways of thinking about human rights today.

Dan Edelstein is the William H. Bonsall Professor of French and (by courtesy) professor of history at Stanford University. He is the author of The Terror of Natural Right, The Enlightenment, and On the Spirit of Rights, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London.

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A Discussion with J. T. Roane on Writing African American Lives Aug 24, 2020

Welcome to New Books in African American Studies, a channel on the New Books Network. I am your host, Adam McNeil. Today on the podcast I have the honor of chatting with a good friend, Dr. J. T. Roane, assistant professor of African and African American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Dr. Roane is on New Books in African American Studies to discuss a range of topics from his upbringing in Tappahannock, Virginia, to his days in undergrad and grad school at the University of Virginia and Columbia University, discussions about his writing process, and the importance of Black rural Southern life, to name a few. I hope and pray y’all enjoy the discussion!

J.T. Roane is assistant professor of African and African American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. He received his PhD in history from Columbia University and he is a 2008 graduate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. He is an out-going co-senior editor of Black Perspectives, the digital platform of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). Roane's scholarly essays have appeared in Souls Journal, The Review of Black Political Economy, and Current Research in Digital History. His work has also appeared venues such as The Brooklyn Rail, Pacific Standard, The Immanent Frame, and Martyr's Shuffle, Roane is a 2020-2021 National Endowment for the Humanities/Mellon Foundation Research Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

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Lauren Michele Jackson, "White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue ... and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation" (Beacon, 2019) Aug 19, 2020

In White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue ... and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation (Beacon, 2019), Lauren Michele Jackson analyzes Christina Aguilera, high fashion, the conceptual poetry of Kenneth Goldsmith, digital blackface, and the dearly departed video platform Vine. She demonstrates that cultural appropriation (especially of Black culture by white artists) is prevalent and deeply rooted in America’s history of inequality. Beyond that, though, she explores why white artists feel drawn to appropriate Blackness: what does appropriated Blackness give to white artists? Status? Sex appeal? Avant-garde credibility? Funding? And why doesn’t it give those same things to Black artists? White Negroes is a timely and engrossing (and funny) work of cultural criticism from a major new critical voice.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.com.

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Khary O. Polk, "Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898-1948" (UNC Press, 2020) Aug 19, 2020

Khary Oronde Polk is the author of Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898-1948, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. Contagions of Empire examines how the shifting views of Black military through the first half of the 20th century, as the U.S. increased its global empire and warfare. At once viewed as both contagious and immune, Black workers attempted to navigate the complex pathways that were left open in the military, even as they were seen as simultaneously integral and threatening to both the U.S. military and nation state. Polk’s work shows not just how scientific racism developed during this period and how U.S. militarism expanded, but how the Black community responded at each step.

Khary Oronde Polk is an Associate Professor of Black Studies and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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Benjamin Talton, "In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics" (Pennsylvania UP, 2019) Aug 19, 2020

In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press) by Benjamin Talton is a transnational history that explores the influence of African American leaders on US foreign policy towards Africa in the 1980s.

By examining the life and labors of the political activist turned Texas congressman, Mickey Leland, Talton traces the afterlives of 1960s-era Black radicalism in the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) after Leland’s election in 1978. Leland shaped the CBC’s outlook on famine in Ethiopia and established the Committee on Hunger where he developed a broad transformative vision for ending world hunger.

Talton analyzes Leland’s career alongside contemporaneous political developments in Ethiopia and apartheid South Africa, an issue which ultimately became the focal point of CBC endeavors. Talton investigates the ways that anti-apartheid limited Black Congressional action on other African-related foreign policy issues throughout the decade. Talton paints a portrait of Leland as an activist, statesman, and visionary who lived out his politics of humanitarian solidarity from Houston to Addis Ababa.

Benjamin Talton is Professor of History at Temple University.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the grassroots movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall

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Aaron Carico, "Black Market: The Slave's Value in National Culture after 1865" (UNC Press, 2020) Aug 17, 2020

On the eve of the Civil War, the estimated value of the U.S. enslaved population exceeded $3 billion--triple that of investments nationwide in factories, railroads, and banks combined, and worth more even than the South's lucrative farmland. Not only an object to be traded and used, the slave was also a kind of currency, a form of value that anchored the market itself. And this value was not destroyed in the war. Slavery still structured social relations and cultural production in the United States more than a century after it was formally abolished.

As Aaron Carico reveals in Black Market: The Slave's Value in National Culture after 1865 (UNC Press, 2020), slavery's engine of capital accumulation was preserved and transformed, and the slave commodity survived emancipation. Through both archival research and lucid readings of literature, art, and law, from the plight of the Fourteenth Amendment to the myth of the cowboy, Carico breaks open the icons of liberalism to expose the shaping influence of slavery's political economy in America after 1865. Ultimately, Black Market shows how a radically incomplete and fundamentally failed abolition enabled the emergence of a modern nation-state, in which slavery still determined--and now goes on to determine--economic, political, and cultural life.

Aaron Carico received his PhD in American Studies from Yale University.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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Kimberly Brown Pellum, "Black Beauties: African American Pageant Queens in the Segregated South" (History Press, 2020) Aug 17, 2020

Florida A&M University professor and former Miss FAMU Kimberly Brown Pellum, Ph.D., recently released her book, Black Beauties: African American Pageant Queens in the Segregated South (History Press, 2020). The book explores the glamorous history of African American beauty queens by using the stories of former contestants to address colorism and racism still prevalent in the industry. “My mother and grandmother took me to parades to see Miss Alabama State and Miss Tuskegee University…I loved the glamour,” Pellum said. “I wrote the book to capture that experience and address the politics of beauty within our own culture.” Kimberly Brown Pellum served as the model for the new Rosa Parks monument in Montgomery, Alabama.

The allure of pageants, Pellum said, often masked the social and political challenges experienced by contestants. She said their personal stories not only illustrated their unique definitions of beauty, but also served to explain the political identities contestants created for themselves in the quests for their crowns. “So often, public discourse about black beauty is narrated by persons without an intimacy or expertise in the culture. Black beauty is a topic often exploited. This book lifts and centers the voices of black women,” she said.

Pellum specializes in the history of women’s images and southern culture. Her contributions include work at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the Rosa Parks Museum and Google’s Arts & Culture series. Pellum, Miss FAMU 2005, was used as the model for the Rosa Parks statue erected in Montgomery, Ala., in fall 2019. Pellum is also the director of the digital archives project, The Museum of Black Beauty.

Latif Tarik is Assistant Professor of History at Elizabeth City State University located in Elizabeth City, NC. He is the history program coordinator, editorial board member for the digital journal Evoke: A Historical, Theoretical, and Cultural Analysis of Africana Dance and Theatre, and serves as book review editor for the Southern Conference of African American Studies. Latif is a contributor to Race and Ethnicity In America From Pre-Contact the Present, Islam and the Black Experience African American History

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Rae Linda Brown, "Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price" (U Illinois Press, 2020) Aug 14, 2020

In 1933, the Chicago Symphony performed the Symphony in E Minor by Florence B. Price. It was the first time a major American orchestra played a composition by an African American woman. Despite her success, Price sank into obscurity after her death in 1953. Dr. Rae Linda Brown spent much of her career researching and writing about Price’s life and music, as well as advocating for African American representation in academia and in the concert hall. Three years after her death, University of Illinois Press published the manuscript she left largely complete at her passing: Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price (University of Illinois Press, 2020). Two guests join this podcast to talk about the biography—Dr. Carlene Brown, Rae Linda’s sister, and Dr. Guthrie Ramsey, who edited the book and prepared it for publication. Heart of a Woman places Price’s life and music within the context of genteel middle-class African American culture and the active black classical music scene in Chicago in the 1930s and 40s. Brown also analyzes Price’s major pieces, teasing out the ways the composer embedded influences from black musical traditions into her concert music. Today Florence Price’s music is experiencing a resurgence in popularity, due in no small part to the work of Dr. Rae Linda Brown. G. Schirmer Inc. has acquired the rights to Price’s catalog and has been publishing her music (some pieces for the first time). In the 2019–2020 season alone, the Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Seattle Symphonies, among others, performed her work.

Rae Linda Brown was the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at Pacific Lutheran University at her death in 2017. Her research and publications focused on African American concert music and Florence B. Price.

Carlene J. Brown is Professor of Music and Director of the Music Therapy Program at Seattle Pacific University. Her research and clinical work centers on the use of music for pain management.

Guthrie Ramsey is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University Pennsylvania. A musicologist, pianist, and composer, Ramsey has published extensively on African American music including two books. He has also released three recordings with his band Dr. Guy’s MusiQology and directed the documentary Amazing: The Tests and Triumph of Bud Powell (2015) among other projects.

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Andrea Benjamin, "Racial Coalition Building in Local Elections: Elite Cues and Cross-Ethnic Voting" (Cambridge UP, 2017) Aug 13, 2020

What explains voting behavior in local elections? More specifically, what explains how ethnic and racial blocs vote in local elections, especially when the candidate may be of a different race or ethnicity? These are the main question animating the research in Racial Coalition Building in Local Elections: Elite Cues and Cross-Ethnic Voting (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Political Scientist Andrea Benjamin examines the coalitions that form in local elections and the roles that they play in those elections. Racial Coalition Building in Local Elections outlines not only the most successful form of coalitions between different groups of people, but also tries to get at what might prompt the elite members of those groups to advocate to voters to cast their ballots for a candidate, especially a candidate from a different ethnic or racial group.

Using a variety of complex data sets, including experimental surveys to try to tease out distinctions within racial and ethnic groups in terms of mayoral candidate selections, Benjamin’s research focuses on how Black and Latinx voting coalitions in major cities are open to shifting their support for mayoral candidates. Benjamin was most interested in examining the impact of cross-ethnic voting cues and how elite endorsements within the Black and Latinx communities might move voters to vote across racial and ethnic lines. Often coalitions are formed when candidates need to reach across interest areas in order to build a large enough bloc to elect a candidate. As Benjamin points out in the book, mayoral elections often cut across expected partisan lines, which is why these coalitions are fascinating to explore. Racial Coalition Building in Local Elections examines the reasons why groups of people shift or support one candidate more than others. The data includes 20 years of mayoral races in the largest cities in the United States and traces out voting shifts in mayoral elections in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Houston. This is supplemented by experimental surveys that mirrored voter data from these races while building on some of the conclusions about endorsements, candidate preferences, and racial coalitions.

Andrea Benjamin also discusses how co-ethnic cues provide the theoretical framework for her analysis. The co-ethnic cue theory notes that “[w]hen partisan cues are absent and race/ethnicity is salient in an election, co-ethnic endorsements should prompt minority group members to vote for that candidate, even if that candidate is from another ethnic group.” (Benjamin, 8). Benjamin explains that if there is a race between a black candidate and a Latino candidate, the expectation is that each ethnic group will support the candidate with whom they share ethnicity; but, for example, if there is a race between a white candidate and a Latinx candidate, Black voters will likely support the candidate supported by most Black leaders in that community. Racial Coalition Building in Local Elections explains why this is the coalition dynamic, then unpacks what coalitions may be most effective and why, contextualized within the political dynamics in the cities themselves.

Eli Levitas-Goren assisted with this podcast.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

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Kyle Barnett, "Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry" (U Michigan Press, 2020) Aug 13, 2020

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz.

Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry’s challenges in the wake of the Great Depression.

Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University.

Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in December 2020. Mack is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. She published a 2019 essay for Longreads titled “Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me.”

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Polly E. Bugros McLean, "Remembering Lucile: A Virginia Family's Rise from Slavery and a Legacy Forged a Mile High" (UP of Colorado, 2018) Aug 12, 2020

In 1918 Lucile Berkeley Buchanan Jones received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado, becoming its first female African American graduate (though she was not allowed to "walk" at graduation, nor is she pictured in the 1918 CU yearbook).

In Remembering Lucile: A Virginia Family's Rise from Slavery and a Legacy Forged a Mile High(University Press of Colorado), author Polly McLean depicts the rise of the African American middle class through the historical journey of Lucile and her family from slavery in northern Virginia to life in the American West, using their personal story as a lens through which to examine the greater experience of middle-class Blacks in the early twentieth century.

The first-born daughter of emancipated slaves, Lucile refused to be defined by the racist and sexist climate of her times, settling on a career path in teaching that required great courage in the face of pernicious Jim Crow laws. Embracing her sister’s dream for higher education and W. E. B. Du Bois’s ideology, she placed education and intelligence at the forefront of her life, teaching in places where she could most benefit African American students.

Over her 105 years she was an eyewitness to spectacular, inspiring, and tragic moments in American history, including horrific lynchings and systemic racism in housing and business opportunities, as well as the success of women's suffrage and Black-owned businesses and educational institutions.

Remembering Lucile employs a unique blend of Black feminist historiography and wider discussions of race, gender, class, religion, politics, and education to illuminate major events in African American history and culture, as well as the history of the University of Colorado and its relationship to Black students and alumni, as it has evolved from institutional racism to welcoming acceptance.

This extensive biography paints a vivid picture of a strong, extraordinary Black woman who witnessed an extraordinary time in America and rectifies her omission from CU’s institutional history. The book fills an important gap in the literature of the history of Blacks in the Rocky Mountain region and will be of significance to anyone interested in American history.

Polly E. Bugros McLean is associate professor of media studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she has served as director of Women and Gender Studies and as the faculty associate to the Chancellor.

Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in anthropology, women’s history, and literature. She works as a historian, poet, and photographer. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature.

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Nate Marshall, "Finna: Poems" (One World, 2020) Aug 11, 2020

In Finna: Poems(One World), his new collection of poetry, Nate Marshall examines the way that pop culture influences Black vernacular, the role of storytelling, family, and place.

Marshall defines finna as: fin·na /ˈfinə/ contraction: (1) going to; intending to [rooted in African American Vernacular English] (2) eye dialect spelling of “fixing to” (3) Black possibility; Black futurity; Blackness as tomorrow.

His poems focus on the language of hope when Black lives and Black bodies are confronted with white supremacy, racism, and violence in our present culture.

Finna uses Black vernacular to explore the erasure of peoples in the American narrative, ask how gendered language can provoke violence; and how it expands notions of possibility and hope. Timely and lyrical, Marshall’s work is what is needed in language during this time in our history.

Sharp, lyrical poems celebrating the Black vernacular—its influence on pop culture, its necessity for familial survival, its rite in storytelling and in creating the safety found only within its intimacy

These poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy, and the use of the Black vernacular in America’s vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular, expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope:

nothing about our people is romantic

& it shouldn’t be. our people deserve

poetry without meter. we deserve our

own jagged rhythm & our own uneven

walk towards sun. you make happening happen.

we happen to love. this is our greatest

action.

Nate Marshall is an award-winning writer, rapper, educator, and editor.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.

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Monica Coleman, "Bipolar Faith: A Black Woman’s Journey with Depression and Faith" (Fortress Press, 2016) Aug 10, 2020

Monica A. Coleman's great-grandfather asked his two young sons to lift him up and pull out the chair when he hanged himself, and that noose stayed in the family shed for years. The rope was the violent instrument, but it was mental anguish that killed him. Now, in gripping fashion, Coleman examines the ways that the legacies of slavery, war, sharecropping, poverty, and alcoholism mask a family history of mental illness. Those same forces accompanied her into the black religious traditions and Christian ministry. All the while, she wrestled with her own bipolar disorder.

Bipolar Faith: A Black Woman’s Journey with Depression and Faith (Fortress Press, 2016) is both a spiritual autobiography and a memoir of mental illness. In this powerful book, Monica Coleman shares her life-long dance with trauma, depression, and the threat of death. Citing serendipitous encounters with black intellectuals like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Angela Davis, and Renita Weems, Coleman offers a rare account of how the modulated highs of bipolar II can lead to professional success, while hiding a depression that even her doctors rarely believed. Only as she was able to face her illness was she able to live faithfully with bipolar.

Monica A. Coleman teaches theology and African American religions at Claremont School of Theology, where she also codirects the Center for Process Studies. Her writings cover womanist theology, sexual abuse, and the African American experience. She is an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church a sought-after speaker and preacher.

Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher with offices in Brookline and Norwood, MA. You can follow her on Instagram or visit her website at https://drelizabethcronin.com.

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Nyasha Junior, “Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and Bible” (Oxford UP, 2019) Aug 05, 2020

Popular culture helps shape how audiences imagine Biblical personalities in our contemporary moment. For many, Warner Sallman’s portrait of Jesus fixes him as white, others envision Moses as Charlton Heston because of Cecil B. DeMille’s film, The Ten Commandments, and the Jezebel stereotype is more well known than the Biblical figure. This merging of cultural productions and scripture clearly intersect in the modern understanding of Hagar as a Black woman.

In Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and Bible (Oxford University Press, 2019), Nyasha Junior, Associate Professor in Temple University’s Department of Religion, sought to understand how Hagar become Black and what purposes that served. Junior lays out the primary sources and the divergent interpretive terrain where this identity makes sense to its readers. In our conversation we discuss Hagar in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Muslim sources, categories of color, ethnicity, and race in ancient contexts, Biblical interpretation in nineteenth-century US debates about enslavement, Hagar in the visual arts, music, and literature, womanist theology, and being a Black scholar in the academy.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.

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Charlton D. McIlwain, "Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from AfroNet to Black Lives Matter" (Oxford UP, 2020) Aug 03, 2020

In Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from AfroNet to Black Lives Matter (Oxford Univeristy Press), Charlton McIlwain, Vice Provost for Faculty Engagement and Development and professor of media, culture, and communication at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, examines the intersection of racial justice movements, technology, and culture.

McIlwain names the often ignored or neglected African American pioneers of computer and Internet technology. At the same time, he explores how technological innovations are deployed on Black and other marginalized communities. In connecting these threads, McIlwain demonstrates the centrality of African Americans to both the history and future of the Internet.

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Melissa J. Wilde, "Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion" (U California Press, 2020) Aug 03, 2020

Although it has largely been erased from the collective memory of American Christianity, the debate over eugenics was a major factor in the history of 20th-century religious movements, with many churches actively supporting the pseudoscience as a component of the Social Gospel.

In Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion (University of California Press, 2020), Dr. Melissa J. Wilde, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, demonstrates that support for contraception among some of America’s most prominent religious groups was tied to white supremacist views of race, immigration, and manifest destiny. We discuss how birth control use and promotion was conceived as a religious duty, how Biblical exegesis was used in support of eugenics, how the fear of “race suicide” motivated predominantly White denominations to limit reproduction among marginalized people, how groups like the Catholics and the Orthodox Jews pushed back against the pro-eugenics tide, the hidden racist legacy of contemporary progressive churches, and the silence that continues to exist around the issue today.

Diana Dukhanova received her PhD from Brown University, where she is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies, in 2018. Her work focuses on gender, religion, and sexuality in Russian religious culture. She is currently at work on her first monograph, Jesus of Bethlehem: Vasily V. Rozanov’s Russian Family Values.

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David A. Harris, "A City Divided: Race, Fear and the Law in Police Confrontations" (Anthem Press, 2020) Jul 30, 2020

How do we move police forces from a warrior culture to connecting better with communities they serve?

Today I talked to David A. Harris about his new book A City Divided: Race, Fear and the Law in Police Confrontations(Anthem Press, 2020).

Harris is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s law school and is the leading U.S. authority on racial profiling. Also the author of Profiles in Injustice (2002). he hosts the podcast Criminal Injustice. Topics covered in this episode include:

Harris’s vantage point on what the Minnesota legislature got right and only half-right in recently approving a police accountability measure in the wake of the George Floyd killing.
Why navigating fear and anger is so hard for both black suspects and the police alike.
What role a lack of familiarity – and trust – plays for officers and suspects in trying to avoid escalating their encounters.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Sophie White, "Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana" (UNC Press, 2019) Jul 29, 2020

In her prize-winning study Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Colonial Louisiana (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2019), award-winning historian Sophie White (Professor of American Studies, Africana Studies, History, and Gender Studies, and Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame) beautifully brings to life the lives and experiences of a number of enslaved women and men whose individual stories have heretofore never been told. In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men--like the testimony of free colonists--was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses about attacks, murders, robberies, and escapes, they answered with stories about themselves, stories that rebutted the premise on which slavery was founded.

Focusing on four especially dramatic court cases, Voices of the Enslaved draws us into Louisiana’s courtrooms, prisons, courtyards, plantations, bayous, and convents to understand how the enslaved viewed and experienced their worlds. As they testified, these individuals charted their movement between West African, indigenous, and colonial cultures; they pronounced their moral and religious values; and they registered their responses to labor, to violence, and, above all, to the intimate romantic and familial bonds they sought to create and protect. Their words--punctuated by the cadences of Creole and rich with metaphor--produced riveting autobiographical narratives as they veered from the questions posed by interrogators.

Carefully assessing what we can discover, what we might guess, and what has been lost forever, Sophie White offers both a richly textured account of slavery in French Louisiana and a powerful meditation on the limits and possibilities of the archive.

Awards and Distinctions for Voices of the Enslaved:

2019 Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History, The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana Historical Association
Co-Winner of the 2020 Summerlee Book Prize, Center for History and Culture of Southeast Texas and the Upper Gulf Coast at Lamar University
Honorable Mention, 2020 Merle Curti Social History Award, Organization of American Historians

Jerrad P. Pacatte is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-New Brunswick studying eighteenth and nineteenth century African American women’s history, slavery and emancipation in colonial America and the Atlantic world, and the history of slavery and capitalism. Follow him on Twitter @Jerrad_Pacatte!

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Kevin J. Bryne, "Minstrel Traditions: Mediated Blackface in the Jazz Age" (Routledge, 2020) Jul 29, 2020

The Blackface minstrel show is typically thought of a form tied to the 19th century. While the style was indeed developed during the Antebellum period, its history stretches well into 20th- and even 21st-century America. Far from being the endpoint posited by much of the existing literature on the topic, the Jazz age of the 1920s actually saw a flourishing of Minstrel activity, as new forms of media allowed the circulation of Blackface images in ever greater profusion. This circulation, these images, and the performances that lay behind them make up the focus of Dr. Kevin James Byrne’s Minstrel Traditions: Mediated Blackface in the Jazz Age (Routledge, 2020).

Minstrel Traditions examines the technologically-mediated interactions that developed between live performances and their circulating images during this fraught period. It does so through a set of case studies: the last musical of Bert Williams, the live career of (now-former) pancake brand/performer Aunt Jemima, amateur minstrel shows and the companies that provided them with material, Black vaudeville performers, and Black Broadway. By examining how Blackface transitioned from live performance to images circulating through the mass media, Dr. Byrne provides an insightful account that deepens our understanding of the enormous, baleful influence the form exerted on 20th century culture.

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Philip Butler, "Black Transhuman Liberation Theology: Technology and Spirituality" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) Jul 29, 2020

In his book Black Transhuman Liberation Theology: Technology and Spirituality(Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Philip Butler explores what might happen if Black people in the United States merged technology and spirituality in their fight towards materializing liberating realities.

The discussions shaping what it means for humans to exist with technology and as part of technology are already underway: transhumanism suggests that any use of technology to augment intellectual, psychological, or physical capability makes one transhuman. In an attempt to encourage Black people in the United States to become technological progenitors as a spiritual act, Butler asks whether anyone has ever been 'just' human? Butler then explores the implications of this question and its link to viewing the body as technology.

Re-imagining incarnation as a relationship between vitality, biochemistry, and genetics, the book also takes a critical scientific approach to understanding the biological embodiment of Black spiritual practices. It shows how current and emerging technologies might align with the generative biological states of Black spiritualities in order to concretely disrupt and dismantle oppressive societal structures.

Dr. Philip Butler is the Term Assistant Professor of Theology and Black Posthuman and Artificial Intelligence Systems at the Iliff School of Theology. He is also the founder of the Seekr Project, a distinctly Black conversational artificial intelligence with mental health capacities. His work primarily focuses on the intersection of neuroscience, technology, spirituality, and race. Currently, he is working to construct a Black posthumanism that is both critical and speculative in nature. He is also building a distinctly Black AI interface combining machine learning and psychotherapeutic systems.

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Jan Doering, "Us versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods" (Oxford UP, 2020) Jul 28, 2020

With such high levels of residential segregation along racial lines in the United States, gentrifying neighborhoods present fascinating opportunities to examine places with varying levels of integration, and how people living in them navigate the thorny politics of race. Among the many conflicts revolving around race under gentrification is crime and its relationship with the displacement and marginalization of a neighborhood’s existing low-income minority groups.

Contributing to this conversation is sociologist Jan Doering, whose new book Us versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods (Oxford University Press, 2020) examines the strategic practices of two groups in that city’s Rogers Park and Uptown neighborhoods: “public safety” advocates, or people who were very concerned with crime and active in a variety of local initiatives to address it; and “social justice” advocates, or people who were more concerned with resisting gentrification and keeping their neighborhood racially and socioeconomically diverse.

In documenting their efforts and clashes through three years of fieldwork, Doering focuses on two forms of racial claims-making each camp of residents uses to make its case: racial challenges, or charges of racially problematic behavior, and racial neutralizations, or any defensive or reparative responses to racial failings. Revealing links between how anticrime initiatives can amplify gentrification and contribute to marginalization through the invocation of race as they negotiate the politics of crime and gentrification, the book provides a highly nuanced, and quite timely, analysis of everyday battles over racial meanings with great resonance for today’s political climate.

Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), and editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2019) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012).

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M. C. Stevenson et al. (eds.), "The Legacy of Racism for Children: Psychology, Law and Public Policy" (Oxford UP, 2020) Jul 28, 2020

When children become entangled with the law, their lives can be disrupted irrevocably. When those children are underrepresented minorities, the potential for disruption is even greater.

The Legacy of Racism for Children: Psychology, Law and Public Policy (Oxford University Press) examines issues that arise when minority children's lives are directly or indirectly influenced by law and public policy.

Uniquely comprehensive in scope, this trailblazing volume offers cutting-edge chapters on the intersections of race/ethnicity within the context of child maltreatment, child dependency court, custody and adoption, familial incarceration, school discipline and the "school-to-prison pipeline," juvenile justice, police/youth interactions, and jurors' perceptions of child and adolescent victims and defendants.

The book also includes chapters focused on troubling situations that are less commonly researched, but growing in importance, including the role of race and racism in child sex trafficking and US immigration law and policy. Thus, individual chapters explore myriad ways in which law and policy shape the lives of marginalized children and adolescents - racial and ethnic minorities - who historically and presently are at heightened risk for experiencing disadvantageous consequences of law and policy.

In so doing, The Legacy of Racism for Children can help social scientists to understand and work to prevent the perpetuation of racial discrimination in American laws and public policies.

Margaret C. Stevenson is Associate Professor at the University of Evansville. She has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles, chapters, and an edited volume related to jury decision-making.

Bette L. Bottoms is Professor of Psychology and Dean Emerita of the Honors College at The University of Illinois at Chicago. She is Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) and a past president of APA's Society for Child and Family Policy and Practice and Section on Child Maltreatment.

Kelly C. Burke is a doctoral candidate in the Social Psychology Program at The University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research on the influence of prejudice and case evidence (e.g., body-worn camera footage) on juror decision making has been published in peer-reviewed journals and books and funded by the American Psychology-Law Society's Diversity Research Award and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues Grant-in-Aid Award.

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).

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Andrew Kettler, "The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Jul 27, 2020

In his new book, The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Dr. Andrew Kettler charts the impact that smell had on the making of race and justifications for enslavement in the Atlantic world.

Western European defined the African subject as a scented object, appropriated as filthy to create levels of ownership through discourse that marked African peoples as unable to access spaces of Western modernity. So powerful was this process of embodied cultural knowledge and racial othering that the very European biological function of smell altered in the early modern period.

While the first half of the book details this dialectical materialism from a European perspective, the second half speaks to the real consciousness and function that the sense of smell had in communities of African descent. Smell became a powerful tool for many enslaved peoples and racialized “others” to assert their agency, individualism, power, and perform everyday acts of resistance.

Deeply researched and theorized, The Smell of Slavery offers modern readers a deeper historical understanding of the unconscious development of their senses and the powerful legacy that such embodied cultural knowledge and olfactory racism still has on Atlantic societies.

Dr. Andrew Kettler is an Ahmason-Getty Fellow for the University of California, Los Angeles Center for 17th and 18th-Century Studies at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

R. Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic word.

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Patricia Zavella, "The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism" (NYU Press, 2020) Jul 24, 2020

In The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism (NYU Press, 2020), Pat Zavella shows how reproductive justice organizations' collaborative work across racial lines provides a compelling model for other groups to successfully influence change.

In the context of the war on women's reproductive rights and its disproportionate effect on women of color, and increased legal violence toward immigrants, The Movement for Reproductive Justice demonstrates that a truly intersectional movement built on grassroots organizing, culture shift work, and policy advocating can offer visions of strength, resiliency, and dignity for all.

Dr. Pat Zavella is Professor Emerita in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also the author of I’m Neither Here nor There: Mexicans’ Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty and coauthor of Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios.

Dr. Isabel Machado is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Department of History of the University of Memphis.

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Justin Gomer, "White Balance: How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights" (UNC Press, 2020) Jul 24, 2020

Justin Gomer is the author of White Balance: How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020.

White Balance explores the connection between politics and film from the 1970s to the 1990s. Gomer illustrates the myriad of ways that Hollywood relied on and helped solidify an emerging ideology of colorblindness in the wake of the civil rights movement.

From films like Dirty Harry to Rocky, Gomer is able to show just how much politics and film are intertwined during this period and held to reinforce each other in order to gradually chip away at the gains made during the Civil Rights Movement.

Justin Gomer is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the California State University-Long Beach.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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Raymond Winbush, "The Osiris Papers: Reflections on the Life and Writing of Dr. Frances Cress Welsing" (Black Classics Press, 2019) Jul 22, 2020

Today’s interview is with Dr. Raymond Winbush a research professor and the Director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University. Dr. Winbush and Dr. Denise Wright coedited the book The Osiris Papers: Reflections on the Life and Writing of Dr. Frances Cress Welsing (Black Classic Press, 2019)

As a scholar and activist, Dr. Winbush is known for his systems-thinking approaches to understanding the impact of racism/white supremacy on the global African community. His writings, consultations, and research have been instrumental in understanding developmental stages in Black males, public policy and its connection to compensatory justice, relationships between Black males and females, infusion of African studies into school curricula, and the impact of hip hop culture on the contemporary American landscape.

The Osiris Papers Is intended to be the first of many treatises written to examine the life, theories, and contributions of Dr. Frances Cress Welsing. Some of these writings will be hagiographic. Some will be critical, but all will expand our understanding of one of the greatest African thinkers of the past 100 years.

Latif Tarik is Assistant Professor of History at Elizabeth City State University located in Elizabeth City, NC. He is Elizabeth City State University history program coordinator, editorial board member for the digital journal Evoke: A Historical, Theoretical, and Cultural Analysis of Africana Dance and Theatre, and serves as book review editor for the Southern Conference of African American Studies INC. Latif is a contributor to Race and Ethnicity In America From Pre-Contact to the Present, Islam and the Black Experience African American History Reconsidered, African Religions Beliefs and Practices through History, and Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies

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Christina Dunbar-Hester, "Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures" (Princeton UP, 2020) Jul 20, 2020

In Hacking Diversity: The Politics of inclusion in Open Technology Cultures (Princeton University Press, 2020), Christina-Dunbar Hester, an associate professor in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, explores the world of open technology – communities centered on knowledge sharing.

In particular, she investigates how these communities are considering the question of diversity and inclusion. Using ethnographic methods – interviews, participant observation, and deep readings of texts – Dunbar-Hester shows how the problem-solving ethos of open tech does not quite meet the challenge of structural social problems.

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Walter Johnson, "The Broken Heart of America" (Basic Books, 2020) Jul 17, 2020

St. Louis, Missouri is the city with the highest rate of police shootings in the United States. It’s the city with an 18 year difference in life expectancy between Black and white neighborhoods which stand just 10 miles apart. It’s the city where, after Mike Brown was shot in 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement was born. It is also, now, the city whose history offers essential lessons about the history of the United States as a whole, thanks to Walter Johnson’s indispensable new book The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States (Basic Books).

The book tracks how anti-Blackness in America has long had everything to do with imperialism, working as much by removal as by predation. Imperial racism was at play when 19th-century settlers demanded Native land west of the Mississippi as compensation for abolition, when they tried to make the end of slavery would go hand in hand with the removal of free black people, or when they massacred black workers for strike-breaking instead of organizing across racial divides in the 20th century.

However, the book also shows that the city’s radicalism has never been far from the surface. From the 1877 strike where the proletariat literally took control of the city for a day, to the 1930s when Black women led successful multiracial organizing, people have fought the racial capitalist status quo.

The status quo has fought back, shapeshifting from genocide to lynching to strike-breaking to redlining, ultimately building white supremacy into the very fabric of the city’s material infrastructure. It is this “structural racism” which we need to understand and unbuild if we are to create truly anti-racist, decolonial futures, and this book is a must-read for everyone – historians, organizers, allies, citizens – interested in taking that first step.

Walter Johnson is Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Social Anthropology at Harvard University studying the reproduction of inequality through development projects in rural western India.

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Mark Anderson, "From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism and American Anthropology" (Stanford UP, 2019) Jul 17, 2020

Mark Anderson’s From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism and American Anthropology (Stanford University Press) is at once a story about US anthropology and US liberalism from the 1930s to the 1960s.

By interrogating the Boasian intervention into the idea of biological race, Anderson shows how, despite their progressive and anti-racist intentions, Boas and ‘the Boasians’ naturalised the idea of the United States as a white nation and helped to entrench problematic discourses, such as “colour-blindness”.

Alongside tracing the history of Boasian thought on race, highlighting the paradoxes and strange logics in Boasian anti-racism, Anderson identifies contemporaries who undertook more rigorous examinations of race, who offered more critical anti-racist analytics, but were sidelined in the history of US anthropology.

From Boas to Black Power doesn’t attempt to deny that the Boasians offered a trenchant critique of the biological conception of race, but shows that their commitment to liberalism undermined a true reckoning with how race shapes the United States.

Mark D. Anderson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, and also wrote Black and Indigenous: Garifuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras (University of Minnesota Press).

Lachlan Summers is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, USA, where he researches earthquake politics in Mexico City. He and his friends were permanently banned from teaching at UCSC for participating in the wildcat strike of 2019-2020. He is a contributing editor for Cultural Anthropology and can be found on Twitter @backup_sandwich.

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Jerry Gershenhorn, "Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle" (UNC Press, 2018) Jul 15, 2020

James West speaks with Jerry Gershenhorn, Julius L. Chambers Professor of History at North Carolina Central University, about Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), ahead of the book's paperback release.

Gershenhorn's award-winning study recovers the life and activism of Louis Austin and the influence of his newspaper, the Carolina Times, the preeminent Black newspaper in the state. Spanning much of the twentieth century, this absorbing account explores the long Black freedom struggle in North Carolina from a fresh vantage point, shedding new light on the role of the Black press in the twentieth century.

James West is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in American History at Northumbria University, Newcastle. He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (Illinois, 2020)

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Peniel E. Joseph, "The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr." (Basic, 2020) Jul 09, 2020

How do the political afterlives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. continue to shape American democracy? How does a common myth of opposition distort our understanding of civil rights?

In his dual biography, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (Basic Books, 2020), Peniel E. Joseph (Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and Professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin) interrogates the lives and philosophies of both Dr. King and Malcolm X. Although the two leaders were often depicted as advocating rival visions, Joseph unpacks the false binaries to reveal the many ways they influenced and persuaded one another. For Joseph, they shared a revolutionary path in search of black dignity, citizenship, and human rights.

Using the metaphor of the sword and the shield, Joseph contrasts Malcolm X’s belief in self-defense with Dr. King’s adherence to non-violence. Joseph reveals the manner in which King – as an insider raised in black Christianity – articulated the dream of equal citizenship as black America’s chief defense attorney. In contrast, Malcolm X – an outsider who reimagined himself while in prison using tenets from black nationalism and Islam – acted at the prosecuting attorney who unflinchingly accused white America of creating a cultural, political, and legal nightmare that deprived black citizens of their dignity.

But Joseph cautions against overstating familiar binaries. Based on nuanced, archival research, Joseph rejects Dr. King as a primarily conciliatory figure and Malcolm X as his “evil twin.” Both were radical figures who increasingly came to share a political vision. Rather than symbolizing a divided America, King and X’s strategies often furthered or clarified the other’s message: radical black citizenship as inextricably connected to radical black dignity. Joseph reveals both leaders as complex individuals who cannot be fully or accurately understood through simple binaries. Both were black revolutionaries and “kindred spirits whose very presence helped them fulfill their respective roles.”

In the podcast, Joseph emphasizes the role of women in the fight for civil rights, the disparate messages of the white and black press, and the profound effect the assassination of Malcolm X had on Dr. King. Reflecting on the 2020 national protests, Joseph sees the visions of both men in the Black Lives Matter movement – as well as concern with how police brutality reflects the racial caste system in the U.S.

Bernadette Crehan assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020).

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Richard Gergel, "Unexampled Courage" (Sarah Crichton Books, 2019) Jul 08, 2020

In his new book Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring (Sarah Crichton Books, 2019), District Judge Richard M. Gergel asks pertinent questions for the Summer of 2020. How do tragic events awaken white people to the violence of structural racism? What do white people do about it? How do black leaders shape their agendas? Unexampled Courage connects the stories of Isaac Woodard, Harry Truman, and J. Waties Waring to illustrate how one incident fits into the larger history of civil rights.

On February 12, 1946, Sergeant Isaac Woodard was discharged from the United States military after serving in World War II. While traveling home by bus, Woodard, one of the 900,000 African American men to serve in WWII, was pulled off the bus and arrested for speaking disrespectfully to the white bus driver. While in the custody of police in Batesburg, South Carolina, Sergeant Woodard was beaten and blinded. Viewed in isolation, the blinding of Isaac Woodard appears to be one of many incidents of police brutality against African Americans but Gergel describes how this particular case – publicized widely by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the black press, and Orson Welles – reached President Harry Truman and set off a chain of events impacting 20th century American civil rights.

In this extensively researched book, Gergel details how the mistreatment of Isaac Woodard shocked President Truman into creating a presidential commission on civil rights “To Secure These Rights” and ordering the Justice Department to prosecute Lynwood Shull, the chief of police in Batesburg. Shull was tried in South Carolina with Judge J. Waties Waring presiding – and found not guilty by an all-white jury. The verdict surprised and outraged Judge Waring who moved to confront racism – his own and that of the institutions that he supported. Moving forward, he ruled against racial segregation in Briggs v. Elliott (1952) and his decision helped lay the foundation for Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) and the legal precedent that separate but equal is “inherently unequal.”

The book highlights how black Americans who fought for civil rights risked their livelihood, bodies, and lives while whites like Truman and Waring negotiated social disapproval, political backlash, and – sometimes – violence. Although the focus is on the white men who “awaken,” he demonstrates the importance of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP leadership in addressing how institutional inconsistencies (e.g. Department of Justice, FBI, jury procedures, racist law enforcement) produced a bystander government.

In the podcast, Judge Gergel connects this mid-century civil rights history to the death of George Floyd, the inability of Congress to pass the Emmett Till Antilynching Act in June 2020, and the challenges of legal reform that remain. He also reveals that the book will be the subject of a public television documentary.

Adam Liebell-McLean assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020).

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Matthew Pettway, "Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion" (UP of Mississippi, 2019) Jul 07, 2020

Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido) were perhaps the most important and innovative Cuban writers of African descent during the Spanish colonial era. Both nineteenth-century authors used Catholicism as a symbolic language for African-inspired spirituality. Likewise, Plácido and Manzano subverted the popular imagery of neoclassicism and Romanticism in order to envision black freedom in the tradition of the Haitian Revolution.

Plácido and Manzano envisioned emancipation through the lens of African spirituality, a transformative moment in the history of Cuban letters. In Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion (University Press of Mississippi) Matthew J. Pettway examines how the portrayal of African ideas of spirit and cosmos in otherwise conventional texts recur throughout early Cuban literature and became the basis for Manzano and Plácido’s antislavery philosophy. The portrayal of African-Atlantic religious ideas spurned the elite rationale that literature ought to be a barometer of highbrow cultural progress.

Cuban debates about freedom and selfhood were never the exclusive domain of the white Creole elite. Pettway’s emphasis on African-inspired spirituality as a source of knowledge and a means to sacred authority for black Cuban writers deepens our understanding of Manzano and Plácido not as mere imitators but as aesthetic and political pioneers. As Pettway suggests, black Latin American authors did not abandon their African religious heritage to assimilate wholesale to the Catholic Church. By recognizing the wisdom of African ancestors, they procured power in the struggle for black liberation.

Matthew J. Pettway is assistant professor of Spanish at University of South Alabama.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Nicole Myers Turner, "Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia" (UNC Press, 2020) Jul 06, 2020

In her nuanced case study of postemanciaption Virginia, Nicole Myers Turner, (Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University) challenges assumptions regarding the intersection between black religion and politics in this “signal moment of political and cultural transformation in the African-American experience.” Using traditional archival records from churches, political institutions and personal documents -- as well as ArcGIS to create layered maps of black religious and political participation -- Turner interrogates the integral role black churches played in postbellum Virginia politics. Black political engagement is an understudied facet of the postemancipation period but Turner explores developing relationships between two realms of life and how politics were shaped by the racial positioning of the denominations and of black people within those denominations.

In her new book Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia (UNC Press, 2020), Turner argues that the relationship between black religious institutions and political institutions drastically shifted as the Reconstruction amendments established rights for black citizens. That shift, and the myriad challenges black citizens encountered in their newfound citizenship, necessitated that they pursue a means for education and political power. Soul Liberty focuses on the political involvement and bargaining through which black communities achieved these goals. The term “soul liberty” captures the “combination of religious freedom, righteousness, equity and justice” that fueled remarkable institution building in the period. For example, she highlights the interracial coalitions forged with the Republican and Readjuster parties and political magnates, such as William Mahone: one of the first white politicians to recognize the political power of black churches. Turner trenchantly investigates how women in the church were pushed away from ministerial positions, and thus, often ignored as religious and political leaders. She identifies several aspects of churches and their political connections in which women demonstrated agency, such as voting on ministerial positions and tenure, leading discussions, and fundraising. She also diagnoses theological education and its male focus as the main reason that women were held out of leadership positions in the ministry. She provides a nuanced account of the election of John Mercer Langston, the first African-American congressman elected in 1890.

Soul Liberty uses the powerful tools of archival research and GIS to illustrate the transformation of black churches, explicitly and implicitly, into centers of political organization. It is currently available in three forms: print book, verbatim open access e-book, and enhanced open-access e-book, which allows the reader to manipulate some of the layered maps that Turner created with her research. A website based on her research is available at mappingblackreligion.com.

Benjamin Warren assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020).

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Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, "The Age of Phillis" (Wesleyan UP, 2020) Jul 02, 2020

Jennifer J. Davis speaks with Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, about The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan UP, 2020), Jeffers’s latest collection of poems centered on the remarkable life of America’s first poet of African descent, Phillis Wheatley Peters. The Society of Early Americanists recently selected The Age of Phillis as the subject for their Common Reading Initiative for 2021. Prof. Jeffers has published four additional volumes of poetry including The Glory Gets and The Gospel of Barbecue, and alongside fiction and critical essays. She lives in Norman, Oklahoma.

In The Age of Phillis, Jeffers draws on fifteen years of research in archives and locations across America, Europe and Africa to envision the world of Phillis Wheatley Peters : from the daily rhythms of her childhood in Senegambia, the trauma of her capture and transatlantic transport, to the icy port of Boston where she was enslaved and educated. In our conversation, Jeffers speaks to the origins of this project, reveals how she embarked on the research and writing process, and shares a few powerful poems from the volume.

Jennifer J. Davis is Associate Professor of History and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma, and the Co-Editor of the Journal of Women’s History.

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Joshua M. Myers, "We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989" (NYU Press, 2019) Jul 02, 2020

We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989 (NYU Press, 2019) is the first history of the 1989 Howard University protest. The three-day occupation of the university’s Administration Building was a continuation of the student movements of the sixties and a unique challenge to the politics of the eighties. Upset at the university’s appointment of the Republican strategist Lee Atwater to the Board of Trustees, students forced the issue by shutting down the operations of the university. The protest, inspired in part by the emergence of “conscious” hip hop, helped to build support for the idea of student governance and drew upon a resurgent black nationalist ethos. At the center of this story is a student organization known as Black Nia F.O.R.C.E. Co-founded by Ras Baraka, the group was at the forefront of organizing the student mobilization at Howard during the spring of 1989 and thereafter.

We Are Worth Fighting For explores how black student activists—young men and women— helped shape and resist the rightward shift and neoliberal foundations of American politics. This history adds to the literature on Black campus activism, Black Power studies, and the emerging histories of African American life in the 1980s.

Joshua M. Myers teaches Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He serves on the editorial board of The Compass and is editor of A Gathering Together: Literary Journal.

Latif Tarik is Assistant Professor of History at Elizabeth City State University located in Elizabeth City, NC. He is Elizabeth City State University history program coordinator, editorial board member for the digital journal Evoke: A Historical, Theoretical, and Cultural Analysis of Africana Dance and Theatre, and serves as book review editor for the Southern Conference of African American Studies, Latif is a contributor to Race and Ethnicity In America From Pre-Contact to the Present, Islam and the Black Experience African American History Reconsidered, African Religions Beliefs and Practices through History, and Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies.

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Edward J. Robinson, "Hard-Fighting Soldiers: A History of African American Churches of Christ" (U Tennessee Press, 2019) Jul 01, 2020

In his new book Hard-Fighting Soldiers: A History of African American Churches of Christ (University of Tennessee Press, 2019), Edward J. Robinson provides a comprehensive look at the church’s improbable development against a backdrop of African American oppression. The journey begins with a lesser known preacher, F. F. Carson, in many ways a forerunner in the struggles and triumphs awaiting the preachers and lay people in the congregations to come. Robinson then builds on scholarship treating well-known figures, including Marshall Keeble and G. P. Bowser, to present a wide-ranging history of African American Churches of Christ from their beginnings—when enslaved people embraced the nascent Stone-Campbell Christian Movement even though founder Alexander Campbell himself favored slavery. The author moves on to examine how the churches grew under the leadership of S. R. Cassius, even as Jim Crow restrictions put extreme pressure on organizations of any kind among African Americans.

Robinson’s well-researched narrative treats not only the black male leaders of the church, but also women leaders, such as Annie C. Tuggle, as well as notable activities of the church, including music, education, and global evangelism, thus painting a complete picture of African American Churches of Christ. Through scholarship and compelling storytelling, Robinson tells the two-hundred-year tale of how “black believers survived and thrived on the discarded ‘scraps’ of America, forging their own identity, fashioning their own lofty ecclesiology and ‘hard’ theology, and creating their own papers, lectureships, liturgy, and congregations.” A groundbreaking exploration by a seasoned scholar in American religion, Hard-Fighting Soldiers is sure to become the standard text for anyone researching the African American Churches of Christ.

Robrecus Toles is a graduate student in History at Mississippi State University. He currently researches 20th-century African American history.

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Tsedale Melaku, "You Don’t Look Like a Lawyer: Black Women and Systemic Gendered Racism" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) Jun 29, 2020

What kind of discrimination do Black women face in the legal profession? Tsedale Melaku explores this question and more in her new book: You Don’t Look Like a Lawyer: Black Women and Systemic Gendered Racism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Using in-depth interviews with Black women about their lived experiences working in elite law firms, Melaku explores topics including double burden, system gendered racism, and color-blind ideology. She also pushes our thinking further about these issues through discovery of issues including the invisible labor clause and inclusion tax. Her respondents elaborate on their experiences of having their appearances and positions continually scrutinized, leading to hypervisibility and invisibility. Melaku also explores women’s experiences of isolation, exclusion, and ultimately attrition through daily experiences as well as through important relationships within professional networks.

This book will be of interest to many readers inside and outside of Sociology. Scholars of race, gender, and work will find this to be an important reading for their own work and a critical addition to their classrooms. Anyone working in professional institutions could benefit from reading the experiences of these women and Melaku’s clear and thorough analysis of next steps and take-aways.

Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan.

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Zerlina Maxwell, "The End of White Politics: How to Heal Our Liberal Divide" (Hachette, 2020) Jun 29, 2020

After working on two presidential campaigns (for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton), MSNBC political analyst and SiriusXM host Zerlina Maxwell gained first-hand knowledge of everything liberals have been doing right over the past few elections–and everything they are still doing wrong. Ultimately, these errors worked in President Donald Trump’s favor in 2016; he effectively ran a campaign on white identity politics, successfully tapping into white male angst and resistance. In 2020, after the Democratic Party’s most historically diverse pool of presidential candidates finally dwindled down to Joe Biden, once again an older white man, Maxwell has posed the ultimate question: what now, liberals?

Fueled by Maxwell’s trademark wit and candor, The End of White Politics: How to Heal Our Liberal Divide (Hachette, 2020) dismantles the past and present problems of the Left, challenging everyone from scrappy, young “Bernie Bros” to seasoned power players in the “Billionaire Boys’ Club.” No topic is taboo; whether tackling the white privilege that enabled Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s presidential run, the controversial #HashtagActivism of the Millennial generation, the massive individual donations that sway politicians toward maintaining the status quo of income inequality, or the lingering racism that debilitated some Democratic presidential contenders and cut their promising campaigns short, Maxwell pulls no punches in her fierce critique. However, underlying all of these individual issues, Maxwell argues that it’s the “liberal-minded” party’s struggle to engage women and communities of color–and its preoccupation with catering to the white, male working class–that threatens to be its most lethal shortfall.

The times–and the demographics-are changing, and in order for progressive politics to prevail, we must acknowledge our shortcomings, take ownership of our flaws, and do everything in our power to level the playing field for all Americans. The End of White Politics shows exactly how and why progressives can lean into identity politics, empowering marginalized groups, and uniting under a common vision that will benefit us all.

Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in anthropology, women’s history, and literature. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature.

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François Clemmons, "Officer Clemmons: A Memoir" (Catapult, 2020) Jun 26, 2020

In Officer Clemmons: A Memoir (Catapult, 2020), François Clemmons tells the story of how he became the first ever African-American recurring character on a children’s television when he took on the role of the friendly police officer in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. But this book is more than a behind-the-scenes show business memoir. It is a touching coming of age story that reveals what it felt like to be young, gifted, black, and gay during a time of intense racism and homophobia. We come to understand that Clemmons found in Mr. Rogers a mentor figure who made Clemmons feel loved and appreciated, just as Mr. Rogers made millions of children feel through his program. Officer Clemmons: A Memoir is a testament to the quiet power of love.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached atandyjamesboyd@gmail.com.

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Michael Goldfield, "The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s" (Oxford UP, 2020) Jun 24, 2020

The golden key to understanding the last 75 years of American political development, the eminent labor relations scholar Michael Goldfield argues, lies in the contests between labor and capital in the American South during the 1930s and 1940s. Labor agitation and unionization efforts in the South in the New Deal era were extensive and bitterly fought, and ranged across all of the major industries of the region.

In The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Oxford UP, 2020), Goldfield charts the rise of labor activism in each and then examines how and why labor organizers struggled so mightily in the region. Drawing from meticulous and unprecedented archival material and detailed data on four core industries-textiles, timber, coal mining, and steel-he argues that much of what is important in American politics and society today was largely shaped by the successes and failures of the labor movements of the 1930s and 1940s. Most notably, Goldfield shows how the broad-based failure to organize the South during this period made it what it is today. He contends that this early defeat for labor unions not only contributed to the exploitation of race and right-wing demagoguery in the South, but has also led to a decline in unionization, growing economic inequality, and an inability to confront and dismantle white supremacy throughout the US.

A sweeping account of Southern political economy in the New Deal era, The Southern Key challenges the established historiography to tell a tale of race, radicalism, and betrayal that will reshape our understanding of why America developed so differently from other advanced industrial nations over the course of the last century.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute’s Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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Steven J. L. Taylor, "Exiles, Entrepreneurs, and Educators: African Americans in Ghana" (SUNY Press, 2019) Jun 24, 2020

African Americans have a long history of emigration. In Exiles, Entrepreneurs, and Educators: African Americans in Ghana, Steven J. L. Taylor explores the second wave of African American exiles or repatriates to Ghana in post-1980s.

Unlike the first wave of emigrants during the Kwame Nkrumah years (1957-1966), Taylor argues that the second wave is far more diverse and have largely been attracted to entrepreneurial opportunities. More importantly, this book examines the political engagement of African Americans in Ghana’s two-party political system.

Steven Taylor is Associate Professor in the Department of Government at the American University, Washington, DC

Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.

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Robert T. Chase, "We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America" (UNC Press, 2020) Jun 24, 2020

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Robert T. Chase about his book, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America(UNC Press, 2020).

In the early twentieth century, the brutality of southern prisons became a national scandal. Prisoners toiled in grueling, violent conditions while housed in crude dormitories on what were effectively slave plantations. This system persisted until the 1940s when, led by Texas, southern states adopted northern prison design reforms. Texas presented the reforms to the public as modern, efficient, and disciplined. Inside prisons, however, the transition to penitentiary cells only made the endemic violence more secretive, intensifying the labor division that privileged some prisoners with the power to accelerate state-orchestrated brutality and the internal sex trade. Reformers' efforts had only made things worse--now it was up to the prisoners to fight for change.

Drawing from three decades of legal documents compiled by prisoners, Chase narrates the struggle to change prison from within. Prisoners forged an alliance with the NAACP to contest the constitutionality of Texas prisons. Behind bars, a prisoner coalition of Chicano Movement and Black Power organizations publicized their deplorable conditions as “slaves of the state” and initiated a prison-made civil rights revolution and labor protest movement. These insurgents won epochal legal victories that declared conditions in many southern prisons to be cruel and unusual--but their movement was overwhelmed by the increasing militarization of the prison system and empowerment of white supremacist gangs that, together, declared war on prison organizers. Told from the vantage point of the prisoners themselves, this book weaves together untold but devastatingly important truths from the histories of labor, civil rights, and politics in the United States as it narrates the transition from prison plantations of the past to the mass incarceration of today.

Chase is Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University

This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University.

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A. de la Fuente and A. J. Gross, "Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Jun 24, 2020

How did Africans become 'blacks' in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge University Press, 2020) tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders' efforts to make blackness synonymous with slavery. Looking closely at three slave societies - Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana - Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross demonstrate that the law of freedom - not slavery - established the meaning of blackness in law. Contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims to citizenship would be tied to racial identity. Laws regulating the lives and institutions of free people of color created the boundaries between black and white, the rights reserved to white people, and the degradations imposed only on black people.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Greg Garrett, "A Long, Long Way: Hollywood’s Unfinished Journey from Racism to Reconciliation" (Oxford UP, 2020) Jun 24, 2020

In his powerful new book, A Long, Long Way: Hollywood’s Unfinished Journey from Racism to Reconciliation (Oxford University Press, 2020), Greg Garrett brings his signature brand of theologically motivated cultural criticism to bear on this history.

After more than a century of cinema, he argues, movies have altered our cultural perspectives in the same way that religious narratives have. And in fact, religious traditions offer powerful correctives to our cultural narratives.

A Long, Long Way incorporates both cinematic and religious truth-telling to the subject of race and reconciliation. In acknowledging the racist history of America's national art form, Garrett offers the possibility of hope for the future.

Greg Garrett is a professor at Baylor University, teaching classes in creative writing & religion and culture.

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Shana Redmond, "Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson" (Duke UP, 2020) Jun 23, 2020

In Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke University Press, 2020), Shana Redmond explores the ways in which Paul Robeson, silenced by state repression in his lifetime, still speaks to us today.

Through explorations of Robeson’s genre-defying genius as well as reflections on how Robeson’s legacy continues today, Redmond re-contextualizes Robeson as a thoroughly contemporary figure. Robeson’s brutal mistreatment by the US government provides a case study in how far our supposed democracy will go to crush dissent, particularly black radical dissent.

Still, his vision of anti-racism grounded in global solidarity and anti-capitalism is perhaps more necessary now than ever. Redmond points out that the word that Robeson sang about Joe Hill are true also of him: “I never died, said he.”

Shana Redmond is Professor, Global Jazz Studies Musicology, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached atandyjamesboyd@gmail.com.

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Monika Gosin, "The Racial Politics of Division: Interethnic Struggles For Legitimacy in Multicultural Miami" (Cornell UP, 2019) Jun 22, 2020

Over recent years, scholarship centering Afrolatinidad has pushed the bounds of the field towards greater forms of racial and ethnic understanding. Dr. Monika Gosin’s monograph, The Racial Politics of Division: Interethnic Struggles For Legitimacy in Multicultural Miami (Cornell University, 2019), adds to this burgeoning literary canon.

By examining how controversial waves of Cuban immigration during the late 20th century intensified the friction between African Americans and the existing Cuban immigrant population in Miami, Gosin reveals how differing notions of “worthy citizenship” encouraged interethnic conflict.

Dr. Gosin’s The Politics of Division “forces a relooking at the poles of black and white as they operate in the lives of people who are phenotypically black” (20).

The author’s ability to hold and move between so many complex identities, histories, and frameworks is exemplary of the approach necessary to conduct relational research. Gosin’s communities of study include African American, white Cubans, Afro-Cubans, Haitians, and the ever-present looming structures of white supremacy both in the United States and Cuba.

Traversing between intersecting and transnational racial ideologies, the book highlights three racializing frames (black/white, good/bad immigrant, and native/foreigner) through which communities facilitated their own relationship of belonging to the US nation-state.

Gosin conducts extensive research in newspaper archives to understand how various racial and ethnic communities constructed media discourses about one another. She utilizes the archives of the Miami Times, an African American-owned and controlled paper, and El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language adaptation of the mainstream Miami Herald, to show the complexities of race, immigration, and citizenship.

Throughout the book, Dr. Gosin maintains a strong commitment to the presence and histories of Afro-Cubans in both the African-American and white Cuban controlled newspapers. She supplements this work with in-depth personal interviews with Afro-Cubans living in Miami and Los Angeles, which further adds a dynamic to the history of racial complexity in southern Florida.

As Gosin writes, “Examining how Afro-Cuban immigrants negotiate the intersections of blackness and Latinidad and rejections they sometimes face from other Latinos allows an important critique of the ways white supremacist notions have been embraced or perpetuated by nonblack Latinos” (191).

This call for a better understanding of the ways white supremacy has infiltrated thought processes -- and scholarship -- in non-black Latinx peoples and Latinx Studies is critical to the book’s goal.

The Racial Politics of Division is a book for those interested in race and race-making between non-white communities, how issues of racialization and immigration merge into sociopolitical consequences, and for students of (Afro)Latinx studies.

Monika Gosin is Associate Professor in Sociology at William & Mary.

Jonathan Cortez is a Ph.D. candidate of American Studies at Brown University. They are a historian of 20th-century issues of race, labor, (im)migration, surveillance, space, relational Ethnic Studies, and Latinx Studies. Their research focuses on the rise of federally-funded encampments (i.e., the concentration of populations) from the advent of the New Deal until post-WWII era. Their dissertation, “The Age of Encampment: Race, Surveillance, and the Power of Spatial Scripts, 1933-1950” reveals underlying continuities between the presence of threatening bodies and the increasing surveillance of these bodies in camps throughout the United States. Jonathan is currently a Ford Predoctoral Fellow as well as a curatorial assistant at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @joncortz and on their personal website www.historiancortez.com

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Clifford Mason, "Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America from the Beginning to Raisin in the Sun" (Rutgers UP, 2020) Jun 22, 2020

Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America from the Beginning to Raisin in the Sun (Rutgers University Press, 2020) by Clifford Mason, celebrated actor, director, writer, and playwright, and author of thirty-four plays, is a sweeping history of Black theatre from the early nineteenth century through 1959. With an “Introduction” section, and six concise chapters, Macbeth in Harlem traverses such subjects as the Black hero, plot, narrative, and the African American intellectual in the history of African American theater including an entire chapter on Paul Robeson. From the Black Shakespearean troupe formed in 1821 Greenwich Village, that performed Richard III, Othello, and Macbeth in the 1820s, through the emergence of minstrelsy in the mid-nineteenth century, to the work of Robeson and Lorraine Hansberry at the rise of the Civil Rights Era, Mason tells the story of Black performers, and intellectuals, in the development of American theater. He details how integral Black artists have been in the history of American theater while “fighting against the odds” to demand freedom of expression and human dignity.

In the first chapter, Mason discusses early Black theater and theater troupes in Greenwich Village which was a center of Black life within the Manhattan section of New York City in the early nineteenth century. The African Grove Theatre, as Mason notes, was a group of Black actors including James Hewlett and Ira Aldridge that performed Macbeth as a “the heart of their repertoire” (9). This group was self-sustaining and produced shows without the support of white benefactors. Both Hewlett and Aldridge rose to acclaim and were recognized for their craft by the larger entertainment world. The evolution of minstrelsy in the long nineteenth century is the focus of Chapter Two and the degradation of the Black image as illustrated with the proliferation of stereotypes that emerged at this time. Minstrel shows led to the rise of the Tom shows then the “coon” shows amid the collapse of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow in the late nineteenth century. African Americans and the rise of vaudeville and the musical through the New Negro Era is the focus of the next chapter. Mason assiduously notes the impact that Black actors and entertainers had on the development of musical theater in America in this Third Chapter of the book. The final three chapters focus on Black theater in the twentieth century including some discussion of milestones such as Lorraine Hansberry’s Raison in the Son and the rise and fall of Paul Robeson. Macbeth in Harlem is a noteworthy text that reveals some unknown history about the integral place of African Americans in the history of American theater. It is easily a text that might be used in courses on African American history, theater history, and American intellectual history.

Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. She has published book chapters, essays, and edited/authored five books. Her latest publications include Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger, 2017) and, with Dr. G. Reginald Daniel, professor of historical sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union (University Press of Mississippi 2014). You can follow Dr. Williams on Twitter: @DrHettie2017

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R. Farrugia and K. D. Hay, "Women Rapping Revolution: Hip Hop and Community Building in Detroit" (U California Press, 2020) Jun 17, 2020

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay of Oakland University on their new book Women Rapping Revolution.(University of California Press, 2020). Detroit, Michigan, has long been recognized as a center of musical innovation and social change. Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay draw on seven years of fieldwork to illuminate the important role that women have played in mobilizing a grassroots response to political and social pressures at the heart of Detroit’s ongoing renewal and development project.

Focusing on the Foundation, a women-centered hip-hop collective, Women Rapping Revolution argues that the hip-hop underground is a crucial site where Black women shape subjectivity and claim self-care as a principle of community organizing. Through interviews and sustained critical engagement with artists and activists, this study also articulates the substantial role of cultural production in social, racial, and economic justice efforts.

Resources mentioned in the show: Farrugia and Hay,“The Politics and Place of a ‘Legendary’ Hip Hop Track in Detroit,” Journal of Music and Politics.

Rebekah Farrugia is Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations at Oakland University. She is the author of Beyond the Dance Floor: Female DJs, Technology, and Electronic Dance Music Culture. Connect @b3kkaf on Twitter and @rebekah.farrugia.7 on Facebook.

Kellie D. Hay is Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations at Oakland University. She has authored many articles about music, politics, and cultural identity, and specializes in critical qualitative methodologies. Connect @obihay on Twitter, @kellie.hay.37 on Facebook and by email at hay@oakland.edu.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this interview and the book, Women Rapping Revolution.

Connect with your host @rhetoriclee on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail.

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Sherrow O. Pinder et al., "Black Political Thought: From David Walker to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Jun 16, 2020

Black Political Thought: From David Walker to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a nuanced and long-needed anthology interrogates the “never ending issue” of the unequal positioning of black Americans by combining primary documents that highlight black political ideas and ideals with incisive scholarly commentary. In words of the editor, this collection “focuses how and why blacks in the United States, as individuals and as a group, have historically conceptualized, analyzed, and responded to the ill will of ordinary whites those in power who through laws, policies and customs, and cultural practice have made blacks into inferior beings as a justification to deny them their rights of equality, in such a way that the interest of the dominant class are upheld and preserved and which today have not disappeared.” Highlighting the importance of resistance, the book begins with David Walker and – using thematic chapters – ends in the 21st century. The book aims to make sense of past, present, and future concerns that have and continue to inform and shape the political in black thinking. There is no better time to read this anthology.

Each section opens with a scholarly essay that provides context as well as insightful interpretation that connects the primary documents. The book masterfully brings together accomplished scholars from multiple disciplines: Political Science; Multicultural and Gender Studies; History; English; and African, Africana, and African American Studies. Thoughtfully designed as a book for students as well as general readers, Black Political Thought, combines accessibility and clarity with challenging interpretation and further readings for each section.

The podcast features Sherrow O. Pinder (editor and author of “Key Concepts, Ideas, and Issues that have Formed Black Political Thought” and “Feminism and Difference”), Charisse Burden-Stelly (author of “Race and Racism”), Babacar M’Baye (author of “Black Nationalism”), and Brenda E. Stevenson (author of “Slavery and Its Discontents”). The book includes essays by Nikki L. M. Brown (“Reconstruction”) and Erica Cooper (“Past, Present, and Future Issues”).

We recorded our conversation the day of Mr. George Floyd’s funeral and the invited scholars connect these centuries of thought to the ideals and practices that remain contradictory in the USA – as well as a tradition of black intellectual resistance.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020).

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Kabria Baumgartner, "In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America" (NYU Press, 2019) Jun 16, 2020

In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America (NYU Press, 2019) is an intellectual and cultural history of the educational activism of African American women and girls in the long nineteenth century. Kabria Baumgartner focuses her narrative on the actions of “African American women and girls living in the antebellum Northeast” in cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. These women including individuals such as Sarah Mapps Douglas and Sarah Parker Remond wrote essays about education, built schools, and became educators in their own right while living their lives with a “sense of purpose” defined as a “purposeful womanhood”. Activism is “broadly construed” by the author to note that Black women engaged in “concerted efforts to procure advancing schooling (beyond the primary level) and teaching opportunities for themselves and their community”. Baumgartner notes that not only did these women advocate for entrance into educational institutions for themselves, but that they also developed schools that welcomed students of all races.

In this text, the author essentially traces the historical development of victories against segregation won at the state and local level, in the educational system, a century before the historic Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education, Topeka Kansas in 1954 that helped to make the Civil Rights Movement a mass movement across the United States (U.S.). Baumgartner, in her text, importantly notes that these achievements gained in the nineteenth century were the result of both individual and collective efforts of Black women such as Sarah Harris, Mary E. Miles, Serena de Grasse, Rosetta Morrison, Sarah Parker Remond, Susan Paul, Sarah Mapps Douglass and Charlotte Forten.

This text is concisely organized around two major sections and six chapters with an “Introduction” and a “Conclusion.” Baumgartner reads the activism of Black women in the nineteenth century as “continuous and dynamic, becoming more and more organized” by the mid-nineteenth century. For women such as Sarah Harris, profiled in Chapter One of the text, the schoolhouse was both “an extension of the home and a defining civic space” or place for these women to define a purposeful womanhood. Harris and other Black women who helped to integrate schools in Connecticut such as the Canterbury Female Boarding School did so with the larger goal of securing rights as citizens beyond the schoolhouse. Baumgartner weaves together a network of Black women activists in her narrative who forged a collective attack against school segregation and laid the foundations for the ideology of a beloved community moving beyond the schoolhouse that eventually became the intellectual basis for the Black freedom struggle in the twentieth century. She does this by reading an array of sources against the grain including census records, letters, pamphlets, school records, annual reports, almanacks, petitions, newspapers, abolitionist literature and published writings.

Hettie V. Williams PhD is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. She has published book chapters, essays, and edited/authored five books. Her latest publications include Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger, 2017) and, with Dr G. Reginald Daniel, professor of historical sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union (University Press of Mississippi 2014). Website: hettiewilliams.com/ Follow me on twitter: @DrHettie2017

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Aaron Kamugisha, "Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition" (Indiana UP, 2019) Jun 16, 2020

Aaron Kamugisha reads CLR James and Sylvia Wynter to glean from them ways to navigate the “beyond” of coloniality. In his new book Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition (Indiana University Press, 2019), reminds us of a Caribbean radical tradition that is fiercely critical of racism, middle-class complacencies and the incursions of neoliberalism. It is also full of hope, and brings our attention to James’ “newforms of existence that are a gift of the Caribbean to the world” as well as Wynter’s enormous contribution to our understanding of the black experience in the Americas.

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Jill Strauss, "Slavery's Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation" (Rutgers UP, 2019) Jun 16, 2020

Race remains a potent and divisive force in our society. Whether it is the shooting of minority people by the police, the mass incarceration of people of color, or the recent KKK rallies that have been in the news, it is clear that the scars from the United States’ histories of slavery and racial discrimination run too deep to simply be ignored. But what are the most productive ways to deal with the toxic and torturous legacies of American racism?

In Slavery's Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation(Rutgers UP, 2019), editors Jill Strauss and Dionne Ford have brought together contributors from a variety of racial backgrounds, all members or associates of a national racial reconciliation organization called Coming to the Table, to tell their stories of dealing with America’s racial past through their experiences and their family histories. Some are descendants of slaveholders, some are descendants of the enslaved, and many are descendants of both slaveholders and slaves. What they all have in common is a commitment toward collective introspection, and a willingness to think critically about how the nation’s histories of oppression continue to ripple into the present, affecting us all.

The stories in Slavery’s Descendants deal with harrowing topics—rape, lynching, cruelty, shame—but they also describe acts of generosity, gratitude, and love. Together, they help us confront the legacy of slavery to reclaim a more complete picture of U.S. history, one cousin at a time.

Dr. Strauss teaches conflict resolution and communications at Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York.

Powell Morales holds a Master of Science in International Relations from Troy University.

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Lynn M. Thomas, "Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners" (Duke UP, 2020) Jun 15, 2020

By 2024, global sales of skin lighteners are projected to reach more than $30 billion. Despite the planetary scale of its use, skin lightening remains a controversial cosmetic practice. Lynn M. Thomas’ new book, Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners (Duke University Press, 2020), investigates what she calls its “layered history.” Focused principally on South Africa, the book quickly makes evident how closely connected skin lightening is to the history of the United States and other parts of the African continent. Over the course of the twentieth century, and particularly in the context of minority rule in South Africa, skin lighteners have raised thorny debates about race, respectability and self-regard. Thomas examines these questions but shows how class and gender intersect with race to complicate our understanding of who brightens, and why. A complex history of capitalism, medicine, media and technology informs Thomas’ intimate portrayal of these perilous cosmetics. Beneath the Surface is a deeply social history of a singularly fraught commodity.

Dr. Elisa Prosperetti teaches African and global history at SciencesPo Paris. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at www.elisaprosperetti.net.

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Paige Glotzer, "How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890-1960" (Columbia UP, 2020) Jun 15, 2020

Paige Glotzer is the author of How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890-1960, published by Columbia University Press in 2020. How the Suburbs Were Segregated examines the history surrounding how modern housing segregation was purposefully planned out beginning at the turn of the 20th Century. Looking at the intersection of transnational finance, suburban developers, and local, regional, and federal policymaking, Glotzer illustrates the myriad of people and institutions involved in simultaneously creating the idea of the modern suburb and racializing housing.

Paige Glotzer is an Assistant Professor of history and John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair in the History of American Politics, Institutions, and Political Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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Edward Onaci, "Free The Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State" (UNC Press, 2020) Jun 11, 2020

On March 31, 1968, over 500 Black nationalists convened in Detroit to begin the process of securing independence from the United States. Many concluded that Black Americans' best-remaining hope for liberation was the creation of a sovereign nation-state, the Republic of New Afrika (RNA). New Afrikan citizens traced boundaries that encompassed a large portion of the South including South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana as part of their demand for reparation. As champions of these goals, they framed their struggle as one that would allow the descendants of enslaved people to choose freely whether they should be citizens of the United States. New Afrikans also argued for financial restitution for the enslavement and subsequent inhumane treatment of Black Americans. The struggle to "Free the Land" remains active to this day.

Edward Onaci's Free The Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) is the first book to tell the full history of the RNA and the New Afrikan Independence Movement. Onaci shows how New Afrikans remade their lifestyles and daily activities to create a self-consciously revolutionary culture and argues that the RNA's tactics and ideology were essential to the evolution of Black political struggles. In doing so, he expands the story of Black Power politics, shedding new light on the long-term legacies of mid-century Black Nationalism.

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Neil Roberts on How Ideas Become Books in Africana and AfroAm Studies Jun 09, 2020

Where do good ideas come from? How does an idea go from creation to a research project? How is historical research done? And how does research find its way into a finished book? And what impact can a book have?

Today, I discuss these topics and more with my colleague and friend Dr. Neil Roberts. Dr. Roberts teaches Africana studies, political theory, and the philosophy of religion at Williams College. Roberts is also the Chair and Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Faculty Affiliate in Political Science and Religion. Additionally, Roberts is the W. Ford Schumann Faculty Fellow in Democratic Studies.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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H. Moore and J. Tracy, "No Fascist USA!" (City Lights, 2020) Jun 08, 2020

No Fascist USA!: The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Social Movements (City Lights Publishing, 2020) by Hilary Moore and James Tracy recounts the stories of fearless organizers and activists who created an anti-racist social movement that fought against the normalization of white supremacy during the 1970s and 1980s.

As white allies to contemporaneous Black-led movements against police brutality and incarceration, environmental racism, and government surveillance, organizers of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee supported Black activists’ revolutionary calls for Black Liberation and self-determination. Committee members developed a militant practice of anti-racism that targeted the resurgence of white supremacist terrorist groups and racist cops under President Ronald Reagan and a conservative dispensation that implicitly sanctioned anti-Black violence.

The national network aimed to confront and expose Klan members and white supremacist organizations at a time when these groups sought to surreptitiously grow their base and influence in social, political, penal institutions by penetrating prisons, local school councils, and youth culture.

In recalling this history of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, Moore and Tracey present an important example of anti-racist coalition building that enlisted white people to do the work of abolishing white supremacy while supporting the demands of Black activist organizations.

Hilary Moore is an anti-racist political educator and teaches with generative somatics. She works on the Leadership Team of Showing Up for Racial Justice, and is the author of Organizing Cools the Planet: Tools and Reflections to Navigate the Climate Crisis (PM Press, 2011). Her newest book is Burning Earth, Changing Europe: How the Racist Right Exploits the Climate Crisis—And What We Can Do About It (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung- Brussels, 2020).

James Tracy is an author, organizer, and an Instructor of Labor and Community Studies at City College of San Francisco. He is the co-author of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times and the author of Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes From San Francisco's Housing Wars.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the grassroots movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall

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Joshua Bennett, "Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man" (Harvard UP, 2020) Jun 08, 2020

Throughout US history, black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man(Harvard University Press, 2020) delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal figure―the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, and the shark―in the works of black authors such as Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the simultaneous valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people―all are sites made unforgettable by literature in which we find black and animal life in fraught proximity.

Joshua Bennett argues that animal figures are deployed in these texts to assert a theory of black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. Bennett also turns to the black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of antiblackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a close reading of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Scott Seider and Daren Graves, "Schooling for Critical Consciousness" (Harvard Education, 2020) Jun 05, 2020

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Scott Seider from Boston College and Dr. Daren Graves from Simmons University on their new book, Schooling for Critical Consciousness: Engaging Black and Latinx Youth in Analyzing, Navigating, and Challenging Racial Injustice (Harvard Education Press, 2020).

Over the past thirty years, we have seen a steady increase in students of color in American public schools. The Public School Review reported that from 1997 to 2019, the number of white students in American public schools has declined from over 63 percent to 49.7 percent. One of the key questions that we need to ask is how we shall prepare students of color to become competent and responsible future citizens, especially given the increasingly widening racial disparity in almost all aspects of the social life.

Schooling for Critical Consciousness addresses how schools can help Black and Latinx youth to understand these racial disparities, resist the negative effects of racial injustice and challenge its root causes. Documenting and analyzing how five different mission-driven urban high schools cultivate critical consciousness among their students, Scott Seider and Daren Graves reported the findings of a four-year, longitudinal, mixed methods study. Timely and informative, the book is very helpful for teachers, school leaders, and parents who are interested in supporting youths of color to develop their critical consciousness, navigate their life in the contemporary American society, and challenge the entrenched racial injustice.

Pengfei Zhao is a qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution.

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Gilda R. Daniels, "Uncounted: The Crisis of Voter Suppression" (NYU Press, 2020) Jun 04, 2020

Are we asleep at the (common)wheel? Civil rights attorney and law professor Gilda R. Daniels insists that contemporary voter ID laws, voter deception, voter purges, and disenfranchisement of felons constitute a crisis of democracy – one that should remind us of past poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and physical intimidation – that should spur us to action. Uncounted combines law, history, oral history, and democratic theory to illuminate a 21st century, premediated legal strategy to disenfranchise voters of color.

In Uncounted: The Crisis of Voter Suppression (NYU Press, 2020), Daniels establishes the context of 21st-century voter suppression then focuses on the importance of the Voting Rights Act in discouraging voter suppression – and the negative impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013). She elucidates the types – and impacts – of voter deception with attention to possible impacts on the presidential election in 2020. Throughout the work, she connects past and present to demonstrate the radical impact of voter suppression on voting and this is particularly apparent in the chapters on voter purging and felon disenfranchisement.

The podcast includes a fascinating discussion of the impact of COVID-19 on voter suppression – particularly regarding absentee voting. Daniels complements her nuanced analysis of the cycles of voter suppression in America with concrete steps for combatting it urging people to educate, legislate, litigate, and participate.

This timely book offers an analysis that is both deep and highly accessible. It is simultaneously a work of scholarship and a practical call to action.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013).

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Frank Wilderson III, "Afropessimism" (Liveright, 2020) Jun 03, 2020

How should we understand the pervasiveness – and virulence – of anti-Black violence in the United State? Why and how is anti-Black racism different from other forms of racism? How does it permeate our moral and political ideals? Frank Wilderson III combines memoir and works of political theory, critical theory, literature, and film to offer a philosophy of Blackness.

In his new book Afropessimism (Liveright, 2020), Wilderson insists that the social construct of slavery – as seen through pervasive anti-Black subjugation and violence – permeates our principled and practical assumptions. It is not a relic but a worldview that supports our conception of, for example, what it means to be human. For Wilderson, Blacks remain slaves in the human world because “at every scale of abstraction, violence saturates Black life.” To define what it means to be human, we require people who are slaves.

While the podcast highlights the theory, the book uses accessible autobiographical stories as examples of the philosophical claims. Wilderson’s remarkable life – from his childhood in mid-century Minneapolis to his work with the African National Congress during apartheid – serves to demonstrate that there are no easy solutions (thus his afropessimism) given the level of hatred and violence.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013).

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Bharat Malkani, "Slavery and the Death Penalty: A Study in Abolition" (Routledge, 2018) Jun 03, 2020

What is the connection between the movement for death penalty abolition and the anti-slavery movement? In Slavery and the Death Penalty: A Study in Abolition (Routledge, 2018), Bharat Malkani, Senior Lecturer in Law at Cardiff University, explores this question. Beginning with an acknowledgment that the death penalty in the United States of America has long been shaped by the country’s history of slavery and racial violence, Malkani considers the relationships between the two abolitionist movements. He explains how historical and conceptual links between slavery and capital punishment have both helped and hindered efforts to end capital punishment. Using the history of slavery and abolition, Malkani argues that anti-death penalty efforts should be premised on the ideologies of the radical slavery abolitionists, offering lessons for how death penalty abolitionism should proceed in future.

Antonia Layard is a professor in Law at the University of Bristol Law School

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Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) Jun 02, 2020

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)

Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.

John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd.

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Nemata Blyden, "African Americans and Africa: a New History" (Yale UP, 2019) Jun 02, 2020

“What is Africa to me?”, African-American writer Countee Cullen asked in Color, his 1925 collection of poems. African Americans and Africa: A New History (Yale University Press, 2019) lays out the long history of African American engagement with the continent. Nemata Blyden’s sweeping narrative weaves together iterations of Cullen’s question that have kept re-emerging from the 1600s through the 2010s, and various answers that Black people in the United States have come up with. Early on, enslaved Africans preserved and transmitted aspects of their culture.

In the 19th century, some Black Americans chose to settle on the continent as missionaries, often readily adopting a civilizational discourse that mirrored Western portrayals of Africa as backwards. Others, including members of the Negro Convention movements, fiercely rejected the idea of emigration. Arguments on either ends of this spectrum, as Blyden shows, were both steeped in quests to achieve freedom and justice. In the 1920s and beyond, Pan-Africanism blossomed, followed decades later by the Civil Rights and decolonization movements. Black Americans and Africans alike, people such as Eslanda Goode Robeson or Asadata Dafora, circulated across the Atlantic, crafting and spreading their own ideas about the continent’s place in Black liberation. In this episode, Blyden also gives us a fascinating glimpse of her own family’s history, connecting the West Indies, West Africa, and North America in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Madina Thiam is a PhD candidate in African History at UCLA.

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Kathryn H. Ross, "Black Was Not a Label" (Pronto, 2019) May 28, 2020

Kathryn H. Ross has found a balance. Between past and present. Between self and ancestors. Between self-discovery and continuous growth. In her hybrid collection, Black Was Not a Label, Ross invites readers into a life unfurling. Through the lenses of natural hair, faith, and microaggressions, she lights a path to what it means to seek self while still honoring the past lives, personal and historical, that connect us all.

Black Was Not a Label (Pronto, 2019) is as soft as it is sharp. Ross is a writer of humanness, one who finds more interest in what we feel than theme. Yet, even in this general warmth, she manages to hone in on topics that have rippled throughout generations. Readers are not allowed to look away from the sometimes ingrained expectations of assimilation nor are we allowed to put down the weight of all that came before us. What she gives us in this collection are the means to carry it with grace and the hope it will become a little lighter.

Kathryn Ross is a Southern California based writer and editor. Her works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have previously appeared in Sybil Literary Journal, MORIA Literary Magazine, Linden Avenue, and Crack the Spine. She is a columnist at Pasadena Now where she writes about race and culture and a poetry and essay reviewer for Whale Road Review and The Rumpus, respectively. She completed her MA in English and Creative Writing at Azusa Pacific University and loves cats, baths, and rose slushies.

Athena Dixon is a NE Ohio native, poet, essayist, and editor. Her essay collection, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, is forthcoming from Split/Lip Press (2020). Athena is also the author of No God in This Room, a poetry chapbook (Argus House Press). Her poetry is included in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books). Learn more at www.athenadixon.com

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Carl Suddler, "Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York" (NYU Press, 2019) May 28, 2020

A stark disparity exists between black and white youth experiences in the justice system today. Black youths are perceived to be older and less innocent than their white peers. When it comes to incarceration, race trumps class, and even as black youths articulate their own experiences with carceral authorities, many Americans remain surprised by the inequalities they continue to endure. In Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (NYU Press, 2019), Carl Suddler brings to light a much longer history of the policies and strategies that tethered the lives of black youths to the justice system indefinitely.

The criminalization of black youth is inseparable from its racialized origins. In the mid-twentieth century, the United States justice system began to focus on punishment, rather than rehabilitation. By the time the federal government began to address the issue of juvenile delinquency, the juvenile justice system shifted its priorities from saving delinquent youth to purely controlling crime, and black teens bore the brunt of the transition.

In New York City, increased state surveillance of predominantly black communities compounded arrest rates during the post–World War II period, providing justification for tough-on-crime policies. Questionable police practices, like stop-and-frisk, combined with media sensationalism, cemented the belief that black youth were the primary cause for concern. Even before the War on Crime, the stakes were clear: race would continue to be the crucial determinant in American notions of crime and delinquency, and black youths condemned with a stigma of criminality would continue to confront the overwhelming power of the state.

Adam McNeil is a PhD Student in History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

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Manuel Barcia, "The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2020) May 27, 2020

As we now know, epidemics and pandemics are not new phenomena. In her new book The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2020), Manuel Barcia offers a striking rendition of the diseases that swept through the illegal slave trade Atlantic World. In fact, Barcia argues that the history of disease and the story of continuing traffic in enslaved people despite the abolition of the slave trade are processes that must be understood together. Barcia demonstrates that in the 19th century Atlantic, quarantines were politicized, sworn enemies were forced to work together to combat disease, and the medical expertise of enslaved people often prevailed despite efforts to silence or ignore it.

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Brandon K. Winford, "John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights" (UP Kentucky, 2019) May 19, 2020

John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978) was one of the civil rights movement's most influential leaders. In articulating a bold vision of regional prosperity grounded in full citizenship and economic power for African Americans, this banker, lawyer, and visionary would play a key role in the fight for racial and economic equality throughout North Carolina.

Utilizing previously unexamined sources from the John Hervey Wheeler Collection at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, Brandon K. Winford's John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights(University Press of Kentucky, 2019) explores the black freedom struggle through the life of North Carolina's most influential black power broker. After graduating from Morehouse College, Wheeler returned to Durham and began a decades-long career at Mechanics and Farmers (M&F) Bank. He started as a teller and rose to become bank president in 1952. In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Wheeler to the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, a position in which he championed equal rights for African Americans and worked with Vice President Johnson to draft civil rights legislation. One of the first blacks to attain a high position in the state's Democratic Party, Wheeler became the state party's treasurer in 1968, and then its financial director.

Wheeler urged North Carolina's white financial advisors to steer the region toward the end of Jim Crow segregation for economic reasons. Straddling the line between confrontation and negotiation, Wheeler pushed for increased economic opportunity for African Americans while reminding the white South that its future was linked to the plight of black southerners.

Today I talked to Brandon K. Winford

Dr. Brandon K. Winford is an assistant professor of history at the University of Tennessee. He is a historian of the late-nineteenth and twentieth-century United States and African American history with areas of specialization in civil rights and black business history.

Adam McNeil is a PhD Student in colonial and revolutionary-era Black women’s history.

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Natasha J. Lightfoot, "Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation" (Duke UP, 2015) May 14, 2020

In Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation (Duke University Press, 2015), Natasha J. Lightfoot traces the ways Antiguans and Barbudans experienced freedom in the immediate years before and decades after British emancipation in 1834. With the exception of a handful of places, slavery ended immediately without a period of apprenticeship. However, Lightfoot deftly shows how immediate emancipation did not translate into complete freedom as Antiguan elites enacted new forms control to restrict the time, mobility, wages, and housing availability of freedpeople. They also continued to experience violence in their everyday lives. Despite these constraints, emancipated Antiguans and Barbudans managed to earn livelihoods, obtain land, secure housing, and build independent communities in accordance to and opposition against elites’ attitudes about them. Lightfoot’s study asks us to reconsider how freedom was lived in everyday life and how landlessness was not the primary obstacle for emancipated slaves in the Caribbean.

Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.

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Forrest Stuart, "Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy" (Princeton UP, 2020) May 13, 2020

How do young men use drill music and social media to gain power? In his new book, Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy (Princeton University Press, 2020), Forrest Stuart uses ethnographic and interview methods to explore the lived experiences of young men on Chicago’s south side. Stuart peels back the layers on what is commonly referred to as the digital divide, or the idea that there is unequal access to and use of technology, to instead find what he refers to as digital disadvantage (read the book to find out more!). The book tackles issues including who the audience really is for drill music and the social media output produced by these young men, and how they are sometimes exploited in the process. Exploration of authenticity, micro-celebrity, and self-branding contribute to larger understandings of race, stratification, and power in America.

Sarah E. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan.

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Kenesha N. Grant, "The Great Migration and the Democratic Party" (Temple UP, 2020) May 12, 2020

Kenesha N. Grant, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Howard University, at the beginning of her new book, The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century (Temple University Press, 2020), poses a question to consider in context of trying to understand the realignment of voters within American political parties. This question is about the impact of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern cities, and how this changed the political dynamics in many of the places where African Americans settled and built new lives. Grant’s examination focuses specifically on the impact in terms of politics, how and where African American individuals engaged in politics, as voters, and in running for and being elected to office. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party concentrates on three cities where the population changed and shifted given the influx of black citizens; and the political dynamics in Detroit, Chicago, and in New York City all came to reflect, in different ways, the influx of new voters and politically active citizens. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party focuses on the local, state, and national Democratic Party, since these voters were not only politically engaged at the local level, they were also able to contribute to voting blocs within states, at times making the difference in terms of the Electoral College and presidential candidacies.

The Great Migration and the Democratic Party traces the changes in the political parties over the course of the 20th century, exploring the shifts of voters across parties, with specific attention to Black voters’ movement from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party. Grant examines this shift in context of the movement of voters from one part of the United States to other parts of the United States, but also through the lens of how white Democratic elected officials in northern cities approached and engaged Black voters, and how both black and white citizens in these large urban centers participated in politics. Ultimately, Grant positions the Great Migration as a key dimension of some of the shifts and changes that have occurred in the parties over the past century. In tracing the political impact of the great migration, Grant also concludes her work with some analysis of the re-migration of African Americans back to the South, and how active citizens and voters may once again change the dynamics in American politics.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

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Anne Heffernan, "Limpopo’s Legacy, Student Politics and Democracy in South Africa" (James Currey, 2019) May 04, 2020

Anne Heffernan's new book Limpopo’s Legacy, Student Politics and Democracy in South Africa (James Currey, 2019) is a thoroughly researched account of the Black Consciousness Movement, student activism, and politics in South Africa from the 1960s to the present. Heffernan focuses specifically on black student activism at the University of the North at Turfloop, a rural university in the Northern Transvaal, the modern-day Limpopo province. She compellingly argues that rural uprisings shaped politics nationally as contestations between university students, administrators, and apartheid officials escalated. Heffernan importantly demonstrates that these confrontations and the bureaucratic responses to them assisted the diffusion of radical politics nation-wide, especially in the years leading up to the Soweto Uprisings of 1976.

Heffernan’s biographical sketches of William Kgware, Abram Tiro, Julius Malema, Peter Mokaba, and others outline the political legacies and imprints that residents, students, and activists from Limpopo had and continue to have on post-apartheid politics. In extending her investigation to include student and youth politics after Soweto, Heffernan explores how politics in the Northern Transvaal remained central to national contestations between Black Consciousness and ANC-aligned youth groups throughout the 1980s. Heffernan’s unwavering focus on Limpopo reframes our understanding of national politics and student activists’ central role in shaping them. Limpopo’s Legacy is a foundational text that provides the historical context for understanding contemporary student movements and electoral politics in South Africa today.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall

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Andre Brock, "Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures" (NYU Press, 2020) May 01, 2020

Technology has been instrumental in allowing audiences to encounter expressions of culture to which they may have no direct connection. The popular commercial platforms like Twitter and Instagram mediate culture, the affordances of each determining how aspects of culture translate on the sites. In his new book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures(NYU Press, 2020), Andre Brock, an associate professor at Georgia Tech, theorizes what it means to be Black online, particularly when the physical body can neither be understood nor constrained. Though considering topics like afro-pessimism and the digital divide, Brock particularly focuses on Black joy – “the embodied cognition where Black people express their relationship to the world through our joy in moving through it.”

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Le’Trice D. Donaldson, "Duty Beyond the Battlefield: African American Soldiers Fight for Racial Uplift, Citizenship, and Manhood, 1870-1920" (SIUP, 2020) Apr 28, 2020

In her new book Duty Beyond the Battlefield: African American Soldiers Fight for Racial Uplift, Citizenship, and Manhood, 1870-1920 (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), Le’Trice D. Donaldson investigates how African American soldiers used their military service to challenge white notions of an African American second-class citizenry and forged a new identity as freedom fighters, demanding the rights of full citizenship and manhood. Donaldson identifies the often-overlooked era between the Civil War and the end of World War I as the beginning of black soldiers’ involvement in the long struggle for civil rights.

Donaldson interrogates the association between masculinity and citizenship and the ways in which performing manhood through military service influenced how these men struggled for racial uplift. Following the Buffalo soldier units and two regular army infantry units from the frontier and the Mexican border to Mexico, Cuba, and the Philippines, she investigates how these locations and the wars therein provide windows into how the soldiers’ struggles influenced black life and status within the United States.

Duty beyond the Battlefield demonstrates that from the 1870s to 1920s military race men laid the foundation for the “New Negro” movement and the rise of Black Nationalism that influenced the future leaders of the twentieth century Civil Rights movement.

Dr. Le’Trice Donaldson is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Stout and the author of A Voyage through the African American Experience. She is also the creator and co-editor of The Blerdy Report a blog dedicated to all things Black and nerdy in film, television, and the comic universe. You can find her on Twitter @eboninerd and on Instagram @letrice_blackladynerd

Dr. Isabel Machado is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Memphis. Her forthcoming book uses Carnival as a vehicle to understand social and cultural changes in Mobile, Alabama (USA) in the second half of the 20th century. Her new research project is an investigation of different generations of artists and performers who challenge gender normativity in Monterrey, Nuevo León (Mexico). She also works as an Assistant Producer for the Sexing History podcast.

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Adam H. Domby, "The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory" (U Virginia Press, 2020) Apr 23, 2020

Adam H. Domby, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Charleston, has written a rigorous analysis of American political memory as it connects to the Civil War and long shadow of the Confederacy. The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (University of Virginia Press, 2020) unpacks a variety of threads all connected to the Lost Cause ideology, and all based on falsehoods. These dimensions of the ideology include Domby’s examination of the history of dishonest claims to confederate pensions by white veterans, and also the accusations of fraud associated with claims made by former slaves and free people of color for much smaller pensions.

The False Cause digs into the historical claims made about the heroics demonstrated on the battlefield during the Civil War. In this context, The False Cause unpacks the myth that the Confederate army was one of the best ever, and these heroic claims, many of which were made at least forty years after the war itself, are not the only heroic assertions made in context of the Lost Cause ideology. Domby also explores the “soldiers who weren’t” – the enslaved individuals who were compelled to accompany their masters to war, and were then transformed, within this constructed political memory, into Black Confederates, which is yet another myth within the ideology. The book begins with an extremely topical component of the Lost Cause ideology and political memory, the monuments to confederate soldiers that were built long after the war, and that have become contemporary political lightning rods. Through all of these cases, Domby weaves the thread of how each particular area was used to buttress white supremacy and to re-narrate or re-cast the Civil War itself and those who engaged in it. Issues of white masculinity and grievance are embedded within the mythology and are also unpacked in context of these heroic declarations. This is an important historical examination that leads the reader through the facts and the subsequently created mythologies, which continue to shape and impact American politics and historical understandings.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

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Christopher Tomlins, "In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History" (Princeton UP, 2020) Apr 20, 2020

In 1831, Nat Turner led a band of Southampton County slaves in a rebellion that killed fifty-five whites, mostly women and children. After more than two months in hiding, Turner was captured, and quickly convicted and executed.

Christopher Tomlins' new book In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History (Princeton University Press, 2020) penetrates the historical caricature of Turner as befuddled mystic and self-styled Baptist preacher to recover the haunting persona of this legendary American slave rebel, telling of his self-discovery and the dawning of his Christian faith, of an impossible task given to him by God, and of redemptive violence and profane retribution.

Much about Turner remains unknown. His extraordinary account of his life and rebellion, given in chains as he awaited trial in jail, was written down by an opportunistic white attorney and sold as a pamphlet to cash in on Turner’s notoriety. But the enigmatic rebel leader had an immediate and broad impact on the American South, and his rebellion remains one of the most momentous episodes in American history. Tomlins provides a luminous account of Turner's intellectual development, religious cosmology, and motivations, and offers an original and incisive analysis of the Turner Rebellion itself and its impact on Virginia politics. Tomlins also undertakes a deeply critical examination of William Styron’s 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, which restored Turner to the American consciousness in the era of civil rights, black power, and urban riots.

A speculative history that recovers Turner from the few shards of evidence we have about his life, In the Matter of Nat Turner is also a unique speculation about the meaning and uses of history itself.

Rob Denning is Associate Dean for Liberal Arts at Southern New Hampshire University’s Global Campus. He received his Ph.D from The Ohio State University, where he researched environmental policymaking in California during Ronald Reagan’s terms as governor. Rob hosts Working Historians, a podcast about the various career opportunities open to students with history degrees. He can be reached by email at rdenning13@gmail.com or on Twitter @DrRobHistory.

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Mary Stanton, "Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950" (U Georgia Press, 2019) Apr 15, 2020

Mary Stanton's Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950 (University of Georgia Press, 2019) is the first narrative history of the American communist movement in the South since Robin D. G. Kelley's groundbreaking Hammer and Hoe and the first to explore its key figures and actions beyond the 1930s. Written from the perspective of the district 17 (CPUSA) Reds who worked primarily in Alabama, it acquaints a new generation with the impact of the Great Depression on postwar black and white, young and old, urban and rural Americans.

After the Scottsboro story broke on March 25, 1931, it was open season for old-fashioned lynchings, legal (courtroom) lynchings, and mob murder. In Alabama alone, twenty black men were known to have been murdered, and countless others, women included, were beaten, disabled, jailed, “disappeared,” or had their lives otherwise ruined between March 1931 and September 1935. In this collective biography, Mary Stanton―a noted chronicler of the left and of social justice movements in the South―explores the resources available to Depression-era Reds before the advent of the New Deal or the modern civil rights movement. What emerges from this narrative is a meaningful criterion by which to evaluate the Reds’ accomplishments.

Through seven cases of the CPUSA (district 17) activity in the South, Stanton covers tortured notions of loyalty and betrayal, the cult of white southern womanhood, Christianity in all its iterations, and the scapegoating of African Americans, Jews, and communists. Yet this still is a story of how these groups fought back, and fought together, for social justice and change in a fractured region.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute’s Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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Miriam J. Abelson, "Men in Place: Trans Masculinity, Race, and Sexuality in America" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) Apr 13, 2020

American masculinity is being critiqued, questioned, and reinterpreted for a new era. In Men in Place: Trans Masculinity, Race, and Sexuality in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), Miriam J. Abelson makes an original contribution to this conversation through in-depth interviews with trans men in the U.S. West, Southeast, and Midwest, showing how the places and spaces men inhabit are fundamental to their experiences of race, sexuality, and gender.

In this interview, Dr. Abelson and I discuss the various types of masculinity she identified in her study, such as hypermasculine men, regular guys, and men who seek to embody what Abelson calls “Golidlocks masculinity.” Additionally, we discuss how race and space affect expressions and embodiment of masculinity. For example, trans men in rural spaces were more likely to embody a redneck masculinity. On the other hand, urban trans men were more likely to embody a masculinity of the “urban thug.” Lastly, Abelson explains the significance of health care settings and public bathroom as spaces for upholding the gender binary and potential instances of violence. I recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in gender, sexuality, race, and studies of place.

Dr. Miriam Abelson (@AbelsonDr) is an Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Portland State University.

Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar.

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Katherine Franke, "Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition" (Haymarket Books, 2020) Apr 10, 2020

Katherine Franke’s ambitious new book challenges Americans to face our collective responsibility for ongoing racial inequality. Rather than fall back on what Franke calls a “palliative history” that emphasizes granting freedom and rights after the Civil War, Franke insists that Americans acknowledge the failure to provide any meaningful reparation to formerly enslaved people in the 1860s. That failure has ongoing structural effects today.

The book replots this history through archival research on two post-war communities in which property ownership produced increased autonomy for freed people. Franke contrasts free and freed – and calls this the dangling ‘d’ the residue of enslavement. Using a myriad of primary documents from the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Davis Bend, Mississippi, Franke details the successes and failures of these communities as they governed and organized their land. Repair demonstrates how government officials recognized the need for reparations (a term they used) and repair in the form of land ownership – an approach later reversed by President Johnson.

Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2020) reflects on these radical examples of 19th-century reparations in order to contribute to the modern call for reparations. For Franke, the atrocity of slavery is a festering national wound and the examples of history suggest ways in which we might funnel national wealth (though estate taxes) to a fund to empower black ownership and citizenship.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013).

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Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird, "Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior" (Princeton UP, 2020) Apr 08, 2020

In their new book, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior(Princeton University Press, 2020), political scientists Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird explore the political behavior of African American voters in the United States and examine extensive data to determine how this particular group of voters have operated as a fairly unified voting block over the course of many election cycles. The research is fascinating, delineating the ideological fissures within the African-American community while also analyzing the voting patterns of African Americans and their inclination to remain loyal Democratic voters. Steadfast Democrats spends time examining the historical roots of this unified voting behavior, noting the roles that slavery and segregation played in creating the tightly connected communities in which many African Americans live and work.

White and Laird pay particular attention to how these connections operate in terms of norms in political behavior, building on linked fate theories, but distinguishing differences in terms of understanding how ideology and political behavior operate in context of partisan loyalty. White and Laird explain these dynamics through their theory of racialized social constraint and they build their research from survey data about voting patterns and behaviors, while adding in supplemental, experimental research to test these dynamics and norm enforcement. The research is not necessarily limited to black political behavior in the U.S., and the conclusion of Steadfast Democrats takes the theoretical framework of norm enforcement and community unity and examines other groups in the United States that operate along similar patterns and dynamics.

Steadfast Democrats: is a window into understanding why and how African American voters in the United States remain a strongly unified voting bloc, even among many differences of opinion, a diversity of perspective, and a variety of lived experiences.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

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Vincent Brown, "Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War" (Harvard UP, 2020) Apr 07, 2020

In the second half of the eighteenth century, as European imperial conflicts extended the domain of capitalist agriculture, warring African factions fed their captives to the transatlantic slave trade while masters struggled continuously to keep their restive slaves under the yoke. In this contentious atmosphere, a movement of enslaved West Africans in Jamaica (then called Coromantees) organized to throw off that yoke by violence. Their uprising—which became known as Tacky’s Revolt—featured a style of fighting increasingly familiar today: scattered militias opposing great powers, with fighters hard to distinguish from noncombatants. It was also part of a more extended borderless conflict that spread from Africa to the Americas and across the island. Even after it was put down, the insurgency rumbled throughout the British Empire at a time when slavery seemed the dependable bedrock of its dominion. That certitude would never be the same, nor would the views of black lives, which came to inspire both more fear and more sympathy than before.

Tracing the roots, routes, and reverberations of this event across disparate parts of the Atlantic world, Vincent Brown offers us a superb geopolitical thriller. Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War(Harvard University Press, 2020) expands our understanding of the relationship between European, African, and American history, as it speaks to our understanding of wars of terror today.

Adam McNeil is a 2nd year Ph.D. student in History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick

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Jeff Forret, "William’s Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and his Cargo of Black Convicts" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Apr 02, 2020

Jeff Forret is the author of William’s Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and his Cargo of Black Convicts, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. William’s Gang explores the career of prominent slave trader William H. Williams, whose operation was based in Washington D.C. His infamous Yellow House slave pin was a major stop in the domestic slave trade. Forret examines Williams’s life as a slave trader, and particularly the legal troubles he found himself in when he was accused of trying to sell twenty-seven enslaved convicts, from Virginia, in Louisiana. The myriad of courtroom battles Williams went through are placed alongside the larger history of slavery and the slave trade in the Antebellum Period, as Forret explores issues of slave criminality, southern law, and the U.S. economy.

Dr. Forret is a Professor of History at Lamar University.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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Paula C. Austin, "Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life" (NYU Press, 2019) Apr 01, 2020

Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life (NYU Press, 2019) by Paula C. Austin, an Assistant Professor of history at Boston University, is not only a history of black youth in Washington D.C. in the 1930s but also a history of social science thought as illustrated in the work of scholars such as sociologists E. Franklin Frazier and William H. Jones. Austin juxtaposes the interior lives of black youth, who she posits as “thinkers, theorists, and critics,” with the ideas of well-known intellectuals to tell a multifaceted history of the Jim Crow era in the nation’s capital. This is a concise monograph that utilizes some recognizable sources in intellectual history, including Frazier’s studies on black families, while also considering the thoughts and ideas of everyday people who were interviewed by experts during the New Negro era. Austin draws upon the methodologies of slavery studies, post-colonial theory, labor history and women’s studies in an attempt to challenge the “limiting boundaries of intellectual history” by illustrating the role that ideas played in the lives of everyday people who navigated “structural impediments” and made a world that reveals a rich cultural and intellectual life.

This text is a work of intellectual and social history that is interdisciplinary in scope as structured around four concise chapters. Chapter One focuses on Howard University’s Sociology Department, Chapter Two focuses on race and space, and Chapter Three discusses the political ideas expressed by black youth. Finally, Chapter Four concerns race, gender, and sexuality as well as recreation/leisure time in the lives of black youth in D.C. Austin traverses several modes of inquiry in her narrative including African American history, women’s history, youth studies, and urban history. She does this by making the lives of black children and youths the core of her narrative while considering the history of African Americans, more generally, in the New Negro era and paying critical attention to concerns about gender, race, and space. In this text, Austin reveals how black youth in Jim Crow era D.C. were possessed of both an interior life and an intellectual life. Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC is an important contribution in American intellectual history.

Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. She has published book chapters, essays, and edited/authored five books. Her latest publications include Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger, 2017) and, with Dr. G. Reginald Daniel, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union(University Press of Mississippi 2014). You can follow Dr. Williams on Twitter @DrHettie2017.

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Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) Mar 30, 2020

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction.

The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more.

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Tobie Stein, "Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Performing Arts Workforce" (Routledge, 2020) Mar 27, 2020

Has can theatre confront racial inequality? In Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Performing Arts Workforce (Routledge, 2020), Tobie S. Stein, Professor Emerita in the Department of Theater, Brooklyn College, CUNY, analyses the longstanding failure of America’s theatre industry to address issues of diversity. Drawing on interviews with 70 practitioners, as well as a rich and detailed engagement with the structures of the theatre industry and cultural policy, the book makes clear the unequal opportunities and career paths that result from racial inequality. The book also draws on co-authors to reflect historical, institutional, and international perspectives, adding depth and breadth to an already excellently extensive account. It is an essential read across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in arts and culture.

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Kristen Hoerl, "Bad Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and Black Power Movements" (UP of Mississippi, 2018) Mar 24, 2020

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Kristen Hoerl (she/hers) on her impressive new book The Bad Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and Black Power Movements (University Press of Mississippi, 2018).

The Bad Sixties explores the construction of “the sixties” in Hollywood media, from Family Ties and The Wonder Years to Law and Order, arguing that these texts have proved dismissive, if not adversarial, to the role of dissent in fostering progressive social change. These stories portray a period in which urban riots, antiwar protests, sexual experimentation, drug abuse, and feminism led to national division and moral decay. According to Hoerl, these messages supply distorted civics lessons about what we should value and how we might legitimately participate in our democracy. Hoerl describes our contemporary relationship to the sixties, shaped by these media portrayals, as “selective amnesia.” Selective amnesia removes the spectacular events and figures that define the late-1960s from their motives and context, flattening their meaning into reductive stereotypes. Despite popular television and film, Hoerl explains, memory of 1960s activism still offers a potent resource for imagining how we can strive collectively to achieve social justice and equality. Winner of the 2018 Book Award from the American Studies Division of the National Communication Association. Dr. Hoerl can be reached at khoerl2@unl.edu if you have feedback or questions.

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Spencer Dew, "The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali" (U Chicago Press, 2019) Mar 20, 2020

In his dazzling new book The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Spencer Dew treats his readers to a riveting and often counterintuitive account of the interaction of law, race, and citizenship in the discourses of the Moorish Science Temple and other movements inspired by Noble Drew Ali. How do theological visions of democracy serve as critiques of racism and exclusionary politics? In what ways does a notion of sovereignty as located in faith and outside history mobilize popular sovereignty to critique modern state sovereignty? What are the complicated mechanisms through which legal institutions, texts, and theaters are engaged and negotiated to make space for a notion of citizenship grounded in the entanglement of law, love, and social transformation? These are among the central questions that animate this sparkling study, situated at the intersection of legal studies, African American Religion, and American Islam. Lucidly composed, theoretically charged, and discursively playful, The Aliites is sure to transform the way we look at Noble Drew Ali and his profound and complex legacy. This book will also generate important and productive conversations in various undergraduate and graduate seminars on American Islam, American Religion, Political Studies, History, and Law.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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Marcus P. Nevius, "City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763-1856" (U Georgia Press, 2020) Mar 20, 2020

In his newly released book City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763-1856 (University of Georgia Press, 2020), Professor Marcus P. Nevius (Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Rhode Island) tells the interrelated histories of petit marronage, an informal slave's economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. The vast wetland was tough terrain that most white Virginians and North Carolinians considered uninhabitable. Perceived desolation notwithstanding, black slaves fled into the swamp's remote sectors and engaged in petit marronage, a type of escape and fugitivity prevalent throughout the Atlantic world. An alternative to the dangers of flight by way of the Underground Railroad, maroon communities often neighbored slave-labor camps, the latter located on the swamp's periphery and operated by the Dismal Swamp Land Company and other companies that employed slave labor to facilitate the extraction of the Dismal's natural resources. Often with the tacit acceptance of white company agents, company slaves engaged in various exchanges of goods and provisions with maroons-networks that padded company accounts even as they helped to sustain maroon colonies and communities.

In his examination of life, commerce, and social activity in the Great Dismal Swamp, Nevius engages the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism in the early American republic. City of Refuge uses a wide variety of primary sources-including runaway advertisements; planters' and merchants' records, inventories, letterbooks, and correspondence; abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; county free black registries; and the records and inventories of private companies-to examine how American maroons, enslaved canal laborers, white company agents, and commission merchants shaped, and were shaped by, race and slavery in an important region in the history of the late Atlantic world.

Jerrad P. Pacatte is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-New Brunswick studying eighteenth and nineteenth-century African American women’s history and the history of slavery and capitalism. Follow him on Twitter @Jerrad_Pacatte!

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Diane Jones Allen, "Lost in the Transit Desert: Race, Transit Access, and Suburban Form" (Routledge, 2017) Mar 18, 2020

Increased redevelopment, the dismantling of public housing, and increasing housing costs are forcing a shift in migration of lower income and transit dependent populations to the suburbs. These suburbs are often missing basic transportation, and strategies to address this are lacking. This absence of public transit creates barriers to viable employment and accessibility to cultural networks, and plays a role in increasing social inequality.

In her book Lost in the Transit Desert: Race, Transit Access, and Suburban Form (Routledge, 2017), Diane Jones Allen investigates how housing and transport policy have played their role in creating these "Transit Deserts," and what impact race has upon those likely to be affected. Jones Allen uses research from New Orleans, Baltimore, and Chicago to explore the forces at work in these situations, as well as proposing potential solutions. Mapping, interviews, photographs, and narratives all come together to highlight the inequities and challenges in Transit Deserts, where a lack of access can make all journeys, such as to jobs, stores, or relatives, much more difficult. Alternatives to public transit abound, from traditional methods such as biking and carpooling to more culturally specific tactics, and are examined comprehensively.

This is valuable reading for students and researchers interested in transport planning, urban planning, city infrastructure, and transport geography.

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Great Books: John Callahan on Ellison's "Invisible Man" Mar 17, 2020

Ralph Waldo Ellison's masterpiece Invisible Man tells the story of an African-American man who insists on his visibility, agency, and humanity in a country dead-set on not seeing him. Barring him from most opportunities, and denying his humanity. The book charts this young man's course from the segregated South into 1950's New York where the choices seem to be; militant resistance or assimilation, war or acceptance on an unacceptable status quo.

The book deals with racism and inequality in ways that remain wholly timely, but its continued relevance rests possibly most on the narrator's unflinching introspection and self-interrogation. What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be black? What does it mean to be human? What is an American? By interlocking these questions Ellison writes a book as tightly constructed as a great jazz performance, where many voices and perspectives compete for priority but ultimately must find a way to gel.

Ellison's gripping novel is as timely today as when first published to sensational acclaim, garnering a National Book Award. It inspired countless other works, including the structure of Barack Obama's Dreams from my Father. With remarkable native narrative power, Ellison offers yet another way, beyond violence or acceptance, for America to reckon with its past and present and for African-Americans to re-pledge allegiance to a community that has refused to acknowledge them thus far.

I spoke with John Callahan, Ellison's literary executor and decades-long trusted friend who brought us the posthumously published Juneteenth, the haunting short story collection Flying Home, and a forthcoming edition of Ellison's letters spanning some 40 years. John and I spent an hour in mid-March overlooking Central Park in the waning light, looking at Harlem where Ellison lived and where he's buried today, and wondering whether, as the book's final lines put it: “Who knows but that on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”.

Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It"

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Nancy Appelbaum, "Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia" (UNC Press, 2016) Mar 13, 2020

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Chorographic Commission of Colombia, an ambitious geographical expedition, set out to define and map a nascent and still unstable republic. The commission’s purpose was to survey the land, its resources and people, and portray Colombia as a nation prone to the “wonders” of modernization.

In Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Nancy P. Appelbaum reconstructs how elites, through visual and textual methodologies, envisioned the nation and its component parts. In particular, the books focuses on a dilemma that has characterized modern nation formation in Latin America and the world: how is it possible to build and represent a unified nation while simultaneously showcasing regional diversity and particularity? In the case of Colombia, how did Commissioners solved the tension between aspirational homogeneity and the regional heterogeneity found on the ground? As this fascinating interview tells us, racial and gendered stereotypes were used to solve this paradox. Unsuccessful in their quest for unity, the commissioners represented the highland regions as white and civilized, while the lowlands were allegedly black, backward, and savage. This in turn created a dichotomy that still haunts the way in which we, Colombians, understand our country today.

Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron.

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Paul J. Polgar, "Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement" (UNC Press, 2019) Mar 12, 2020

Paul J. Polgar is the author of Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement, published by University of North Carolina Press in 2019. Standard-Bearers of Equality tells the story of a racially inclusive abolition movement which followed in the wake of the American Revolution. Seeking to uphold Revolutionary-era ideals, these “first movement abolitionists,” as Polgar refers to them, sought to end slavery and prove Black Americans deserved an equal place in the country. Polgar’s work reinterprets this time in American history, illustrating how some people worked tirelessly to create an equalitarian country.

Dr. Polgar is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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Sophie White, "Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana" (UNC Press, 2019) Mar 12, 2020

In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men--like the testimony of free colonists--was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses about attacks, murders, robberies, and escapes, they answered with stories about themselves, stories that rebutted the premise on which slavery was founded.

Focusing on four especially dramatic court cases, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (UNC Press, 2019) draws us into Louisiana’s courtrooms, prisons, courtyards, plantations, bayous, and convents to understand how the enslaved viewed and experienced their worlds. As they testified, these individuals charted their movement between West African, indigenous, and colonial cultures; they pronounced their moral and religious values; and they registered their responses to labor, to violence, and, above all, to the intimate romantic and familial bonds they sought to create and protect. Their words--punctuated by the cadences of Creole and rich with metaphor--produced riveting autobiographical narratives as they veered from the questions posed by interrogators.

Carefully assessing what we can discover, what we might guess, and what has been lost forever, Sophie White offers both a richly textured account of slavery in French Louisiana and a powerful meditation on the limits and possibilities of the archive.

Sophie White is Associate Professor of American Studies and Concurrent Associate Professor in the Departments of Africana Studies, History, and Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is an historian of early America with an interdisciplinary focus on cultural encounters between Europeans, Africans and Native Americans, and a commitment to Atlantic and global research perspectives.

This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University.

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AfroAm Studies Roundtable: Robert Greene II and Tyler D. Parry on the Becoming Historians Mar 09, 2020

Today, instead of discussing a new book, I am convening a “New Books in African American Studies Roundtable” to talk with two historians early in their careers about their recent transitions from graduate school into the professorate, and some of the scholarly and public projects they are developing at their respective institutions: Dr. Robert Greene II, Assistant Professor in History at Claflin University, and Dr. Tyler D. Parry, Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Both Drs. Greene and Parry are incredible examples of what scholarly integrity and kindness are. They also both are graduates of the University of South Carolina’s doctorate program in history!

Adam McNeil is a 2nd year PhD in Early African American history at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

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Rebecca E. Zietlow, "The Forgotten Emancipator: James Mitchell Ashley and the Ideological Origins of Reconstruction" (Cambridge UP, 2018) Mar 05, 2020

Though the story of emancipation is well known in American history, the roles of many of the key figures involved in it are often overlooked. Among them is James Mitchell Ashley, the Ohio congressman who shepherded the Thirteenth Amendment through the House of Representatives. In The Forgotten Emancipator: James Mitchell Ashley and the Ideological Origins of Reconstruction (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Rebecca E. Zietlow recounts the intellectual development of Ashley as an abolitionist and how he sought to turn freedom into a reality for millions of African Americans. As Zietlow explains, an important strain in Ashley’s thinking was his commitment to the free labor ideas prominent in the Democratic Party in the antebellum era. As a committed abolitionist, he played a prominent role in the emergence of the Republican Party in Ohio in the 1850s culminating in his election to Congress in 1858. As a representative during one of the critical period in the nation’s history, Ashley was at the forefront of Congress’ response to the issue of slavery during the Civil War, working not just to pass the amendment that ended the “peculiar institution” but to craft legislation designed to ensure that the freedom won by African Americans was real and not undermined by the unreconstructed Southern governments in power in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

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Ellen Griffith Spears, "Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town" (UNC Press, 2016) Feb 28, 2020

Professor Ellen Griffith Spears of the University of Alabama, author of Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) discusses the decades long struggle for environmental and civil rights justice in Anniston, Alabama, and broader lessons to be learned from this fight to address one community's exposure to toxic chemicals.

In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city's historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston's battles for environmental justice, exposing how systemic racial and class inequalities reinforced during the Jim Crow era played out in these intense contemporary social movements.

Spears focuses attention on key figures who shaped Anniston--from Monsanto's founders, to white and African American activists, to the ordinary Anniston residents whose lives and health were deeply affected by the town's military-industrial history and the legacy of racism. Situating the personal struggles and triumphs of Anniston residents within a larger national story of regulatory regimes and legal strategies that have affected toxic towns across America, Spears unflinchingly explores the causes and implications of environmental inequalities, showing how civil rights movement activism undergirded Anniston's campaigns for redemption and justice.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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Graham R. G. Hodges, "Black New Jersey 1664 to the Present Day" (Rutgers UP, 2019) Feb 26, 2020

Black New Jersey 1664 to the Present Day (Rutgers University Press, 2018) by Graham Russell Gao Hodges, George Langdon, Jr. Professor of History and Africana and Latin American Studies at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, is a survey history of African Americans in New Jersey. This is the first published scholarly book-length historical study of African Americans in New Jersey covering the Colonial era to the present in a single volume. Hodges, a prolific scholar, is the author/editor of sixteen books including Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North: African Americans in Monmouth County, New Jersey 1660-1870 (Madison House, 1997) and Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey,1613-1863 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999). Black New Jersey was awarded the McCormick Prize from the New Jersey Historical Commission in 2019. Hodges’s text is organized around eight neat chapters encompassing Pre-Revolutionary New Jersey to the present. Black New Jersey also includes a useful “Introduction.”

In his text, Hodges emphasizes the history of slavery, religion, the rise of the Black middle class, and the quest for social equality through the Jim Crow era. He also discusses some of the more notable intellectuals in the history of New Jersey such as Paul Robeson and Marion Thompson Wright. Both were active in the long black freedom struggle. Wright’s research became the basis for the first case to challenge segregation in the public-school system Hedgepeth-Williams vs. Trenton, Board of Education (1944) before the historic Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education (1954). Wright, a trained historian, worked on the pivotal Brown case conducting historical research for litigation. These intellectuals were instrumental in advancing the Civil Rights Movement in the Garden State before 1954. This text by Hodges is an important study on the history of northern struggles for equality including the Civil Rights Movement that likely first began in New Jersey.

Hettie V. Williams Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. You can follow Dr. Williams on twitter: @DrHettie2017.

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Great Books: Deborah Plant on Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" Feb 25, 2020

"It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.” This line from Zora Neale Hurston’s masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, captures what is at the heart of all great literature: the irrepressible urge to speak, to be heard and understood. I spoke with Professor Deborah Plant, a scholar of African-American literature and culture, an expert on Hurston, and the editor of Hurston’s posthumously published Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo". When I asked Deborah about this sentence, how Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God could fear misunderstanding more than death, she gently corrected me. Janie no longer feared death even before this pivotal scene, Deborah explained. Deborah also corrected me, again gently but firmly, when I misspoke and suggested that Hurston had been largely forgotten between 1937, when Their Eyes Were Watching God was first published and she was still a celebrated figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and the book’s renewed popularity starting in the mid-1970s. "Their Eyes Were Watching God was never really forgotten in my community," Deborah explained. Hurston's work re-shuffles the tradition of American literature so productively that public success may be the wrong measure.

Professor Plant also explained how Hurston’s training as an anthropologist with Franz Boas at Barnard College shaped her writing. She helped us see African-American language and culture as the greatest cultural treasure of our nation. Professor Plant explained how best to understand this magisterial book in light of Hurston’s other work. “I had things clawing inside of me that must be said,” Hurston added in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, to explain her decision to leave a man she truly loved. But it’s not specific facts and experiences that need to be heard; it is the human voice. This, of course, is what great literature is: the need for one's voice and vision to be accepted on their terms.

Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It"

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Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) Feb 25, 2020

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike.

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Orly Clergé, "The New Noir: Race, Identity and Diaspora in Black Suburbia" (U California Press, 2019) Feb 24, 2020

How has the expansion of the Black American middle class and the increase in the number of Black immigrants among them since the Civil Rights period transformed the cultural landscape of New York City? In her new book The New Noir: Race, Identity & Diaspora in Black Suburbia (University of California Press, 2019), Orly Clergé explores this question and more. Exploring the lived experiences of the people in Queens and Long Island through ethnographic methods, Clergé discovers a racial consciousness spectrum and heterogeneity of experiences among and between people living in these two suburbs of NYC. Presenting deep and rich exploration of history of racial and social stratification, the book investigates issues of urbanization and suburbanization, migration, race, class, and family.

This book would be an excellent addition to many graduate level Sociology courses, including any that focus on migration, race, stratification, or neighborhoods. This book will also be of interest to anyone interested in the history and development of NYC.

Sarah E. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan.

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Erika Denise Edwards, "Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic" (U Alabama Press, 2020) Feb 21, 2020

Argentina promotes itself as a country of European immigrants. This makes it an exception to other Latin American countries, which embrace a more mixed—African, Indian, European—heritage. Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic (University of Alabama Press, 2020) traces the origins of what some white Argentines mischaracterize as a “black disappearance” by delving into the intimate lives of black women and explaining how they contributed to the making of a “white” Argentina. Erika Denise Edwards has produced the first comprehensive study in English of the history of African descendants outside of Buenos Aires in the late colonial and early republican periods, with a focus on how these women sought whiteness to better their lives and that of their children.

Erika Edwards argues that attempts by black women to escape the stigma of blackness by recategorizing themselves and their descendants as white began as early as the late eighteenth century, challenging scholars who assert that the black population drastically declined at the end of the nineteenth century because of the whitening or modernization process. She further contends that in Córdoba, Argentina, women of African descent (such as wives, mothers, daughters, and concubines) were instrumental in shaping their own racial reclassifications and destinies.

This volume makes use of a wealth of sources to relate these women’s choices. The sources consulted include city censuses and notarial and probate records that deal with free and enslaved African descendants; criminal, ecclesiastical, and civil court cases; marriages and baptisms records and newsletters. These varied sources provide information about the day-to-day activities of cordobés society and how women of African descent lived, formed relationships, thrived, and partook in the transformation of racial identities in Argentina.

Adam McNeil is a 2nd-year Ph.D. Student in History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

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Steve Suitts, "Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement" (NewSouth Books, 2020) Feb 21, 2020

School choice, widely touted as a system that would ensure underprivileged youth have an equal opportunity in education, has grown in popularity in the past fifteen years. The strategies and rhetoric of school choice, however, resemble those of segregationists who closed public schools and funded private institutions to block African American students from integrating with their white peers in the wake of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.

In Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement (NewSouth Books, 2020), Steve Suitts examines the parallels between de facto segregationist practices and the modern school choice movement. He exposes the dangers lying behind the smoke and mirrors of the so-called civil rights policies of Betsy DeVos and the education privatization lobbies. Economic and educational disparities have expanded rather than contracted in the years following Brown, and post-Jim Crow discriminatory policies drive inequality and poverty today. Suitts deftly reveals the risk that America and its underprivileged youth face as school voucher programs funnel public funds into predominantly white and often wealthy private schools and charter schools

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).

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Peter Cole, "Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area" (U Illinois Press, 2018) Feb 19, 2020

Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area (University of Illinois Press, 2018) is a fascinating, densely researched account of dockworkers and their organized responses to seismic economic and technological changes in the shipping industry between the 1940s and 1970s. Peter Cole examines the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and San Francisco’s Local 10 from its desegregation through its involvement in local and regional civil rights and anti-apartheid struggles. In Durban, Cole shows how South African unionists’ used stay-aways and strikes to fight racial capitalism, ultimately setting off a wave of protest in the early 1970s, only a few years before the Soweto Uprisings.

Dockworker Power is a refreshing mixture of two methodological approaches that situates the study of black internationalism among workers. Cole boosts our understanding of the radical tradition on the world’s docks by dexterously shifting between comparative and transnational analysis. This approach importantly reveals the global consequences of containerization on workers who tried to insulate themselves from the excesses of technological change. Cole’s book shows the significance of dockworkers as power-players in regional politics, the world economy, and transnational social movements, as they fought for, established, and wielded their collective power to secure their own prosperity and assist others in struggles near and far.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall

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Great Books: Emily Bernard on Larsen's "Passing" Feb 18, 2020

Nella Larsen's gripping 1929 novel Passing recounts the fateful encounter, first on a fancy Chicago hotel rooftop restaurant on a sweltering August afternoon and later in New York City, of two women who grew up together and then lost touch, and who can pass from being black to white, and back again -- with devastating moral and social consequences. The book examines the American mythology of race, and its real-world effects, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance and during a time when racial segregation regulated the lives of all Americans and severely disadvantaged African-Americans in nearly all aspects of existence. Many people chose to escape this injustice by 'passing' for white, which gave Larsen the idea to examine race and racism in a powerful work of fiction. I spoke with Professor Emily Bernard, Julian Lindsay Green & Gold Professor at the University of Vermont and the author of many award-winning books, including: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten; Some of My Best Friends: Writers on Interracial Friendship; Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs; Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White, and the 2019 Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine.

Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It"

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adrienne maree brown, "Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good" (AK Press, 2019) Feb 17, 2020

In the introduction to Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (AK Press, 2019), adrienne maree brown defines pleasure activism as “the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy”. brown challenges the idea of activism from the traditional ideas of protest or advocacy to consider how happiness and pleasure for marginalized individuals resists various structures of power and oppression. Yet brown argues in her work that pleasure activism is not just about resistance, but also about generating justice and liberation.

This book features much of brown’s own writings which are quick, accessible, yet thought-provoking, but also the work of others including Audre Lorde, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Sami Schalk, and Joan Morgan. In our interview, listen to brown discuss pleasure activism, putting together the book and its central themes, and highlight the various and important components in being a pleasure activist.

adrienne maree brown is a social justice facilitator, doula, healer, and podcaster. She is committed to black liberation and resides in Detroit. Check out her website here and her podcast with her sister Autumn Brown here.

Adrian King (they/them) is a PhD student in American Culture at the University of Michigan.

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Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle, "Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy" (The New Press, 2018) Feb 14, 2020

Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle, Professors of History at California State University—Fresno, discuss their co-authored book, Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy (The New Press, 2018), competing narratives about slavery in the South, and the fraught history of race, memory and memorialization in the region.

Hailed by the New York Times as a “fascinating and important new historical study that examines . . . the place where the ways slavery is remembered mattered most,” Denmark Vesey’s Garden “maps competing memories of slavery from abolition to the very recent struggle to rename or remove Confederate symbols across the country” (The New Republic). This timely book reveals the deep roots of present-day controversies and traces them to the capital of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the slaves brought to the United States stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof murdered nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, which was co-founded by Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection in 1822.

As they examine public rituals, controversial monuments, and competing musical traditions, “Kytle and Roberts’s combination of encyclopedic knowledge of Charleston’s history and empathy with its inhabitants’ past and present struggles make them ideal guides to this troubled history” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). A work the Civil War Times called “a stunning contribution, ” Denmark Vesey’s Garden exposes a hidden dimension of America’s deep racial divide, joining the small bookshelf of major, paradigm-shifting interpretations of slavery’s enduring legacy in the United States.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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Rupert Lewis, "Marcus Garvey" (UP of West Indies, 2018) Feb 13, 2020

Rupert Lewis has written a biography of Marcus Garvey published by the University Press of the West Indies in 2018. His book Marcus Garvey documents the forging of Garvey’s remarkable vision of pan-Africanism and highlights his organizational skills in framing a response to the radical global popular upsurge following the First World War (1914–1918). Central to Garvey’s response was the development of organizations under the umbrella of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, which garnered the transnational support of several million members and sympathizers and challenged white supremacist practices and ideas.

Garvey established the ideological pillars of twentieth century pan-Africanism in promoting self-determination and self-reliance for Africa’s independence. Although Garvey travelled widely and lived abroad in New York and London, he spent his early years in Jamaica. Rupert Lewis traces how Garvey’s Jamaican formation shaped his life and thought and how he combated the British colonial authorities as well as fought deep-rooted self-doubt and self-rejection among Jamaican black people. Garvey’s much neglected political and cultural work at the local level is discussed as part of his project to stimulate self-determination in Africa and its diaspora.

Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com.

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Blain Roberts, "Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South" (UNC Press, 2016) Feb 07, 2020

Professor Blain Roberts of California State University, Fresno, talks about intersections of race, identity, and memory in the South in a wide-ranging discussion that starts in the segregated beauty parlors of the Jim Crow era and ends with remembrances of slavery in modern-day Charleston, South Carolina.

From the South's pageant queens to the importance of beauty parlors to African American communities, it is easy to see the ways beauty is enmeshed in southern culture. But as Blain Roberts shows in this incisive work, the pursuit of beauty in the South was linked to the tumultuous racial divides of the region, where the Jim Crow-era cosmetics industry came of age selling the idea of makeup that emphasized whiteness, and where, in the 1950s and 1960s, black-owned beauty shops served as crucial sites of resistance for civil rights activists. In these times of strained relations in the South, beauty became a signifier of power and affluence while it reinforced racial strife.

In Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Roberts examines a range of beauty products, practices, and rituals--cosmetics, hairdressing, clothing, and beauty contests--in settings that range from tobacco farms of the Great Depression to 1950s and 1960s college campuses. In so doing, she uncovers the role of female beauty in the economic and cultural modernization of the South. By showing how battles over beauty came to a head during the civil rights movement, Roberts sheds new light on the tactics southerners used to resist and achieve desegregation.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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Roberto Strongman, "Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou" (Duke UP, 2019) Feb 04, 2020

In Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou (Duke University Press, 2019), Roberto Strongman reveals the many non-heteronormative texts, practices and beliefs though which Black Atlantic religious practices in Haiti, Cuba and Brazil were constituted. Strongman examines Haitian Vodou, Cuban Lucumí/Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé to demonstrate how religious rituals of trance possession allow humans to understand themselves as embodiments of the divine. In these rituals, the commingling of humans and the divine produces gender identities that are independent of biological sex. As opposed to the Cartesian view of the spirit as locked within the body, the body in Afro-diasporic religions is an open receptacle. Showing how trance possession is a primary aspect of almost all Afro-diasporic cultural production, Strongman articulates transcorporeality as a black, trans-Atlantic understanding of the human psyche, soul, and gender as multiple, removable, and external to the body.

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Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, "Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean" (Princeton UP, 2019) Feb 03, 2020

In the late nineteenth century, a small group of Cubans and Puerto Ricans of African descent settled in the segregated tenements of New York City. At an immigrant educational society in Greenwich Village, these early Afro-Latino New Yorkers taught themselves to be poets, journalists, and revolutionaries. At the same time, these individuals―including Rafael Serra, a cigar maker, writer, and politician; Sotero Figueroa, a typesetter, editor, and publisher; and Gertrudis Heredia, one of the first women of African descent to study midwifery at the University of Havana―built a political network and articulated an ideal of revolutionary nationalism centered on the projects of racial and social justice. These efforts were critical to the poet and diplomat José Martí’s writings about race and his bid for leadership among Cuban exiles, and to the later struggle to create space for black political participation in the Cuban Republic.

In Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean (Princeton University Press, 2019), Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof presents a vivid portrait of these largely forgotten migrant revolutionaries, weaving together their experiences of migrating while black, their relationships with African American civil rights leaders, and their evolving participation in nationalist political movements. By placing Afro-Latino New Yorkers at the center of the story, Hoffnung-Garskof offers a new interpretation of the revolutionary politics of the Spanish Caribbean, including the idea that Cuba could become a nation without racial divisions.

A model of transnational and comparative research, Racial Migrations reveals the complexities of race-making within migrant communities and the power of small groups of immigrants to transform their home societies.

Tyesha Maddox is an assistant professor of African and African American studies at Fordham University.

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SpearIt, “American Prisons: A Critical Primer on Culture and Conversion to Islam” (First Edition Design, 2017) Jan 31, 2020

America has the largest incarcerated population in the world. This staggering and troubling fact has driven a great deal of scholarship. Much of this research has shown that mass incarceration in America is facilitated by systemic racial discrimination, which disproportionately affects African-American and Latinx communities. Only recently have scholars focused on the role of religion in American prisons.

In American Prisons: A Critical Primer on Culture and Conversion to Islam (First Edition Design, 2017), SpearIt, Professor in the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, brings the subject of incarcerated Muslims into focus. The collection of essays synthesizes SpearIt’s legal and academic work on issues of conversion, radicalization, and Muslim prisoner rights. Overall, the collection demonstrates that prisons are a crucial space for understanding the history of Muslims in America. In our conversation we discussed how Muslims have shaped religious life in prisons, the everyday challenges of incarceration, prison as a center for religious conversion, reasons prisoners chose Islam while incarcerated, prison administrators’ and policy makers’ definitions of radicalization, Muslim hip hop in the age of mass incarceration, incarcerated Latinx communities, and strategies to improve the criminal justice system.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.

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Catherine A. Stewart, "Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project" (UNC Press, 2016) Jan 30, 2020

Catherine A. Stewart is the author of Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2016. Long Past Slavery examines the history behind the collection of more than 2,300 narratives from formerly enslaved people, as part of the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project. Stewart pays close attention to how the ex-slave narratives represented a site of contestation between many people who had competing visions of what America’s past looked like, and what the future could hold. From Black interviewers to members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to the formerly enslaved themselves, Stewart illustrates how these narratives were a battleground over national memory, Black identity, and Black citizenship.

Catherine A. Stewart is Professor of History at Cornell College.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) Jan 30, 2020

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you.

Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that.

Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.

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Andrea Boyles, "You Can’t Stop the Revolution: Community Disorder and Social Ties in Post-Ferguson America" (U California Press, 2019) Jan 30, 2020

“Black lives matter before death.” (p.132) In her powerful new book, You Can’t Stop the Revolution: Community Disorder and Social Ties in Post-Ferguson America (University of California Press, 2019), Andrea S. Boyles provides vivid ethnographic work and in-depth interviews from the Ferguson protests. She shares discussions and experiences that illustrate that protestor’s actions are both spontaneous and deliberate, but she also explores how peaceful protesting can become framed in a compromising way for the participants. Boyles leaves readers with important implications and take-aways that include recognizing and paying homage to activists on the ground who are continuing this work today.

This book would be an excellent addition to any upper-level undergraduate or graduate level Sociology course. Although the focus of the book is on protest movements and race, the materials cover a wide variety of Sociological material that would make it an important addition to any course. Any courses or scholars interested in qualitative methods would benefit from reading Boyle’s account of her complex and in-depth methodology.

Sarah E. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan.

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Andrew R. M. Smith, "No Way But To Fight: George Foreman and the Business of Boxing" (U Texas Press, 2020) Jan 28, 2020

Today we are joined by Andrew R. M. Smith, author of No Way But To Fight: George Foreman and the Business of Boxing (University of Texas Press, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed Foreman’s career, the role of race in American sports, and how boxing helped give rise to athletic mega-events.

In No Way But To Fight, Smith traces the intersections between Foreman’s life, the racial politics of sports during the Civil Rights era, the intensification of boxing’s commercialization, the complexities of black masculinities, and the internationalization of sports mega-events. He shows that from his upbringing in Houston’s Fifth Ward to his role as a spokesman for the Foreman Grill, Foreman always fought to redefine himself along with the times. Smith’s telescoping view showcases a Foreman that played with different personalities - including American patriot, soul man, and evangelical preacher - in order to achieve success at distinct stages of his life.

Although Smiths work proceeds chronologically, it focuses heavily on Foreman’s first boxing career, the period between Foreman’s Gold Medal fight in 1968 to his defeat in 1977 to Jimmy Young. Based on a close reading of newspaper articles, advertising materials, and interviews with the boxer, he paints vivid pictures of the snapshots of Foreman’s life. The pugilist pursued different strategies throughout his career in and outside of the ring – some more sensible than others such as not drinking water the day before a fight. He also showcases the way fighting created pathways for a young man from one of Houston’s roughest neighborhoods to achieve global fame and fortune.

No Way But To Fight will appeal to readers interested in the links between money, race, and prize fighting in the United States.

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Mark Katz, "Build: The Power of Hip Hop Diplomacy in a Divided World" (Oxford UP, 2019) Jan 28, 2020

In April 2014, a cohort of twenty-five hip hop artists assembled in Washington, D.C. for the first orientation meeting of a new cultural diplomacy program sponsored by the United States State Department. Next Level brings hip hop practitioners from the United States to other countries where they collaborate with local artists in workshops and other events in short residencies. Mark Katz, a hip hop scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, proposed the program and served as its first director.

Build: The Power of Hip Hop Diplomacy in a Divided World (Oxford University Press, 2019) is Katz’s response to the first five years of this project. Cultural diplomacy has been part of the State Department’s outreach efforts since the 1940s, but hip hop was only included in the program when Toni Blackman became a cultural specialist in 2001. In his book, Katz takes on the hard questions prompted by the legacy of American imperialism abroad and racism at home that informs hip hop as a global art form and makes a Next Level residency a complex interaction between people that have something important in common, but also much that could divide them. He uses the insights he has gleaned from over thirty residencies around the world as he considers the sometimes conflicting agendas between artists and diplomats that can complicate cultural diplomacy. While defending the value of people-to-people exchanges as a way to bring about what he calls conflict transformation, Katz takes a hard look at what is beneficial as well as difficult about these types interactions.

Mark Katz is Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the founding director of Next Level. His work centers on hip hop and the transformative effect of technology on music. In 2016 he was awarded the Dent Medal. Build is his fourth book.

Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.

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Adrienne Petty, "Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War" (Oxford UP, 2013) Jan 24, 2020

Professor Adrienne Petty discusses her book, Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2013), the black and white farmers in the South who were part of the "small farming class," and their evolving strategies for holding onto their land through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The transformation of agriculture was one of the most far-reaching developments of the modern era. In analyzing how and why this change took place in the United States, scholars have most often focused on Midwestern family farmers, who experienced the change during the first half of the twentieth century, and southern sharecroppers, swept off the land by forces beyond their control.

Departing from the conventional story, this book focuses on small farm owners in North Carolina from the post-Civil War era to the post-Civil Rights era. It reveals that the transformation was more protracted and more contested than historians have understood it to be. Even though the number of farm owners gradually declined over the course of the century, the desire to farm endured among landless farmers, who became landowners during key moments of opportunity. Moreover, this book departs from other studies by considering all farm owners as a single class, rejecting the widespread approach of segregating black farm owners. The violent and restrictive political culture of Jim Crow regime, far from only affecting black farmers, limited the ability of all farmers to resist changes in agriculture.

By the 1970s, the vast reduction in the number of small farm owners had simultaneously destroyed a Southern yeomanry that had been the symbol of American democracy since the time of Thomas Jefferson, rolled back gains in landownership that families achieved during the first half century after the Civil War, and remade the rural South from an agrarian society to a site of global agribusiness.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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Great Books: Rich Blint on James Baldwin's "Another Country" Jan 21, 2020

"If we - and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks [...] do not falter in our duty now, we may be able [...] to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.” James Baldwin's appeal and admonition ring as true as they did in the 1960s, when the novelist became the nation's conscience - and also started to feel "like a broken record," repeating a message that white America refused to accept. The current revival of Baldwin in films, books, and documentaries such as Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me (2015), Raoul Peck's documentary based on Baldwin’s writings, I Am Not Your Negro (2017), Jesmyn Ward's incisive collection of essays, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race"(2017), and Barry Jenkins's feature film, If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), and references by liberals and conservatives alike, signal that something is yet to be grasped in Baldwin's powerful words.

Rich Blint is a scholar, writer and curator who teaches at the New School in New York City, and the author of a forthcoming book on Baldwin who has published, curated events, and participated in key academic events on Baldwin's unceasing relevance over the past several years. Rich explains what it means to take Baldwin seriously today — and why his work continues to be of such powerful relevance. Rich talks with me about Baldwin's powerful and indispensable 1961 novel, Another Country to show how Baldwin's vision can guide our actions today. He explains what it would mean to heed Baldwin's advice for the nation to finally leave its romantic adolescent delusions behind (including, I've learned in this conversation, its attachment to interracial buddy movies), and truly grow up. Special thanks to Rowan Ricardo Phillips, author of The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey and Heaven: Poems, for lending his voice to some of Baldwin’s quotes.

Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It"

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Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, "The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games" (NYU Press, 2019) Jan 20, 2020

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas has written a beautiful, captivating, and thoughtful book about the idea of our imaginations, especially our cultural imaginations, and the images and concepts that we all consume, especially as young readers and audience members. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (NYU Press, 2019) dives into the question of, as Thomas explains, “why magical stories are written for some people and not for others.” Thomas explores the narratives of magical and fantastical stories, especially ones that currently dominate our Anglo-American cultural landscape, and discerns a kind of “imagination gap” in so many of these literary and visual artifacts. The Dark Fantastic provides a framework to consider this imagination gap, by braiding together scholarship from across a variety of disciplines to think about this space within literature and visual popular culture. Thomas theorizes a tool to examine many of these narratives, the cycle through which to contextualize the Dark Other within these fantastical narratives, noting that the Dark Other is the “engine that drives the fantastic.”

The Dark Fantastic spends time analyzing and interrogating a variety of televisual and cinematic artifacts, noting how the Dark Other cycle operates in each of these narratives. In exploring these narratives, and considering who the protagonist is in so many cultural artifacts, the imagination gap becomes not only obvious but quite distinct. Thomas is concerned about this gap, because of the implication it has for readers and for film and television viewers—not only in regard to representation, but also in terms of learning how to imagine, how to dream, how to think conceptually, and how to center one’s self within these fictional spaces and created worlds.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

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Christopher Cameron, "Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism" (Northwestern UP, 2019) Jan 13, 2020

Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism (Northwestern University Press, 2019) by Christopher Cameron, an Associate Professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, is a precise and nuanced history of African American secularism from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. This text is written with economy and clarity as defined by four concise chapters that detail the major moments in African American history including some discussion of Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights-Black Power era. Traversing nearly two centuries of black thought, from the Antebellum period to the demise of the Black Power era, Black Freethinkers is the first comprehensive historical survey of black free thought. For Cameron, free thought encompasses atheism, agnosticism, deism, paganism and other non-traditional modes of thinking. Cameron’s work focuses primarily on the ideas advanced by African American men and women of letters such as Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin to support his core argument that freethought and “unbelief” have been key elements of Black thought since the era of enslavement to the institutionalization of free thought oriented associations in African American society.

Cameron’s work forces us to rethink the way we study the era of enslavement and African American culture, and the place of Douglass as an American intellectual central to this history, as well as the role of religion in Black life more generally. In many respects, his text presents a more humanistic portrait of African American thought and culture from a historical perspective that goes well beyond most texts on this subject.

Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., has taught survey courses in U.S. history, Western Civilization, and upper division courses on the history of African Americans at the university level for more than fifteen years. Her teaching and research interests include: African American intellectual history, gender in U.S. history, and race/ethnicity studies. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. She has published book chapters, essays, and encyclopedia entries and edited/authored five books. Her latest publications include Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger, 2017) and, with Dr. G. Reginald Daniel, professor of historical sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union (University Press of Mississippi 2014). You can learn more about her work here or follow her on twitter (@DrHettie2017).

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John N. Singer, "Race, Sports, and Education: Improving Opportunities and Outcomes for Black Male College Athletes" (Harvard Ed Press, 2019) Jan 10, 2020

College sport is a multi-billion dollar industry. The men and women who lead the teams in the most important conferences often make millions of dollars between their coaching salaries and endorsement deals. But what about the athletes themselves? Most get a “free ride” (tuition, food and board), but is that sufficient?

Given that the majority of the athletes in the major sports (read that to be football and men’s basketball) are African American, what type of recompense are they getting for their toil and sweat on the gridiron and the hardcourt? Since the overwhelming majority of these men do not make it to the NFL or the NBA, are they benefiting from being student-athletes, or are they being taken advantage of by schools and universities that make money off of their efforts and provide little in return?

It is important questions such as these that John N. Singer addresses in his book, Race, Sports, and Education: Improving Opportunities and Outcomes for Black Male College Athletes (Harvard Education Press, 2019). By interviewing athletes, Singer gets to the heart of the debate about the value (or not) of collegiate athletics. Many of the subjects interviewed did benefit, but they relate how the machinery of college athletics still continues to exploit its principal workers: African American young men. Singer’s work opens the door to the voices of such individuals, and they have much to say about the current (sorry) state of things, and how the athletes themselves can work (with concerned faculty and administrators) to bring about change.

Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University.

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Keri Leigh Merritt, "Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South" (Cambridge UP, 2017) Jan 03, 2020

Keri Leigh Merritt discusses her book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and intersections of race, class, politics, and slavery in the pre-Civil War South.

Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Merritt reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor. With the rising global demand for cotton - and thus, slaves - in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass who were unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete - for jobs or living wages - with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socio-economic consequences as a result of living in a slave society. Merritt examines how these 'masterless' men and women threatened the existing Southern hierarchy and ultimately helped push Southern slaveholders toward secession and civil war.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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Brandon R. Byrd, "The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti" (U Penn Press, 2019) Dec 24, 2019

Brandon R. Byrd is the author of The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. The Black Republic examines the multitude of responses by African American leaders towards Haiti following the Civil War and going into the 20th Century. Byrd’s work provides keen insight the ways in which Haiti was as a symbol of Black sovereignty and self-determination for many African-Americans, as well as a site of concern for those who wished to present Black Americans as worthy and capable of governance. The Black Republic brings to light an often glossed over part Black internationalism long history, placing the United States and Haiti in dialogue.

Brandon R. Byrd is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where he specializes in intellectual history of the 19th and 20th Centuries, African American History, and the African Diaspora.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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Talitha LeFlouria, "Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South" (UNC Press, 2016) Dec 20, 2019

Professor Talitha LeFlouria, a fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, discusses her book, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) and the lives, labors, and legacies of incarcerated black women and the convict lease system in the early 20th century South.

In 1868, the state of Georgia began to make its rapidly growing population of prisoners available for hire. The resulting convict leasing system ensnared not only men but also African American women, who were forced to labor in camps and factories to make profits for private investors. In this vivid work of history, LeFlouria draws from a rich array of primary sources to piece together the stories of these women, recounting what they endured in Georgia's prison system and what their labor accomplished. LeFlouria argues that African American women's presence within the convict lease and chain-gang systems of Georgia helped to modernize the South by creating a new and dynamic set of skills for black women. At the same time, female inmates struggled to resist physical and sexual exploitation and to preserve their human dignity within a hostile climate of terror. This revealing history redefines the social context of black women's lives and labor in the New South and allows their stories to be told for the first time.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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Darnella Davis, "Untangling a Red, White, and Black Heritage: A Personal History of the Allotment Era" (U New Mexico Press, 2018) Dec 19, 2019

In Untangling a Red, White, and Black Heritage: A Personal History of the Allotment Era (U New Mexico Press, 2018), Darnella Davis combines the personal with the national in telling the story of allotment in Indian Territory/Oklahoma. Dr. Davis traces her family story back several generations and explores the contested and complicated nature of race in the United States. Her journey through the archives is a personal one, and draws upon a range of sources form family stories and saved documents, to government records and the tangled history of land sales. Untangling a Red, White, and Black Heritage is about how marriages, births, and lives lived in Oklahoma complicate the story of race in the United States, and describe the histories of Cherokee and Muskogee Creek leaders such as Amos Thornton and the Adams clan, as well as the children of Oklahoma freedmen and women such as John Bowlin. Davis’s story of her kin is a family chronicle, but also a story of how the United States has attempted to put people into ill-fitting boxes based on race. As Davis herself asks, “Do the stories of the Thorntons, Bowlins, Davises, and Adamses tell us that the federal government succeeded in transforming a communal culture into one solely occupied with individual wealth?” Her argument is one that embraces complication and emphasizes how the microcosm of family can encompass a hopeful story of American life.

Stephen Hausmann is an Assistant Professor of US History at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and Indigenous history and is currently working on his book manuscript, an environmental history of the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming.

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Davin Phoenix, "The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotion in Politics" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Dec 19, 2019

In the race for the best book of 2020, Davin Phoenix has placed himself in the lead. Phoenix has written The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotion in Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019). He is assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine. The Anger Gap answers dozens of the most important questions of our time. Throughout the book, Phoenix pushes for more data and more nuanced answers. We know from this book that anger is animating politics, but the ways that anger is expressed and translated into political participation, varies greatly by race, gender, and age.

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Lennox Honychurch, "In the Forests of Freedom: The Fighting Maroons of Dominica" (UP Mississippi, 2017) Dec 12, 2019

Maroons—enslaved Africans who escaped and formed autonomous communities—dominated Dominica’s hilly interior for centuries. Dominica’s unusual history of a relatively brief period of colonization and few sugar plantations shaped a history of Maroon life very different from the more familiar experiences of Jamaican Maroons. Here they were able to exploit differences among Europeans and elude slavery to a much greater extent. With meticulous attention to detail, Lennox Honychurch's new book In the Forests of Freedom: The Fighting Maroons of Dominica (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) tells the fascinating stories of these communities and offers accounts of both heroism and tragedy.

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Matthew Hild and Keri Leigh Merritt, "Reconsidering Southern Labor History" (UP of Florida, 2018) Dec 06, 2019

Matthew Hild and Keri Leigh Merritt discuss their new edited volume, Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power (University Press of Florida, 2018), the nexus of race, class and power in the history of labor in the South, and how a new generation of southern labor scholars are changing our understanding of labor's past, present and future in the region.

The American Dream of reaching success through sheer sweat and determination rings false for countless members of the working classes. This volume shows that many of the difficulties facing workers today have deep roots in the history of the exploitation of labor in the South. Contributors make the case that the problems that have long beset southern labor, including the legacy of slavery, low wages, lack of collective bargaining rights, and repression of organized unions, have become the problems of workers across the country.

Spanning nearly all of U.S. history, the essays in this collection range from West Virginia to Florida to Texas. They examine vagrancy laws in the early republic, inmate labor at state penitentiaries, mine workers and union membership, and strikes and the often-violent strikebreaking that followed. They also look at pesticide exposure among farmworkers, labor activism during the civil rights movement, and foreign-owned auto factories in the rural South. They distinguish between different struggles experienced by women and men, as well as by African American, Latino, and white workers.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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Lundy Braun, "Breathing Race into the Machine" (U Minnesota Press, 2014) Dec 04, 2019

“We cannot get answers to questions that cannot be asked.” Lundy Braun’s influential book, Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) documents the history and present-day use of an everyday medical instrument, the spirometer, which measures a person’s lung capacity. The instrument has a long history, but since the 1970s, this common medical device has been built with a switch that forces users to choose: are these the lungs of a person who is Black or a person who is White? In its materiality, the instrument forces racialized and individualized answers to the question: What explains human variation? In doing so, the people who have imagined, built, and refined the instrument have foreclosed structural, political explanations of human difference—and in doing so, foreclosed the possibility of holding governments and corporations accountable, including in recent workers’ compensation lawsuits.

Lundy Braun tells the long history of this instrument as it passed between “knowledge networks” in the United Kingdom, United States, and South Africa within the contexts of medicine, law, and education. Admirably, Braun documents how and in what terms experts (unsuccessfully) questioned the spirometer’s epistemic authority and its racialization, as well as how experts partnered with social justice groups to use the spirometer for liberatory ends. The book emphasizes the contexts of war and industrial labor, the importance of standardization, and, above all, the role of the spirometer in creating and maintaining the “white norm” in the body.

Lundy Braun is Professor of Medical Science in Pathology and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. The interview was conducted collaboratively by Laura Stark [insert www.laura-stark.com] and students in her Vanderbilt seminar, History of Global Health: Omar Amir, Maggie Cox, Bryce Bailey, Donald Fitzgerald, Ashley Hunter, Jillian Jackson, Rohit Kamath, Zoe Mulraine, Liu Lanxi, Madison Noall, Catie O’Reilly, Isabella Schaffer, Katie Swift, Charlotte Whitfield, and Allie Yan.

For ideas and resources to use NBN interviews in your classes, please email Laura Stark at laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu or see Stark’s essay “Can New Media Save the Book?” in Contexts (2015).

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Asher Price, "Earl Campbell: Yards After Contact" (U Texas Press, 2019) Dec 04, 2019

Earl Campbell was a force in American football, winning a state championship in high school, rushing his way to a Heisman trophy for the University of Texas, and earning MVP as he took the Houston Oilers to the brink of the Super Bowl. Asher Price's exhilarating blend of biography and history, Earl Campbell: Yards After Contact(University of Texas Press, 2019) chronicles the challenges and sacrifices one supremely gifted athlete faced in his journey to the Hall of Fame. The story begins in Tyler, Texas, and features his indomitable mother, a crusading judge, and a newly integrated high school, then moves to Austin, home of the University of Texas (infamously, the last all-white national champion in college football), where legendary coach Darrell Royal stakes his legacy on recruiting Campbell. Later, in booming, Luv-Ya-Blue Houston, Campbell reaches his peak with beloved coach Bum Phillips, who celebrates his star runner’s bruising style even as it takes its toll on Campbell’s body.

Drawing on new interviews and research, Asher Price reveals how a naturally reticent kid from the country who never sought the spotlight struggled with complex issues of race and health. In an age when concussion revelations and player protest against racial injustice rock the NFL, Campbell’s life is a timely story of hard-earned success—and heart-wrenching sacrifice.

Paul Knepper is an attorney and writer who was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. He used to write about basketball for Bleacher Report and his currently working on his first book about the New York Knicks Teams of the 1990s is due out next year. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) Dec 03, 2019

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.

However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.

In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world.

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John L. Brooke, "'There Is a North': Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation in the Coming of the Civil War" (U Mass Press, 2019) Dec 03, 2019

How does political change take hold? In the 1850s, politicians and abolitionists despaired, complaining that the “North, the poor timid, mercenary, driveling North” offered no forceful opposition to the power of the slaveholding South. And yet, as John L. Brooke shows, the North did change. Inspired by brave fugitives who escaped slavery and the cultural craze that was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the North rose up to battle slavery, ultimately waging the bloody Civil War.

While Lincoln’s alleged quip about the little woman who started the big war has been oft-repeated, scholars have not fully explained the dynamics between politics and culture in the decades leading up to 1861. Rather than simply viewing the events of the 1850s through the lens of party politics, 'There Is a North': Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation in the Coming of the Civil War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019) is the first book to explore how cultural action—including minstrelsy, theater, and popular literature—transformed public opinion and political structures. Taking the North’s rallying cry as his title, Brooke shows how the course of history was forever changed.

Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Peter Kerasotis, "Alou: My Baseball Journey" (U Nebraska Press, 2018) Nov 26, 2019

All aficionados of baseball are familiar with the pathbreaking role of Jackie Robinson in reintegrating the game back in 1947. What many fans are less familiar with are the issues that Latinos of color endured both in the minor leagues and the Majors starting back in the 1950s. How difficult was it for a mulato, a person who had never endured (or even heard of) Jim Crow, to come to grips with the “peculiarities” of life in the United States, while simultaneously trying to learn a new language as well as trying play well enough in order to move up the various rungs of a particular franchise’s farm system?

The story of Major League great (as a player and manager) Felipe Alou sheds light on this important topic. Alou started playing organized baseball late in life (early teens), endured poverty and hardship in his native Dominican Republic, and then helped to break down barriers of language and perception throughout his long career on the field and in the dugout. All the while, he played with skill, dignity, and intelligence; helping to shatter the stereotypes that professional baseball (and many in the United States) embraced about Spanish-speakers.

Felipe utilized his position as a player, coach, and manager to help various clubs win ball games; but he also did even more important things. He challenged the notion that Latinos are lazy and not tactical in their approach and understanding of baseball. By doing this, he has opened many possibilities for the current and upcoming generation of Latinos in the game. No longer are Spanish-surnamed players merely perceived as athletes, now they have Alou, and others, to look toward as role models for entering into the off-the-field aspect of the game. The book, Alou: My Baseball Journey (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), which is co-authored with Peter Kerasotis, documents the life, struggles, and successes of this great ambassador of the game of baseball.

Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University.

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Rebecca Scofield, "Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West" (U Washington, 2019) Nov 25, 2019

Rodeo is one of the indelible images of culture in the American West. The John Wayne-like cowboy tenaciously hanging on to the bucking bronc is a classic vision of what it means to be in the West. In Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West (University of Washington, 2019), author and University of Idaho historian Rebecca Scofield argues that rodeo performance has also long-been a means of asserting “Western-ness” for people excluded from narratives about the region. From women rodeo riders to African American and gay performers, Scofield writes about the ways professional rodeo has been a means of inclusion into Western stories, and how professionalization of the sport has also excluded riders from its ranks. Among the stories Scofield tells are the incarcerated Texas rodeo performers who put their bodies on the line both for the coerced spectacle, as a means of entertaining visitors, and as a method of asserting their rights and humanity within a dehumanizing system. The meaning of rodeo has been contested and contingent throughout the twentieth century, and is about much more than clowns, cowboys, and angry steer. Outriders may exist on the fringes of traditional Western stories, but they are central to the constantly changing image of the American West.

Stephen Hausmann is an Assistant Professor of US History at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and Indigenous history and is currently working on his book manuscript, an environmental history of the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming.

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Jonathan Rothwell, "A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society" (Princeton UP, 2019) Nov 20, 2019

Inequality in the U.S. has increased dramatically over the past decades -- on that there is agreement. There is less agreement on the causes of that inequality, the consequences of it, and, perhaps least of all, what to do about it. Join us to hear Jonathan Rothwell talk about his new book, A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society (Princeton University Press, 2019), which pushes back against some of the conventional wisdom about the sources of inequality to offer his own provocative diagnosis of the problem and proposed remedies for it.

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Daniel Schwartz, "Ghetto: The History of a Word" (Harvard UP, 2019) Nov 19, 2019

The word “ghetto” has taken on different meanings since its coinage in the 16th century. The uses of this term have varied considerably, from its original understanding as a compulsory Jewish quarter in Venice to its appropriation by black Americans to describe racial segregation in the United States. Daniel Schwartz traces this fascinating history in Ghetto: The History of a Word (Harvard University Press, 2019) and examines how “ghetto” has come to occupy different meanings to different people in a variety of historical and cultural contexts.

Daniel Schwartz is Associate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at George Washington University.

Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

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Ruha Benjamin, "Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code" (Polity, 2019) Nov 19, 2019

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.

In Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity, 2019), Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life.

This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com.

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David Wheat, "Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640" (UNC Press, 2016) Nov 18, 2019

David Wheat’s fantastic book Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640 (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) argues that the extensive participation of Luso-Africans, Latinized Africans, and free people of color made possible Spain’s colonization of the Caribbean. For Wheat, the history of the region is entangled with older and deeper histories of Atlantic Africa and the Iberian world. Particularly, Wheat focuses on events and precedents that took place in Upper Guinea and West Central Africa, two regions that experienced very different patterns of exchange, conquest, and enslavement. Such emphasis on connection and entanglement pushes our listeners to move away from narratives that have argued that Africans and their descendants were brought to the New World simply to “replace” the labor of extinguishing indigenous communities. Instead, Wheat asks us to focus on the specific roles that these forced migrants had in the colonization of important Caribbean ports such as Cartagena de Indias, Havana, Panama City, Santo Domingo and their semirural hinterlands. We thus learn about the existence of Nharas and Morenas Horras, black women that held social power and prestige. We also hear about black peasants, men and women that were the basis of agricultural production, and that occasionally found ways to move up the social ladder, even managing to become property owners. This is then a nuanced story that complicates seemingly straightforward concepts such as “settler” and “colonialist,” and that asks us to re-conceptualize this period as one of social mobility, in which racial hierarchies were less stark and somewhat more flexible. As Wheat tell us by the end of the interview, this deep past teaches us that identities can, and have been in the past, flexible and prone to transformation. This is of course an important lesson for the present for questions about identity are ever more pressing in contemporary political debates.

Lisette Varón Caravajal is a doctoral student in history at Rutgers University.

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Wendy Gonaver, "The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840–1880" (UNC Press, 2019) Nov 15, 2019

Dr. Wendy Gonaver discusses her book, The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880 (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Virginia, and the roles that race, the institution of slavery, and slave labor played in the development of psychiatric diagnosis and care through the nineteenth century and beyond.

Though the origins of asylums can be traced to Europe, the systematic segregation of the mentally ill into specialized institutions occurred in the United States only after 1800, just as the struggle to end slavery took hold. In this book, Wendy Gonaver examines the relationship between these two historical developments, showing how slavery and ideas about race shaped early mental health treatment in the United States, especially in the South. She reveals these connections through the histories of two asylums in Virginia: the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Williamsburg, the first in the nation; and the Central Lunatic Asylum in Petersburg, the first created specifically for African Americans. Eastern Lunatic Asylum was the only institution to accept both slaves and free blacks as patients and to employ slaves as attendants.

Drawing from these institutions' untapped archives, Gonaver reveals how slavery influenced ideas about patient liberty, about the proper relationship between caregiver and patient, about what constituted healthy religious belief and unhealthy fanaticism, and about gender. This early form of psychiatric care acted as a precursor to public health policy for generations, and Gonaver's book fills an important gap in the historiography of mental health and race in the nineteenth century.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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Dave Tell, "Remembering Emmett Till" (U Chicago Press, 2019) Nov 14, 2019

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Dave Tell (he/him/his)--Professor of Communication at The University of Kansas--on the insightful Remembering Emmett Till (University of Chicago Press, 2019). The book takes a rhetorical approach on the commemoration of Emmett Till by looking at acts of remembering Emmett following his brutal murder in the 1960s until the present day. Tell persuasively demonstrates the way in which the act of commemorating has saturated the physical landscape of the Mississippi Delta. In addition to a fascinating discussion of Till’s legacy and the current commemoration of racial tragedy in the American South, Dave also introduces listeners to the Emmett Till Memory Project (ETMP), which, among other things, offers a free app through which all of us can calibrate our relationship to Emmett to civil rights as an ongoing collective project.

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William P. Hustwit, "Integration Now: Alexander v. Holmes and the End of Jim Crow Education" (UNC Press, 2019) Nov 12, 2019

In this episode of Talking Legal History, Siobhan talks with William P. Hustwit about his book Integration Now: Alexander v. Holmes and the End of Jim Crow Education (UNC Press, 2019). Hustwit is the Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Birmingham-Southern College. Fifty years after the Supreme Court decision, Integration Now explores how studying the case Alexander v. Holmes (1969) enhances understandings of the history underlying school desegregation. This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press.

Recovering the history of an often-ignored landmark Supreme Court case, William P. Hustwit assesses the significant role that Alexander v. Holmes (1969) played in integrating the South’s public schools. Although Brown v. Board of Education has rightly received the lion’s share of historical analysis, its ambiguous language for implementation led to more than a decade of delays and resistance by local and state governments. Alexander v. Holmes required “integration now,” and less than a year later, thousands of children were attending integrated schools.

Hustwit traces the progression of the Alexander case to show how grassroots activists in Mississippi operated hand in glove with lawyers and judges involved in the litigation. By combining a narrative of the larger legal battle surrounding the case and the story of the local activists who pressed for change, Hustwit offers an innovative, well-researched account of a definitive legal decision that reaches from the cotton fields of Holmes County to the chambers of the Supreme Court in Washington.

Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University.

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AfroAm Studies Roundtable: Ashley Farmer on "Archiving While Black" Nov 08, 2019

For histories to be written, historians must engage archival material. What happens, though, when particular groups of historians do not feel like they have full access to archival material(s), simply because of their race? Before the 1960s and 1970s, when Black historians were accepted into the historical profession, African American scholars did not have equal access to the archives. The stain of this history has yet to go away.

In a special discussion on her groundbreaking 2018 Black Perspectives piece, “Archiving While Black,” Dr. Ashley D. Farmer, Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and History, is interviewed by New Books in African American Studies co-host, Adam McNeil, about the origin story of Farmer’s important piece, and about her own experiences archiving while Black. Farmer discusses not only her personal experiences in the archive, but also how those experiences now inform her classroom teaching while training new historians.

Adam McNeil is a 2nd year History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

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Derrick E. White, "Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football" (UNC, 2019) Nov 08, 2019

Dr. Derrick E. White's new book Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) chronicles the development of black college football in the twentieth century, and is among the first comprehensive histories of black college athletics. Using the biography of Alonzo “Jake” Gaither and the history of the football program at Florida A&M University (FAMU), Dr. White shows how black college football and its supporters created successful programs during segregation by relying on a network of athletic enthusiasts in the media, on campuses, and in the community.

White is the author of The Challenge of Blackness: The Institute of the Black World and Political Activism in the 1970s (Florida, 2011) and has published articles in New Politics, The Journal of African American History, the C.L.R. James Journal, The Journal of African American Studies, and The Florida Historical Quarterly. He's also the co-host “The Black Athlete Podcast” with Professor Louis Moore of Grand Valley State University. You can find him on Twitter @blackstar1906.

Adam McNeil is a History PhD Student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

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Nina Sun Eidsheim, "The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre and Vocality in African American Music" (Duke UP, 2019) Nov 04, 2019

In 2018, Nicolle R. Holliday and Daniel Villarreal published the results of a study they conducted asking people to rank how “black” President Obama sounded when given four different examples of his speech. Dr. Nina Sun Eidsheim’s latest book, The Race of Sound: Listening Timbre and Vocality in African American Music (Duke University Press, 2019) explores the values, stereotypes, and cultural norms that underline such a question. Through examples ranging from black opera singers in the nineteenth century to user’s responses to the vocal synthesis technology called Vocaloid, Eidsheim sheds light on the ways that listeners invest racial and gendered meanings in vocal timbre. Contending that vocal timbre is an even stronger marker for race and gender than physical appearance, Eidsheim explores the consequences of and reasons for the cognitive dissonance caused by of the seeming “mismatch” between the bodies and vocal timbres of African American jazz singer Jimmy Scott and Norwegian child singer and Billie Holiday impersonator, Angelina Jordan. She takes on the significant political and social results of essentialized understandings of race, gender, age, and ethnicity that support cultural constructions of identity and investigates the central role vocal timbre plays in creating and reinforcing those ideas.

Nina Sun Eidsheim is a Professor of Musicology in the Herb Alpert School of Music at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.

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Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing Nov 03, 2019

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are written. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it.

How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com.

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Jay Driskell, "Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta's Booker T. Washington High School" (UVA Press, 2014) Nov 01, 2019

Professor Jay Driskell of Hood College, author of Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta's Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics (University of Virginia Press, 2014), traces the roots of black protest politics to early 20th century Atlanta and the fight for equal education.

In 1919 the NAACP organized a voting bloc powerful enough to compel the city of Atlanta to budget $1.5 million for the construction of schools for black students. This victory would have been remarkable in any era, but in the context of the Jim Crow South it was revolutionary. Schooling Jim Crow tells the story of this little-known campaign, which happened less than thirteen years after the Atlanta race riot of 1906 and just weeks before a wave of anti-black violence swept the nation in the summer after the end of World War I. Despite the constant threat of violence, Atlanta’s black voters were able to force the city to build five black grammar schools and Booker T. Washington High School, the city’s first publicly funded black high school. Schooling Jim Crow reveals how they did it and why it matters.

In this pathbreaking book, Driskell explores the changes in black political consciousness that made the NAACP’s grassroots campaign possible at a time when most black southerners could not vote, let alone demand schools. He reveals how black Atlantans transformed a reactionary politics of respectability into a militant force for change. Contributing to this militancy were understandings of class and gender transformed by decades of racially segregated urban development, the 1906 Atlanta race riot, Georgia’s disfranchisement campaign of 1908, and the upheavals of World War I. On this cultural foundation, black Atlantans built a new urban black politics that would become the model for the NAACP’s political strategy well into the twentieth century.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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Zoltan Hajnal, "Dangerously Divided: How Race and Class Shape Winning and Losing in American Politics" (Cambridge UP, 2019) Oct 30, 2019

In his new book Dangerously Divided: How Race and Class Shape Winning and Losing in American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Zoltan Hajnal examines the political impact of the two most significant demographic trends of last fifty years. Examining federal and local elections over many decades, as well as policy, Hajnal finds that race more than class or any other demographic factor shapes not only how Americans vote but also who wins and who loses. America has become a racial democracy, with non-Whites and especially African Americans regularly on the losing side. As worrisome, Hajnal shows that over time these divisions are worsening, yet also discovers that electing Democrats to office can make democracy more even and ultimately reduce inequality in well-being.

Hajnal is professor of political science at UC-San Diego.

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W. Caleb McDaniel, "Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America" (Oxford UP, 2019) Oct 30, 2019

Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood's employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved throughout the Civil War, giving birth to a son in Mississippi and never forgetting who had put her in this position.

By 1869, Wood had obtained her freedom for a second time and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for damages in 1870. Astonishingly, after eight years of litigation, Wood won her case: in 1878, a Federal jury awarded her $2,500. The decision stuck on appeal. More important than the amount, though the largest ever awarded by an American court in restitution for slavery, was the fact that any money was awarded at all. By the time the case was decided, Ward had become a wealthy businessman and a pioneer of convict leasing in the South. Wood's son later became a prominent Chicago lawyer, and she went on to live until 1912.

W. Caleb McDaniel's book is an epic tale of a black woman who survived slavery twice and who achieved more than merely a moral victory over one of her oppressors. Above all, Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America (Oxford University Press, 2019) is a portrait of an extraordinary individual as well as a searing reminder of the lessons of her story, which establish beyond question the connections between slavery and the prison system that rose in its place.

Adam X. McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. McNeil also regularly contributes to Black Perspectives and The Junto.

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Nicholas Buccola, "The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America" (Princeton UP, 2019) Oct 30, 2019

Nicholas Buccola’s new book, The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America(Princeton University Press, 2019), uses the iconic debate between Baldwin and Buckley which took place at the Cambridge Union in February 1965 as an entry point into their own lives and their place within the post black freedom struggle and the rise of the modern conservative movement. A timely and eloquent contribution, The Fire is Upon Us is the first book to tell the full story of the event, the radically different paths that led Baldwin and Buckley to it, and how the debate and the decades-long clash between the men continues to illuminate America’s racial divide today.

James West is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in American History at Northumbria University. He is a historian of the modern United States. For more information please visit https://www.ejameswest.com

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Aisha Shillingford and Terry Marshall, "Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Re-Imaging Gender in Wakanda" (WDL, 2019) Oct 28, 2019

Wakanda Dream Lab’s anthology, Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Re-Imaging Gender in Wakanda, features the work of writers, artists, and activists, as they imagine gender justice through the framework of Wakanda. The various stories and pieces are creative and thought-provoking as they center the voices, experiences, and visions of Black and Native women, femmes, girls, and trans and gender non-conforming people. In this interview, we chat with Aisha Shillingford and Terry Marshall about their own work and the work of Wakanda Dream Lab. We go on to discuss the process of putting together the anthology, what makes Wakanda so special, and what they want readers to learn from the book. Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Re-Imaging Gender in Wakanda shows the importance of speculative writing in envisioning liberation and justice.

A huge shoutout to the many people involved in this project!

Follow Wakanda Dream Lab’s work on their website and on their Instagram.

Download the anthology for free here!

Adrian King (they/them) is a PhD student in American Culture at the University of Michigan.

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Marc Dollinger, "Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s" (Brandeis UP, 2018) Oct 25, 2019

In Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s (Brandeis University Press, 2018), Professor Marc Dollinger who holds the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility at San Francisco State University, challenges widely held beliefs about the black-Jewish alliance in American politics. Dollinger shows how black nationalists enabled Jewish activists to devise a new Judeo-centered political agenda - including the emancipation of Soviet Jews, the rise of Jewish day schools, the revitalization of worship services with gender-inclusive liturgy, and the birth of a new form of American Zionism. This book breaks new ground and charts new directions for understanding the relationship between black and Jewish politics in the twentieth century and beyond.

Dr Max Kaiser teaches at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiserm@unimelb.edu.au

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Jared Hardesty, "Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England" (Bright Leaf, 2019) Oct 25, 2019

Shortly after the first Europeans arrived in seventeenth-century New England, they began to import Africans and capture the area’s indigenous peoples as slaves. By the eve of the American Revolution, enslaved people comprised only about 4 percent of the population, but slavery had become instrumental to the region’s economy and had shaped its cultural traditions. This story of slavery in New England has been little told. In this concise yet comprehensive history, Jared Hardesty, Associate Professor of History at Western Washington University, focuses on the individual stories of enslaved people, bringing their experiences to life. He also explores larger issues such as the importance of slavery to the colonization of the region and to agriculture and industry, New England’s deep connections to Caribbean plantation societies, and the significance of emancipation movements in the era of the American Revolution. Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England (Bright Leaf, An Imprint of University of Massachusetts Press, 2019), is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of New England.

Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Greta de Jong, "You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement" (UNC Press, 2016) Oct 25, 2019

Professor Greta de Jong of the University of Nevada, Reno, discusses her book, You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), rural organizing, social justice movements, and the connected histories of the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty in the US South.

Two revolutions roiled the rural South after the mid-1960s: the political revolution wrought by the passage of civil rights legislation, and the ongoing economic revolution brought about by increasing agricultural mechanization. Political empowerment for black southerners coincided with the transformation of southern agriculture and the displacement of thousands of former sharecroppers from the land. Focusing on the plantation regions of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, Greta de Jong analyzes how social justice activists responded to mass unemployment by lobbying political leaders, initiating antipoverty projects, and forming cooperative enterprises that fostered economic and political autonomy, efforts that encountered strong opposition from free market proponents who opposed government action to solve the crisis.

Making clear the relationship between the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty, this history of rural organizing shows how responses to labor displacement in the South shaped the experiences of other Americans who were affected by mass layoffs in the late twentieth century, shedding light on a debate that continues to reverberate today.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) Oct 24, 2019

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers(West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all.

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).

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Brenna Wynn Greer, "Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined American Citizenship" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019) Oct 23, 2019

Brenna Wynn Greer’s new study Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined American Citizenship(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), provides a fascinating look at a trio of black imagemakers – publisher John H. Johnson, PR executive Moss Kendrix, and photographer Gordon Parks – who played a critical role in selling the nation civil rights and African American respectability during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Greer offers a dense and highly nuanced analysis of the relationship between race, capitalism, and the modern American state. By demonstrating how black entrepreneurs used magazines, photographs and advertising to position African Americans as enthusiastic consumers and upstanding citizens, Represented provides a field-altering account of the ways in which black people attempting to make the market work for racial progress.

James West is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in American History at Northumbria University. He is a historian of the modern United States. For more information please visit https://www.ejameswest.com

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Karen Cox, "Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South" (UNC Press, 2017) Oct 18, 2019

Karen Cox, Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, discusses her new book, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and what one murder case in 1930s Mississippi reveals about race relations, criminal justice, and life in the Jim Crow South.

In 1932, the city of Natchez, Mississippi, reckoned with an unexpected influx of journalists and tourists as the lurid story of a local murder was splashed across headlines nationwide. Two eccentrics, Richard Dana and Octavia Dockery—known in the press as the "Wild Man" and the "Goat Woman"—enlisted an African American man named George Pearls to rob their reclusive neighbor, Jennie Merrill, at her estate. During the attempted robbery, Merrill was shot and killed. The crime drew national coverage when it came to light that Dana and Dockery, the alleged murderers, shared their huge, decaying antebellum mansion with their goats and other livestock, which prompted journalists to call the estate "Goat Castle." Pearls was killed by an Arkansas policeman in an unrelated incident before he could face trial. However, as was all too typical in the Jim Crow South, the white community demanded "justice," and an innocent black woman named Emily Burns was ultimately sent to prison for the murder of Merrill. Dana and Dockery not only avoided punishment but also lived to profit from the notoriety of the murder by opening their derelict home to tourists.

Strange, fascinating, and sobering, Goat Castle tells the story of this local feud, killing, investigation, and trial, showing how a true crime tale of fallen southern grandeur and murder obscured an all too familiar story of racial injustice.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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Steven White, "World War II and American Racial Politics: Public Opinion, the Presidency, and Civil Rights Advocacy" (Cambridge UP, 2019) Oct 18, 2019

World War II played an important role in the trajectory of race and American political development, but the War's effects were much more complex than many assume. In order to unpack these complexities and mine underutilized sources of public opinion data, Steven White had written World War II and American Racial Politics: Public Opinion, the Presidency, and Civil Rights Advocacy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). White is an assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University.

White offers an extensive analysis of rarely used survey data and archival evidence to assess white racial attitudes and the White house response to civil rights. Intriguingly, he shows that the white public's racial policy opinions largely DID NOT liberalize during the war against Nazi Germany and Congress remained unwilling to act on a civil rights policy agenda. Painfully aware of this, civil rights advocates shifted venues to lobby for unilateral action by the president. This book offers a reinterpretation of this critical period in American political development, as well as implications for the theoretical relationship between war and the inclusion of marginalized groups in democratic societies.

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David Farber, "Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed" (Cambridge UP, 2019) Oct 16, 2019

A shattering account of the crack cocaine years from award-winning American historian David Farber, Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed (Cambridge University Press, 2019) tells the story of the young men who bet their lives on the rewards of selling 'rock' cocaine, the people who gave themselves over to the crack pipe, and the often-merciless authorities who incarcerated legions of African Americans caught in the crack cocaine underworld. Based on interviews, archival research, judicial records, underground videos, and prison memoirs, Crack explains why, in a de-industrializing America in which market forces ruled and entrepreneurial risk-taking was celebrated, the crack industry was a lucrative enterprise for the 'Horatio Alger boys' of their place and time. These young, predominately African American entrepreneurs were profit-sharing partners in a deviant, criminal form of economic globalization. Hip Hop artists often celebrated their exploits but overwhelmingly, Americans - across racial lines -did not. Crack takes a hard look at the dark side of late twentieth-century capitalism.

David Farber is Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Kansas.

Matthew Johnson teaches history at Texas Tech University.

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Richard Bell, "Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home" (Simon and Schuster, 2019) Oct 16, 2019

Richard Bell is the author of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home, published by Simon & Schuster in 2019. Stolen tells the true story of how five young Black boys were kidnapped from Philadelphia in 1825. Dr. Bell recounts the boys’ journey as they were forced to travel south into slavery. Those familiar with Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years A Slave or Erica Dunbar’s Never Caught will find Dr. Bell’s Stolen to be a must read, as he explores how one kidnapping was shaped by the larger history of slavery, the interstate slave trade, the law, and a host of other factors.

Dr. Bell is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland – College Park, where he studies United States history and culture in the 18th and 19th Centuries.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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T. L. Bunyasi and C. W. Smith, "Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter" (NYU Press, 2019) Oct 14, 2019

Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith have written an accessible and important book about the #BlackLivesMatter social movement and broader considerations of, essentially, how we got to where we are, in the United States, in regard to race and racism. They also go on to suggest and encourage readers and citizens to move towards a more equal and better future.

Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter (NYU Press, 2019) compiles social science research and data to explain the current situation for white citizens, African-American citizens, Latinx citizens, and citizens of other races in the United States. By laying out, in facts and figures, the very different experiences and daily lives of citizens, Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith demonstrate not only the way many individuals live profoundly separate and different lives in the United States, but also to show the many ways in which we, as Americans, speak past each other when we are talking about the fraught issue of race, racism, and racial inequality. Stay Woke provides substantial social science data to buttress the discussion and analysis of race and racism in the United States, and it also has an excellent chapter that provides definitions, context, and understanding of so many of the terms that are used, and often differently conceptualized, by citizens in thinking about race, inequality, and social and political dynamics. The authors also examine the history around structural racism and racial inequality. At the end of each chapter Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith also include other resources that contributed to their research and that extends the substance of each chapter—the resources include podcast, films, documentaries, television shows, websites, books and articles. These resources along with the questions provided for discussion and debate help readers and students think about what they are learning from each section of the book. The final part of the book provides more options for activism while positioning these actions within the American federal system. This book can be used in classes across a variety of disciplines; it is also a text that is accessible and of interest to any citizen who might want to learn more and work towards a better future.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012).

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Rafia Zafar, "Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning" (U Georgia Press, 2019) Oct 11, 2019

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with Rafia Zafar about her 2019 book Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning, from the University of Georgia Press. It’s part of the Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People and Place series. The book contains 7 chapters, covering the earliest formally-published African-American-authored hospitality books from the 1820s to Edna Lewis’s Taste of Country Cooking from the 1970s, as well as the unpublished and incomplete cookbook of Arturo Schomburg, with many other examples in between. Each chapter examines a set of related texts in conversation with one another and the historical moment of their publication, treating cookbooks not just as archives for historical information about how people eat but also as literary, artistic, and culture-making documents. Zafar argues that cookbooks written by and for African Americans provide “recipes for respect” alongside instructions for cooking. The avenues for respect vary between authors and eras, at turns offering advice for gaining the respect of white employers or membership in the black middle-class. The act of authorship itself is presented as a way to respect and agency, leveraging domestic knowledge into public acclaim. Implicit in each of the examples is the means for generating self-respect and self-love, as cookbooks show their readers how to participate in vibrant and storied African-American foodways.

Rafia Zafar is Professor of English, African and African-American Studies, and American Culture Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. Rafia writes about the intersection of food, authorship, and American identities, nineteenth century Black writers, and the Harlem Renaissance. She is the faculty director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her new book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

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Gregory P. Downs, "After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War" (Harvard UP, 2015) Oct 09, 2019

On April 8, 1865, after four years of civil war, General Robert E. Lee wrote to General Ulysses S. Grant asking for peace. Peace was beyond his authority to negotiate, Grant replied, but surrender terms he would discuss. As Gregory P. Downs, Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, reveals in this gripping history of post–Civil War America, Grant’s distinction proved prophetic, for peace would elude the South for years after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Harvard University Press, 2015; Paperback Edition, 2019) argues that the war did not end with Confederate capitulation in 1865. Instead, a second phase commenced which lasted until 1871—not the project euphemistically called Reconstruction but a state of genuine belligerency whose mission was to shape the terms of peace. Using its war powers, the U.S. Army oversaw an ambitious occupation, stationing tens of thousands of troops in hundreds of outposts across the defeated South. This groundbreaking study of the post-surrender occupation makes clear that its purpose was to crush slavery and to create meaningful civil and political rights for freed people in the face of rebels’ bold resistance. But reliance on military occupation posed its own dilemmas. In areas beyond Army control, the Ku Klux Klan and other violent insurgencies created near-anarchy. Voters in the North also could not stomach an expensive and demoralizing occupation. Under those pressures, by 1871, the Civil War came to its legal end. The wartime after Appomattox disrupted planter power and established important rights, but the dawn of legal peacetime heralded the return of rebel power, not a sustainable peace. Readers can also visit the book’s companion website.

Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres, "Black British Migrants in Cuba" (Cambridge UP, 2018) Oct 09, 2019

Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres' new book Black British Migrants in Cuba: Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898–1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) invites readers to enter the world of empire and labor migration in all its complexity. Giovannetti-Torres focuses on the workers and their interactions with British colonial officials, American landowners and sugar producers, and local and national-level members of the Cuban government. Black British workers arrived as Cubans were reckoning with racist violence in tension with supposedly race-blind nationalist ideology, and often bore the brunt of animosity towards people of African descent. At the same time these workers were integral to the growth of the sugar industry and the efforts to meet demand in the United States and the UK. The book offers a clear explanatory framework for this explosive setting, but it also unfolds like a novel, with striking characters and sharp observations.

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Cécile Vidal, "Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society" (UNC Press, 2019) Oct 08, 2019

Combining Atlantic and imperial perspectives,Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society (University of North Carolina Press and the Omohundro Institute, 2019), offers a lively portrait of the city and a probing investigation of the French colonists who established racial slavery there as well as the African slaves who were forced to toil for them. Casting early New Orleans as a Caribbean outpost of the French Empire rather than as a North American frontier town, Cécile Vidal, Professor of History at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, reveals the persistent influence of the Antilles, especially Saint-Domingue, which shaped the city’s development through the eighteenth century. In so doing, she urges us to rethink our usual divisions of racial systems into mainland and Caribbean categories. Drawing on New Orleans’s rich court records as a way to capture the words and actions of its inhabitants, Vidal takes us into the city’s streets, market, taverns, church, hospitals, barracks, and households. She explores the challenges that slow economic development, Native American proximity, imperial rivalry, and the urban environment posed to a social order that was predicated on slave labor and racial hierarchy. White domination, Vidal demonstrates, was woven into the fabric of New Orleans from its founding. This comprehensive history of urban slavery locates Louisiana’s capital on a spectrum of slave societies that stretched across the Americas and provides a magisterial overview of racial discourses and practices during the formative years of North America’s most intriguing city.

Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Paul Musselwhite, "Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake" (U Chicago Press, 2019) Oct 08, 2019

Early American colonialism is often distinguished by an urban and rural divide. Urban development was a sign of imperial progress. British writers frequently boasted about the size of early Boston and Philadelphia while mocking the scattered settlements of the French. Colonial founders characterized their social experiment as a ‘City on a Hill’, and texts that promoted colonization listed the size and location of a growing number of principal towns and cities. Outside the confines of cities lay different places: the backcountry of settlement and Indian war; an unmapped landscape of forests and rivers. If the town stood out as a site of ordered settlement, the ‘wilderness’ remained a place of mystery and danger.

Paul Musselwhite is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. In Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake (University of Chicago Press, 2019), he challenges the conventional view of the Chesapeake as a rural society of tobacco and slavery that prevented the development of towns and cities. He argues that contemporaries argued about urban development in ways that intersected with wider discussions of the political and commercial order of the Chesapeake, and its place in theories of commerce and the state in Britain between the early seventeenth century and the American Revolution.

Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster.

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Remi Joseph-Salisbury, "Black Mixed-Race Men: Transatlanticity, Hybridity and 'Post-Racial' Resilience" (Emerald, 2018) Oct 07, 2019

What are the experiences of mixed-race men? In Black Mixed-Race Men: Transatlanticity, Hybridity and 'Post-Racial' Resilience (Emerald Publishing, 2018), Remi Joseph-Salisbury, a Presidential Fellow in Sociology at the University of Manchester, explores the double consciousness of black mixed-race men in America and the UK. Theoretically rich, with detailed empirical case studies, the book explores the everyday life and experiences, as well as the broader social context, of black mixed-race men. The book considers masculinity, friendships, microaggressions, hair, dating, and many other subjects and issues to give a comprehensive look at black mixed-race men’s lives. At a time when discussions of race are prominent in popular and media discourses, the book will be essential reading for anyone interested in understanding race and society, as well as for scholars across social science and the humanities.

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A Conversation with Acquisitions Editor Dawn Durante about How Manuscripts Become Books Oct 04, 2019

For a book to exist, there must be a lot more than a writer. Of course, the writer is the essential component. But what about all the other hard-working professionals who shepherd the text from manuscript to beautiful finished product? There are a bunch of them, and today we talk to one: Dawn Durante, Senior Acquisitions Editor at the University of Illinois Press for books in African American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, Religion, and Anthropology. She tell us how it all works, from soup to nuts. Naturally, we at the New Books Network are very grateful for Dawn's work, and that of all her colleagues at UPs and trade presses, for without their efforts, there would be no New Books Network and you wouldn't get to listen to all these great authors talk about their great books. On with the show...

Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick focusing on Black runaway women during the broad eighteenth century.

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Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, "The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games" (NYU Press, 2019) Oct 03, 2019

Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children’s publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter.

Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas's book The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (NYU Press, 2019) is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC’s Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world.

In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, “we dark girls deserve more, because we are more.”

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Elizabeth Herbin-Triant, "Race, Class, and Campaigns to Legislate Jim Crow Neighborhoods" (Columbia UP, 2019) Sep 24, 2019

Elizabeth Herbin-Triant is the author of Threatening Property: Race, Class, and Campaigns to Legislate Jim Crow Neighborhoods, published by Columbia University Press in 2019. Threatening Property examines the campaigns for residential segregation in early-20th century North Carolina. Looking at the intersections of both race and class, Herbin-Triant explores how white supremacy was divided along class, pitting elite whites against their poorer counterparts, as Jim Crow America increasingly held back Black Americans.

Elizabeth Herbin-Triant is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She studies U.S. history, with a particular interest in African-American history, urban history, and histories of racial capitalism, slavery, and segregation.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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Ashanté M. Reese, "Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C." (UNC Press, 2019) Sep 23, 2019

Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), by Ashanté M. Reese, examines the ways in which residents of the Deanwood neighborhood navigate the surrounding area to acquire food. Reese examines the historical processes that gave rise to the decrease of supermarkets, general stores, and other locations to purchase food thus constraining options. Residents articulated a commitment to self-reliance in meeting their culinary needs through their strategies for accessing food markets, nostalgia for and memories of the past, practice of connection and community, and belief in personal responsibility. Reese emphasizes the role of structural racism and inequality in generating the conditions of decreased food options while holding in tension residents’ insistence upon relying on their own actions to forge futures of abundance and community. Reese examines a corner store and a community garden as local sites for residents to work towards and articulate responses to their current situation. The term food desert tends to emphasize lack and emptiness, occlude agency, and sideline the historical processes that conditioned such limited food options. Black Food Geographies offers a powerful critique of the food desert by emphasizing the agency of African American people, the forces of racism and inequality, and by showing that these spaces are rich with the lives, hopes, and outlooks of the people who live there.

Ashanté M. Reese is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on race, blackness, and visual representation in Brazil. She is on Twitter @ReighanGillam.

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Claudia Leal, "Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia" (U Arizona Press, 2018) Sep 23, 2019

Claudia Leal’s Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia (University of Arizona Press, 2018), narrates the unknown history of the transition from slavery to freedom in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia. Not only does Leal centers a region long neglected in histories of Colombia—and more generally in histories of slavery and manumission in Latin America—but she also asks us to use this case to understand the centrality of the environment in any historical account. According to Leal, the particularities of the environment of the Pacific lowlands in Colombia explains the formation of a black peasantry that was able to attain high levels of freedom and autonomy. Here we hear about the importance of rainforests, of minerals, of vegetable ivory, and we learn that through extractive practices black Colombians were able to carve and maintain degrees of freedom perhaps only comparable to the maroons of Surinam.

This history, however, does not start in 1851 with the total abolition of slavery in Colombia, for Leal goes back to the colonial period in order to explain why a political economy of extraction was established in the first place. In fact, Leal tracks how blacks appropriated an environment that originally didn’t belong to them, how they negotiated with whites their access to resources and power, and how even in moments in which mining companies challenged their autonomy, they nonetheless found ways to maintain their hard-won freedom. Paradoxically, even if blacks of the Pacific lowlands fulfilled one of the main values of the republican order of the Colombian national state (freedom!), they were not recognized as contributors to the national project. Quite to the contrary, white elites equated them to an environment deemed unhealthy, and allegedly suitable only for savages. The pacific lowlands, and its recently created cities of Tumaco and Quibdó, were thus built as racialized landscapes; geographies plagued by ideologies of racism and biological determinism. Whites’ project to control and “civilize” the territory was ultimately a failed one, for black culture crept into cities and forests. Eventually, with the advent of the 1991 Colombian constitution, black ethnicity became a part and asset of the nation as Colombia entered the era of multiculturalism.

Lisette Varon-Carvajal is a graduate student in history at Rutger’s University.

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Thomas Aiello, "The Grapevine of the Black South" (U Georgia Press, 2018) Sep 19, 2019

In the summer of 1928, William Alexander Scott began a small four-page weekly with the help of his brother Cornelius. By 1932 the Atlanta World had become a daily paper and the basis of Scott's vision for a massive Southern newspaper chain - the Southern Newspaper Syndicate, later renamed as the Scott Newspaper Syndicate. At its peak, more than 240 papers were associated with the Syndicate, making it one of the largest black press institutions in the country. However, the extent of the Syndicate's reach and its centrality to Black southern life has remained largely overlooked.

In The Grapevine of the Black South: The Scott Newspaper Syndicate in the Generation before the Civil Rights Movement (University of Georgia Press, 2018), Thomas Aiello offers the first critical history of this influential newspaper syndicate, tracing its roots in the early 1930s through to its eventual dissolution in the 1950s. During this critically important period preceding the the "civil rights era" ushered in by the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on school segregation, the Syndicate helped to shape the collective identity and community networks of the Black South. While providing local editors with a large degree of control and the flexibility to emphasize regional concerns and interests, the Syndicate gave its readers a similar set of tools from which to craft their understanding of Black life and culture, a means to document racial injustice and oppression, and an unparalleled grapevine of information and news coverage.

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Scott Heerman, "The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country" (U Pennsylvania, 2018) Sep 19, 2019

Scott Heerman is the author of The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2018. The Alchemy of Slavery examines how slavery and emancipation developed in the Illinois Country from the 18th Century through the 19th Century. Drawing on the regions mixed legacies of Native American, French, Spain, English, and eventually American rule, Heerman shows how the deep history of Illinois Country influenced slavery, and set it apart from slavery on the eastern seaboard of North America.

Scott Heerman is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Miami. He studies 18th and 19th century U.S. history, particularly slavery and emancipation.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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Jennifer Jensen Wallach, "What We Need Ourselves: How Food has Shaped African American Life" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) Sep 18, 2019

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with Jennifer Jensen Wallach about the her book Getting What We Need Ourselves: How Food has Shaped African American Life (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). The book covers a wide chronology and geography from the continent of Africa pre-Transatlantic slave trade to lunch counter sit-ins of the Civil Rights Era to haute cuisine of Harlem in the present. Wallach’s wide-ranging history demonstrates that there is not one story of African American foodways. Instead, as Wallach writes, “The history of black food traditions can be most accurately conceptualized as a web of ongoing conversations, debates, and reinventions rather than as a single, uninterrupted line leading directly back to the African continent.” In each chapter, Wallach contextualizes and complicates key moments of the story of African American foodways to emphasize the multiplicity of meanings that food may have and the “cultural compromises” that people of color have had to make throughout American history. Wallach calls for historians and students of food culture to accept a difficult lesson: “there are often multiple plausible theories for how certain recipes and techniques were created,” and so we must be content to leave these multiple origin stories to stand side by side, resisting the temptation to simplify.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her new book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

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Mark Burford, "Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field" (Oxford UP, 2019) Sep 17, 2019

Mahalia Jackson, the great mid-twentieth century gospel singer, thought of herself as an embodiment of the history of African Americans in the United States. She understood that her family’s background, as they moved from enslavement in Louisiana to farming in the same rural area to New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth century and then her own move to Chicago with the Great Migration was emblematic of the experiences of generations of black people. In Mahalia Jackson & the Black Gospel Field (Oxford University Press, 2018), Mark Burford describes Jackson as both an exemplary figure and an exceptional figure. Ending the book in 1955 just as Jackson reached the height of her career after she released her first recording with a major label and was hosting her own television show, Burford uses the first part of Jackson’s career to tell the story of the development of gospel music set against her experiences, the networks within which she moved, and the overlapping contexts of black culture and American political history. Adapting Pierre Bordieu’s ideas, he argues that to study gospel music we must understand the cultural field created by all the players in the industry—the performers, composers, business owners, churches, audiences, and media company executives that shaped gospel music. For a time, Mahalia Jackson was in the center of this network, and Burford uses her connections to explore this field. She grew up with the industry and eventually became one of the best-known gospel singers in the United States by navigating the gospel music industry with her potent combination of a great voice, charisma, and business acumen. Besides telling the compelling story of gospel music and Mahalia Jackson, Burford analyzes Jackson’s voice and her early Apollo recordings using innovative techniques grounded in the listener’s experience. Much more than a biography of Mahalia Jackson, this book is a reimagining of the study of gospel music.

Mark Burford is Associate Professor of Music at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he is also chair of the American Studies program. His research and teaching focuses on twentieth-century popular music in the United States, with particular focus on African American music, and late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Austro-German concert music. His scholarship has appeared in numerous journals and edited collections. His article “Sam Cooke as Pop Album Artist—A Reinvention in Three Songs” received the Society for American Music’s 2012 Irving Lowens Award for the outstanding article on American music. He is the author of Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field, released last fall by Oxford University Press, and editor of the forthcoming Mahalia Jackson Reader, an anthology of writings on Jackson that he is editing for Oxford’s Readers on American Musicians series.

Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.

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Michael F. Conlin, "The Constitutional Origins of the American Civil War" (Cambridge UP, 2019) Sep 17, 2019

In an incisive analysis of over two dozen clauses as well as several 'unwritten' rules and practices, The Constitutional Origins of the American Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2019) shows how the Constitution aggravated the sectional conflict over slavery to the point of civil war. Going beyond the fugitive slave clause, the three-fifths clause, and the international slave trade clause, Michael F. Conlin, Professor of History at Eastern Washington University, demonstrates that many more constitutional provisions and practices played a crucial role in the bloody conflict that claimed the lives of over 750,000 Americans. He also reveals that ordinary Americans in the mid-nineteenth century had a surprisingly sophisticated knowledge of the provisions and the methods of interpretation of the Constitution. Lastly, Conlin reminds us that many of the debates that divide Americans today were present in the 1850s: minority rights vs. majority rule, original intent vs. a living Constitution, state's rights vs. federal supremacy, judicial activism vs. legislative prerogative, secession vs. union, and counter-majoritarianism vs. democracy.

Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Chelene Knight, "Dear Current Occupant" (Book*hug, 2018) Sep 12, 2019

Today, I’m talking with Chelene Knight. She’s written a new memoir called Dear Current Occupant (Book*hug, 2018). And as her title suggests, it’s a letter of sorts, one written to those people who might now be occupying one of many places she and her family lived back when she was growing up in downtown Vancouver’s eastside, and in this sense, her memoir is a map of the city, allowing us to see into lives and loves and struggles we might otherwise never see. But Dear Current Occupant is also a letter to Knight’s younger selves, to the girl and eventually young woman who lived in these places and who struggled to discover who she was and who she could be. The result of this correspondence is a rich and multifaceted account of what it means to become a strong writer and, in Knight’s words, “a strong black woman.” Knight’s book combines poetry, prose, maps, photographs, and other media to tell a singular story that could be told in no other way, to make visible what she calls “the cracks in the narrative,” which, in the end, hold the truth of her story and perhaps her very self.

Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.

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William Sturkey, "Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White" (Harvard UP, 2019) Sep 10, 2019

If you really want to understand Jim Crow—what it was and how African Americans rose up to defeat it—you should start by visiting Mobile Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the heart of the historic black downtown. There you can see remnants of the shops and churches where, amid the violence and humiliation of segregation, men and women gathered to build a remarkable community. William Sturkey introduces us to both old-timers and newcomers who arrived in search of economic opportunities promised by the railroads, sawmills, and factories of the New South. He also takes us across town and inside the homes of white Hattiesburgers to show how their lives were shaped by the changing fortunes of the Jim Crow South.

In Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (Harvard University Press, 2019), Sturkey reveals the stories behind those who struggled to uphold their southern “way of life” and those who fought to tear it down—from William Faulkner’s great-grandfather, a Confederate veteran who was the inspiration for the enigmatic character John Sartoris, to black leader Vernon Dahmer, whose killers were the first white men ever convicted of murdering a civil rights activist in Mississippi. Through it all, Hattiesburg traces the story of the Smith family across multiple generations, from Turner and Mamie Smith, who fled a life of sharecropping to find opportunity in town, to Hammond and Charles Smith, in whose family pharmacy Medgar Evers and his colleagues planned their strategy to give blacks the vote.

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Harriet Washington, "A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind" (Little, Brown Spark, 2019) Sep 09, 2019

Environmental racism is visible not only as cancer clusters or the location of grocery stores. It is responsible for the reported gap in IQ scores between white Americans and Black, Latinx, and Native Americans. So argues science writer Harriet Washington in A Terrible to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind (Little, Brown Spark 2019). While acknowledging IQ is a biased and flawed metric, she contends it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. Using copious data and synthesizing a generation of studies, Washington calculates the staggering, population-scale neurological effects of marginalized communities having been forced to live and work in landscapes of waste, pollution, and insufficient sanitation services. She investigates heavy metals, neurotoxins, asthma, deficient prenatal care, bad nutrition, and even pathogens as drags on cognitive development to explain why communities of color are disproportionately affected—and what can be done to remedy this devastating problem.

Harriet A. Washington has been the Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada's Black Mountain Institute, a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University, and a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law. She is the author of Deadly Monopolies, Infectious Madness, and Medical Apartheid, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Oakland Award, and the American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy.

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Hendrik Hartog, "The Trouble with Minna: A Case of Slavery and Emancipation in the Antebellum North" (UNC Press, 2018) Sep 05, 2019

In this episode of the American Society for Legal History’s podcast Talking Legal History Siobhan talks with Hendrik Hartog about his book The Trouble with Minna: A Case of Slavery and Emancipation in the Antebellum North (UNC Press, 2018). The Trouble with Minna is also used as a vessel to explore some of the topics discussed in Law and Social Inquiry's May 2019 “Review Symposium: Retrospective on the Work of Hendrik Hartog.” Hartog is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty, Emeritus at Princeton University. This episode is the first in a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

In this intriguing book, Hendrik Hartog uses a forgotten 1840 case to explore the regime of gradual emancipation that took place in New Jersey over the first half of the nineteenth century. In Minna’s case, white people fought over who would pay for the costs of caring for a dependent, apparently enslaved, woman. Hartog marks how the peculiar language mobilized by the debate—about care as a “mere voluntary courtesy”—became routine in a wide range of subsequent cases about “good Samaritans.” Using Minna’s case as a springboard, Hartog explores the statutes, situations, and conflicts that helped produce a regime where slavery was usually but not always legal and where a supposedly enslaved person may or may not have been legally free.

In exploring this liminal and unsettled legal space, Hartog sheds light on the relationships between moral and legal reasoning and a legal landscape that challenges simplistic notions of what it meant to live in freedom. What emerges is a provocative portrait of a distant legal order that, in its contradictions and moral dilemmas, bears an ironic resemblance to our own legal world.

Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University.

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Kevin M. Levin, "Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth" (UNC Press, 2019) Sep 04, 2019

Kevin M. Levin is the author of Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2019. Searching for Black Confederates investigates the claims that numerous African Americans willingly fought for the Confederacy. Investigating the Confederate Army at the time of the Civil War, Levin illustrates that such a claim would have surprised those actually present in the army. Moving forward, Levin recounts how this myth came to be, and its persistence into our own day. All the while, he makes sure to pay attention to the actions of African Americans during the Civil War and after its conclusion.

Kevin Levin is an award-winning educator and historian, who studies the American Civil War.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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David Doddington, "Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South" (Cambridge UP, 2018) Sep 02, 2019

Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South (Cambridge University Press, 2018) demonstrates the significance of internal divisions, comparison, and conflict in shaping gender and status in slave communities of the American South. David Doddington seeks to move beyond unilateral discussions of slave masculinity, and instead demonstrates how the repressions of slavery were both personal and political. Rather than automatically support one another against an emasculatory white society, Doddington explores how enslaved people negotiated identities in relation to one another, through comparisons between men and different forms of manhood held up for judgment. An examination of the framework in which enslaved people crafted identities demonstrates the fluidity of gender as a social and cultural phenomenon that defied monolithic models of black masculinity, solidarity, and victimization. Focusing on work, authority, honor, sex, leisure, and violence, this book is a full-length treatment of the idea of 'masculinity' among slave communities of the Old South.

Adam McNeil is a History PhD Student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick

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Niambi Michele Carter, "American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship" (Oxford UP, 2019) Aug 28, 2019

Just in time for the APSA annual meeting, Niambi Michele Carter has written an incredibly timely book on a central issue to American politics, American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2019). Carter is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Howard University. Her work focuses on racial and ethnic politics in the United States, specifically public opinion and political behavior of African Americans.

In American While Black, Carter argues that immigration, both historically and in the contemporary moment, has served as a reminder of the limited inclusion of African Americans in the body politic. Carter draws on original interview material and empirical data on African American political opinion to offer the first theory of black public opinion toward immigration.

Carter contends that blacks use the issue of immigration as a way to understand the nature and meaning of their American citizenship-specifically the way that white supremacy structures and constrains not just their place in the American political landscape, but their political opinions as well. But what may appear to be a conflict between blacks and other minorities is about self-preservation.

Prof. Carter also makes a host of excellent recommendations for enjoying the District, including: Hazel, Haikan, Thai Xing, Dirty Goose, Compass Coffee, The Royal (coffee/bar/restaurant), Brookland’s Finest, Calabash, Menomale (didn’t mention but a great place for Neoplitan style pizza), Union Market ( esp. Neopol Savory Smokery), and St. Anselm.

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Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, "Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean" (Princeton UP, 2019) Aug 27, 2019

In his new book, Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean (Princeton University Press, 2019), historian Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof seamlessly ties together various scholarly subfields into a truly transnational history of anticolonial politics and the Afro-Latino diaspora in the United States. Hoffnung-Garskof, Professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan, brings to life the migration stories of black Cubans and Puerto Ricans who founded an intellectual and political movement in nineteenth-century New York. Though exiles and migrants from the Spanish Caribbean were but a fraction of the growing immigrant population during the Gilded Age, this small community of color produced leaders in industry, journalism, and above all, revolutionary struggle. From a small apartment in the center of segregated New York City, a mutual aid organization called La Liga became the political hub for a vast network of exiles of color seeking to liberate Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spanish colonialism. The book provides “a migrants’-eye view” through a collection of microhistories that shed light on the worldviews of a select group of thought leaders and their increasingly intertwined lives. While most of the historical actors featured in this text were afro-descendants, their own racial subjectivities and racialization by external parties took on various forms. This interview delves further into the migrants’ articulations of race – among many other issues – a core theme and line of inquiry throughout the book. In the shadow of a complex and contested historiography centered on revolutionary leaders such as José Martí, Hoffnung-Garskof highlights the invaluable contributions of the Spanish Caribbean’s “class of color.” Black Cuban and Puerto Rican intellectuals did not passively participate in the movement led by Martí, but rather fought to manifest their own vision of what a new interracial democracy could be.

Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr.

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Kevin Dawson, "Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018) Aug 26, 2019

Long before the rise of New World slavery, West Africans were adept swimmers, divers, canoe makers, and canoeists. They lived along riverbanks, near lakes, or close to the ocean. In those waterways, they became proficient in diverse maritime skills, while incorporating water and aquatics into spiritual understandings of the world. Transported to the Americas, slaves carried with them these West African skills and cultural values. Indeed, according to Kevin Dawson's examination of water culture in the African diaspora, the aquatic abilities of people of African descent often surpassed those of Europeans and their descendants from the age of discovery until well into the nineteenth century.

As Dawson argues, histories of slavery have largely chronicled the fields of the New World, whether tobacco, sugar, indigo, rice, or cotton. However, most plantations were located near waterways to facilitate the transportation of goods to market, and large numbers of agricultural slaves had ready access to water in which to sustain their abilities and interests. Swimming and canoeing provided respite from the monotony of agricultural bond and brief moments of bodily privacy. In some instances, enslaved laborers exchanged their aquatic expertise for unique privileges, including wages, opportunities to work free of direct white supervision, and even in rare circumstances, freedom.

Dawson builds his analysis around a discussion of African traditions and the ways in which similar traditions—swimming, diving, boat making, even surfing—emerged within African diasporic communities. Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) not only chronicles the experiences of enslaved maritime workers, but also traverses the waters of the Atlantic repeatedly to trace and untangle cultural and social traditions.

Adam McNeil is a History PhD Student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick

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Patricia A. Banks, "Diversity and Philanthropy at African American Museums: Black Renaissance" (Routledge, 2019) Aug 23, 2019

What is the future, and what is the past, of the African American Museum? In Diversity and Philanthropy at African American Museums: Black Renaissance(Routledge, 2019), Patricia Banks, an associate professor of sociology at Mount Holyoke College, explores the rise of the African American museum and its patrons and philanthropists. Combining sociology of culture with organisational and institutional analysis, the book offers both contemporary and historical analysis of some of the most important cultural institutions in America. Crucially, the book restates the importance of understanding race to sociology of culture, particularly in understanding elites. The book also reveals the changing nature of giving, with younger patrons expecting a different mode of engagement, as well as distinctive political and collecting practices. The book is essential reading across social science and humanities, as well as museum and arts professionals, and anyone interested in contemporary culture.

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Simon Balto, "Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago From Red Summer to Black Power" (UNC Press, 2019) Aug 22, 2019

Recent scholarship locates the origins of mass incarceration in national anticrime policy from 1960 to 1990, and has drastically reframed the “punitive turn” in American politics as bipartisan. But how then, do we reckon with the fact that most police policy and funding is determined locally? In his new book, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago From Red Summer to Black Power (UNC Press, 2019), Simon Balto argues that local police department policies and procedures left black Chicagoans “overpoliced and underprotected” far before mass incarceration began. Machinations in municipal politics is therefore essential to understanding how and why Chicago has been a flashpoint in national conversations about police.

Building a picture of the carceral state from the bottom up, Balto shows that it was not Lyndon Johnson’s War on Crime, or Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs that turned the Chicago Police into an abusive and racist institution, but rather city and police officials’ response to the Great Migrations. Police violence is therefore cast not as the product of legislation, but of mendacious discourses of black criminality that police have acted upon for over a century.

Patrick Reilly is a PhD student in History at Vanderbilt University. He studies US policing and surveillance in domestic and transnational contexts.

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Joshua D. Farrington, "Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2016) Aug 19, 2019

Reflecting on his fifty-year effort to steer the Grand Old Party toward black voters, Memphis power broker George W. Lee declared, "Somebody had to stay in the Republican Party and fight." As Joshua D. Farrington, Instructor in African & African-American Studies at Eastern Kentucky University, recounts in Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), Lee was one of many black Republican leaders who remained loyal after the New Deal inspired black voters to switch their allegiance from the "party of Lincoln" to the Democrats. Ideologically and demographically diverse, the ranks of twentieth-century black Republicans included Southern patronage dispensers like Lee and Robert Church, Northern critics of corrupt Democratic urban machines like Jackie Robinson and Archibald Carey, civil rights agitators like Grant Reynolds and T. R. M. Howard, elected politicians like U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke and Kentucky state legislator Charles W. Anderson, black nationalists like Floyd McKissick and Nathan Wright, and scores of grassroots organizers from Atlanta to Los Angeles. Black Republicans believed that a two-party system in which both parties were forced to compete for the African American vote was the best way to obtain stronger civil rights legislation. Though they were often pushed to the sidelines by their party's white leadership, their continuous and vocal inner-party dissent helped moderate the GOP's message and platform through the 1970s. And though often excluded from traditional narratives of U.S. politics, black Republicans left an indelible mark on the history of their party, the civil rights movement, and twentieth-century political development. Farrington marshals an impressive amount of archival material at the national, state, and municipal levels in the South, Midwest, and West, as well as in the better-known Northeast, to open up new avenues in African American political history.

Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Paul Finkelman, "Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court" (Harvard UP, 2018) Aug 19, 2019

In this episode of the American Society for Legal History’s podcast Talking Legal History Siobhan talks with Paul Finkelman, President of Gratz College, about his book Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court(Harvard University Press, 2018). Finkelman is a specialist on the history of slavery and the law. He is also the author of more than 200 scholarly articles and the author or editor of more than fifty books on a broad range of topics including American Jewish history, American legal history, constitutional law, and legal issues surrounding baseball.

The three most important Supreme Court Justices before the Civil War―Chief Justices John Marshall and Roger B. Taney and Associate Justice Joseph Story―upheld the institution of slavery in ruling after ruling. These opinions cast a shadow over the Court and the legacies of these men, but historians have rarely delved deeply into the personal and political ideas and motivations they held. In Supreme Injustice, the distinguished legal historian Paul Finkelman establishes an authoritative account of each justice’s proslavery position, the reasoning behind his opposition to black freedom, and the incentives created by circumstances in his private life.

Finkelman uses census data and other sources to reveal that Justice Marshall aggressively bought and sold slaves throughout his lifetime―a fact that biographers have ignored. Justice Story never owned slaves and condemned slavery while riding circuit, and yet on the high court he remained silent on slave trade cases and ruled against blacks who sued for freedom. Although Justice Taney freed many of his own slaves, he zealously and consistently opposed black freedom, arguing in Dred Scott that free blacks had no Constitutional rights and that slave owners could move slaves into the Western territories. Finkelman situates this infamous holding within a solid record of support for slavery and hostility to free blacks.

Supreme Injustice boldly documents the entanglements that alienated three major justices from America’s founding ideals and embedded racism ever deeper in American civic life.

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Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi, "For Black Trans Girls Who Gotta Cuss A Mother F*cker Out When Snatching An Edge Ain’t Enough" Aug 19, 2019

Inspired by Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi has written her own beautiful choreo drama titled For Black Trans Girls Who Gotta Cuss A Mother F*cker Out When Snatching An Edge Ain’t Enough. Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi describes For Black Trans Girls as “a celebration of Trans Women, Goddesshood, a lament for our fallen, a sword for our living and a challenge to white supremacy, structural oppression and any who would dare try to erase us from existence." In this interview Lady Dane shows that she really is a renaissance woman, discusses the connection between racism and transphobia, challenges the idea that science is better religion especially for trans folks of color, and promotes the importance of accountability.

You can purchase a copy of For Black Trans Girls here. $2 from each book sold goes to a trans and/or gender non-conforming person of color’s survival fund.

Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi is an African, Cuban, Indigenous, American Trans performance artist, author, and playwright among many different titles.

Adrian King (pronouns: they/them/theirs) is a recently graduate of Brandies University’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies MA program and is an incoming graduate student in University of Michigan’s American Culture PhD program.

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Mary-Elizabeth Murphy, "Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, DC, 1920-1945" (UNC Press, 2018) Aug 16, 2019

Though women’s roles in the black freedom struggle remain under-acknowledged, scholars continue to make their importance clear. In her new book, Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, DC, 1920-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Mary-Elizabeth Murphy (Associate Professor of History at Eastern Michigan University) examines black women’s activism in Washington D.C. during the interwar period. The nation’s capital has long been an important location for influencing national politics. Black women recognized this fact and shaped their activism accordingly. Consequently, the city is a particularly rich site in which to study women’s political efforts and to see how these activists tackled discrimination on both the local and national levels. Murphy's book shows the interwar years were an important time for fighting discrimination in politics, government, employment, and by law enforcement.

In this episode of the podcast, Murphy discusses this rich history. She discusses the importance of Washington D.C. as a site for black women’s activism, explains successes and failures of the period, and the precedents it set. The conversation highlights the book's themes of class, gender, and police violence. She also discusses some of the lessons this history provides for today’s politics. Finally, Murphy explains her source base and the challenges and rewards of her time in the archives.

Christine Lamberson is an Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu.

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Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, "Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic" (NYU Press, 2019) Aug 12, 2019

Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan is the author of Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic, published by New York University Press in 2019. Vagrants and Vagabonds focuses on the control over poor migrants’ mobility and how their movement shaped ideas of class, race, and status in the United States. Examining how local and state government’s criminalized vagrancy, O’Brassill-Kulfan illustrates that the vagrant, whether real of a figment of people’s imaginations, were crucial to the development of the state and ideas about community.

Dr. O’Brassill-Kulfan is an instructor of public history at Rutgers University. She specializes in early American social and legal history, as well as public history.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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Claudrena N. Harold, "Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity" (U Virginia Press, 2018) Aug 10, 2019

When hate groups descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, triggering an eruption of racist violence, the tragic conflict reverberated throughout the world. It also had a profound effect on the University of Virginia’s expansive community, many of whose members are involved in teaching issues of racism, public art, free speech, and social ethics. In the wake of this momentous incident, scholars, educators, and researchers have come together in this important new volume to thoughtfully reflect on the historic events of August 11 and 12, 2017.

How should we respond to the moral and ethical challenges of our times? What are our individual and collective responsibilities in advancing the principles of democracy and justice? Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity (University of Virginia Press, 2018) brings together the work of these UVA faculty members catalyzed by the events of the summer to examine their community’s history more deeply and more broadly. Their essays―ranging from John Mason on the local legacy of the Lost Cause to Leslie Kendrick on free speech to Rachel Wahl on the paradoxes of activism―examine truth telling, engaged listening, and ethical responses, and aim to inspire individual reflection, as well as to provoke considered and responsible dialogue. This prescient new collection is a conversation that understands and owns America’s past and―crucially―shows that our past is very much part of our present. Today we speak with one of the editors, Claudrena N. Harold.

Adam McNeil is a PhD Student in History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick

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Lenora Warren, "Fire on the Water: Sailors, Slaves, and Insurrection in Early American Literature, 1789-1886" (Rutgers UP, 2019) Aug 08, 2019

Lenora Warren about her book, Fire on the Water: Sailors, Slaves, and Insurrection in Early American Literature, 1789-1886, published by Rutgers University Press in 2019. Fire on the Water looks at the history of abolition and slave violence by looking at the representation of shipboard mutiny and insurrection in late 18th and early 19th century literature. By examining the intersection of both real and fictional stories, Warren explains how mutiny and insurrection were critical to the development of the abolitionist movement, even as the connection between slave violence and the abolitionist movement was a complex and fraught relationship.

Warren is a lecturer in the English department at Ithaca College. She specializes in Early African American and American literature, and maritime 18th and 19th century British and American literature.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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Grégory Pierrot, "The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture" (U Georgia Press, 2019) Aug 07, 2019

With the Ta-Nehisi Coates–authored Black Panther comic book series (2016), recent films Django Unchained (2012), The Birth of a Nation (2016), Nate Parker’s cinematic imagining of the Nat Turner rebellion, and screen adaptations of Marvel’s Luke Cage (2016) and Black Panther (2018), violent black redeemers have rarely been so present in mainstream Western culture. Grégory Pierrot argues, however, that the black avenger has always been with us: the trope has fired the news and imaginations of the United States and the larger Atlantic World for three centuries.

The black avenger channeled fresh anxieties about slave uprisings and racial belonging occasioned by European colonization in the Americas. Even as he is portrayed as a heathen and a barbarian, his values―honor, loyalty, love―reflect his ties to the West. Yet being racially different, he cannot belong, and his qualities in turn make him an anomaly among black people. The black avenger is thus a liminal figure defining racial borders. Where his body lies, lies the color line. Regularly throughout the modern era and to this day, variations on the trope have contributed to defining race in the Atlantic World and thwarting the constitution of a black polity.

Grégory Pierrot's Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture (University of Georgia Press, 2019) studies this cultural history, examining a multicultural and cross-historical network of print material including fiction, drama, poetry, news, and historical writing as well as visual culture. It tracks the black avenger trope from its inception in the seventeenth century to the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915. Pierrot argues that this Western archetype plays an essential role in helping exclusive, hostile understandings of racial belonging become normalized in the collective consciousness of Atlantic nations. His study follows important articulations of the figure and how it has shifted based on historical and cultural contexts.

Adam McNeil is a PhD Student in History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick

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Jaime Alves, "Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (U Minnesota Press, 2018) Aug 02, 2019

The 2018 election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has brought the issues of police violence, racial discrimination, and misogyny to the fore. Jaime Alves’s book the Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) shows that, from the perspective of Black Brazilians, these forces have deep roots in the nation’s history. Alves makes a powerful contribution to urban anthropology, describing the spatial contours of “Brazilian Apartheid” in Sao Paulo, the role of police violence in the constitution of the city’s racial-spatial order, and the ways that national sovereignty is exercised on individual bodies. Richly ethnographic, The Anti-Black City explores these themes through an account of the lives and activism of black residents of Sao Paulo’s favelas. In this episode, Jaime Alves talks with Jacob Doherty about how his background shaped the research leading to the book, about the entanglement of neoliberal moral government through community and the deployment of police terror, and about his conceptual engagements with Afro-pessimist philosophy.

Jaime Alves is assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York and a research affiliate at the Centro de Estudios Afrodiasporicos at Universidad Icesi, Colombia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin. His work has appeared in the Journal of Black Studies, Antipode, Journal of Latin American Studies, Identities, and Critical Sociology.

Jacob Doherty is a research associate in urban mobility at the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford, and, most recently, the co-editor Labor Laid Waste, a special issue of International Labor and Working Class History.

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Ryan A. Quintana, "Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina" (UNC Press, 2018) Aug 01, 2019

Ryan A. Quintana is the author of Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2018. Making a Slave State examined how enslaved African Americans built the state of South Carolina, in the literal sense of the word. From roads to canals, from public buildings to military fortifications, Quintana examines not only how enslaved people were central to producing the state’s infrastructure and early governing practices, but also how they claimed these same spaces for themselves.

Dr. Quintana is associate professor of history at Wellesley College. He specializes in race, slavery, space, and the state in the late colonial and early national eras.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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Christy Clark-Pujara, "Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island" (NYU Press, 2016) Jul 25, 2019

In Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island(NYU Press, 2016; paperback, 2018), Christy Clark-Pujara, Associate Professor of History in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells the story of one state whose role was outsized: Rhode Island. Like their northern neighbors, Rhode Islanders bought and sold slaves and supplies that sustained plantations throughout the Americas; however, nowhere else was this business so important. During the colonial period trade with West Indian planters provided Rhode Islanders with molasses, the key ingredient for their number one export: rum. More than 60 percent of all the slave ships that left North America left from Rhode Island. During the antebellum period Rhode Islanders were the leading producers of “negro cloth,” a coarse wool-cotton material made especially for enslaved blacks in the American South.

Clark-Pujara draws on the documents of the state, the business, organizational, and personal records of their enslavers, and the few first-hand accounts left by enslaved and free black Rhode Islanders to reconstruct their lived experiences. The business of slavery encouraged slaveholding, slowed emancipation and led to circumscribed black freedom. Enslaved and free black people pushed back against their bondage and the restrictions placed on their freedom. It is convenient, especially for northerners, to think of slavery as southern institution. The erasure or marginalization of the northern black experience and the centrality of the business of slavery to the northern economy allows for a dangerous fiction—that North has no history of racism to overcome. But we cannot afford such a delusion if we are to truly reconcile with our past.

Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Ashley Robertson, "Mary McLeod Bethune in Florida: Bringing Social Justice to the Sunshine State" (The History Press, 2015) Jul 25, 2019

Mary McLeod Bethune was often called the "First Lady of Negro America," but she made significant contributions to the political climate of Florida as well. From the founding of the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls in 1904, Bethune galvanized African American women for change. She created an environment in Daytona Beach that, despite racial tension throughout the state, allowed Jackie Robinson to begin his journey to integrating Major League Baseball less than two miles away from her school. Today, her legacy lives through a number of institutions, including Bethune-Cookman University and the Mary McLeod Bethune Foundation National Historic Landmark. In her new book Mary McLeod Bethune in Florida: Bringing Social Justice to the Sunshine State(The History Press, 2015), historian Ashley Robertson explores the life, leadership and amazing contributions of this dynamic activist.

Adam McNeil is a PhD Student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

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Andrew Torget, "Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850" (UNC Press, 2015) Jul 24, 2019

The secession of Texas from Mexico was a dry run for the slaveholder’s republic of the Confederate States of America, argues Andrew Torget in Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850(University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Torget, the University Distinguished Teaching Professor of history at the University of North Texas (and the Guinness World Record holder for longest history lesson), covers a pivotal swath of history in the American southwest. During the antebellum period, the Texas borderlands transitioned from Comanche, to Mexican, to Texan, to American territory. Slavery, Torget argues, was a crucial political and social institution each step of the way, and acted as a wedge which drove the United States apart and into Civil War. The region’s unique climate made plantation cotton cultivation profitable, and in turn shaped the history of an entire continent. Seeds of Empire won several awards in 2016, including the David J. Weber – Clements Center for Best Non-fiction Book on Southwestern America from the Western History Association.

Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

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Anne Twitty, "Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787-1857" (Cambridge UP, 2016) Jul 23, 2019

Anne Twitty is the author of Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787-1857, published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. Before Dred Scott looks at numerous freedom suits filed in the St. Louis circuit court in order to examine the legal history of slavery and freedom. In this area, known as the American Confluence, a unique legal culture developed characterized by a sophisticated and widespread knowledge of formal law. From enslaved people to slaveholder, Twitty illustrates the many ways people in this area were deeply enmeshed in law.

Twitty is Associate Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. She studies 19th century American social and cultural history. More specifically, Twitty works on legal and labor history, slavery and freedom, gender and women’s history, and the history of the South and Midwest.

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Thomas A. Foster, "Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men" (U Georgia Press, 2019) Jul 19, 2019

Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men (University of Georgia Press, 2019) is the first book-length study of sexual violence against enslaved men. Scholars have extensively documented the widespread sexual exploitation and abuse suffered by enslaved women, with comparatively little attention paid to the stories of men. However, a careful reading of extant sources reveals that sexual assault of enslaved men also occurred systematically and in a wide variety of forms, including physical assault, sexual coercion, and other intimate violations.

To tell the story of men such as Rufus―who was coerced into a sexual union with an enslaved woman, Rose, whose resistance of this union is widely celebrated―historian Thomas A. Foster interrogates a range of sources on slavery: early American newspapers, court records, enslavers’ journals, abolitionist literature, the testimony of formerly enslaved people collected in autobiographies and in interviews, and various forms of artistic representation. Foster’s sustained examination of how black men were sexually violated by both white men and white women makes an important contribution to our understanding of masculinity, sexuality, the lived experience of enslaved men, and the general power dynamics fostered by the institution of slavery. Rethinking Rufus illuminates how the conditions of slavery gave rise to a variety of forms of sexual assault and exploitation that affected all members of the community.

Adam McNeil is a PhD Student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

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Kimberly Welch, "Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South" (UNC Press, 2018) Jul 18, 2019

Kimberly Welch is the author of Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Welch is Assistant Professor of History and Assistant Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University. Her book explores the history of free and enslaved black Americans use of local courts in the Cotton South. Largely focused on unpublished and unexplored lower court records from the Natchez district of Mississippi and Louisiana between 1800 and 1860, Dr. Welch’s study highlights the many ways black Americans were able to utilize a system, which was stacked against them, for their own benefit.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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Ann Powers, "Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music" (Dey St. Books, 2017) Jul 17, 2019

In Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music (Dey St. Books, HarperCollins, 2017), Ann Powers explores the rich and, at times, unexpected intersections of love, sex, race, gender, sexuality, and American popular music. This heavily-researched book features colorful stories about sex, eroticism, and American music, while engaging source material in the realms of African American and American history, black feminist and womanist theory, American dance, and more. Good Booty begins in the 19th century in New Orleans’ Congo Square, and it ends with a discussion of Britney Spears and Beyoncé as cyborg and avatar, respectively. In other chapters, Powers engages early 20th-century American music and dance, eroticism in gospel music, sexuality and teen-girl rock and roll fandom, rock groupie culture, popular music in the early years of the AIDS crisis, and more.

Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio. Her book, Fade to Black: Blues Music and the Art of Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is under contract with the University of Massachusetts Press. She is also a music journalist who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press.

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jayy dodd, "The Black Condition Ft. Narcissus" (Nightboat Books, 2019) Jul 16, 2019

If the prompt is “respond to a myth of Narcissus using thoughtful, meditative poems,” then jayy dodd gave us a beautiful answer. In The Black Condition Ft. Narcissus (Nightboat Books, 2019), jayy dodd offers her own brilliant reflections on so many things: the contemporary moment, dystopia, her transition, and more. In this interview, jayy dodd shares poems from this collection, discusses the process of making the book come to light, and talks about her other projects.

jayy dodd is a blxk trans womxn from Los Angeles, California who is now based in Portland, Oregon. She is a poet and a performance artist. You can also follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @deyblxk.

Adrian King (pronouns: they/them/theirs) is a recently graduate of Brandies University’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies MA program and is an incoming graduate student in University of Michigan’s American Culture PhD program.

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Shirletta J. Kinchen, "Black Power in the Bluff City: African American Youth and Student Activism in Memphis, 1965–1975" (U Tennessee Press, 2016) Jul 15, 2019

During the civil rights era, Memphis gained a reputation for having one of the South’s strongest NAACP branches. But that organization, led by the city’s black elite, was hardly the only driving force in the local struggle against racial injustice. In the late sixties, Black Power proponents advocating economic, political, and cultural self-determination effectively mobilized Memphis’s African American youth, using an array of moderate and radical approaches to protest and change conditions on their campuses and in the community.

While Black Power activism on the coasts and in the Midwest has attracted considerable scholarly attention, much less has been written about the movement’s impact outside these hotbeds. In Black Power in the Bluff City: African American Youth and Student Activism in Memphis, 1965–1975 (University of Tennessee Press, 2016), Shirletta J. Kinchen helps redress that imbalance by examining how young Memphis activists, like Coby Smith and Charles Cabbage, dissatisfied by the pace of progress in a city emerging from the Jim Crow era, embraced Black Power ideology to confront such challenges as gross disparities in housing, education, and employment as well as police brutality and harassment. Two closely related Black Power organizations, the Black Organizing Project and the Invaders, became central to the local black youth movement in the late 1960s. Kinchen traces these groups’ participation in the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike—including the controversy over whether their activities precipitated events that culminated in Martin Luther King’s assassination—and their subsequent involvement in War on Poverty programs. The book also shows how Black Power ideology drove activism at the historically black LeMoyne-Owen College, scene of a 1968 administration-building takeover, and at the predominately white Memphis State University, where African American students transformed the campus by creating parallel institutions that helped strengthen black student camaraderie and consciousness in the face of marginalization.

Drawing on interviews with activists, FBI files, newspaper accounts from the period, and many other sources, the author persuasively shows not only how an emerging generation helped define the black freedom struggle in Memphis but also how they applied the tenets of Black Power to shape the broader community.

Adam McNeil is a PhD Student in the Department of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

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Catherine Keyser, "Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions" (Oxford UP, 2019) Jul 15, 2019

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Catherine Keyser about early twentieth century fiction and the role that modern food plays in literature as a language for talking about race and racial categories. In Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions, published in 2019 by Oxford University Press, Keyser explores the ways that modern fiction writers responded to the theories and anxieties about race in the early twentieth century through related anxieties about modern industrial food. In each chapter, Keyser focuses on a few closely related authors and texts, linked by their common use of food for plot, imagery, and metaphor, each one shedding some light on how that food carried meanings of racial identity. Keyser uncovers the historical context around each food to help today’s readers see what it might have meant to the writers and their contemporary readers. Keyser examines the use of soda pop and syrup or images of effervescence in Jean Toomer’s Cane as a metaphor for inevitable racial intermixing; the promises of raw food for revitalizing African American resistance in George Schuyler’s speculative fiction; Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein’s search for a cosmopolitan identity through European terroir; the fragility of whiteness in F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s anxieties about coffee, wine, and the sticky Mediterranean; and the failure of capitalism to secure black masculinity through the figure of the grocer in Zora Neale Hurtson’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Dorothy West’s The Living is Easy. Keyser’s careful pairing of familiar texts with their less canonical contemporaries brings an important new perspective to both.

Catherine Keyser is Associate Professor and McCausland Fellow at the University of South Carolina. Cat’s research focuses on Modern American Literature, African American Literature, Periodicals, Gender, and Food. She is also the author of the 2010 book Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture from Rutgers University Press, 2010. You can follow Cat on Twitter @Cat_Keyser.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

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David Varel, "The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought" (U Chicago Press, 2018) Jul 12, 2019

Allison Davis (1902-1983) was a pioneering anthropologist who did ground-breaking fieldwork in the Jim Crow south, challenged the racial bias of IQ tests, and became the first African American to be tenured at the University of Chicago. And yet despite these contributions Davis's work is little read today. The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought(University of Chicago Press, 2018) is the first full-length biography of Davis ever written. In it, historian David Varel documents Davis's remarkable life. In this episode in New Books in Anthropology we talk about Davis's collaboration with authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Edward Sapir, John Dollard, W. Lloyd Warner Warner, St. Clair Drake, and many others. We also discuss how Davis pioneered concepts such as structural racism and explored the relationship between race and class. David Varel talks about the choices he made as a White academic writing about an African American life, and the importance of widening intellectual genealogies by including 'lost' figures such as Davis.

David Varel earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Colorado, Boulder. The Lost Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is his first book.

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is the author of the article "Welcoming the New Amateurs: A future (and past) for non-academic anthropologists" as well as other books and articles.

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Seán Moore, "Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries" (Oxford UP, 2019) Jul 11, 2019

Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce—the book trade and the slave trade. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731-1814 (Oxford University Press, 2019) bridges the study of these trades by demonstrating how Americans' profits from slavery were reinvested in imported British books and providing evidence that the colonial book market was shaped, in part, by the demand of slave owners for metropolitan cultural capital. Drawing on recent scholarship that shows how participation in London cultural life was very expensive in the eighteenth century, as well as evidence that enslavers were therefore some of the few early Americans who could afford to import British cultural products, Seán Moore, Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire as well as journal Editor for Eighteenth Century Studies, merges the fields of the history of the book, Atlantic studies, and the study of race, arguing that the empire-wide circulation of British books was underwritten by the labor of the African diaspora.

The volume is the first in early American and eighteenth-century British studies to fuse our growing understanding of the material culture of the transatlantic text with our awareness of slavery as an economic and philanthropic basis for the production and consumption of knowledge. In studying the American dissemination of works of British literature and political thought, it claims that Americans were seeking out the forms of citizenship, constitutional traditions, and rights that were the signature of that British identity. Even though they were purchasing the sovereignty of Anglo-Americans at the expense of African-Americans through these books, however, some colonials were also making the case for the abolition of slavery.

Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Tanisha C. Ford, "Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl's Love Letter to the Power of Fashion" (St. Martins Press, 2019) Jul 10, 2019

In this highly engaging book, fashionista and pop culture expert Tanisha C. Ford investigates Afros and dashikis, go-go boots and hotpants of the sixties, hip hop's baggy jeans and bamboo earrings, and the #BlackLivesMatter-inspired hoodies of today.

The history of these garments is deeply intertwined with Ford’s story as a black girl coming of age in a Midwestern rust belt city. She experimented with the Jheri curl; discovered how wearing the wrong color tennis shoes at the roller rink during the drug and gang wars of the 1980s could get you beaten; and rocked oversized, brightly colored jeans and Timberlands at an elite boarding school where the white upper crust wore conservative wool shift dresses.

Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl's Love Letter to the Power of Fashion (St. Martins Press, 2019) is a story of desire, access, conformity, and black innovation that explains things like the importance of knockoff culture; the role of “ghetto fabulous” full-length furs and colorful leather in the 1990s; how black girls make magic out of a dollar store t-shirt, rhinestones, and airbrushed paint; and black parents' emphasis on dressing nice. Ford talks about the pain of seeing black style appropriated by the mainstream fashion industry and fashion’s power, especially in middle America. In this richly evocative narrative, she shares her lifelong fashion revolution―from figuring out her own personal style to discovering what makes Midwestern fashion a real thing too.

Adam McNeil is a PhD Student in the Department of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

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Genevieve Carpio, "Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race" (U California Press, 2019) Jul 08, 2019

In her new book, Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race (University of California Press, 2019), Professor Genevieve Carpio considers tensions around mobility and settlement in the 19th- and 20th-century American West, especially California’s Inland Empire. In this wide-ranging study, the first academic work to draw on the Inland Mexican Heritage archives, Carpio examines policies and forces as disparate as bicycle ordinances, immigration policy, incarceration, traffic checkpoints, and Route 66 heritage. She shows how regional authorities constructed racial hierarchies by allowing some people to move freely while placing limits on the mobility of others. Highlighting the ways that people of color have negotiated and resisted their positions within these systems, Carpio offers a compelling and original analysis of race through spatial mobility and the making of place.

Carrie Lane is a Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment (Cornell University Press, 2011). Her research concerns the changing nature of work in the contemporary U.S. She is currently writing a book on the professional organizing industry. To contact her or to suggest a recent title, email clane@fullerton.edu.

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Tiffany Gill, "To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism" (U Illinois Press, 2019) Jul 05, 2019

Annette Joseph-Gabriel talks with Tiffany Gill about the history of African American travel in the late twentieth century and its significance to Black communities across the lines of class and gender. Joseph-Gabriel is an assistant professor of French at the University of Michigan, College of Literature, Science and the Arts.

Gill is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies & History and Cochran Scholar at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry and the co-editor (with Keisha Blain) of To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (University of Illinois Press, 2019).

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Yuko Miki, "Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil" (Cambridge UP, 2018) Jul 05, 2019

Yuko Miki’s book, Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil(Cambridge University Press, 2018), was the recent recipient of LASA’s 19th-century section Honorable Mention for Best Book. Frontiers of Citizenship is a beautifully written book that integrates quite seamlessly the history black and indigenous peoples in 19th century Brazil. The book explores the intersections of race and ethnicity, borderlands studies, as well as the intersecting histories of citizenship, popular politics, national identity, emancipation, and labor. In the book, Dr. Miki explores the quandaries of citizenship in a multiracial society and challenges the idea that citizenship is an equally important and equally valued goal for everyone. The book not only demonstrates otherwise, but really helps the reader challenge these widely held assumptions in a compelling and grounded manner.

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Nancy Mirabal, "Suspect Freedoms: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823-1957" (NYU Press, 2017) Jun 27, 2019

In Suspect Freedoms: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823-1957 (NYU Press, 2017), Nancy Mirabal details New York Cuban diasporic history between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with keen attention to how political debates about the potential future, visibility, and belonging in Cuba played out along issues of race and gender. By shifting moments of importance in Cuban and U.S. history, it becomes clear exactly how contentious the differing opinions on how to move the island away from Spanish colonial rule and the role it would come to play – if any – on the political, racial, and economic landscape of the United States. Mirabal utilizes vast archival material spanning club records, literary texts, newspapers, photographs, and oral histories to tell how exiled Cuban migrants formed, maintained, and disagreed within social clubs in New York. Her inclusion of labor history, intellectual history, political history, social history, and immigration history makes for an incredibly detailed and dynamic history.

Mirabal is committed to writing a history that focuses on the experiences and intellectual debates of Afro-Cubans during a period of enslavement, empire, and colonialism. Further, she tells how the movement of peoples and ideas of revolution and independence were both being informed and redefined by an exiled Afro-Cuban experience well before and after 1898. Mirabal writes, “Afro-Cuban migrants were some of the most incisive, powerful, and radical voices in the exile nationalist movement, so much so that by the mid- to late nineteenth-century, meanings of Cubanidad were inextricably tied to ending slavery, racial equality, and a promise of enfranchisement” (6). Suspect Freedoms recounts a history of how nation-building in Cuba, which was dependent largely on diasporic intellectuals, was a racialized and masculinist project dependent on the white supremacy, anti-blackness, and patriarchy. Even then, the intricacies with which Dr. Mirabal recounts Black migrant’s, women’s, and Black women’s experiences and resistance to such fault lines within this century-long period of Cuban diasporic history is masterful.

Jonathan Cortez is a Ph.D. candidate of American Studies at Brown University. They are a historian of 20th-century issues of race, labor, (im)migration, surveillance, space, relational Ethnic Studies, and Latinx Studies. Their research focuses on the rise of federally-funded encampments (i.e., the concentration of populations) from the advent of the New Deal until post-WWII era. Their dissertation, “The Age of Encampment: Race, Surveillance, and the Power of Spatial Scripts, 1933-1975” reveals underlying continuities between the presence of threatening bodies and the increasing surveillance of these bodies in camps throughout the United States. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @joncortz and their personal website www.historiancortez.com

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Chris S. Duvall, "The African Roots of Marijuana" (Duke UP, 2019) Jun 24, 2019

There's so much discussion in the contemporary United States about marijuana. Debates focus on legalization and medicalization. Usually, Reefer Madness, Harry Anslinger, and race are brought into the conversation. But a big part of the larger marijuana story is missing. In Chris S. Duvall's new book, The African Roots of Marijuana (Duke University Press, 2019), he tells a distinctly non-American story that nevertheless has important lessons for current debates. Duvall helps us understand cannabis as a crop, commodity, and tool in African culture and in the history of slavery. He showcases the plant-person relationship and offers valuable lessons about colonialism and rise of 'big marijuana' in 2019.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

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Stephen R. Duncan, "The Rebel Café: Sex, Race, and Politics in Cold War America’s Nightclub Underground" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) Jun 24, 2019

The art and antics of rebellious figures in 1950s American nightlife―from the Beat Generation to eccentric jazz musicians and comedians―have long fascinated fans and scholars alike. In The Rebel Café: Sex, Race, and Politics in Cold War America’s Nightclub Underground(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), Stephen R. Duncan flips the frame, focusing on the New York and San Francisco bars, nightclubs, and coffeehouses from which these cultural icons emerged. Duncan shows that the sexy, smoky sites of bohemian Greenwich Village and North Beach offered not just entertainment but doorways to a new sociopolitical consciousness.

This book is a collective biography of the places that harbored beatniks, blabbermouths, hipsters, playboys, and partisans who altered the shape of postwar liberal politics and culture. Throughout this period, Duncan argues, nightspots were crucial―albeit informal―institutions of the American democratic public sphere. Amid the Red Scare’s repressive politics, the urban underground of New York and San Francisco acted as both a fallout shelter for left-wingers and a laboratory for social experimentation.

Touching on literary figures from Norman Mailer and Amiri Baraka to Susan Sontag as well as performers ranging from Dave Brubeck to Maya Angelou to Lenny Bruce, The Rebel Café profiles hot spots such as the Village Vanguard, the hungry i, the Black Cat Cafe, and the White Horse Tavern. Ultimately, the book provides a deeper view of 1950s America, not simply as the black-and-white precursor to the Technicolor flamboyance of the sixties but as a rich period of artistic expression and identity formation that blended cultural production and politics.

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Dorinne Kondo, "Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity" (Duke UP, 2018) Jun 24, 2019

In Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Duke University Press 2018), Dorinne Kondo brings together critical race studies, affect theory, psychoanalysis and her critically keen awareness of the politics and potential of theatre production and reception to ask how theatre ‘makes, unmakes and remakes’ race. Building on over 20 years of experience as an ethnographer, dramaturg and playwriter, Kondo exposes the racial structures that are mutually constitutive of the theatre specifically, and the arts more generally. So doing, she attends to the economic forces and representational practices that have not only enabled the affective violence through which the theatre so often operates; she also draws attention to how these forces and practices can produce the grounds for theatre’s restorative and transformative potential.

Dorinne Kondo is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on cultural theory, performance, aesthetics and politics, cross-racial identification/ multiracial collaboration, modes of embodiment, ethnography and genre, the integration of "creative" and "critical" writing.

She is also the author of About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater, and Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace.

Sitara Thobani is Assistant Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University. Her research focuses on the performance arts in colonial and postcolonial South Asia and its diasporas, especially as these relate to formations of nation, gender, sexuality and religion. She received her DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology form Oxford University, and is the author of Indian Classical Dance and the Making of Postcolonial National Identities: Dancing on Empire’s Stage (Routledge 2017).

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Camisha Russell, "The Assisted Reproduction of Race" (Indiana UP, 2018) Jun 20, 2019

Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) such as in vitro fertilization and surrogacy have been critically examined within philosophy, particularly by feminists and bioethicists, but the role of race—both in how the technologies are used and in the effects that they are having—has received less attention. In The Assisted Reproduction of Race (Indiana University Press, 2018), Camisha Russell undertakes this critical analysis. While there is a robust scientific consensus that there is no meaningful genetic basis for race, Russell’s analysis of the role of race in ARTs reveals that when it comes to producing kinship, race is still doing a great deal of work. Further, by arguing that race itself is a technology, Russell shows how race is both produced and productive, historically, as well as in everyday practices, techniques, and choices. While this analysis focuses on what race does in the contemporary realm of ARTS, it illuminates the role of race, in the past and now, in constructing social reality.

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Shennette Garrett-Scott, "Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal" (Columbia UP, 2019) Jun 19, 2019

Think running an insurance company or a bank is hard? Try doing it as an African-American woman in the Jim Crow South. Shennette Garrett-Scott's new book, Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal (Columbia University Press, 2019) tells the fascinating story of just such an endeavor, first the Independent Order of St. Luke, and then the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, founded in Richmond in 1903. Along the way, she tells the tale of force-of-nature strong women, particularly Maggie Lena Walker, who wouldn't take no for an answer as she built up a culture of business and entrepreneurship against incredibly long odds and never-ending efforts by regulators and competitors to thwart her efforts. It makes for gripping reading.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com

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Marisol LeBrón, "Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico" (U California Press, 2019) Jun 18, 2019

Marisol LeBrón’s new book, Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2019), examines the rise of and resistance to punitive governance (tough on crime policing policies) in Puerto Rico from the 1990s to the present. As in the United States, LeBrón shows how increased investment in policing did not respond to a spike in crime. It actually emerged as a strategy to shore up the local political and economic establishment mired in the crisis of the archipelago’s postwar colonial development policy “Operation Bootstrap,” spiking unemployment, lack of U.S. investment, and a growing informal economy which included the drug trade. Puerto Rican elites hoped to reinvent themselves as models for tough on crime policing and gatekeepers for the United States to Latin America. Beginning with the mano dura contra el crimen (iron fist against crime) policy of commonwealth Governor Pedro Rosselló in 1993, police increasingly targeted lower income, predominantly Black public housing complexes (caseríos) as sources of criminality and lawlessness. Using Justice Department reports, social media research, newspapers, and oral interviews to create a “police archive,” LeBrón demonstrates that while police killings, brutality, surveillance, and harassment were hallmarks of mano dura, the policy also reinvented popular understandings of the “who” and “where” of crime that endure to the present. In doing so, she shows how presumptions about race, class, gender, and sexuality linked to certain places (public housing, sex work neighborhoods, schools, and universities) created notions of victims and criminals who “deserved” life or death. The book’s second half explores critiques of and resistance to punitive governance by looking at underground rap, university student activism, social media debates, and non-punitive anti-violence activism. These case studies show the growing resistance to policing as policy instead of social investment, but also the tenacity of the discourses of criminality activists must wrestle with today.

LeBrón is also the author of the forthcoming Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (Haymarket Books) and the co-creator of the Puerto Rico Syllabus.

Jesse Zarley will be an assistant professor of history at Saint Joseph’s College on Long Island, where in Fall 2019 he will be teaching Latin American, Caribbean, and World History. His research interests include borderlands, ethnohistory, race, and transnationalism during Latin America’s Age of Revolution, particularly in Chile and Argentina. He is the author of a recent article on Mapuche leaders and Chile’s independence wars. You can follow him on Twitter.

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E. Douglas Bomberger, "Making Music American: 1917 and the Transformation of Culture" (Oxford UP, 2018) Jun 13, 2019

There has been a recent trend in books that explore one year in detail: 1914, 1927, and 1968 have all received this treatment. E. Douglas Bomberger’s new book Making Music American: 1917 and the Transformation of Culture from Oxford University Press (2018) is new twist on this phenomenon. Rather than primarily trace historical events while touching on cultural matters as many of these books do, Bomberger follows the events in jazz and classical music during this crucial year while framing them within America’s entry into World War One.

Written for the general public as well as a scholarly audience, each chapter puts the events of one month in conversation with each other, allowing readers to grasp the busy cultural landscape in the period. Bomberger focuses on eight key figures. Classical musicians Fritz Kreisler, Karl Muck, Walter Damrosch, Olga Samaroff, and Ernestine Schumann-Heink contended with the fallout from mounting anti-German feeling within the United States in different ways as audiences turned against the German music which was the core of their repertory, and viewed German musicians with suspicion. Only Olga Samaroff was born in the US. The others were German-speaking, and some were not U.S. citizens. Through canny marketing and patriotic concerts, Ernestine Schumann-Heink maintained her singing career even though she had sons fighting on both sides of the conflict, while conductor Karl Muck ended up in an internment camp.

Meanwhile popular musicians Freddie Keppard, Dominc LaRocca, and James Reese Europe worked to establish their careers and popularize the fledging musical style of jazz. James Reese Europe spent most of the year staffing and then training the band for the Fifteenth Regiment (Colored) of the New York National Guard, an all-black unit that went on to distinguish itself in battle, but not before encountering racism at home. Bomberger also explains the legal and recording challenges jazz musicians faced in 1917. Over the course of the book, Bomberger skillfully makes the case that 1917 saw crucial developments in American music that changed the cultural landscape in the United States forever.

E. Douglas Bomberger is Professor of Musicology at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. A prolific author, Bomberger has published six books and over one hundred articles on subjects ranging from the medieval origins of keyboard instruments to mid-twentieth century American music. His primary research areas are in the piano literature, nineteenth-century American music, and transatlantic musical connections. He received the Elizabethtown College 2018–2019 Ranck Prize for Research Excellence.

Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.

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Bryan McCann, "The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era" (U Alabama Press, 2017) Jun 12, 2019

On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Communication at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Bryan McCann (he/his)--Associate Professor of Communication at Louisiana State University--on a dope new work of cultural criticism The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era (University of Alabama Press, 2017). The Mark of Criminality positions the work of key gangsta rap artists--Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur--as well as the controversies their work produced, squarely within the law-and-order politics and popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s to reveal a profoundly complex period in American history when the meanings of crime and criminality were incredibly unstable. McCann argues that, among other well-circulated meanings, the mark of criminality was a source of power, credibility, and revenue. By understanding gangsta rap as a potent, if deeply imperfect, enactment of the mark of criminality, we can better understand how crime is always a site of struggle over meaning.

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Christina Proenza-Coles, "American Founders: How People of African Descent Established Freedom in the New World" (NewSouth Books, 2019) Jun 11, 2019

Christina Proenza-Coles' new book American Founders: How People of African Descent Established Freedom in the New World (NewSouth Books, 2019) reveals men and women of African descent as key protagonists in the story of American democracy. It chronicles how black people developed and defended New World settlements, undermined slavery, and championed freedom throughout the hemisphere from the sixteenth thorough the twentieth centuries. While conventional history tends to reduce the roles of African Americans to antebellum slavery and the civil rights movement, in reality African residents preceded the English by a century and arrived in the Americas in numbers that far exceeded European migrants up until 1820. Afro-Americans were omnipresent in the founding and advancement of the Americas, and recurrently outnumbered Europeans at many times and places, from colonial Peru to antebellum Virginia. African-descended people contributed to every facet of American history as explorers, conquistadores, settlers, soldiers, sailors, servants, slaves, rebels, leaders, lawyers, litigants, laborers, artisans, artists, activists, translators, teachers, doctors, nurses, inventors, investors, merchants, mathematicians, scientists, scholars, engineers, entrepreneurs, generals, cowboys, pirates, professors, politicians, priests, poets, and presidents. The multitude of events and mixed-race individuals included in the book underscores that black and white Americans share the same history, and in many cases, the same ancestry. American Founders is meant to celebrate this shared heritage and strengthen these bonds.

Adam McNeil is PhD student in History at the University of Delaware where he is an African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar. He received his M.A. in History at Simmons College in 2018 and his B.S. in History at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2015. Follow him @CulturedModesty on Twitter to learn more about upcoming interviews.

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Daniel HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes, "Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) Jun 10, 2019

Dan HoSang and Joe Lowndes’ new book,Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) documents the changing politics of race and class in the age of Trump across a broad range of phenomena, showing how new forms of racialization work to alter the economic protections of whiteness while promoting some conservatives of color as models of the neoliberal regime. Through careful analyses of diverse political sites and conflicts—racially charged elections, attacks on public-sector unions, new forms of white precarity, the rise of black and brown political elites, militia uprisings, multiculturalism on the far right—they highlight new, interwoven deployments of race in the ascendant age of inequality. Using the concept of “racial transposition,” the authors demonstrate how racial meanings and signification can be transferred from one group to another to shore up both neoliberalism and racial hierarchy.

This podcast was hosted by Lilly Goren, Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. You can follow her on Twitter @gorenlj

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Amy Murrell Taylor, "Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps" (UNC Press, 2018) May 29, 2019

The Civil War was just days old when the first enslaved men, women, and children began fleeing their plantations to seek refuge inside the lines of the Union army as it moved deep into the heart of the Confederacy. In the years that followed, hundreds of thousands more followed in a mass exodus from slavery that would destroy the system once and for all. Drawing on an extraordinary survey of slave refugee camps throughout the country, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps(University of North Carolina Press, 2018) reveals as never before the everyday experiences of these refugees from slavery as they made their way through the vast landscape of army-supervised camps that emerged during the war. Amy Murrell Taylor vividly reconstructs the human world of wartime emancipation, taking readers inside military-issued tents and makeshift towns, through commissary warehouses and active combat, and into the realities of individuals and families struggling to survive physically as well as spiritually. Narrating their journeys in and out of the confines of the camps, Taylor shows in often gripping detail how the most basic necessities of life were elemental to a former slave's quest for freedom and full citizenship.

The stories of individuals--storekeepers, a laundress, and a minister among them--anchor this ambitious and wide-ranging history and demonstrate with new clarity how contingent the slaves' pursuit of freedom was on the rhythms and culture of military life. Taylor brings new insight into the enormous risks taken by formerly enslaved people to find freedom in the midst of the nation's most destructive war.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Quincy D. Newell, "Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon" (Oxford UP, 2019) May 21, 2019

"Dear Brother," Jane Manning James wrote to Joseph F. Smith in 1903, "I take this opportunity of writing to ask you if I can get my endowments and also finish the work I have begun for my dead .... Your sister in the Gospel, Jane E. James." A faithful Latter-day Saint since her conversion sixty years earlier, James had made this request several times before, to no avail, and this time she would be just as unsuccessful, even though most Latter-day Saints were allowed to participate in the endowment ritual in the temple as a matter of course. James, unlike most Mormons, was black. For that reason, she was barred from performing the temple rituals that Latter-day Saints believe are necessary to reach the highest degrees of glory after death.

A free black woman from Connecticut, James positioned herself at the center of LDS history with uncanny precision. After her conversion, she traveled with her family and other converts from the region to Nauvoo, Illinois, where the LDS church was then based. There, she took a job as a servant in the home of Joseph Smith, the founder and first prophet of the LDS church. When Smith was killed in 1844, Jane found employment as a servant in Brigham Young's home. These positions placed Jane in proximity to Mormonism's most powerful figures, but did not protect her from the church's racially discriminatory policies. Nevertheless, she remained a faithful member until her death in 1908.

Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon (Oxford University Press, 2019) is the first scholarly biography of Jane Manning James. Quincy D. Newell chronicles the life of this remarkable yet largely unknown figure and reveals why James's story changes our understanding of American history.

Daniel P. Stone holds a PhD in American religious history from Manchester Metropolitan University (United Kingdom) and is the author of William Bickerton: Forgotten Latter Day Prophet (Signature Books, 2018). He has taught history courses at the University of Detroit Mercy and Florida Atlantic University, and currently, he works as a research archivist for a private library/archive in Detroit, Michigan.

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Derrick Spires, "The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019) May 15, 2019

With talk about birthright citizenship and border walls running rampant in Trump’s America, there are many scholars reaching back to antebellum America to historically ground today’s citizens in debates from the past that hold relevance now about both topics. Scholars like University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Associate Professor of English Derrick Spires is one of those scholars weighing in. Today on New Books in African American Studies, your host, Adam McNeil will help guide the conversation with Professor Spires about his brand new book The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

Adam McNeil is a PhD Student in the Department of History at the University of Delaware.

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Ali Michael, "Raising Race Questions: Whiteness and Inquiry in Education" (Teachers College Press, 2015) May 13, 2019

In this episode, I talked with Ali Michael on her award-winning book, Raising Race Questions: Whiteness and Inquiry in Education (Teachers College Press, 2015). According to a 2014 report by the National Center for Education Statistics, white teachers comprise over 85% of the K-12 teaching force in the United States, whereas as of 2011, 52% of the public school students were white students, 16% black students, 24% Hispanic students, 5% Asian and Pacific Islander students, and 1% American India or Alaska Native students. In many urban areas, white teachers are teaching classes in which a majority of the students are non-white. In such a context, how is the issue of race addressed in American schools? How do white teachers connect to their students of color? Or simply, is it necessary to raise race questions?

In Raising Race Questions, Ali Michael worked with a group of white teachers to inquire about race and schooling. She has masterfully shown to us, how teachers can become more racially competent through asking difficult questions, building inquiry groups, and working on personal and interpersonal reflection. The book offers four guiding principles for teachers to inquire about race and racism: (1) the inquiry aims to make teachers and classrooms more whole than creating fractures; (2) teachers’ and students’ positive racial identity matter; (3) a multicultural curriculum is not sufficient for building an antiracist classroom; (4) racial competence can be learned. These principles are inspiring and helpful for not only teachers, but also all the citizens who care about the issues of equity, inclusion, and social justice. Raising Race Questions won the 2017 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award. Its author, Ali Michael is the co-founder and director of the Race Institute for K-12 Educators. Other than this book, Dr. Michael also published regularly on popular and professional media such as the Huffington Post and Independent Schools Magazine.

Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Among her research interests are qualitative research methodology, youth culture, identity formation, and comparative sociological and educational studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution.

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J Mase III, "And Then I Got Fired: One Transqueer’s Reflections on Grief, Unemployment, and Inappropriate Jokes About Death" May 13, 2019

In his own description of his book, And Then I Got Fired: One Transqueer’s Reflections on Grief, Unemployment, & Inappropriate Jokes About Death, J Mase III writes, “Feel free to scream directly into this book if you need to.” It is in this invitation that J Mase III takes on themes of the messiness of grief, Black trans spirituality, and what it means to be an independent artist. Written after the passing of both his grandmother and father within the span of three months, this book is honest, brave, and full of love.

J Mase III is a Black trans queer poet and educator and is the founder of awQward, a talent agency exclusively for trans and queer people of color. You can check out his amazing work and purchase his book here.

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Fernando Orejuela and Stephanie Shonekan, "Black Lives Matter and Music: Protest, Intervention, Reflection" (Indiana UP, 2018) May 07, 2019

Music has always been integral to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, with songs such as Kendrick Lamar’s "Alright," J. Cole’s "Be Free," D’Angelo and the Vanguard's "The Charade," The Game’s "Don’t Shoot," Janelle Monae’s "Hell You Talmbout," Usher’s "Chains," and many others serving as unofficial anthems and soundtracks for members and allies of the movement. In Fernando Orejuela and Stephanie Shonekan's collection of essays, Black Lives Matter and Music: Protest, Intervention, Reflection (Indiana University Press, 2018), contributors draw from ethnographic research and personal encounters to illustrate how scholarly research of, approaches to, and teaching about the role of music in the Black Lives Matter movement can contribute to public awareness of the social, economic, political, scientific, and other forms of injustices in our society. Each chapter in Black Lives Matter and Music focuses on a particular case study, with the goal to inspire and facilitate productive dialogues among scholars, students, and the communities we study. From nuanced snapshots of how African American musical genres have flourished in different cities and the role of these genres in local activism, to explorations of musical pedagogy on the American college campus, readers will be challenged to think of how activism and social justice work might appear in American higher education and in academic research. Black Lives Matter and Music provokes us to examine how we teach, how we conduct research, and ultimately, how we should think about the ways that black struggle, liberation, and identity have evolved in the United States and around the world.

Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University.

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Jeanne Theoharis, "The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South" (NYU Press, 2019) May 06, 2019

In this New Books Network/Gotham Center for NYC History podcast, guest host Beth Harpaz, editor of the City University of New York website SUM, interviews Jeanne Theoharis, distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College. Their topic is a new book just out from NYU Press, co-edited by Theoharis, called The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South (NYU Press, 2019).

The book looks at the history of institutionalized racism around the U.S., showing that laws, policies, and entitlements in every region of the country not only created segregated communities, but also promoted affluence and opportunities for white Americans while keeping African Americans out of the middle class.

“There did not need to be a ‘no coloreds’ sign for hotels, restaurants, pools, parks, housing complexes, schools, and jobs to be segregated across the North as well,” wrote Theoharis and her co-editor Professor Brian Purnell of Bowdoin College.

In the podcast, Theoharis shows how African-Americans have faced discrimination in everything from pre-Civil War legal codes in New York, to 20th-century government programs like Social Security and the G.I. bill. She and Harpaz also discuss the ways in which the legacy of these racist policies persist today in public education, the criminal justice system, and other aspects of American society.

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Ernest McGowen III, "African Americans in White Suburbia: Social Networks and Political Behavior" (UP of Kansas 2017) May 06, 2019

Relative wealth has given suburban African Americans employment opportunities and political resources--but not necessarily neighbors, coworkers, or elected officials who share their concerns. How does this environment affect the political behavior of African Americans who have strong racial identifications and policy preferences? Ernest McGowen III set out to answer this question in African Americans in White Suburbia: Social Networks and Political Behavior (University Press of Kansas, 2017). McGowen is assistant professor of political science, University of Richmond.

McGowen uses a various surveys to understand the opinion and behavior of suburban African Americans and compares these attitudes their white neighbors and to African Americans in the city. The findings from the book reveal that suburban African Americans feel their minority status acutely. As a result, they find more agreeable networks that reinforce their racial identity, such as churches, fraternal organizations, and charities in black neighborhoods they've left behind.

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Matthew Fox-Amato, "Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America" (Oxford UP, 2019) Apr 25, 2019

Shortly after its introduction, photography transformed the ways Americans made political arguments using visual images. In the mid-19th century, photographs became key tools in debates surrounding slavery. Yet, photographs were used in interesting and sometimes surprising ways by a range of actors. Matthew Fox-Amato, an Assistant Professor at the University of Idaho, examines the role of photography in the politics of slavery during the 19th century and the important legacies of those uses on later visual politics in his new book, Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America (Oxford University Press, 2019). The book examines the use of photographs by slaves, abolitionists, slaveholders, and Union soldiers to explore the rich complexities of the visual politics of the moment. He also considers the legacies of this use of the new medium.

In this episode of the podcast, Fox-Amato discusses the ways these various groups used photography for individual purposes and to shape the debates surrounding slavery in the antebellum period. He explains how photographs also highlight how union soldiers were beginning to think about a post-slavery racial hierarchy during the war. The book demonstrates the importance of thinking about photographs as both visual images and material objects. In the interview, Fox-Amato discusses the research necessary to analyze the photographs in both these ways and the broader importance of studying visual and material culture in all their historical complexity.

Christine Lamberson is an Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu.

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Andra Gillespie, "Race and the Obama Administration: Substance, Symbols, and Hope" (Manchester UP, 2019) Apr 18, 2019

Scholars and pundits have been busy trying to assess the legacy of President Barack Obama. Few have done so with the nuance and comparative approach of Andra Gillespie. In her new book Race and the Obama Administration: Substance, Symbols, and Hope (Manchester University Press, 2019), she examines the promotion of the substantive and symbolic initiatives for blacks. She compares Obama to Presidents Bush and Clinton to assess whether the election of a black president actually changed the status of blacks in the United States.

Gillespie is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Emory University and previous published The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark, and Post-Racial America (NYU Press, 2012).

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Anand Prahlad, "The Secret Life of a Black Aspie: A Memoir" (U Alaska Press, 2017) Apr 17, 2019

Anand Prahlad was born on a former plantation in Virginia in 1954. This memoir, vividly internal, powerfully lyric, and brilliantly impressionistic, is his story.

For the first four years of his life, Prahlad didn’t speak. But his silence didn’t stop him from communicating—or communing—with the strange, numinous world he found around him. Ordinary household objects came to life; the spirits of long-dead slave children were his best friends. In his magical interior world, sensory experiences blurred, time disappeared, and memory was fluid. Ever so slowly, he emerged, learning to talk and evolving into an artist and educator. His journey takes readers across the United States during one of its most turbulent moments, and Prahlad experiences it all, from the heights of the Civil Rights Movement to West Coast hippie enclaves to a college town that continues to struggle with racism and its border state legacy.

Rooted in black folklore and cultural ambience, and offering new perspectives on autism and more, The Secret Life of a Black Aspie: A Memoir (University of Alaska Press, 2017) will inspire and delight readers and deepen our understanding of the marginal spaces of human existence.

Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University.

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Jamila Lee-Johnson, and Ashley Gaskew, "Critical Theory and Qualitative Data Analysis in Education" (Routledge, 2018) Apr 12, 2019

Jamila Lee-Johnson and Ashley Gaskew, doctoral students in education at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, join us in this episode to discuss their recently published co-edited volume entitled, Critical Theory and Qualitative Data Analysis in Education. In addition to talking about their own journey to becoming critical scholars, Jamila and Ashley talk to us about the importance of centering voices and perspectives that have been traditionally marginalized in the academy. Their work builds a pathway forward for rigorous data analysis that will shape future generations of critical scholars.

After an overview of the book and its contribution, Ashley and Jamila each summarize their chapters. Ashley’s chapter applies Habermas’ theory of colonization of the lifeworld to the analysis of for-profit television advertisements. She talks about why it is important to study the for-profit sector in higher education, how she transcribed and coded the advertisement, and what this technique allows us to understand about how for-profit sectors are shaping the higher education system. Jamila’s chapter uses tweets from Black Twitter and the #BlackWomenAtWork hashtag. She tells us the inspiration for her inquiry, how she applies Critical Discourse Analysis and W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness to code and interpret tweets, and what this analysis contributes. These are just two examples of the range of data sources and theories that authors use in the book, with other chapters analyzing syllabi, photos, interviews, and political campaign speeches.

The book came together as a result of a graduate-level seminar taught by Rachelle Winkle-Wagner, and Jamila and Ashley talk about what it was like to be involved as both editors and writers in the project. They describe how they worked with authors, provided feedback, and humanized the writing and editing process, demonstrating yet another level of their scholarship.

Julie Kallio is a graduate student in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her research interests include educational change, innovation and improvement networks, and participatory design. You can find more about her work on her website, follow her on twitter, or email her at jmkallio@wisc.edu.

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Max Felker-Kantor, "Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD" (UNC Press, 2018) Apr 09, 2019

In recent years, the treatment of African Americans by police departments around the country has come under increased public scrutiny. As any student of the longer historical relationship between law enforcement and people of color will know, this relationship has been the subject of tension and scrutiny at many moments in the past as well. In his new book, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Max Felker-Kantor examines this multi-racial relationship in the key city of Los Angeles. The book begins with the uprising of the Watts neighborhood in August 1965, where decades of frustration with urban poverty and racial discrimination along with anger at racist police practices exploded in violence. The book then traces the subsequent decades of policing and anti-police abuse activism. During this time, reforms were common, yet real change was often difficult to achieve as symbolized by the 1992 rebellion, sparked by some of the same issues that caused the previous Watts uprising.

In this episode of the podcast, Felker-Kantor discusses this history of policing and importantly, the way LA communities of color mobilized to reshape law enforcement in the city. He highlights both the achievements and limitations of their reform. He also discusses both the possibilities and limits of urban political reformers working within city government and the ways in which the police themselves became a political force. Finally, Felker-Kantor discusses some of the little-used archival sources he examined for this project in light of the notorious difficulty historians have faced obtaining access to law enforcement records for histories of policing.

Christine Lamberson is an Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu.

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Su'ad Abdul Khabeer, “Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States” (NYU Press, 2016) Apr 05, 2019

Islam in American has been profoundly shaped by the Black Muslim experience. However, Black Muslims are often marginalized both within their own religious communities and in public discourse about Muslim Americans. Su'ad Abdul Khabeer, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, attends to this erasure by centering Black Muslims to investigate the relationship between race, religion, and popular culture. In Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States (NYU Press, 2016) she offers a rich ethnography of Muslims in Chicago, many of whom are involved with the Inner-City Muslim Action Network. IMAN and members of its community regularly perform “Muslim Cool,” a blueprint for being Muslim in America that is steeped in Blackness. Abdul Khabeer’s research helps us understand how Black Muslims have shaped Islam in America in general despite intra-communal tensions around anti-Blackness. In our conversation we discuss new approaches to Hip Hop, the loop of Muslim Cool, opinions about music in Islam and its use among Afrodiasporic Muslim communities, Black Muslim women’s veiling habits and its adoption by non-Black Muslims, Muslim Dandies and formulations of masculinity, state sponsored cultural diplomacy trips and Muslim hip hop artists, Sapelo Square as an effort to produce materials about Black Muslims, and how family histories can enrich the archives of Black Muslim Americans.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.

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Michael A. Schoeppner, "Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America" (Cambridge UP, 2019) Apr 04, 2019

Between 1822 and 1857, eight Southern states barred the ingress of all free black maritime workers. According to lawmakers, they carried a 'moral contagion' of abolitionism and black autonomy that could be transmitted to local slaves. Those seamen who arrived in Southern ports in violation of the laws faced incarceration, corporal punishment, an incipient form of convict leasing, and even punitive enslavement. The sailors, their captains, abolitionists, and British diplomatic agents protested this treatment. They wrote letters, published tracts, cajoled elected officials, pleaded with Southern officials, and litigated in state and federal courts. By deploying a progressive and sweeping notion of national citizenship - one that guaranteed a number of rights against state regulation - they exposed the ambiguity and potential power of national citizenship as a legal category. Ultimately, the Fourteenth Amendment recognized the robust understanding of citizenship championed by Antebellum free people of color, by people afflicted with 'moral contagion’. In his new book Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America(Cambridge University Press, 2019), Michael A. Schoeppner tells their story. Listen in.

Adam McNeil is PhD student in History at the University of Delaware where he is an African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar. He received his M.A. in History at Simmons College in 2018 and his B.S. in History at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2015. Follow him @CulturedModesty on Twitter to learn more about upcoming interviews.

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LaTanya McQueen, "And It Begins Like This" (Black Lawrence Press, 2018) Apr 03, 2019

Today, I spoke with LaTanya McQueen, whose new collection of essays reckons with intriguing and timely questions about history, race, family, place, and self. It’s called And It Begins Like This(Black Lawrence Press, 2018), and I immediately found myself asking, “What’s it? What’s this?” Not until over halfway through the book did McQueen make the answer clear, when she writes: “There is a story I once believed and it begins like this—a woman named Leanna Brown was a slave to Bedford Brown, Senator of North Carolina. Sometime during her enslavement she had a relationship with a white man who lived on a neighboring farm, and the results of their relationship produced three children, one of them my ancestor.” McQueen’s book is, in part, her attempt to learn the full and complicated truth of this story, to discover, as much as the record will allow, the history of her great-great grandmother. This search, it turns out, asks her no less than to grapple with the history of race relations in the United States and the ways in which it manifests in her own life and family. And It Begins Like This is a clear-eyed and powerful account not only of the experience of being an African American woman right now, but also a testament to the importance of this experience and the insight it brings for all Americans.

Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.

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Racquel J. Gates, "Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture" (Duke UP, 2018) Apr 03, 2019

Racquel J. Gates’ new book, Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2018), interrogates understandings of African-American representations on screen. This book is an important analysis of the concepts of negative and positive representations, especially in regard to the narrow space that these binary classifications create. Gates takes on not only the concept of representation, but also the texts where the images are presented, leading the reader through a variety of popular culture venues. Double Negative presents a careful typology of negativity, with extensive and diverse examples of each distinct variation. This analysis also integrates texts that are often dismissed or undermined. Instead, Gates provides valuable and nuanced interpretations of genres, reclaiming popular culture artifacts that are often excluded from scholarly or critical analysis. Gates explores many of the less respectable images and presentations of African-Americans, considering not only the images themselves and the narratives in which they are presented, but also the historical context in which the popular culture artifacts are engaged and consumed. Double Negative also takes up a metanalysis of celebrity in context of representation, especially in the entwining of race and gender. This is a fascinating book, examining important political questions and understandings through popular culture texts.

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Elena Schneider, "The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World" (UNC Press, 2018) Apr 02, 2019

Histories of the British occupation of Havana in 1762 have focused on imperial rivalries and the actions and decisions of European planters, colonial officials, and military officers. In her stunning revision, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Elena Schneider restores the central roles of enslaved Africans in all stages of the story. The relevance of the slave trade and the multiple and essential roles of African and African descended people in battle and in urban life emerge in this beautifully written account. In the aftermath, their valor and loyalty were omitted from contemporary accounts and the ensuing historiography. This book draws from a wide range of sources and multiple archives in a careful narrative that connects the Atlantic worlds of Spain, London, Havana, Kingston and the colonial United States, and zooms in on the enslaved individuals that made that world possible.

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Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, "They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South" (Yale UP, 2019) Mar 29, 2019

Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. In her new book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (Yale University Press, 2019) historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave‑owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave‑owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave‑owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding.

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Candis Watts Smith, "Black Politics in Transition: Immigration, Suburbanization, and Gentrification" (Routledge, 2019) Mar 27, 2019

Candis Watts Smith and Christina Greer are the editors of Black Politics in Transition: Immigration, Suburbanization, and Gentrification (Routledge, 2019). Smith is assistant professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina; Greer is associate professor of political science and American Studies at Fordham University.

Black Politics in Transition examines the role of three themes—immigration, suburbanization, and gentrification—in Black politics today. Immigration has resulted in demographic changes in Black populations throughout the US. In addition, the movement of Black populations out of the cities to which they migrated a generation ago—a reverse migration to the American South or a movement from cities to suburbs shifts the locus of Black politics. At the same time, middle class and white populations are returning to cities, displacing low income Blacks and immigrants alike in a process of gentrification.

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Brooke Newman, "A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica" (Yale UP, 2018) Mar 27, 2019

In an empire built on racial slavery, what roles do blood purity and citizenship play in the creation of subject citizens? This is one of the many questions broached by Dr. Brooke Newman in her new book A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (Yale University Press, 2018), Newman tells the story of how racial mixing affected the status of many different groups of people in colonial Jamaica. In doing so, Newman interrogates how notions of race were largely dependent on government’s role in shaping the meaning(s) of it. Largely, such discussions were based on the sexual violation and rape of enslaved women. Such violations were exacerbated by British print culture’s dissemination of what could only be termed a sort of modern-day rape tourism. A Dark Inheritance ultimately shifts our understandings of British notions of race, sex, and national belonging.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Anne Cheng, "Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface" (Oxford UP, 2017) Mar 25, 2019

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dr. Anne Cheng (she/hers)--Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University--to discuss an inimitable work of critique: Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford University Press, 2017). Moving fluidly and with suspense through Baker’s performances, personal journals, museums, architectural designs, and the lyrics of Cole Porter--to name a few--Cheng draws on the oft-studied but little considered Josephine Baker as a figure of articulation for the nuanced contradictions of primitivism, modernism, and theory. Through Baker, Cheng invites us to reconsider the mutual imbrication of object/subject, surface/depth, and exploitation/fascination. Cheng’s careful eye and beautiful command of texture illustrates that dissolving Baker into pure particularity--into pure surface--is the best way to capture her unique agency.

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I. Gould Ellen and J. Steil, "The Dream Revisited: Contemporary Debates about Housing, Segregation, and Opportunity" (Columbia UP, 2019) Mar 25, 2019

Why do people live where they do? What explains the persistence of residential segregation? Why is it complicated to address residential segregation? Please join me as I meet with Dr. Ingrid Gould Ellen and Dr. Justin Peter Steil to discuss The Dream Revisited: Contemporary Debates about Housing, Segregation, and Opportunity (Columbia University Press, 2019). This interview takes a heartfelt approach to discussing the ever-changing presence of urban inequality and possible solutions that would foster a more integrated America. We begin the interview with a discussion of what brought the authors to develop this anthology and the strategies they used to select a wide range of expert viewpoints on the causes and consequences of segregation and unequal living patterns in the United States of America. The leading scholars and practitioners who contributed to this anthology include civil rights advocates, affordable housing developers, elected officials, and fair housing lawyers. Together they discuss the nature and policy responses to residential segregation; scrutinize how barriers to mobility and complex neighborhood preferences allow segregation to persist; as well as identify the consequence that residential segregation has on health, home finance, local policing, and local politics. They editors of this book conclude with the debate in how government can intervene in housing markets to foster integration and at what level it should occur at (i.e., individual residence, neighborhood, or community).

In addition to The Dream Revisited, listeners can access additional contemporary debates about housing, segregation, and opportunity from the NYU Furman Center The Dream Revisited blog (the blog that served as a platform for the launch of this anthology).

Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is currently conducting research on the placemaking associated with the development of farmers’ market.

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Steve Luxenberg, "Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation" (Norton, 2019) Mar 22, 2019

Steve Luxenberg has created an unusual history of the famous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson and the 19th century’s segregationist practices in his book Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation (Norton, 2019) It is unusual because it is chiefly an ensemble biography of Henry Brown, John Marshall Harlan, and Albion Tourgee, three men intimately connected with the Plessy case. The book covers the Antebellum period youth of the three men, each from a different part of the young nation and each encountering freedmen, slaves, and the institution of slavery in different social and political contexts. We follow these men through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the post-Reconstruction period leading up to the Plessy decision. The Plessy case helped solidify official, state-enforced segregationist practices throughout the United States. It made the now-infamous phrase “separate but equal” a constitutional doctrine that was the law of the land until the 1950s and 1960s.

Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.

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Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing Mar 19, 2019

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge.

You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/

Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.

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Andrew T. Fede, "Homicide Justified: The Legality of Killing Slaves in the United States and Atlantic World" (U Georgia Press, 2017) Mar 18, 2019

Andrew T. Fede is a lawyer in private practice in northern New Jersey and an adjunct professor of law at Montclair State University. His new book Homicide Justified: The Legality of Killing Slaves in the United States and Atlantic World (University of Georgia Press, 2017) is a comparative account of slave homicide law in the American colonies and states, covering the period from the early 17th century through the American Civil War. Professor Fede’s account traces the variations in restrictions on slave owners and third parties’ treatment upon the murder of a slave. The harsh, often lethal, conditions of servitude in the Caribbean seem to have shaped the willingness (usually unwillingness) of slave owners and elected officials in these island to restrict what masters could do to their slaves. Whereas in the mid-Atlantic and northeastern colonies, restrictions were somewhat more easily countenanced. Fede reveals the details of murder prosecutions against slave masters, overseers and third-party non-owners and the limits such prosecutions faced in courts.

Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.

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Kellie Carter Jackson, "Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence" (U Penn Press, 2019) Mar 18, 2019

What the United States dubs “freedom” is inherently tied to methods of violence. The United States’s abolitionist movement was not free from this connection. This is in spite of one of the best known white abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison, being a pacifist, and many contemporary politicians referencing his method of non-violent resistance as a way to thwart present-day movements that grapple with the subject of revolutionary violence as a method to gain freedom from oppression. The abolitionist movement’s Black activists saw how the repression of their freedoms in the north were directly tied to the oppression of their enslaved sisters and brothers. In her new book Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Kellie Carter Jackson chronicles how violence was harnessed by Black abolitionists in their quest to rid the United States of chattel slavery. Force and Freedom explores why for many Black abolitionists, slavery could only be obliterated through violent means.

Adam McNeil is PhD student in History at the University of Delaware where he is an African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar. He received his M.A. in History at Simmons College in 2018 and his B.S. in History at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2015. Follow him @CulturedModesty on Twitter to learn more about upcoming interviews.

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Elizabeth Todd-Breland, "A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s" (UNC Press, 2018) Mar 14, 2019

Elizabeth Todd-Breland’s new book A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) tells the story of the struggle for educational reform in one of America's biggest and most segregated cities. By highlighting the activism of local Black women and Black teachers, Todd-Breland uncovers hidden histories of how Black women have been at the forefront of this fight from the 1960s to the present.

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Martha S. Jones, "Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America" (Cambridge UP, 2018) Mar 11, 2019

Martha S. Jones, in her excellent new book Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America(Cambridge University Press, 2018), weaves together the legal and constitutional dimensions of citizenship—from the Founding documents and law cases with which many scholars and students are familiar—with the daily civic engagement of African-Americans as they took part in public life and the rights of citizens. This political, historical, and legal analysis focuses particularly on the antebellum experiences of black Americans in Baltimore, Maryland, just miles from the U.S. Capital, but also vital as the largest free black community in the U.S. in one of the largest cities in the United States before the Civil War. Birthright Citizens takes the question of what defines and makes an individual a citizen, legally, and how that is performed and engaged in a granular or daily way, and delves into the historical record of black Americans in Baltimore, exploring how individuals took on the qualities and actions of citizens before the 14th Amendment. Jones’ deeply researched work is, as she notes, “a history, told through a series of disruptive vignettes, that suggests how people without rights still exercised them.” This is a fascinating marrying together of the structural and legal parameters of citizen rights and denials of those rights for many black Americans, both free and enslaved, and the ideas and actions pursued and taken by African-Americans in an effort to act like and thus be citizens. As we continue to consider the idea of citizenship, which remains less fixed and clear as a concept or legal construct, this analysis lays out the fluid and evolving understanding of the idea and daily functioning of citizenship in the early years of the republic and, particularly, in context of free, formerly enslaved, and enslaved black Americans in the United States.

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Ronald L. Lewis and Robert L. Zangrando, "Walter F. White: The NAACP’s Ambassador for Racial Justice" (West Virginia UP, 2019) Mar 01, 2019

Though overshadowed today by more celebrated figures, Walter Francis White was one of the most prominent campaigners for civil rights in mid-20th-century America. As Ronald L. Lewis and Robert L. Zangrando detail in Walter F. White: The NAACP’s Ambassador for Racial Justice(West Virginia University Press, 2019), for all his relative obscurity today White’s accomplishments did much to lay the groundwork for the civil rights victories won later in the century. Growing up in Atlanta, White enjoyed the benefits of a middle-class upbringing and a college education. His work to establish a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Atlanta brought him to the attention of James Weldon Johnson, who brought him to New York in 1918 to work full time for the organization. Throughout the 1920s White worked to expose the atrocities of lynching as part of the NAACP’s unsuccessful campaign to ban such violence. Upon succeeding Johnson as executive secretary of the organization in 1931, White dealt with both the ongoing problems of racism and the challenges imposed by the Great Depression, which he worked to surmount with constant organizing and lobbying. During the 1940s White used his relationships with both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to win greater federal action to surmount discrimination, though in his later years he faced a series of frustrations that were exacerbated both by his ill health and the controversy surrounding his divorce and remarriage to a white woman.

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Matthew Bowman, "Christian: The Politics of a Word in America" (Harvard UP, 2018) Feb 28, 2019

The intersection of religion and politics in the United States is one of the nation's most enduring conversations. Christian: The Politics of a Word in America(Harvard University Press, 2018) by Dr. Matthew Bowman at Henderson State University, was recently named one of the five Best Books in Religion for 2018 by Publishers Weekly. It is out now from Harvard University Press. Please enjoy this conversation with Dr. Matthew Bowman.

Greg Soden is the host "Classical Ideas," a podcast about religion and religious ideas. You can find it on iTunes here.

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Geraldine Heng, "The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages" (Cambridge UP, 2018) Feb 26, 2019

In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approaches to race that show the breadth and depth of the kinds of racial thinking in medieval society. In creating a detailed impression of the medieval race-making that would be reconfigured into the biological racism of the modern era, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaches beyond medievalists and race-studies scholars to anyone interested in the long history of race.

Throughout the study, Heng treats race-making as a repeating tendency to demarcate human beings through differences that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental. Thus constituted, these categories are then used to guide the differential apportioning of power. Scholars working in critical race studies have clearly demonstrated that culture predisposes notions of race. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaffirms that insight by examining the era before the dominance of biological discourses. Race has always been about strategically creating a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. By exploring race in the European middle ages, Heng lays bare the skeleton of racial thinking as a sorting mechanism, a structural relationship for the management of human differences.

In Heng's hands, the tools of critical race studies make it possible to name the systems and atrocities of the Middle Ages for what they were, revealing race-making before the modern vocabulary of race coalesced. Bringing together a group of specialized archives that aren't usually in conversation, Heng in many cases allows the medieval past to powerfully testify to the pre-modern history of race-formation, racial administration, and racist exploitation and oppression.

Beginning with the violent and sweeping anti-Semitism of thirteenth century England, showing the ways that Jews became the template by which other races were measured, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages launches a careful exposure of the way that minority groups were (and are) manipulated to create the sense of a national majority. A short but potent comparison to the English treatment of Irish subjects drives the analysis home.

A researcher, writer, editor, and educator, Carl Nellis digs in archives and academic libraries for the critically-acclaimed Lore Podcast and as research lead for Unobscured Podcast. Studies on both sides of the Atlantic left him chasing the tangled colonial history that threads the culture of the Middle Ages into today’s United States.

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Adrienne Brown, "The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race" (John Hopkins UP, 2017) Feb 25, 2019

Adrienne Brown joins the New Books Network this week to talk about her fascinating 2017 book, The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (John Hopkins University Press, 2017), which was a recent recipient of the Modern Studies Association's First Book prize.

Tracing the interconnected histories of the skyscraper and racial thought between the 1880s and the 1930s, Brown provides a sophisticated account of how vertical as well as horizontal expansion within the modern American city helped to shape perceptions and understandings of race and racial difference.

Drawing on a rich array of material, including art, literature, architectural design and urban planning records, The Black Skyscraper explores architecture's effects on the process of seeing and being seen as a racialized subject. In this bold and deeply interdisciplinary work, Brown demonstrates the centrality of race to modern architectural design and the impact of the skyscraper on perceptions of race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Bianca Williams, “The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism" (Duke UP, 2018) Feb 15, 2019

Analyses of the lives of black women in the United States often focus on narratives of struggle and sorrow, as black women must contend daily with the intersecting oppressions of sexism and racism. However, in her new book The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2018), Bianca Williams offers her readers a different starting point by asking: What about Black women’s experiences of happiness, pleasure, leisure, desire, travel? This book follows the journeys of middle-aged Black women who travel from the US to Jamaica, often many times over, on trips organized by Girlfriend Tours International. These women are seeking to fulfill diasporic dreams of finding connections with other people of African descent even as they hope to experience respite from the everyday realities of racism in the US and a fuller sense of freedom to express and care for themselves. Williams traces the complicated threads of these women’s emotional lives and relationships through a multi-sited ethnography that includes various places within Jamaica and the US as well as online sites where travelers share their stories of journeys to Jamaica. This book will be of interest to readers in a variety of fields, including Black feminist studies, diaspora and transnational studies, affect studies, and the anthropology of tourism and mobility.

Dannah Dennis is an anthropologist currently working as a Teaching Fellow at New York University Shanghai. You can find her on Twitter @dannahdennis.

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Debra Thompson, "The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census" (Cambridge UP, 2016) Feb 12, 2019

Debra Thompson, in her award-winning* book The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016), explores the complexities of the politics of the census. This book, which unpacks the census itself, leads the reader to consider how this mundane tool actually translates the abstraction of the state into a concrete entity, and, at the same time, how this tool has been and is used in contradictory ways in regard to the issue of race. Thompson, in exploring the census, contextualizes her analysis within three case studies: the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. She examines these cases over the course of more than 200 years of history and data, and she traces the shifts and changes in terms of racial categorization on the census, noting the fluid nature of understandings of race as applied to the citizen body in each of these countries, and how race was made legible by the census. The Schematic State also digs into the state, how it makes use of the data that is gleaned from the census, and what these uses suggest in terms of the instrument of the census. This book will be of interest to a variety of scholars and lay people, since the text and the research knit together different fields within and beyond political science, including comparative politics, critical race studies, critical legal studies, political theory, public policy, institutional political development, and statistical studies.

*Winner, 2017 Race and Comparative Politics Best Book Award, Race, Ethnicity and Politics Section, American Political Science Association.

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Micah McCrary, "Island in the City" (U Nebraska Press, 2018) Feb 08, 2019

If you read a lot of nonfiction, you may be familiar with what some call the “memoir quandary”—the complaint that memoir and autobiography are too narrowly focused on the writer’s life to be of real interest to anyone but themselves. To avoid this criticism, many nonfiction writers attempt to achieve greater relatability and universality in their writing. But is this appeal really more desirable than the art of telling a good story? While there’s nothing wrong with seeking common ground, one of the magical qualities of writing is how it can not only transport the reader to new places and experiences, but also introduce them to perspectives they might not have considered before.

As a recent entry in the University of Nebraska Press’ award-winning American Lives Series, Micah McCrary’s Island in the City (2018) challenges us to consider both personal and political implications of one man’s life experiences through intimately intersectional prose. As a black and queer-identifying man, McCrary examines these identities through keen exploration of gender, sexuality, race, class, geography, and more in order to comment on the simultaneous singularity and ubiquity of human experience. Though McCrary is careful to note that his is an autobiography of one man, and that he can speak for no one but himself, Island in the City is nevertheless a radical exercise in empathetic connection.

Today on New Books in Literature, join us as we sit down with author Micah McCrary to hear more about Island in the City, available now from the University of Nebraska Press (2018).

Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and teaches writing classes. For more NBn interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiereor head to zoebossiere.com.

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Elliott J. Gorn, "Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till" (Oxford UP, 2018) Feb 05, 2019

The story of Emmett Till’s death at the hands of white Mississippians is well known. For many Americans, it highlights the racism of the Jim Crow South and was a defining moment that helped galvanize a generation of civil rights leaders. In his new book, Elliott J. Gorn (Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago) tells the story of Till’s life and death. The death and trial was a national and international news story, but the exact meaning of events in Mississippi were contested. Moreover, the horrific images of Till’s badly beaten body were published in black publications at a time of a segregated media landscape. Most white Americans did not see them until decades later. In Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till (Oxford University Press, 2018), Gorn also tells this story of the story of Till’s death—examining how responses to the death varied across the population and showing how public memory of Till’s murder has changed over the intervening years.

In this episode of the podcast, Gorn discusses Till’s life, death, and legacy. He explains what happened and how it was received at the time. He also discusses why Till’s death drew so much attention, and how that attention fit into the larger historical context. He touches on why his death feels especially timely today. Finally, he discusses the experience of researching the book.

Christine Lamberson is an Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu.

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Calvin Schermerhorn, "Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery" (Cambridge UP, 2018) Jan 25, 2019

At this point, it is hard to fathom the shear volume of studies of American slavery that scholars have produced. And new works on American slavery are being published at a remarkable clip. As a result, writing a new synthesis of this scholarship is a monumental feat. Dr. Calvin Schermerhorn, however, has taken done the job, and wonderfully. His new book Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2018) weaves the history of slavery into that of the United States from the founding of the nation to the Reconstruction era.

Adam McNeil is PhD student in History at the University of Delaware where he is an African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar. He received his M.A. in History at Simmons College in 2018 and his B.S. in History at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2015. Follow him @CulturedModesty on Twitter to learn more about upcoming interviews.

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Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie Harris, "Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas" (U Georgia Press, 2018) Jan 24, 2019

Scholarly interest in the institution of American slavery is enjoying a kind of resurgence. Researchers are examining heretofore rarely (or never) studied aspects of slavery. One such new frontier is the history of sexuality and slavery. Two scholars at the forefront movement are Drs. Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie Harris. Drs. Berry and Harris’s recent edited volume, Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas (University of Georgia Press, 2018), brings together a variety of scholars working on the ways in which slavery and sexuality interacted, and whose efforts combine to show that sexuality was in some ways more central to the history of slavery in the Americas than has been thought.

Adam McNeil is PhD student in History at the University of Delaware where he is an African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar. He received his M.A. in History at Simmons College in 2018 and his B.S. in History at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2015. Follow him @CulturedModesty on Twitter to learn more about upcoming interviews.

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Clarence Taylor, "Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City" (NYU Press, 2018) Jan 18, 2019

In his most new book Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City (NYU Press, 2018), Clarence Taylor, dean of the history of the civil rights movement in New York, looks at black resistance to police brutality in the city, and institutional efforts to hold the NYPD accountable, since the late 1930s and '40s.

“Many people think that police brutality is a recent phenomenon,” says Taylor, professor emeritus at Baruch College and The Graduate Center of City University of New York. But, in fact, it has a long, sordid history, going back even further than the years covered in this new book. And long before the era of cellphones, black newspapers did their own investigations when men, women, and children were beaten or killed by the police. (Louis Lomax, the first African-American journalist to appear regularly on television news, commented in the early 1960s that, if not for police brutality, the black press would have "considerable blank space.")

Taylor also looks at the history of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, first proposed after the Harlem riots of 1935 and 1943. La Guardia and the mayors who followed refused to challenge the NYPD’s power, which is why it took nearly fifty years to establish an independent public agency to investigate allegations of abuse.

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Ashley D. Farmer, "New Perspectives of the Black Intellectual Tradition" (Northwestern UP, 2018) Jan 11, 2019

The field of African American intellectual history is enjoying a kind of renaissance at the moment. The resurgence is due to the work of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) and its terrific blog Black Perspectives. The fruits of the AAIHS's labors can be seen in the book we're discussing today: New Perspectives of the Black Intellectual Tradition(Northwestern University Press, 2018). Its editors--Keisha N. Blain, Christopher Cameron, and Ashley D. Farmer--have collected insightful essays ranging across the entire African Diaspora from the leading scholars of Black intellectual history. Listen in as we talk to one of them, Ashley Farmer.

Adam McNeil is a PhD Student in the Department of History at the University of Delaware.

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Robin Marie Averbeck, "Liberalism is not Enough: Race and Poverty in Postwar Political Thought" (UNC Press, 2018) Jan 10, 2019

Robin Marie Averbeck is a writer, activist and teacher at California State University, Chico. Liberalism is not Enough: Race and Poverty in Postwar Political Thought (The University of North Carolina Press, 2018) is a historical examination of postwar liberalism that powerfully shows how racist capitalism is at the heart of liberal thought. Through ideological laden invocation of pluralism, the “culture of poverty,” and faith in the workings of democratic institutions, liberals shared with conservatives support for an individualistic and racist social order. Demonstrating concern for poverty embodied in the vision of the Great Society, liberals attempted to effectively deny the issue of race for African Americans. Attention to poverty turned to finding an explanation in the pathological makeup of poor blacks and in the overarching “culture of poverty” that became identified with urban environments. After supporting Civil Rights legislation and Community Action Programs funded by the federal government, liberal thinkers were able to deny structural racism and capitalist inequality setting fire to radical resistance. The liberal ideology of white supremacy continues to manifest itself in mass incarceration of African Americans and the weakening of the welfare state. Averbeck demonstrates how the failure to confront the political and social structures that produce inequality stand in the way of true liberation for all Americans.

This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.

Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2008).

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William D. Green, "The Children of Lincoln: White Paternalism and the Limits of Black Opportunity in Minnesota, 1860–1876" (U Minnesota Press, 2018) Jan 08, 2019

At a speech before the unveiling of the Freedman’s Monument in 1876, Fredrick Douglass stated, “You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are only at best his step-children; children by adoption, children of circumstances and necessity.” But who was Douglass referring to when he said "You are the children of Abraham Lincoln" and what did he mean? Dr. William Green investigates this statement in a case-study of four whites from Minnesota who fought hard and won rights for black Americans during and after the Civil War. By evaluating the actions of Morton Wilkinson, Thomas Montgomery, Daniel D. Merrill, and Sarah Burger Stearns, Dr. Green shows how black suffrage was earned in Minnesota, leading the so-called children of Lincoln to say, “We have done our part.” The Children of Lincoln: White Paternalism and the Limits of Black Opportunity in Minnesota, 1860–1876(University of Minnesota Press, 2018) is a fascinating, well-researched book about the limits of black opportunity in Minnesota with remarkable parallels to today’s social and political climate.

Dr. William Green is professor of history at Augsburg University and vice president of the Minnesota Historical Society. Dr. Green received his B.A. in History from Gustavus Adolphus College, and his M.A., Ph.D., and J.D. from the University of Minnesota.

Colin Mustful has a M.A. in history from Minnesota State University, Mankato, and is currently a candidate for a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Augsburg University. You can learn more about his work at his website: www.colinmustful.com.

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Michael Fischbach, "Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color" (Stanford UP, 2018) Jan 04, 2019

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the great animating foreign policy issues of the twenty-first century, one that provokes fierce divisions across the world. In the United States, the issue has become increasingly politicized in recent decades. While the conflict is not a strict binary issue, varying degrees and kinds of support for the Palestinians has become increasingly normalized among certain groups in the United States. One group that tends to profess sympathy with and support for Palestinians far more commonly than the average is African Americans. Links between the two groups are strong. For example, in 2016 Black Lives Matter released a statement critical of Israel; perhaps unsurprisingly, its use of the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” triggered a backlash among other progressive and Jewish-American groups.

Michael Fischbach’s Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color(Stanford University Press, 2018) examines the history of African American ties to Palestine. Fischbach begins with Malcolm X’s interactions with Palestinians and his criticism of Zionism in the early 1960s. The writing of Frantz Fanon and others drew Black Power activists to Palestine, beginning with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s public statements on Israel. Fischbach uses the furor over that to illuminate the position of moderate groups such as the NAACP, supporters of Israel such as Bayard Rustin, and more radical groups such as the Black Panthers. Fischbach shows that despite pushback from Jewish-American groups, a consensus emerged that drew links between African Americans and Palestinians as people of color facing similar problems.

Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.

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Maurice J. Hobson, "The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta" (UNC Press, 2017) Jan 02, 2019

Dr. Maurice J. Hobson’s new book The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) delves into the tremendously rich history of Atlanta, a city that has long been associated with African American achievement in a great variety of spheres--cultural, economic, and political. Atlanta is thought by many to be a model of Black progress in the U.S., a sort of standard by which other large American cities are measured. How did it gain this exalted status, and is it deserved? Listen in and find out.

Adam McNeil is a PhD Student in History at the University of Delaware.

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Laura McEnaney, "Postwar: Waging Peace in Chicago" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018) Dec 24, 2018

When World War II ended, Americans celebrated a military victory abroad, but the meaning of peace at home was yet to be defined. From roughly 1943 onward, building a postwar society became the new national project, and every interest group involved in the war effort—from business leaders to working-class renters—held different visions for the war's aftermath. In Postwar: Waging Peace in Chicago (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Laura McEnaney plumbs the depths of this period to explore exactly what peace meant to a broad swath of civilians, including apartment dwellers, single women and housewives, newly freed Japanese American internees, African American migrants, and returning veterans. In her fine-grained social history of postwar Chicago, McEnaney puts ordinary working-class people at the center of her investigation.

What she finds is a working-class war liberalism—a conviction that the wartime state had taken things from people, and that the postwar era was about reclaiming those things with the state's help. McEnaney examines vernacular understandings of the state, exploring how people perceived and experienced government in their lives. For Chicago's working-class residents, the state was not clearly delineated. The local offices of federal agencies, along with organizations such as the Travelers Aid Society and other neighborhood welfare groups, all became what she calls the state in the neighborhood, an extension of government to serve an urban working class recovering from war. Just as they had made war, the urban working class had to make peace, and their requests for help, large and small, constituted early dialogues about the role of the state during peacetime.

Postwar examines peace as its own complex historical process, a passage from conflict to post-conflict that contained human struggles and policy dilemmas that would shape later decades as fatefully as had the war.

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Kellie Jones, "South of Pico: African American Artists in the 1960s and 1970s" (Duke UP, 2017) Dec 24, 2018

New York City might have been the epicenter of the twentieth century American art scene, but Los Angeles was no slouch either, writes Kellie Jones in South of Pico: African American Artists in the 1960s and 1970s(Duke University Press, 2017). Dr. Jones, Professor of Art History at Columbia University and 2016 MacArthur Fellow, examines several African American artists and their work including Bettye Saar, Charles White, and John Outterbridge, and emphasizes the importance of migration, space, and interconnectivity in the LA art scene of mid-century. Watts, the site of a 1965 rebellion, was one particularly salient and vibrant part of the city’s African American art community. These artists used diverse media including performance and assemblage to comment on post-war American politics and society. The book appeals to experts and non-experts alike and is a strong example of how understanding art can help us to understand social movements and the interconnectivity of our world.

Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

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James Baldwin, "Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood" (Duke UP, 2018) Dec 21, 2018

This 2018 reprint of Little Man, Little Man exemplifies communal and collaborative textual production. The story was written by James Baldwin and illustrated by French artist Yoran Cazac. It was published in 1976 and then went out of print. In this new edition, scholars Nicholas Boggs and Jennifer DeVere Brody write the introduction, while Baldwin’s nephew and niece, Tejan Karefa-Smart and Aisha Karefa-Smart write the foreword and afterword respectively. In Little Man, Little Man, which Baldwin alternately described as a children’s book for adults and an adults’ book for children, we see a slice of a Harlem neighborhood through the eyes of young TJ. The story presents a complex and multifaceted vision of black childhood in America and nudges the contemporary reader to think critically about what it means to see through the eyes of a child and to be seen by those in one’s world.

Nicholas Boggs was an undergraduate at Yale when he discovered James Baldwin's out-of-print "children's book for adults," Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976) at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The senior thesis he wrote about it was published in the anthology James Baldwin Now (NYU, 1999). A subsequent essay on Little Man Little Man that draws on his interviews in Paris with the book's illustrator, French artist Yoran Cazac, appears in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin (2015). This research led him to co-edit and write the introduction to a new edition of Little Man, Little Man (Duke UP, 2018), which the New York Times wrote "couldn't be more timely" and Entertainment Weekly hailed as "brilliant, essential." He was interviewed by the New York Times and Publisher's Weekly for their feature articles on Little Man, Little Man and he appeared on Madeleine Brand's Press Play on KCRW , on Black America TV , and on a panel at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture moderated by Jacqueline Woodson, National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. The recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Camargo Foundation, he is currently at work on a literary biography of Baldwin, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Reimagined Belongings: Black Women’s Decolonial Citizenship in the French Empire examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements.

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Jessica Trounstine, "Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities" (Cambridge UP, 2018) Dec 12, 2018

2018 has been a great year for books about sub-national government in the United States. The year ends with another to add to the list. Jessica Trounstine has written Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities(Cambridge University Press, 2018). Trounstine is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Merced.

Segregation by Design draws on a century of data from thousands of American cities to explore how local governments design policies that create race and class segregation. Trounstine maps the historical development of segregation and the ways that suburbanization has fit with patterns of residential segregation. Zoning laws and public goods have been used to advance the goal of some residents for racially segregated neighborhoods. She argues that local governments have pursued these policies to enhance the wealth and resources of white property owners at the expense of people of color and the poor.

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McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017) Dec 06, 2018

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with!

Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.

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Aram Goudsouzian and Charles McKinney, "An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee" (UP of Kentucky, 2018) Dec 04, 2018

Most people will know that Memphis, Tennessee is where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. That's too bad, because Memphis played an important role in the struggle for civil rights both before and after King was murdered. Drs. Aram Goudsouzian and Charles McKinney’s reclaim this history in their excellent edited volume An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee (University Press of Kentucky, 2018). Listen in.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Delaware.

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Adam Malka, "The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation" (UNC Press, 2018) Dec 04, 2018

Criminal justice, policing, and mass incarceration have gained significant political attention recently, and the problems of these systems have drawn increasingly frequent calls for reform from the right and left. Historians have turned their attention to illuminating the roots of these institutions. While many historians have focused on the 20th century, others have examined the emergence of urban professional police departments in the 19th century. Adam Malka, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma, takes these questions to the antebellum period to illuminate how these new police forces emerged in an age of liberal ideals and emancipation. In The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Malka examines the development of the Baltimore police department in the years leading up to and following the Civil War. Malka highlights several unexpected features of this development. He shows the continuity and connections between antebellum vigilante justice and the professional police force. Further, he shows the emerging image of black criminality in the post-Civil War era was not opposed to the liberal ideals that came with the war, but rather was integral to them.

In this episode of the podcast, Malka discusses the insights of the book. He explains why Baltimore is a particularly apt city for studying the rise of professional policing and how those new law enforcement institutions built on and worked in tandem with the vigilante policing that came before. He also discusses how ideas of property shaped policing, the ideals of liberalism, and the image of black criminality. We also discuss the challenges of researching this topic and, finally, conclude by considering how this more nuanced history might inform our understanding of current controversies surrounding policing.

Christine Lamberson is an Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu.

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John C. Hajduk, "Music Wars: Money, Politics, and Race in the Construction of Rock and Roll Culture, 1940–1960" (Lexington Books, 2018) Dec 03, 2018

In his new book Music Wars: Money, Politics, and Race in the Construction of Rock and Roll Culture, 1940–1960(Lexington Books, 2018), John C. Hajduk examines the emergence of a “rock and roll culture” in mid 20th century America. Professor Hajduk’s focus is on “gatekeepers” such as record executives and musician’s union leaders, all of whom operated in a highly charged environment where financial, racial, and political considerations mutually impacted one another.

Drawing on archival materials, a variety of contemporary music industry publications, and a wide range of secondary literatures, Hajduk argues that mid 20th century discussions about race, class, and culture were deeply inseparable from the role that live and recorded music played in popular culture in that same period. These themes take Music Wars through chapters on disputes over radio play, jukeboxes, and communism, culminating in a discussion of the infamous “Payola Scandal,” which resulted in corporate assertion of control over rock and roll on the radio, as a means of self-preservation against increasing state interest in popular music’s potentially “disturbing” influence on the young.

Music Wars is an affecting account of a fascinating period—one with which most of us can identify. We live in a culture imbued not just with rock and roll, but with the history of rock and roll, and John Hajduk’s new book gives us a window into that reality.

Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism.

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Sharon Block, "Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018) Nov 28, 2018

Today we have a certain idea of "race"; it's socially constructed, conventional, and not really biological-grounded in any sense. Yet we commonly use the idea of "race" in our everyday lives to identify ourselves and others. We even have a typology of "races" that we use in official contexts. Yet, as Sharon Block shows in her book Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), our way of putting people in "racial" buckets is not the same as that of our ancestors. Listen in as we talk about the often surprising ways in which Colonial-era Americans discussed and depicted the "races" of people in their world.

Adam McNeil is PhD student in History at the University of Delaware where he is an African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar. He received his M.A. in History at Simmons College in 2018 and his B.S. in History at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2015. Follow him @CulturedModesty on Twitter to learn more about upcoming interviews.

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Keisha Lindsay, "In a Classroom of Their Own: The Intersection of Race and Feminist Politics in All-Black Male Schools" (U Illinois Press, 2018) Nov 28, 2018

According to most experts, boys have more trouble in schools than girls. Further, African-American boys have even more trouble than, say, white boys. What to do? According to some, one possible solution to the latter problem is all-Black male schools, or "ABMSs." In her new book In a Classroom of Their Own: The Intersection of Race and Feminist Politics in All-Black Male Schools (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Keisha Lindsay critiques ABMSs from a feminist perspective and has some helpful things to say about how to educate young African-Americans generally.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Michael E. Staub, “The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence Between Brown and The Bell Curve” (UNC Press, 2018) Nov 21, 2018

The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision required desegregation of America’s schools, but it also set in motion an agonizing multi-decade debate over race, class, and IQ. In The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence Between Brown and The Bell Curve (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Michael E. Staub, Professor of English and American Studies at Baruch College, City University of New York, investigates neuropsychological studies published between Brown and the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve. In doing so, he illuminates how we came to view race and intelligence today.

In tracing how research and experiments around such concepts as learned helplessness, deferred gratification, hyperactivity, and emotional intelligence migrated into popular culture and government policy, Staub reveals long-standing and widespread dissatisfaction—not least among middle-class whites—with the metric of IQ. He also documents the devastating consequences—above all for disadvantaged children of color—as efforts to undo discrimination and create enriched learning environments were recurrently repudiated and defunded. By connecting psychology, race, and public policy in a single narrative, Staub charts the paradoxes that have emerged and that continue to structure investigations of racism even into the era of contemporary neuroscientific research.

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Ruma Chopra, “Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone” (Yale UP, 2018) Nov 21, 2018

After being exiled from their native Jamaica in 1795, the Trelawney Town Maroons endured in Nova Scotia and then in Sierra Leone. In Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone (Yale University Press, 2018), Ruma Chopra demonstrates how the unlikely survival of this community of escaped slaves reveals the contradictions of slavery and the complexities of the British antislavery era. Encompassing three distinct regions of the British Atlantic World, and drawing on a vast array of primary source material, Chopra traces their journey and eventual transformation into refugees, empire builders—and sometimes even slave catchers and slave owners.

Ruma Chopra is Professor of History at San Jose State University, and author of Unnatural Rebellion: Loyalists in New York City during the Revolution (2011) and Choosing Sides: Loyalists in Revolutionary America (2013).

Tyler Yank is a senior doctoral candidate in History at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her work explores bonded women and British Empire in the western Indian Ocean World.

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Yael Ben-zvi, “Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories” (Dartmouth College Press, 2018) Nov 15, 2018

Histories of rights have too often marginalized Native Americans and African Americans. Addressing this lacuna, Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories (Dartmouth College Press, 2018), expands our understanding of freedom by examining rights theories that Indigenous and African-descended peoples articulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As settlers began to distrust the entitlements that the English used to justify their rule, the colonized and the enslaved formulated coherent logics of freedom and belonging. By anchoring rights in nativity, they countered settlers’ attempts to dispossess and disenfranchise them. Drawing on a plethora of texts, including petitions, letters, newspapers, and official records, Yael Ben-zvi, American Studies Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, analyzes nativity’s unsettling potentials and its discursive and geopolitical implications. She shows how rights were constructed in relation to American, African, and English spaces, and explains the obstacles to historic solidarity between Native American and African American struggles.

________________________________________________________________________

Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University.

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Vernon Keeve III, “Southern Migrant Mixtape” (Nomadic Press, 2018) Nov 15, 2018

In this episode, we speak with Vernon Keeve III about his book Southern Migrant Mixtape (Nomadic Press, 2018), a collection published by Nomadic Press.

Memoir comes in many forms, be it poetry or prose. Keeve’s work is a bridge between both worlds. In a manner that is simultaneously universal and intimate, his book is an unflinching view at what it is to be black, queer, disenfranchised, jubilant, and resilient. Via his deft pen, Keeve turns his focus on how his own personal history is deeply connected to, and is bolstered by, the black experience in society.

It is via this collection, Keeve hopes to create a legacy for the story of his family, his culture, and the future. As he writes in “The decomposition of Emmett,”

There is a dis-

ease in the land.

This collection dissects the diss, the unease, and the sickness of American generations as a means of healing and reconciliation.

Born and raised in Northeast Ohio, Athena Dixon is a poet, essayist, and editor. She is Founder of Linden Avenue Literary Journal.

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Tracy Fessenden, “Religion Around Billie Holiday” (Penn State UP, 2018) Nov 14, 2018

Billie Holiday is one of the most iconic jazz performers of all time. Her voice is certainly unmistakable but for many her religious sensibilities may be invisible. In Religion Around Billie Holiday (Penn State University Press, 2018), Tracy Fessenden, Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University, delineates the religious worlds that shaped Holiday and her music. Fessenden takes the reader through Holiday’s short but full life by placing it within the contexts of Catholicism, black vernacular music, Jazz compositions, and the culture of American celebrity. She shows how race, gender, and religious conditions guided her sound and formed the prism through which her genius shone. In our conversation we discussed Holiday’s early Catholic formation, the Jewishness of the American songbook, Afro-Protestant notions of redemption, confessional performance, the eclectic religious orbits of her jazz contemporaries, Strange Fruit and the vigilante faith of some Southerners, the cinematic representation of a musician’s life, and the mytho-poetic nature of Holiday’s iconicity.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.

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Alisha Gaines, “Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy” (UNC Press, 2017) Nov 14, 2018

How does one show empathy towards someone across racial lines? In her new book Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) Dr. Alisha Gaines analyzes the history of sympathetic whites “becoming” temporarily black (often going beyond simple “blackface”) to understand (and explain to their peers) what it was “like” to be black in America. Dr. Gaines details the limits of racial empathy and vouches, rather, for an anti-racist sensibility for those seeking to work on behalf of oppressed people everywhere.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Bernard Fraga, “The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America” (Cambridge UP, 2018) Nov 12, 2018

Following a historic election, we return again to the question of turnout. Who turned out in large numbers to shift power in the House back to the Democrats? What we know about the past is that there are substantial gaps in turnout between different groups. White Americans have turned out in larger numbers that many other racial and ethnic groups. This much is well-know, but what explains these gaps? Is it political interest, barrier to voting, or something else?

Such is the focus of Bernard Fraga’s new book The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Fraga is assistant professor of political science at Indiana University.

Fraga finds that the common explanations don’t always hold up when you examine rigorous data and use advanced methods. He argues for a theory of electoral influence based on the relative size of the racial and ethnic population in a voting district. In districts where minority groups make up a relatively small portion of the electorate, turnout tends to be low. In other districts, where the group makes up a larger portion, turnout tends to be much higher. These findings, and others, explain a lot about the 2018 election and future elections and campaigns.

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R. C. Romano and C. B. Potter, “Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past” (Rutgers UP, Nov 07, 2018

Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past (Rutgers University Press, 2018), edited by Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, is a collection of essays about Lin Manuel Miranda’s hit musical, Hamilton. The show has taken Broadway and much of the United States by storm and is currently running on the West End in London as well. The popular interest in Alexander Hamilton prompted by the show’s success has generated new museum exhibits, numerous hot takes in the media, and even a successful effort to preserve Hamilton’s likeness on the ten dollar bill. The essays in this collection take on some of the questions and issues raised by the musical and its popularity. Some of the authors comment on the ways that Miranda’s interpretation of American history diverges from many historians’ understandings, while others take him to task for his portrayals of women and slavery. Miranda’s decision to cast non-white actors in most of the roles also comes under scrutiny in several essays. Aimed at a wide audience, including teachers, scholars, and fans the essays provide a diverse, sometimes contradictory, set of views on Hamilton, as well as suggestions for teaching the musical. It is not often that we see a new collective memory of the past form in real time, but that is what is happening because of the success Hamilton. This collection is one of the first attempts at analyzing the musical as a piece of art, an interpretation of America’s founders, and a phenomenal commercial success in the online age.

Renee C. Romano is the Robert S. Danforth Professor of History at Oberlin College in Ohio. She is the author or coeditor of many books and articles on racial politics of the post-WWII United States, African American history, civil rights, and historical memory. Her most recent book is Racial Reckoning: Prosecuting America’s Civil Rights Murders from Harvard University Press.

Claire Bond Potter is a professor history at the New School in New York and the executive editor of Public Seminar. In addition to her monograph, War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men and the Politics of Mass Culture, and scholarly articles, she is a prolific public historian whose writing has been published by many news outlets including The Guardian, the Washington Post. She is also the Director of the Digital Humanities Initiatives at the New School.

Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.

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Caitlin C. Rosenthal, “Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management” (Harvard UP, 2018) Oct 31, 2018

The familiar narrative of American business development begins in the industrial North, where paternalistic factory owners, committed to a kind of Protestant ethic, scaled up their operations into ‘total institutions’—an effort to forestall labor turnover by providing housing and fulfilling community needs. Many of these firms were, of course, dependent on the availability of cotton from the South where, as Caitlin C. Rosenthal argues, modern management practices were expanded and refined through experimentation with enslaved workers. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Harvard University Press, 2018) resituates the development of scientific record-keeping and labor optimization practices within the Atlantic slave trade. The book pays close attention to how sophisticated reporting practices, emerging from the standard record books that circulated throughout the Atlantic world, allowed planters to rate and categorize enslaved people in a generalizable way. The book is an invitation to rethink the genealogy of business management, to disabuse professionals of a claim to moral distance from a time when unfettered legal control over a labor force—as capital—created hitherto unknown opportunities for knowledge production and experimentation with efficiency.

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America.

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Stefan M. Bradley, “Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League” (NYU Press, 2018) Oct 26, 2018

The eight elite institutions that comprise the Ivy League, sometimes known as the Ancient Eight—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell—are American stalwarts that have profoundly influenced history and culture by producing the nation’s and the world’s leaders. The few black students who attended Ivy League schools in the decades following WWII not only went on to greatly influence black America and the nation in general, but unquestionably awakened these most traditional and selective of American spaces. In the twentieth century, black youth were in the vanguard of the black freedom movement and educational reform.

In Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League (NYU Press, 2018), historian Stefan Bradley illuminates how the Black Power movement, which was borne out of an effort to edify the most disfranchised of the black masses, also took root in the hallowed halls of America’s most esteemed institutions of higher education. Between the close of WWII and 1975, the civil rights and Black Power movements transformed the demographics and operation of the Ivy League on and off campus. As desegregators and racial pioneers, black students, staff, and faculty used their status in the black intelligentsia to enhance their predominantly white institutions while advancing black freedom. Although they were often marginalized because of their race and class, the newcomers altered educational policies and inserted blackness into the curricula and culture of the unabashedly exclusive and starkly white schools.

This book attempts to complete the narrative of higher education history, while adding a much needed nuance to the history of the Black Power movement. It tells the stories of those students, professors, staff, and administrators who pushed for change at the risk of losing what privilege they had. Putting their status, and sometimes even their lives, in jeopardy, black activists negotiated, protested, and demonstrated to create opportunities for the generations that followed. The enrichments these change agents made endure in the diversity initiatives and activism surrounding issues of race that exist in the modern Ivy League.

Upending the Ivory Tower not only informs the civil rights and Black Power movements of the postwar era but also provides critical context for the Black Lives Matter movement that is growing in the streets and on campuses throughout the country today. As higher education continues to be a catalyst for change, there is no one better to inform today’s activists than those who transformed our country’s past and paved the way for its future.

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Jonathan Shandell, “The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era” (U Iowa Press, 2018) Oct 26, 2018

The role of the artist in the cause of Black freedom has been a hotly debated topic for generations now. Dr. Jonathan Shandell’s The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era (University of Iowa Press, 2018) focuses the American Negro Theatre, located in Harlem, New York, to argue that the stories told in the theatre transformed and expanded how Black life was and would be portrayed. Ultimately, Shandell shows that the American Negro Theatre was a formative space for many Black artists who ended up shaping the Civil Rights Movement, as well as American popular culture as a whole.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Sylvia Chan-Malik, “Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam” (NYU Press, 2018) Oct 17, 2018

The story of Muslims in America has primarily been told through the experiences of men and often revolves around narratives of immigration. Sylvia Chan-Malik, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, expands upon and challenges this scholarly pattern in Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam (NYU Press, 2018). Chan-Malik centers Black Muslim women’s involvement in U.S. communities and the various spaces of social identity that are frequently ignored in scholarship. Crucial to her analysis is how social racial-religious formation informs both lived religion and how Muslim women are represented in public. “Being Muslim,” therefore, can be variously embodied in Black Muslim womanhood. Through an episodic exploration of Islam in twentieth and twenty-first century America Chan-Malik demonstrates the crucial ways race, gender, and religion intersect. In our conversation we discussed the “blackness” of American Islam, the Ahmadiyya Movement, domesticity, the Nation of Islam, Betty Shabazz, cultural representations of Black Muslim women, the problem with feminism and how it can be deployed, American perceptions of Iranian’s 1979 revolution, and environmentalism and food justice.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.

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Andrew M. Busch, “City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas” (UNC Press, 2017) Oct 16, 2018

Austin, Texas has a reputation as a vibrant, youthful capital city buoyed economically and culturally by the University of Texas. In City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Andrew M. Busch argues that this identity was consciously constructed over the course of the twentieth century and came at a price. Busch, an assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies at Coastal Carolina University, uses a bevy of promotional material and other municipal records to credibly argue that Austin’s image as a city of “industry without smokestacks” appealed to white-collar knowledge workers after World War II was a racially coded message that shaped the city’s racial geography. Environmental racism revolving around water rights, noise pollution, gasoline farms, and segregated public space all shaped Austin’s history and continue to do so up to today. City in a Garden is a wonderfully interdisciplinary history that critiques colorblind sustainability and provides an alternate and just vision for the new urbanism of the early twenty-first century.

Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

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Stefan M. Wheelock, “Barbaric Culture and Black Critique: Black Antislavery Writers, Religion, and the Slaveholding Atlantic” (U Virginia Press, 2015) Oct 15, 2018

In Barbaric Culture and Black Critique: Black Antislavery Writers, Religion, and the Slaveholding Atlantic (University of Virginia Press, 2015), Dr. Stefan M. Wheelock analyses a little-discussed episode in the the late Enlightenment, namely, criticism of slavery by black writers such as Ottabah Cuguano, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, and Maria Stewart. These authors marshaled a variety of religious and secular arguments to attack bondage and, in so doing, promoted important ideas concerning democracy, Christianity, freedom, and their race’s role in all of these projects.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Delaware.

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Treva Lindsey, “Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington D.C.” (U Illinois, 2017) Oct 08, 2018

The New Negro Movement is typically seen as a Harlem-based project. Dr. Treva Lindsey’s important book, Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington D.C. (University of Illinois Press, 2017), however, challenges the centrality of Harlem to the movement. Dr. Lindsey considers how important institutions like Howard University were pivotal centers where Black women fought against gender oppression and institutional restrictions. Washington D.C., simultaneously, was emerging as an essential space for Black women artists to develop their talents in ways also seen in Harlem. Ultimately, Dr. Lindsey centers Washington D.C. as just as important a cultural center to the New Negro Movement as Harlem.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Delaware.

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Matthew Harper, “The End of Days: African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation” (UNC Press, 2016) Oct 02, 2018

In the wake of the bloody Civil War, millions of slaves were emancipated. How did those freed slaves, along with African Americans freed before the Civil War, interpret this new post-war world? Dr. Matthew Harper’s The End of Days: African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) answers this question and others by chronicling how Black North Carolinians, through their robust Christian denominational culture, biblically interpreted the world made anew by the Civil War.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Laila Amine, “Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light” (U Wisconsin Press, 2018) Sep 27, 2018

At the heart of Laila Amine’s book is a crucial question: where is Paris? This question may be surprising for anyone who can readily point to the French capital on a map. Geography is, after all stable, is it not? Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) shows that space and place are anything but stable. Amine focuses on the literal margins of Paris, and on the literary and artistic works that are produced in or about those margins. Rather than reproduce the well-worn trope of the banlieue, the outskirts of Paris, as a tragic space whose inhabitants are unable to integrate so-called French values, Amine carefully examines the work of writers and artists who have engaged with the space and have produced pointed critiques of structural inequality and the legacy of colonialism that calls into question traditional French narratives of cultural and religious alterity.

Postcolonial Paris makes the rare and much-needed move of reading across the works of North African and African American writers, artists and filmmakers, thereby expanding traditional scholarly notions of thinkers of African descent in France. From novels to film to graffiti art, Amine writes about spaces that are oft-ignored and that remain productive sites at which to locate Paris and the attendant, highly contested idea of what it means to be French.

Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Resistance in the Francophone World, examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements.

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Nicholas Grant, “Winning Our Freedoms Together: African Americans and Apartheid, 1945–1960” (UNC Press, 2017) Sep 25, 2018

The links between African Americans and the global struggle for decolonization, particularly in Africa are well-documented. Facing similar kinds of repression that were rooted in systemic racism and the denial of political rights, Pan-Africanism became one expression of a transnational fight for equality. The first Pan-African Conference was held in 1900 in London, and in the wake of World War II, the joint struggles for civil rights in the United States and political independence from European powers heated up. Nicholas Grant’s Winning Our Freedoms Together: African Americans and Apartheid, 1945–1960 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) builds on the earlier work of scholars by focusing in closely on the connections between U.S. activists and black South Africans facing dual repression from anticommunism and racist regimes.

Grant begins by describing the factors that drove the U.S. government and South African governments together. Increasing financial investment in South Africa by American businessmen created economic linkages and anticommunism pushed the two governments into a Cold War alliance, with the South African government even trying to improve its anticommunist laws by consulting with American lawyers. From there, Grant goes on to describe various ways that African Americans and black South Africans were in conversation with one another. One chapter focuses on the effects of travel, while another focuses on print and musical culture. Grant examines the effect of anticommunist repression on the international black left as well as incarceration and the depictions of imprisonment before concluding with links between African American women and black South African women.

Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.

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Christina Snyder, “Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson” (Oxford UP, 2017) Sep 18, 2018

Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (Oxford, 2017) is a dramatic and vibrant story of a little-known Kentucky school, the Choctaw Academy. Christina Snyder, McCabe-Greer Professor of History at Penn State University, argues that this short-lived institution represented both the promise of a multi-ethnic American society, as well as the withering of that dream during the era of Jacksonian Democracy and Indian Removal. Snyder presents several characters, including the Choctaw scion Peter Pitchlynn, the enslaved nurse and sometime-plantation overseer Julia Chinn, and her mate and master, Vice President Richard M. Johnson. Each person’s story (as well as several others) underscores the complicated hierarchies of race and class in antebellum America, as their histories intertwine with that of the Choctaw Academy and its students. Winner of the 2018 Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, Great Crossings is a richly told and thickly researched tale that upends simple narratives of pre-Civil War American society, Native nations, and enslaved people. In their place, Snyder tells of complex humans acting by turns graciously and selfishly, with cruelty and with kindness, as the diverse population of the antebellum American West fumbled its way into the modern era.

Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

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Neil Roberts, “A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass” (UP of Kentucky, 2018) Sep 17, 2018

The year 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’ birth. It can hardly be said that scholars have neglected Douglass; indeed, he is one of the most written-about figures in American history. But not all aspects of Douglass’ thought have received their due. One such blank spot in what might be called “Douglass Studies” concerns his political philosophy. Williams College scholar Dr. Neil Roberts’ new edited volume, A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass (University Press of Kentucky, 2018), helps to fill this lacuna in Douglass scholarship.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Freeden Blume Oeur, “Black Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Public Schools” (U Minnesota Press, 2018) Sep 13, 2018

How do schools empower but also potentially emasculate young black men? In his new book, Black Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Public Schools (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), Freeden Blume Oeur uses observational and interview methods to better understand the lived experiences of young black men in two all-male schools. Situating the book in “privilege, power, and politics” (p. 7), Blume Oeur encourages the reader to think beyond typical narratives around race and masculinity. The book elaborates on how the two all-male school come to be, structurally — through policies like No Child Left Behind, but also theoretically–through narratives of racial uplift and resilience. Blume Oeur explores gender dynamics in the schools as well, addressing issues like contradictory discourses around girls as competition or distraction, as well as the “adultification” of young black men. Overall, this book encourages the reader to think beyond traditional narratives, think more about the “hidden curriculum” of schools, and understand the lived experiences of these young black men in his study.

This book would be a great addition to any higher level undergraduate or graduate level Sociology of Education or Sociology of Race course. Anyone involved in educational systems, from primary school to higher education, should also read this book.

Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch.

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M. Cooper Harriss, “Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology” (NYU Press, 2017) Sep 12, 2018

Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man is a milestone of American literature and the idea of invisibility has become a key way for understanding social marginalization. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology (NYU Press, 2017), M. Cooper Harriss, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University, explores the theological dimensions of invisibility within the intersection of race, religion, and secularism through the life and literary career of Ralph Ellison. Harris places Invisible Man and its reception within its contemporary context of literary and theological inquiry. Pairing this with a genealogy of Ellison’s proximity to religious scholars and writers reveals how his secular accounts are steeped in theological appeal. In our conversation we discussed the life of Ralph Ellison, writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Ellison’s second novel, Ellison’s relationship with scholar of religion and literature, Nathan A. Scott Jr., Ellison’s love of nineteenth century American literature, invisibility as an analytical category, and its applications in our contemporary moment.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.

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Keri Leigh Merrit and Matthew Hild, eds., “Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power” (UP of Florida, 2018) Sep 11, 2018

In their new edited volume Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power (University Press of Florida, 2018), Keri Leigh Merritt and Matthew Hild provide an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the historical development of southern labor. The essays in this volume demonstrate that the “southern working class”–far from being a kind of white, Trump-supporting monolith–is actually a complicated beast.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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David García, “Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins” (Duke UP, 2017) Sep 05, 2018

In Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins (Duke University Press, 2017), David García reminds us that how culture is understood and interpreted not only reflects the political and social discourses of the day, but also shapes those discussions. Drawing on figures as diverse as academics like Melville Herskovitz, performers such as Duke Ellington, and those like dancer/anthropologist Katherine Dunham who filled multiple roles, García lays bare the ways that people in the Americas from the 1930s until the 1950s understood the African origins of black music and dance. He is particularly interested in how the discourse about African retentions in black diasporic culture intensified cultural, political, and social dichotomies: primal vs. civilized, science vs. magic, black vs. white, and most importantly, modernity vs. primitivity. García argues these concepts were defined in terms of each other through the discourse he analyzes, with the politically dominant groups reinforcing positive connotations with the ideas they identified with themselves. Proceeding in broadly chronological order, García begins with a critique of the intellectual foundations of the discipline that we now call ethnomusicology and explores how the approaches taken to African retentions in black music and dance by some of the field’s prominent figures were fundamentally influenced by scientific principles and Freudian psychology. Moving from academia to performance, García expands his argument by considering the rhetoric around black music and dance in the United States, the Caribbean, and Mexico as well as analyzing individual works and performances by Katherine Dunham, Asadata Dafora, Modupe Paris, Duke Ellington, and others. The book ends with a close reading of the cultural and political implications of the mambo, which was a transnational dance phenomenon in the early 1950s. Listening for Africa provides a dense, theoretically rigorous accounting of how the forces that shaped the production and analysis of black music and dance in the mid twentieth century also reinforced political and cultural oppression.

David F. García is an Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research on black and Latin music in the United States has been published in MUSICultures, Journal of the Society for American Music and other journals. His first monograph, Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music received a Certificate of Merit from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 2014 and is also a Visiting Scholar at the Cristobal Díaz Ayala Collection of Cuban and Latin American Popular Music by the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.

Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.

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Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood, “Race Over Party: Black Politics and Partisanship in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston” (UNC Press, 2018) Aug 29, 2018

Boston’s political culture is most known within the frame of antebellum political struggles over the institution of slavery. What about Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction era Black Bostonian politics though? That story is made clear by the Dr. Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood’s newly published book Race Over Party: Black Politics and Partisanship in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Centering Edwin Garrison Walker, political leader and son of antebellum era abolitionist and pamphleteer David Walker, Bergeson-Lockwood tells the story of how independent Black Bostonian politics was used as a mechanism to shield Black Bostonians from party loyalty. Party loyalty, especially to the Republican Party, could be used to promote a connection to the “Party of Lincoln,” or to retain Black voters despite not always being on the side of their best interest. Ultimately, Black citizenship and the protection of the Black rights were at the forefront of Black Bostonians’ political project, and Bergeson-Lockwood’s history of Black politics in the late nineteenth century dramatically highlights the successes and shortcomings of this era.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Brian Abrams, “Obama: An Oral History, 2009-2017” (Little A, 2018) Aug 21, 2018

Brian Abrams interviewed more than 100 people – Democrats, Republicans, cabinet officials, White House aides, campaign operatives, congresspeople and activists – to piece together a comprehensive oral history of the Barack Obama presidency, in Obama: An Oral History, 2009-2017 (Little A, 2018). Based almost solely on the words of those who helped Obama win election and govern the country, Abrams begins with Obama’s famous anti-war speech in 2002 and carries the reader through the shocking aftermath of Donald Trump’s election victory. Through often candid and unvarnished remembrances, readers will relive the debates between Democrats and Republicans, and between pragmatists and idealists, that shaped Obama’s legacy and continue to reverberate. Abrams gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most dramatic presidencies in history.

Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006.

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Lessie B. Branch, “Optimism at All Costs: Black Attitudes, Activism, and Advancement in Obama’s America” (U Massachusetts Press, 2018) Aug 17, 2018

Optimism at All Costs: Black Attitudes, Activism, and Advancement in Obama’s America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2018) takes as its point of departure and central preoccupation the notion of “paradoxical ebullience,” by which author Lessie B. Branch means the optimism expressed by African Americans during the presidency of Barack Obama despite a lack of socioeconomic gains (and some notable reversals) during the same period. Branch’s argument around what she considers unwarranted optimism is premised on the idea that during the Obama era, African Americans bought into an elite discourse that was a departure from the discursive norms of the 20th-century Civil Rights movement, and whose leaders discouraged optimism. Both Branch and leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. see outsized optimism as undermining the collective action necessary for meaningful social change.

Mireille Djenno is the African Studies Librarian at Indiana University. She can be reached at mdjenno@indiana.edu

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Judith Weisenfeld, “New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration” (NYU Press, 2017) Aug 17, 2018

A wave of religious leaders in black communities in the early twentieth-century insisted that so-called Negroes were, in reality, Ethiopian Hebrews, Asiatic Muslims, or a raceless children of God. In New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (NYU Press, 2017), historian of religion Judith Weisenfeld argues that the appeal of these groups lay in how they rejected conventional American racial classifications and offered alternative visions of black history, racial identity, and a collective future.

Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

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Kristen Epps, “Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras” (U Georgia Press, 2016) Aug 16, 2018

The Kansas-Missouri border holds a place of infamy in the history of American slavery as the chief battleground of the Bleeding Kansas crisis of the mid-nineteenth century. Kristen Epps, an associate professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas, argues that there is much more to the region’s story in Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras (University of Georgia Press, 2016). Epps provides in-depth detail about the social history of slavery in the border region, from the institution’s roots in the early nineteenth century up through the chaos and bloodshed wrought by the Civil War in this divided region. Along the way, Slavery on the Periphery shows how the mobility of enslaved people within a system of smaller scale slavery allowed them greater autonomy while also creating unique challenges. Rather than an afterthought, the American West was a crucial battleground for American slavery not just ideologically, but also materially, and Epps rightfully places the lives of people caught in its midst at the center of the story.

Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

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Naomi André, “Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement” (U Illinois Press, 2018) Aug 08, 2018

Naomi André’s innovative new book, Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (University of Illinois Press, 2018) is an example of a concept she calls “engaged musicology.” Positioning herself within the book as a knowledgeable and ethical listener, André seeks to understand the resonances and importance of opera to today’s audiences, performers, and scholars. To do this, she focuses on seven works and two continents. André places opera in the United States in conversation with opera in South Africa, the only country in Africa that has a continuous operatic tradition from the nineteenth century until the present day. Her work in South Africa began when she traveled with renowned opera singers George Shirley and Daniel Washington to that country as part of a project through the African Studies Center at her home institution of the University of Michigan. There she found a rich operatic life that included the performance of new works, such as Winnie: The Opera by Bongani Ndodana Breen as well as new interpretations of canonical operas such as a South African reimagining of Bizet’s Carmen called U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, both of which she features in Black Opera. The other works she considers are From the Diary of Sally Hemings by William Bolcom and Sandra Seaton, Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin, along with Carmen and two American versions of that opera, Oscar Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones and the MTV production, Carmen: A Hip Hopera.

André’s central concern is how the history of race relations and changing gender roles in both countries impacted the development, performance, composition, and reception of opera. To do this, she provides what she terms a “shadow history” of opera culture to help her readers understand “black operas” (that is operas by black and interracial compositional teams, about black subjects, and the issues around black opera singers) that have been hidden due to social, political, and economic reasons rather the quality of the works and performers. Nestled within the disciplines of musicology, ethnomusicology, African Studies, and cultural theory, this truly interdisciplinary monograph points to a new way to analyze music’s place in the past and the present.

Naomi André is Associate Professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, Women’s Studies, and the Associate Director for Faculty at the Residential College at the University of Michigan. She received her B.A. from Barnard College and M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her research focuses on opera and issues surrounding gender, voice, and race. Her publications are on topics including Italian opera, Schoenberg, women composers, and teaching opera in prisons. Her earlier books, Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (2006) and Blackness in Opera (2012, co-edited collection) focus on opera from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries and explore constructions of gender, race and identity. In addition to serving on the Executive Committee for the Criminal Justice Program at the American Friends Service Committee (Ann Arbor, MI), she brings her expertise on race, politics, and opera to the public through numerous appearances on public panels and symposia, and in the popular press.

Kristen M.

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Heather Schoenfeld, “Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration” (U Chicago Press, 2018) Aug 08, 2018

How did prisons become a tool of racial inequality? Using historical data, Heather Schoenfeld’s new book Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration (University of Chicago Press, 2018) “answers how the United States became a nation of prisons and prisoners” (p. 5). Schoenfeld exposes the reader to the historical development of prisons and policy development. She focuses specifically on Florida as a case study to show how prisons become racialized social systems. Interestingly, much of the crime control we have today grew out of racialized punishments and unrest shaped during the civil rights era. Bringing us all the way up to 2016, Schoenfeld sheds light on how prisons developed over time, even as crime rates have fallen. Often incentivized as a source of economic potential in rural areas, prisons have a unique history in the U.S. and this book uncovers that fascinating history.

This book will be of interest to Sociologists and Criminologists, but also Political Scientists and social activists. Sections of the book could be used in an undergraduate Criminology course or a course specifically focused on race and crime. This text would also be critically important to have in a graduate level Criminology course.

Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch.

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Vanessa Valdés, “Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg” (SUNY Press, 2018) Aug 03, 2018

As every scholar of African Americans knows, Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is an essential resource for black history. But who was Schomburg? In Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (SUNY Press, 2018), Vanessa Valdés recovers the important legacy of the man whose name, collection, and activism are now attached forever to the legacies of the African Diaspora. Dr. Valdés situates Schomburg’s life within the context of his multi-layered identity as an Afro-Puerto Rican man born and formatively shaped in the Spanish Caribbean during a fraught period. This period witnessed Puerto Rico’s abolition of slavery and the imperialist Spanish-Cuban-American War as well. These events shaped the young man who migrated to the United States in the early 1890s and who became one of the leading Black bibliophiles and intellectuals of the twentieth century.

Adam McNeil is PhD student in History at the University of Delaware where he is an African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar. He received his M.A. in History at Simmons College in 2018 and his B.S. in History at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2015. Follow him @CulturedModesty on Twitter to learn more about upcoming interviews.

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Wendy Laybourn and Devon Goss, “Diversity in Black Greek-Letter Organizations: Breaking the Line” (Routledge, 2018) Aug 01, 2018

Black Greek-Letter organizations (BGLOs) appeared as an initiative from black college students to provide support, opportunities and service, as well as a free space for the black community. Despite most BGLO members are black, there are some non-black students who decide to join these organizations. In their new book Diversity in Black Greek-Letter Organizations: Breaking the Line (Routledge, 2018), Wendy M. Laybourn and Devon R. Goss explore the motivations for membership as well as the impact that these experiences had for non-black BGLO members. Membership to BGLOs provides non-black members with the opportunity to reinterpret their own racial identities. Diversity in Black Greek-Letter Organizations provides a good opportunity to explore the opportunities and challenges of cross-racial interactions within civil society organizations.

Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.

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J. Samuel Walker, “Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington, DC Riots of 1968” (Oxford UP, 2018) Jul 30, 2018

Fifty years ago, the United States, and many other societies, experienced one of the most turbulent years of the century. In 1968, Americans were deeply divided. The Vietnam War was at its height, an antiwar movement raged, the racial and women’s equality movements continued, and new activism surrounding gay rights, the environment, Native Americans’ treatment and other topics was emerging. These political controversies were accompanied by significant unrest and disruption in the streets. After Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in early April, some of the most intense conflict occurred. Riots broke out in cities across the nation as frustration exploded into angry over continued inequality and King’s death. In his new book, Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington, DC Riots of 1968 (Oxford University Press, 2018), J. Samuel Walker closely examines the riots that occurred in Washington, DC, some of the worst of that moment.

In this episode of the podcast, Walker discusses his research into the riots. His book sets them in the context of the city’s longer residential and racial history. It examines how the government prepared for a riot and how it actually responded when one occurred. The book also provides a detailed hour by hour discussion of how the riots unfolded and were experienced. In our discussion on this episode, Walker explains how the riots grew out of a longer history of racial inequality in Washington, DC, and how the events affected numerous groups living and working in the area. Finally, we talk about the challenges of researching a chaotic and controversial event like a riot.

Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu.

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Ian Rocksborough-Smith, “Black Public History in Chicago: Civil Rights Activism From World War II Into the Cold War” (U Illinois Press, 2018) Jul 30, 2018

Activism comes in many forms, be it political, educational, or social. Less often though, do people perceive historical activism in such conversations. Dr. Ian Rocksborough-Smith’s new book: Black Public History in Chicago: Civil Rights Activism From World War II Into the Cold War (University of Illinois Press, 2018) puts the activist function front and center. Black Chicago has been heavily studied over the last hundred years, but Black Public History in Chicago tells the story of how Black Chicagoans like Margaret and Charles Burroughs, William Stratton, Madeline Stratton Morris, and many others used Black Public History within the museum and educational contexts as mechanisms for positive change in the Windy City. By centering this story, readers see how important their activism was to the founding of the DuSable Museum of African American History and the public consciousness raising effects of telling the radical revisionist historical stories of those of the African Diaspora to those in the Black Metropolis at large.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Kelley Fanto Deetz, “Bound to the Fire: How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine” (UP of Kentucky, 2017) Jul 26, 2018

The concept of “Southern hospitality” began to take form in the late eighteenth century and became especially associated with Virginia’s grand plantations. This state was home to many of our founding fathers. Their galas, balls, feasts, and entertainments became famous internationally as well as at home.

On whose shoulders did this success rest? Not the mistress, whose role was mainly that of social director. The labor was slavery, the abundant and spectacular food was produced by enslaved cooks. Bound to the Fire: How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine (University Press of Kentucky, 2017) is their story.

Let’s start with where you can’t learn about them. Colonial Williamsburg and many plantation houses that are tourist destinations did their best in the early twentieth century to remove all traces of slavery. Field hand houses and kitchens alike were razed. Author Kelley Fanto Deetz is director of programming, education, and visitor engagement at Stratford Hall, the birthplace of Robert E. Lee, near Lynchburg, Virginia. She has made it her work to restore the history of the “disappeared.”

First, the kitchen: an external brick building with at least one hearth burning constantly, where the enslaved cooks and their families often lived upstairs. The author examines the question whether being a “house slave” was better that being a field hand. Yes and not. The reader learns why.

When the transatlantic slave trade was banned internationally in 1803, Virginia plantation owners began to come under scrutiny from their business associates and abolition groups on both sides of the Atlantic. Discussions at table were becoming problematic, not in small part because enslaved butlers and waiters were hearing about what the world beyond the plantation thought.

This gave rise to “protective” architecture between the external kitchen and the house, which Deetz describes in detail (Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello is an outstanding example). Nat Turner’s failed slave rebellion in 1831 had a further reactionary result: it because illegal for a slave to learn to read or write. The irony is that enslaved cooks did learn to read, write, and do simple math because it was required in their work: reading and writing down recipes, and changing measurements.

Labor without negotiating power was the enslaved cook lot. The dynamic between mistress and slave was complex, and the enslaved cook, while powerless, still worked to find ways to bend the power struggle in their own favor. This was inevitable given that the enslaved cook was a de facto member of the master’s family, feeding them (often tweaking dishes with African ingredients such as okra), providing companionship to her mistress (plantations were isolated from each other) and her children likewise providing playmates for the mistress’s children. And everyone had an enslaved “mammy.”

Some details in this book dismay, some shock, but perhaps the most jaw-dropping story is about George Washington and his famous enslaved cook Hercules. This alone makes Bound to the Fire a book to read and reread.

Kelle Fanto Deetz has a doctorate in African Diaspora Studies from UC Berkeley and is founding director of the Shared History Project.

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Tameka Bradley Hobbs, “Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida” (UP of Florida, 2015) Jul 26, 2018

The World War II era was a transformative period for the United States’ relationship to the rest of the world. Exporting liberal democracy was an important goal for the American government. Yet in places like Florida, the promise of liberal democracy was yet to be fulfilled for African Americans. In her 2015 book Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida (University Press of Florida, 2105), Tameka Bradley Hobbs explores this contradiction by telling the stories of four African American men–Arthur C. Williams, Cellos Harrison, Willie James Howard, and Jessie James Payne–who were lynched in the Panhandle of Florida between 1941-1945. Using a plethora of court documents, white and black press editorials, and oral histories to find the voices of those living in the aftermath of the lynchings, Dr. Hobbs targets the narrative of Florida “exceptionalism” in the American South to show that Florida was actually, per capita, the state where Black Americans were most likely to be lynched.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Anna-Lisa Cox, “The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality” (PublicAffairs, 2018) Jul 09, 2018

Most people’s image of the American frontier does not conjure anything relating to people of African descent. But, as Anna-Lisa Cox’s points out in her new book The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality (PublicAffairs, 2018), it should. Dr. Cox uncovers not only the presence of black life in the Northwest Territory states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, but also the communities and institutions they built as they strived for equality in a constantly shifting governmental terrain. Their pursuit of freedom coincided with the Abolitionist and Colored Conventions movements that voiced the aspirations of blacks. Dr. Cox weaves an intricate story of black freedom and the triumphs and pitfalls African Americans faced prior to the Civil War.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Hilary Green, “Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools In The Urban South, 1865-1890” (Fordham UP, 2016) Jul 09, 2018

In cities ravaged by years of bloodshed and warfare, how did black populations, many formerly enslaved, help shape the new world that the Civil War left open for them to mold? In Dr. Hilary Green’s book Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools In The Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham University Press, 2016), she answers that question and more. Dr. Green chronicles the history of the black educational struggles in the urban centers of Richmond, Virginia and Mobile, Alabama during the Reconstruction period. During Reconstruction, African Americans fought vigorously on behalf of their race to have educational opportunities to better themselves in the postbellum South. Weathering the storms of physical violence, arson, political strife, and overall incivility in Richmond and Mobile, Dr. Green recovers the important history of how African Americans saw the interconnectedness of educational attainment to democracy and citizenship.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Roger Biles, “Mayor Harold Washington: Champion of Race and Reform in Chicago” (U Illinois Press, 2018) Jul 05, 2018

Harold Washington’s election as mayor of Chicago in 1983 sent a shockwave through the politics of America’s third largest city, one that reverberated for decades afterward. Yet as Roger Biles describes in his book Mayor Harold Washington: Champion of Race and Reform in Chicago (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Washington’s promise as mayor was in many respects unfulfilled. The son of parents who moved to the city during the Great Migration of the early 20th century, Washington was involved in politics from an early age. Though a member of the powerful party organization led by Richard J. Daley, Washington demonstrated an independent streak during his time in the Illinois state legislature. After an initial attempt to succeed Daley fizzled in 1977, Washington won the office six years later thanks to a remarkable coalition of interests and an unprecedented voter mobilization of the African American populace. As mayor Washington quickly found many of his efforts to implement a progressive agenda thwarted by the hostile remnants of the Daley organization, who enjoyed a majority on the city council throughout most of his first term. While Washington overcame their opposition, the heightened expectations of his supporters were frustrated by his sudden death just months after winning a second term in 1987.

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Frank R. Baumgartner, “Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race” (Cambridge UP, 2018) Jul 04, 2018

We recently marked the 50th Anniversary of Terry vs. Ohio, the US Supreme Court case that dramatically expanded the scope under which agents of the state could stop people and search them. Taking advantage of a North Carolina law that required the collection of demographic data on those detained by the police during routine traffic stops, Frank Baumgartner and his colleagues analyzed twenty million such stops from 2002-2016. They present the results of this research in Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Join us as we speak with Baumgartner about what they found—and what we can do to reduce the most discriminatory features of the practice.

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics and Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017).

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Martha S. Jones, “Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America” (Cambridge UP, 2018) Jul 02, 2018

The contemporary moment has brought to the forefront the question of what constitutes an American citizen. The legal question in popular understanding stems from the Fourteenth Amendment and its use of birthright citizenship as a central identifier of what makes a citizen. In Dr. Martha S. Jones’ newest book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge University Press, 2018) skillfully demonstrates that by the time the amendment was passed, Black Baltimoreans had already personally conceived of themselves as birthright citizens because of their lived experiences in the antebellum era. By using the country’s largest free Black population as a proxy to discuss the performance of citizenship by Black Baltimoreans, Dr. Jones re-conceptualizes our understanding of what the politics of belonging meant for this very important antebellum Black community.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Christopher W. Schmidt, “The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era” (U Chicago Press, 2018) Jun 22, 2018

The sit-in movement that swept the Southern states in 1960 was one of the iconic moments of the post-World War II civil rights movement. Yet the images of students patiently sitting at “whites-only” lunch counters conveys only one facet of a complex series of events. In The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Christopher W. Schmidt chronicles the movement and its impact on the political and legal struggle for civil rights for African Americans. As Schmidt explains, prior to the sit-ins the main civil rights organizations were fighting segregation primarily through the courts. The incremental pace of change frustrated younger activists, with four students at North Carolina A&T ultimately deciding to fight segregation through direct protest. Yet the lunch counter protests they inspired were viewed with considerable ambivalence by the civil rights leadership, who were doubtful that the counters could be compelled to accept black patrons under existing law. Their uncertainly was reflected on the Supreme Court, where the justices’ division on the legality of segregation in privately-run facilities ultimately left the matter to be resolved by Congress in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

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Jacqueline Jones, “Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical” (Basic Books, 2017) Jun 18, 2018

The award-winning author Jacqueline Jones is the Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women’s History at the University of Texas. Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical (Basic Books, 2017) is a biography of the riveting life of Lucy Parsons. As an activist, writer and speaker, Parsons embodied the most radical expression of the battle for labor rights in American history, yet her life remains a mystery. Born an enslaved woman in 1851 of mixed lineage, the circumstances of her birth and early life are unknown. Exceedingly beautiful and articulate, she met and married Albert Parsons, a confederate army veteran, in Waco, Texas in 1872. Their politics shifted from loyal Republicans to socialism and finally to anarchism advocating for white labor in Chicago. As a dynamic and radical duo engaged in extensive writing, charismatic speaking and alliances across multiple labor organizations, they became symbols of unrelenting agitation against industrial capitalism. Their call for armed resistance and involvement with the Haymarket bombing and trial, led to the execution of Albert leaving Lucy Parsons to carry their mutual legacy alone. Jones has brought to life an enigmatic figure whose compelling presence left a mark on the history of the radical movement for labor rights.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, forthcoming in August, 2018 from Oxford University Press.

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Sami Schalk, “Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction” (Duke UP, 2018) Jun 12, 2018

What do werewolves, enslaved women and immortal beings have in common? And how can they shed light on contemporary questions of ableism and police brutality? In Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Duke University Press, 2018), Sami Schalk argues that black women’s speculative fiction changes the rules of literary and textual interpretation by opening up productive spaces of conversation at the intersection of (dis)ability, race and gender. Schalk undertakes a close reading of a variety of genres of speculative fiction including science fiction and neo-slave narratives by authors such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson and N.K. Jemisin. Her book shows the range of black women authors’ exploration and critique of marginalizing social and political structures and their visions for more just, equitable futures.

Sami Schalk is an Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her interdisciplinary research focuses broadly on disability, race, and gender in contemporary American literature and culture, especially African American literature, speculative fiction, and women’s literature. She has published on literature, film, and material culture in a variety of peer-reviewed humanities journals.

Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Narratives of Resistance in the Francophone World examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements.

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Sandra Jean Graham, “Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry” (U Illinois Press, 2018) Jun 12, 2018

What happened in popular entertainment when African Americans could access the stage after the Civil War? In Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Sandra Graham tells the complex story of how folk spirituals composed by enslaved people but transformed for the stage became the core repertoire for the emerging black entertainment industry after 1865. She begins by telling the familiar story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers who first popularized the concert spiritual during their successful tours of the United States and Europe in the 1870s. She expands this narrative, however, by including the crucial contributions of choirs that followed in Fisk’s footsteps especially the Hampton Institute Singers and the Tennesseans. The truly ground-breaking work in the monograph, however, is her study of commercial spirituals and the performers who popularized them in all-black minstrel shows and, at the end of the nineteenth century, in plays with music, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and black musicals such as Out of Bondage. These productions helped convince white audiences to embrace real African American entertainers, although their performances were constrained by stereotypes about black people first presented onstage in blackface minstrelsy. Graham brings her narrative to life by introducing her readers to composers, singers, and actors that were famous at the end of the nineteenth century but have since disappeared from our national consciousness. Her book’s website provides a wealth of information on jubilee choirs and their personnel, as well as excerpts from some of the early twentieth-century recordings she references in the text. The complicated interplay between black performers, the white men who generally managed and directed them, and the integrated audiences who enjoyed their work in this period solidified the racial politics that continues to shape popular entertainment today.

Sandra Jean Graham is an Associate Professor in the Arts and Humanities Division at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Graham is also the Faculty Director of the Sorenson Center for the Arts at Babson. An ethnomusicologist by training, Graham studies African American music and blackface minstrelsy in nineteenth-century America. Her work on spirituals and minstrelsy has appeared in books and journals including the Journal for the Society of American Music and American Music. Along with Chad Runyon, she produced a website on the nineteenth-century black actor and musician Sam Lucas. In addition to her scholarly activities, Graham is currently serving as the President of the Society for American Music.

Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.

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Charles Hughes, “Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South” (UNC Press, 2015) Jun 06, 2018

As America changed in the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, the Southern music industry was changing as well. The music studios of Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals–known as the “country-soul triangle”–began producing some of the most important music of the 1960s and 1970s. In Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Charles Hughes chronicles the ways in which inter-racialism, cultural appropriation, racism, and racial politics affected the musical studios and the country and soul industry. How could two separate musical sounds, one white and country, and the other Black and soul, be considered completely separate when many of the musicians and producers worked in the same buildings? Charles Hughes explains all!

Adam McNeil is PhD student in History at the University of Delaware where he is an African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar. He received his M.A. in History at Simmons College in 2018 and his B.S. in History at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2015. Follow him @CulturedModesty on Twitter to learn more about upcoming interviews.

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Halifu Osumare, “Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir” (UP of Florida, 2018) Jun 04, 2018

Combining memoir with auto-ethnography, historical study and sociocultural analysis, Halifu Osumare draws on her decades of experience to explore the complexities of black dance in the United States. Starting in San Francisco during the rise of the Black Arts and Black Power Movements as well as of hippie counterculture, Osumare’s narrative follows her subsequent journeys to twenty-three countries across Europe, Africa and North America. Throughout Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir (University Press of Florida, 2018), she reflects on her subjectivity as a black woman traveling through and performing in diverse national/cultural contexts. Drawing on her academic grounding in black studies as well as her artistic experiences as a professional dancer, Osumare underscores the relationship between art, performance, and the black struggle for recognition, justice and self-empowerment.

Dr. Osumare is professor emerita of African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis, is the author of The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop and The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves.

Sitara Thobani is Assistant Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University. Her research focuses on the performance arts in colonial and postcolonial South Asia and its diasporas, especially as these relate to formations of nation, gender, sexuality and religion. She received her DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology form Oxford University, and is the author of Indian Classical Dance and the Making of Postcolonial National Identities: Dancing on Empire’s Stage (Routledge 2017).

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Avidit Acharya et al., “Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics” (Princeton UP, 2018) May 30, 2018

Several weeks ago, we had Professor Lilliana Mason on the podcast talking about her book about the process of social sorting that has deepened divides between citizens by aligning race, religion, and region. Mason argues that social sorting acts on a psychological-level, shaping how not just how people view policy but also political opponents.

This week on the podcast, Matt Blackwell and Maya Sen extend this conversation back into history. In Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics (Princeton University Press, 2018), the authors (with Avidit Acharya) argue that views on race have deeply historical roots, passed on across generations through cultural practices and other institutional mechanisms. They call this behavioral path dependence. Using sophisticated statistical analysis, they find that the long, disturbing legacy of slavery can be observed in the variation of attitudes of those living in different southern communities. In counties where slavery thrived in the 1860s (compared to similar counties in the south where slavery was less prevalent), white citizens hold significantly more hostile views of African Americans and express less support for race-related public policies. Interestingly, when they compare residents in those same two types of southern counties, their non-race views on other conservative issues, such as abortion, are essentially the same. Thus, the legacy of slavery is not in general conservative beliefs, but in specific and negative views on race.

Avidit Acharya is assistant professor of political science at Stanford University. Matthew Blackwell is assistant professor of government at Harvard University. Maya Sen is associate professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

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Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, “Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy” (The New Press, 2018) May 22, 2018

A book that strikes at the source of the recent flare-ups over Confederate symbols in Charlottesville, New Orleans, and elsewhere, Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts‘ Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy (The New Press, 2018) reveals the deep roots of these controversies and traces them to the capital of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the slaves brought to the U.S. stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof murdered nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, which was co-founded by Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection in 1822.

As early as 1865, former slaveholders and their descendants began working to construct a romanticized memory of the antebellum South. In contrast, former slaves, their descendants, and some white allies have worked to preserve an honest, unvarnished account of slavery as the cruel system it was.

Examining public rituals, controversial monuments, and competing musical traditions, Denmark Vesey’s Garden tracks these two rival memories from the Civil War to recent decades—when a segregated tourism industry reflecting these opposing visions of the past took hold in the popular vacation destination. Denmark Vesey’s Garden exposes a hidden dimension of America’s deep racial divide, joining the small bookshelf of major, paradigm-shifting interpretations of slavery’s enduring legacy in the United States.

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John Munro, “The Anticolonial Front: The African-American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization” (Cambridge UP, 2017) May 21, 2018

John Munro’s new book, The Anticolonial Front: The African-American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is a transnational study that traces the persistence and continuities of Black radicalism from the end of the Second World War through the period of McCarthyism in the United States. Departing from an insistence on colonialism as the primary historical driver of the twentieth century, the book moves from the Popular Front politics of the interwar years to the beginning of the 1960s. Considering of “long civil rights movement” in relationship to the history of forms of colonialism and imperialism that were global in scope, the chapters of the book travel from key sites and events in the U.S. across the Atlantic to the U.K. and Europe, and further afield to spaces and conversations between activists in Asia and Africa.

Reframing the history of Cold-War U.S. politics in relationship to broader histories of decolonization, The Anti-Colonial Front challenges analyses that over-emphasize national and generational differences in the social justice struggles and movements of the period, as well as those narratives that would have us believe that McCarthyism was wholly successful in suppressing radical political thought and activisms in the 1950s. Indeed, the book makes a contribution to our understanding of the origins of the revolutionary ideas and events of the 1960s. Drawing on a range of archival materials, the book examines the work of organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Council on African Affairs and the American Society for African Culture. It also explores the lives and political work of individuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Alphaeus Hunton, George Padmore, Richard Wright, Esther Cooper Jackson, Jack O’Dell and C. L. R. James. Engaging literary works, press and periodical literature across a political spectrum, the book interrogates the boundaries and histories of left and liberal politics in the period. The Anticolonial Front will be of tremendous interests to historians of American political culture, Black radicalisms, and the complex global past of anticolonialism and decolonization in the Cold-War era.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.

*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as hazy). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.

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Katharine Gerbner, “Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World” (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018) May 16, 2018

Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, how could perpetual enslavement be justified? In her recent book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Katharine Gerbner asks these questions as she traces how religion was fundamental to the development of both slavery and race in the early modern period, as Anglicans, Quakers, and Moravians settled and missionized the Protestant Atlantic world.

Katharine Gerbner is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Minnesota.

Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

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Matthew Karp, “This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at The Helm of American Foreign Policy” (Harvard UP, 2016) May 14, 2018

Most people know that slavery was foundational to the economic development of the United States in the antebellum period. Fewer people are aware that slavery was also important for American foreign policy in the period. In his book This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at The Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard University Press, 2016), Matthew Karp examines how American slaveholders and their allies steered American diplomacy so as to preserve and expand slavery as an institution.

Adam McNeil is an incoming PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware. He completed his M.A. in History at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts and B.S. in History at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) in Tallahassee, Florida. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Nancy Mitchell, “Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War” (Stanford UP, 2016) May 09, 2018

Today we talked with Nancy Mitchell about her book Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War, published by Stanford University Press in 2016 as part of the Cold War International History Project Series. Drawn from extensive archival research and personal interviews spanning three continents, Mitchell’s book attempts to recast the Carter administration as an active, and in some cases forceful, participant in the Cold War. By examining key areas of conflict, most notably Rhodesia and the Horn of Africa, Mitchell illustrates the continuity and shifts in American foreign policy on the continent, while highlighting the importance of Carter seeing these crises “through the prism of the civil rights struggle”. Bringing together the interlocking relationships of the likes of Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance, Adwar Sadat, Andrew Young, Ian Smith, and Kenneth Kaunda, her book provides one of the most complete pictures of the Carter administration’s dealings with the African continent and its legacies for US and international policy across the globe.

Nancy Mitchell is a Professor of History at North Carolina State University, where she was elected to the Academy of Outstanding Teachers. Her previous work includes the book The Danger of Dreams: German and American Imperialism in Latin America, 1895-1914 (1999), a chapter on “The Cold War and Jimmy Carter,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War (2010), and another on “The United States and Europe, 1900-1914,” in American Foreign Relations since 1600: A Guide to the Literature Online, (2007).

Jacob Ivey is an Assistant Professor of History at the Florida Institute of Technology. His research centers largely on the British Colony of Natal, South Africa, most notably European and African systems of state control and defense during the colony’s formative period. He is currently working on a history of anti-apartheid movements in Central Florida. He tweets @IveyHistorian.

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Lisa A. Lindsay, “Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey” (UNC Press, 2017) Apr 27, 2018

The title of Lisa A. Lindsay’s book Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), invokes enduring family ties, as well as the connections between slavery, migration, and colonization in the Atlantic world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The book returns, again and again, to the theme of vulnerability as a consequence of the fragile freedoms of African Americans and Africans of the period, and charts the unusual story of two families – one African American and the other Nigerian – connected by a common ancestor, who have managed against significant odds, to keep in touch over many generations. The life story of one of the sons of Scipio Vaughan (the common ancestor), Churchwill Vaughan, forms the arc of Atlantic Bonds and traces, among other things, a “reverse migration” from South Carolina to West Africa.

In the interview, Lisa Lindsay, discusses the ways in which this family was both typical and exceptional.

Mireille Djenno is the Librarian for African, African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Averell Smith, “The Pitcher and the Dictator: Satchel Paige’s Unlikely Season in the Dominican Republic” (U Nebraska Press, 2018) Apr 26, 2018

Today we are joined by Averell “Ace” Smith, The Pitcher and the Dictator: Satchel Paige’s Unlikely Season in the Dominican Republic (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). Smith is a political consultant and a lifelong baseball fan who became enamored with the game when he bought a copy of the 1956 edition of The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball at a school rummage sale. In a descriptive and richly detailed narrative, legendary pitcher Satchel Paige, along with several Negro League stars, are enticed to play in a tournament in the Dominican Republic. Paige, offered an eye-popping $30,000, is amazed by the lack of racial discord on the island, the relaxed baseball schedule and the ease in obtaining good food, wine and women. But there is a dark side. Paige is playing for Ciudad Trujillo in a tournament created to support and celebrate the “re-election” of the country’s ruthless dictator, Rafael Trujillo. And “El Jefe” does not like to lose. So, when Paige and his teammates struggle early in the tournament, Trujillo assigns the leader of his death squads to join team management. The message is clear: “You’d better win.” The all-stars do, by the barest margins, and Paige and his teammates return to the United States. Although they are banned from the Negro Leagues, a barnstorming tour is much more profitable. This book combines politics, racial issues and some of the best men who ever played the game.

Bob D’Angelo is about to receive his master’s degree in history at Southern New Hampshire University. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. Bob currently is a national digital content editor for Cox Media Group. Bob can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information and reviews, be sure to visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs.

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Keisha N. Blain, “Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom” (U Penn Press, 2018) Apr 26, 2018

Keisha N. Blain teaches African American and gender and women’s history at the University of Pittsburg. Her book Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) tells the story of an overlooked group of black women leaders in the aftermath of a declining Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist movement of the 1920s. Building on numerous religious and political ideologies, Garveyite women organized black workers from the Mississippi Delta to Harlem and built transnational alliances in the pursuit of global black liberation and nationalism. They followed strategies such the Greater Liberia Bill seeking funding from the U.S. government for black emigration to Africa. In doing so, they formed unlikely alliances and remained outside the established civil rights organizations tapping the frustrated aspirations of thousands of African Americans in mid-century America. Over a period of four decades, they never gave up on their dream of a return to Africa and building a black nation recognized on the international stage. Set the World on Fire, offers a continuous link between the nationalism of the Garvey movement and Black Power of the 1960s in which women were key.

This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press.

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John Gennari, “Flavor and Soul: Italian America and Its African American Edge” (U Chicago Press, 2017) Apr 25, 2018

In his book, Flavor and Soul: Italian America and Its African American Edge (University of Chicago Press, 2017), scholar John Gennari examines the intersectionalities between African American and Italian American cultures in the United States. Using an auto-ethnographic lens, Gennari explores this relationship, what he calls “the edge”, between the two cultures. Gennari examines the intersectionalities in music, film, sports, and foodways, spotlighting the edge as a way to highlight the ways in which the relationship between Italian American and African American cultures has been both joyous and beneficial as well as fraught with violence and suspicion. He posits that an Afro-Italian sensibility has vitalized American culture, even with the conflicts over urban spaces, political and personal respect, and overlapping histories of exclusion. Through his personal connections as well as critical and well-researched chapters on the intersections between these two cultures, Gennari gives readers a deeper understanding of the histories and relationships between African Americans and Italian Americans.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in peoples lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.

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Greg Berman and Julian Adler, “Start Here: A Roadmap to Reducing Mass Incarceration” (The New Press, 2018) Apr 23, 2018

The United States leads the world in incarceration. That’s a problem, especially the disproportionate impact of “mass incarceration” on low-income men of color. In their new book Start Here: A Roadmap to Reducing Mass Incarceration (The New Press, 2018), Greg Berman and Julian Adler take us though a series of concrete, practical, and practicable steps that we could take to radically reduce the number of people we incarcerate while, at the same time, making our communities healthier and safer. Listen in.

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics and Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017).

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Imani Perry, “May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem” (UNC Press, 2018) Apr 23, 2018

Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem in August 2016 prior to a preseason game reopened a national conversation about public performances of patriotism. What does a national anthem do to promote unity in a nation with a long running history of racial slavery, lynching, and segregation? Imani Perry answers this question in her recent book May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Through her history of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” Perry powerfully shows how and why throughout the Black liberation struggles in the twentieth and twenty-first century, Black Americans adopted the song as the “Black National Anthem.”

Adam McNeil is a soon-to-be Ph.D. in History and Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Lisa Ze Winters, “The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic” (U Georgia Press, 2016) Apr 20, 2018

Popular and academic representations of the free mulatta concubine repeatedly depict women of mixed black African and white racial descent as defined by their sexual attachment to white men, and thus they offer evidence of the means to and dimensions of their freedom within Atlantic slave societies. In The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic (University of Georgia Press, 2016), Lisa Ze Winters traces the echo of the free mulatta concubine across the physical and imaginative landscapes of three Atlantic sites: Gorée Island, New Orleans, and Saint Domingue (Haiti). Ze Winters contends that the uniformity of these representations conceals the figure’s centrality to the practices and production of diaspora, while engaging with issues of gender, theorized race and freedom, and identity.

Lisa Ze Winters is an associate professor of African American Studies and English at Wayne State University, where she teaches African American literature, African diaspora studies, and Black Feminist thought.

Tyler Yank is a senior doctoral candidate in History at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her work explores bonded women and British Empire in the western Indian Ocean World.

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Koritha Mitchell, ed., “Iola Leroy Or, Shadows Uplifted” by Frances E.W. Harper (Broadview Editions, 2018) Apr 20, 2018

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s nineteenth-century novel Iola Leroy has not always been considered a core text in the canon of African American literature. Indeed, throughout much of the twentieth century, her work was dismissed as derivate and was erased by intellectuals until black feminist scholars such as Deborah McDowell and Hazel Carby undertook the crucial work of recuperating Harper’s writings and highlighting her important contributions to African American literature and history. Koritha Mitchell’s new critical edition of the book–Iola Leroy Or, Shadows Uplifted (Broadview Editions, 2018)—makes a timely contribution to the study of black literary and political history by contextualizing Harper’s life and work. In our contemporary moment where black women spearhead international movements for justice and equality such as Black Lives Matter and Me Too, but continue to be erased from public discourse and recognition, Mitchell’s foregrounding of Watkins Harper makes a crucial intervention in redressing the skewed narrative. Mitchell draws on the most recent scholarship and archival discoveries to provide a clearer picture of Watkins Harper and the importance of her novel then and now.

Koritha Mitchell specializes in African American literature, racial violence throughout U.S. literature and contemporary culture, and black drama and performance. She examines how texts, both written and performed, have helped terrorized families and communities survive and thrive. Her study Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 2011) won book awards from the American Theatre and Drama Society and from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Her essay “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister Charlie” appears in the March 2012 issue of American Quarterly and her Callaloo journal article “Love in Action” draws parallels between racial violence at the last turn of the century and anti-LGBT violence today. She recently completed a book manuscript, “From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture.” For the most comprehensive picture of her current projects and activities, please visit Mitchell’s website.

Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Resistance in the Francophone World, examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements.

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Gary Dorrien, “The New Abolition: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel” (Yale UP, 2018) Apr 18, 2018

The black social gospel–formulated and given voice by abolitionists and post-reconstruction Black men and women–took the United States by storm in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Black Christians were not the only ones involved in the black social gospel, though. Rev. Dr. Gary Dorrien’s The New Abolition: W.E.B Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (Yale University Press, 2018) argues that although Du Bois would not consider himself a black social gospel adherent, he was affected by the tradition and came to realize its importance in the milieu of social democracy. Dorrien uses black social gospel to chart an intellectual and theological map of the tradition that gave birth to the leader of one of America’s most radical social movements: Dr. Martin Luther King.

Adam McNeil is a soon-to-be PhD student and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He received his M.A in History at Simmons College and B.S. in History at Florida A&M University. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Sharla Fett, “Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade” (UNC Press, 2017) Apr 12, 2018

The Amistad Rebellion is usually remembered as the only instance in which a US court sent re-captured slaves back to Africa. Yet as Sharla Fett shows in her new book Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), the Amistad case is not exactly unique. By using the stories of re-captured Africans in detention in places like Key West, Florida and Charleston, South Carolina, Dr. Fett examines how pro-slavery and abolitionist factions used re-captives to argue their respective cases. She also examines the lives of re-captured slaves sent to “back” to Liberia, a place they had never been.

Adam McNeil is a soon-to-be PhD student and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He received his M.A in History at Simmons College and B.S. in History at Florida A&M University. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Amy Bass, “One Goal: A Coach, A Team, and the Game that Brought a Divided Town Together” (Hachette Books, 2018) Apr 04, 2018

Today we are joined by Amy Bass, author of the book One Goal: A Coach, A Team, and the Game that Brought a Divided Town Together (Hachette Books, 2018). This is the fourth book for Bass, who is director of the honors program and a professor of history at the College of New Rochelle in New York. One Goal is the story of a high school soccer team in Lewiston, Maine, that helped bring together a racially divided city. Lewiston, overwhelmingly white, became the home base for thousands of Somali refugees. Longtime residents of Lewiston were uncomfortable with people whose language, religion and customs were markedly different. A popular saying in Maine was “You’re always from away,” and yet Lewiston’s citizens were having trouble adjusting to this latest group of immigrants from far away. Enter longtime Lewiston High School soccer coach Mike McGraw, who saw the potential in the young Somalis playing in pickup games in the city. Molding the group into a cohesive unit, McGraw and his squad weathered racial taunts from opponents and a less-than-ringing endorsement from Lewiston’s mayor to bring an elusive soccer state championship to a traditionally hockey-mad area. Bass shows how trust, faith, hard work and some uncanny soccer ability helped bring glory and pride to a town that still struggles with coexistence between very different cultures.

Bob D’Angelo is working on his master’s degree in history at Southern New Hampshire University. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob DAngelo’s Books and Blogs.

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Julian Lim, “Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands” (UNC Press, 2017) Mar 30, 2018

With the railroad’s arrival in the late nineteenth century, immigrants of all colors rushed to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, transforming the region into a booming international hub of economic and human activity. Following the stream of Mexican, Chinese, and African American migration, Julian Lim presents a fresh study of the multiracial intersections of the borderlands, where diverse peoples crossed multiple boundaries in search of new economic opportunities and social relations. However, as these migrants came together in ways that blurred and confounded elite expectations of racial order, both the United States and Mexico resorted to increasingly exclusionary immigration policies in order to make the multiracial populations of the borderlands less visible within the body politic, and to remove them from the boundaries of national identity altogether.

In Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (UNC Press, 2017), Lim reveals how a borderlands region that has traditionally been defined by Mexican-Anglo relations was in fact shaped by a diverse population that came together dynamically through work and play, in the streets and in homes, through war and marriage, and in the very act of crossing the border.

Julian Lim is an Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University. She holds a B.A. in literature and a law degree from U.C. Berkeley, and received her Ph.D. in History from Cornell University. Trained in history and law, she focuses on immigration, borders, and race, and has taught in both history department and law school settings.

Lori A. Flores is an Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale University Press, out in paperback May 2018).

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J. Michael Butler, “Beyond Integration: The Black Freedom Struggle in Escambia County, Florida 1960-1980” (UNC Press, 2016) Mar 27, 2018

Historians have long debated when the Black Freedom Struggle began and when it ended. Most point to the King years, 1955-1968. In his excellent book Beyond Integration: The Black Freedom Struggle in Escambia County, Florida 1960-1980 (UNC Press, 2016), Michael Butler argues that the fight continued well after King’s death. Butler also dispels the myth of Floridian exceptionalism, that is, that Florida was somehow less “Southern” than neighboring states. Whether through stories of police brutality, Confederate iconography, riots over integration, or the rise of Ku Klux Klan, Butler’s work demonstrates that even Southern Florida was not spared the racial violence endemic in other states of the South.

Adam McNeil is a soon-to-be PhD candidate in History and a Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Marcus Rediker, “The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became The First Revolutionary Abolitionist” (Beacon Press, 2017) Mar 20, 2018

In the annals of abolitionist history, names like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, the Grimke sisters, and Harriet Tubman are well known. Dr. Marcus Rediker‘s new book, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became The First Revolutionary Abolitionist (Beacon Press, 2017) adds an important abolitionist to this group of revolutionaries. Benjamin Lay lived and proclaimed a life dedicated to the immediate abolition of slavery over a century before many of the women and men aforementioned were either born or first proclaimed abolition as their chosen lifework. Many characteristics described Benjamin Lay: Quaker, dwarf, vegetarian, cave-dweller, sailor, farmer, or anti-capitalist; all of them informed his personal interpretation of militant and revolutionary abolitionism.

Adam McNeil is a soon-to-be PhD in History and Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Matthew Clavin, “Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers” (Harvard UP, 2015) Mar 13, 2018

We all know that most runaway African-American slaves fled north in pursuit of freedom. Most, but not all. Some also fled to Pensacola, a city located in (of all places) the Deep South. In his excellent book Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers (Harvard University Press, 2015), historian Matthew Clavin examines how Pensacola became a destination for fugitive slaves, how the runaways got there, and what they did after they arrived. Listen in.

Adam McNeil is a soon-to-be PhD in History and Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Kali Nicole Gross, “Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso” (Oxford UP, 2016) Mar 13, 2018

True crime is as popular as ever in our present moment. Both television and podcast series have gained critical praise and large audiences by exploring largely unknown individual crimes in depth and using them to consider broader questions surrounding the justice system, guilt and innocence, class and racial inequality, and evidence. Rarely do we get to think historically about these broader topics through the lens of individual, especially unknown, cases in light of the challenges posed by researching historical crimes. Kali Nicole Gross, Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University New Brunswick, has done incredible research to do just that in her new book, Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America (Oxford University Press, Hardcover 2016, Paperback 2018). The book won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction.

The book tells the story of the discovery of a torso, the investigation of the murder, and the life of the accused—Hannah Mary Tabbs. The body was discovered in 1887 and drew an unusual amount of attention in the segregated areas in and around Philadelphia, especially given the victim and accused were black. In this episode of the podcast, Gross discusses why the case caught the eye of the public and investigators at the time. She also explains some of the broader context and insights of the case. Finally, she talks about her research process. We don’t give away the resolution of the case in our conversation, but will introduce you to Hannah Mary Tabbs and the world of post-Reconstruction Philadelphia in which she lived.

Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu.

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Jeffrey Stewart, “The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke” (Oxford UP, 2018) Feb 26, 2018

Through his work as a scholar and critic, Alain Locke redefined African American culture and its place in American life. Jeffrey Stewart‘s book The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Oxford University Press, 2018) offers a detailed examination of Locke’s life, one that reveals his many achievements and how they changed the nation. Born into a middle-class family in Pennsylvania, his mother worked to ensure that Locke had the best education possible. After graduating from Harvard and spending three years in Europe as the first African American Rhodes Scholar, Locke returned to the United States and took a position at Howard University. In the 1920s he encouraged African Americans to embrace their own cultural past, becoming one of the leading promoters of the Harlem Renaissance then emerging in the country. Though his relationship with its leading figures was often fraught with tension, Locke never gave up his advocacy of Afro-American cultural identity, which he continued for the rest of his life through his writings, his lectures, and his sponsorship of African American artists.

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Seth Markle, “A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism 1964-1974” (Michigan State UP, 2017). Feb 16, 2018

Today we talked to Seth Markle about his book, A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism 1964-1974, published by Michigan State University Press in 2017 as part of the Ruth Simms Hamilton African Diaspora Series. Providing extensive insight into the importance of Tanzania in the emergence of a new form of Pan-Africanism in the 1960s, Markle conveys both the character of modern nationhood in Tanzania as well the activists in the diaspora who shaped and were affected by it. Markle highlights the international connections that defined the African Diaspora and Pan-Africanism throughout the 1960s and 70s. His book is a story about the networks and friendships that tie together Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania to the pivotal figures and ideas of the twentieth century, including Malcolm X, A.M. Babu, Stokely Carmichael, and Walter Rodney.

Seth Markle is an Associate Professor of History and International Studies at Trinity College. He also serves as the Director of the Human Rights Program; Coordinator of the International Studies Program’s Africa concentration and Interdisciplinary Minor in African Studies and is the Faculty Advisor to Trinity’s International Hip Hop Festival.

Jacob Ivey is an Assistant Professor of History at the Florida Institute of Technology. His research centers largely on the British Colony of Natal, South Africa, most notably European and African systems of state control and defense during the colony’s formative period.He tweets @IveyHistorian.

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Douglas Hartman, “Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy” (U Chicago Press, 2016) Feb 12, 2018

The concept of late-night basketball gained prominence in the late 1980s when G. Van Standifer founded Midnight Basketball League as a vehicle upon which citizens, businesses, and institutions can stand together to prevent crime, violence, and drug abuse. The concept ignited and late-night basketball leagues were developed in dozens of cities across America. In Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Douglas Hartmann traces the history of late-night basketball with particular emphasis on the racial ideologies, cultural tensions, and institutional realities that continue to shape sports-based social policy. Hartmann brings to life the experience he had as a researcher in the field working with late-night basketball programs and the young men they were intended to serve. This experience provided him with a more grounded and nuanced understanding of the intricate ways sports, race, and risk intersect and interact in urban America.

Douglas Hartman is a professor and the chair of sociology at University of Minnesota.

Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. His most recent paper, to be presented at the upcoming American Society for Environmental History conference, is titled “Down Lovers Lane: A Brief History of Necking in Cars.”

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Paul Ortiz, “An African American and Latinx History of the United States” (Beacon Press, 2017) Feb 05, 2018

Throughout many American classrooms, students learn how the United States was formed, and most importantly, the historical figures who helped produce the contemporary nation we occupy. All too often, however, African American, Latinx, and Native Americans are not given similar attention. Rather, they are depicted as passive receivers of what those of European-descent pushed upon them.

In An African American and Latinx History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2017), Paul Ortiz attempts to bring more balance to this picture. By employing a bottom-up approach, Ortiz shows how central black and brown solidarities were to the political history of the United States. Ortiz’s is a narrative history spanning two hundred-plus years of African Americans, Latinx, and Native Americans expanding what freedom and justice in the United States meant by challenging American exceptionalism, imperialism, and colonialism as much as possible.

Adam McNeil is a graduating M.A in History student at Simmons College in Boston, MA. He graduated from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in Fall 2015 with B.S. in History. Adam can be reached at @CulturedModesty.

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Sridhar Pappu, “The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age” (HMH, 2017) Feb 01, 2018

Today we are joined by Sridhar Pappu, author of the book The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). Pappu is The Male Animal columnist for The New York Times, and his work has appeared in Sports Illustrated and The Atlantic. Blending two interesting pennant races against the backdrop of a turbulent year in world history, Pappu examines 1968 not only as a landmark season in sports, but also views it through social, cultural and racial lenses. Denny McLain became the first pitcher to win 30 or more games in 34 seasons, and Bob Gibson posted an incredible 1.12 ERA. The Detroit Tigers would rally from a 3-1 series deficit in the World Series to win in seven games, beating Gibson in the Series’ finale. But those achievements were tempered by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. The deadlock in the Vietnam War helped topple a president, and the Democratic National Convention charged with finding his replacement dissolved into clashes between Chicago police and antiwar demonstrators. Worldwide, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and the Soviets’ crushing of dissidents in Czechoslovakia added to the turbulence. Pappu deftly juggles sports and world events to present an absorbing narrative.

Bob D’Angelo earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs.

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Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, “Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War” (UNC Press, 2016) Jan 29, 2018

Typically the Jim Crow Era of segregation is understood as beginning directly after Reconstruction and going into the mid-twentieth century with the dual climaxes of the Brown vs. Board Supreme Court decision and the Montgomery Bus Boycott Movement in Montgomery, Alabama. What this narrative suggests is that Jim Crow was a southern phenomenon. Such a view is unfortunately ill conceived. Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), written by Dr. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Associate Professor of History at Smith College, reshapes contemporary memory of when and why Jim Crow laws were enacted. In Colored Travelers, Dr. Pryor details how while antebellum-era Northern black abolitionists simultaneously fought to abolish slavery, they also pushed the limits of what citizenship meant by attempting to freely travel within it. They did this by challenging Northern Jim Crow laws set to undermine the mobility of black people in general, but this oppression hit black abolitionists most because of the mobility needed to reach their events. By using travel narratives, newspaper articles, and various primary sources of domestic and international black travel, Dr. Pryor explains why the pre-Civil War period was an essential training ground for the laws that would nationally become entrenched in the post-emancipation United States of America.

Adam McNeil is a graduating M.A in History student at Simmons College in Boston, MA. He graduated from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in Fall 2015 with B.S. in History. Adam can be reached at @CulturedModesty.

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Robert Hunt Ferguson, “Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi” (U of Georgia Press, 2018) Jan 24, 2018

In an unlikely place at an unlikely time, a group of black and white former sharecroppers, socialist organizers, and Christian reformers began an agricultural experiment in pursuit of economic subsistence and human dignity. Historian Robert Hunt Ferguson, in Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi (University of Georgia Press, 2018), makes the surprising case that the Depression-era Mississippi Delta provided the necessary conditions for the flowering of such an endeavor. New Deal policies inspired socialist optimism while their racial exclusions left displaced tenant farmers looking for work and attracted to enterprises like Delta Cooperative Farm and Providence Farm, which promised to break them from the cycle of debt and offer them equal access to the schooling, medical care, and opportunity enjoyed by the white middle class. These cooperative farms drew inspiration from the transnational communitarian movement and advanced the radical visions of the American Socialist Party and the religious left, including celebrated theological Reinhold Niebuhr, who served as president of their board of trustees. While the experiment struggled with agro-ecological obstacles and internecine power struggles, and ultimately could not withstand the postwar attacks of white supremacist movement, Delta and Providence stand as models of how those trapped within withering hegemonies imagine a most just and free society and set out to do the daily labor of bringing it into being.

Robert Hunt Ferguson is an assistant professor of history at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his publications include “Mothers Against Jesse in Congress: Grassroots Maternalism and Cultural Politics of the AIDS Crisis in North Carolina” (Journal of Southern History, Feb 2017).

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

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Brian McCammack, “Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago” (Harvard UP, 2017) Jan 11, 2018

What can we learn about African American life between the world wars if we center our attention on the parks and pleasuring grounds of the urban North? That is what historian Brian McCammack endeavors to find out in his new book, Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago (Harvard University Press, 2017). McCammack’s study is the first book-length environmental history of black Chicago and the first sustained exploration of the how the 1.6 million black southerners who moved to northern cities between 1910 and 1940 thought about and interacted with the natural world. He follows black Chicagoans’ through both the greenspaces of the South Side and rural retreats across the Upper Midwest. He finds their experiences of nature were shaped by racial exclusion, intraracial class conflict, and paternalistic reform efforts. Many of their preferred forms of outdoor recreation blended southern traditions with new practices coded as modern. And they articulated their devotion to nature in terms often indistinguishable from white northerners, raising troubling questions about why postwar environmentalism ended up overwhelmingly white.

Brian McCammack is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Lake Forest College in suburban Chicago. He earned his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University in 2012.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

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Ula Yvette Taylor, “The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam” (UNC Press, 2017) Jan 11, 2018

The Nation of Islam and other black nationalist groups are typically known for their male leaders. Men like the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Minister Malcolm X or Martin Delany and Marcus Garvey are notable examples. But what about the work of black women in these groups? Ula Yvette Taylor’s new book, The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), expands our knowledge of the role of black women from the Depression-era development of Allah Temple of Islam in Detroit to the formal group known as the Nation of Islam that expanded under the leadership in the 1960s and 1970s of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Women like Clara Muhammad, Burnsteen Sharrieff, and Thelma X Muhammad were essential to the development of the Nation of Islam’s goal of creating a black nation within the American nation. The Promise of Patriarchy shows how black women created notions of black womanhood and black motherhood that best helped them deal with the daily indignities of living in Jim Crow America.

Ula Yvette Taylor is Professor and H. Michael and Jeanne Williams Department Chair in the African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley.

Adam X. McNeil is a graduating M.A. in History student at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, and received his Undergraduate History degree at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University University in 2015.

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Elizabeth McRae, “Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy” (Oxford UP, 2017) Jan 01, 2018

Much attention has been drawn to the role of white women in the recent Alabama senate election and the earlier election of Donald J. Trump as president. Today’s racial and gender politics have long historic roots, according to Elizabeth McRae, the author of Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (Oxford University Press, 2018). Gillespie McRae is an associate professor of history and director of the graduate social science education programs at Western Carolina University.

Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s, Mothers of Massive Resistance explores the local workers who promoted the system of racial segregation and Jim Crow. In rural communities and cities, white women performed various duties that upheld segregation and racism: rejecting marriage certificates, deciding on the racial identity of neighbors, canvassing communities for votes, and lobbying elected officials. And the work of white women was not restricted to the South. McRae also shows how this politics of Massive Resistance to de-segregation and civil rights plays out in cities in the North.

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Kay Wright Lewis, “A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World” (U. Georgia Press, 2017) Jan 01, 2018

In her new book, A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World (University of Georgia Press, 2017), Howard University’s Kay Wright Lewis chronicles the history of white and black perspectives on the idea of “race war.” She examines the ways in which this concept shaped such events such as the Haitian Revolution, Vesey’s Plot, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry, and terrorist Dylann Roof’s shooting of nine churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. Ultimately, A Curse upon the Nation provides us with a deep intellectual history of “race war” and an analysis of the ways it continues to affect us today. Dr. Kay Wright Lewis’ research focuses on slavery and abolition, African American intellectual history, Atlantic World history, and the history of violence.

Adam X. McNeil is a graduating M.A. in History student at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, and received his Undergraduate History degree at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University University in 2015.

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Corey D. Fields, “Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans” (UC Press, 2016) Dec 24, 2017

What is it about Black Republicans that makes them fodder for comedy? How do Black Republicans view their participation in their political group? Corey D. Fields answers these questions and more in his new book, Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans (University of California Press, 2016). Using interviews and ethnographic data, Fields investigates how identity, race, and politics work together and influence each other. He finds two different lenses through which respondents see their Republican values: color-blind or race-conscious. Those who have a color-blind approach to their politics try not to emphasize race at all. In contrast, the race-conscious approach brings race to the forefront of any political argument. This book presents a fascinating case study. In addition to his interviews, Fields also presents historical background on the participation of African Americans in the Republican party across time and current day Black Republican organizations. Fields encourages the reader to move past seeing Black Republicans as a monolith, and instead appreciate the ways in which they are a heterogeneous group. Fields also encourages the reader to understand the ways in which politics may influence racial identity and vice versa.

This book will be of interest to sociologists, political scientists, and race scholars. Given the concepts used and the ideas raised in the book, it would be especially useful in a sociology of race class or political sociology course.

Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch.

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Ashley D. Farmer, “Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era” (UNC Press, 2017) Dec 21, 2017

Black Power was one of the most iconic movements of the twentieth century. Recent documentary treatments like The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 in 2011 and The Black Panthers: Vanguards of the Revolution in 2015 brought the Panthers into the households of a new generation. When combined with Beyonce’s 2016 Super Bowl halftime performance, the Black Power movement’s memory hit a high note upon its fiftieth anniversary. Ashley D. Farmer’s Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (University of North Carolina Press Press, 2017) increases scholarly and mainstream audiences’ knowledge of black women’s centrality in theorizing and organizing Black Power and black nationalist circles throughout the majority of the twentieth century. Not only does Farmer’s work push our grasp of the black women who influenced the Black Power Movement from within, but Remaking Black Power is also the first comprehensive study of black women’s intellectual production throughout the Black Power era.

What makes Remaking Black Power such a compelling history is that it uses similar source material as prior scholars, but Farmer uses them much differently. Accessing untapped sources of cartoons, political manifestos, and political essays, Farmer asserts that they were important sites which redefined black womanhood and ultimately black thought in general. As the Black Power movement grew throughout the world, black women were central to the movement’s expansive visions of black freedom and political organizing. Ultimately, Remaking Black Power deepens our understanding of what black intellectual history is, and what groups are considered “intellectuals.”

Ashley D. Farmer is a historian of black women’s history, intellectual history, and radical politics. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the African American Studies Program at Boston University. Farmer also is a leader of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) and a regular blogger for Black Perspectives.

Click here to read the introduction to Remaking Black Power. Ashley Farmer can be reached through Twitter at @drashleyfarmer

Adam X. McNeil is a graduating M.A. in History student at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, and received his Undergraduate History degree at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University University in 2015.

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Patrick Breen, “The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt” (Oxford UP, 2015) Dec 14, 2017

How did African-American slaves react to slavery? What factors, particularly religion, might shape those reactions, even making them violent? Patrick Breen, in his carefully researched and cogently written The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt (Oxford University Press, 2015) sheds light on these questions through a meticulous study of the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. With its careful attention to the historiography of the rebellion, its consideration of the veracity of “The Confessions of Nat Turner” (the primary source that serves as the center of studies on the rising), and its treatment of how churches reacted to the rising, this work is not only of interest to scholars, but could easily be adopted into a college-level survey of American history or a course introducing the historian’s craft.

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Sowande Mustakeem, “Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage” (U. Illinois Press, 2016) Dec 14, 2017

Most scholars and members of the public believe the process of enslavement was confined to the Western Hemispheric plantation or other locations of enslavement. Sowande Mustakeem’s award-winning Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (University of Illinois Press, 2016) disrupts that narrative. Mustakeem changes how readers understand the packaging process for how African captives became enslaved once they reached their final destinations. Slavery at Sea reveals for the first time how similar dimensions of land-based slavery were expressed largely on board slaving vessels. By highlighting the lived experiences of those groups most neglected by prior scholars of the Middle Passage—women, children, the disabled, and the elderly—Mustakeem demonstrates how Atlantic slave ships were important areas of development to land-based methods of medical treatment and violence.

Mustakeem’s approach to producing history does not end with the writing of Slavery at Sea. As a member of the St. Louis, Missouri-based band Amalghemy, Mustakeem adds to the readers experience by constructing a first of its kind soundtrack specifically for them to listen to as they read. Slavery At Sea: The Book Soundtrack pushes the public to consider how a soundtrack could mirror the “feelings, vibrations, and imagination forged in the book.” Ultimately, when coupled together, Slavery At Sea and Slavery At Sea: The Book Soundtrack alters how people of all backgrounds understand how pivotal the Middle Passage was to one of, if not the largest forced migrations of people in human history. She asserts that by the time captive Africans ultimately reached their final port of entry, the psychological and sexual trauma that would be their futures as enslaved people, had already begun during the Middle Passage.

Sowande M. Mustakeem is an assistant professor in the Department of History and the African and African American Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis. She can be reached on Twitter at @somustakeem.

Adam X. McNeil is a graduating M.A. in History student at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, and received his Undergraduate History degree at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University University in 2015.

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Nikki M. Taylor, “Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio” (Ohio U. Press, 2016) Dec 05, 2017

You may know Toni Morrison’s famed novel Beloved, but do you know much about the true story of the woman depicted in that story? You will know about the real story and more, by reading her biography called Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio (Ohio University Press, 2016) authored by Howard University Professor of History and Department Chair Nikki Taylor. Driven Toward Madness tells the story of how fugitive slave Margaret Garner and her family escaped to free Ohio in late January 1856, only to be captured in a cabin outside of Cincinnati. What happened as the Garner family were being apprehended is the climax of the story; Taylor shows what drove Margaret’s attempt to kill all four of her children, while only successfully doing so by way of decapitating her two year-old daughter Mary.

Based in history, Taylor uses various theoretical frameworks like trauma studies, pain studies, black feminist theory, and literary criticism to broaden our understandings of the why surrounding Margaret Garner’s murder of her child. Taylor broadens popular understandings of black womanhood, resistance, and what are acceptable forms of gendered violence. In doing so, Taylor displays the ways antagonistic groups like abolitionists and pro-slavery activists both used Garner’s story for their own causes without necessarily recognizing Garner’s agency and humanity. Ultimately, Taylor expresses how far a person could go to protect their child from bondage, even if that meant taking their life so they reached freedom elsewhere.

Author Nikki M. Taylor is Professor of History and History Department Chair at Howard University. Her work focuses on nineteenth-century African American History. Her sub-specialties are in Urban, African American Women, and Intellectual History.

Adam McNeil is a graduating M.A. in History student at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, and received his Undergraduate History degree at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2015.

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Stephane Robolin, “Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African American and South African Writing” (U. Illinois Press, 2015) Nov 30, 2017

Writers have long created networks and connections by exchanging letters or writing back to one another in their poetry and fiction. Letters between Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, attest to the rich world of intellectual exchange beyond the pages of published works. In Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African American and South African Writing (University of Illinois Press, 2015), Stephane Robolin examines the conversations between writers on spatial terms. Paying attention to the transnational crossings and circulations of African American and South African writers through their travels, correspondence and published works, Robolin’s study uncovers the metaphoric and sometimes quite literal grounds on which authors in different spaces contested the similar realities of racism and segregation that they experienced in South Africa and the United States. This study weaves together the voices of Langston Hughes, Richard Rive, Peter Abrahams, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Bessie Head and others in a larger narrative about the spatial dimensions of Black transnationalism in the twentieth century.

Stephane Robolin is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University where he also directs the Center for African Studies. He teaches courses in African Literature, African Diaspora Studies and Postcolonial Literature and Theory.

Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Resistance in the Francophone World, examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements.

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Michelle Kuo, “Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, A Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship” (Random House, 2017) Nov 26, 2017

It takes courage to walk into a classroom when students don’t look like you. It takes courage to return every day to teach a class when students devalue education. Media has portrayed the scenario in films like Freedom Writers and Dangerous Minds with white teachers symbolizing the great white hope to a class of minority students. Well, Michelle Kuo is not the great white hope, but she becomes hope and maintains hope for young black students in Mississippi Delta, specifically Patrick.

Kuo writes about her journey in the memoir Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship (Random House, 2017). Her story focuses on race, justice and education in the rural south where she taught American History through black literature. Kuo, a Harvard graduate born to Taiwainese parents, wanted to work in a place where she was needed. Thus, she was assigned to an alternative school, which the local administration used as a dumping ground for the so-called “bad kids”—where rabble-rousers who had already been expelled from mainstream schools now given a final chance before being permanently ejected from the public education system. Her memoir navigates the terrain of teacher speaking to students through books and poems they can understand. Reading with Patrick points to a teacher who breaks the rule, choosing favorites. The memoir includes effective teaching tools Kuo used in the classroom. Most importantly, the memoir illustrates humanity when Kuo leaves Helena for a law school but returns after discovering her favorite student, Patrick, has gone to jail.

Michelle Kuo teaches in the History, Law and Society program at the American University of Paris. She and Patrick share the royalties from this book.

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Melissa Milewski, “Litigating Across the Color Line: Civil Cases between Black and White Southerners from the End of Slavery to the Civil Rights Era” (Oxford UP, 2017) Nov 24, 2017

Drawing on materials from archives in eight southern US states, Melissa Milewski’s Litigating Across the Color Line: Civil Cases Between Black and White Southerners from the End of Slavery to the Civil Rights Era (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines how African Americans utilized courts for disputes over property, personal injury, and workplace compensation, among other fields. She argues for a reexamination of African American agency through the use of the courts. In a fascinating juxtaposition, Milewski‘s work also addresses the white lawyers, juries, judges and, of course, often plaintiffs or defendants within these cases, some of whom operated out of concern, some through paternalism, and some, either overtly or not, in order to maintain white supremacy.

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David Goldstein, “Alley-Oop To Aliyah: African American Hoopsters in The Holy Land” (Skyhorse Publishing, 2017) Nov 11, 2017

Today we are joined by David A. Goldstein, author of the book Alley-Oop To Aliyah: African American Hoopsters in The Holy Land (Skyhorse Publishing, 2017.) Goldstein explores the story of the African-American professional basketball players who practice their craft in the Israeli Basketball Premier League, and what that means as far as religion, race, nationalism, power in international arenas, and identity. What are the tensions of African-Americans in Israeli basketball, while why has Israel been a popular destination for African-American players? Why has Maccabi Tel Aviv so dominated the league, while showing itself as a player in the Euro League, yet is widely disliked within Israel? What are the opinions of African-American players who end up moving to Israel on the issues of the country, especially around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Goldstein’s work shines a light on a little known phenomenon, and his interview shouldn’t be missed.

James Robinson is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at Northeastern University. He studies international sports history, and US in the world, with an emphasis on urban history and social movement history. He is working on his dissertation about American radicals in the interwar period who used sports as organizing tools. He can reached at robinson.jame@husky.neu.edu. For more information, visit jameswjrobinson.net.

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Martha J. Cutter, “The Illustrated Slave: Empathy, Graphic Narratives, and the Visual Culture of the Transatlantic Abolition Movement, 1800-1853” (U. Georgia Press, 2017) Oct 19, 2017

Slavery as a system of torture and bondage has fascinated the optical imagination of the transatlantic world for centuries. Scholars have examined various aspects of the visual culture that was slavery, including its painting, sculpture, pamphlet campaigns, and artwork, yet an important piece of this visual culture has gone unexamined: the popular and frequently reprinted antislavery illustrated books that were utilized extensively by the antislavery movement in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Illustrated Slave: Empathy, Graphic Narrative, and the Visual Culture of the Transatlantic Abolition Movement, 1800-1852 (University of Georgia Press, 2017) analyzes some of the more innovative works in the archive of antislavery illustrated books published from 1800 to 1852 alongside other visual materials that depict enslavement. The author argues that some illustrated narratives attempt to shift a viewing reader away from pity and spectatorship into a mode of empathy and interrelationship with the enslaved. She also contends that some illustrated books characterize the enslaved as obtaining a degree of control over narrative and lived experiences, even if these figurations entail a sense that the story of slavery is beyond representation itself. Through exploration of famous works and unfamiliar ones she delineates a mode of radical empathy that attempts to destroy divisions between the enslaved individual and the free white subject and between the viewer and the viewed.

Author Martha J. Cutter is a Professor in the Department of English and in the Africana Studies Institute at the University of Connecticut. She received her Ph.D. in English from Brown University, and is currently the editor of the journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. Her previously book-length projects include Unruly Tongue: Language and Identity in American Womens Fiction, 1850-1930 and Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity. She has published articles in numerous academic journals and remains intrigued by the interrelationships between literary texts and cultural contexts.

James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at james.stancil@intellectuwell.org.

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James Forman Jr., “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017) Oct 17, 2017

In this podcast I talk with James Forman Jr. about his book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). Mass incarceration and the carceral state are hot topics in law and criminology, as the American criminal justice system faces mounting criticism for imprisoning disproportionate numbers of minorities, especially blacks. But as James Forman Jr. lays out in this book, the war on crime that saw its origins in the 1970s found a great deal of support among African American citizens, community leaders, and politicians across America’s urban landscape. Locking Up Our Own tries to understand this phenomenon.

James Forman Jr. is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He teaches and writes in the areas of criminal procedure and criminal law policy, constitutional law, juvenile justice, and education law and policy. His particular interests are schools, prisons, and police, and those institutions race and class dimensions.

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Lisa M. Corrigan, “Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation” (U. Press of Mississippi, 2016) Oct 16, 2017

In the black liberation movement, imprisonment emerged as a key rhetorical, theoretical, and media resource. Imprisoned activists developed tactics and ideology to counter white supremacy. Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) underscores how imprisonment—a site for both political and personal transformation—shaped movement leaders by influencing their political analysis and organizational strategies. Prison became the critical space for the transformation from civil rights to Black Power, especially as southern civil rights activists faced setbacks.

Black Power activists produced autobiographical writings, essays, and letters about and from prison beginning with the early sit-in movements. The author conducts rhetorical analyses of these extremely popular though understudied accounts of the Black Power movement. Through prison writings, these activists deployed narrative features supporting certain tenets of Black Power, pride in blackness, disavowal of nonviolence, identification with the Third World, and identity strategies focused on black masculinity. Prison Power fills gaps between Black Power historiography and prison studies by scrutinizing the rhetorical forms and strategies of the Black Power ideology that arose from prison politics.

Author Lisa M. Corrigan is an Associate Professor of Communication, Director of the Gender Studies Program, and Affiliate Faculty in both African & African American Studies and Latin American Studies in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. She earned her B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh in Communication and English Literature and both her M.A. and Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Political Communication from University of Maryland, College Park. Corrigan is a feminist rhetorical scholar who researches and teaches in the areas of social movement studies, the Black Power and civil rights movements, prison studies, feminist studies, the Cold War, and the history of public address. Her writings and reviews have appeared in numerous academic publications. Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation is her first book.

James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at james.stancil@intellectuwell.org.

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Steve Sheinkin, “The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights” (Roaring Brook, 2014) Oct 06, 2017

On July 17, 1944, a massive explosion rocked the segregated Navy base at Port Chicago, California, killing more than 300 sailors who were at the docks, critically injuring off-duty men in their bunks, and shattering windows up to a mile away. On August 9th, 244 men refused to go back to work until unsafe and unfair conditions at the docks were addressed. When the dust settled, fifty were charged with mutiny, facing decades in jail and even execution.

The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights (Roaring Brook Press/Square Fish, 2014/17) is a fascinating story of the prejudice and injustice that faced black men and women in America’s armed forces during World War II, and a nuanced look at those who gave their lives in service of a country where they lacked the most basic rights. This thoroughly-researched and documented book can be worked into multiple aspects of the common core curriculum, including history and social studies.

Steve Sheinkin is the award-winning author of fast-paced, cinematic nonfiction histories for young readers. The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights was a National Book Award finalist and received the 2014 Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for Nonfiction. The Notorious Benedict Arnold: A True Story of Adventure, Heroism & Treachery, won both the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award and the YALSA award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults. Bomb: The Race to Build-and Steal-the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon was a Newbery Honor Book, a National Book Award Finalist, and winner of the Sibert Award and YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults. Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War was a National Book Award finalist, a YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award winner, and a Boston Globe/Horn Book Nonfiction Award winner. His most recent work is Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team. Sheinkin lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, with his wife and two children.

James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at james.stancil@intellectuwell.org.

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Vincent J. Intondi, “African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement” (Stanford UP, 2015) Oct 03, 2017

For the first time, African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement (Stanford University Press, 2015) tells the compelling story of those black activists who fought for nuclear disarmament by connecting the nuclear issue with the fight for racial equality. Early on, blacks in America saw the use of atomic bombs as a racial issue, asking why such enormous resources were being spent building nuclear arms instead of being used to improve impoverished communities. Black activists’ fears that race played a role in the decision to deploy atomic bombs only increased when the U.S. threatened to use nuclear weapons in Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam a decade later. For some, the nuclear issue was connected to colonialism the U.S. obtained uranium ore used to produce fissile material from the Belgian controlled Congo and the French tested their nuclear weapons in the Sahara.

By expanding traditional research in the history of the nuclear disarmament movement the author reveals the links between the black freedom movement in America and issues of global peace. From Langston Hughes through Lorraine Hansberry to President Obama, African Americans Against the Bomb offers an eye-opening account of the continuous involvement of African Americans who recognized that the rise of nuclear weapons was a threat to the civil rights of all people.

Author Vincent Intondi is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Race, Justice, and Community Engagement at Montgomery College, and formerly the Director of Research for American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute. His academic research focuses on the intersection of race and nuclear weapons. In 2016, Intondi began working with the Union of Concerned Scientists exploring new efforts to expand the nuclear disarmament movement to include more diverse voices, specifically from the black community. Beyond African Americans Against the Bomb, Intondi is currently working on a new book project, which will examine the famous June 12, 1982 nuclear disarmament march in New York City.

James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at james.stancil@intellectuwell.org.

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Anne C. Bailey, “The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History” (Cambridge UP, 2017) Sep 20, 2017

Contemporary conversations and debates over Confederate monuments underline how memory-making and the legacies of U.S. slavery and the Civil War remains raw and highly contested in public discourse. In her new book, The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Anne C. Bailey, an associate professor of history and Africana studies at Binghamton University SUNY, tells the story of the largest slave auction in U.S. history. In March 1859, the Butler Plantation estates in Georgia sold approximately 400 enslaved persons in a two-day period. Bailey uncovers the lives of enslaved people before and after their sale at the auction, offering a gripping narrative of the event and the people involved through the use of oral histories, journalistic accounts of the auction, and the papers of the Butlers. Bailey’s book pushes readers to think about how the traditional historical narrative treats slavery, specifically by considering slavery’s ongoing impact on modern-day descendants and their families.

In this episode of New Books in African American Studies, Anne Bailey discusses The Weeping Time and the role of the auction block in shaping the memory and meaning of slavery from the antebellum era to the present day. Bailey emphasizes the power of family in crafting the meaning of freedom in the Reconstruction era and beyond. She also discusses the importance of the democratization of memory and its influence in her current work. The Weeping Time presents the auction block as a lens through which to analyze this traumatic chapter in U.S. history as well as examine the resilience of enslaved people and their descendants in recovering familial bonds and histories.

Samantha Bryant is a Ph.D. candidate in history at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research, writing, and teaching focuses on twentieth-century U.S. history, U.S. cultural history, African American history and politics, and gender and sexuality studies. She is currently working on her dissertation, which explores the tangled and contested history of a 1960s rape case that took place in her hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia. You can reach her at sbryant21@huskers.unl.edu.

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Sarah Haley, “No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity” (UNC Press, 2016) Sep 15, 2017

Recent popular and scholarly interest has highlighted the complex and brutal system of mass incarceration in the United States. Much of this interest has focused on recent developments while other scholars have revealed the connections between the development of the prison system after Reconstruction and the legacies of slavery. In her new book, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Sarah Haley points to an often under recognized part of this history. Haley, an associate professor of gender studies and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, focuses on the Southern criminal justice system’s treatment and exploitation of black women during the Jim Crow era. Though black women were caught up in the criminal justice system in smaller numbers than men were, Haley shows their treatment was very important to the development of Jim Crow modernity. The brutal and violent treatment, the ideological narratives surrounding black women, and the exploitation of their labor were all key in creating the ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy. Haley also discusses the ways black women resisted this treatment and contented the related ideologies.

In this episode of New Books in History, Haley discusses No Mercy Here and this history of gender, criminal justice, and race. She tells listeners about some of experiences of black women in this criminal justice system, explaining the development of the system from convict leasing to chain gangs with an the exploitative parole system. Haley also clearly explains the ideological role this system played in the development of the Jim Crow system. Finally, Haley also discusses some of her research and the challenges of accurately and thoroughly portraying the experiences of women whose voices were mediated by the criminal justice system.

Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. Shes currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu.

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Ben H. Winters, “Underground Airlines” (Mulholland Books, 2016) Sep 13, 2017

Underground Airlines (Mulholland Books, 2016) is a ground-breaking novel, a wickedly imaginative thriller, and a story of an America that is more like our own than we’d like to believe. In an alternative world, a gifted young black man calling himself Victor has struck a bargain with federal law enforcement, working as a bounty hunter for the US Marshall Service. He’s got plenty of work.

This may sound like a story from the United States of today, but in this version of America, slavery continues in four states called the Hard Four. On the trail of a runaway known as Jackdaw, Victor arrives in Indianapolis knowing that something isn’t right with the case file, with his work, and with the country itself.

Choosing to ignore his past, Victor suppresses his memories of his childhood on a plantation, and works to infiltrate the local cell of an abolitionist movement called the Underground Airlines. Tracking Jackdaw through the back rooms of churches, empty parking garages, hotels, and medical offices, Victor believes he’s hot on the trail. But his strange, increasingly uncanny pursuit is complicated by a boss who wont reveal the extraordinary stakes of Jackdaw’s case, as well as by a heartbreaking young woman and her child who may be Victor’s salvation. Victor himself may be the biggest obstacle of all though his true self remains buried, it threatens to surface.

Author Ben H. Winters, the author of nine novels, grew up in suburban Maryland and attended Washington University in St. Louis. Beyond Underground Airlines, his other works include the highly-regarded Last Policeman trilogy. Winters is the winner of numerous literary awards, including a NPR Best Book of 2013, the Philip K. Dick Award for Distinguished Science Fiction, and the Edgar Award. He currently lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife Diana, a law professor, and their three children.

James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at james.stancil@intellectuwell.org.

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Keri Leigh Merritt, “Masterless Men: Poor Whites in the Antebellum South” (Cambridge UP, 2017) Sep 11, 2017

Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Masterless Men: Poor Whites in the Antebellum South (Cambridge University Press, 2017) reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor. With the rising global demand for cotton – and thus, slaves – in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass who were unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete – for jobs or living wages – with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socio-economic consequences as a result of living in a slave society. The author examines how these ‘masterless’ men and women threatened the existing Southern hierarchy and ultimately helped push Southern slaveholders toward secession and civil war.

Keri Leigh Merritt is an independent scholar from Atlanta, Georgia. She received her B.A. in History and Political Science from Emory University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of Georgia. Her research generally focuses on race and class in American history. Merritt’s work on poverty and inequality has garnered multiple awards, and she also writes historical pieces for the public, with letters and essays appearing in Aeon, on BillMoyers.com, and in The New York Times.

In addition to Masterless Men, Merritt has a forthcoming co-edited book on southern labor history with University of West Georgia historian Matthew Hild tentatively titled Reviving Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power. She is also currently conducting research for two additional book-length projects; the first is on black resistance in the vastly understudied Reconstruction era, and the second project examines the changing role of law enforcement in the mid-nineteenth century south. Masterless Men: Poor Whites in the Antebellum South is her first book.

James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at james.stancil@intellectuwell.org.

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Beverly Jenkins, “Chasing Down a Dream: A Blessings Novel” (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2017) Sep 07, 2017

The Blessings Series continue with a heartwarming novel, Chasing Down a Dream (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2017), about what makes a family when trials test relationships. And in Henry Adams, Kansas, there’s never a dull day. After a horrendous storm, Gemma finds a young boy and his little sister walking on the side of the road. She takes them in and quickly falls in love with the orphaned siblings. But when Gemma contacts Social Services to try to become their foster mother, she’s told a white woman cannot foster African-American children.

Tamar July has never had a great relationship with certain members of her family. In fact, she’d characterize it as a “hate/hate relationship.” But when her cousin calls her with the news that she’s dying and wants Tamar to plan the funeral, she’s shocked but is willing to drop everything for her.

In the midst of these trials, Jack and Rocky are trying to plan their wedding. The entire town comes together to lend a helping hand. Although the residents of Henry Adams face seemingly insurmountable obstacles, each of them discovers family comes in many forms, especially during the most trying of times.

Beverly Jenkins is the recipient of the 2017 Romance Writers of America Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as the 2016 Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for historical romance. She has been nominated for the NAACP Image Award in Literature, was featured both in the documentary Love Between the Covers and on CBS Sunday Morning. Since the publication of Night Song in 1994, she has been leading the charge for multicultural romance, and has been a constant darling of reviewers, fans, and her peers alike, garnering accolades for her work from the likes of The Wall Street Journal, People Magazine, and NPR.

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Joanna Dee Das, “Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora” (Oxford UP, 2017) Sep 07, 2017

By drawing on a vast, never-utilized trove of archival materials along with oral histories, choreographic analysis, and embodied research, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2017) offers new insight about how this remarkable woman built political solidarity through the arts. One of the most important dance artists of the twentieth century, dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) created works that thrilled audiences the world over. As an African American woman, she broke barriers of race and gender, most notably as the founder of an important dance company that toured the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Australia for several decades. The author makes the argument that Dunham was more than a dancer she was an intellectual and activist committed to using dance to fight for racial justice. Dunham saw dance as a tool of liberation, as a way for people of African descent to reclaim their history and forge a new future. She put her theories into motion not only through performance, but also through education, scholarship, travel, and choices about her own life.

The book examines how Dunham struggled to balance artistic dreams, personal desires, economic needs, and political commitments in the face of racism and sexism. Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora analyzes Dunham’s multiple spheres of engagement, assessing her dance performances as a form of black feminist protest while also presenting new material about her schools in New York and East St. Louis, her work in Haiti, and also traces Dunham’s influence over the course of several decades from the New Negro Movement of the 1920s to the Black Power Movement of the late 1960s and beyond.

Dance historian Joanna Dee Das is a dancer, a scholar, and an Assistant Professor of Dance at Washington University in St. Louis. She is passionate about teaching dance history from a global perspective and linking theory and practice in the classroom. Her research interests include dance in the African Diaspora, musical theater dance, the politics of performance in the twentieth century, and urban cultural policy. She received her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, her M.A. in American Studies, from New York University, and her undergraduate degree in Dance and History, also from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in Dance Research Journal, Journal of American History, Journal of African American History, Journal of Urban History, and Studies in Musical Theatre. This is her first book.

James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at james.stancil@intellectuwell.org.

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Johari Jabir, “Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War’s ‘Gospel Army'” (Ohio State UP, 2017) Aug 29, 2017

What is the labor for Black soldiers of the regiment? That is the question Johari Jabir asks in his book Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War’s “Gospel Army” (Ohio State University Press, 2017). Conjuring Freedom analyzes the songs of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment of Black soldiers who met nightly in the performance of the ring shout the counterclockwise song, dance, drum, and story in African American history and culture. Conjuring Freedom reflects the ring shout structure. Jabir illustrates three new concepts to cultural studies to describe the practices, techniques, and implications of the troop’s performance. First, Black Communal Conservatories, borrowing from Robert Farris Thompson’s “invisible academies” to describe the structural but spontaneous quality of black music-making. Then Listening Hermeneutics that accounts for the generative and material effects of sound on meaning-making. And finally Sonic Politics, which points to the political implications of music’s use in contemporary representations of race and history. The book discusses the meaning of conjure as a political and epistemological practice. Jabir demonstrates how the musical performance allowed troop members to embody new identities about national citizenship, militarism, and masculinity in more inclusive ways. Jabir also establishes how these musical practices of the regiment persisted long after the Civil War in Black culture, resisting, for instance, the paternalism and co-operative state anti-racism of the film Glory, and the assumption that Blacks need to be deracinated to be full citizens.

JOHARI JABIR, a practicing musical artist since age eight, serves as Associate Professor of African American Studies for the Department of African American Studies College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at The University of Illinois at Chicago. He frames his courses, African American introductory course, religious traditions, history, and music, using music as an epistemological frame.

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Juilet Hooker, “Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos” (Oxford UP, 2017) Aug 28, 2017

In 1845 two thinkers from the American hemisphere – the Argentinean statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and the fugitive ex-slave, abolitionist leader, and orator from the United States, Frederick Douglass – both published their first works. Each would become the most famous and enduring texts in what were both prolific careers, and they ensured Sarmiento and Douglass’ position as leading figures in the canon of Latin American and U.S. African-American political thought, respectively. But despite the fact that both deal directly with key political and philosophical questions in the Americas, Douglass and Sarmiento, like African-American and Latin American thought more generally, are never read alongside each other. Still, as Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (Oxford University Press, 2017) contends, looking at the two together allows one to chart a hemispheric intellectual geography of race that challenges political theory’s preoccupation with and assumptions about East / West comparisons, and questions the use of comparison as a tool in the production of theory and philosophy.

By juxtaposing four prominent nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers – Frederick Douglass, Domingo F. Sarmiento, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Jose Vasconcelos – Theorizing Race in the Americas will be the first to bring African-American and Latin American political thought into conversation. The book stresses that Latin American and U.S. ideas about race were not developed in isolation, but grew out of transnational intellectual exchanges across the Americas. In so doing, she shows that nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. and Latin American thinkers each looked to political models in the ‘other’ America to advance racial projects in their own countries. Reading these four intellectuals as hemispheric thinkers, the author foregrounds elements of their work that have been dismissed by dominant readings, and provides a crucial platform to bridge the canons of Latin American and African-American political thought.

Juliet Hooker is a Professor of Political Science at Brown University. She earned her undergraduate degree from Williams College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University. In addition to Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos she is also the author of Race and the Politics of Solidarity. Hooker’s research interests have focused on theories of multiculturalism, Latin American political thought, and Afro-descendant and indigenous politics in Latin America.

James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at james.stancil@intellectuwell.org.

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T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, “Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris between the Two World Wars (SUNY Press, 2015) Aug 26, 2017

When Dorothy Sterling wrote her book about nineteenth-century black women in America, she stated in the introduction that the book was not a definitive history of black women but a sourcebook to lead others to “compile a complete history.” And while a complete history of black women has not yet been written, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting has added to the history of black women in Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris Between the Two World Wars and The Autobiography of Ada Bricktop Smith, or Miss Baker Regrets (SUNY Press, 2015). Sharpley-Whiting does two things with this book; she appeals to the scholar and the mystery reader. The first part of the book captures the multi-life history of twenty-five African American women who lived in Paris as artists, singers, club owners, poets, and writers. Sharpley-Whiting’s stories illustrate how travel and place were transformative for black women despite the length of their stay in Paris. She says, “the book is a moment in time.” In this book, we get to go into that world, a world where they were honored and treated not by the color of their skin, but by their talents. We get to meet many different women along the way. Some stayed for a long time, while others could only stay several months before returning back to the United States. By the end of the 1930s, their time was over.

The second part of Bricktop’s Paris is a noir mystery, titled The Autobiography of Ada Bricktop Smith, or Miss Baker Regrets. Sharpley-Whiting illuminates the lines of fact and fiction in the autobiography of Ada Bricktop Smith. The novel explores the black and feminine perspective of image, self-possession, and self-exhibition. The novel takes us to Paris with black American women in salons and saloons crossing boundaries with purpose, and discovering they are the wealth of the nation. Josie Baker and Bricktop what are they up to? And who did it?

Bricktop’s Paris was an American Library in Paris Book Award Long List selection and a Choice 2015 Outstanding Academic Title. Sharpley-Whiting is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and French at Vanderbilt University where she also chairs African American and Diaspora Studies and directs the Callie House Center for the Study of Global Black Cultures and Politics. She publishes an academic murder mystery series under the nom de plume Tracy Whiting. She also teaches a course on Detective Fiction at Vanderbilt. The first novel, an academic cozy-thriller set in the South of France with Professor Havilah Gaie, is titled The 13thFellow: A Mystery in Provence (BooksbNimble Press, May 2015). She has completed the second mystery in this series, Paris A-Go-Go (Books nimble Press, forthcoming 2016), and is currently at-work on a scholarly volume, A Quartet in Four French Movements: A Voodoo Queen, A French Romantic, a Poet, and an African Ethnologist, as well as a family history. She is on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association (2014-2018).

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Mitch Kachun, “First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory” (Oxford UP, 2017) Aug 23, 2017

First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory (Oxford University Press, 2017) explores how Crispus Attucks’ death in the 1770 Boston Massacre led to his achieving mythic significance in African Americans’ struggle to incorporate their experiences and heroes into the mainstream of the American historical narrative. While the other victims of the Boston Massacre have been largely ignored, Attucks is widely celebrated as the first to die in the cause of freedom during the era of the American Revolution. He became a symbolic embodiment of black patriotism and citizenship.

First Martyr of Liberty traces Attucks’ career through both history and myth to understand how his public memory has been constructed through commemorations and monuments; institutions and organizations bearing his name; juvenile biographies; works of poetry, drama, and visual arts; popular and academic histories; and school textbooks. There will likely never be a definitive biography of Crispus Attucks since so little evidence exists about the man’s actual life. While what can and cannot be known about Attucks is addressed here, the focus is on how he has been remembered variously–as either a hero or a villain–and why at times he has been forgotten by different groups and individuals from the eighteenth century to the present day.

Mitch Kachun is Professor of History at Western Michigan University. He studied anthropology at Penn State University and studied history at Illinois State University before earning his M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Cornell. Kachun’s research focuses on how African Americans during the 19th and 20th centuries used historical writing and public commemorations to work for equal rights, construct a sense of collective identity, and claim control over their status and destiny in American society. His first book was Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915, and he was the co-editor of The Curse of Caste; or the Slave Bride: A Rediscovered African American Novel by Julia C. Collins. After First Martyr of Liberty Mitch Kachun’s next book-length project will be a biographical accounting of the early 20th Century African-American journalist Charles Stewart, tentatively titled The Life and Times of Colonel J. O. Midnight.

James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at james.stancil@intellectuwell.org.

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Marcia Walker-McWilliams, “Reverend Addie: Faith and the Fight for Labor, Gender, and Racial Equality (U. Illinois Press, 2016) Aug 22, 2017

Addie Wyatt stands at the intersection of unionism, feminism, and civil rights activism in post-World War II America. In Reverend Addie Wyatt: Faith and the Fight for Labor, Gender, and Racial Equality (University of Illinois Press, 2016), Marcia Walker-McWilliams recounts her life within the context of a nation she helped to change. Born in Mississippi, Addie Cameron grew up in Chicago, where despite her skills as a typist she could only find employment on the floor of a meatpacking plant. As a member of the interracial United Packinghouse Workers of America, she soon moved full time into union work, organizing workers and fighting for their rights. In her capacity as a union official she began a lifelong participation in the civil rights movement by raising funds on behalf of Montgomery Improvement Association during the 1955 bus boycott campaign, and in the 1970s formed coalitions designed to promote African American and female participation in the labor movement. As Walker-McWilliams demonstrates, throughout the many struggles she undertook Addie Wyatt’s faith was an important constant, providing her with a set of values and a source of emotional strength that helped her to persevere against the difficulties she faced.

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Tanya Ann Kennedy, “Historicizing Post-Discourses: Postfeminism and Postracialism in United States Culture” (SUNY Press, 2017) Aug 06, 2017

Tanya Ann Kennedy‘s book, Historicizing Post-Discourses: Postfeminism and Postracialism in United States Culture (SUNY Press, 2017), is a complex and important exploration of our collective understanding of questions of racial and gender equality, or lack thereof. The text specifically interrogates the theoretical concepts of postracialism and postfeminism and the discourse surrounding these terms and their meaning. Kennedy examines these ideas, where they were initially linked together, and how they have been pursued separately, often without attention paid to the intersectional nature of how race and gender actually interact within American culture and society. Historicizing Post-Discourses examines these concepts within a variety of cultural venues, including television series like Mad Men, The Wire, and Gray’s Anatomy; within films like The Help, Perfect Stranger, The Blind Side, and Monsters Ball; within popular non-fiction like Lean-In and The End of Men; and in political speeches and rhetoric that have been integrated into our culture, often without historically clear contexts. Postracialism and postfeminism have become frameworks that often reify cultural and political tropes within American society, and Kennedy’s book explores how these frameworks and narratives reaffirm heroic notions of individualism and triumphalism, especially in our popular culture consumption.

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Rosalind Rosenberg, “Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray” (Oxford UP, 2017) Aug 06, 2017

Rosalind Rosenberg‘s book Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a multi-layered and rich biography of Pauli Murray, an activist, lawyer and Episcopal priest whose life intersected with the most significant civil and human rights issues of the twentieth century. As a mixed raced woman who felt that her identity was at odds with her body before transsexual had become part of the popular consciousness, Murray’s life provides insight into a lived intersectionality of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Beginning with her southern upbringing, we follow Murray through multiple educational, vocational and identity challenges she suffered. In a journey through a dislocated life, she contributed to multiple movements and institutions working with many key social leaders such as Thurgood Marshall, Eleanor Roosevelt and Betty Friedan. Appearing as a one-person social movement with a deep religious faith she pursued justice not only for herself but also for others. Rosenberg has provided sympathetic insight into the personal cost that Murray incurred on the road to a more equitable society. Rosalind Rosenberg is Professor of History Emerita at Barnard College.

Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is tentatively entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

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Tommy J. Curry, “The Man-Not: Race, Class, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood” (Temple UP, 2017) Jul 25, 2017

The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press, 2017) is a book-length justification for the burgeoning field of Black Male Studies. The author posits that we should conceptualize the black male as a victim, oppressed by his sex. The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood, therefore, is a corrective of sorts, offering a concept of Black males that could challenge the existing accounts of black men and boys desiring the power of white men who oppress them that has been proliferated throughout academic research across disciplines.

The Man-Not argues that black men struggle with death and suicide, as well as abuse and rape, and their genred existence deserves study and theorization. This book offers intellectual, historical, sociological, and psychological evidence that the analysis of patriarchy offered by mainstream feminism (including black feminism) does not yet fully understand the role that homoeroticism, sexual violence, and vulnerability play in the deaths and lives of black males.

Author Tommy J. Curry‘s work spans across the various fields of philosophy, jurisprudence, Africana Studies, and Gender Studies. He received his BA from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, his masters from DePaul, and he returned to SIUC to earn his Ph.D. Though trained in American and Continental philosophical traditions, Curry’s primary research interests are in Critical Race Theory and Africana Philosophy. In addition to his work as Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at Texas A&M University, Dr. Curry is also the executive director of Philosophy Born of Struggle, a multimedia project billed as a community a conference, and a textbook. His next major research project will be a book-length follow up to The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood, tentatively titled The Mismeasurement of Man: Phallicism and the Paradox of the Racially Subjugated Male.

James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at james.stancil@intellectuwell.org.

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Ira Dworkin, “Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State” (UNC Press, 2017) Jul 20, 2017

In his 1903 hit “Congo Love Song,” James Weldon Johnson recounts a sweet if seemingly generic romance between two young Africans. While the song’s title may appear consistent with that narrative, it also invokes the site of King Leopold II of Belgium’s brutal colonial regime at a time when African Americans were playing a central role in a growing Congo reform movement. In an era when popular vaudeville music frequently trafficked in racist language and imagery, “Congo Love Song” emerges as one example of the many ways that African American activists, intellectuals, and artists called attention to colonialism in Africa.

Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) examines black Americans’ long cultural and political engagement with the Congo and its people. Through studies of George Washington Williams, Booker T. Washington, Pauline Hopkins, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, and other figures, the author brings to light a long-standing relationship that challenges familiar presumptions about African American commitments to Africa. Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State offers compelling new ways to understand how African American involvement in the Congo has helped shape anticolonialism, black aesthetics, and modern black nationalism.

Author Ira Dworkin is an assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University who specializes in African American and African Diaspora literature, American literature and culture, race and ethnicity studies, and transnational literatures. After Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State, Dworkin’s current book project is focused on two autobiographies published by African Muslim and American Civil War soldier Nicholas Said in 1867 and 1873, tentatively titled Imperfectly Known: Nicholas Said and the Routes of African American Narrative. The work will consider the place of Africa, including Islamic religious traditions, in early African American narrative by examining oral accounts within African American communities, northern literary venues like the Atlantic Monthly, and publishing in the Reconstruction-era South.

James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at james.stancil@intellectuwell.org.

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Patricia Spears Jones, “A Lucent Fire: New and Collected Poems” (White Pines Press, 2015) Jul 19, 2017

Jackson Poetry Prize Winner Speaks

Patricia Spears Jones has been writing poetry since she was twenty and then she was “good.” Today, the prolific poet is the winner of one of the most prestigious poetry prizes–the Jackson Poetry Prize. She has numerous published collections, and A Lucent Fire, New & Collected Poems (White Pines Press, 2015), is a report on the current state of everything. “Poetry is hard work,” Jones says. Yet the job of the poet is to say something that will matter, that can improve the daily and momentary experience of living and speak back to American capitalist business when it comes to gentrification, stolen history, and racist hatred. Rachel Levistsky of Bomb Magazine writes “Jones’s poems insist on making vibrantly possible American, black, female, queer, poor, jazz, assimilated, heroic, unemployed, crazy, displaced lives that, considering the constant assault on them, can appear merely endangered and precarious.”

Additionally, A Lucent Fire croons with blues and gospel, on Cuban and opera. “Her poems are full of harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, songs, and a meticulous aesthetic,” says Linda Rodriguez of La Bloga. When asked “what is Poetry?” Spear Jones suggest checking out George Quasha’s wonderful video.

Spears Jones is the author of Painkiller (Tia Chucha Press, 2010), Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha Press, 2006), and The Weather That Kills (Coffee House Press, 1995). She has been the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Goethe Institute, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. A resident of New York City since the 1970s, Spears Jones currently serves as a fellow of the Black Earth Institute and has long been involved with the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. She has taught at Cave Canem, Parsons School of Design, The New School, Sarah Lawrence College, and Naropa University, and she currently teaches at CUNY.

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Leigh Fought, “Women in the World of Frederick Douglass” (Oxford UP, 2017) Jul 16, 2017

Leigh Fought is an assistant professor of history at Le Moyne College. Her book Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (Oxford University Press, 2017) offers a detailed and rich portrait of Frederick Douglass’ private and public life and his many relationships with women. From his enslaved mother Harriet, Sophia Auld the slave mistress that sparked his interest in reading, to his wife of forty-four years Anna Murray, daughter Rosetta and his white second wife Helen Pitts; these were the women who populated his private world. From each he learned lessons about the workings of race, gender and class in America and prepared him to collaborate with many antislavery women including Julia Griffiths, Maria Weston Chapman and Amy Post. He saw his fight for abolition as part of “woman’s cause” bringing him into contact with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Seeing himself as “woman’s rights man,” who had attended the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention in 1848, he was perplexed by the betrayal of many woman’s rights advocates. Fought fills in much of what is lacking in the female “empty space” in the study of Douglass allowing a fuller understanding of his life and ideas. This is an invaluable contribution to Douglass studies.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is tentatively entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2018.

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Max Krochmal, “Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era” (UNC, 2016) Jul 13, 2017

Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) is about the “other” Texas, not the state known for its cowboy conservatism, but a mid-twentieth-century hotbed of community organizing, liberal politics, and civil rights activism. Beginning in the 1930s, the author tells the story of the decades-long struggle for democracy in Texas, when African American, Mexican American, and white labor and community activists gradually came together to empower the states marginalized minorities. At the ballot box and in the streets, these diverse activists demanded not only integration but economic justice, labor rights, and real political power for all. Their efforts gave rise to the Democratic Coalition of the 1960s, a militant, multiracial alliance that would take on and eventually overthrow both Jim Crow and Juan Crow.

Using rare archival sources and original oral history interviews, historian Max Krochmal reveals the often-overlooked democratic foundations and liberal tradition of one of our nation’s most conservative states. Blue Texas recalls the many forgotten activists who, by crossing racial lines and building coalitions, democratized their cities and state to a degree that would have been unimaginable just a decade earlier and shows why their story still matters today.

Max Krochmal is an associate professor of history and founding director of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University. Krochmal is also the founder and director of the Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project, a statewide collaborative research initiative and digital humanities website that received a collaborative research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. His research and teaching center on African American and Chicano/a-Latino/a civil rights and labor histories and their present-day ramifications. Krochmal is a native of Reno, Nevada, and attended undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz before earning his M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University.

James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at james.stancil@intellectuwell.org.

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Marlene Banks, “Ruth’s Redemption” (Lift Every Voice, 2012) Jun 27, 2017

It’s A Love Story.

Set in the 1800s, Ruth’s Redemption (Lift Every Voice, 2012), is an unusual depiction of the lives of slaves and free blacks in pre-Civil War America. Although a slave, Bo is educated. When he gets his freedom, he becomes a property owner of a farm. He purchases slaves only to grant them their freedom. As a man of God and widower, his life changes when the proud and hard-hearted slave girl, Ruth, appears.

Ruth has never known a man like Bo. She wants freedom from slavery, from men and from her past. She is drawn to Bo but not to his Godly devotion. Bo is unwillingly attracted to Ruth. Can their relationship and love push through the personal and cultural hardships? Does love really heal all wounds? A gripping novel, Ruth’s Redemption is a story of love, forgiveness, and redemption. Surrounding the events of the Nat Turner Rebellion the light of God’s unconditional love shines into the darkness of a woman’s heart, a mans violent mission and a cultures cruel and socially accepted inhumanity.

Banks creates a love story between, woman and self, woman and God as well as man and woman.

Marlene considers herself a Kingdom Writer/Word Warrior with a style of storytelling that does not box comfortably in the usual categories. She blends engaging plots, stand out characters with memorable historical events through a Christian lens. Although known for her historical storytelling with a romantic edge, she writes multiple genres including contemporary, mystery, and nonfiction. Storytelling is a gift from God, a passion she uses for His glory and Kingdom purposes.

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Brittney C. Cooper, “Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women” (U. Illinois Press, 2017) Jun 26, 2017

Dr. Brittney C. Cooper, who is an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, explores the intellectual genealogy and geography of the work of African-American women over the course of more than a century in her book, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (University of Illinois Press, 2017). While knitting together an understanding of the intellectual achievements and contributions of many African-American women, Cooper pays particular attention to Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Barrier Williams, Mary Church Terrell, Pauli Murray, Toni Cade Bambara and the engagement that these women had with ideas, highlighting the contributions they made to racial knowledge, questions of gender, and civic engagement within the United States, from the period after Reconstruction through the 1970s. Cooper than provides a contemporary epilogue, integrating into her research the conversation around the beginnings of the #blacklivesmatter movement and the women who started it, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi, and how they, like the race women who preceded them, have been compelled to attest to their primacy in thinking about and then coming together to form this more recent social movement.

Cooper traces the spaces where Black female intellectual engagement took place, in places like the National Association for Colored Women, the club movement, and the pages of the political magazine, Voice of the Negro, as well as how some of this movement migrated into college and university classrooms and programs. Cooper’s book engages with the actual ideas and concepts that many of these women voiced or wrote, as well as analyzing the intellectual conversations these women had with each other on occasion, but more particularly with their contemporaries. Beyond Respectability is both accessible and sophisticated in the discussion of American intellectual history, race, gender, sexual orientation, black feminism, citizenship, and social engagement.

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Jeanine Michna-Bales, “Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2017) Jun 23, 2017

When the Sun comes back

And the first quail calls

Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd.

For the old man is a-waiting for to carry you to freedom

If you follow the Drinkin’ Gourd.

-“Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd” author unknown (possibly Peg Leg Joe)

They left in the middle of the night, often carrying little more than the knowledge to follow the North Star. Between 1830 and the end of the Civil War in 1865, an estimated one hundred thousand slaves became passengers on the Underground Railroad, a journey of untold hardship, in search of freedom. Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad (Princeton Architectural Press, 2017) presents a remarkable series of images following a route from the cotton plantations of central Louisiana, through the cypress swamps of Mississippi and the plains of Indiana, north to the Canadian border a path of nearly fourteen hundred miles.

The culmination of a ten-year research quest, Through Darkness to Light imagines a journey along the Underground Railroad as it might have appeared to any freedom seeker. A person who explores her photography in this work may get the feeling they were actually there during this tumultuous time in American history. Framing the powerful visual narrative is an introduction by the author; a foreword by noted politician, pastor, and civil rights activist Andrew J. Young; and essays by noted historian Fergus M. Bordewich, journalism professor Robert F. Darden, and black studies scholar Eric R. Jackson.

Author Jeanine Michna-Bales is a Dallas-based photographer. Her work explores the relationships between what has occurred, or is occurring, in a society and how people react to those events. She meticulously researches each topic considering different viewpoints, causes, and effects and political climates and often incorporates found or archival text and audio into her projects. Images from her Underground Railroad series have been exhibited throughout the United States and have appeared in numerous online and print publications. Her next book-length work will focus on the images and architecture of Cold War era nuclear fallout shelters in the United States.

James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at james.stancil@intellectuwell.org

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Michelle D. Commander, “Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic” (Duke UP, 2017) Jun 20, 2017

In Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Duke University Press, 2017), Michelle D. Commander examines the (im)possibility of literal and figurative returns to Africa of African-descended peoples throughout the diaspora. Using analysis inspired by “the ways in which the enslaved and their descendants took and have continued to take back control over their bodies”, and focusing on cultural production, Commander traces the points of intersection and divergence between the two modes of return, rather than dealing with them as mutually exclusive.

Mireille Djenno is the African Studies Librarian at Indiana University. She can be reached at mdjenno@indiana.edu.

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Kathy Wilson Florence, “Jaybird’s Song” (Kathy Wilson Florence, 2017) Jun 20, 2017

Josie Flint, known as Jaybird, narrates her story of life in Atlanta during the turbulent South as Jim Crow laws come to an end. Her school desegregates. The country meanders through new ideas brought about by the Civil Rights movement. And the perfect childhood Jaybird treasured is shattered. The narrative alternates between Josie’s childhood and thirty-five years later when her grandmother, Annie Jo, dies. A family secret brings a new heartache for Josie as she struggles to rise against tragedy with grace while maintaining family loyalty.

Not only does Jaybird’s Song (Kathy Wilson Florence, 2017) have strong female characters, but also the turbulent 1960s South is its own character. Additionally, for the modern woman, Jaybird’s Song grapples with sexuality and aggression from the opposite sex in a time before trigger warnings and rape culture awareness. Florence notes she too dealt with an embarrassing sexual incident as a child which she has not told her parents, even as an adult. “Why do girls feel guilt and not tell?” Florence’s novel tackles the perplexity of coming to age and the obstacles in the maternal matrix of mothers and daughters.

Kathy Wilson Florence lives in Dunwoody, Georgia with her husband and two daughters. She is a full-time Realtor with her husband. Durning her off hours, Florence runs her own graphic design, copywriting and marketing business, Right Brain Communications, and writes novels. She was a weekly columnist for the Dunwoody Crier newspaper for 16 years where she penned Over the Picket Fence. A collection of favorite columns can be found in her first book, You’ve Got a Wedgie Cha Cha Cha.

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Michael W. Twitty, “The Cooking Gene: A Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South” (Amistad, 2017) Jun 19, 2017

The “ownership” of Southern food is a divisive cultural issue, reflective of the ongoing struggle for racial justice in America. Michael Twitty shares with us that struggle in The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South (Harper Collins: Amistad 2017). He brings to life the unsung heroes of American food history, the black cooks in slavery and freedom who created an innovative and syncretic cuisine. Like them, he builds upon the South’s diverse botanical ecosystems, a continent of indigenous nations, and the long roots of memory, extending back across the middle passage to West Africa.

For Twitty, this is also a tale of family. He shares his ancestors experiences through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents. He travels from abandoned cotton plantations to black-owned organic farms, from synagogues in Georgia to vodun rituals in New Orleans.

As Twitty takes us on this journey, he shows how food and memory together can heal. He reminds that as uncomfortable as honest conversation about racism’s legacy can be, its the only path to rejuvenating body, soul, and American community.

Jeremy Wood is a Seattle appellate attorney. Much of his scholarly work has concerned Native American interests. He also serves as Co-Chair for the Seattle City Human Rights Commission and as a Jewish educator. You can learn more about his work by visiting https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyfwood. He can be reach at jeremywood10@gmail.com.

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Tom Adam Davies, “Mainstreaming Black Power” (U. Cal Press, 2017) Jun 14, 2017

What is Black Power? Does it still exist in the so-called post-racial 21st Century? How does Black Power relate to similar movements, like Black Lives Matter? There as so many questions, but there may now be a scholar and text to help answer many of them. Mainstreaming Black Power (University of California Press, 2017) upends the narrative that the Black Power movement allowed for a catharsis of black rage but achieved little institutional transformation or black uplift. Retelling the story of the 1960s and 1970s across the United States and focusing on New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles this book reveals how the War on Poverty cultivated black self-determination politics and demonstrates that federal, state, and local policies during this period bolstered economic, social, and educational institutions for black control.

Mainstreaming Black Power shows more convincingly than ever before that white power structures did engage with Black Power in specific ways that tended ultimately to reinforce rather than challenge existing racial, class, and gender hierarchies. The author emphasizes that Black Power’s reach and legacies can be understood only in the context of an ideologically diverse black community.

Author Tom Adam Davies is a lecturer and a school visits representative in American History at the University of Sussex. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Leeds and is a specialist in twentieth-century postwar political and social American history, with a particular focus on the history of race in the United States and the relationship between public policy and mainstream political institutions and movements for social, economic and political change. Davies has also written and recorded a six-part podcast lecture series on the American Civil Rights and Black Power movements for Massolit, a company which produces audio-visual online educational content primarily for A-Level students across the United Kingdom. Mainstreaming Black Power is his first book.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Shelvy Haywood Keglar, “Underdog to Top Dog: An Improbable Rise” (IBJ, 2017) Jun 14, 2017

Most psychology books are written by experts with knowledge deriving from professional experience–for which we are grateful. Occasionally, a psychologist ventures to write a book that draws from intimate personal experience to illuminate important psychological phenomena. Such is the case with our guest this week, Shelvy Haywood Keglar. In his book Underdog to Top Dog: An Improbable Rise (published in 2017 in association with IBJ Book Publishing), Dr. Keglar describes his journey from poverty and rural life, through racism and segregation, to the fulfillment and success he enjoys now. He talks with me about what inspired him to document his personal journey and the hard-earned lessons he imparts to young Black men in search of hope and guidance. To the extent that dreaming is a basic human enterprise, Dr. Keglar’s experiences and wisdom strike universal chords.

Shelvy Haywood Keglar is a psychologist, and founder and president of Midwest Psychological Center, Inc. He also serves as staff member at Community Hospital and Fairbanks Hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana. He has taught at Indiana University Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry. Prior publications have been in the areas of personality assessment, addictions, and adolescent psychology.

Listen to the interview by clicking below. To subscribe to the New Books in Psychology podcast, click here.

Eugenio Duarte is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship problems. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

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John P. Langellier, “Fighting for Uncle Sam: Buffalo Soldiers in the Frontier Army” (Schiffer, 2016) Jun 08, 2017

From the American Revolution to the present day, African Americans have stepped forward in their nation’s defense. Fighting for Uncle Sam: Buffalo Solders in the Frontier Army (Schiffer, 2016) breathes new vitality into a stirring subject, emphasizing the role men who have come to be known as “buffalo soldiers” played in opening the Trans-Mississippi West. This concise overview reveals a cast of characters as big as the land they served. Over 150 images painstakingly gathered nearly a half century from public and private collections enhance the written word as windows to the past. Now 150 years after Congress authorized blacks to serve in the Regular Army, the reader literally can peer into the eyes of formerly enslaved men who bravely bought their freedom on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War, then trekked westward, carried the “Stars and Stripes” to the Caribbean, and pursued Pancho Villa into Mexico with John “Black Jack” Pershing.

Growing up in Tucson, Arizona, historian and author John P. Langellier spent four decades working in public history after earning a B.A. and M.A. in history from the University of San Diego and his Ph.D. in military history from Kansas State University. He spent a dozen years with the U.S. Army, helped found California’s Autry Museum of the American West, and served as director for Wyoming State Museum, deputy director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, executive director of Arizona’s Sharlot Hall Museum, and director of Arizona Historical Society’s Central Division. He was also awarded an honorary membership into the 9th and 10th U.S. Horse Calvary Association. He has written dozens of published books, served as a Hollywood film consultant, a Smithsonian Institution fellow, and produced history documentaries for television networks A&E, History, and PBS.

Langellier officially “retired” to Tucson in 2015, but still continues his work as one of the preeminent military historians in the United States. After Fighting for Uncle Sam: Blacks in the Frontier Army, one of his current research projects is a book-length work on the connections between the Western art of Frederic Remington and the U.S. Army 10th Calvary (Buffalo Soldiers) in Arizona.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Bruce D. Haynes and Syma Solovitch, “Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family” (Columbia UP, 2017) Jun 02, 2017

Public scholarship takes many forms, from op-eds to activism to blog posts. In their new book, Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family (Columbia University Press, 2017), Associate Professor Bruce Haynes and freelance writer, developmental editor, and educator Syma Solovitch (both co-authors and a married couple) use a “sociological memoir” to show a variety of social science concepts in the fields of urban studies, social class, and race.

The subject is Haynes’s family, whose members were at the heart of several key events, periods, and organizations in African American life in the twentieth century. His grandfather was a leading scholar of the Great Migration and founded the National Urban League, while his grandmother was a noted children’s book author of the Harlem Renaissance. The couple became members of the new black Harlem. His parents, who made great sacrifices, such as the gradual deterioration of their house, to send their three sons to private school, resembled the tenuous position African Americans held in the middle class. And Haynes and his brothers came of age in an equally exciting and dangerous period in New York City’s history: the turbulence of the 60s, decline of the 70s, and devastation of the 80s. Interweaving a variety of sociological concepts and historical examinations with intimate portraits of this singular family, Down the Up Staircase takes readers on an entertaining and provocative tour of twentieth-century urban America.

Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale mens barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge; 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.

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Paul Youngquist, “A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism” (U. Texas Press, 2016) May 27, 2017

The legendary band leader Sun Ra said he came from Saturn. Known on Earth for his inventive music and extravagant stage shows, he pioneered free-form improvisation in an ensemble setting with the devoted band he called the “Arkestra,” Sun Ra took jazz from the inner city to outer space, infusing traditional swing with far-out harmonies, rhythms, and sounds. Described as the father of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra created “space music” as a means of building a better future for American blacks here on earth.

A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism (University of Texas Press, 2016) offers a spirited introduction to the life and works of this legendary but underappreciated musician, composer, and poet. The book explores and assesses Sun R’as wide-ranging creative output–music, public preaching, graphic design, film and stage performance, and poetry–and connects his diverse undertakings to the culture and politics of his times, including the space race, the rise of technocracy, the civil rights movement, and even space-age bachelor-pad music. By thoroughly examining the astro-black mythology that Sun Ra espoused, A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism masterfully demonstrates that he offered both a holistic response to a planet desperately in need of new visions and vibrations and a new kind of political activism that used popular culture to advance social change. In a nation obsessed with space and confused about race, Sun Ra aimed not just at assimilation for the socially disfranchised but even more at a wholesale transformation of American society and a more creative, egalitarian world.

Author Paul Youngquist teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is a professor in the English Department and associate chair of Graduate Studies. His current areas of research focus are British literature, cultural studies, literacy theory, popular culture, film/digital media, and Romanticism. He is the author or editor of six books, including Cyberfiction: After the Future, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism, and Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic. Dr. Youngquist now devotes much of his energy to studying the histories written and oral of resistance and creativity in the Caribbean.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Christopher Mele, “Race and the Politics of Deception: The Making of an American City” (NYU Press, 2017) May 27, 2017

Urban sociologists typically use a few grand narratives to explain the path of the American city through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. These include industrialization, mass immigration, the “Great Migration,” deindustrialization, suburbanization (or “white flight”), gentrification, and postindustrial/neoliberal growth policies, among others.

In Race and the Politics of Deception: The Making of an American City (New York University Press, 2017) , Associate Professor Christopher Mele shows readers the more granular details of this history. Focusing on growth, decline, and revitalization of Chester, a small city in Pennsylvania near Philadelphia, Mele specifically reveals how race, or an ideology and discourse of racial blindness, have been used as a strategy of exclusion since World War I. Proceeding chronologically, the book examines how the politics of growth in Chester have revolved on ideas of race, from housing segregation to civil rights clashes. It culminates with the present-day realities of life in Chester, in which the city boasts a casino, a soccer stadium, and a redeveloped waterfront, mainly for visitors, while its majority population of low-income minorities get labeled as either compliant participants in (e.g. as low-wage workers) or obstructions to (e.g. as criminals or deviants) this image and growth. The imagery ignores the structural conditions that create their poverty. Mele provides a new, fascinating lens for looking at the relationship between race and space in the city.

Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge; 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.

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Britt Rusert, “Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture” (NYU Press, 2017) May 26, 2017

Traversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York University Press, 2017), uncovers the dynamic experiments of a group of black writers, artists, and performers. The author chronicles a little-known story about race and science in America. While the history of scientific racism in the nineteenth century has been well-documented, there was also a counter-movement of African Americans who worked to refute its claims.

Far from rejecting science, these figures were careful readers of antebellum science who linked diverse fields–from astronomy to physiology–to both on-the-ground activism and more speculative forms of knowledge creation. Routinely excluded from institutions of scientific learning and training, they transformed cultural spaces like the page, the stage, the parlor, and even the pulpit into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation. From the recovery of neglected figures like Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, to new accounts of Martin Delany, Henry Box Brown, and Frederick Douglass, Fugitive Science makes natural science central to how we understand the origins and development of African American literature and culture.

Britt Rusert received her Ph.D. in English and certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University. Her research and teaching focus on African American literature, American literatures to 1900, speculative fiction, the history of race and science, U.S. print cultures, and critical theory. She is currently working on a book-length research study of William J. Wilson’s “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” a text that imagines the first museum of black art in the United States. She is also editing W.E.B. Du Bois short genre fiction with scholar Adrienne Brown. Their edition of W.E.B. Du Bois’ fantasy story, “The Princess Steel,” was recently published in PMLA, the journal of Modern Language Association of America. Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture is her first book.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Ashon T. Crawley, “Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility” (Fordham UP, 2016) May 19, 2017

Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press, 2016) is innovative and lyrical, challenging and beautiful. Ashon Crawley brings together black studies, queer theory, theology, and continental philosophy to theorize the ways in which what he calls “otherwise worlds of possibility” can serve as disruptions against marginalization and violence and also produce possibilities for flourishing. Examining the whooping, shouting, noise-making, and tongue speaking of Black Pentecostalism, Crawley reveals how these aesthetic practices allow for the emergence of alternative modes of social organization. In the process, he does much more: suggesting a hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture when people are under siege.

Ashon Crawley is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia.

Hillary Kaell is associate professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal.

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Melissa L. Cooper, “Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination” (UNC Press, 2017) May 19, 2017

Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) is a wide-ranging history that upends a long tradition of scrutinizing the Low Country blacks of Sapelo Island by outsiders. The book promotes a refocusing, and the observational lens is instead focused on those white and black scholars who the Gullah of Sapelo Island during the early 20th Century. The author uses a wide variety of sources to unmask the connections between the rise of the social sciences, the voodoo craze during the interwar years, the black studies movement, and black land loss and land struggles in coastal black communities in the Low Country. What emerges is a fascinating examination of Gullah people’s heritage, and how it was reimagined and transformed to serve vastly divergent ends over the decades.

During the 1920s and 1930s, anthropologists and folklorists became obsessed with uncovering connections between African Americans and their African roots. At the same time, popular print media and artistic productions tapped the new appeal of black folk life, highlighting African-styled voodoo as an essential element of black folk culture. A number of researchers converged on one site in particular, Sapelo Island, Georgia, to seek support for their theories about “African survivals,” bringing with them a curious mix of both influences. The legacy of that body of research is the area’s contemporary identification as a Gullah community.

Melissa L. Cooper is an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark. She specializes in African American cultural and intellectual history, and the history of the African Diaspora. In addition to Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination Cooper is also the author of Instructor’s Resource Manual Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents and a contributing writer to Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line. Her current research concerns the connections between Afrocentricism and its portrayals in mass media and popular culture.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Stanley Corkin, “Connecting the Wire: Race, Space, and Postindustrial Baltimore” (U. Texas Press, 2017) May 16, 2017

Critically acclaimed as one of the best television shows ever produced, the HBO series The Wire (2002-2008) is a landmark event in television history, offering a raw and dramatically compelling vision of the teeming drug trade and the vitality of life in the abandoned spaces of the postindustrial United States. With a sprawling narrative that dramatizes the intersections of race, urban history, and the neoliberal moment, The Wire offers an intricate critique of a society ravaged by racism and inequality.

In Connecting The Wire: Race, Space, and Postindustrial Baltimore (University of Texas Press, 2017), The author presents the first comprehensive, season-by-season analysis of the entire series. Focusing on the show’s depictions of the built environment of the city of Baltimore and the geographic dimensions of race and class, he analyzes how The Wire’s creator and showrunner, David Simon, uses the show to develop a social vision of its historical moment, as well as a device for critiquing many social givens. In The Wire’s gritty portrayals of drug dealers, cops, longshoremen, school officials and students, and members of the judicial system, Stanley Corkin maps a web of relationships and forces that define urban social life and the lives of the urban underclass in particular, in the early twenty-first century. He makes a compelling case that, with its embedded history of race and race relations in the United States, The Wire is perhaps the most sustained and articulate exploration of urban life in contemporary popular culture.

Author Stanley Corkin is Charles Phelps Taft Professor and Niehoff Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Departments of History and English at the University of Cincinnati. His research and pedagogical interests include history and urban geography, cinema and the city, and the intersections of literature, film, and history in American Studies. His previous book-length projects include Starring New York: Filming the Grime and Glamour of the Long 1970s, Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History, and Realism and the Birth of the Modern United States: Cinema, Literature, and Culture. He is currently working on a research project relating to race and space in the city of Boston.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Sarah Bracey White, “Primary Lessons: A Memoir” (CavanKerry Press, 2013) Apr 29, 2017

As an African-American child growing up in the segregated pre-Civil Rights South, Sarah Bracey White pushed against the social conventions that warned her not to rock the boat, even before she was old enough to fully understand her urge to defy the status quo. In her candid and poignant memoir, Primary Lessons (CavanKerry Press, 2013), White recalls a childhood marked by equal measures of poverty and pride–formative years spent sorting through the “lessons” learned from a complicated relationship with her beloved, careworn mother and from a father’s absence engendered by racial injustice and compromised manhood.

Although born in Sumter, South Carolina, Sarah spends much of her first five years in Philadelphia in the care of her bighearted Aunt Susie and her husband, Uncle Whitey. As her parents fourth daughter, she has been sent north to ease her family’s financial burden, freeing her mother to work as a schoolteacher. Young Sarah loves her life in Philadelphia, and is devastated when her mother comes to retrieve her and take her back to a home she has never known. There, she is shocked and confused to encounter strange signs that read “colored only” and to be told for the first time that black people must behave a certain way around white people and accept their lot as second class citizens.

“The point of any successful memoir is to discover what the speaker learns on their journey,” writes Kevin Pilkington, author of Ready to Eat the Sky and The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree, in his foreword to Primary Lessons. “[I]t is a trip worth taking when it teaches and enlightens and encourages me to revisit and solidify profound truths I already know to be true. Sarah Bracey Whites journey is a continuous struggle to find her way, a struggle I found both difficult and inspirational. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ Young Sarah becomes aware of this at an early age, realizing being born poor and black is not the measure of a persons value.”

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Stafanie Deluca, et.al. “Coming of Age in the Other America” (Russell Sage Foundation, 2016) Apr 26, 2017

Do you think that what poor people most need to escape poverty is grit? Join us as we speak with Stefanie Deluca, co-author, along with Susan Clampet-Lundquist and Kathryn Edin, of Coming of Age in the Other America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2016), about their decade-long research project tracking the ambitions and activities of 150 black Baltimore youth born in the 1980s and 1990s to parents living in high-rise public housing. The results — and the implications — will likely surprise you as much as it did them.

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).

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Samuele F.S. Pardini, “In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen” (Dartmouth, 2017) Apr 26, 2017

In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen (Dartmouth, 2017) emphasizes the racial “in-betweenness” of Italian Americans rearticulated as “invisible blackness,” a view that enlarges and complicates the color-based dimensions of American racial discourse. This strikingly original work will interest a wide spectrum of scholars in American Studies and the humanities.

The author examines the cultural relationship between African American intellectuals and Italian American writers and artists, and how it relates to American blackness in the twentieth century. He also explores the links between African American literature and the Mediterranean tradition of Italian immigrants, and then examines both against the white intellectual discourse that defines modernism in the West. This previously unexamined encounter offers a hybrid, transnational model of modernity capable of producing democratic forms of aesthetics, social consciousness, and political economy.

Sameule F. S. Pardini is the coordinator of the American Studies Program and Faculty-in-Residence of the Honors Pavilion at Elon University. He holds a Laurea degree in Letters and Philosophy from the Universita’ degli Studi di Pisa, Italy, and an M.A. and a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. Dr. Pardini’s teaching and research interests focus on 20th century Italian studies, Italian American studies, American studies, cinema and literary criticism. Prior to this work, Pardini edited and translated into Italian two collections of writings of the famed critic Leslie Fiedler titled Vacanze Romane: Un critico americano a spasso nell’Italia letteraria and Arrivederci alle armi. He also edited The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler. Pardini is currently pursuing a new book-length research project called Modernity on Wheels: Speed and Automobile Culture from Futurism to Fascism and the New Deal, which examines the theme of speed in automobile culture of the first half of the 20th century in Italy and the United States.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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James A. Cosby, “Devil’s Music, Holy Rollers and Hillbillies: How America Gave Birth to Rock and Roll” (McFarland, 2016) Apr 18, 2017

Do you love Rock and Roll or is Rock and Roll music dead? Are you old enough to have put any money in a jukebox to hear your favorite song, watched American Bandstand, or spent any hours viewing music videos on MTV? It has been said that music can truly bring people together. Rock music today is universal and its popular history is well known. Yet few know how and why it really came about. Taking a fresh look at events long overlooked or misunderstood, Devil’s Music, Holy Rollers and Hillbillies: How America Gave Birth to Rock and Roll (McFarland, 2016) tells how some of the most disenfranchised people in a free and prosperous nation strove to make themselves heard and changed the world.

So where did it all begin? Not where you may think. Describing the genesis of rock and roll, author James A. Cosby covers everything from its deep roots in the Mississippi Delta and The Blues to key early figures, like deejay “Daddy-O” Dewey Phillips and gospel music star Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Also discussed are the importance of country music performers and the influence of the so-called holy rollers of the Pentecostal church who became crucial performers in Rock and Roll’s early years –artists like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard.

James A. Cosby is an attorney by day and entertainment writer, book author, and music enthusiast by night. He is a regular contributor on pop culture matters for PopMatters.com as well as other media outlets. Cosby resides in Philadelphia, a great music city, and is currently conducting research for his second Rock and Roll book about the further history of the music genre from the early 1960s through the present day. Devil’s Music, Holy Rollers and Hillbillies: How America Gave Birth to Rock and Roll is his first book.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, “Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico” (Duke UP, 2015) Apr 12, 2017

Puerto Rico is often depicted as a “racial democracy” in which a history of race mixture has produced a racially harmonious society. In Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico (Duke University Press, 2015), Petra R. Rivera-Rideau shows how reggaeton musicians critique racial democracy’s privileging of whiteness and concealment of racism by expressing identities that center blackness and African diasporic belonging. From censorship campaigns on the island that sought to devalue reggaeton, to its subsequent mass marketing to U.S. Latino listeners, Rivera-Rideau traces reggaeton’s origins and its transformation from the music of San Juan’s slums into a global pop phenomenon. Reggaeton, she demonstrates, provides a language to speak about the black presence in Puerto Rico and a way to build links between the island and the African diaspora.

Petra Rivera-Rideau is an associate professor of American Studies at Wellesley University. She earned her B.A. at Harvard University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. Her research examines the cultural politics of race in Latin American and Latina/o communities. Rivera-Rideau is primarily interested in how ideas about blackness and Latinidad intersect (or not) in popular culture, especially popular music.

In addition to Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico, Rivera-Rideau also co-edited Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism the Americas, an interdisciplinary volume that combines academic analysis, personal reflections, interviews, and photography to examine how different ideas about blackness travel across Latin America, the Spanish Caribbean, and the United States. Beyond her book-length works, Rivera-Rideau has also published articles about reggaeton in journals such as Popular Music & Society, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. Her current research project explores representations of Latinidad in the Zumba fitness program, tentatively titled Fun, Fitness, Fiesta: Zumba and the Production of Latinidad.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Marlene Banks, “Son of A Preacher Man” and “Greenwood and Archer” (Lift Every Voice, 2012) Apr 05, 2017

The tragic Tulsa Race Riots plus a smidgeon of romance equals to a compelling historical saga. Marlene Banks weaves fact and fiction together illustrating how law and culture may change but human nature remains the same in her historical novel series Son of a Preacher Man and Greenwood and Archer. Son of a Preacher Man takes place in 1920 Tulsa, Oklahoma, a strictly segregated oil boomtown. The preacher’s son, Billy Ray Matthias and Benny Freeman, daughter of an oil-rich rancher, befriend each other when both want to escape the shadows of their past. Billy Ray’s heart is open for love but Benny’s is fearfully shut. After the devastating race riot, Banks continues the narrative of restoration in the sequel Greenwood and Archer. Lives have been drastically changed since the riot and its citizens defiantly rebuild their piece of prosperity. Tulsa, Oklahoma is as segregated as ever but doesn’t want the whole nation watching. Additional tension festers as prohibition brings Chicago gangsters to settle in wealthy Tulsa. Now, Benny and Billy must navigate hurdles in their relationship. Marlene Banks is Kingdom writer/novelist with a unique style of storytelling. She blends engaging plots, standout characters, and memorable events from a Kingdom perspective. Although known for her historical romances, she likes to write multiple genres including contemporary, mystery, and nonfiction. ind out more about Banks’ novels here.

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Daina Ramey Berry, “The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation” (Beacon Press, 2017) Apr 05, 2017

A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Beacon Press, 2017) will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, nineteenth-century medical education, and the value of life and death. Slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. This is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death in the early American domestic slave trade.

Covering the full life cycle, historian and author Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating ghost values or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry also explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools. This book is the culmination of more than ten years of Berry’s exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, Ramey Berry resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved people’s experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives.

Daina Ramey Berry is an associate professor of history and African and African diaspora studies, and the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Fellow in History at the University of Texas at Austin. An award-winning historian, she is also a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Dr. Berry’s research interests include 19th century American History, Comparative Slavery, and Southern History, with a particular emphasis on the role of gender, labor, family, and economy among the enslaved. Her previous book-length works include Slavery and Freedom in Savannah, Enslaved Women in America: An Encyclopedia, and Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia. Ramey Berry also appeared on the first season finale of the NBC series Who Do You Think You Are? she assisted Hollywood legend Spike Lee in tracing his family ancestry with some very surprising results.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Race and Democratic Virtue with Paul C. Taylor Apr 05, 2017

As US politics becomes increasingly driven by divisions, we need some way of sustaining a shared civic life. Paul Taylor makes the case for democratic virtues. Paul C. Taylor is Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the College of the Liberal Arts and Associate Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at Penn State. His research focuses on philosophy of race, social and political philosophy, Africana philosophy, and aesthetics.

The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project.

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Ruth Beckford and Careth Reid, “The Picture Man: From the Collection of Bay Area Photographer E. F. Joseph” (Arcadia, 2017) Mar 30, 2017

From 1927 until his death in 1979, E.F. Joseph documented the daily lives of African Americans in the Bay Area. His images were printed in the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, but not widely published in his home community. A graduate of the American School of Photography in Illinois, Joseph photographed the likes of such celebrities and activists as Josephine Baker, Mahalia Jackson, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Thurgood Marshall. However, what is perhaps more compelling within these pages are the countless images of everyday citizens teaching, entertaining, worshipping, working, and serving their community and their nation. Emmanuel Francis (E. F.) Joseph (1900-1979) was born on November 8, 1900 in St. Lucia, West Indies. After graduating from the American School of Photography of Illinois, he moved to Oakland, California in 1924 where he served as an apprentice in a photography studio. He was the first professional African American photographer in the San Francisco Bay Area operating a commercial and studio photography business in his home initially at 1303 Adeline St. and then at 384 50th St. in Oakland. In 1980, Careth Reid purchased Josephs collection of negatives and personal papers, and nearly four decades later, a labor of love comes to fruition with the publication of The Picture Man: From the Collection of Bay Area Photographer E. F. Joseph (Arcadia, 2017). Ms. Reid, a lifelong educator and champion of community service in the Bay Area, partnered with longtime friend Ruth Beckford, a dancer, teacher, choreographer, actor, and author. Ms. Reid, a native of Berkeley, was the recipient of San Francisco State University’s Alumna of the Year Award in 1990 and is also a member of the university’s Hall of Fame. Ms. Beckford is featured in a downtown mural of the community’s artists and was also celebrated as an Outstanding Alumni of Oakland Technical High School in 2015. Together, they tell the story of the Bay Areas African American community through the eye and lens of one of its own. Ms. Beckford and Ms. Reid live in Oakland, California.

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Mia Mask, “Divas on the Screen: Black Women in American Film” (U. of Illinois Press, 2009) Mar 29, 2017

Five charismatic women navigate uneven terrain of racial gender and class stereotypes: Dorothy Dandridge, Pam Grier, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and Halle Berry. The quintet charisma, as explored by Dr. Mia Mask in Divas on The Screen: Black Women in American Film (University of Illinois Press, 2009), range from erotic and a phallic idol of perversity and sexuality to comedic, cathartic and capitalistic to beauty in the multicultural age. Dr. Mask, associate professor of film at Vassar College, says they are the building blocks of our black women stars today. And the building blocks focus on what can we learn from the complex and contradictory careers of successful black women? Where do we find African-Americans in the performative, other-directed, narcissistic culture? What does African-American stardom as a social phenomenon reveal about the aspirations of black folks in the 21st Century? How have African-Americans-in their struggle for inclusion in commercial entertainment-complied with dominant culture? (Introduction 4).

Divas on Screen considers Dandridge’s status as a sexual commodity in films revealing the contradictory discourses regarding race and sexuality in segregation-era American culture. Grier’s feminist-camp performances in sexploitation pictures and her subsequent blaxploitation vehicles Coffy and Foxy Brown highlight a similar tension between representing African American women as both objectified stereotypes and powerful, self-defining icons. Mask reads Goldberg’s transforming habits in Sister Act and The Associate as representative of her unruly comedic routines, while Winfrey’s daily television performance as self-made, self-help guru echoes Horatio Alger’s narratives of success. Finally, Mask analyzes Berry’s meteoric success by acknowledging the ways in which Dandridge’s career made Berry’s possible. Dr. Mask teaches African American cinema, documentary film history, seminars on special topics such as the horror film, and auteurs like Spike Lee. She also teaches feminist film theory, African national cinemas, and various genre courses. Dr. Mask also curated and edited the anthology Contemporary Black American Cinema: Race, Gender, Sexuality at the Movies.

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Steve Aldous, “The World of Shaft: A Complete Guide to the Novels, Comic Strip, Films and Television Series” (McFarland, 2015) Mar 29, 2017

Who’s the black private dick

That’s a sex machine to all the chicks? (Shaft)

Ya damn right

Who is the man that would risk his neck

For his brother man? (Shaft)

Can you dig it?

Who’s the cat that won’t cop out

When there’s danger all about? (Shaft)

Right on

They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother – (Shut your mouth)

But I’m talkin’ ’bout Shaft – (Then we can dig it)

He’s a complicated man

But no one understands him but his woman

(John Shaft)

–Theme from Shaft by Isaac Hayes

Mention Shaft and most people think of Gordon Park’s seminal 1971 film starring Richard Roundtree in a leather coat, walking the streets of Manhattan to Isaac Hayes’ iconic theme music. But the black private dick that inspired the black action cinema/blaxploitation film genre actually made his debut on the printed page as the creation of white novelist Ernest Tidyman, who was a seasoned journalist down on his luck when he decided to try his hand at fiction. Shaft was the result, giving Tidyman the break he was looking for.

The World of Shaft: A Complete Guide to the Novels, Comic Strip, Films and Television Series (McFarland, 2015) is based on the extensive research of Ernest Tidyman’s personal papers, and tells the story of John Shaft from the perspective of his creator the original source. The book also provides new insight and analyses of the writing of the Shaft novels, the films, and the television series. The World of Shaft also features first-ever coverage of the forgotten Shaft newspaper comic strip, and includes previously unseen artwork. Also included are Shaft’s recent 21st century reappearances on the printed page, in both comic book and prose form.

Steve Aldous is a British banker by day and an enthusiastic writer, film fanatic and avid reader of crime fiction by night. In addition to The World of Shaft, he has written a number of well-received short stories in a wide range of styles and genres, and has been short-listed in the Writers Forum magazine short story competition. His as yet unpublished novel, a crime thriller entitled Poisoned Veins, features a modern-day black Manchester-based private investigator Joe Gibbs, and is inspired in part by Ernest Tidyman’s Shaft. Aldous resides Bury, Lancashire, UK and is a proud father of three and a loving grandfather.

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Quincy T. Mills, “Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America” (UPenn Press, 2013) Mar 25, 2017

Business. Community. Politics. That’s the making of a barbershop. In Cutting Along the Color Lines: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Dr. Quincy Mills chronicles the history of black barber shops as businesses and civic institutions, demonstrating their central role in Civil Rights struggle throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dr. Mills says what’s most intriguing to him about barbershops is people forget the barbershop is a business first before community and politics. He states, “Barbershops, beauty salons and churches are the remaining institutions rooted in black culture production.” When Mills is not engaged in teaching, reading, writing or teaching he’s running; a space that provides him solitary time to think and work out his ideas.

Dr. Mills is an associate professor at Vassar College. He teaches courses on African American history, specifically, Dr. Martin Luther King, race and segregation, black power movement, and consumer culture.

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James McGrath Morris, “Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press” (Amistad, Reprint Edition, 2017) Mar 22, 2017

In his acclaimed biography Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press (Amistad, Reprint Edition, 2017), James McGrath Morris explores the fascinating life of pioneering black female journalist Ethel Payne. Backed by exhaustive archival research, Morris traces Payne’s role in documenting the civil rights struggle during the decades following World War II, before her later impact as the first female African American radio and television commentator on a national network. The New York Times has described Eyes on the Struggle as an “an important and often absorbing new book,” while the Chicago Tribune has contended that Morris’ beautifully written and carefully researched new book “gives Payne’s ground-breaking work the attention it deserves.”

Morris’ other books include Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power, which Booklist placed on its 2010 list of the ten best biographies, and The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism, which the Washington Post named as one of its Best Books of the Year. His most recent work is The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War which will be published in April 2017 by Da Capo Press.

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Patrick Phillips, “Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America” (W.W. Norton, 2016) Mar 13, 2017

This episode of New Books in African American Studies covers Patrick Phillips’ powerful new book Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W.W. Norton and Company, 2016)

At the turn of the twentieth century, Forsyth County in Georgia, was home to an diverse African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. However, following the rape and murder of a white girl in 1912, and accusations levied against three black laborers, bands of white “night riders” launched a devastating campaign of arson and terror against Forsyth’s black community.

Expanding backwards and forwards from this flashpoint, Blood at the Root is a sweeping tale that spans the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the hope and promise of Reconstruction, and the crushing injustice of Forsyth’s racial cleansing. With bold storytelling and lyrical prose, it breaks the century-long silence of Patrick’s hometown, and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that continues to shape America in the twenty-first century.

Patrick is a past fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has also received honors such as the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Nation. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at Drew University.

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Tyina Steptoe, “Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City” (U. California Press, 2015) Mar 09, 2017

What do you know about Houston, Texas? That Houston is the fourth largest city in the United States? That Houston was the home of the 2016 NCAA Final Four in basketball and the home of the NFL’s Super Bowl LI in 2017? That Houston is the home of the world’s largest medical center and is also the hub of the American energy industry? All of the above are true, and even more Houston is noted for its rich diversity of people and blending of cultures.

Beginning after World War I, Houston was transformed from a black-and-white frontier town into one of the most ethnically and racially diverse urban areas in the United States. Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City (University of California Press, 2015) draws on social and cultural history to show how, despite Anglo attempts to fix racial categories through Jim Crow laws, converging migrations particularly those of Mexicans from across the border and Creoles from Louisiana complicated ideas of blackness and whiteness and introduced different understandings about race. This migration history also uses music and sound to examine these racial complexities, tracing the emergence of Houston’s blues and jazz scenes in the 1920s as well as the hybrid forms of these genres that arose when migrants forged shared social space and carved out new communities and politics. Houston Bound is both an innovative historiography about migration and immigration in the twentieth century as well as a critical examination of a city located in the former Confederacy.

Author Tyina L. Steptoe is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arizona. Her work focuses on the cultural and social history of the United States especially race, ethnicity, and gender. After Houston Bound, her current research concerns how rhythm and blues performers Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton and Little Richard subverted and challenged gender norms in the 1950s.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Andre Carrington, “Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction” (U. Minnesota Press, 2016) Mar 03, 2017

Have you ever watched a futuristic movie and wondered if there will actually be any black people in the future? Have you ever been surprised, disappointed, or concerned with the lack of diversity demonstrated in many science fiction stories? In Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) the author analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan culture to illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination. Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science reveals new understandings of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature and culture and interrogates the meanings of race and genre through studies of science fiction, fanzines, comics, film and television, and other speculative fiction texts.

Author and professor Andre Carrington earned his bachelors degree in African American Studies from Macalester College and a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University. He is now an assistant professor of English at Drexel University, where he teaches courses on African American Literature, Comics & Graphic Novels, LGBT Literature and Culture, Global Black Literature and Literary Theory. His research focuses on the cultural politics of race, gender, and genre in 20th century Black and American literature and the arts. Carrington has devoted particular attention to considerations of cultural production and identity, especially those articulated in feminist criticism, critical race theory, performance studies and Marxism.

In addition to his book Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction, Dr. Carringtons writings have appeared in the journals Present Tense, Sounding Out!, Callaloo, and African & Black Diaspora. In 2015, he organized the first international Queers & Comics conference through CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies in New York. His current research project, “Audiofuturism,” explores literary adaptation and sound studies through the analysis of science fiction radio plays based on the work of black authors.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Jeroen Dewulf, “The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves” (U. Press of Mississippi, 2016) Feb 27, 2017

The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) presents the history of the nation’s forgotten Dutch slave community and free Dutch-speaking African Americans from seventeenth-century New Amsterdam to nineteenth-century New York and New Jersey and also develops a provocative new interpretation of one of America’s most intriguing black folkloric traditions, Pinkster. The author rejects the usual interpretation of this celebration of a “slave king” as a form of carnival. Instead, he shows that it is a ritual rooted in mutual-aid and slave brotherhood traditions. By placing these traditions in an Atlantic context, he identifies striking parallels to royal election rituals in slave communities elsewhere in the Americas, and traces these rituals to the ancient Kingdom of Kongo and the impact of Portuguese culture in West-Central Africa.

The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves also suggests the necessity for an increased focus on the substantial contact that many Africans had with European primarily Portuguese cultures before they were shipped as slaves to the Americas. The book has already garnered honors as the winner of the Richard O. Collins Award in African Studies, the New Netherland Institute Hendricks Award, and the Clague and Carol Van Slyke Prize.

Jeroen Dewulf is associate professor of Dutch studies at the University of California at Berkeley, and director of the school’s Institute of European Studies. In addition to The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves, he is also the author of Spirit of Resistance: Dutch Clandestine Literature during the Nazi Occupation and co-editor of Shifting the Compass: Pluricontinental Connections in Dutch Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. His current research focuses on the connections between African-American culture in New Orleans and West African traditions, and will also soon be published in book form.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Amy Brown, “A Good Investment? Philanthropy and the Marketing of Race in an Urban Public School (U. Minnesota Press, 2015) Feb 23, 2017

There has been much talk in the news recently about funding for public education, the emergence of charter schools, and the potential of school vouchers. How much does competition for financing in urban public schools depend on marketing and perpetuating poverty in order to thrive? Are the actors in this drama deliberately playing up stereotypes of race and class? A Good Investment? Philanthropy and the Marketing of Race in an Urban Public School (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) offers a firsthand look behind the scenes of the philanthropic approach to funding public education a process in which social change in education policy and practice is aligned with social entrepreneurship. The appearance of success, equity, or justice in education, the author argues, might actually serve to maintain stark inequalities and inhibit democracy.

A Good Investment? Philanthropy and the Marketing of Race in an Urban Public School shows that models of corporate or philanthropic charity in education may in fact reinforce the race and class hierarchies that they purport to alleviate. As their voices reveal, the teachers and students on the receiving end of such a system can be critically conscious and ambivalent participants in a school’s racialized marketing and image management. Timely and provocative, this nuanced work exposes the unintended consequences of an education marketplace where charity masquerades as justice.

Amy Brown is an educational anthropologist and a faculty member in the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. In her research she often explores how the increasing privatization of public education affects teaching and learning practices. Another area of focus for Brown is how “philanthrocapitalism” and reliance on private sector funding influence constructions of gender, class and race as well as distribution of power and resources. A Good Investment? Philanthropy and the Marketing of Race in an Urban Public School is her first book.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Kerry Pimblott, “Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois” (U. Press of Kentucky, 2016) Feb 21, 2017

When you think of black power, do you think about churches and religious institutions, or do you relate them more to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s? How do the social justice struggles of the past relate to those of today? In this vital reassessment of the impact of religion on the black power movement, Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois (University Press of Kentucky, 2016) presents a nuanced discussion of the ways in which black churches supported and shaped the United Front black power organization in Cairo, Illinois during the 1970s. The book deftly challenges conventional narratives of the de-Christianization of the movement, revealing that Cairoites embraced both old-time religion and revolutionary thought. Not only did the faithful fund the mass direct-action strategies of the United Front, but activists also engaged the literature on black theology, invited theologians to speak at their rallies, and sent potential leaders to train at seminaries. In Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois the author also investigates the impact of female leaders on the organization and their influence on young activists, offering new perspectives on the hypermasculine image of black power.

Based on extensive primary research, Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois contributes to and complicates the history of the black freedom struggle in America. It not only adds a new element to the study of African American religion but also illuminates the relationship between black churches and black politics during this tumultuous era.

Kerry Pimblott is a Lecturer in American History at the University of Manchester. She earned a B.A. with First Class Honours in American Studies from King’s College London and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include African American history, Black social movements, urban history, working class history, and religious cultures and institutions.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Deborah Hopkinson “Steamboat School” (Jump At the Sun, 2016) Feb 15, 2017

In Steamboat School (Jump at the Sun, 2016), an historical picture book based on true events, author Deborah Hopkinson recounts the story of Reverend John Berry Meachum’s brave act to defy an 1847 Missouri law designed to prohibit African American children from attending school. This fictional account is told from the point of view of a young boy who is at first a student at Meachum’s secret school, which held in a church basement. But when the Missouri law is passed and it is no longer safe to continue teaching the students there, Meachum enlists his students and decides to build a steamboat to house a new, legal, school set afloat on the Mississippi River and thus on federal property. The book concludes with a nonfiction afterword about Reverend Meachum’s life and the research behind the book.

Deborah Hopkinson is the author of more than 40 books for young readers including picture books, middle grade fiction, and nonfiction. In her presentations at schools and conferences, she helps bring history and research alive. Her work is especially well suited for STEM and CCSS connections.

Her nonfiction includes Courage & Defiance, Stories of Spies, Saboteurs and Survivors in WWII Denmark, Titanic: Voices from the Disaster, a Robert F. Sibert Award honor book and YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction honor book, and Shutting out the Sky, Life in the Tenements of New York 1880-1924, an NCTE Orbis Pictus award honor book and Jane Addams Award honor book. Deborah’s award-winning picture books include Sky Boys, How They Built the Empire State Building, an ALA Notable and Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor book and Apples to Oregon won the Golden Kite Award and Spur Storytelling Award.

Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’s also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18

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Carol Hardy-Fanta and Dianne Pinderhughes, “Contested Transformation: Race, Gender, and Political Leadership in 21st Century America” (Cambridge UP, 2017) Feb 06, 2017

This week on the podcast, I speak with Carol Hardy-Fanta and Dianne Pinderhughes, the co-authors (along with Pei-te Lien and Christine Marie Sierra) of Contested Transformation: Race, Gender, and Political Leadership in 21st Century America (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Hardy-Fanta is Senior Fellow at the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston; Pinderhughes is University of Notre Dame Presidential Faculty Fellow as well as Professor in the Departments of Political Science and Africana Studies, and chair of the department of Africana Studies.

Based on comprehensive data from the Gender and Multicultural Leadership (GMCL) National Database and Survey, Contested Transformations provides a baseline portrait of Black, Latino, Asian American, and American Indian elected officials at national, state, and local levels of government. The book presents a complex picture of office holders across race and gender groups and the various backgrounds, paths to public office, leadership roles, and policy positions. The authors argue that the advances in political leadership by people of color are transforming American politics, but these gains have been hard fought and struggles for equality continue.

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Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken, “Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884-1960” (Cambridge UP, 2015) Feb 04, 2017

“There were black Germans?”

My students are always surprised to learn that there were and are a community of African immigrants and Afro-Germans that dates back to the nineteenth century (and sometimes earlier), and that this community has at times had an influence on German culture, society, and racial thinking that belied its small size.

Germany’s role in colonizing Africa has received increased attention lately, with an exhibit on German colonialism appearing at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in October and recent headway on a deal for Germany to pay reparations to the descendants of Herero and Nama genocide victims in Namibia. In Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Disapora Community, 1884-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken supply a part of the colonial story that gets even less attention than that of Germans in Africa: what about Africans in Germany? Focusing primarily on a community of West-African-born black Germans and their families, Rosenhaft and Aitken trace the groups evolution in the nineteenth century through its persecutions by the Nazi state and postwar existence.

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Robyn C. Spencer, “The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender and the Black Panther Party in Oakland” (Duke UP, 2016) Feb 01, 2017

As the first substantive account of the birthplace of the Black Panther Party (BPP), Robyn C. Spencer’s The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Duke University Press, 2016) rewrites elitist accounts that narrowly defined the party by its male leaders and masculine militarism. With a panoramic and critical lens on the role that gender politics played in effecting and affecting the Revolution – an internal and external activist project of overcoming oppression – Spencer’s organisational history weaves the urban parameters of Oakland, California, into a national and international narrative of racial consciousness.

A book that Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams, has said “tears down myths and distortions,” The Revolution Has Come traverses the BPP’s uncritical embrace of heteropatriachy in self-defense tactics, the dialectic relationship of state oppression and Black Women’s leadership of the party, the role of community programs in reshaping notions of masculinity and the personal toll of sexual double-standards in unspoken dating rules. Using archival and interview research that includes artwork, wiretap transcripts, poems, trial documents and the BPP’s newsletter, Spencer provides an example of historical scholarship that forefronts the voices and mouthpieces of the BPP to creates a unique intimacy with the “coming of age” of the men and women who set the groundwork for current iterations of Black resistance. In the words of Spencer herself, “this book is right on time,” and is necessary reading for activists and scholars alike who are attempting to define the gendered assumptions and history of strength, self-care and endurance.

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Holly Charles, “Velvet” (AuthorHouse, 2013) Jan 25, 2017

Have you ever wondered about your family history, and how family traditions or secrets through the years may affect you, your behavior, and major aspects of your life? Velvet (AuthorHouse, 2013) begins with Ludie, a young, unwed mother escaping reality down a dusty Southern road. Author Holly Charles also found a way to escape reality; or, rather, found a means to cope with reality years ago when she first began to write about her complicated relationship with her mother. It was through her own extensive research and many meaningful conversations with her grandmother that she identified several common themes in mother/daughter relationships particularly in (but not exclusive to) the African American community.

All mothers, regardless of race and culture, seek to protect their children from the demons and disappointments they themselves have been hindered by. Trying to spare their own daughters the pangs of womanhood and colorist ideals causes African American mothers to reproduce their own personal feelings of inferiority, fear and lack of esteem. Velvet is series of vignettes that chronicles poignant conversations and pivotal moments in the lives of four generations of women, all connected by blood, circumstance and the common tug-of-war that exists between mother and daughter.

Holly Charles was raised just north of Chicago and attended Purdue University for her undergraduate studies. She later earned a graduate degree in English from Prairie View A&M University. Writing has been a therapeutic outlet for her since childhood, whether through music, poetry or prose. Her personal journey to find herself as a woman and as a writer became her graduate thesis: Velvet: the Burden of Melanin and Motherhood, which has now been transformed into her first book, Velvet. In addition to her work as a writer, Charles teaches English to high school students through a Houston-area community college. She will debut her first stage play, In All Thy Getting, this spring at Houston’s Ensemble Theater.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Tom Rice, “White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Ku Klux Klan” (Indiana U. Press, 2016) Jan 23, 2017

There has been much discussion recently in the United States about the contentious recent presidential election. Along with the election results, there has also been an increased interest in the so-called “fake news” stories spread on social media as well as on the emergence of the “Alt Right” movement in the past few years. Many scholars and historians have begun to look to the past for comparisons and parallels to the current state of affairs. The Ku Klux Klan was reestablished in Atlanta in 1915, barely a week before the Atlanta premiere of The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s paean to the original Klan. While this link between Griffith’s film and the Klan has been widely acknowledged, White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Klux Klan (Indiana University Press, 2016) explores the little-known relationship between the Klan’s success and its use of film and media in the interwar years when the image, function, and moral rectitude of the Klan was contested on the national stage.

By examining rich archival materials including a series of films produced by the Klan and a wealth of documents, newspaper clippings, and manuals, the author uncovers the fraught history of the Klan as a local force that manipulated the American film industry to extend its reach across the country. White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Klux Klan highlights the ways in which the Klan used, produced, and protested against film in order to recruit members, generate publicity, and define its role within American society.

Tom Rice is a senior lecturer in Film Studies at University of St Andrews in the United Kingdom. Dr. Rice focuses on film history, specifically examining the relationship between political and cultural movements and cinema. In addition to his work on the Ku Klux Klan, Dr. Rice has also worked extensively on British colonial, world and transnational cinemas and written extensive historical essays on more than 200 films and production companies. Dr. Rice is currently developing another book length project on the Colonial Film Units of the British Empire during the years 1939-1960.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Toni Pressley-Sanon, “Zombifying a Nation: Race, Gender and the Haitian Loas on Screen” (McFarland, 2016) Jan 18, 2017

Zombifying a Nation: Race, Gender and the Haitian Loas on Screen (McFarland, 2016) dwells on the intersections of memory, history, and cultural production in both Africa and the African diaspora. The figure of the zombie that entered the popular imagination with the publication of William Seabrook’s book The Magic Island (1929) during the American occupation of Haiti still holds cultural currency around the world.

Zombifying a Nation: Race, Gender and the Haitian Loas on Screen calls for a rethinking of zombies in a sociopolitical context through the examination of several films, including White Zombie (1932), The Love Wanga (1935), I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988). A 21st-century film from Haiti, Zombi candidat la presidence … ou les amours dun zombi, is also examined. A reading of Heading South (2005), a film about the female tourist industry in the Caribbean, explores zombification as a consumptive process driven by capitalism.

Author Toni Pressley-Sanon holds a Ph.D. in African Languages and Literatures with a minor in Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also holds an M.A. in Liberal Studies and Anthropology from the New School for Social Research and a B.A. in Comparative Literature with a minor in African-American Studies from Hamilton College. She is an assistant professor at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

In addition to Zombifying a Nation: Race, Gender and the Haitian Loas on Screen, Pressley-Sanon has a forthcoming book titled Istwa across the Water: Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural Imagination. The work reads the historical and contemporary relationship between Dahomey/Benin Republic, Kongo and Saint Domingue/Haiti dialectically; that is, as a “long conversation” that is facilitated by the ebb and flow of the ocean’s waves. She argues that this relationship is anchored in memory and manifest through material culture on both sides of the Atlantic divide.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Patrick Phillips, “Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America” (W.W. Norton, 2016) Jan 16, 2017

Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. In 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One man was dragged from a jail cell and lynched on the town square, two teenagers were hung after a one-day trial, and soon bands of white “night riders” launched a coordinated campaign of arson and terror, driving all 1,098 black citizens out of the county. In the wake of the expulsions, whites harvested the crops and took over the livestock of their former neighbors, and quietly laid claim to abandoned land. The charred ruins of homes and churches disappeared into the weeds, until the people and places of black Forsyth were forgotten.

Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing (W.W. Norton and Company, 2016)in America is a sweeping American tale that spans the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the hope and promise of Reconstruction, and the crushing injustice of Forsyth’s racial cleansing. With bold storytelling and lyrical prose, the author breaks a century-long silence and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that continues to shape America in the twenty-first century.

Dr. Patrick Phillips tells Forsyth’s tragic story in vivid detail and traces its long history of racial violence all the way back to antebellum Georgia. Recalling his own childhood in the 1970s and 80s, Phillips sheds light on the communal crimes of his hometown and the violent means by which locals kept Forsyth all white well into the 1990s.

Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America is Patrick Phillip’s first book of nonfiction. He is currently the director of the Writing Minor at Drew University, and teaches creative writing, literature, and literary translation. Phillips is also noted poet in addition to being a well-respected scholar. His Elegy for a Broken Machine appeared in the Knopf Poets series in 2015, and Phillips was named a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, was a past fellow of both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggennheim Foundation. He is also the author of two earlier poetry collections, Boy, and Chattahoochee, and the translator of When We Leave Each Other: Selected Poems by the Danish writer Henrik Nordbrandt.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Ben Westhhoff, “Original Gangtas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap” (Hachette, 2016) Jan 09, 2017

The real story behind the origin of gangsta rap is difficult to discern. Between the bombastic rhetoric and imagery, the larger-than-life characters, and the subsequent success of many of the individuals, it is hard to know exactly what to believe.

Ben Westhoff’s new book, Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur and the Birth of West Coast Rap (Hachette Books, 2016), sets the record straight with a clear account of the rise and dissolution of N.W.A., the founding of Death Row Records, and the events that led up to the deadly beef between Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. Based on scores of interviews with the principals, Westhoff provides a definitive account of 1990s gangsta rap’s birth and growth. It offers clarity on the confusing turn of events and explores in rich detail the murders of Tupac and Biggie. Westhoff’s book also provides a great opportunity to reflect on the legacy of gangsta rap, especially after the film Straight Outta Compton and the transformed images of Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, and Dr. Dre.

Ben Westhoff is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vice, Pitchfork, and The Wall Street Journal. He spent three years as the music editor at LA Weekly and is the author Dirty South: OutKast, Lil Wayne, and Soulja Boy, and the Southern Rappers Who Reinvented Hip-Hop. His website can be found at http://benwesthoff.com.

Richard Schur is the host of this podcast and is Professor of English at Drury University.

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Manisha Sinha, “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition” (Yale UP, 2016). Jan 06, 2017

Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She was born in India and received her Ph.D from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. Her book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016) centers the role of African Americans in ending slavery in the US by detailing the actions they took, the ideas they generated, and the ways they influenced white abolitionists. Acts of Black rebellion including the Haitian Revolution, escapes from bondage and slave revolts shaped the analysis and trajectory of the movement. Drawing on extensive archival research that spans centuries and nations, Sinha paints a complex picture of the transnational and radical movement to end slavery in the US from the 1500s to the Civil War. Previous historical scholarship on abolitionism focused on white participants in the “second wave” of abolitionism, depicting them as paternalistic middle-class reformers who believed in capitalism and imperialism. In contrast, Sinha treats the black and white streams of the abolition movement together, details the “first wave” of organized abolitionist activity as well as the second, and outlines the radical visions of democracy held by many abolitionists. These advocates linked their opposition to slavery to support of the labor movement, utopian socialism and women’s rights and questioned imperialism and market society. The robust movement to end slavery involved men and women, black and white, free, enslaved and formerly enslaved. Despite sometimes bitter disagreements over goals, strategy and tactics, abolitionists found ways to work together.

The Slave’s Cause has been reviewed in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and numerous scholarly journals. It was also named to the National Book Awards Longlist for 2016, and as one of Stephen L. Carter’s’ top three “Great History Books of 2016.”

Isabell Moore is a PhD Student in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on social movements in the 20th century and she is involved in activism for racial, gender, economic and queer justice.

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Sylvester Johnson, “African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom” (Cambridge UP, 2015) Dec 29, 2016

When and where do African American religions begin? Sylvester Johnson, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Religious Studies at Northwestern University, disrupts the traditional temporal and geographical boundaries in the academic study of black religion in the Americas in his new book, African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Johnson places the productive forces in African American religion at the intersection of empire and colonialism and within the constructs of notions of democratic freedom. His study requires this analytical reformulation in order to examine how Black religious history unfolds within changing social and political contexts over the longue duree. In our conversation we discussed Afro-European commercialism, European views on Indigenous African religious practices, Black Christianization, violent state regulation, nineteenth century political theologies, Black settler colonialism and the creation of Liberia, Garveyism, African American Muslims, anticolonial movements, the racialization of religion, FBI surveillance and repression of Black religious movements, the connection between the history of African American Religions and Muslims Americans after 9/11, and interdisciplinarity.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu.

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Timothy S. Huebner, “Liberty and Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism” (U. Press of Kansas, 2016) Dec 19, 2016

Timothy S. Huebner, the Irma O. Sternberg Professor of History at Rhodes College in Memphis, has written Liberty & Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism (University Press of Kansas, 2016), a one-volume history of the constitutional debates regarding slavery and sovereignty from the Declaration of Independence through the end of Reconstruction. Huebner brings together three strands of history: African American history, military history, and constitutional/political history. In doing so, he joins often disparate areas of inquiry in an account of the unresolved questions from the Founding Era: 1) what would become of slavery? and 2) what was the nature of the Union and how was sovereignty divided between the states and federal government? Huebner reviews the competing theories and political events that repeatedly stoked debate and conflict over how slavery would be handled in a federated constitutional republic. Huebner makes original contributions to the debates about the Civil Wars origins and outcomes by integrating the political and military contributions of African Americans, especially norther free blacks of the antebellum period and blacks from North and South who sought freedom and fought in the war. Additionally, Huebner denotes how the conduct of the war revealed the political and constitutional views of military and civilian commanders on both sides. Huebner concludes that the Civil War and Reconstruction provided definitive answers to the questions of slavery and sovereignty: slavery was extinguished and the sovereignty of the people (rather than the states) had been vindicated. This is a work intended for general readers and professional historians.

Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.

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Bill V. Mullen, “W.E.B. Du Bois: Revolutionary Across the Color Line,” (Pluto Press, 2016) Dec 17, 2016

Born just five years after the abolition of slavery, W. E. B. Du Bois died the night before Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech at the March on Washington in 1963. In the many decades between, W. E. B. Du Bois contributed as much to the political and social advancement of African Americans as any other figure in history.

W. E. B. Du Bois: Revolutionary Across the Color Line (Pluto Press, 2016) offers an accessible and brief introduction to the life and times of W. E. B. Du Bois. It takes in his many achievements, such as being the first black man to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University and co-founding the NAACP, and sets them alongside the seismic political changes of the twentieth century many of which Du Bois weighed in on, including anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles across Asia and Africa.

The author reveals a Du Bois who was focused not just on the immediate question of African American rights, but also took up the question of socialism, the rise of communism, and the complicated interrelationship of capitalism, poverty, and racism. The picture that emerges here is of a powerfully original thinker, fiercely engaged with the political, economic, and social questions of his day never letting up in his struggle to change the world for the better.

Dr. Bill V. Mullen is a professor of American Studies at Purdue University, and teaches courses in African American Literature and Culture, American Studies, Working-Class Literature, Cultural Studies, and Postcolonial Literature. His previous written works include Afro-Orientalism, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Cultural Politics 1935-1946 and Un-American: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution. In addition to his current tenure at Purdue University, Dr. Mullen also has been a Fulbright lecturer at Wuhan University in the Peoples Republic of China.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Jane Eppinga, “Henry Ossian Flipper: West Point’s First Black Graduate” (Wild Horse Press, 2015) Dec 09, 2016

The remarkable story of Henry Ossian Flipper, a young man born into slavery on the eve of the Civil War, and his struggle for recognition left its mark on our nations history. Through extensive research of military documents, court records, appeals, and from Flippers personal journals and published papers, Henry Ossian Flipper: West Point’s First Black Graduate (Wild Horse Press, 2015) captures the sum and substance of a nation torn apart by political ambitions and extreme prejudices and reveals the uncertainty of acceptance and intolerance of blacks in America following Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. In 1878, Flipper seemed destined for a long military career. Four years later, he was on trial at Fort Davis, Texas, for embezzlement of government funds and conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. But his journey through the West did not end in West Texas, it was only the beginning. Before Flipper’s life was over his adventures would take him through Mexico, South America, and Arizona. It was on that journey that he found fame and redemption.

Historian and author Jane Eppinga is a legendary Arizona writer. Her writing credentials include more than 300 articles for both popular and professional publications covering a broad spectrum of subjects including children’s fiction, travel, personal profiles, biology, construction, food, and public relation pieces. A long-time resident of Arizona and a graduate of the University of Arizona, Eppinga is a member of Western Writers of America, Southern Arizona Authors, the National Federation of Press Women, and serves on the board of directors of Arizona Press Women. In addition to Henry Ossian Flipper: West Points’ First Black Graduate, Jane Eppinga has written on many diverse topics concerning the American West. Unsolved Arizona, La Malinche, Black Heroes: America’s Buffalo Soldiers, and They Made Their Mark: an Illustrated History of the Society of Woman Geographers are some of her more recent works. Her articles have also often appeared in Wild West Magazine and Persimmon Hill, the official publication of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015) Nov 29, 2016

Runaway slave Sojourner Truth gained fame in the nineteenth century as an abolitionist, feminist, and orator and earned a living partly by selling photographic carte de visite portraits of herself at lectures and by mail. Cartes de visite, similar in format to calling cards, were relatively inexpensive collectibles that quickly became a new mode of mass communication. Despite being illiterate, Truth copyrighted her photographs in her name and added the caption “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance. Sojourner Truth.”

Featuring the largest collection of Truth’s photographs ever published, Enduring Truths: Sojourners Shadows and Substance (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is the first book to explore how she used her image, the press, the postal service, and copyright laws to support her activism and herself.

A Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities at the University of California at Berkeley, the book’s author, Dr. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, specializes in 18th- through early 20th-century French and American art, visual and material culture, particularly in relation to the politics of race and colonialism. Dr. Grigsby writes on painting, sculpture, photography and engineering as well as the relationships among reproductive media and new technologies from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Dr. Grigsby is also the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including two Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowships, a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, a History of Art Undergraduate Association Award for Outstanding Contribution to Art Historical Education, and The Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of California at Berkeley. Some of Dr. Grigsby’s previous works include Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France and Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and Panama Canal. In addition to her teaching, Dr. Grigsby is currently conducting research for a book project tentatively titled Creole Looking: Portraying France’s Foreign Relations in the Nineteenth Century, which will examine France’s relationship to the Caribbean and Americas.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Corey D. Fields, “Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans” (U. of California Press, 2016) Nov 21, 2016

The 2016 election cycle will be remembered as one for the history books. Many people are left asking questions as to what happened to lead to such an expected outcome, while still others are left wondering after such a tumultuous and divisive campaign season what is next. There were a significant number of African American religious and political leaders who emerged during this presidential campaign representing the GOP than can easily be remembered in recent years. Even before the most recent election in November, many in the African American community felt underserved by the Democrats, and now there are some who have even more fear about what to expect from President-elect Trump and the new Republican-dominated three branches of the federal government. But not everyone.

In his book Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans (University of California Press, 2016), Corey D. Fields considers how race structures the political behavior of African American Republicans and discusses the dynamic relationship between race and political behavior in the purported “post-racial” context of US politics. Drawing on vivid first-person accounts, the book sheds light on the different ways black identity structures African Americans’ membership in the Republican Party.

What do you think of when you hear about an African American Republican? Are they heroes fighting against the expectation that all blacks must vote democratic? Are they Uncle Toms or sellouts, serving as traitors to their race? What is it really like to be a black person in the Republican Party?

Moving past rhetoric and politics, we begin to see the everyday people working to reconcile their commitment to black identity with their belief in Republican principles. And at the end, we learn the importance of understanding both the meanings African Americans attach to racial identity and the political contexts in which those meanings are developed and expressed.

Dr. Fields is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. This is his first book.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Paul C. Taylor, “Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics” (Wiley Blackwell, 2016) Nov 15, 2016

Why is it controversial to cast light-skinned actress Zoe Saldana as the lead character in a film about the performer Nina Simone? How should we understand the coexisting desire and revulsion of the black body that traces its roots to Thomas Jefferson’s longstanding relationship with his slave Sally Hemings and extends to contemporary attitudes towards black hair? In Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), Paul C. Taylor examines primary themes in racialism from the perspective of aesthetic culture. Taylor, Associate Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies and an Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies and at Penn State University, considers such issues as black invisibility, expressive culture and politics, and the problem of authenticity and cultural appropriation. He also lays the foundation for analytic philosophical tools to be brought more widely to bear on scholarly discussion of issues related to race and racialism.

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Ashaki Jackson, “Surveillance” (Writ Large Press, 2016) Nov 09, 2016

Now in its fifth printing of a very short life, Ashaki Jackson’s Surveillance examines the relationship between acts of violence, the witnessing of violence, the witnessing of the witnessing of violence, and the internalization of all three.

Media offers no escape from trauma, instead it creates a cyclical nature where the traumatized are re-traumatized and forced to live out fear after dread after terror.

Written over the course of 3 months, Surveillance stretches the far-reaching arms of community to tap into a universal empathy. The collection nearly demands that this empathy exists, almost calls it into being through faith and continued presence.

After reading this collection, I thought of the Nikki Giovanni poem Allowables which ends with:

I don’t think

I’m allowed

To kill something

Because I am

Frightened

Our own fear can pull us away from this universal empathy and understanding. The hyper-anxiety mode we are placed in by media rendering of violence, social media proliferation of those renderings, and the vitriol that ensues over our subjective views only positions us in an oppositional stance. Paranoia is heightened and exacerbated until we wonder who among us is human at all? Jackson touches on this very experience:

You ask the screen where is the Black body’s god

as if it is missing God is there demanding

that the Black body get up Like you

it is disappointed

that the black body too is human

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Susan Greenbaum, “Blaming the Poor: The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images about Poverty” (Rutgers UP, 2015) Nov 06, 2016

Patrick Moynihan’s Report on the Negro Family was a seminal document in Great Society-era racial politics and public policy. Join us as we talk with Susan Greenbaum about her new book, Blaming the Poor: The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images about Poverty (Rutgers University Press, 2015), which chronicles the lasting legacy of The Moynihan Report and the ways in which housing, criminal justice, education, and poverty policy all still bear its marks.

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).

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LaShawn Harris, “Sex Workers, Psychics and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy” (U. of Illinois Press, 2016) Nov 03, 2016

LaShawn Harris is an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University. Sex Workers, Psychics and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy, (University of Illinois Press, 2016) offers a colorful look at the lives of black urban women who worked and lived in the space between the legitimate and illegal economy. Her subjects are women not previously considered in histories of the working class: mothers, single ladies, churchwomen, hustlers, and partygoers who worked in the underground economy. Motivated by many factors, they sought economic autonomy, to provide for their families, or individual pleasure and fulfillment. The underground economy offered women a break from middle class respectability and opportunities to forge complex identities of self-sufficiency and an escape from the confines of New Negro womanhood. Working outside the wage system in illegal gaming, sex work or as supernatural consultants, they experienced the dangers and thrill of illicit trade, and challenged black progressive crusaders and promoters of racial uplift. As entrepreneurs and cultural produces, they reinforced and reconfigured the race, gender and class hierarchies of black urban life.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation.

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Ethan Michaeli, “The Defender: How The Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) Oct 27, 2016

In his new book The Defender: How The Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), Ethan Michaeli charts the riveting history of the Chicago Defender, one of the nation’s longest running and most significant black periodicals.

Founded in 1905 by publisher Robert S. Abbott, the Defender came to play a central role in regional and national black politics; drawing African Americans north to Chicago as part of the Great Migration out of the South, condemning Jim Crow and bolstering the electoral power of black America, and helping to secure the election of presidents such as Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama.

Relying on exhaustive research, including dozens of interviews and extensive archival material, Ethan has constructed the most in-depth and illuminating history of the Defender ever published – highlighting not only the impact of publisher Abbott and iconic columnists such as Ida B. Wells and Langston Hughes, but also the hundreds of other journalists and editors who contributed to the legendary newspaper’s development. Alex Kotlowitz has described The Defender as “a majestic, sweeping history, both of a newspaper and of a people,” and Carol Anderson has applauded the text as a landmark study which will “become an essential resource in African American cultural and political studies.”

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Natalie Byfield, “Savage Portrayals: Race, Media, and the Central Park Jogger Story” (Temple UP, 2014) Oct 21, 2016

Savage Portrayals: Race, Media, and the Central Park Jogger Story (Temple University Press, 2014) offers a timely reminder of how racial bias and prejudice continue to shape political perspectives and dominant media narratives. Drawing on her unique experience as a journalist covering the case, Natalie Byfield explores the media response to and framing of the Central Park Jogger case which gained national attention during the late 1980s.

Byfield is a cultural sociologist, who has taught in the fields of sociology and media studies. She is an associate professor at St. John’s University in Queens, New York where her research centers on the sociology of knowledge. She examines language, media systems, and methodologies exploring their roles in the production and construction of race/class/gender inequalities. In 1989 she was a member of a reporting team nominated by the Daily News for a Pulitzer Prize relating to the papers coverage of the Central Park Jogger case. Dr. Byfield is also the recipient of a Charles H. Revson Fellowship at Columbia University and a National Science Foundation Fellowship. Her current book project is titled Minority Report: Place, Race, and Surveillance in New York City.

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Damien M. Sojoyner, “First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles” (U. of Minnesota Press, 2016) Oct 21, 2016

Dr. Damien M. Sojoyner, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, joins the New Books Network to discuss his recently published book, entitled First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Through both ethnographic and historical analyses, First Strike explores the tragic relationship between education and the prison system in California.

For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan M. Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd.

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Thomas Aiello, “The Battle for the Souls of Black Folk: W.E.B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, and the Debate that Shaped the Course of Civil Rights” (ABC-CLIO, 2016) Oct 14, 2016

Thomas Aiello is associate professor of history and African American studies at Valdosta State University. In The Battle for the Souls of Black Folk: W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and the Debate that Shaped the Course of Civil Rights (ABC-CLIO, 2016) Aiello focuses on the conversation between Washington and Du Bois in order to fully examine its contours. The book serves as both a document reader and an authored text that enables readers to perceive how the back and forth between these two individuals produced a cacophony of ideas that made it anything but a bipolar debate, even though their expressed differences would ultimately shape the two dominant strains of activist strategy. The numerous chapters on specific topics and historical events follow a preface that presents an overview of both the conflict and its historiographical treatment; evaluates the legacies of both Washington and Du Bois, emphasizing the trajectories of their theories beyond 1915; and provides an explanation of the unique structure of the work.

The debate between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington on how to further social and economic progress for African Americans lasted 20 years, from 1895 to Washington’s death in 1915. Their ongoing conversation evolved over time, becoming fiercer and more personal as the years progressed. But despite its complexities and steadily accumulating bitterness, it was still, at its heart, a conversation and impassioned contest at the turn of the century to capture the souls of black folk. In addition to this work, Aiello is also the author of Jim Crow’s Last Stand: Nonunanimous Criminal Jury Verdicts In Louisiana; Model Airplanes Are Decadent and Depraved: The Glue-Sniffing Epidemic of the 1960s; and The Kings of Casino Park: Black Baseball in the Lost Season of 1932, among several others.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Jack Hamilton, “Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination” (Harvard UP, 2016) Oct 11, 2016

In Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2016), Jack Hamilton examines major American and British recording artists of the 1960s to explain what happened during the decade to turn rock-n-roll white. By pairing musicians such as Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan or The Beatles and Motown, Hamilton explores the connections among artists and how artists influenced each other across racial and musical distinctions. Hamilton’s well-researched text seeks to expand how we think about the rock and roll canon and challenge how we think about music during the time period. He explores the ways in which rock and roll critics rebranded rock and roll as white and promoted and sold it as authentic to fans. Hamilton’s book challenges the racial categories of authenticity in the 1960s, and challenges readers to hear music differently.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.

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Elizabeth Reich, “Militant Visions: Black Soldiers, Internationalism, and the Transformation of American Cinema” (Rutgers UP, 2016) Oct 10, 2016

Elizabeth Reich is an assistant professor of film studies at Connecticut College in New London. Militant Visions: Black Soldiers, Internationalism, and the Transformation of American Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2016) examines how, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the cinematic figure of the black soldier helped change the ways American moviegoers saw black men, for the first time presenting African Americans as vital and integrated members of the nation. In the process, Elizabeth Reich reveals how the image of the proud and powerful African American serviceman was crafted by an unexpected alliance of government propagandists, civil rights activists, and black filmmakers.

Contextualizing the figure in a genealogy of black radicalism and internationalism, Reich shows the evolving images of black soldiers to be inherently transnational ones, shaped by the displacements of Diaspora, Third World revolutionary philosophy, and a legacy of black artistry and performance. Offering a nuanced reading of a figure that was simultaneously conservative and radical, Reich considers how the cinematic black soldier lent a human face to ongoing debates about racial integration, black internationalism, and American militarism. Militant Visions thus not only presents a new history of how American cinema represented race, but also demonstrates how film images helped to make history, shaping the progress of the civil rights movement itself.

In addition to this work, previously in 2015 Reich co-edited a special issue of Film Criticism, titled “New Approaches to Cinematic Identification,” which brings together works on one of Reich’s other primary interests: identification and film spectatorship. Reich’s own articles appear in Screen, African American Review, Film Criticism and Women and Performance, and she has a chapter forthcoming in Black Cinema Aesthetics, edited by Michael Gillespi and Akil Huston. She also serves on the editorial boards of Criticism and Film Criticism.

Reich is also currently at work on two new projects: co-editing a book collection on Afrofuturism, Justice In Time: Critical Afrofuturism and Black Freedom Struggles, and writing another monograph on global cinema, temporality and reparations, tentatively titled Reparative Time. In addition to her film studies scholarship, Reich is also a noted documentary director. Her feature-length documentaries include “Milton and Charlotte: A Baliwood Love Story” and “very Queer kids.”

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Eric Gardner, “Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture” (Oxford UP, 2015) Oct 07, 2016

Eric Gardner’s new study Black Print Unbound: the Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (Oxford University Press, 2015) explores the development and voice of the Christian Recorder during the years leading up to and immediately after the American Civil War. As the house organ of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Recorder held a national reach among free African Americans and became an integral part of broader nineteenth-century black print networks. Through recovering the paper’s history, Black Print Unbound offers an important intervention into the study of African American literary history and American print culture.

Eric’s teaching and research interests center on African American literature and culture and American literary history, and he is currently a professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University. His first monograph, Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature was published in 2009 by the University Press of Mississippi and was awarded the Research Society for American Periodicals annual book prize. His work can be found in edited collections and journals such as American Literary History and Legacy: a Journal of American Women Writers. To find out more about Eric’s research visit his personal website: http://www.blackprintculture.com/

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Marisa J. Fuentes, “Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive” (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) Sep 19, 2016

Marisa J. Fuentes’, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) is an important new book that challenges historians to think more carefully about the methods and categories with which they have described and analyzed slavery. Marisa Fuentes uses fragmentary evidence about five enslaved women in 18th century Barbados to take up larger questions of agency, violence, the production of knowledge, and gender. At the same time, the book also offers detailed and often surprising stories from an atypical slave society.

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Ibram X. Kendi, “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” (Nation Books, 2016) Sep 08, 2016

Ibram X. Kendi is an assistant professor of African American history at the University of Florida. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Nation Books, 2016) offers a fast moving narrative of racist ideas beginning with the Puritan theologian and preacher Cotton Mather to the post-racial color-blind arguments in the age of Barack Obama. Through American history, racism has been justified by appeals to God’s word, science, nature, or common sense. He demonstrates how good intentioned efforts to overcome racism have often helped to cement racist ideas. The ideas of segregation and assimilation have rationalized racism and have reproduced and spread in the face of challenge by antiracist arguments. Americans have unsuccessfully attempted to root out racism through notions of self-sacrifice, “uplift suasion,” and educational persuasion. Kendi argues that overcoming racism, which hides classism and sexism, will require intelligent self-interest, not altruism. Americans, regardless of color, need to realize that when Black people are free of racism all will be free.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation.

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Loki Mulholland, et.al. “She Stood for Freedom: The Untold Story of a Civil Rights Hero, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland” (Shadow Mountain, 2016) Sep 08, 2016

“Anyone can make a difference. Find a problem, get some friends together, and go fix it. Remember you don’t have to change the world, just change your world.” –Joan Trumpauer Mulholland

In the early 1960s, in the segregated South, a white teenager, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, made a conscientious decision to join the Civil Rights struggle. In doing so she put her life at risk, but given her family history (the first relative to come to America did so as an indentured servant in the 1600s; her grandmother was a suffragette) she could not sit idly by as blacks were treated like second-class citizens. She organized non-violent sit-ins, attended a predominately black college, and participated in protests including the March on Washington and the Selma to Montgomery March. She was arrested and held on death row; she was spit on, dragged off her stool and threatened with violence at a Woolworths lunch counter sit-in, yet she never relented. Now readers of all ages can learn more about this extraordinary woman in She Stood for Freedom: The Untold Story of a Civil Rights Hero, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland (Shadow Mountain, 2016). The picture book is for ages 4 to 8; the illustrated biography is for ages 8 and older and includes primary source photographs and documents from the period. She Stood for Freedom has been nominated for the 2017 Amelia Bloomer Award, part of the American Library Association’s Task Force on Social Responsibility recognizing the best feminist books for young readers that “affirm positive roles for girls and women.”

Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’s also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18

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Carol McCabe Booker, ed. “Alone Atop the Hill: The Autobiography of Alice Dunnigan” (U. of Georgia Press, 2015) Sep 02, 2016

Carol McCabe Booker is a Washington, D.C. attorney and former journalist. In the 1960s and 70s, she covered civil rights for the Voice of America, freelanced articles for The Washington Post, Readers Digest, Ebony, Jet, and Black Stars, and reported from Africa, including the Nigerian warfront, for Westinghouse Broadcasting stations. After retiring in 2008, she helped her husband, journalist Simeon Booker, write Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement, which received widespread critical acclaim following its publication by the University Press of Mississippi.

After Simeon and trailblazing reporter Alice Dunnigan were inducted into the black journalists Hall of Fame in 2013, Carol tracked down Dunnigan’s out-of-print autobiography to recover her fascinating story for a modern audience. The daughter of a sharecropper born in rural Kentucky, Dunnigan went on to become the first African American female reporter accredited by the White House, the Supreme Court, and the Senate, and fashioned an illustrious career in journalism and politics in the nation’s capital. Alone Atop The Hill: The Autobiography of Alice Dunnigan, Pioneer of the National Black Press (University of Georgia Press, 2015) is an updated, annotated edition of a classic yet forgotten memoir which illustrates how Dunnigan overcame race and gender barriers to break into the highest echelons of the national press.

James West is a historian of the twentieth-century United States. His research focuses on African American business enterprise and print culture, with a particular interest in Chicago. His current book project examines the role of EBONY magazine as an outlet for popular black history. He tweets @chitownanddown.

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Benjamin Fagan, “The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation” (U. of Georgia Press, 2016) Aug 30, 2016

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, antebellum African Americans elites turned to the newspaper as a means of translating their belief in black “chosenness” into programs for black liberation. Benjamin Fagan’s The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (University of Georgia Press, 2016) demonstrates how the belief that God had marked black Americans as his chosen people on earth became a central article of faith in many northern African American communities throughout the nineteenth century. Directed by varying understandings of black “chosenness,” black periodicals helped to frame public debate, shape the black public sphere and to define forms of respectability and strategies for racial uplift.

Fagan joins podcast host James West to discuss many of the key protagonists and periodicals of his work in more detail, shedding new light on prominent editors such as Frederick Douglass, Samuel Cornish and Mary Ann Shadd, and important early black periodicals such as Freedoms Journal, the North Star and the Provincial Freeman. As Fagan ably demonstrates, the idea of black “chosenness” played a major role in the early development of the black press, and helped to shape broader understandings of freedom, equality and nationhood on both a translocal and transnational scale.

James West is a historian of the twentieth century United States. His research focuses on African American business enterprise and print culture, with a particular interest in Chicago. His current book project examines the role of EBONY magazine as an outlet for popular black history. He tweets @chitownanddown.

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Russell Rickford, “We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power and the Radical Imagination” (Oxford UP, 2016) Jul 31, 2016

Russell Rickford is an assistant professor of history at Cornell University. We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power and the Radical Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers an intellectual history of the Pan African nationalist schools that emerged in the late 1960s from dissatisfaction with urban school desegregation and its failure to provide an equal education and foster racial pride. Influenced by Third World theories and African anti-colonial campaigns, these black institutions promoted self-determination and black political sovereignty. Beginning with the campaigns for the community control of schools to visions of a Black University, Rickford identifies the key ideological strengths and weaknesses that ultimately resulted in the failure to build strong independent institutions necessary for cultural renewal. The Afrocentric ideas and schools that survived were congruent with a neoliberal ideology that elided the socio-economic conditions of African Americans.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Comes of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation.

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Jon Hale, “The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement” (Columbia UP, 2016) Jul 28, 2016

Dr. Jon Hale, Assistant Professor of Educational History, Department of Teacher Education, College of Charleston, joins the New Books Network to discuss his new book, entitled The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (Columbia University Press, 2016). Through primary interviews and in-depth historical analysis, the author provides a bottom-up view of the Mississippi Freedom Schools, part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, an important legacy to the US Civil Rights Movement.

For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd.

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Susan Cahan, “Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power” (Duke UP, 2016) Jul 21, 2016

The struggle for representation within the art museum is the focus of a timely and important new book by Susan Cahan, Associate Dean for the Arts at Yale College. Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power (Duke University Press, 2016) charts a pivotal moment for the American Art Museum and reflects on the progress, or lack thereof, for African American Art’s place within the US museum system. Focusing on 4 key institutions and range of exhibitions beginning in the late 1960s, the book offers a rich and detailed reading of the institutional context, the aesthetic practices, and the historical lineages that explain both the period and the current museum settlement. The book is replete with illustrations and is accessible, readable and interesting, representing an important and urgent intervention to how we understand the role of the museum today.

Dave O’Brien is the host of New Books in Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr. Peter Matthews). He tweets@Drdaveobrien.

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April R. Haynes, “Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America” (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Jul 16, 2016

April R. Haynes is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth- Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Haynes shows how the campaign against masturbation redefined women’s sexuality and reformulated the battle for political rights. Beginning with Sylvester Graham’s “Lecture to Mothers” to reform-minded women to the black abolitionists Sarah Mapps Douglas’s sex education lectures to African American women, masturbation became a topic with both gender and racial import. After a long history of neglect, it became tied to issues of purity, virtue and self-government. Through women reformers the proscriptions against masturbation were popularized and institutionalized. Haynes sheds light on the continued attention given to masturbation in American culture and the women’s movement, demonstrating its political significance.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation.

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Anthea Kraut, “Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance” (Oxford UP, 2015) Jun 23, 2016

Is it possible to lay claim to ownership of a dance? Is choreography intellectual property? How have shifting conceptions of race and gender shaped the way we think of dance, property and ownership? In Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance, Anthea Kraut wrestles mightily with these questions as she presents the first book by a dance scholar to focus explicitly on matters of copyright and choreography. Combining archival research with critical race and gender theory, Kraut offers new perspectives in this cross-genre history of American Dance. Professor Kraut’s research addresses the interconnections between American performance and cultural history and the raced and gendered dancing body. Her first book, Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2008, and received a Special Citation from the Society of Dance History Scholars de la Torre Bueno Prize for distinguished book of dance scholarship. Her teaching interests include American and African American dance history, critical race theory, and methods and theories of dance studies. Dr. Anthea Kraut is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Dance at the University of California, Riverside.

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Bert Ashe, “Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles” (Agate Bolden, 2015) Jun 23, 2016

What’s missing from contemporary discussions of aesthetics and representation within the natural hair movement? Bert Ashe generously offers a response in Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, an unprecedented account of black male identity as seen through our culture’s perceptions of hair. In this personal story that weaves together the cultural and political history of dreadlocks with the authors own mid-life journey to lock his hair, Ashe addresses the significance of black hair in the 20th and 21st centuries through an engaging and humorous literary style. Professor Ashe’s research focuses on late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literature and culture. He teaches and writes about contemporary American culture, primarily post-Civil Rights Movement African American literature and culture (often referred to as post-blackness or the post-soul aesthetic), as well as the black vernacular triumvirate of black hair, basketball, and jazz. His first book, From Within the Frame: Storytelling in African-American Fiction (Routledge, 2002) tracks the development of the African American frame text, from Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman through John Edgar Wideman’s Doc’s Story. Dr. Bert Ashe is Associate Professor of English at the University of Richmond.

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Ed Berlin, “King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era” (Oxford UP, 2016) Jun 15, 2016

Few composers dominate a genre of music as completely as did Scott Joplin. From the publication of his iconic Maple Leaf Rag in 1899 onward his ragtime compositions came to serve as the soundtrack of his age. Yet Joplin aspired to be recognized not just as a successful writer of popular tunes but as a respected composer of classical music, an ambition that led him to write a ballet and two operas. In a new edition of his biography of Scott Joplin, King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era, the eminent ragtime scholar Ed Berlin reveals many new details that sharpen our understanding of Joplin’s life and the times in which it was lived. Tracing his life from his childhood in rural Texas to his death in New York City in 1917, he describes Joplin’s career as a musician and composer, setting it within the context of an African American community seeking to define its place within American society. Through his extensive research, Berlin sheds new light on Joplin’s personal life, his business affairs, and the public reception of his music, helping us to better understand the impact and legacy of this great American artist.

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Gabriel Mendes, “Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry” (Cornell University Press, 2015) Jun 15, 2016

In his 1948 essay, “Harlem is Nowhere,” Ralph Ellison decried the psychological disparity between formal equality and discrimination faced by Blacks after the Great Migration as leaving “even the most balanced Negro open to anxiety.” In Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry (Cornell University Press, 2015), Gabriel Mendes undertakes an engaging study of race and mental health in the 20th century through the lens of an overlooked Harlem clinic.

While providing the first in-depth history of the Lafargue Clinic (1946-58), the book focuses on the figures who came together in a seemingly unlikely union to found it: Richard Wright, the prominent author; Fredric Wertham, a German Jewish emigre psychiatrist now known for his advocacy for censorship of comic books; and The Reverend Shelton Hale Bishop, an important Harlem pastor. Wright’s literary prowess, work for the Communist party, and brush with Chicago School sociology met with Wertham’s socially-conscious and uncompromising brand of psychoanalysis to challenge mainstream psychiatric theory and its discriminatory practices in the Jim Crow North. Those who could afford it were charged 25 cents for sessions in the basement of St. Philip’s Episcopal church in Harlem, and 50 cents for court testimonials. A thoroughgoing grassroots effort, ignored by philanthropists and state funding, the Lafargue Clinic throws mid-20th Century mental health and race relations into relief, and is sure to stir interest in the untold stories of projects like it.

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Edlie Wong, “Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship” (NYU Press, 2015) Jun 15, 2016

The dialectical configuration of black inclusion/Chinese exclusion is at the center of Edlie Wong‘s book Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship (New York University Press, 2015). At the end of the 19th century, the southern United States was experimenting with a transition from a dependency on uncompensated, coerced labor in the form of black chattel slavery, to a system of (nominally) voluntary, wage labor i.e. Chinese contract labor (coolieism), modeled most prominently in nearby colonial Cuba. Wong poses the important question of whether coolieism constituted a form of slavery or was indeed, a transition to free labor. In so doing, Racial Reconstruction explores the implications of mutually constitutive African American and Chinese American racialized identity formations, the Chinese Question, and the Negro Problem being coterminous: Chinese exclusion–the exception that proved the rule–helped America define itself as a free nation in the wake of racial slavery. Wong’s use of unusual documentary sources such as the underexamined archive of Anglo-American Cuban travelogues and invasion fiction by both African and European Americans, limns the changing racial landscape of Reconstruction-era immigration policies and conceptions of citizenship that shaped Asian-American cultural politics and impacted African American life.

NB: Professor Wong’s next project, mentioned toward the end of the interview, concerns apprenticeship and not indenture as indicated.

Mireille Djenno is the Librarian for African, African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Laurent Dubois, “The Banjo: America’s African Instrument” (Harvard UP, 2016) Jun 02, 2016

Most scholars of popular music use songs, artists, and clubs as the key texts and sites in their exploration of the social, cultural, political, and economic effects of music. Laurent Dubois‘ new book looks at the history of an instrument, the banjo, to help us better understand American history and culture. Dubois also helps readers understand the banjo as part of an Afro-Atlantic musical heritage.

In The Banjo: Americas African Instrument (Harvard University Press, 2015), Dubois examines how the banjo came into existence in the Americas and what it reveals about debates about American culture. Dubois book starts in Africa with a wide range of instruments that shaped the banjo. He then follows these instruments as they cross the Atlantic in the Middle Passage, winding up in the Caribbean and in North America. Sifting through travelers accounts and documents in archives, Dubois shows how the banjo brought together African peoples in the Americas, creating a familiar but new instrument and sound. He describes the banjo as the product of parallel development in which many enslaved musicians deployed similar instrument-making strategies to create what we now know as the banjo.

The story, however, does not stop there. The banjo came to represent authentic Africa American and American culture and became a key symbol in abolitionist rhetoric and minstrelsy. As a result, the banjo was not simply an instrument but a powerful marker of identity within American culture. Dubois traces how the banjo played a significant role in jazz, country, bluegrass, and folk music, symbolizing a diverse set of values and politics. From the minstrel Joel Walker Sweeney to the political activist Pete Seeger, the history of the banjo is the history of American popular culture.

Laurent Dubois is Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History at Duke University. He is also the author of Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution and Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. More information about his work on the banjo can be found at Banjology and Musical Passage.

Richard Schur, Professor of English at Drury University, is the host for this podcast.

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Alfred Frankowski, “The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Towards a Political Sense of Mourning” (Lexington Press, 2015) Jun 02, 2016

How are cultural practices that suggest social inclusion at the root of marginalizing social suffering? In The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Towards a Political Sense of Mourning (Lexington Books, 2015), Alfred Frankowski, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern Illinois University, makes clear this central tension at the heart of contemporary American life. The re-election of Barack Obama and the murder of Trayvon Martin form the backdrop to Frankowski’s exploration of both the philosophical aesthetics and the practical manifestations of race in America today. From these two events the book moves to consider examples from Kantian aesthetic theory, through the history of memorials and museums, to examples from music, to illustrate how, in memorializing the past, we may forget both lessons and insights into current social struggles. The first book in a new series on the Philosophy of Race, The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Towards a Political Sense of Mourning will be of interests to philosophers and cultural theorists, as well as those considering questions of race in society.

Dave O’Brien is the host of New Books In Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr. Peter Matthews). He tweets @Drdaveobrien

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Jason Bivins, “Spirits Rejoice! Jazz and American Religion” (Oxford UP, 2015) May 31, 2016

Jazz is often dubbed the greatest American original art form. This claim might be difficult to contend. But a close exploration of the folks who created, listened, and participated in jazz environments can also tell us lot about the religious history of those people. In his new book, Spirits Rejoice! Jazz and American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2015), Jason Bivins, Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at NC State University, argues that Jazz is a unique and under-explored venue for investigating American religious history. Bivins explores Jazz through common components of religious communities and traditions, including as forms of ritual, institutional structures, practices of healing, and jazz cosmologies. He begins with an outline of the deep connections between jazz musicians and their relationships with specific religious traditions, including Islam, the Black church, Bah’ ethics, Buddhism, and Scientology. He also outlines how artists engage in historical self-reflection and the production of religious narratives. In our conversations we discussed analyzing religion in music, the difficulties and opportunities of examining wordless artifacts, spaces of religio-musical practice, the role of performative and improvisational aspects of jazz, the sonic architecture of metaphysical worlds, egolessness and the divine, racial imaginaries, and forms of American spirituality. Of course, we talked about a lot of wonderful musicians too, including John Carter, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, Wynton Marselies, John Coltrane, Mary Lou Williams, and Ornette Coleman. And when you are done listening to our conversation check out the listening guide, which has music video playlists for all the chapters of the book.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu.

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Jonathon S. Kahn and Vincent W. Lloyd, editors, “Race And Secularism in America” (Columbia UP, 2016) May 28, 2016

Jonathon S. Kahn is an associate professor of religion at Vassar College. He is co-editor with Vincent W. Lloyd of a collection of essays entitled Race and Secularism in America (Columbia University Press, 2016). Eleven scholars forward the argument that secularism in America has been a project that manages, or excludes, difference by control over both religion and race. The introduction demonstrates how Martin Luther King Jr., both a religious and black leader, was stripped of both his race and his religion to represent a homogenous white secularism. Secularism is dependent on managing not just the intertwined racial and religious discourse but the practices and bodies of ordinary people. Secularism thus becomes white and springs from a managed Protestantism. The abolitionist movement in the nineteenth century and the Civil Rights movement in the twentieth are historical examples of resistance to a secularist white consensus. The volume explores the many ways religion and race are circumscribed, how they are entwined, and the ways their management has been refused. In the process, the authors recover the transformative potential of racial and religious discourse in imagining worlds of possibilities and justice.

Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation.

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Betina Cutaia Wilkinson, “Power and Latino, Black, and White Relations in the Twenty-First Century” (U of Virginia Press, 2015) May 23, 2016

Betina Cutaia Wilkinson is the author of Partners or Rivals? Power and Latino, Black, and White Relations in the Twenty-First Century (University of Virginia Press 2015). Wilkinson is assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Wake Forest University. In Partners or Rivals, Wilkinson relies on national survey and focus group data to examine how social interaction; feelings of identification with members of their own group and others; and individuals sense of power as established by their racial, economic, and political surroundings impact interracial attitudes. She finds that the complex racial dynamics are not easily reducible to simple formulae, yet they have strong implications for the formation of interracial coalitions.

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Lester K. Spence, “Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics” (Punctum Books, 2016) May 16, 2016

Lester K. Spence is the author of Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics (Punctum Books, 2016). Spence is associate professor of political science and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

In Knocking the Hustle, Spence links the rising prominence of neoliberal ideas to the transformation of African American communities. The book, a combination of political history and policy analysis, argues that the Nixon and Reagan administrations advanced the neoliberal policy-making agenda and contributed to the associated rise in economic inequality, especially for African Americans. At the same time, African American communities and institutions are transformed by this neoliberal turn and its underlying, and surprising compatibility, with hustle.

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Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith, “Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X” (Basic Books, 2016) Apr 30, 2016

Is there a figure in sports more admired and beloved than Muhammad Ali? Widely revered not only as one of boxing’s greatest champions but also as one of the rare athletes to speak out on political issues, Ali holds a place at the pinnacle of sports heroes.

In their new book Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X (Basic Books, 2016), historians Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith take the bold step of viewing Muhammad Ali not as hero but as human. Randy and Johnny focus on the young contender Cassius Clay as he trains in Miami, rises through the heavyweight ranks, and hones his persona as an athlete and celebrity. At the heart of the book is the boxer’s friendship with Malcolm X and their respective ties to Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad. The two subjects are extraordinary figures in the history of the 1960s, and they have been subjects of several books. As Randy and Johnny explain in the interview, they offer a fresh perspective by taking a meticulous approach to sources old and new, even plotting out — day by day — where Clay and Malcolm were and what they did in the years leading up to February 1964, when Clay defeated Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title, and February 1965, when Malcolm was assassinated. This fresh perspective yields a picture of Clay/Ali somewhat at odds with the reverential view commonly held today. It is a picture of a young man still finding his place in the world, before he became its king.

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Keenanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation” (Haymarket Books, 2016) Apr 20, 2016

Few social justice struggles have captivated recent political history like the broad Black Lives Matter movement. From the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore to campaign rally interruptions of leading politicians, we have seen people speak up in outrage about injustices of policing, racist violence, wealth inequality and much more. What does this cycle of struggle have to do with the history of capitalism? In addition to these questions, our guest today, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, asks “Can the conditions created by institutional racism be transformed within the existing capitalist order?.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation was recently published by Haymarket Books.

Republished with permission from Betsy Beasley and David Stein’s Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast,

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Kimberly Fain, “Black Hollywood: From Butlers to Superheroes, the Changing Role of African American Men in the Movies” (Praeger, 2015) Apr 03, 2016

While black men have been portrayed in film for over a hundred years, they have often been stereotyped or portrayed very badly. In her book Black Hollywood: From Butlers to Superheroes, the Changing Role of African American Men in the Movies (Praeger, 2015), Kimberly Fain reviews the changing aspect of these roles and the African American actors who played them. Going decade by decade, she chooses specific films that do a particularly good job of showing these shifts. She also talks about how African American men began to use their popularity in other entertainment fields to give them power in the film industry.

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Steve Phillips, “Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority” (The New Press, 2016) Mar 21, 2016

Steve Phillips is the author of Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority (The New Press, 2016). Phillips is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Several weeks ago, Matt Lewis came on the podcast to assess the state-of-affairs for conservatives. This week, Steve Phillips offers his new book on how progressives might reposition their electoral coalition in the future. Drawing on demographic data and the changing electoral map, Phillips argues for a shift from focusing on white swing voters to a new coalition of African American, Latino, and progressive white voters.

The podcast is hosted by Heath Brown, assistant professor of public policy at the City University of New York, John Jay College and The Graduate Center. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown

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James Davis, “Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean” (Columbia University Press, 2015) Feb 24, 2016

This terrific book follows the itinerary of Eric Walrond’s peripatetic life. Born in Guyana in 1898, Walrond lived in Barbados, Panama, New York, Paris, London. As a writer and sharp observer of those around him, he produced trenchant critiques of racial dynamics, imperialism, and labor relations in short stories, journalism, essays, and historical narratives. His book Tropic Death (1926), a searing rendition of Caribbean life, was widely read. Yet he struggled toward the end of his life as he became increasingly isolated both professionally and socially. In Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean (Columbia University Press, 2015), James Davis draws on numerous and surprising sources to build a complex but eminently readable portrait of this man, his work, his friends and acquaintances in diasporic communities of the transatlantic Caribbean.

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Jessica Parr, “Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon” (UP of Mississippi, 2015) Feb 22, 2016

George Whitefield was a complex man driven by a simple idea, the new birth that brought salvation. Because of such passion, Whitefield received both enthusiastic support, preaching to audiences numbering in the thousands, and bitter criticism for violating religious doctrine or political convention. As such, Whitefield remains someone who continues to stir debate and devotion even to this day. In her fascinating new book, Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon (University Press of Mississippi, 2015), Dr. Jessica Parr explores the life and afterlife of George Whitfield, focusing particularly on how the conflict he spurred and the veneration he received have shaped memories of him. Parr’s work is fascinating and accessible, making it a good read for both the scholar of American religious history and for students in an undergraduate classroom.

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Aisha Durham, “Home With Hip Hop Feminism” (Peter Lang, 2014) Jan 14, 2016

Is hip hop defined by its artists or by its audience? In Home With Hip Hop Feminism, Aisha Durham returns hip hop scholarship to its roots by engaging in an ethnographic and autoethnographic approach to studying hip hop. Rooting her study in the Diggs Park Public Housing Project in Norfolk, Virginia, Durham examines what hip hop means to ordinary and everyday women who see themselves as hip hop, equals to the rappers and other artists who receive greater recognition and scholarly attention.

By focusing on gender and social class, Durham explores the sexual scripts that women find and negotiate within hip hop and how hip hop continually navigates socio-economic boundaries. She also considers how the very act of studying and writing about hip hop can turn a hip hop “insider” into an outsider. The book spends considerable attention looking at Queen Latifah and Beyonce as key figures who both reinforce and interrogate dominant representations of African American women.

Aisha Durham is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of South Florida. Her research about Black popular culture explores the relationship between media representations and everyday life. She examines how controlling images or power-laden stereotypes are produced by media makers and interpreted by media audiences to make sense of blackness in the “post” era. She is co-editor of Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology (2007) and Globalizing Cultural Studies: Ethnographic Interventions in Theory, Method, and Policy (2007).

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Eric Foner, “Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad” (Norton, 2015) Jan 05, 2016

In this podcast I talk with Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University about his book, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015).

Per the book jacket, “More than any other scholar, Eric Foner has influenced our understanding of America’s history. Now, making brilliant use of extraordinary evidence, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian once again reconfigures the national saga of American slavery and freedom.

A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Slaves could be found in the streets of New York well after abolition, traveling with owners doing business with the city’s major banks, merchants, and manufacturers. New York was also home to the North’s largest free black community, making it a magnet for fugitive slaves seeking refuge. Slave catchers and gangs of kidnappers roamed the city, seizing free blacks, often children, and sending them south to slavery.

To protect fugitives and fight kidnappings, the city’s free blacks worked with white abolitionists to organize the New York Vigilance Committee in 1835. In the 1840s vigilance committees proliferated throughout the North and began collaborating to dispatch fugitive slaves from the upper South, Washington, and Baltimore, through Philadelphia and New York, to Albany, Syracuse, and Canada. These networks of antislavery resistance, centered on New York City, became known as the underground railroad. Forced to operate in secrecy by hostile laws, courts, and politicians, the city’s underground-railroad agents helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Until now, their stories have remained largely unknown, their significance little understood.

Building on fresh evidence,including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York–Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to sweeping history. The story is inspiring–full of memorable characters making their first appearance on the historical stage–and significant–the controversy over fugitive slaves inflamed the sectional crisis of the 1850s. It eventually took a civil war to destroy American slavery, but here at last is the story of the courageous effort to fight slavery by ‘practical abolition,’ person by person, family by family.”

Some of the topics we discuss are:

-How vigilance committees provided fugitives with legal representation if they were apprehended.

-Why the unwillingness of local juries to convict persons who took part in widely publicized rescues influenced congressional debates over slavery.

-The ways resistance to Fugitive Slave Law forced ordinary northerners who had no connection with the abolitionist movement to confront the relationship between individual conscience and legal obligation.

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Neil Roberts, “Freedom as Marronage” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) Dec 18, 2015

What does it mean to be free? How can paying attention to the relationship between freedom and slavery help construct a concept and practice of freedom that is “perpetual, unfinished, and rooted in acts of flight” (181)? In his book Freedom as Marronage University of Chicago Press, 2015), Neil Roberts (Africana Studies, Religion, and Political Science, Williams College) explores this and many other questions. Proceeding from and working with the concept and practice of marronage – modes of escape from slavery emerging from the Caribbean – Roberts articulates a theory of freedom that is historically specific while having trans-historical reverberations, and that is attentive to lived experiences of freedom and slavery. In doing so, he engages histories of the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, diaspora, the Haitian Revolution, and American slavery. Arguing for the need to creolize political theory and philosophy, Roberts also takes up the thought and practice of W.E.B. DuBois, Hannah Arendt, Philip Petit, Frederick Douglass, Angela Davis, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Edouard Glissant, Rastafari, and much more.

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Jodi Eichler-Levine, “Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature” (NYU Press, 2013) Dec 14, 2015

In Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature (New York University Press, 2013), Jodi Eichler-Levine, associate professor of Religion Studies and Berman Professor of Jewish Civilization at Lehigh University, analyses a theme in American religious history–suffering–through the lens of Jewish and African American children’s literature. In her analysis of works by authors such as Maurice Sendak, Julius Lester, Jane Yolen, Sydney Taylor, and Virginia Hamilton, Eichler-Levine deftly examines the ways in which historical narratives of suffering are used by religious communities to claim their status as citizens.

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Phil Ford, “Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture” (Oxford UP, 2013) Dec 10, 2015

What is hip? Can a piece of music be hip? Or is hipness primarily a way of engaging with music which recognizes the hip potential of the music? Or primarily a manner of being, which allows the hip individual to authentically engage with the hip artwork? Whatever the case may be, we know that the hip is meant to be authentic. We know that it is opposed to the square:all that is inauthentic, conformist, and authoritarian. And we know that attempts to understand hipness tend to locate it in the sonorous immediacy of musical experience.

Phil Ford‘s, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013) uses these attempts to understand hipness as an entry into the altogether more intractable problem of defining hipness itself. Ford traces the hip sensibility from its roots in the African-American subcultures that arose in cities such as New York and Chicago in the aftermath of the Great Migration, through its adoption (or appropriation) by the beat poets of the 1950s and the counterculture movement of the 1960s. In doing so, he marshals a wide array of sources:newspaper columns, jazz improvisations, political posters, liner notes, diaries, and amateur acetate recordings, all grappling — in creative, illuminating, and sometimes painful ways — with the impossibility of capturing the lived experience of hipness.

In the closing chapters of the book, he turns to two specific figures, Norman Mailer (a major writer), and John Benson Brooks (a somewhat peripheral jazz musician), reevaluating their works — and perhaps more importantly, their methods of working — in the light of the hip aesthetics described in the earlier sections of the book.

Further Listening/Viewing/Reading:

John Benson Brooks Trio: Avant Slant

Thomas Frank: The Conquest of Cool

Fruity Pebbles Rap

Rip Torn attacks Norman Mailer with a Hammer

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Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, “Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights” (UNC Press, 2015) Dec 09, 2015

In Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights (The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, a writer and former journalist, introduces us to the larger-than-life personality Harry Golden. A writer, publisher, and humorist, as well as activist, Golden used his popularity and incredibly wide network for a variety of causes, most notably the civil rights movement.

Hartnett explores the ways Golden utilized his talents (he was, at his core, a salesman) to make America more equal and free.

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Kimberly Fain, “Colson Whitehead: The Postracial Voice of Contemporary Literature” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015) Nov 30, 2015

Colson Whitehead’s fiction has drawn varied criticism. On the one hand, there’s the scholarship of the African diaspora, a tradition that takes the long view of Whitehead–extrapolating him from their existing canon (of Du Bois, Hurston, Ellison, etc.); on the other hand, there’s the conversation on Whitehead’s work that’s happening more in the literary main stream. On Kimberly Fain‘s view, the last word is somewhere in between, and in her Colson Whitehead: The Postracial Voice of Contemporary Literature (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), she considers a more integral fiction: one both a product of a long history and of an intermediating pop culture.

The big task of Colson Whitehead is to position the fictionist as a “postracial” figure–a figure who represents a changing attitude on the concept and reality of race. What would it mean to live a really, truly colorblind America? You can see inklings in Whitehead, especially in his latter work. And while it is clear from Whitehead’s own (critical) writing that postracialism is–to us, now–still an ideal, it’s in the same writing where race begins to matter not less, but perhaps just in a different way. That race might begin to signify culture, community, a legacy in art–and something less sociopolitical or less economic.

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Daniel Geary, “Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) Oct 27, 2015

Daniel Geary is the Mark Pigott Associate Professor in U.S. History at Trinity College Dublin. His book Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) is a detail and illuminating analysis of the reception of Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Geary argues that the report was neither a conservative or a liberal document but rather a conflicted one whose internal contradictions reflected the breakup of the liberal consensus and its legacy. The ambiguities of the report allowed multiple interpretations, from both the left and the right, and marked the emergence of neoconservatism. Conservatives used the report to rally against the liberal welfare state and promote African Americans self-help. Liberals saw in the document the need to go beyond legal equality to aggressive economic intervention through training programs, job creation and the family wage. The extensive and long debate over the report involved the issues of family structure, the source of “social pathology” and the “culture of poverty.” African American civil rights leader split over the report. The Black Power representatives attacked its white sociological perspective that failed to take into account how black people saw the situation. Black feminists protested the portrayal of black women as domineering matriarchs and the male breadwinner model. By the time of the Nixon administration, fatigue over the debates had Moynihan arguing for “benign neglect” rather than national action, believing in an unfolding of progress evident in the black middle-classes. After fifty years, the reverberation from the Moynihan report continues as Americans wrestle with the relationship between race and economic inequality and the unfinished business of social equality that moves beyond civil rights.

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Debra Majeed, “Polygyny: What it Means When African American Muslim Women Share Their Husbands” (UP of Florida, 2015) Sep 30, 2015

In her wonderful new book Polygyny: What it Means When African American Muslim Women Share Their Husbands (University Press of Florida, 2015), Debra Majeed, Professor of Religious Studies at Beloit College, provides an analytically robust and moving account of the aspirations, paradoxes, and problems attached to polygyny in the African American Muslim community. By combining ethnography, history, and performance studies, Majeed seamlessly weaves together the theological, legal, and sociological dynamics of living polygyny. Readers of this book are treated to a riveting and incredibly lucid portrayal of a complicated phenomenon that brings together intimate individual stories and the broader historical and societal conditions that generate those stories in a remarkably effective fashion. In our conversation, we talked about the idea of Muslim Womanism, the methodology of dialogical performance, the Qur’an and polygyny, the paradoxes of polygyny, Imam W.D Mohammed’s teachings on polygyny, and the emotional and psychological impact of polygyny n children and women. This is among those rare books that are at once methodologically exciting and complex and yet astonishingly accessible and well written. Polygyny should also make an excellent reading in courses on gender and Islam, Islamic law, American Islam, and American Religion more broadly.

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Gregory O’Malley, “Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807” (UNC Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2014) Sep 26, 2015

Gregory E. O’Malley examines a crucial, but almost universally overlooked, aspect of the African slave trade in his new book Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807 (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2014). Although most work on the topic focuses on the “Middle Passage” – the shipping of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean – O’Malley chronicles the “final passages” that many captives faced from the Caribbean to ports scattered throughout the Americas. A significant percentage of enslaved people faced these added voyages, which could often be more brutal and unhealthy than the Middle Passage. O’Malley traces the effect of the intercolonial trade on African captives, as well its influence on the creation of an enslaved culture in the Americas. He also examines in great detail how this intercolonial trade shaped the markets of slavery in the Western Hemisphere, which in turn dramatically affected diplomatic relations between European powers in the period.

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Sonja D. Williams “Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom” (U of Illinois Press, 2015) Sep 23, 2015

Sonja D. Williams‘ book Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom (University of Illinois Press, 2015) connects its subject to some of the most important events and social movements of his time, including what we now call the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Migration. Durham’s life path, like that of many other African Americans born in the early part of the 20th century, goes from the Jim Crow South, to Chicago, where his family builds a solid middle-class existence founded on educational attainment and hard work. Durham’s writing career included poetry, newspapers, radio, television, and a celebrated biography of Muhammad Ali. Durham also played a significant role in the election of the first black mayor of Chicago, his high school friend, Harold Washington. In this engaging interview, Sonja Williams sheds important light on an unassuming man who was most comfortable quietly but forcefully serving the causes he believed in from behind the scenes.

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Leah Wright Rigueur, “The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power” (Princeton UP, 2015) Aug 16, 2015

Leah Wright Rigueur is an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her book The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton University Press, 2015) examines how the Grand Old Party of Lincoln lost its position as the home of the African American vote. Covering more than four decades beginning in Roosevelt’s New Deal to Ronald Reagan’s presidential election, Rigueur examines the ideas and actions of black Republican activists, officials, and politicians to build and remain within the Party’s shrinking tent. Marginalized within their own communities and party, black Republicans fought political battles on two fronts. They continually sought to include black needs and interest in the changing formulation of conservatism. Their stories reveal an alternative approach to economic and civil rights within a party increasingly hostile to racially progressive ideas as it wooed the white vote. Rigueur introduces us to republican views of many including the Senator Edward Brooks, Robert J. Brown, Jackie Robinson and black organizations such as National Black Republican Council and the National Negro Republican Assembly. Black republicans dealt with numerous issues including ensuring black political participation, individual rights, economic opportunity, and racial equality. Rigueur has given us a thought-provoking examination on the failure of the Republican Party to live up the legacy of Lincoln, and to respond to its black members who remained committed to the conservative ideals of free enterprise, individual initiative, and limited government.

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Preston Lauterbach, “Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis” (Norton, 2015) Aug 04, 2015

Following the Civil War, Memphis emerged a center of black progress, optimism, and cultural ferment, after a period of turmoil. Preston Lauterbach joins host Jonathan Judaken for an in-depth discussion in advance of the launch of Lauterbach’s latest book, Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis (Norton, 2015).

Robert Church, Sr., who would become “the South’s first black millionaire,” was a slave owned by his white father. Having survived a deadly race riot in 1866, Church constructed an empire of vice in the booming river town of post-Civil War Memphis. He made a fortune with saloons, gambling, and–shockingly–white prostitution. But he also nurtured the militant journalism of Ida B. Wells and helped revolutionize American music through the work of composer W.C. Handy, the man called “the inventor of the blues.”

In the face of Jim Crow, the Church fortune helped fashion the most powerful black political organization of the early twentieth century. Robert and his son, Robert, Jr., bought and sold property, founded a bank, and created a park and auditorium for their people finer than the places whites had forbidden them to attend.

However, the Church family operated through a tense arrangement with the Democrat machine run by the notorious E. H. “Boss” Crump, who stole elections and controlled city hall. The battle between this black dynasty and the white political machine would define the future of Memphis.

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Laura F. Edwards, “A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights” (Cambridge UP, 2015) Jul 26, 2015

In this podcast I talk with Laura F. Edwards, Peabody Family Professor of History at Duke University about her book, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights (Cambridge University Press 2015).

Per the book’s introduction, “[a]lthough hundreds of thousands of people died fighting in the Civil War, perhaps the war’s biggest casualty was the nation’s legal order. A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction explores the implications of this major change by bringing legal history into dialogue with the scholarship of other historical fields. Federal policy on slavery and race, particularly the three Reconstruction Amendments, are the best-known legal innovations of the era. Change, however, permeated all levels of the legal system, altering American’s relationship to the law and allowing them to move popular conceptions of justice into the ambit of government policy. The results linked Americans to the nation through individual rights, which were extended to more people and, as a result of new claims, were reimagined to cover a wider array of issues. But rights had limits in what they could accomplish, particularly when it came to the collective goals that so many ordinary Americans advocated. Ultimately, Laura F. Edwards argues, this new nation of rights offered up promises that would prove difficult to sustain.”

Some of the topics we cover are:

–The way, in the lead up to the Civil War, all arguments came back to the Constitution.

–How wartime policies in both the Confederacy and the states that remained in the Union fundamentally remade the –legal authority of the nation.

–Why the Confederacy’s legal order was at odds with its stated governing principles.

–Popular conceptions of Reconstruction-era legal change.

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Mia E. Bay, et al., “Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women” (UNC Press, 2015) Jul 26, 2015

Mia Bay is a professor of history at Rutgers University, and Director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity. She is co-editor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina, 2015). Bay and her co-authors have brought together a strikingly good collection of fifteen essays that presents us with a sampling of a neglected field of thought. All focus on black women of the diaspora in North America, the Caribbean and Africa as subjects of critical thought and articulators of ideas on a wide variety of subjects. The authors demonstrate how black women lived and thought at the intersection of both race and gender. As a distinct field, the growth of black women’s intellectual history has suffered from several handicaps including resistance within the field of intellectual history. As Black men are often the focus as defenders of their race, black women are often portrayed as activists; doers rather than thinkers. The informal nature of much of black women’s thought, the lack of formal education and the use of religious language makes them appear as inarticulate in matters of racial and gender politics. The scarcity of written texts, particularly for the eighteen-century and much of the nineteenth, renders constructing a history of black women’s thought a project akin to archeology; a limitation the writers readily take up as a challenge. The authors appeal to social history influencing the wider acceptance of non-elite thought, and feminist scholarship as bringing attention to the field as worthy of study. The fifteen essays cover a range of topics including religion, challenges to race science, the meaning of black women’s bodies, respectability, political theory, and feminism. The entire collection is an excellent source and a promising movement toward constructing a transnational history of black women’s thought.

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David George Surdham, “The Big Leagues Go to Washington: Congress and Sports Antitrust, 1951-1989” (U of Illinois Press, 2015) Jul 24, 2015

David George Surdham is the author of The Big Leagues Go to Washington: Congress and Sports Antitrust, 1951-1989 (University of Illinois Press, 2015). Surdham is Associate Professor of Economics at Northern Iowa University.

Just back from the Major League Baseball All-Star break, Surdham has written a book for sports lovers. Why do major league sports receive such preferential treatment from Congress? And what does this have to do with labor and economic development policy? Surdham examines Congressional hearings held over decades to figure out how Washington’s role in professional sports has changed over since the 1950s.

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Carlos Kevin Blanton, “George I. Sanchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration” (Yale UP, 2015) Jul 12, 2015

Although the designation now applies to American citizens of Mexican ethnicity writ large, the term Mexican American (hyphenated or not) also refers to the rising generation of ethnic Mexicans born and raised in the U.S. that came into adulthood during the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War years. In a new biography, George I. Sanchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration (Yale University Press, 2015) Professor of History at Texas A&M University Carlos Kevin Blanton provides the first in-depth study of one of the Mexican American generation’s most prolific intellectuals and activists. Born into humble circumstances in rural New Mexico in 1906, George I. Sanchez became a tireless and tremendously influential academic, policy advisor, and activist who devoted his career to battling poverty and discrimination against Mexican Americans throughout the Southwest. Whether engaged in teaching as a professor of education at the University of Texas, a researcher for numerous governmental and non-profit foundations, or as a leader and collaborator of civil rights organizations like LULAC, AGIF, ACLU, and the NAACP, Sanchez was a racial integrationist ahead of his time. In this thorough and empathetic portrait of one of the mid-twentiethcentury’s most innovative educators and activists, Professor Blanton challenges previous interpretations of the Mexican American Generation’s sense of identity, as well as their contributions to civil rights reform and Cold War liberalism.

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Julian E. Zelizer, “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society” (Penguin, 2015) Jul 06, 2015

Julian E. Zelizer is the author of The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (Penguin Press, 2015). Zelizer is the Malcom Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a fellow at New America.

In the Fierce Urgency of Now, Zelizer focuses on the heated period of 1963-1966, and President Lyndon Johnson’s effort to pass a civil rights bill. Johnson has been credited as the chief architect of the passage of the ultimate bill, but Zelizer shifts focus to Congress and the variety of interest groups lobbying for and against the bill. In doing so, Zelizer argues that credit for the civil rights acts must be more widely shared.

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Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox, “Running from Office: Why Young Americans Are Turned off to Politics” (Oxford UP, 2015) Jun 28, 2015

Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox are the authors of Running from Office: Why Young Americans Are Turned off to Politics (Oxford UP,2015). Lawless is a Professor of Government and the Director of the Women & Politics Institute at American University. Fox is a Professor of Political Science at Loyola Marymount University.

The two conducted surveys of over 4,000 younger Americans. What they find is that their young Americans rarely think, talk or consider politics. While many seem to care about the world, this infrequently translates to running for office or aspirations to work in politics. They find: Just 11 percent of respondents said that they had thought about running office “many times” while 61 percent said they “never” considered it. Asked if various jobs paid the same, they find just 13 percent of respondents said they would want to be a member of Congress, versus 37 percent who chose business executive and 27 percent school principal; only 19 percent indicated that a future goal was to become a political leader. And less than 10% of respondents said that their parents would want them to pursue a job as a member of Congress, compared to around 50 percent for owning a business.

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Ted A. Smith, “Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics” (Stanford UP, 2014) Jun 23, 2015

People living in the modern west generally have no problem criticizing religiously-justified violence. It’s therefore always interesting when I discuss John Brown, a man who legitimized anti-slavery violence Biblically. My most recent batch of students sought to resolve this tension by declaring John Brown to be “crazy but right.” In his new book Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics (Stanford University Press, 2014), Ted A. Smith unravels the tensions that led to my students’ ambiguous conclusion. By providing a profound ethical meditation on Brown and his fellow raiders to challenge how people, particularly Americans, think about morality; the relationship between religion, the state, and violence; and to the possibilities of judgment and redemption, Smith illustrates how an ethical and philosophical reading of history can help us to better understand the world we live in, what we should do, and of the importance of going beyond just what we ought to do.

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Philip A. Wallach, “To The Edge: Legality, Legitimacy, and the Responses to the 2008 Financial Crisis” (Brookings, 2015) Jun 22, 2015

Philip A. Wallach is the author of To The Edge: Legality, Legitimacy, and the Responses to the 2008 Financial Crisis (Brookings Institution Press, 2015). Wallach is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution.

There has been a lot written about the financial crisis of the late 2000s, but little with the attention to important concepts from political science. Wallach investigates the various federal strategies to address the meltdown of the financial sector from the perspective of legitimacy, seeking to understand what we can learn about this idea from the unprecedented expansion of federal power. From efforts to save the failing investment banks, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, to the passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), federal officials applied a largely ad-hoc approach that Wallach deems “adhocracy” often substituting expedience for legal authority. While this worked in the short-term, Wallach probes where this leaves the country and speculates about what will come in the future.

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Akinyele Omowale Umoja, “We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement” (NYU Press, 2013) Jun 20, 2015

The historiography of the southern Civil Rights Movement has long focused on the tactic of non-violence. With only a few notable exceptions, most scholarship locates the use of armed self-defense and other forms of armed resistance in northern cities while temporally, we usually think of these strategies as rising to prominence only later in the movement. Akinyele Omowale Umoja, Professor and Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Georgia State University, tells us this common narrative omits a long and rich history of armed resistance in the southern Black Freedom Struggle. His new book, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York University Press, 2013), traces the roots of this armed resistance in Mississippi. His book shows black Mississippians had a long tradition of armed self-defense extending well before the iconic Civil Rights campaigns in the state. Moreover, when the movement came, self-defense remained. The book shows armed self-defense co-existed with non-violence–sometimes cooperatively, sometimes uneasily, and often both–throughout the period usually strongly associated with non-violence, such as during Freedom Summer. We Will Shoot Back goes on to examine the growing prominence of armed resistance in the mid to late 1960s. He shows the many different forms armed resistance took. Some of those forms were advocated by small groups or were short-lived, while others were quite successful.

In this episode of the podcast, Umoja discusses how he came to study this topic and his research process, including many oral histories. He also explains the importance of broadening our understanding of Civil Rights activism to include this longer history of armed resistance.

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Andrew Hartman, “The War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) Jun 20, 2015

Andrew Hartman is associate professor of history at Illinois State University. His book A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2015) provides a whirlwind tour through the most salient debates of what became known as the culture wars of the late twentieth century. As a set of debates and political tussles the culture wars reflected America’s struggle to deal with the vast changes left by 1960s and more complex than a simple left/right, secular/religious binary that characterized public discussion. Beginning with the normative Americanism fragmenting under the influence of the New Left, Hartman shows us how the watershed decade set the terms for the cultural wars. Public intellectuals such as Paul Goodman and C. Wright Mills to rock stars such as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the comedy duo the Smothers Brothers marked the changes. Seemingly everything about American life from sexual mores to national history was up for renegotiation. Hartman places the genesis of the debate for the American future in the struggle between the New Left and their chief ideological opponents, and former liberals, neoconservatives. Soon this initial intellectual battle fueled a popular war for the social, religious, and economic future drawing in the newly formed Christian Right, self-identified ethnic groups, feminist and others. The struggles over school curriculum, the rewriting of history, cultural power, the family, religion, and the nature of truth, was the process of coming to terms with a new reality – a situation of a permanent culture revolution and the loss of a normative shared culture. With the heat of the battle significantly cooled, we are left with what Hartman calls an “antiauthoritarian individualism” under intransigent capitalism weakening the hope for social democracy.

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Rory Carroll, “Comandante: Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela” (Penguin Books, 2013) Jun 09, 2015

Historically, Venezuela is known as one of the most stable Latin American nations of the twentieth century. The subsequent discovery of oil transformed Venezuela into a petrostate. Yet wealth inequality dramatically increased. Against this economic and social disparity, Hugo Chavez rose to power, becoming one of a number of dynamic Latin American politicians. But what legacy did Chavez leave behind after his death in 2013, and how has his successor, Nicholas Madruo, fared in continuing the Bolivarian Revolution? Rory Carroll is a journalist with The Guardian and spent a number of years in Venezuela. His book, Comandante: Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela (Penguin Books, 2013), recounts his time in Latin America. Speaking to Venezuelans on both side of the political spectrum, from farmers to ex-politicians and government insiders, Carroll discovers that opinions of Chavez’s presidency are sharply divided. However, many agree that Hugo fundamentally changed the destiny and vision of Venezuela.

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Charis Thompson, “Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research” (MIT Press, 2013) Jun 08, 2015

Charis Thompson‘s Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research (MIT Press, 2013) is an important book. Good Science explores the “ethical choreography” of the consolidation of human embryonic stem cell research in the first decade of the twenty-first century, drawing important implications for the possible futures of stem cell research by looking carefully at its past and developing an approach to what Thompson calls “good science.” The book compellingly argues that “a high level of political attention to the ethics of the life sciences and biomedicine…is a good thing for science and democracy,” especially as we have now reached “the end of the beginning of human pluripotent stem cell research.”

Part I of the book (Stem Cell Biopolitics) explores early attention to the embryo debate. Ch. 2 looks at stem cell research as it’s widely understood to engage ethical concerns, describing the “pro-curial frame” of stem cell research in the period under scrutiny, when promoting stem cell innovation involved aspirations to be pro-cure and there was an ethical focus on the procurement of stem cells and cell lines for research. Pt. II of the book (Stem Cell Geopolitics) looks at what happened domestically as the debate over stem cells moved from the federal to the state levels and back in the US, and then turns to consider transnational circuits that were crucial to those practices and conversations. Ch. 3 looks at three phases that made up the beginning of human pluripotent stem cell research in the US: the time around President Bush’s 2001 policy, the period when states “seceded” from that policy (exemplified by California’s Proposition 71), and the period around Obama’s 2009 policy. Ch. 4 looks at the transnational geopolitics of stem cell research in an era when stem cell research became increasingly international and research advocates were deeply concerned with international competition and “brain drain.” Thompson takes readers into laboratory environments in South Korea and Singapore in order to undermine a popular rhetorical binary of East/West that contrasted an “East” that had a pro-science spirit and lack of concern with the moral status of the embryo, and a “West” that had been taken over by anti-science religious fanatics and technophobes.

Pt. III of the book (Thinking of Other Lives) looks carefully at questions of research subjecthood. Ch. 7 focuses on human-human relationships and practices of donation at a time when a number of norms came under renewed scrutiny – including altruism, anonymity, and the alienation of tissue from donors – and this led to the conclusion that the old model for donation wasn’t working. In this context, there were increasing demands for reciprocity in various forms, and Thompson considers various models in California that rethought the relationships between donor/recipient and biomaterial/bioinformation. Ch. 6 focuses on the logic of using animals as substitutive research subjects for human-focused research, and calling for a move away from using animals as research subjects and toward using in vitro systems instead.

To do all of this, Thompson develops a methodology she calls “triage” which we talk about early in the interview. Good Science is a wonderful and critical book, and well worth reading and teaching widely!

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Kevin M. Schultz, “Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Shaped the Sixties” (W. W. Norton, 2015) Jun 02, 2015

In Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Shaped the Sixties (W.W. Norton, 2015), Kevin M. Schultz has given us a lively and colorful narrative history that captures the character of two complex men and the times in which they lived. Juxtaposing a conservative William F. Buckley Jr. and the radical Norman Mailer against a liberal establishment brings into sharp relief what the men shared and the source of their conflict. Both men agreed that there was something amiss of about American society and sought to build a movement against the entrenchment of liberal bureaucratic control and the threat of totalitarianism. With clashing visions for a new national politic, they were both surprised by the constituency that they each attracted and grew more alike as they responded to the movements they had fomented. Through their writings, public and private encounters, and an overlapping network of friends and political acquaintances we get a glimpse in the elite power dynamics that shaped the sixties. By attending to a flurry of lectures, debates, parties, letters, and the striking personalities of these two men, Schultz shows us was right and wrong with America at mid-century and the transition from a rules based to a rights based society. The relationship of Buckley and Mailer not only reflected the nation’s struggles in the sixties, but also captures the continual conflict over the future of America.

Kevin M. Shultz is an associated professor of history at University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Michael Gould-Wartofsky, “The Occupiers: The Making of the 99 Percent Movement” (Oxford UP, 2015) Jun 01, 2015

Michael Gould-Wartofsky is the author of The Occupiers: The Making of the 99 Percent Movement (Oxford University Press, 2015). He is a PhD candidate in Sociology at New York University.

There has been a lot written about the Occupy Wall Street movement, but little with the sophistication and personal touch of Gould-Wartofsky’s new book. What emerged in the fall of 2011 in Lower Manhattan had roots in similar protests going on across Europe, but soon spread to over a thousand US cities. As a participant observer from the very earliest days of the movement, Gould-Wartofsky blends writing styles and perspectives as he deepens what we know about social movements, in general. He maps the various tactics, factions, and motivations that drove the movement, but also what it felt like to be in Zuccotti Park.

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Miriam Pawel, “The Crusades of Cesar Chavez” (Bloomsbury Press, 2014) May 29, 2015

Cesar Chavez founded a labor union. Launched a movement. And inspired a generation. Two Decades after his death, Chavez remains the most significant Latino figure in U.S. history.” So reads the inside flap ofMiriam Pawel’s new biography The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (Bloomsbury Press, 2014). However, while many are acquainted with the iconography of Chavez as the leader of the Farmworker Movement that took on California’s powerful grape industry during the mid-to-late 1960s, much less is known about Chavez himself and his personal and organizational background prior to the formation of the National Farm Workers Association (the precursor to the United Farm Workers or UFW) or the internal dynamics and struggles between Chavez and his top brass. With great detail and empathy, Pawel provides a complex portrait of Chavez as a visionary and tireless organizer whose humility, strategic brilliance, and improbable success was matched only by his own arrogance, tactical blunders, and embarrassing defeats. We hope you enjoy listening to our fascinating conversation.

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Michelle Ann Stephens, “Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and the Black Male Performer” (Duke UP, 2014) May 28, 2015

Why would Bert Williams, famous African-American vaudeville performer of the early twentieth century, feel it necessary to apply burnt cork blackface make-up to his already dark skin, in order to emphasize “blackness”? According to Michelle Ann Stephens, this was one question about the space between realness, race, and performance that led her to write Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and the Black Male Performer (Duke University Press, 2014). Stephens investigates the history of the concept of the skin, especially in relation to the notion of the flesh, and how they are both re-written by colonialization, and the idea of racial difference. Stephens turns to the work of four iconic black male stars whose careers span the twentieth century–including Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte and Bob Marley–and explores the dynamic between the gaze, representation and technology, and how these performers challenged notions of race, sexuality, and skin/flesh in the act of performing. Stephens uses psychoanalytic theory to understand the role of the viewer and the viewed and how the gaze operates as a racial and racializing object. Calling on the work of cultural theorists, Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, Lacan, Jessica Benjamin, and Sylvia Winter among so many others, Stephens takes the reader along on a bold new attempt to relate psychoanalysis, race, and gender identity in fresh, optimistic, and clinically promising ways.

Michelle Stephens teaches in the Departments of English and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Originally from Jamaica, West Indies, she graduated from Yale University with a Ph.D. in American Studies and teaches courses in African American, American, Caribbean and Black Diaspora Literature and Culture. She is the author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914 to 1962 (Duke University Press, 2005).She is currently in training at the The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology.

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Beatrix Hoffman, “Health Care for Some: Rights and Rationing in the United States since 1930” (U of Chicago, 2012) May 28, 2015

Disputes over the definitions or legality of ‘rights’ and ‘rationing’ in their various guises have animated much of the debate around the United States Affordable Care Act. Many legislators and vocal members of their constituency have strong convictions about the state of our current national health care system and where it is going. Far fewer, however, understand how our current state of affairs is the product of a quite recent and contingent history, which is precisely what Beatrix Hoffman‘s Health Care for Some: Rights and Rationing in the United States since 1930 (University of Chicago, 2012) sets out to explain. While Hoffman’s scope is the U.S. as a whole, she draws out the local consequences of sweeping wartime and post-war reform by focusing on various cities, notably Chicago. Using a framework that addresses the reciprocal roles of rights and rationing as articulated by physicians, policymakers, and patients throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, she presents a concise history that speaks to far greater questions.

Throughout Health Care for Some, we learn much about the institutional transformations of modern U.S. healthcare: how the expansive yet exclusive county hospital system was not inevitable but fell in line with other infrastructural imperatives, while war-wrecked European nations actually improved primary care coverage through austerity policies; how doctors increasingly struggled with poor state management and strictures that, despite being legally sanctioned, discouraged providing care to the most needy; how Medicare and Medicaid were motivated as much by the civil rights movement as arguments for dignity of old age as a social right. Importantly, the human dimensions of care are never hidden from sight, as Hoffman unravels narratives of entangled structures and subjectivities that evince the personal damage wrought by a system too diffuse to overhaul. Her book is an engaging, informative, and concise read, as capable of becoming a valuable reference as it is of fomenting thought and action.

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Julian E. Zelizer, “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society” (Penguin Press, 2015) May 22, 2015

In recent decades, as Democrats and Republicans have grown more and more polarized ideologically, and gridlock has becoming increasingly standard in Congress, there has been a noticeable pining for the good old days when bipartisanship was common, and strongmen like Lyndon B. Johnson occupied the White House, ready to twist a few arms or trade a little pork when narrow interests threatened the general welfare. Liberals have perhaps been most vulnerable to this myth of late, with journalists repeatedly calling on Obama to bust through the unprecedented obstruction of the last few years by channeling the spirit of LBJ, who delivered more progressive legislation than anyone, save FDR.

But as the eminent political historian Julian E. Zelizer writes in his new book The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (Penguin Press, 2015), this view of the past falls short on a number of counts. When LBJ first took over, he faced the same “do-nothing” Congress that had imprisoned domestic reform under JFK, Eisenhower, Truman, and the late New Deal, too. The South, an increasingly small part of the national population (counting the millions who could not vote), nonetheless dominated the old committee system, thanks to mass incumbency in the one-party region, America’s uncommon deference to seniority in the legislature and its local delegation of voter law. Leaguing frequently with the GOP’s right wing, Southern chairmen prevented a host of reforms from escaping the drafting stage and reaching a floor vote, even where legislation had popular support. A golden age of bipartisanship. Johnson understood, where many have forgotten, that it was these giants of Congress, not the White House, which held all the power. And these legislators boasted as much, often protected by districts with vanishingly small electorates.

What opened the floodgates to the Great Society was not LBJ, “master of the Senate,” famed author of “The Treatment,” but the liberal supermajority of the “Fabulous eighty-ninth” Congress. When these votes disappeared in the midterm, a standard historical pattern, reform came to a screeching halt. (One reason Johnson urged House terms–the shortest in the democratic world–be extended to four years.) Liberals had major advantages in the 1960s that they have since lost: huge unions with crucial manpower and funding, a massive civil rights groundswell, “modern” Republican allies, brain-trust and whip organizations in Congress that Zelizer here thankfully recovers from obscurity. But one thing that has not changed is America’s uniquely divided governmental system. Reformers dream of Great Men and focus on the White House, not Capitol Hill and the built-in features of gridlock, to their peril.

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Lawrence Jacobs, “Who Governs? Presidents, Public Opinion, and Manipulation” (U Chicago Press, 2015) May 18, 2015

Lawrence Jacobs is the author (with James Druckman) of Who Governs? Presidents, Public Opinion, and Manipulation (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Jacobs is the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota.

Just how responsive is the president to the public? In theory, we all hope very, but increasingly we worry that presidents have grown more distant from the wishes of the public. In Who Governs?, we get an empirical answer to that question that is at once novel and also deeply disturbing. Jacobs and Druckman explore how presidents, since Kennedy, have used public opinion polling to craft public messages and shape public priorities. Polling has grown significantly since the 1960s, both in its utilization, and also its sophistication, and presidents, especially Ronald Reagan, have given increasing attention to their results. But rather than using polls to closely adhere to the average voter, many presidents have catered to narrow segments of the populace, rending polling another tool used to undermine democratic governance.

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Mariana Candido, “An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World” (Cambridge UP, 2013) Apr 17, 2015

Mariana Candido‘s book An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World. Benguela and its Hinterland (Cambridge University Press, 2013) is a powerful and moving exploration of the history and development of the port of Benguela. Founded by the Portuguese in the early seventeenth century, Benguela, located on the central coast of present-day Angola, was the third largest port of slave embarkation on the coast of Africa. In discussing the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on African societies, Candido looks at the formation of new elites, the collapse of old states, and the emergence of new ones. Her book offers a new perspective on the importance of the South Atlantic as a space for the circulation of people, ideas, and crops. But what makes this book truly distinctive is how Candido digs beneath the surface of her evidence to give readers a sense of the lived experiences and feelings of all involved in the trade: the unfortunate victims and those who benefited from the violent capture and selling of human beings. As historian John Thornton observes, Candido’s book “will be a starting point for studies of the region for years to come.”

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Kirt von Daacke, “Freedom Has a Face: Race, Identity, and Community in Jefferson’s Virginia” (UVA Press, 2012) Apr 16, 2015

In this podcast I talk to Kirt von Daacke about his 2012 work, Freedom Has a Face:Race, Identity, and Community in Jefferson’s Virginia (University of Virginia Press, 2012). Professor von Daacke is Associate Professor of History and Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. In this interview a few topics we discuss are:

* Sources and methods for piecing together a picture of life in Albemarle County and the use of legal documents as a window into a past society

* The relationship between law on the books and the actual behavior of the inhabitants of Albemarle County

* Free people of color’s experiences with the legal system

* The possibilities and the pitfalls awaiting unmarried women of color in the rural antebellum South

* Some implications of Freedom Has a Face for future work on African American history

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Paula T. Connolly, “Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790-2010” (U of Iowa Press, 2013) Mar 26, 2015

The “peculiar institution” upon which the US nation was founded is still rich for examination.Perhaps this is why it is a subject to which 21st century authors continue to return. In this exploration of slavery, Paula T. Connolly, author of Slavery in American Children’s Literature 1790 – 2010 (University of Iowa, 2013), provides an expansive study of the ways in which proslavery and abolitionist literature framed discussions of slavery for the future of the nation: children.

One of the questions to which Connolly’s investigation responds is whether US authors of children’s literature frame discussions of slavery in similar ways that writers of adult literature do. In the course of our conversation Connolly notes, “Many of us like to believe that we frame slavery differently for adults and children, but it’s simply not true.” Thus, readers will find that, similar to books for adults, children’s literature has conventional motifs of the subservient and grateful slave, or the kind and heroic master, for example. Additionally, character demonstration that he can properly manage his responsibility as master — a rite of passage — remains a shared theme.

Connolly, Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, reminds readers of the various genres of abolitionist and/or proslavery literature. She includes sharp analysis of popular plantation stories, slave narratives, post-plantation novels, proslavery adventure novels, confederate textbooks, Freedman’s schoolbooks, and neo-abolitionist texts throughout the various historical periods of her extensive research. Along the way, readers learn, interestingly, that at times both abolitionist and proslavery texts upheld the same old notions of white supremacy despite their oppositional goals.

That both adult literature and/or children’s literature frame slavery through similar cultural lenses makes sense. After all, adults are the ones writing for children. Indeed, ideologies of the “white savior” or “needy slave” for example, remain firmly rooted as we learn that children’s literature long after the Civil War continues to reflect old beliefs. It remains clear that the act of emancipation did nothing to destroy deeply entrenched white hegemony in the nation.

Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790-2010 — the first expansive study of slavery in children’s literature — is a fine example of the ways in which interdisciplinarity enhances the study of slavery in the US. The text brings together History, Literary Studies, Education, studies in Visual Arts, and what results is an enriching, multi-dimensional perspective on US pedagogy of race.

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Carolyn Finney, “Black Faces, White Spaces” (UNC Press, 2014) Mar 17, 2015

Geographer Carolyn Finney wrote Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), out of a frustration with the dominant environmental discourse that, she asserts, doesn’t fully take into consideration the perspectives and interests of African Americans.Finney takes care to recognize the multiplicity of African American relationships to the natural environment and to the environmental movement, broadly understood.Finney’sapproach to the subject matter, in which the personal (family history and herpersonal politics) is fully integrated into her scholarly project, is deliberately directed to a diverse audience in order to allowthe broadest possible cross section of readers to engage meaningfully with issues surrounding the environmental movement and natural resource management in the United States.

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Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos, “Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America” (Oxford UP 2014) Mar 15, 2015

Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos are the authors of Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America (Oxford University Press, 2014). McAdam is The Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and the former Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Kloos is a scholar of political sociology and social movements at Stanford University, where she is a PhD candidate.

What has gotten us to this point of high political polarization and high income inequality? McAdam and Kloos offer a novel answer to what divides us as a country that focuses on the role social movements have in pulling parties to the extremes or pushing parties to the middle. They argue that the post-World War II period was unusual for its low levels of social movement activities and the resulting political centrism of the 1950s. The Civil Rights movement that followed – and the related backlash politics of the Southern Democrats – pushed the parties away from the center and toward regional realignment. Along the way, activists re-wrote party voting procedures that reinforced the power of vocal minorities within each party, thereby entrenching political polarization for the decades to come.

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Kaeten Mistry, “The United States, Italy, and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare” (Cambridge UP, 2014) Mar 11, 2015

In the annals of cold war history Italy is rarely seen as a crucial locale. In his stimulating new book, The United States, Italy, and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Kaeten Mistry reveals how events in Italy proved surprisingly crucial in defining a conflict that dominated much of the twentieth century. For the United States, it marked the first intervention in the postwar era to influence events abroad through political warfare, the use of all measures ‘short of war’ in foreign affairs. Drawing particular attention to the Italian election of 18 April 1948, he explains how the campaign for the first national election of the newfound Italian republic marked a critical defeat for communism in the early cold war. The United States utilized a range of overt and covert methods against Marxist political and social power. Political warfare seemingly outlined a way to tackle communist strength more widely.

Analyzing American political warfare efforts against the Italian left allows Mistry to advance a number of important arguments. He shows how U.S. efforts were largely improvised and many key decisions ad hoc. While officials in Washington like George F. Kennan worked to institutionalize political warfare, Italian actors and a host of non-governmental organizations played a crucial role in the defeat of the Italian left, even if they did not always share the same agenda as American officials. Mistry emphasizes Italian agency, explaining how Christian Democrat Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi pursued his own agenda to protect national sovereignty. The Vatican had its own objectives, as did trade unions, citizen groups, and multinational corporations. Other actors held a less rigid view of the Cold War than their American counterparts. In short, political warfare was more than an American story yet U.S. officials and commentators lined up to praise the election campaign as a distinctly American success. Mistry argues that this ‘perception of success’ contributed to an expanded use of political warfare, as U.S efforts turned to subverting communist power in Eastern Europe and, later, the Global South.

The work is a refreshing reminder of how foreign policy is rarely under the control of elite figures in Washington. Rather, it is subject to negotiation with various foreign and non-governmental actors. When viewed in this light, Mistry’s work is a useful reminder that governments will almost always invite trouble when they assume the ‘success’ of their efforts to shape events abroad, overlooking the role and motives of other peoples and groups, to make the case for intervention elsewhere. Enjoy.

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David Krugler, “1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back” (Cambridge UP, 2014) Feb 13, 2015

In 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (Cambridge University Press, 2014), David Krugler chronicles the origins and development of ten major race riots that took place in the United States during that year. Although sustained, anti-black violence both predates and succeeds the year under examination, 1919 distinguishes itself by the sheer number of major racial conflicts occurring between late 1918 and late 1919. Krugler argues that these riots can be seen as a direct result of the societal upheavals engendered by the Great War and less directly, as a continuation of Reconstruction violence. Krugler uses the term “race riot” as shorthand for “anti-black collective violence”, which took several forms including mob attacks and lynchings. He describes the armed resistance of African Americans to this systemic and systematic terror as a three-front war comprised of self-defense, “the battle for the truth about the riots”, and the fight for justice.

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Randy J. Sparks, “Where the Negroes Are Masters” (Harvard UP, 2014) Jan 01, 2015

A kind of biography of the town of Annamaboe, a major slave trading port on Africa’s Gold Coast, Randy J. Sparks‘s book Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Harvard University Press, 2014) focuses on the African women and men who were the crucial middle figures in the African slave trade, the largest forced migration of people in human history. The millions of people caught up in the trade who ended up toiling on plantations in the New World (or who never made it) were victims, but the figures Sparks details were hardly that. Instead, they skillfully parlayed their superior numbers, knowledge of local conditions, and control of a crucial commodity — people — to establish themselves as major players in this bloody commerce.

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Sarah Mayorga-Gallo, “Behind the White Picket Fence: Power and Privilege in a Multiethnic Neighborhood” (UNC Press 2014) Dec 29, 2014

Sarah Mayorga-Gallo is the author of Behind the White Picket Fence: Power and Privilege in a Multiethnic Neighborhood (UNC Press 2014). She is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Cincinnati. We are joined by a guest podcaster, Candis Watts Smith, assistant professor of political science at Williams College.

Behind the White Picket Fence makes a strong case that simple, statistical analyses of residential segregation may overlook more important dimensions of multiethnic neighborhood integration. Instead, Mayorga-Gallo presents a fascinating ethnography of a neighborhood in Durham, NC. She shows the various ways that different ethnic groups relate to the neighborhood, express social power, and benefit from privilege. Of particular interest is the role of the neighborhood association in the life of this neighborhood.

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Jeff Smith, “Ferguson in Black and White” (Kindle Single, 2014) Dec 22, 2014

Jeff Smith is the author of Ferguson in Black and White (Kindle Single, 2014). Smith is assistant professor of political science at The New School’s Milano Graduate School.

Smith writes this book from a position of academic and personal expertise. He grew up in the area and served as a state representative for several years. Ferguson in Black and White provides useful background about the socio-political history of the St. Louis region that set the stage for Michael Brown’s killing and the painful aftermath. Smith writes: “In St. Louis, parochialism is inextricably intertwined with race.” He ends the book with specific recommendations for how to improve conditions in the future for the residents of Ferguson.

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Dick Lehr, “The Birth of a Nation” (PublicAffairs, 2014) Dec 19, 2014

Many books on film discuss the artistic aspects of movies, often as they relate to social and political events that affected the filmmakers. In his book The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America’s Civil War (PublicAffairs, 2014), journalist/professor Dick Lehr uses a controversial film to tell a bigger story about one of the first civil rights leaders of the 20th century.

Lehr presents a fascinating account of how African American journalist Monroe Trotter tried to get D. W. Griffith’s landmark film banned in Boston. He describes how the film’s release was an important aspect about how Trotter became a key participant in the nascent civil rights movement.

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Jason Sokol, “All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn” (Basic Books, 2014) Dec 17, 2014

When it came to race relations, the post-World War Two North was different — better — than the South. Or so white people in the northeast told themselves. While Jason Sokol argues that there was a real basis for what he calls the “northern mystique,” his new book All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn (Basic Books, 2014) shows that this conviction disguised a deep, rich vein of racism that blocked progress and justice for people of color. Examining Jackie Robinson, Shirley Chisholm, David Dinkins, and other important figures from the 1930s through the 2000s, Sokol presents us with a sobering reflection on the limits of racial progress in the nation’s progressive center.

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Cathy L. Schneider, “Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) Dec 08, 2014

Cathy L. Schneider is the author of Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). She is associate professor in the School of International Service at American University.

Timeliness is not something that every scholarly book can claim, but Cathy Schneider has published a book of the moment. With protests occurring across the country in response to recent police-related deaths (Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and Eric Garner in New York City), Schneider explains why some of these protests have resulted in rioting in the past and others in peaceful protest. Why, she ponders, has Paris burned while New York City has not had significant rioting in decades, despite similar sociopolitical conditions? New York, Schneider argues, has effective social movement organizations in place to channel frustration surrounding past police violence toward organized protest. For anyone trying to make sense of what recent events, this book is a must read.

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Brian Purnell, “Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings” (UP of Kentucky, 2014) Nov 25, 2014

Scholars interested in the history of the civil rights movement in the North will definitely be interested in Brian Purnell‘s new book, Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings:The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn (University Press of Kentucky, 2014). Thiscase study of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Brooklyn joins one of the fastest-growing areas of research in the field: the roots and experience of the black freedom struggle above the Mason-Dixon. Challenging many of the nation’s persistent beliefs about the geographic timeline and ideological dynamics of that social movement, this literature has broadened our understanding of the past and given us a far more complicated view of the challenges facing grassroots organizations in the years before, during, and following the “classical period,” stretching from Rosa Parks’s arrest to Martin Luther King’s dream. Purnell looks at one of CORE’s most active, aggressive chapters in the North between 1960 and 1965. An exemplar of social history, the book explores the difficulties facing a small organization trying to upset the racial status quo in a city that prided itself on colorblindness–pioneering much of the legislation adopted by the federal government later–despite the fact that in education, housing, and labor segregation prevailed. Aggravating matters were a number of seismic changes in New York, as elsewhere: the flight of industry and middle class taxpayers to the suburbs and Sunbelt, and the influx of millions of laid-off southern sharecroppers to neighborhoods that, because of “de facto” Jim Crow, became increasingly poor,overcrowded, dilapidated, and ridden with trash, crime, and despair. Purnell gives us the story of a group valiantly attempting to avert and assuage these overwhelming developments. As he notes, their failures speak to the reality many still face today.

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Candis Watts Smith, “Black Mosaic: The Politics of Black Pan-Ethnic Diversity” (NYU Press, 2014) Nov 18, 2014

Candis Watts Smith is the author of Black Mosaic: The Politics of Black Pan-Ethnic Diversity (NYU Press, 2014). Watts Smith is assistant professor of political science at Williams College.

How do Black immigrants in the US view their racial and ethnic identities? Do they identify with being Black, African American, or something else? Like Christina Greer (Black Ethnics) and Natalie-Masuoka and Jane Junn (Politics of Belonging) who have appeared on the podcast before, Watts Smith aims to unpack the immigrant experience in the US. Her book takes terms like African American and Black, and analyzes the way individuals from a variety of immigrant backgrounds attach identity. Watts Smith finds areas of wide agreement on group consciousness, but also areas of divergence, particularly around finding a common policy agenda.

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Edward E. Andrews, “Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World” (Harvard UP, 2013) Nov 07, 2014

Often when we think of missions to Native Americans or people of African descent, we think of white missionaries. In his book Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2013), Dr. Edward E. Andrews challenges this view. Through his careful research, skilled use of anecdotes, and compelling narrative. Dr. Andrews shows how it was Native Americans and people of African descent themselves who did much of the heavy lifting when it came to mission work. Moreover, Dr. Andrews not only explores the complex relationship between these diverse groups of people within the Protestant churches he studies (primarily Puritan, Anglican, and Moravian), the meeting of Protestant Christianity and indigenous religious beliefs, and the relationship between culture and religion, he also shows how white, black, and Native American missionaries cooperated (and argued with) each other. This book is a fascinating read and is highly recommended to anyone interested in the history of the Atlantic World or missions.

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Eric Allen Hall, “Arthur Ashe: Tennis and Justice in the Civil Rights Era” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) Nov 04, 2014

When he died from AIDS in 1993, Arthur Ashe was universally hailed as a man of principle, grace, and wisdom–a world-class athlete who had transcended his game. But a closer look at Ashe’s life reveals a more complex picture. Certainly, Ashe was an admirable figure. When tennis tournament organizers barred the teenage phenom because of his race, Ashe maintained his dignity. Decades later, when he was teaching a university course on African Americans in sport, Ashe couldn’t find a suitable textbook. So he researched and wrote one himself. At the same time, however, Ashe’s views on civil rights initially were more in line with those of Booker T. Washington than those of other politically active athletes of the 1960s. He did not accept the equality of women in sports. And his position on competing in South Africa under apartheid went through a long evolution. On these issues and others, Arthur Ashe had plenty of critics-something that is often missed today.

Surprisingly, despite his pioneering role in the history of tennis and his involvement in a range of pursuits off the court, Ashe has not been the subject of a scholarly biography. Eric Allen Hall’s book, Arthur Ashe: Tennis and Justice in the Civil Rights Era (Johns Hopkins University, 2014) fills this gap. As Eric explains in the interview, Ashe was a unique athlete in that he left his personal papers to a research archive. His biography thus draws not only from press accounts of Ashe’s life and the tennis star’s own memoirs (he wrote four during his lifetime), but also from Ashe’s notes and letters. The result is a portrait of Arthur Ashe that shows the fullness of his character-his broad interests, his impressive talents, and his missteps.

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John Morrow and Jeffrey Sammons, “Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War” (University Press of Kansas, 2014) Nov 04, 2014

John Morrow and Jeffrey Sammons share their insights on the story of the fabled 369th Infantry Regiment in their book, Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War: The Undaunted 369th Regiment and the African American Quest for Equality (University Press of Kansas, 2014). Our guests reveal a great deal about the...

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Catherine W. Bishir, ‘Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina, 1770-1900’ (UNC Press, 2013) Oct 28, 2014

Seeking to fill the gap in scholarship focused on African American artisans in the American South, Catherine W. Bishir uses the very specific location of New Bern, North Carolina to “dig a deep hole” and produce a longitudinal study of black artisans that moves chronologically from the colonial period, through the early national period to the period following the Civil War. Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina, 1770-1900 (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) looks at how artisans, enslaved and free, negotiated a complex social landscape that relied on their skills but circumscribed their lives. Specifically, Bishir examines the broader American artisan-citizen identity, the hallmarks of which are independence, mastery and self-determination and how the racial mores of the South made the enactment of this identity a problematic proposition for black artisans in New Bern despite its relatively lenient racial laws.

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Melvin Ely, “Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War” (Vintage Books, 2004) Oct 21, 2014

In Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (Vintage Books, 2004), Melvin Ely uses a trove of documents primarily found in the county court records of Prince Edward County, Virginia to unravel a rich story about the free blacks who inhabited “the gentle slope of Israel Hill.” The story begins in 1796 when Richard Randolph, a prominent Virginian and cousin to Thomas Jefferson, left a will full of fiery abolitionist sentiment that emancipated his slaves and parceled 350 acres of his land among them. Ely explores the lives of the freed people who used this land to cultivate small farms and launch successful entrepreneurial ventures.

Israel on the Appomattox demonstrates that historians can gain a deep understanding of a society using legal documents as their window into the past. Ely’s research exposes the little known fact that Afro-Virginians could file (and often successfully filed) civil suits, despite not being allowed to testify in criminal courts. While not a perfect check on abuse, Ely explains that civil suits were an inroad free blacks could make against an unjust system. Through Ely’s exploration of the quotidian behavior of Prince Edward’s inhabitants, much is revealed about the relationship between politics, law, and actual behavior in societies past or present.

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Janet Sims-Wood, “Dorothy Porter Wesley at Howard University” (The History Press, 2014) Oct 15, 2014

There was once a notion that black people had no meaningful history. It’s a notion Dorothy Porter Wesley spent her entire career debunking. Through her 43 years at Howard University, where she helped create the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, her own publishing endeavors and collecting, and her unfettered support of the researchers she encountered, Wesley devoted her entire life to the preservation of black history.

Her career was once summed up as that of a “historical detective”, and the characterization is apt. As Dr. Janet Sims-Wood writes in her excellent study, Dorothy Porter Wesley at Howard University: Building a Legacy of Black History (The History Press, 2014) she was unrelenting in her mission: “To supplement her meager acquisitions budget, Porter appealed to faculty to donate manuscripts of their published works as well as any letters from noted individuals. […] she appealed to publishers, authors and friends who were collectors to donate their materials. She also rummaged through the attics and basements of recently deceased persons to acquire materials.” The portrait that emerges is that of an indefatigable, iconic archivist, a researcher’s dream.

But, beyond the life, there is the legacy. A mighty legacy, as Sims-Wood establishes. Sims-Wood is an oral historian and she assembles here an interesting chorus of voices: those who knew Dorothy Porter Wesley, who worked with her, who watched her, whose lives and careers were impacted by her.

Timed to coincide with the centenary of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Sims-Wood’s book is an important reminder of how much the preservation of history relies upon individuals. And, also, what a significant impact one person can have.

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Adam Ewing, “The Age Of Garvey: How A Jamaican Activist Created A Mass Movement And Changed Global Black Politics” (Princeton UP, 2014) Oct 09, 2014

Adam Ewing acknowledges the enduring, if reductive, image of Garveyism – “the parades and shipping lines and colonization schemes” – in its early, Harlem-based incarnation, but focuses The Age Of Garvey: How A Jamaican Activist Created A Mass Movement And Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton University Press, 2014) on tracing the myriad manifestations of this “organic mass politics” beyond the larger-than-life figure at its center, to shed scholarly light on a diffuse movement observable throughout the African diaspora in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ewing explains why Garveyism is so much more than Marcus Garvey, not an ordinary strain of pan-Africanism nor merely an extension of (Booker T.) Washingtonianism. In fact, he asserts, it is precisely when the more notorious initiatives of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) fail, that the age of Garvey truly begins.

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Lauren Araiza, ‘To March for Others: The United Farm Workers and the Black Freedom Movement’ (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) Sep 24, 2014

Co-founded in 1962 by CÃ©sar ChÃ¡vez and Dolores Huerta, the National Farm Workers Association would eventually become the United Farm Workers (UFW), the landmark labor union dedicated to achieving better wages and working conditions for rural California agricultural workers. In To March for Others: The Black Freedom Struggle and the United Farm Workers (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), Lauren Araiza uses the UFW as a lens through which to examine the factors that contribute to the viability of cross-racial coalitions in achieving civil and economic rights. Specifically, Araiza looks at the UFW’s alliances with “five organizations that represented a wide spectrum of black activism”, namely the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Black Panther Party. In this interview, the author discusses, among other things, her deliberate departure from the black/white and North/South binary paradigms that dominate the discourse on race in the United States, instead examining the intersecting interests of organizations representing African Americans and Latinos. Listen here.

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Karl Spracklen, “Whiteness and Leisure” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) Sep 12, 2014

Our taken for granted assumptions are questioned in a new book by Karl Spracklen, a professor of leisure studies at Leeds Metropolitan University in England. Whiteness and Leisure (Palgrave, 2013) combines two bodies of theoretical literature to interrogate leisure activities which seem innocuous or inoffensive. The book deploys insights from critical race theory along with the work of Jurgen Habermas to at once critique leisure as a site for the continued reproduction of inequality, but at the same time consider the utopian or transformative possibilities offered by leisure activity. The central inequality concerning Whiteness and Leisure is that of the socially constructed, but socially powerful, idea of race. Spracklen argues that whilst there is no scientific evidence for the vast swathes of claims made about race, the idea is influential in modern life. Most notably, ideas of race create categories of normal or taken for granted, in the case of whiteness, and other, exotic and different in the case of blackness. The replication of social inequality using categories of race is shown in discussions of sport, both participating and watching, of popular culture, such as Harry Potter and World of Warcraft, Music, including Folk and Metal, and forms of travel, tourism and outdoor experience. Drawing on a wide range of literature, empirical examples and personal anecdotes, the text will be of interest to readers from across both social science and the humanities, as well as anyone concerned with social justice.

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Edward E. Baptist, “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” (Basic Books, 2014) Sep 08, 2014

An unflinching examination of the trauma, violence, opportunism, and vision that combined to create the empire for slavery that was the Old South, Ed Baptist‘s new book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2014) challenges popular conceptions of that region that imagine it as a land of proud men, genteel ladies, and an antiquated, inefficient system of labor. The slavery that Baptist uncovers is dynamic, relentless, brutal, and extremely profitable. Surviving it, he shows, was an impressive accomplishment all its own. And its role in driving the development of American capitalism in the formative years of the republic raises troubling questions about the legacy of slavery in contemporary times.

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Gabriel Solis, “Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall” (Oxford UP, 2013) Sep 07, 2014

On November 29, 1957, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holliday, Zoot Sims, Chet Baker, Sonny Rollins, and a multi-talented young R&B player who played jazz that night, Ray Charles, and others played a benefit concert for the Morningside Recreation Center at Carnegie Hall. Almost a half a century later, these recordings, intended to be played on radio Voice of America, were found in the Library of Congress. The aforementioned artists’ performances were never made available and yet, one set from that night was released, featuring a quartet with pianist Thelonious Monk, saxophonist John Coltrane with Shadow Wilson on drums and Abdul-Ahmed Malik on bass. That recording, on Blue Note records, released in 2005, was a critical and commercial sensation.

Monk and Coltrane had played more than 100 shows together the previous five months at the Five Spot Club in New York City and, as Gabriel Solis writes in his thought-provoking multi-disciplinary analysis of their program, that Carnegie Hall concert was “a compendium of what was possible in the jazz conventions of the day and a glimpse of how these jazz conventions could be pushed forward.”

The Monk/Coltrane concert set featured two great icons in the history of jazz at different points in their career. Monk had already established himself as a unique, eccentric and groundbreaking composer and performer and bandleader, too (as Solis points out in our interview). John Coltrane was still evolving into one of the most multi-perspectived yet focused and revered players in American jazz. It was, as Solis documents, in many ways a golden age of jazz: besides new recording technologies that afforded the possibility of longer recordings with greater listening fidelity, it was an age of “legendary intensity” when players such as Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Sonny Stitt, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Max Roach, Benny Golson, Dizzy Gillispie, MJQ, Hank Mobly, Hank Jones, Milt Jackson, Lennie Tristano, and Gerry Mulligan “wrote and played and recorded songs and albums that would challenge their contemporaries and become standards in time.” And, jazz had not “separated” from pop music. People went to clubs to hear live jazz; they went in great numbers to jazz concerts/benefits – and, at the same jazz recordings were being brought into the country’s living rooms to larger and larger audiences.

Gabriel Solis, an Associate Professor in Music, African-American studies and Anthropology at the University of Illinois, has written a fascinating volume about the cultural significance of the concert, contextual insights about the serendipitous yet important collaborative bond between Monk and Coltrane, “close reading” musical analyses as to how each piece on their set “played out” with respect to the members of the quartet, and a retrospective look at the significance of the public’s and critical responses to the CD’s release by Blue Note Records in 2005.

In Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (Oxford UP, 2013) Solis discusses whether the popularity of the CD after its release in 2005 is evidence of nostalgic reverence for an era gone by, or a validation that jazz is alive-and-well and more appreciated than ever. Of course, Solis knows it’s far more complicated than that, but he improvises riffs and ruminations that stimulate the reader into pleasing new ponderings about the meaning of “nostalgia,” the “is jazz dead?” question (which Solis notes going back as least as far as 1964), the decline of the jazz clubs, the ascendency of jazz studies in the Academy, and interesting perspectives on Monk’s and Coltrane’s musical development ...

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Bruce Ackerman, “We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution” (Harvard UP, 2013) Aug 02, 2014

Bruce Ackerman is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University. His book, We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard UP, 2013) fills out the constitutional history of America’s “Second Reconstruction” period and makes a powerful argument that traditional understandings of the constitutional canon must be expanded to accurately reflect the American lawmaking process.

The official constitutional canon is composed of the 1787 Constitution and the formal amendments to this document. However, Ackerman argues that the Supreme Court should give more deference to an operational canon that includes the landmark statutes, which are the legacy of the civil rights revolution. Ackerman reveals that the leaders of the civil rights movement actively avoided altering the Constitution through an Article V amendment because this method had failed during the first Reconstruction period. Instead, he lays out how they relied on constitution-altering techniques established during the New Deal. The champions of the civil rights movement following these New Deal methods emerged victorious from robust constitutional debates in all three branches. These successes reveal the American people’s broad support for a change to the constitutional status quo, a level of consent much greater than that behind the Reconstruction that produced three Article V amendments and Ackerman asserts even greater than the support underpinning the American Revolution.

Ackerman’s position as a scholar of both law and political science allows him to avoid interpretative pitfalls common to each respective discipline and to use his greater breadth of knowledge to present a wide picture of the civil rights era’s political history. His interdisciplinary interpretation argues for an even greater respect for Brown v. Board of Education’s importance in the movement while simultaneously arguing that lawyers must move away from a court-centric view of the period to be faithful to the collective voice of We the People.

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Toby Green, “The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589” (Cambridge UP, 2011) Jul 30, 2014

Slavery was pervasive in the Ancient World: you can find it in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In Late Antiquity , however, slavery went into decline. It survived and even flourished in the Byzantine Empire and Muslim lands, yet it all but disappeared in Medieval Western and Central Europe.

Then, rather suddenly, slavery reappeared in the West, or rather in Western empires. By the early sixteenth century, Portuguese traders had laid the foundations of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. They bought or captured slaves in West Africa and then transported and sold those slaves to plantation owners in European-controlled regions in the New World (especially Brazil, the Caribbean Basin, and Mexico).

How, one might well ask, did the trans-Atlantic slave trade emerge so quickly, seemingly from nothing? In his fascinating book The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), historian Toby Green addresses this question. His answer is subtle and multi-faceted, but it might be boiled down to this: the Portuguese traders didn’t build the slave trade, they joined it, expanded it and, ultimately, transformed it. Listen in.

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Lorena Turner, “The Michael Jacksons” (Little Moth Press, 2014) Jul 23, 2014

During his lifetime, Michael Jackson became a global icon. Michael Jackson was beloved by millions; his journey began as he became a boy star with The Jackson Five and it culminated with his being crowned the King of Pop, While some of the controversy of his later years along diminished his popularity, Jackson’s status as an icon of American music has never wavered. When he died, there was a tremendous outpouring of affection.

In the new book, The Michael Jacksons (Little Moth Press, 2014) explores the world of Michael Jackson representers, especially since Jackson’s passing. A photographer and a cultural critic, Turner photographs and examines these Michael Jackson representers and tribute artists to help us better understand Michael Jackson and the world of impersonators. The book offers a fascinating look of an oft-neglected aspect of popular music and popular culture.

Lorena Turner teaches in the Communications Department at California State Polytechnical University in Pomona. Turner is a former freelance photojournalist. Her projects have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, and Mercy Corps Global Headquarters in Portland, Oregon. More information about her book can be found at here.

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Abigail Perkiss, “Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia” (Cornell UP, 2014) Jul 16, 2014

Sitting in my home office this morning, I’ve periodically looked up from my computer screen and out the window to see who the dog is barking at. Sometimes it’s a young mother pushing a stroller, sometimes an older man walking his dogs, occasionally a young woman jogging. Regardless of age, gender or agenda, all of the people I’ve seen have one thing in common. They are white. This is not unusual, of course. Blacks and whites throughout America live separate lives. They attend separate schools. They worship in separate sanctuaries. And, most obviously, they live in different neighborhoods.

This remains true despite the dramatic migrations of the mid-Twentieth Century. The racial identity of specific neighborhoods changed. But the persistence of segregation even after the gradual dismantling of legal and extralegal barriers to black mobility and choice is striking. However, there are a few neighborhoods that chose strategically to invite certain black families to put down roots in their part of the city. This was not an easy task. The obstacles, institutional, cultural and economic, were great, and often subverted such efforts. But a few neighborhoods surmounted these to become national models of what integration might look like.

Abigail Perkiss discusses one of these neighborhoods, West Mount Airy in Philadelphia, in her wonderful new book Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia (Cornell University Press, 2014). Having grown up in the neighborhood, Perkiss has both an instinctive sympathy for the residents of the neighborhood and a thorough understanding of the cultural, economic and demographic challenges facing the city. Her study reflects this familiarity while remaining analytically rigorous. As a bonus, she writes beautifully. The result is a book that sheds much light on what the residents of West Mount Airy meant when they talked about integration, how they strove to integrate their neighborhood and how they struggled to address the challenges to that accomplishment.

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Robert E. Gutsche Jr., “A Transplanted Chicago: Race, Place and the Press in Iowa City” (McFarland, 2014) Jul 01, 2014

The city of Iowa City’s website promotes its “small-town hospitality” and its focus on “culture.” But a closer look at Iowa City, home to 70,000 and the University of Iowa, reveals a community trying to redefine itself as urban African-Americans relocate to the area.

This is the focus of Robert E. “Ted” Gutsche‘s book, A Transplanted Chicago: Race, Place and the Press in Iowa City (McFarland, 2014). In it, he takes on the “Southeast Side” and all its meanings.

“Southeast Side” has become a coded term by local press to describe an area of Iowa City it associates with crime and unruliness, sometimes even using the term when the actual crime does not occur on the Southeast Side.

“Home to a mixture of white townies and new, black arrivals from Chicago, St. Louis, and other metro regions in the Upper Midwest,” Gutsche writes, “the Southeast Side is known–mythically–as a bastion of affordable housing, black families, and stories of devious behavior.”

Through original interviews and research, Gutsche, a former reporter, shows just how wrong the press has it about Iowa City’s Southeast Side.

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Ian Haney Lopez, “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class” (Oxford UP, 2014) Jun 30, 2014

Ian Haney Lopez is the author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford UP 2014). He is the John H. Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and on the Executive Committee of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice.

Lopez investigates the often hidden side of racism. He traces the political history of candidates for office using a set of coded phrases, allusions, and references to call attention to race, without ever uttering the word. In the post Brown v. Board era, Lopez argues, candidates learned a new language of strategic racism, substituting anti-government rhetoric for anti-black, anti-Latino, or anti-immigrant. In doing so, the dog whistle was heard as a much wider criticism of the social welfare state, and thus a direct attack not just on minorities, but on the middle class.

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Luke E. Harlow, “Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830-1880” (Cambridge UP, 2014) Jun 26, 2014

Luke E. Harlow, Religion, Race and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830-1880 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) examines the role of religion, and more specifically, conservative evangelical Protestant theology, in the struggle over slavery and abolition in a crucial period of American history. The book makes an impressive case that we cannot really understand that struggle or the war that grew out of it without fully appreciating the political, cultural, and intellectual history of conservative evangelical theology.

Harlow describes a profoundly religious period in American history, where people claimed religious motives for all kinds of political positions, in a slave-holding border state that remained part of the Union. Kentucky was home to a diverse theological climate that nonetheless seemed always to break toward finding a Biblical warrant for slavery. Politically, however, gradualist emancipationists and pro-slavery advocates were often far apart. When the Civil War came, thousands of black Kentuckians joined Union ranks, profoundly shaping how their emancipation unfolded. Former gradualists, in response, fled to the pro-slavery side. While white Kentuckians had not overwhelmingly embraced the Confederate cause in the war, after it ended, they did so – fully and vigorously. The result, as Harlow shows, was that Kentucky arguably became the least reconstructed former slave state, and that development held profound implications for the shape of the society the Civil War made.

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David Williams, “I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era” (Cambridge UP, 2014) Jun 05, 2014

Lincoln was very clear–at least in public–that the Civil War was not fought over slavery: it was, he said, for the preservation of the Union first and foremost. So it’s not surprising that when the conflict started he had no firm plan to emancipate the slaves in the borderland or Southern states. He also knew that such a move might prove very unpopular in the North.

So why did he issue the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863? There are many reasons. According to David Williams‘ fascinating new book I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era (Cambridge University Press, 2014), an important and neglected one has to do with African American self-emancipation. After the war began, masses of slaves began to leave the South and head for the Northern lines. The Union forces received them as “contraband” seized from the enemy during wartime. As such, their status was uncertain. Many wanted to fight or at least serve as auxiliaries in the Union armies like freemen, but they were still seen as property. As Williams points out, the North certainly needed their manpower–as Lincoln knew better than anyone. Bearing this in mind, the President felt the time was propitious to do what he thought was right all along–free the slaves. Listen in.

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Christine Knauer, “Let Us Fight as Free Men: Black Soldiers and Civil Rights” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) May 20, 2014

Recent controversies over integrating the military have focused on issues of gender and sexuality. In the 1940s and 50s, however, the issue was racial integration. As Christine Knauer shows in her new book Let Us Fight as Free Men: Black Soldiers and Civil Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), the persistence of soldiers and activists of color forced the Truman administration to bar discrimination in the military. Even then, however, it took continued agitation — and the military crisis of the early days of the Korean War — to force the army to allow black soldiers to fight alongside their white brothers-in-arms. Let Us Fight as Free Men illuminates how agitation for Civil Rights did not begin with the Brown decision in 1954 or the Montgomery Bus Boycott several years later, but was a long-term struggle with its roots in the Second World War.

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Vershawn Young et al., “Other People’s English” (Teacher’s College Press, 2013) Apr 15, 2014

In linguistics, we all happily and glibly affirm that there is no “better” or “worse” among languages (or dialects, or varieties), although we freely admit that people have irrational prejudices about them. But what do we do about those prejudices? And what do we think the speakers of low-status varieties of language should do to overcome them? Take the case of African American English. An influential approach, code-switching, advises teachers to help their AAE-speaking students to identify the systematic differences between their variety and the prestige variety (“Standard English”), and eventually to be able to switch effectively between both varieties according to the circumstances. However, although code-switching seems to promote communicative effectiveness, Vershawn Young and colleagues argue that that approach is inherently problematic. By effectively labelling AAE as inappropriate for public contexts, code-switching runs the risk of promoting and reinforcing society’s prejudices against the language (and indeed its speakers). Young and colleagues offer an alternative vision for the multilingual classroom, which they refer to as “code-meshing”, a process by which multiple varieties can sit side-by-side in a speaker’s communicative repertoire. Their book, Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy (Teacher’s College Press, 2013), explores this concept in theoretical and practical detail, discussing the rationale for encouraging code-meshing, the effect of this on communicative abilities, and some of the ways in which code-switching can be and has been implemented in real-life teaching. In this interview, we discuss the effect of code-switching on the speaker’s identity, the ubiquity of code-meshing across a range of actual discourse contexts, and some of the challenges that code-meshing might present in the classroom. And we consider why Barack Obama isn’t criticised for code-meshing but Michelle Obama is.

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Marc Myers “Why Jazz Happened” (University of California Press, 2014) Apr 06, 2014

How did jazz take shape? Why does jazz have so many styles? Why do jazz songs get longer as the twentieth century proceeds? Marc Myers, in his fascinating book Why Jazz Happened (University of California Press, 2014) examines the social and economic forces affected the growth of jazz between 1942 and 1972. Myers considers how the American Federation of Musicians ban on recording in 1942 changes the terrain for jazz musicians. He looks to how the G.I. Bill and suburbanization bring a new adult sophistication to the music. Myers also explores how changes in recording technology allow jazz artists a greater range of expression and permits the recording of longer songs and extended soloing. The book culminates with considering how jazz musicians responded to the challenge offered by rock music.

Marc Myers is a writer for The Wall Street Journal and founder of the blog, JazzWax.com.

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Arica L. Coleman, “That the Blood Stay Pure” (Indiana UP, 2014) Mar 18, 2014

Arica Coleman did not start out to write a legal history of “the one-drop rule,” but as she began exploring the relationship between African American and Native peoples of Virginia, she unraveled the story of how the law created a racial divide that the Civil Rights movement has never eroded. Virginia’s miscegenation laws, from the law of hypo-descent to the Racial Integrity Act, are burned into the hearts and culture of Virginians, white, black and Indian.

That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia (Indiana University Press, 2014) demonstrates how people continue to insist on racial discrimination and racial purity even though the legal barriers have been lifted and the biological imperatives of “blood purity” have been discredited. Dr. Coleman traces the origins the one-drop rule–that one African American ancestor made a person “colored”–from the days of slavery to the present. She shows how Indians came to disavow their African American descent in the wake of the Virginia racial purity statutes, and how the Bureau of Indian Affairs process continues to perpetuate a fear of admitting racial mixing. She also reveals how one of the most famous Civil Rights cases of our time, Loving v. Virginia, is not about what everyone thinks; it is not, she argues, about the right of blacks and whites to marry.

Dr. Arica L. Coleman is Assistant Professor of Black American Studies at the University of Delaware and a lecturer for the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She has a four-year appointment to the Organization of American Historians Alana committee, which focuses on the status of African American, Latino/Latina American, Native American and Asian American histories and historians. Dr. Coleman has lent her expertise on the history and politics of race and identity formation to the Washington Post, Indian Country Today and most recently NPR’s “Another View,” a weekly program with a focus on contemporary African American issues.

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N. Jeremi Duru, “Advancing the Ball: Race, Reformation, and the Quest for Equal Coaching Opportunity in the NFL” (Oxford University Press, 2011) Mar 06, 2014

Each year, following the end of the NFL season, there is a blizzard of activity as teams with disappointing records fire their head coaches and look for the new leader who will turn things around. This year, seven teams fired their coaches and spent the next weeks searching for a replacement among the pool of qualified candidates. The league office imposes one rule on these searches: teams must interview at least one minority candidate for the head coaching position. Established in 2003 by owners of NFL teams, the Rooney Rule was intended to give African American coaches a shot at top coaching positions, at a time when a majority of the league’s players were black but only two of the 32 teams had a black coach. More than a decade later, the effectiveness of the rule is still subject of debate. Yes, two of seven teams hired new black coaches this year. But the total number of black coaches in the league is only four, down from a high of seven in 2011. And a look at fan sites shows that prejudice still rears its head, as some white fans will dismiss a black coaching candidate as a “Rooney interview.”

N. Jeremi Duru was part of the legal team that pressed the NFL to take more proactive steps in opening coaching opportunities for black coaches, and he now serves with the Fritz Pollard Alliance, an organization that promotes greater diversity in the league’s coaching and management. His book Advancing the Ball: Race, Reformation, and the Quest for Equal Coaching Opportunity in the NFL (Oxford University Press, 2011) looks at this campaign leading to the Rooney Rule. Jeremi brings the perspective of an insider and a scholar. In addition to his work as an attorney, Jeremi is a law professor and legal scholar who writes and teaches about a variety of issues in sports law. In his book, he uncovers the obstacles that have historically kept African Americans from coaching and front-office positions in the NFL, and he evaluates the changes that have occurred since the Rooney Rule was implemented. At a time when other leagues in the world are contemplating a similar step to remedy the lack of minority coaches, Jeremi’s book offers valuable lessons on the formation of the Rooney Rule, the obstacles it has faced, and the successes it has achieved in the last decade.

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Kevin Quashie, “The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture” (Rutgers UP, 2012) Feb 17, 2014

Musician James Brown is famous for his civil rights slogan, “Say it loud; I’m Black and I’m proud,” illustrating the argument that Kevin Quashie makes in his new book The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2012)–that public expressiveness has become the dominant trope for thinking through and even theorizing blackness. As a result, public expressivity (think powerful oratory at mass demonstrations or spirited polemics, such as David Walker’s Appeal) is linked to resistance. In fact, contemporary activist-scholars, such as Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, have called on others, particularly whites, to engage in this kind of public expressiveness associated with blacks. One of Jones’ 6 Rules for Allies, encourages others “to be loud and crazy so black folk don’t have to” (see http://vimeo.com/78945479). Jones is asking for allegiances that allow black folk time and space for quiet. Although what Jones advocates it still a necessity, Quashie presents a history and present of black folk engaging quiet, both with and without allies. In his provocative new study, Quashie expands and even challenges what it means to be loud and re-examines long held notions about double consciousness, the role of surrender vis a vis resistance, oratory as the most effective means of resistance, and the need to develop retrospection and cultivate interiority. No doubt his remarks during this interview will be of as much interest as the book.

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Aram Goudsouzian, “Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear” (FSG, 2014) Feb 12, 2014

When I was a kid in the 1970s, I really didn’t know anything about the “Civil Rights Movement.” I knew who Martin Luther King was, and that he had been assassinated by white racists (I knew quite a few of those). But to me all that was old history. The issue of the day–at least as it concerned African Americans–was something called the “Black Power Movement.” Of Rosa Parks, the Freedom Riders, and the Little Rock Nine I knew nothing. At the forefront of my mind were Stokley Carmichael, Huey Newton, and Bobby Seale. I followed the exploits of the Black Panthers. I read Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. I really understood none of it. I was a suburban white kid in the Midwest. The world these angry men described was foreign to me, but nonetheless fascinating.

At what point did the Civil Rights Movement become the the Black Power Movement? Aram Goudsouzian tries to answer this question in his terrific, readable book Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). Goudsouzian has a sharp eye for ironies, and the story he tells is full of them. James Meredith, the leader of the “march,” didn’t desire or plan a march at all; rather, he wanted to walk across Mississippi and thereby launch his political career. Martin Luther King never intended to take part in the “march” but was compelled to do so after Meredith was shot and his erstwhile political stunt morphed into a national spectacle. Stokely Carmichael was a regional black leader who was, much to his surprise, catapulted into the spotlight by a slogan he could not control–“Black Power.” It’s a fascinating story. Listen in.

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Adam Henig, “Alex Haley’s Roots: An Author’s Odyssey” (2014) Feb 05, 2014

Alex Haley’s 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family still stands as a memorable epic journey into the history of African Americans during the enslavement period and after. The 1977 televised miniseries was a must-watch event of the day, and it remains an important production in television history. However, a little more than a decade after his success, Haley was in trouble. His wealth had dwindled and he had strained relationships with other writers. What happened? Adam Henig tells us in his new book Alex Haley’s Roots: An Author’s Odyssey (2014). Listen to this lively interview with the author.

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Ravi K. Perry, “Black Mayors, White Majorities: The Balancing Act of Racial Politics” (University of Nebraska Press, 2014) Feb 03, 2014

Do black mayors face a different governing challenge than other mayors? Ravi K. Perry explores this question in his Black Mayors, White Majorities: The Balancing Act of Racial Politics (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). Perry is assistant professor of political science at Mississippi State University.

Using the cities of Toledo and Dayton, Ohio as his starting point, Perry’s book investigates the ways black mayors govern in majority white cities. He compares how Jack Ford, mayor of Toledo from 2002-2006, and Rhine McLin, mayor of Dayton from 2002-2010, use targeted universalism to balance the need to represent black and white constituents. This balancing act is a tenuous one for black mayors with such high expectations and often limited authority to deliver the range of needs of the community. Perry’s research ranges from historical analysis of election results and rhetorical analysis of speeches to deliver a thoughtful look at two interesting political figures and an understudied area of political science scholarship.

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Cindy Hooper, “Conflict: African American Women and the New Dilemma of Race and Gender Politics” (Praeger Press, 2012) Jan 29, 2014

Cindy Hooper is a veteran of various local, state, and national political campaigns. She is the founder of a national organization for African American women that is headquartered in Washington, D.C. Hooper is also a member of the American Political Science Association. Her new book, Conflict: African American Women and the New Dilemma of Race and Gender Politics (Praeger Press, 2012), draws on all of her experiences. Please listen to our lively exchange.

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Amy L. Wood, “Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940” (UNC Press, 2011) Jan 25, 2014

Host Jonathan Judaken talks with author and professor Amy Wood about her book, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Wood discusses her book, the use of photography and media in the spectacle of lynching, religious justification for the practice, and the importance of honoring the legacies of anti-lynching Civil Rights Era leaders like Medgar Evers and Ida B. Wells.

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Keith Waters, “The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, 1965-1968” (Oxford UP, 2011) Jan 18, 2014

“…when people were hearing us, they were hearing the avant-garde on the one hand, and they were hearing the history of jazz that led up to it on the other hand – because Miles was that history.” -Herbie Hancock, 1968

Professor of music and musician/composer Keith Waters at the University of Colorado, Boulder has produced a masterful analysis of the Miles Davis second quintet studio recordings in the years 1965 through 1968. Waters analyzes the remarkable period of “controlled freedom” and collaboration between trumpeter Miles Davis, keyboardist Herbie Hancock, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams.

Waters writes that “the role of analysis is to provide further, alternative, or nuanced ways into hearing the music, to consider how the moment to moment flow of improvisation resonates with or creates frictions with aspects of jazz traditions in which the players were so firmly rooted, and to hear how the recordings themselves participated in shaping that jazz tradition.”

Waters’ comprehensive and nuanced strategies for analyzing pitch, rhythm/meter and form are given context in chapter 2 followed by chapter discussions of specific quintet recordings (and selected solos within) in E.S.P. (Iris, Little One, ESP, Agitation), Miles Smiles (Dolores, Orbits, Circle, Ginger Bread Boy, Freedom Jazz Dance), Sorcerer (Vonetta, Masqualero, Prince of Darkness, Pee Wee, Limbo), Nefertiti (Hand Jive, Nefertiti, Madness, Pinocchio, Riot) in chapters 3- 6, respectively. The albums Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro (Country Son, Paraphernalia, Black Comedy, Stuff, Petits Machins, Tout De Suite, Filles de Kilimanjaro), according to Waters, signaled a significant departure from previous recordings/compositions with electric piano, electric bass and rock-based rhythms, and an “imminent shift to jazz-rock fusion.” Later groups continued forays into jazz fusion (including those from the second quintet – Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters band, Wayne Shorter’s Weather Report and The Tony Williams Lifetime).

Many of the aforementioned compositions have found their way into the “jazz canon,” though Waters cautions that lead sheets may be more indicative of jazz “pedagogies” of the time that don’t reflect the highly complex modal explorations and rhythmic nuances found in the quintet recordings.

Waters writes that Miles Davis embraced the concept of “sketches” which “provided his musicians with a germinal idea, allowing room for flexibility and substantial individual input.” This also blurred the concept of “authorship,” however, since collaborations of this kind brought varied and complex alterations to the many facets of original compositions.

Waters’ own biographical sketches of quintet members Davis, Shorter, Hancock, Carter and Williams (their interactions and what they individually said about the music and their musical colleagues) give the reader fascinating insights as to how the sum of the parts of these extraordinarily skilled jazz professionals provided a literal Big Bang of collaborative innovation in a period of three and a half years.

The idea of “controlled freedom,” a concept articulated by keyboardist Herbie Hancock, is an important concept in defining the second quintet’s body of work. Quintet leader Miles Davis, Waters emphasizes, with his “palette of timbres,” and “…melodic ideas in the middle register of the trumpet, “searing lyricism on ballad playing combines tenderness with detachment.” He was always open to new ideas, experimentation and artistic challenge.

Waters cites critic Robert Walsar’s description of Miles Davis,

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Christina Greer, “Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream” (Oxford UP, 2013) Jan 13, 2014

Christina Greer is the author of Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream (Oxford University Press, 2013). Greer is assistant professor of political science at Fordham University.

In previous podcasts, authors have illuminated the immigrant experience of Latino and Asian Americans (Rouse, Masuoka and Junn), as well as the African American politics (Logan and Gillespie). Researchers have increasingly studied the opinions, political culture, and political institutions of each community.

Greer uses this literature to explore an understudied population, who she dubs “Black Ethnics.” Green analyzes the public opinion differences between African Americans, African immigrants, and Afro-Caribbean immigrants in New York City. She finds that Afro-Caribbean immigrants held some of the lowest opinions of the American Dream. Their collective frustration with a lack of opportunities placed them below African Americans and African immigrants.

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Nathaniel Millett, “The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World” (UP of Florida, 2013) Dec 20, 2013

This is a very timely book, coming as it does in the midst of the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 — the war that gave birth to the maroon community of Prospect Bluff, Florida. In his book The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World (UP of Florida, 2013), Nathaniel Millett shows how an assortment of free African-Americans, escaped slaves, Africans, and Afro-Indians created a thriving, highly organized community in the shadow of the expanding slave empire of the southwestern United States. Inspired by the singular figure of Edward Nichols, and Irish-born British officer of staunch anti-slavery convictions, the men and women of Prospect Bluff forged a community that realized their deepest understandings of freedom in the midst of the era of Atlantic revolutions.

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Julia H. Lee, “Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937” (NYU Press, 2011) Dec 18, 2013

Julia H. Lee is the author of Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937 (New York University Press, 2011). Dr. Lee is an Assistant Professor in the department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Interracial Encounters investigates the overlapping of African American and Asian American literature. By focusing on the diverse attitudes that blacks and Asian Americans had towards each other, Dr. Lee pushes against dominant conceptions of these groups as either totally cooperative or as totally antagonistic. Lee also explores how American nationalism was produced through this comparison, and shows how Afro-Asian representations allowed readers and writers to consider alliances outside of the American nation-state.

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Susan D. Carle, “Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915” (Oxford UP, 2013) Dec 02, 2013

Historians tell stories, and stories have beginnings and ends. Most human eras, however, are not so neat. Their beginnings and ends tend to blend into one another. This is why historians are often arguing about when eras–the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, etc.–started and stopped. One usually learns very little from these debates, primarily because the established beginnings and endings were agreed upon for good reason. Nothing really big had been missed, so nothing really big has to be changed.

But there are exceptions, times when historians discover–or at the very least bring to light–evidence that truly moves the chronological bounds of an era or movement. One such exception is Susan D. Carle‘s excellent new book Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915 (Oxford UP, 2013). I will only speak for myself, but I always considered the formation of the NAACP in 1909 to be the beginning of the organized, national effort to fight discrimination against African Americans. Having read Susan’s book, I now know that I was wrong. She ably tells the stories of a number of national organizations that pursued the agenda of the NAACP (and, for that matter, the Urban League) decades before the NAACP (and the Urban League) was founded. It would, I think, be a mistake to see Carle’s book as a “pre-history” of the organized struggle for racial justice; rather, it is more appropriate to see it as a book about the true beginning of that struggle. Listen in to our fascinating discussion.

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Matthew L. Basso, “Meet Joe Copper: Maculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) Nov 09, 2013

In the United States, World War II is now called “The Good War,” as opposed to bad ones, I suppose, like Vietnam. Moreover, the Americans who fought in World War II are now called “The Greatest Generation,” as opposed to lesser generations, I suppose. Now most of the Americans of “The Greatest Generation” who fought in “The Good War” were men. What made them the “greatest” was that they had proved not only their willingness pro patria mori, but also their masculinity. They were, well, “real men.”

But what about those American men who, though of “The Greatest Generation,” did not actually fight in “The Good War?” There were millions of them. Early in the war Washington designated certain industries essential to the war effort and therefore exempted those who worked in them from the draft. These men “fought” on the Home Front, of course. But they knew very well that fighting on the “Home Front” was not the same as fighting on the actual front. As men of fighting age but not fighting, they were the object of a certain skepticism. “Why,” they imagined people asking, “weren’t they in uniform?” Maybe they weren’t “real men…”

In his path-breaking new book Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Matthew L. Basso explores the ways in which American men on the “Home Front” protected their masculinity during the War, and the ways in which those efforts reverberated in the decades that followed it. It’s a fascinating story. Listen in.

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Simon P. Newman, “A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) Oct 10, 2013

Ask most educated people about the development of American slavery, and you’re likely to hear something about Virginia or, just maybe, South Carolina. In his far-reaching but concise and elegantly written new book A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Simon Newman takes us to the tiny Caribbean island of Barbados to trace the beginnings of African slavery in British America. The cotton slavery we know from the killing fields of Mississippi and Louisiana can be traced back to the sugar regimen that developed in Barbados. And that slavery, Newman shows, must be understood amidst the larger trajectory of bound labor in England and Scotland, and even in the British forts on Africa’s Gold Coast. A New World of Labor shows how the regime of bound servant labor — not the institution of West African slavery — provided the foundation for slavery as it developed in Britain’s New World plantation colonies.

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Robert Cassanello, “To Render Invisible: Jim Crow and Public Life in New South Jacksonville” (University Press of Florida, 2013) Sep 30, 2013

The story of the rise of Jim Crow in Jacksonville, Florida is in many ways illustrative of the challenges facing newly emancipated African Americans throughout the South with local officials erecting barriers to black participation; blacks building institutions to overcome those obstacles; then Southern bigots using the reaction of blacks as justification for both the initial barriers and further draconian measures.

This usually involved labeling black political action as in some way primitive, corrupt or unfairly self-interested. For example, many in the white establishment in Jacksonville resented that blacks voted for Republicans out of loyalty, yet they also attacked blacks for voting for ‘reform Democrats’ out of self -interest. So, the solution? Political education of some kind? Outreach perhaps? No, instead they implemented what was called the ‘Australian ballot’: a subway map style list of candidates with intersecting names and titles intended to either confuse or disqualify many black voters.

This hostility to black political agency extended to all aspects of public life in Jacksonville, with each reaction forcing blacks further from power and from view. Robert Cassanello’s To Render Invisible: Jim Crow and Public Life in New South Jacksonville (University Press of Florida, 2013) explores this dynamic in rich detail, helping further our understanding of the post Civil War but pre- Civil Rights era in the South. Robert was kind enough to speak with me. I hope you enjoy.

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W. Caleb McDaniel, “The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform” (LSU Press, 2013) Sep 20, 2013

How could members of a movement committed to cosmopolitanism accommodate nationalism? How could men and women committed to non-resistance reconcile themselves to politics when the authority of even democratic polities depended ultimately upon the threat of force? How could activists committed to equality — the essence of democracy — deny that the democratic process produced policies that were manifestly unjust? Those are some of the main questions that animate W. Caleb McDaniel‘s important book The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Louisiana State University Press, 2013). The most deeply research study of the transatlantic networks of the radical antislavery movement to date, it raises questions about the tensions between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, peace and violence, and means and ends that continue to bedevil those struggling to achieve social justice.

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John K. Thornton, “A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820” (Cambridge UP, 2012). Sep 12, 2013

Thanks in no small part to John K. Thornton, professor of history at Boston University, the field of Atlantic history has emerged as one of the most exciting fields of historical research over the past quarter century. Thornton has long insisted that the the age of discovery fostered linkages between the Americas, Europe, and Africa that transformed the diverse peoples of all three regions. Europeans did not simply impose their will upon Africans and Native Americans. A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2012) showcases Thornton’s deep research in the primary source material of multiple nationalities — and languages — to provide the most comprehensive interpretation we have of how the first era of globalization transformed the cultures of all the peoples of the Atlantic basin.

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Brian Harker, “Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings” (Oxford UP, 2011) Sep 02, 2013

“The public don’t understand jazz music as we musicians do. A diminished seventh don’t mean a thing to them, but they go for high notes. After all, the public is paying. If musicians depended on musicians at the box office they would starve to death.”–Louis Armstrong

Brian Harker’s Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings (Oxford University Press, 2011) is an artful jambalaya of rigorous musical analysis, thoughtful cultural contexts, and some provocative informed speculation as to how Armstrong absorbed, innovated, and consolidated the music we call jazz.

Harker focuses his analysis and discussion on seven of Louis Armstrong’s “Hot Five” recordings, made during the period between 1925 and 1928. Harker’s recording-as-“snap-shot” approach illuminates how Armstrong used novelty, musical narrative, rhythmic variation, harmonic changes, “sweet” and “hot” elements, and technical virtuosity in his vast recording repertoire.

Harker also details how Armstrong relentlessly wedded his drive for self-improvement and creative expression to commercial realities, giving the reader fascinating anecdotes and back stories about this extraordinary African-American’s journey for personal and musical acceptance.

Highlights of Harker’s song -by-song analysis include Armstrong’s “novelty” imitation of a clarinet’s cascading arpeggios in “Cornet Chop Suey,” his “telling a story” in “Big Butter and Egg Man,” his negotiation of harmonic changes in “Potato Head Blues,” his crowd-thrilling high note playing in “SOL Blues” and “Gully Low Blues,” his “sweet jazz” elements in “Savoy Blues” and his brilliant amalgam of all the afore-mentioned jazz elements in his masterpiece recording, “West End Blues.”

Brian Harker, a Professor of Music at Brigham Young University and former professional trumpet player himself, has spent a good part of his life studying Louis Armstrong. And, he is quite interesting and provocative when he is a speculative detective.

Some examples include how he shares the theory that some of Armstrong’s dynamic rhythmic experimentation was inspired by Armstrong’s association with the dance team of Brown and McGraw, or how Armstrong’s sustained high C virtuosity was influenced by his admiration for opera superstar Enrico Caruso as well as his competitive rivalry with trumpeter Reuben Reeves – or how Armstrong’s incorporating elements of “sweet music” (in Savoy Blues) may have been inspired by Armstrong’s own predilection for Guy Lombardo’s sweet jazz as a preferred musical background during his own romantic trysts. This gives feel and flesh to the book and complements Harker’s studied analyses of Armstrong’s solo transcriptions.

Louis Armstrong drew from everything and everyone around him. He constantly tried to improve himself musically and personally and yet, at the same time, resented the “putting on of airs,” all the while negotiating the politics of race and the brutal realities of the music and entertainment world. Harker’s thoughtful cultural introspections gives the reader a greater appreciation for what Armstrong himself had to endure and transcend during the Hot Five recording period of his career. According to Harker, Louis was most proud of his “color barrier” advances in radio and film and saw his Hot Five recordings as simply another pay...

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Sikivu Hutchinson, “Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels” (Infidel Books, 2013) Aug 12, 2013

Why does it seem like everyone in the atheist movement is white and male? Are African-American women less interested in secularism? In her book, Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels (Infidel Books, 2013), Dr. Sikivu Hutchinson critiques the mainstream atheist movement’s lack of diversity and uncovers some of the reasons why African-Americans seem so connected to religion. She reveals that racism and social and economic disadvantage has led to a dearth of resources in black communities – a gap that churches often end up filling. Though there is a strong tradition of African-American secular humanism, it has focused on social justice issues and the intersection of racism, classism, capitalism and religion, topics usually ignored by the media and the mainstream secular movement. Dr. Hutchinson also criticizes the new atheism’s singularfocus on science and reason to the detriment of social justice and anti-racist consciousness. Sikivu’s blog can be found here.

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Matthew W. Hughey, “White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race” (Stanford UP, 2012) Aug 09, 2013

Whiteness studies has confirmed that race is a social construction, even for whites, and that the identity we understand as white is also a social invention. Those who benefit from this invention accrue privileges that others either must pay dearly to obtain or cannot have at all. But there are those who are willing to give up this privilege in the name of equality (white anti-racists) and those who ask ‘Why should we have to?’ (white nationalists). Of course this summary is a reduction. To get a fuller, more meaningful account of what drives anti-racists and white nationalists read Matthew W. Hughey‘s insightfully written book White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race (Stanford University Press, 2012). In it, he reveals that both groups appeal to many of the same discourses on race and also share some of the same underlying narratives. If both groups then ascribe to the same stories and beliefs, what’s the difference between the two and how can anti-racists help the struggle for civil rights and fight against discrimination if they hold white nationalist ideologies? And how can white nationalist serve the interests of white supremacy if they share liberal views? Or is it more complex? To find out listen to this lively exchange.

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Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey, “The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America” (UNC Press, 2012) Jul 25, 2013

Jesus has inspired millions of people to both strive for social justice and commit horrific acts of violence. In the United States, Jesus has remained central in the construction of American identities and debates about Jesus have frequently revolved around his skin color and bodily appearance. In The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), we get a history of Americans’ encounters with images of Jesus and the creation of them. Edward J. Blum, professor of history at San Diego State University, and Paul Harvey, professor of history at University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, have carefully mined a plethora of sources, including paintings, drawings, music, poetry, sermons, visions, and other historical documents, to reveal the rich conversation Americans have had around religion and race. The Color of Christ offers a chronological history from the colonial period to the present that weaves through the construction of Jesus’ image in various Christian groups consisting of primarily white members, and appropriations and challenges within Native Americans and African Americans communities. In our chat, Blum and Harvey discuss the ups and downs of American religious history, offering various vignettes of Jesus’ role in determining opinions about race. They also help us think about being an author, including issues of public scholarship, hustling as an academic, creating a book website, successful peer review, editorial control, and co-writing a book.

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Carmen Kynard, “Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacies Studies” (SUNY Press, 2013) Jul 18, 2013

You know you are not going to get the same old story about progressive literacies and education from Carmen Kynard, who ends the introduction to her book with a saying from her grandmother: “Whenever someone did something that seemed contradictory enough to make them untrustworthy, my grandmother simply called it runnin’ with the rabbits but huntin’ with the dogs.” Kynard persuasively illustrates throughout her book the extent to which progressive and liberal educationalists hold up progress toward truly liberatory education for African Americans and Latinos because they seek to please both rabbits and dogs in the 21st Century.

In her own words, Kynard begins with this critique: “American schools and universities, through their scholarship and instructional designs, have often upheld a racial status quo alongside a rhetoric of dismantling it. These [are] not the workings of contradictory and confused individuals merely locked within their space and time. My grandmother understood that such contradictions happen inside of a totemic system. And once she pointed out that someone or something was runnin with the rabbits and huntin with the dogs, the expectation was that I would question the process and work to achieve an alternative awareness, ideological approach, and set of cultural practices” (19).

Kynard is not taking the easy road. She looking calling out the racial double-tongue that characterizes the current educational discourse on cultural relevant teaching and learning. This is why a book such as this, which traces the histories, legacies, and influences of black protest movements (mostly student lead) on education and literacy is a must read now.

Please listen in as I discuss this book with Kynard.

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H. Paul Thompson Jr., “A Most Stirring and Significant Episode: Religion and the Rise and Fall of Prohibition in Black Atlanta, 1865-1887” (NIU Press, 2012) Jul 08, 2013

The American Temperance Movement remains an interesting and important topic. Considering the various attitudes that influenced laws about alcohol sale and consumption of the past are often referred to when reviewing issues related to liquor legislation today. However, what may not be as readily considered is the role that interracial race relations affected and may still impact legislation today. In H. Paul Thomspon Jr.’s A Most Stirring and Significant Episode: Religion and the Rise and Fall of Prohibition in Black Atlanta, 1865-1887 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2012), we are given a front row seat to a 22 year period, from the end of slavery to the failure of Reconstruction, when blacks and whites in Atlanta, Georgia, were negotiating, wrangling and vying for various iterations of temperance, from prohibition to anti-prohibition. Thompson uncovers not only the role that race played in this period, but that religion and region (the North’s relationship to the South) played as well.

This fascinating read is sure to capture the attention of any interested in religion, or region, or race, or prohibition during this fascinating and important period of history.

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Keith Clark, “The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry” (Louisiana State UP, 2013) Jun 23, 2013

What do you do if you accompany a friend on her research trip to Boston University’s Gotlieb Archival Research Center and end up finding a treasure trove of letters, news articles, hand written notes, and original drafts of nonfiction by one of your favorite authors? Keith Clark wrote a book. A truly insightful and wonderful one on the known but understudied Ann Petry. The title? The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry (Louisiana State University Press, 2013).

Those familiar with the work of Petry probably know her mid-century, naturalist novel The Street and probably place among the likes of Richard Wright. However, Clark expands our notion of Petry’s work, takes us on a journey that shows her work within other traditions, such as gothic, modernism and realism. He also shows her as a politically active figure, even writing letters to presidents. This book is a must read for any interested in any of the topics Clark undertakes, since he handles each with care, deft, and discernment. He’s equally loquacious and informative during our interview. Please, listen in.

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Marc Mauer, “Race to Incarcerate” (New Press, 2013) Jun 18, 2013

The American penitentiary model began as not merely a physical construct, but as a philosophical and religious one. Prisoners were to use their time in silence and isolation to contemplate their crimes/sins and to pursue God’s grace. Alexis de Tocqueville’s trip to America began not as a study of American democracy, but of its prisons, though he would go on to write about both arguing that arguing that American social reformers were beginning to view prisons as the “remedy for all of the evils of society”. As with many of his other observations Tocqueville was both accurate and prescient.

Today America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, more than four times the number of second place contender Russia. Regions like upstate NY that used to rely on logging, dairy farms, and manufacturing now rely on prison jobs for economic stability, while states like Mississippi release prisoners in the thousand because they cannot afford to continue to house them. Private prisons trade shares on the NASDAQ, promising to ‘lock up the profits’ of investors, which often means cutting corners in areas that can actually lead to rehabilitation – prisoner education, job training and substance abuse treatment.

Marc Mauer‘s Race to Incarcerate (New Press, 2013) is a graphic exploration of this reality based on his earlier book by the same title. Marc was kind enough to speak with us. I hope you enjoy.

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Monica R. Miller, “Religion and Hip Hop” (Routledge, 2012) Jun 03, 2013

The relationship between music and religion is a site of increasing interest to scholars within Religious Studies. Monica Miller, Assistant Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Lehigh University, explores the social processes and human activity related to Hip Hop music and its accompanying cultural expressions. In Religion and Hip Hop (Routledge, 2012) she introduces us to the various methods that have been used to examine Hip Hop culture and the descriptive terrain of previous scholarship. What is possibly the most laudable aspect of Miller’s efforts are her continued and repeated explorations into the purposes, effects, and operations of theory and method in the study of religion. In this regard, she does not perform a theological or religious analysis of music or lyrics as a search for meaning but rather examines the material productions of Hip Hop culture and the manufactured zones of significance within various discourses. Miller looks at the public context of Hip Hop culture and its relationship to larger social pathologies, the religious rhetoric and style of Hip-Hop knowledge productions or books written by Hip Hop artists, and a visual ethnography of the dance culture of Krumping where the body is examined as a site of significance through aesthetics, style, taste, and dispositions. Very often these interrogations challenge the category of religion in new ways and leave us asking what counts as religion and what is left out. Altogether, Miller does a lot in this book, much of which we did not get to discuss in detail. In our conversation we discussed authorial authority, social constructionism, youth religious participation, the Black Church, KRS One, morality, intentionality and habitus, complex subjectivity, postmodernism, classification, and many other interesting things.

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Alexis Wilson, “Not So Black and White” (Tree Spirit Publishing, 2012) Jun 03, 2013

When I think of the name “Billy Wilson” certain things come to mind immediately. I think of his sparkling career as director and choreographer of “Bubbling Brown Sugar” on Broadway. I am still stunned by his ability to shift from Broadway and back again so readily into making master works for the concert dance stage – Wilson’s works are in the repertory today of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Philadanco (Philadelphia Dance Company) and the Dance Theater of Harlem. I am all warm inside when I remember seeing the lush, rhythmic and striking choreography he created to the music of Dizzy Gillespie for his last work of concert dance, “The Winter in Lisbon” (1992.) A tour de force, Wilson was a passionate and celebrated dancer during his time as a soloist with the Dutch National Ballet and was later founder of the Dance Theater of Boston. For me, Billy Wilson is one of those names in dance history that is all too often reduced to a footnote that obfuscates his career and contributions to dance at home and abroad. I am thrilled that his daughter, Alexis Wilson, has stepped up and out to ensure that her father’s legacy survives, all while sharing her own voice and lived experiences with deep integrity.

Alexis Wilson’s touching and deeply personal book Not So Black and White (Tree Spirit Publishing, 2012) goes well beyond the commonly known information about her father’s life and work to reveal her experience growing up as the daughter of this dance genius. This book is her memoir, which is at once both a loving homage to her father, a meditation on her life as the biracial daughter of Wilson and a Dutch ballerina (Sonja van Beers) and a narrative that strives for reconciliation of the contradictions that shaped Alexis’s life. Abandoned by her mother at the age of 11, moving through the worlds of ballet and Broadway and navigating her life journey with her father and his chosen life partner (Chip Garnett) are just a taste of what shaped Alexis’s experiences. An accomplished dancer, author, mother and more, Alexis Wilson does what she did not have to do in this book: she pours herself onto the page so that others might have a lens through which to know who her father was beyond the footlights and a look at how race, class, art, love and pain intertwine to create a stunning portrait of her life. This work is at once deeply personal and relevant to the history of 20th century American dance. With a foreword by actor Blair Underwood, Not So Black and White is not to be missed. Today, Alexis Wilson makes her home in Columbus, OH with her two daughters and her husband, Byron.

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Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, “Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston” (UNC Press, 2011) May 31, 2013

How were black women manumitted in the Old South, and how did they live their lives in freedom before the Civil War? Historian, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers (Associate Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University in Bloomington) answers this complex question by explaining the precarious nature freedom for African American women in Charleston before the Civil War in Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston (UNC Press, 2011). In three tightly woven sections, she tells stories that reveal what it meant to glimpse, build and experience freedom from the early national period to the end of the antebellum era. Her beautifully written prose, coupled with thorough research to understand black women’s experiences in antebellum Charleston, makes her work an important contribution to the historical literature. Furthermore, her book has been awarded several prizes, namely the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize (2012) from the Southern Association of Women Historians, the George C. Rogers Jr. Award (2011) from the South Carolina Historical Society, and the Anna Julia Cooper – CLR James Book Award (2011) from the National Council for Black Studies.

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Marcus Rediker “The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom” (Viking, 2012) May 24, 2013

If the moniker of the slave ship Amistad brings to mind images of Anthony Hopkins, Djimon Hounsou, and Morgan Freeman you are likely not alone. The monumental success of Steven Spielberg’s cinematic depiction of this antebellum event swept the nation when it hit theaters in 1997. However, the event itself–the insurrection onboard the slaving vessel–made up only a small portion of the film and the tale Spielberg tells, which instead focuses on the courtroom drama. In fact, nearly all of the histories written about the Amistad focus solely on the triumphs of the American legal system, leaving the story of the true protagonists–the Africans–by the wayside. Marcus Rediker‘s The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (Viking, 2012) corrects this historical oversight by peeling back the layers of the often told “top down” history to tell the story of the rebellion from the perspective of the African captives, the story from below.

Rediker artfully employs newly discovered evidence to piece together cultural backgrounds of the disparate group of African captives in order to tell the hitherto untold story of the African roots of the Amistad rebellion. His adroit ability as both author and historian make this retelling both engaging and deeply informative. Rediker illustrates how the Amistad Africans overcame innumerable obstacles by playing a leading role in their own legal victory, liberation and repatriation. The political, legal, and cultural implications of the Amistad rebellion, as Rediker reminds us, were vast. That fifty-three slaves had violently emancipated themselves was jarring enough to the antebellum slaveholders in the South, but lawful recognition of the rebels’ self-emancipation by the United States government was another matter entirely. This reality and its reverberations influenced the sectional crisis unfolding in the antebellum United States and altered the nature and discourse of abolitionism in the Atlantic world.

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Henry Wiencek, “Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves” (FSG, 2012) May 15, 2013

The Louisiana Purchase was a perfect illustration of the challenges, yet seemingly boundless opportunities that slavery presented statesmen like Thomas Jefferson. Napoleon Bonaparte had been dealt a significant military defeat at the hands of a slave revolt in Haiti, forcing him to reconsider his interests in the Americas and the Caribbean. So, when Jefferson’s emissaries began negotiating to buy the port city of New Orleans, Napoleon instead offered them the entire Louisiana Territory: a deal that essentially doubled the size of the United States at 3 cents an acre and expanded slavery into new regions.

Decades earlier Jefferson had argued for ending the slave trade and enfranchising blacks. As a young lawyer he had taken the case of a black indentured servant pro-bono and fought for his freedom. He had included language in the Declaration of Independence denouncing the slave trade. Jefferson wrote the Ordinance of 1784 which would have banned slavery in any new territory in the US, officially ended it in 1800. Yet as he became more personally invested in slavery, Thomas Jefferson would evolve from being one of slavery’s detractors to becoming one of its great proponents and innovators. In Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (FSG, 2012), Henry Wiencek chronicles this transformation.

Mr. Wiencek was kind enough to speak with us. I hope you enjoy.

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Andre Williams, “Dividing Lines: Social Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction” (University of Michigan, 2013) May 08, 2013

Andrei Williams‘ provocative new book on African American class divisions in Post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow America is sure to spark spirited debate among those interested in how the interplay of economic status and racial identity influence what has been called “the black experience.” Her insightful book is called Dividing Lines: Social Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction (University of Michigan, 2013). Specifically, the book examines how late-nineteenth-century black authors represent intra-racial stratification and class mobility. Analyzing works by such authors as Frances Harper, Sutton Griggs, Paul L. Dunbar, and Charles Chesnutt, Williams casts doubt on the now two-easy distinction between sell out and black nationalist when it comes to class ascension as she historicizes the moment when blacks were seeking to compete in the mainstream. Her look at representations of class at the turn of the 20th Century is fresh and illuminating.

Please, listen in to the discussion.

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Steven Roby and Brad Schreiber, “Becoming Jimi Hendrix” (Da Capo, 2010) May 03, 2013

After his incendiary performance at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, Jimi Hendrix almost immediately went from obscure musician to pop superstar in America. But as Steven Roby and Brad Schreiber reveal in Becoming Jimi Hendrix: From Southern Crossroads to Psychedelic London, the Untold Story of a Musical Genius, Hendrix was far from an overnight sensation. Drawing on an impressive research base, the authors have unearthed the early 1960s prehistory of Hendrix’s well-known but all-too-short life in the spotlight. They show that before his artistic and cultural breakthrough Hendrix had worked as a guitar-playing sideman for some of the biggest R & B acts of the 1960s, including Ike and Tina Turner, the Isley Brothers, and the incomparable Little Richard. In doing so, they paint a vivid and compelling portrait of a massively influential musician whose genius did not suddenly emerge after he formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1966, but rather evolved during endless nights of gigging in backwater juke joints and dive bars from Nashville to New York City.

Steven Roby is a San Francisco-based photographer and the author of three books on the life and legacy of Jimi Hendrix: Black Gold: The Lost Archives of Jimi Hendrix, Becoming Jimi Hendrix: From Southern Crossroads to Psychedelic London, the Untold Story of a Musical Genius, and his latest, Hendrix on Hendrix: Interviews and Encounters with Jimi Hendrix. He can be reached through his blog.

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Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen, “Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop” (W.W. Norton, 2012) Apr 25, 2013

The moral arguments in defense of slavery hinged on the claim that it was the best arrangement for all parties involved, especially the slaves. Thomas Jefferson, for example, argued that the differences between black slaves and white masters were ‘fixed in nature’, with blacks being condemned to an existence driven more by ‘sensation than reflection’, thus making them incapable of comprehending the full weight of their predicament, let alone improving it. Freedom, according to John C. Calhoun, was the enemy of the black slave and would condemn him or her to the miserable life of a ‘pauper in the poor house’, rather than the ‘superintending’ care of masters and mistresses. When Jefferson returned from long trips, according to some biographers, he would have to wade through a throng of slaves eager to touch him, to thank him, to celebrate their master’s return. The minstrel, to many African Americans, is the physical embodiment of these arguments: the word made flesh.

The minstrel stalks our collective imaginations like a grinning, groveling, hand-clapping, toe-tapping Freddie Krueger. He leaps out just when we let our guards down and turns dignified moments into disgraceful debacles. He transforms the Academy Award Ceremony into a tribute to the trials and tribulations of pimps. He turns televisions shows about the plight of the poor in the inner city into buck-eyed dyno-mite (!!!!) joke fests. He morphs news stories into youtube songs and memes – bedroom intruders, AK-47 fried chicken disputes, Jordan sneaker riots. Somewhere the minstrel lies in wait, ready to leap back into the hearts and minds of the American public at the expense of those of us who demand dignity and respect, but as with all things American the story of the minstrel is more complex.

In Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop (W.W. Norton, 2012), Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen explore the minstrel tradition and put it in its proper context. While many of us may have used the label to attack particular artists or actions (see above), Taylor and Austen dissect it as a creature of American art, commerce, and racism that occasionally created opportunities for advancement – even for those who wore the mask.

Yuval Taylor was kind enough to speak with me. I hope you enjoy.

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Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, “Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party” (University of California Press, 2013) Apr 17, 2013

German military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz observed that many of the important variables in war exist in ‘clouds of great uncertainty’ which create disconnects and confusion that persist even after the fighting has ended. The conflict between the Black Panther Party and the United States government is in ways illustrative of this phenomenon–or ‘the fog of war’ as it has come to be called–and helps explain why the Party is so well known yet misunderstood.

For many, the Black Panther Party exists in image fragments: bullet-pocked storefronts, raised fists, drawings of mutant-pig policemen, Huey P. Newton on a wicker throne. For others, it exists in biographies of its leaders: Revolutionary Suicide, Seize the Time, This Side of Glory, A Taste of Power, just to name a few. Historians and political theorists have weighed in as well exploring the excesses of COINTELPRO, the failures of party leaders, gender inequity, missed opportunities, failed alliances, and endless betrayals. Yet there is still much to learn. In Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (University of California Press, 2013), authors Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin do an excellent job of putting the movement in its historical and philosophical context as not merely a challenge to American racism, but to American empire.

Joshua was kind enough to speak to us about his book. I hope you enjoy.

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Vladimir Alexandrov, “The Black Russian” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013) Apr 03, 2013

Vladimir Alexandrov‘s new book The Black Russian (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013) tells the epic and often tragic story of Fredrick Bruce Thomas, an African American born to recently freed slaves, who would go on to make a fortune in Russia as a club owner and entrepreneur.

Mr. Thomas was a pioneer in many respects. He migrated North in search of opportunity decades before the Great Migration. He fled the states in pursuit of greater prospects in Europe before it was fashionable for blacks to do so. He confronted and combated many of the forces that would shape the 20th century – racism, classism, and nativism – yet his story was little known to us until now.

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Peter Benjaminson, “Mary Wells: The Tumultuous Life of Motown’s First Superstar” (Chicago Review Press, 2012) Mar 09, 2013

Who is Motown’s first real star? The answer, of course, is Mary Wells, singer of such classics as “My Guy,” “Bye Bye Baby,” “The One Who Really Loves You,” “You Beat Me to the Punch,” and “Two Lovers,” among others. All of these hits were released in just four years between 1960 and 1969. In Mary Wells: The Tumultuous Life of Motown’s First Superstar (Chicago Review Press, 2012) author Peter Benjaminson chronicles the life of this singular performer from her early days as a young rock ‘n’ roll diva to her last years struggling with cancer. Along the way we learn that Wells was a tireless performer. She never stopped touring, never stopped reaching for the brass ring of financial success that eluded her for much of her career. It seems she never did receive the money she felt she deserved for the songs she released for Motown, while the record company appeared to rake in a handsome profit. She left Motown in 1964, released records with a number of different labels over the next twenty-six years, and finally received a paltry $100,000 from a law suit she filed against Motown in the late eighties. Whatever the case, Benjaminson shows well how Mary Wells star still shines bright. Her songs are known by most everyone, they are ingrained in the American popular psyche.

Peter Benjaminson is the author of The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard, The Story of Motown, and co-author of Investigative Reporting. He has written numerous articles for the Detroit Free Press and Atlanta Journal-Constitution among others.

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Reiland Rabaka, “Hip Hop’s Amnesia: From Blues and the Black Women’s Club Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Movement” (Lexington Books, 2012) Feb 19, 2013

In Hip Hop’s Amnesia: From Blues and the Black Women’s Club Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Movement (Lexington Books, 2012), the second installment of his hip hop trilogy, Reiland Rabaka again discusses, in great detail, many of the essential historical, musical, aesthetical, political, and cultural movements and moments of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first African America. Building on his overtly Africana, feminist, and queer critical theoretical analyses of black movements in Hip Hop’s Inheritance (the first installment), Rabaka uses a more comparative historical eye in this book to show how (A) there are many aspects of early blues, jazz, bebop, and soul musical movements, especially as they related to other political and cultural movements of their times, that can inform us as to the place of modern rap and neo-soul movements and their relationships with other modern cultural and political movements, and (B) the modern hip hop movement (musical and otherwise) can benefit from an understanding of the ways actors in these other movements (musical and otherwise) dealt with situations similar to their own. In this way, Rabaka passionately argues, rap music can take its rightful political, aesthetic, and cultural place in the ongoing historical struggle of African Americans (men and women, straight and gay) to overthrow the bonds of oppression that have characterized their experiences in U.S. society.

Reiland Rabaka is associate professor of African, African American, and Caribbean studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Humanities Program and the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is also an affiliate professor in the Women and Gender studies Program and a research fellow at the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America. He is the author of ten books, including Against Epistemic Apartheid, Du Bois’s Dialectics, and the forthcoming third installment of his Hip Hop trilogy, The Hip Hop Movement.

Click here to listen to my previous interview with Rabaka about Hip Hop’s Inheritance.

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Michael P. Jeffries, “Paint the White House Black: Barack Obama and the Meaning of Race in America” (Stanford UP, 2013) Feb 16, 2013

Over the last year, this podcast has featured several authors who’ve examined the presidency of Barack Obama. John Sides, Daniel Kriess, and Enid Logan each wrote about the election campaign of the President. Michael P. Jeffries steps back and places the President into a larger theoretical conversation about race and language. Jeffries is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Welleseley College and also writes for The Atlantic magazine and The Guardian newspaper. He is the author of Paint the White House Black: Barack Obama and the Meaning of Race in America (Stanford University Press, 2013) and published his first book, Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop in 2011. Jeffries peels back the debate over exactly “post-racial” life in America really is in 2013. Using the presidency of Barack Obama as a focal point, he draws from sociology, feminist theory, and political science to situate the president in long-standing debates about the state of race in America. The book is provocative, timely, and an enjoyable read

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Andra Gillespie, “The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark, and Post-Racial America” (NYU Press, 2012) Feb 08, 2013

Andra Gillespie is the author of The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark, and Post-Racial America (NYU Press, 2012). She is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Emory University and earned her Ph.D. from Yale University. Her new book focuses on the rise of one of the most well-known mayors in the country, Cory Booker. Gillespie tracks Booker’s rise through the complex politics of the city of Newark, NJ. As one of the few US cities with a history of African American mayors, Booker’s story is unique, but also illustrative. By challenging long-time Mayor Sharpe James, Booker — a newcomer to the city — confronted a deep and protective political establishment. The strategies Booker used, some effective, others less so, help Gillespie explain a larger phenomenon of the “post-racial America”. The book’s clear and personal writing make this an engaging read for political scientists and those interested in urban politics.

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Stephen G. Hall, “A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America” (UNC Press, 2009) Feb 08, 2013

Historian Stephen Hall passionately engages in the history of nineteenth-century African American intellectual life in his first monograph, A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). This work traces the long nineteenth-century and how black historical writers evoked various themes at different moments, including ancient African history, biblical history, the paradox of American slavery, and challenges to black citizenship during the Reconstruction era. He unearths of a plethora of black historical sources in the nineteenth century in various forms, including speeches, sermons, newspapers, and literary texts, which each serve as precursors to the black historical writing of the twentieth century. His work reveals the complexities of African American intellectual history, and would be a great inclusion for undergraduate or graduate course, or for a general audience of readers who would be interested in learning more about the important history he illuminates. Listen in.

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Richard W. Leeman and Bernard Duffy, “The Will of a People: A Critical Anthology of Great African American Speeches (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) Jan 30, 2013

The Will of a People: A Critical Anthology of Great African American Speeches (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) is a compendium of 22 orations delivered by African Americans over a span of over 265 years. Co-edited by frequent collaborators Richard Leeman and Bernard Duffy, both professors of communication studies, both interested in the American tradition of public address, have spotlighted the African American oral tradition in public testimonies, speeches, declarations, and jeremiads, among other possible categories of purpose in black oratory. Limited by such constraints as space and copy right law, the speeches included are those considered great, either because the speech itself is considered “famous,” like Sojourner Truth’s “A’n’t I a Woman?,” or because it is considered “the finest speech delivered by a an influential orator,” like Henry Turner’s “I Claim the Rights as a Man.” Whatever the reason for their inclusion, it’s no doubt the speeches collected are inspirational, informative, and worth studying as part of American cultural history, an oratorical history that continues to this very moment. In fact, capturing the contemporary milieu, the book also contains the first inaugural address by Barack Obama, the first U.S. president of color. Thus covering an impressive range, The Will of a People, will give readers much to think about, debate, and contemplate.

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Stephen Caliendo and Charlton McIlwain, “Race Appeal: How Candidates Invoke Race in US Political Campaigns” (Temple University Press 2011) Jan 22, 2013

Stephen Caliendo and Charlton McIlwain are the authors of Race Appeal: How Candidates Invoke Race in US Political Campaigns (Temple University Press 2011). Caliendo is Professor of Political Science at North Central College and McIlwain is Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communications at New York University. The two present a complicated portrait of the way race has played a part in recent elections. They utilize a multi-method approach combining content analysis and experiments to analyze how race is presented in campaign advertisements and comment on the verbal and visual dimensions of race in advertising. The book can help make sense of past elections and also the way race may play a part in campaigns in the future.

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Carla L. Peterson, “Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (Yale UP, 2011) Jan 18, 2013

Digging up our roots seems to be the thing these days. There are a host of genealogy resources available for anyone who cares to (re)discover their familial past. Still, in the Americas people of African descent who want to take part in this digging encounter barriers; often there are gaps in the family histories of those whose members were bought and sold on a whim. As she takes readers on a remarkable historical journey, Carla Peterson, author of Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (Yale University Press, 2011), illuminates the challenges of (re)discovering family histories and along the way, readers glean much about US national history.

Armed with determination, patience beyond measure, and with several doses of serendipity, Peterson, Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, takes her desire to return and find elements of her past to the archives of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her persistence reveals to readers a new view of nineteenth century Gotham, as Washington Irving called the city of New York. For example, Black Gothamprovides support for social historians who would argue that the New Negro movement–often solely associated with the Harlem Renaissance–began in the ante-bellum era. And, those interested in the education of free African Americans pre-1865 may find it fascinating that many of the 19th century’s black elite were a part of New York’s African Free School system–the Mulberry Street School, in particular. Celebrated alumni include James McCune Smith, Alexander Crummell, Henry Highland Garnet, George Downing, the Reason brothers–Charles and Patrick–as well as Peterson’s great-great grandfather, Peter Guignon, and her great-grandfather, Philip White. As Peterson rediscovers her paternal family’s New York history, she at times laments the obscurity to which the women in her family were relegated; she does her best to remedy this, however, as she uses facts and imagination to piece together their lives.

While the book divulges new perspectives on freedom–or the lack thereof–for black New Yorkers in the nineteenth century, it also is instructive with regards to methods of research for those who seek to dress up the scraps of memory mothers, fathers, grand-aunts or grand-uncles choose to share. Needless to say, the acts of both forgetting and remembering are found not only in personal narratives of history; the journey upon which Peterson embarks also forces readers to consider how and whom institutions choose to forget and/or remember–indeed, how the nation selectively forgets and remembers.

Sankofa is an Adinkra symbol of West Africa’s Akan people that means “to go back and take it.” It describes one impetus for Dr. Carla Peterson’s journey for she indeed goes back to see; Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City attests to the fact that her insistence pays off significantly–both for her personally, and for lovers of history alike. Read alongside a virtual archive http://archive.blackgothamarchive.org/ wherein one can find documents and images of New York’s black elite of the nineteenth century, the narrative moves one steadily along, inspiring new critical questions and intrigue.

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Preston Lauterbach, “The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll” (W. W. Norton, 2011) Jan 15, 2013

Where does rock ‘n’ roll begin?

In The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll (W. W. Norton, 2011), Preston Lauterbach makes a strong case for its beginnings in the backwoods and small-town juke joints, fed by big-city racketeering, of the black American South. It begins, possibly, on Indianapolis’s Indiana Avenue where Denver Fergusun ran numbers, paid-off cops, and operated the Sunset Terrace. It begins, maybe, in Houston where Don Robey was the proprietor of the Bronze Peacock, oversaw a network of bars and taverns throughout Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, and was a founder of the seminal Peacock Records. Maybe it began in Memphis, home of W.C. Handy, Beale Street, and the Mitchell Hotel. Or maybe it was the multitude of juke joints that littered the American South from Texas to Florida, Georgia to Chicago, in the 1930s and 40s that afforded artists such as Walter Barnes, Louis Jordan, Little Richard, and Roy Brown a series of non-stop one-nighters to ply their raunchy jumped-up versions of swing and the blues to an insatiable audience of primarily African American men and women looking for good times. In the book Lauterbach details the Chitlin’ Circuit as it was, a network of promoters, clubs, radio stations, con-men, highways and, most importantly, musicians that supported an underground artistic economy and lifestyle just beneath the surface of the mainstream music industry; a network that gave birth to rock ‘n’ roll.

The Chitlin’ Circuit is Preston’s first book. He is currently working on his second, a hustler’s history of Beale Street.

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Marcia Alesan Dawkins, “Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity” (Baylor UP, 2012) Jan 11, 2013

Performance queen RuPaul once famously quipped that “we’re born naked; the rest is drag”–meaning everyone dons identity, performs one’s concept of self within our social networks, e.g., family, community, work. Marcia Alesan Dawkins takes RuPaul’s theory further in her new book, Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity (Baylor University Press, 2012). In it, she discusses (racial) passing as a performance that everyone, even social institutions, at one time or another, enact. In fact, she contends that we understand passing because we all might be required to do it, but also because we participate in rhetoric, ways of communicating and comprehending identity.

Dawkins defines passing as “the phenomenon in which a person gains acceptance as a member of social groups other than his or her own, usually in terms of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion, citizenship, or disability status” (xii). She connects this to communication by discussing “passing as a series of rhetorical intersections where tropes and identifications meet texts, personalities, social situations, categories, and hierarchies” (xi). In the course of her theorizing, she distills intellectual concepts into accessible prose that every educated reader can enjoy.

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Yael Tamar Lewin, “Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins” (Wesleyan UP, 2011) Jan 11, 2013

What does it mean for a contemporary scholar to be trusted with the unfinished autobiography of a dance legend? How does one ensure that the integrity of their research matches the depth of life experience embodied in their subject’s narrative? Who is best served by the sharing of the untold stories of those whose narratives have been historically marginalized? And what does it mean for today’s dancers to learn about those who have paved the way for them under harsh and unjust circumstances? These were the questions I had in mind when I was lucky enough to interview historian and dancer Yael Tamar Lewin, author of Night’s Dancer, The Life of Janet Collins (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), a soaring work that includes Ms. Collin’s unfinished autobiography.

Born in 1917, Janet Collins was raised in Los Angeles and has the historic distinction of being the first African – American prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera. A dancer with demonstrable skill in both ballet and modern dance vocabularies, Janet’s career included performances on television, in film and on Broadway. Despite her triumphs as an artist, Ms. Collins faced intense racial bias throughout her career as a dancer, choreographer and teacher. An accomplished painter and deeply spiritual person, Janet’s story is tenderly and meticulously recounted in both her own words and through Ms. Lewin’s wonderful research. The book stands as a testament to any dancer today wishing to fulfill their artistic potential in a world that can be unwelcoming and cold. Notably, Yael’s research on Collins began during her own undergraduate studies and took shape over several years during which a trusting relationship budded between subject and author. This model of scholarship and the resulting work shares lessons on how to handle the narrative of a beloved artist with care. Yael Tamar Lewin is a writer, editor, choreographer, and alternative medicine practitioner. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Barnard College and Columbia University, and has performed with several dance companies, including her own. She lives in New York.

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Meredith Roman, “Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of US Racism, 1928-1937” (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) Dec 21, 2012

In December 1958, US Senator Hubert H. Humphery recalled that at some point during an eight hour meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier “tore off on a whole long lecture” that the Senator wished he could remember because it was “the best speech I could ever make in my life on antiracialism. Boy, he really gave me a talking to.” Thus beings Meredith Roman‘s fascinating book Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of US Racism, 1928-1937 (Nebraska UP, 2012). At first read, the image of animated Khrushchev haranguing a US Senator with “the best speech” the latter ever heard on the topic of race seems out of place, odd, and to some extent even comical. After all, what could Khrushchev really have known about race in America to impress an American?

Khrushchev’s fluency in “speaking antiracism” was no mere preformative dig at the United States. In fact, many African American travelers and expatriates to the Soviet Union in the 1930s were astonished how much its citizens knew and were concerned about American race relations. In Opposing Jim Crow, Roman shows that antiracism was a genuine vernacular constructed through show trials, antiracist campaigns, media, and representations of racial oppression in the United States. It was through American racism that the USSR was crafted into a morally superior, raceless society. Nothing reinforced this idea more than the adoption of Soviet antiracist discourse by American Americans visitors, expatriates, and sympathizers themselves. But more importantly, it was via these multiple intersections that speaking antiracism became an important, and until now ignored, component in the effort to create new Soviet people in the 1930s.

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Sikivu Hutchinson, “Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars” (Infidel Books, 2011) Dec 13, 2012

Sikivu Hutchinson‘s book Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars (Infidel Books, 2011) is a brave examination of African American religious perspectives vis a vis progressive racial politics, gender relations, and cultural values. She tackles uncomfortable questions about the possibly excessive role of religiosity among African Americans, especially woman. And she wonders even as she offers a critique about the abundance of storefront churches in communities that need essential resources. Why so many churches? Why so few activist cultural institutions?

A prolific cultural critic and writer, Hutchinson received a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and has taught women’s studies, cultural studies, urban studies and education at UCLA, the California Institute of the Arts and Western Washington University. She is also the author of Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles (Lang, 2003) and has published fiction, essays and critical theory in Social Text, California English, Black Agenda Report, Free Inquiry and American Atheist Magazine. She is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a senior fellow for the Institute for Humanist Studies. Readers can also look forward to the publication of her latest project, Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels. But for now, enjoy our conversation about Moral Combat.

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Catherine Higgs, “Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa” (Ohio University Press, 2012) Nov 14, 2012

With elegant and accessible prose, Catherine Higgs takes us on a journey in Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa (Ohio University Press, 2012). It is a fascinating voyage fueled by the correspondence of Joseph Burtt, a man who had helped found a utopian commune before being sent by the chocolate magnate William Cadbury in the early 1900s to investigate labor conditions on cocoa plantations in Africa. For almost two years, Burtt observed and wrote and fevered his way to the large Portuguese colony of Angola, to Mozambique in Portuguese East Africa, and finally to Transvaal in British southern Africa. Higgs’s wonderfully evocative account uses Burtt’s journey to tell a much larger story about competing British and Portuguese colonial interests in Africa that was fueled, in part, by tensions over very different notions of “labor” and “slavery.” It is a story of the co-creation of two vital commodities of the twentieth century – chocolate and human beings – that invites readers into the hospitals, roads, ships, and plantations that were such crucial sites of negotiation over the basic components of a free human life. It is an engaging and assignable book built on archival work that will satisfy both academic historians and a general audience.

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Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, “Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life” (Verso Books, 2012) Nov 11, 2012

Racism is a process by which people are segregated and discriminated against based on their race, and race is defined as a set of physical characteristics which certain groups share. Or is it? In Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (Verso Books, 2012), Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields argue that racism does not come from race. In fact, racism is the very act of creating race, by transforming it from something an aggressor does, into something the target is. So-called physical characteristics are red herrings in the discourse, conveniently there to justify certain kinds of racism, but certainly not necessary for them (anti-Semitism being an example). In this highly original book, the Fields’ draw a fascinating parallel between our everyday concept of race and the outdated notion of witchcraft, two beliefs firmly held by the societies which birthed them, reproduced and recreated in daily life by what was, in their time, “evidence,” and both which are, quite plainly, false. This is a fascinating book about the power that racecraft and other delusions have on all of us, and more importantly, how to defeat them. In this interview, we talk with Karen E. Fields about this important new book.

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Peggy Schwartz and Murray Schwartz, “The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus” (Yale UP, 2012) Nov 02, 2012

For some time now I’ve been in spaces with dancers and dance scholars who lament the amount of available research on some of the black luminaries in our field. Sometimes the need for a particular project is present for so long that its absence is taken for granted and treated as the norm. One of the “missing” but “much needed” projects I’ve heard talked about over the years is a book length treatment of the work of modern dance pioneer and scholar Dr. Pearl Primus. I’m really glad that her dear friends, Peggy and Murray Schwartz decided to fill that empty space with their latest project that is as much scholarly research as it is a homage to their very dear friend.

For the entirety of her 74-year lifespan, Dr. Primus worked tirelessly and diligently as a dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist bringing the value of African culture to students and audience members around the globe. Though Primus studied and honed her approach to contemporary dance right alongside well known artists like Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Hanya Holm her work, while known to some has not been celebrated in the same way for its enduring impact. Pearl’s career began in 1943 as she began sharing dance works that infused her commitment to social justice and racial commentary with her approach to concert dance. In The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus (Yale University Press, 2012), Peggy Schwartz and Murray Schwartz, examine the ways in which Pearl’s career influenced dance, education and culture, charting her life story through its beginnings in Trinidad and work with the New Dance Group up to and through her later years. Dr. Primus’s extensive travels through Africa, the Caribbean, Israel, the United States and Europe are discussed in this book and presented as an example of what the life of a committed dancer, scholar and humanitarian can look like through hard work and dedication. Peggy and Murray were longtime personal friends of Primus decided to take on the task of cementing her name in the literature by crafting a tender, thoughtful and soaring biography that focuses on not only her creative work but her lasting impact on the contemporary dance landscape. Peggy Schwartz is professor emeritus of dance and former director of the dance program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Murray Schwartz is former dean of humanities and fine arts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He teaches literature at Emerson College.

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Michele Elam, “The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics and Aesthetics in the New Millennium” (Stanford UP, 2011) Oct 31, 2012

“What are you?” The question can often comes out of nowhere One can be going about her quotidian activities, or she might have just finished a meeting at work. “What are you?” The question is disorienting for most, but for others who are racially ambiguous it is commonplace. The ostensibly benign question suggests that it is about the person being asked. However, one might argue that it is more about the one who does the asking. In The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millenium (Stanford University Press, 2011), Michele Elam critically discusses the rise of the Mixed Race Studies. To demonstrate the new sub-genre of cultural studies in both art and academia Elam shows elements of what mixed-racedness looks like in the classroom, as well as in the public sphere here at the turn of the 21st century.

One of the contributions of Elam’s Souls makes to Mixed Race Studies is her careful outline of the ways people of mixed biological ancestry have historically worked for the goal of social justice for all oppressed groups; moreover, she shows how those who look at mixed-racedness critically continue to do so. This, despite the trajectory in which some of mixed-race advocates are moving: people of mixed-race backgrounds are a separate group with separate issues, and most importantly, being both black and white–and that is most often the only definition many use of being “mixed”–their experience falls outside the purview of race studies. This notion of being separate and outside is often used to justify a view of race that essentially reifies notions of identity as being defined by blood percentage–a point of view that takes us back, not forward. While those who critically study mixed- raceness see that one’s movement through a society that continues to ask What are you? can result in alternate experiences, many show that the difference can work in a way to help all understand racial oppression. Dr. Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor in the English Department at Stanford University, falls within the latter group.

And, so do Lezley Saar, Danzy Senna, Philip Roth, Aaron McGruder, and Dave Chappelle, to name but a few. A mixed bag, for sure, Elam examines relevant works of the aforementioned artists as she considers the way in which they challenge what is quickly becoming conventional thought on mixed-racedness from the academic classroom to the public sphere.

Whether one is fascinated with her critical reading of K-12 textbooks focused on mixed race curriculum or with her reading of artist Lezley Saar’s “Baby Halfie Brown Head”; with her insightful readings of Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks comic strips and/or the unforgettable episode “The Racial Draft” from The Dave Chappelle Show; whether one is interested in the ways that author Colson Whitehead and playwright Carl Hancock Rux ask their audiences to think critically about mixed-racedness in the 21st century one thing is clear: Elam first highlights and subsequently knocks down the notion that “fetishizing the box” of the racial categories on census forms or outlining one’s mixed family tree represents progression towards a most just society in the US.

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Donald Spivey, “‘If You Were Only White’: The Life of Leroy ‘Satchel’ Paige” (University of Missouri Press, 2012) Oct 25, 2012

Of all American sports, baseball has contributed the greater number of folk heroes to the larger culture. Fictional characters of awe-inspiring ability, like the mighty Casey and Roy Hobbs, or quirky sages such as Casey Stengel and Yogi Berra are broadly known in a way that few representatives of other sports are. And one of baseball’s great folk heroes–a man of both extraordinary talent and peculiar sagacity–is Satchel Paige. As a pitcher in the Negro Leagues and the barnstorming circuits of the Twenties and Thirties, Paige’s exploits on the field were the stuff of legend. Rearing back his tall, lanky body, with a double and sometimes triple wind-up of his arm, Paige would unload rocket pitches that buzzed like a bee as they flew past the batter. There were innings when Paige would tell his fielders to sit down, or even stay on the bench. He didn’t need fielders when the batters weren’t even close to hitting his pitches. But Paige also understood that fans not only wanted to see impressive displays of prowess. They wanted to be entertained. So he cultivated a nonchalant, even lazy persona on the field. He taunted batters from the mound. And as the years passed, he cast himself as the wizened old man of baseball, dispensing homespun proverbs such as: “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”

The problem with legendary figures like Satchel Paige is that their accomplishments are often buried under an accumulation of exaggerations and fables. In his biography of Paige, historian Donald Spivey digs through the mythology to present the first scholarly account of the great pitcher’s life. The result of more than a decade of research, “If You Were Only White”: The Life of Leroy “Satchel” Paige (University of Missouri Press, 2012) shows that, even without embellishment, Paige’s life was epic, sometimes turbulent, and often humorous. From the Alabama reform school where Paige learned to throw a baseball to the black teams of the South that endured Jim Crow at every stop, from high-paying stints in North Dakota and the Dominican Republic to his World Series-winning season with the Cleveland Indians as a 42-year-old “rookie,” the story of Satchel Paige roams far and wide. But it is more than a colorful tale. As Don argues, Paige’s ability to draw large crowds of black and white fans, and a talent that drew praise from white Major Leaguers, were important factors in eroding the segregation of baseball. While Jackie Robinson is hailed as the man who broke the color line in 1947, it was the wide popularity of Satchel Paige in the Thirties and Forties that set the stage for him.

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David Kirby, “Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll” (Continuum, 2009) Oct 02, 2012

“A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop, a-lop-bam-boom!”And so rock and roll was born. And so American culture changed forever. So says David Kirby in Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll (Continuum, 2009). “Tutti Frutti,” Little Richard’s first hit, recorded by Robert “Bumps” Blackwell at Cosimo Matassa’s J & M Studio in New Orleans in September 1955, co-written and sanitized by Dorothy LaBostrie after Richard’s original lyric (“A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop, a-good-goddamn/Tutti Frutti, good booty”) was deemed a bit too racy for a recorded release (it was, after all, a song about anal copulation, writes the author), is the lynchpin around which Kirby builds a biography of one of the greats of twentieth-century American music and art. His story moves from Richard’s childhood in Macon, Georgia, to his place among the greats of the old, weird America, to his legacy as the Architect of Rock. It’s Kirby’s contention, really, that Richard’s story is America’s story. It’s filled with entrepreneurs, con artists, straights, gays, gospels, devils, showmen and, best of all, outrageous and booty shakin’ music, and Little Richard Penniman, in a more than fifty-year career, embraces all of these and more with abandon.

David Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. He has written on music for the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and others.

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Peter Hoffer, “Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739” (Oxford, 2010) Sep 26, 2012

In Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739 (Oxford, 2010), Peter C. Hoffer offers a succinct and refreshing new look at the Stono slave rebellion of 1739, an event that has been the subject of much historical scholarship. His main departure from previous interpretations of what actually happened on that fateful night on that lowcountry South Carolina road is that the event was not premeditated, as other historians often argue. Instead, as Dr. Hoffer reveals in this meticulously researched volume, the true story is likely one of contingency. His nuanced examination of the few primary sources that exist is commendable and make his argument that the insurrection was not planned all the more convincing.

The book–other than forcing us to revisit other possible underlying motivations for rebellion–draws into question larger issues surrounding the writing of history and the authorial decisions made by professional historians.

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Theresa Runstedtler, “Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line” (University of California Press, 2012) Sep 24, 2012

In the history of American sports, few athletes were as famous and hated in their day as Jack Johnson. The first African American boxing champion, Johnson was an astonishingly brash figure who flouted the prejudices held by white Americans. His 1910 victory over James J. Jeffries, the former champion dubbed the “Great White Hope,” set off clashes between whites and blacks in cities across America–one of the most widespread and notorious episodes of racial violence in U.S. history. But Johnson was far more than a figure of American sports. He was, in the fullest sense, the world heavyweight champion. He won the title in 1908 in Australia, and lost it seven years later in Cuba. When he fought, news of the matches was reported around the world. And during and after his years as champion, Johnson lived abroad as an exile. Charged in the U.S. with trafficking a white woman for immoral purposes, Johnson spent seven years moving between England, France, Russia, Spain, Argentina, Barbados, Cuba, and Mexico. At every stop, he was celebrated–and condemned. But he was never quiet, and he was never boring.

In her book Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (University of California Press, 2012), Theresa Runstedtler presents the fighter in this broader, international perspective. As she explains in the interview, Johnson was like other African American men of the turn of the century who traveled the world in order to overcome the racial constraints of American society. While abroad, he offered direct criticisms of American racism in newspaper articles and autobiographical writings. But he also encountered racism in new forms, coming to realize that Jim Crow was one part of a worldwide phenomenon. At the same time, Johnson stoked white fears around the world. In South Africa and India, as well as in the United States, officials and journalists dreaded the effects that another Johnson victory would have on local black and brown populations: the people who were supposed to be their subject inferiors. For them, the search for a “white hope” was not simply a matter of putting the brash fighter in his proper place. It was a matter of confirming their racial superiority.

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Reiland Rabaka, “Hip Hop’s Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement” (Lexington Books, 2011) Sep 11, 2012

Cultural movements don’t exist in vacuums. Consciously or not, all movements borrow from, and sometimes reject, those that came before. In Hip Hop’s Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement (Lexington Books, 2011), the first in a trilogy of books that cast a critical eye upon hip hop as a social and cultural movement, Reiland Rabaka traces the pre-history of hip hop as a series of separate yet connected movements that dealt with inequalities of race/ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. Using Africana, feminist, and queer critical theories as tools for understanding, Rabaka follows the history of black, women’s, and LGBT resistance to heterosexual white male hegemony in U.S. culture. Rabaka’s focus is always on the roles that art and artists (literary, visual, musical) have in people’s active resistances to oppression. The Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts Movement, Black Women’s Liberation, and Feminist Art Movements are just a few of the cultural happenings that Rabaka details as precursors to today’s “conscious” rap, feminist rap, and Homo-Hop, among others. All along, Rabaka’s message is not simply academic, he is also speaking directly to contemporary hip hoppers, urging them not to forget their past and to learn from the struggles of their forbears.

Reiland Rabaka is an Associate Professor of African, African American, and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Humanities Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is also an Affiliate Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Program and a Research Fellow at the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America (CSERA). He has published ten books, including Hip Hop’s Amnesia: From Blues and Black Women’s Club Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Movement (2012) and The Hip Hop Movement: From R&B and the Civil Rights Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Generation (2013).

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Brenda Dixon Gottschild, “Joan Myers Brown and the Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina: A Biohistory of American Performance” (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011) Aug 29, 2012

For the launch of the Dance Channel, I thought long and hard about what the first author interview would be. I felt that it was critically important that this channel begins with a rich conversation between myself and a well respected author whose contributions to dance scholarship were substantial. It seemed to me that this channel could function as a space where the voices of those doing rigorous work with dance at the center, could be invited into conversations that focused on their most recent project, but exposed the challenges and issues they faced along the way in trying to do their work with integrity. To that end, I knew I needed someone whose voice in dance scholarship was strong and consistent and whose contributions were undeniable. When I thought of it that way, it became clear that I needed to have this first interview showcase the work of Dr. Brenda Dixon Gottschild.

Brenda Dixon Gottschild‘s newest work, Joan Myers Brown and the Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina: A Biohistory of American Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) chronicles the growth and development of one of the country’s most important dance companies through the life of its creator and her community. Here, the author treats readers to a backstage pass into the mind of one of the toughest ladies in dance, Joan Myers Brown, founder of the Philadelphia School of Dance Arts and later of the Philadelphia Dance Company (known lovingly as Philadanco.) It’s important to understand that this book is a “biohistory” – a work that blends not just Ms. Brown’s biography, but contextualizes it in the history of Black Philadelphia and the development of American concert dance. The book is just the most recent in the line of works written by the author whose work has always focused on bringing invisibilized narratives to light and putting them into their proper historical context. The author, who I am glad to know as “Dr. Brenda,” doesn’t shy away from the realities of race, class, power and gender that can often constrain one’s mobility in the world and her work here makes clear that to that point, the dance world is no exception. Challenges and constraints aside, Joan Myers Brown and the Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina: A Biohistory of American Performance is an example of the some of the finest contemporary scholarship in dance studies. As the fifth book project for Dr. Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, fans of her work won’t be left wanting for anything in this newest book and dance enthusiasts are sure to find a compelling narrative that will leave them satisfied and wanting more of what this author has to offer.

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Minkah Makalani, “In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939” (UNC Press, 2011) Aug 15, 2012

Minkah Makalani is the author of a new intellectual history on the efforts of early twentieth century black radicals to organize an international movement, one that would address both racial and class oppression around the globe. The book is called In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2011). As the title suggests, the focus of the study is on two black radical groups: One in Harlem, the African Blood Brotherhood; and the other in London, the International African Service Bureau. The book examines among other things, “how they communicated across continents.” This is important not only because it illustrates that race was a concern outside of the U.S., but to show just how intricately race and class are linked; so much so that the two cannot be separated.

This new study explores provocative questions, and also definitively adds to ongoing debates regarding:

* African Americans and communism

* Tensions about which is more important, race or class?

* Definitions of black radicalism

* International black figures of the Harlem Renaissance

* The relationship among artists, the arts and politics during the Harlem Renaissance

* How the Communist Party perceived race in relation to class oppression

These and other insightful topics are addressed at length in this wonderful history. But you can find an appetizing introduction to them in this lively interview. Please, listen in.

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Charlotte Pierce-Baker, “This Fragile Life: A Mother’s Story of a Bipolar Son” (Lawrence Hill Books, 2012) Jul 30, 2012

When a mother listens to the beats of her own heart, where angst, fear and fortitude compete, and then beautifully weaves emotion into a story about her ongoing journey to support a bipolar son, then you know something significant has happened in African American literature. At least I did, when I read Charlotte Pierce-Baker‘s insightful memoir, This Fragile Life: A Mother’s Story of a Bipolar Son (Lawrence Hill Books, 2012).

But what I didn’t know is why Pierce-Baker would “go there” again. I mean, she has already, once before, “gone there,” when she mined personal pain to write about trauma and black women’s narratives of rape. Yet, when I reflect on a line from her son’s poetry, which is what knits the narrative together, I understand. Her son Mark writes: “When mom is gone nothing is right and everything is wrong/A joke is not a joke, and the birds don’t sing their song.” The power of this book for me is that a mother has created a literary space for her son, a black man living with mental illness, to sing about being a father, a husband, a solid citizen, and yet struggling. Mark’s wrangles with his struggles are revealed in poetic opening lines like these:

“In the padded room of my heart/ A madman suffers.”

“Street vendors here do not sell soft pretzels/They trade toxic pebbles for pocket change until there is just lint left.”

“I will love you until God dies.”

This book is as much about a black man in America, as it is about a black man dealing with bipolar disorder, as it is about a mother, a family, learning to cope and ultimately to understand.

This Fragile Life is a must read. Listen to the interview, and you’ll see why?

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Erica R. Edwards, “Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership” (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) Jun 29, 2012

Picture the familiar scene: the visiting pastor thanks the local pastor for granting him the use of his pulpit; he sends out the call (“Can I just speak with you this morning?”) and the congregation responds (“Yessir! Amen!”). The disclaimer follows: he is only the vessel through which the Lord will speak. Should he say something with which one disagrees take it up with the Lord. He pats his brow, grips the podium; throws away his notes, transitions to improvisation; cadenced speech follows, and the congregation responds in kind. Erica R. Edwards describes the aforementioned as the charismatic scene in Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). The new author probes charismatic leadership and its interventions found in literature written by African Americans throughout the 20th century. The fundamental questions Edwards, assistant professor of English at the University of California, Riverside asks are: What is the seduction of charismatic leadership? And, how does it shape 20th century African American literary productions? The rise of white supremacy coupled with sharecropping as a system of peonage made emancipation essentially a non-event. In the face of domestic terrorism singular, male leadership became a necessary survival strategy. Still, there is apparent dissonance; reverence for the black male leader in African American culture does not translate to the literature. From W.E.B. DuBois’s stage pageant “The Star of Ethiopia” (1913) to Marcus Garvey’s speech performances in 1920s Harlem, NY; from George Schuyler’s Black Empire (1936-38) to Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939); from Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997) to postulations by Eddie (played by Cedric the Entertainer) in “Barbershop” 1 & 2 (2002, 2004, respectively) Edwards demonstrates when one depends solely on the convention of singular male leadership as the answer to solving the various communal needs of the people much is at stake: gender oppression; the violence of silencing; and, dismissal of all alternative forms of leadership, just to name a few. “The dream” of singular black male leadership has translated to the nightmare for the masses–and women, in particular–time and time again. In the end the book leaves readers with a set of critical questions regarding charisma and leadership. Erica R. Edwards’s Charisma is a critical read for anyone who is interested in the relationship between literature and real life scenes of black leadership–particularly as it plays out in the black political sphere in the post-civil rights era.

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Koritha Mitchell, “Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930” (University of Illinois Press, 2012) Jun 29, 2012

Koritha Mitchell‘s Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 2012) is, as described on the publisher’s webpage, “the first full-length critical study of lynching plays in American culture.” Drawing from a diverse array of methods and disciplines including American studies, literary criticism, performance studies, and theatre, Mitchell boldly claims and astutely substantiates how early twentieth-century lynching plays provide a literary and even domestic and community space for African Americans to challenge and cope with erratic vigilante racism that threatened black life in America. She also claims that reading these plays can inform our understanding of African American literature, politics, theatre, and the performance of everyday life today.

Perhaps what’s most provocative and noteworthy about Mitchell’s study is her insistence that contemporary representations of lynching, such as well-known photographs, perpetuate lynching as a spectacle for white consumption. These representations serve as a buoy and less of a challenge to an ideology of white racial superiority. On the other hand, the performance and readying of lynching plays written by African Americans places black humanity and community, instead of black degradation, at the center of spectatorship and thus serves as a challenge to anti-black ideologies and violence. The assault on the black body is certainly noted in the plays, but the effect of lynching on the lives, families, communities, and even histories and futures of the imagined victims and, from there, the real race, is considered in fuller ways that are limited by the iconic photographic representations of lynching. That said, Mitchell’s discussion of Living with Lynching is a must to consider. Please listen in.

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Kelly Baker, “Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930” (University Press of Kansas, 2011) Jun 24, 2012

If images of white robes, pointed hoods, and a burning cross represent racism and violence for you then you are not alone. But do they also evoke ideas of nationalism, Protestantism, and masculinity? In the early twentieth century, the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan tied their faith to patriotism and in the process produced a unique self-fashioned religious identity.

Kelly J. Baker, scholar of America religious history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, examines this seemingly reprehensible organization and treats it as she would any other phenomenon, through a critical lens from an objective perspective. In her wonderful new book, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 (University Press of Kansas, 2011), she explores the writings of Klan members and outlines their creative renderings of religion, nationalism, gender, and race. In our conversation we discuss the importance of print culture, the communal act of reading, Jesus as the ideal Klansman, the symbolic meaning of the robes, cross, and flag, and the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK). We end our discussion by looking at the Klan’s legacy of exclusionism and conservatism as a widespread characteristic of American society and how this is manifested in contemporary culture through figures like Terry Jones, who gained notoriety with his call to burn the Qur’an. Kelly does an excellent job of encouraging scholars of religion to reexamine our subjects and tackle issues that make us uneasy and uncomfortable. These topics and individuals are as much a part of religious history as the figures we would want to sit down and have a cup of coffee with.

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David J. Leonard, “After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness” (SUNY Press, 2012) Jun 15, 2012

The NBA Finals are under way, with the Oklahoma City Thunder facing the Miami Heat. Network executives and the sports punditocracy are elated with the match-up. Ratings for Game 1 of the series were up more than 10 per cent over last year, as casual fans tuned in to see the teams’ marquee players, NBA scoring leader Kevin Durant and three-time MVP LeBron James, face each other. Meanwhile, opinion-makers are happy with teams and personalities that can be easily slotted into arresting narratives. It’s safe to say that the Thunder are cast as the “good guys”: a team of young and talented players, gathered through the draft, who have committed themselves to their coach and to an un-glamorous city on the Plains. Meanwhile, the Heat are a high-priced experiment always teetering on the edge of implosion, a collection of uncoachable stars led by LeBron, who alienated the entire sports world by declaring on an ESPN special in 2010 that he would take his talents to South Beach.

While perceptive fans are aware of the media-driven narratives that mold the presentation of sports, we don’t often acknowledge the racial stereotypes at the root of these storylines. Sociologist David Leonard insists that ideas of race are always present with the NBA, a league of predominantly black players watched by predominantly white fans. When fans or commentators talk about “the NBA player” in the abstract, the picture that typically comes to mind is a black man. In his book After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness (State University of New York Press, 2012), David examines how white American fans and commentators, as well as NBA officials, have struggled with this image of the black player. Once upon a time, when the embodiment of the NBA player was the universally liked Michael Jordan, blackness was not a problem. But after Jordan’s departure, the model of the black player became someone more than Allen Iverson, with his tattoos, braided hair, and sideways cap, ridiculing the idea of attending practice. The perception of the NBA player as overpaid and undisciplined thug burst open with the 2004 “Brawl at the Palace.” In response to scenes of Ron Artest and other players fighting with fans at the close of a game, commentators and fans stated openly that the problem with the NBA player was that he was a product of black, hip-hop culture. David’s book looks at these responses and the efforts of the league to rectify the NBA’s damaged image, by turning players into respectable professionals who would be more acceptable to white fans in the seats, to the wealthy buyers of luxury boxes, and to the league’s corporate sponsors.

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Enid Logan, “At this Defining Moment: Barack Obama’s Presidential Candidacy and the New Politics of Race” (NYU Press, 2011) Jun 08, 2012

Enid Logan‘s At this Defining Moment: Barack Obama: Presidential Candidacy and the New Politics of Race (NYU Press, 2011) examines the campaign and politics around the election of Barack Obama from a sociological perspective. Drawing on a rich array of television, newspaper, and blogs, Logan challenges many of the conventional interpretations of the Obama victory. In trying to define the “new politics of race”, the book is a contribution to the field of political science, where scholars have also grappled with putting the first African American president into political, historical, and social context. One of the more compelling chapters of the book deals with the intersection of Hispanic and Asian Americans and the Obama campaign. The length, clear-writing, and salient topic should make this a considered adoption for many courses in American politics, race and politics, and campaigns/elections.

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Erin D. Chapman, “Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s” (Oxford University Press, 2012) May 29, 2012

Whoever states the old adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words” grossly underestimates. So Erin D. Chapman shows in Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s (Oxford University Press, 2012). Just consider the images of African Americans in US popular culture throughout the 19th and 20th centuries; consider the power they held in defining an entire people, and we know better–pictures evince far more than 1000 words. Chapman explores what happens when African Americans use old sexist-racist images and/or create fresh ones to tout the Negro at the turn of the 20th century as modern and new. Through an examination of advertisements at the time, the author makes it evident that many saw the commodification and consumption of the black female body as essential to achieving goals for racial advancement or self-determinism.

Chapman, professor of History at George Washington University, offers readers something new: she demonstrates the push-pull dynamics of the image-making in the New Negro era. For, as the new public desire for actual black bodies (as opposed to minstrel caricatures) opens space for the nation to view African Americans as human beings, it also allows for the continued dehumanization of those same bodies–particularly those of the African American female body.

As Blueswoman Gertrude “Ma” Rainey demonstrates in the lyrics of her 1928 recording, “Prove It On Me”, to define the self through the use of images is tricky business for who one purports to be in their public persona does not necessarily reflect their private selves. Moreover, in judging “right” versus “wrong” images one must consider the sex-race marketplace where selling and buying is the name of the game–regardless of who is selling to and/or buying from whom.

If you want to learn more about New Negroes and how they used prominent ideas about gender, race and sexuality to sell and consume various ideas and products Erin D. Chapman’s fine book is what you’re looking for.

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Kevin Whitehead, “Why Jazz? A Concise Guide” (Oxford UP, 2011) May 21, 2012

Kevin Whitehead‘s highly readable, informative and entertaining Why Jazz? A Concise Guide (Oxford University Press, 2011) is bookshelf “must have” for anyone who loves jazz – and he does it in a question/answer call and response style that is the perfect format for today’s point and click text and twitter world. It’s a primer for those who want to know more about the fascinating personalities in jazz from Louis Armstrong to Mary Lou Williams to Anthony Braxton (and Miles, Mingus, Monk and Coltrane); it’s a history lesson from New Orleans Dixieland to otherworldly free-jazz. Best of all, Kevin gives the reader a rich trove of musical examples and a wide-ranging discography certain to open new vistas for those who are just digging jazz for the first time as well as aficionados who have been listening for years. Almost a half century ago, historian Will Durant condensed his 11 volumes of a lifetime of research into a small, thin work acknowledging the folly of trying to encompass the complexity of the impossible task before him. Kevin Whitehead has worked a similar miracle in his slim volume Why Jazz? This is a gem of a book that’s got passion and insight and beckons those who dig jazz and don’t know why as well as those who think they “get it” and want to know more.

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Kathryn Lofton, “Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon” (University of California Press, 2011) May 17, 2012

In December of 2011, Oprah Winfrey appeared on The Dr. Oz Show to talk about her new big plans and her inspirations for the future. Oprah replied, “For me at this particular time in my life I recognize that everything is about moving closer to that which is God. And without a full, spiritual center — and I’m not talking about religion — I’m talking about without understanding the fullness from which you’ve come, you can’t really fulfill your supreme moment of destiny. And I think everybody has a supreme moment of destiny.” Oprah has been providing the path to achieve this (Aha!) moment for decades now through the rituals of contemporary consumer culture and spirituality that enable individuals to live their best life. Kathryn Lofton, Professor of Religion at Yale University, cleverly unravels Oprah’s story within the broader context of American religiosity and the academic study of religion in her book Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (University of California Press, 2011). In this excellent work, Lofton contends that modern religion is not something distinct that we can analyze but should be conceived of as the interaction of various modalities, which are often bracketed off as “Spirituality,” “Commodity,” and “Corporatism.” In our interview we explore various topics, weaving in and out of the content of the book, covering politics, public policy, ritual, capitalism, 9/11, among many others. We also had time to discuss freq.uenci.es, a co-curated project funded by the Social Science Research Council, as well as the various reactions to the project from critics on The Immanent Frame. Lofton was a delight to talk to as you can tell from her engaging presence but for those who have not yet read the book be reassured that her personality and sharp insight shines throughout the text. It was a joy to read and there should be no wonder why she has received such a wide response by commentators.

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Vershawn Young, “From Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performances” (Wayne State UP, 2011) May 07, 2012

What does it mean to be black? In From Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performances (Wayne State University Press, 2011) editor Vershawn Ashanti Young and assistant editor Bridget Harris Tsemo ask the more accurate question: what does it mean to perform blackness? And, what is the relationship between race performance and belonging in the U.S.? While we know that race is a social construct, we also know that how society perceives one’s race coupled with class carries very real outcomes. Thus, to act “black” (or not) and/or to act “boojie” (or not) is a lesson many learn from a young age. In this text, Professor Young brings together a group of heavy hitters who signify on race performances, how one’s socio-economic status alter them, in what contexts, and why.

InFrom Bourgeois to Boojie Professor Young, performance artist, and professor of African American Studies, English, and Performance Studies at University of Kentucky brings together an esteemed group of artists and/or scholars such as Amiri Baraka, Houston A. Baker, Jr, and E. Patrick Johnson, to name but a few. The collection is arranged in four sections–Performing Responsibility, Performing Womanhood, Performing Media, and Performing Sexuality–in which all contributors riff off the terms ‘boojie’ and ‘bourgeois’–the former derived from the latter. Deliciously multi-layered, From Bourgeois to Boojie contains various genres like visual art, essay, poetry, personal reflections, short story, and play scripts. All readers can easily find something that will help them along the path to answer the questions Professor Young asks in his Introduction.

In a time of ostensible post-racialism, Bourgeois to Boojie will highlight the history of race and class as performance in the US, and how they still impact perceived citizenry in the 21st century.

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Manning Marable, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” (Penguin, 2011) May 01, 2012

Nearly 50 years after his death, Malcolm X remains a controversial figure. An 8th grade dropout (he ditched school when a white teacher told him it was unrealistic for a black kid to dream of being a lawyer), he rose to prominence as the second most influential minister in the Nation of Islam, only to dramatically break with the Nation and convert to Sunni Islam the year before he was killed.

As the nickname “Detroit Red”–gained during his hustling days in Harlem–implies, Malcolm X makes for a sneaky biographical subject. In the public imagination, he’s largely defined by The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written by Alex Haley and published shortly after his death. However, as the late Columbia University scholar Manning Marable reminds us in his ground-breaking biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Penguin, 2011), The Autobiography is a text and not a history. The Autobiography itself was a reinvention.

The winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for History, Malcolm X is an attempt to reshape the narrative of Malcolm X’s life and to prompt further investigation into the circumstances surrounding his death, but the book’s greatest contribution may turn out to be its portrayal of Malcolm himself. In contrast to the near messianic figure of The Autobiography, the Malcolm that emerges in Marable’s telling is profoundly flawed and hauntingly human.

He is also vividly alive. “He lived the existence of an itinerant musician,” writes Marable, “traveling constantly from city to city, standing night after night on the stage, manipulating his melodic tenor voice as an instrument. He was consciously a performer, who presented himself as the vessel for conveying the anger and impatience the black masses felt.” The snappiness of Marable’s prose leaves one with the sensation that Malcolm X must’ve been standing over the author’s shoulder for the full twenty years it took him to write the book. Detroit Red– whistling, snapping, hustling, along.

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Matthew Delmont, “The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia” (University of California Press, 2011) Apr 20, 2012

Matthew Delmont‘s The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia (University of California Press, 2012) weaves a fascinating narrative in which the content of a popular television show is only one element of its phenomenal impact. Nor is American Bandstand‘s popularity the limit of Delmont’s interest. In The Nicest Kids in Town, American Bandstand marks the confluence of competing, contradictory, and even some complementary forces in 1950s Philadelphia: local civil rights activism, inter-ethnic tensions, defensive localism, housing discrimination, and concerns over youth behavior influenced the content and reception of the program.

Part of the book’s brilliance lies in its use of character to create a sense of the place and time. From smaller characters like Walter Palmer, a black teen who organized against the segregation of Bandstand, to earnest liberal anti-segregationists like Maurice Fagan, whose treatment is more extensive, to the television icon Dick Clark, Delmont makes the people in the book both historical agents and complex human beings.

Though it is most unusual as a piece of scholarship in so fully evoking a time and place filled with real people, The Nicest Kids in Town is equally a model for American Studies research. Delmont’s painstaking thoroughness yields incredible specificity, which is most useful to making major claims about the importance of popular culture and about particular cultural products.

Finally, the book offers a perspective on the major industrial shifts in the television and music industries of the period, revealing how the displacement and/or appropriation of local talent and culture through the giant apparatus of television both expanded TV’s possibilities and complicated (for better and worse) the potential for local change.

In addition to the book itself (which is available both in text and for Kindle) and its website, and the author’s website , check out The Nicest Kids in Town digital project which includes 100 related images and video clips including American Bandstand memorabilia, newspaper clippings regarding protests of American Bandstand, photographs from high school yearbooks, and video clips from American Bandstand.

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Elizabeth West, “African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature, and Being” (Lexington Books, 2011) Apr 09, 2012

Elizabeth West has written an insightful study about the presence of African spirituality in the autobiographies, poetry, speeches and novels of African American women, ranging from Phylis Wheatley to Harriet Wilson to Zora Neale Hurston. West’s book is titled African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature, and Being (Lexington Books, 2011).

It’s a powerful read!

West’s two blubists, literary critics Georgene Bess Montgomery and Dana Williams, do not hold back in expressing their admiration of the work . Both detail how useful the book is to readers, students, and teachers of African American studies. Montgomery writes that “while [the authors West studies] have received much critical attention and analysis, [West’s] analysis is quite original and provocative.” And Williams adds that West’s book “is an important first step in advancing new frameworks through which to read African American literature.”

This provocative examination of how Motherland spirituality inflects, influences, and sometimes challenges and often times mingles with Anglo-Christianity as a rhetorical device for black female authors is too important to miss.

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Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, “Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color” (Rutgers UP, 2012) Mar 09, 2012

One lesson that the ever-present trickster figure in African American folklore teaches is how to use signifying to protect one’s intimate self. A challenge of writing Dorothy West’s life is getting beyond the masks she presents before the ever-prying gaze. To get around the problem, the biographer must think in unconventional ways. In Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color (Rutgers University Press, 2012), Cherene Sherrard-Johnson abandons the old battle between fact versus fiction; instead, she focuses on Dorothy West’s masks and what they show. Sherrard-Johnson respectfully evades West’s tactics of elusion and reveals a black woman artist with an acute awareness of the performative nature of class, and a keen sense of the intricacies of intra-racial identity.

Dorothy West arrived to New York at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance. Although her first novel, The Living Is Easy (1948) was critically acclaimed it was not until the re-issue of her novel in 1982 that literary scholars and readers alike began to take a closer look at what she had to say. Publication of The Wedding (1995), as well as Oprah Winfrey’s TV miniseries based on the novel three years later, placed West in the limelight before she passed away in 1998.

Sherrard-Johnson, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Madison, offers readers more than the conventional biography that beginsand ends with the birth and death of the subject. As she maps West’smovement from Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard to Moscow, Russia and back again, Sherrard-Johnson treats readers to a myriad of responses to thequestion Dorothy West asks in the epigraph of her introduction: “Why wouldanybody write a book about me?” Should you desire to see one way to meet the challenge of catching anelusive figure while being mindful of the intrusive gaze, a good start is to read ChereneSherrard-Johnson’s fine book.

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Mia Bay, “To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells” (Hill and Wang, 2009) Feb 24, 2012

I can’t remember when I first saw one of those horrible photographs of a lynching, with crowds of white people, kids included, laughing and pointing at the mangled black body hanging from a tree. I do know that such images were part of my childhood mental archive of atrocities, together with stacks of dead bodies in the liberated concentration camps and naked children running from napalm in Vietnam. Images like that made me a historian.

But I didn’t have to live any of that history. Ida B. Wells did. A young journalist, she happened to be out of town when a game of marbles escalated into the lynching of three men who were pillars of the Memphis black community. She knew all of them; one was a close friend. Ida B. Wells was nobody’s fool – she’d already sued two train companies for denying her a seat in the “Ladies’ Car” and she’d long written about racial injustice. But she wasn’t prepared for the viciousness of this lynching, or for the subsequent defamation of its victims in the white press. She published a strongly-worded editorial, moved north – after that editorial, there was a warrant on her life in the South – and became an internationally-known crusader against lynching.

In her book, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Hill and Wang, 2009), historian Mia Bay takes us from Wells’s Reconstruction-era Mississippi childhood, through the anti-lynching work for which she’s best remembered, and on to her work for urban reform in Chicago during the Great Migration. Along the way we see struggles around race, class, and gender in American history: the linkage of sexual and racial terror in lynching, of course, but also questions about what it meant for a minimally-educated Black woman to be an activist. Mia Bay is associate professor of history and the associate director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University. Read her book – you’ll be glad you did.

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Vorris Nunley, “Keepin’ It Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric” (Wayne State UP, 2011) Feb 16, 2012

Vorris Nunley‘s Keepin it Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric (Wayne State University Press, 2011), uses the black barbershop as a trope to discuss black talk within literary, cultural, and political sites. Nunley’s brilliant analysis of Aaron McGruder’s cartoon Boondocks, the well-known play Ceremonies in Dark Old Men by Lonne Elder III, and Barack Obama’s Race Speech, substantiates his bold claim that “to not know [African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric] is to not know Black people, their subjectivities, their perspectives” (3).

By reading this book you will understand just how African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric is specific to black people, generated by them, and speaks to their worldviews and experiences–even when black talk is directed to white people. As I understand it, Hush Harbor Rhetoric is often undervalued and grossly misunderstood in the mainstream because whites sometimes prefer to hear what Nunley calls the African American Podium-Auction Block Rhetoric, racially domesticated talk that both caters to and comforts white sensibilities and concerns. While hush harbor rhetoric is criticized sometimes for not being as palatable as podium-auction block rhetoric, Nunley’s book underscores why “palatable” is in the ears of the beholder. He encourages us to stop finding unnecessary fault with black people’s philosophical tongues and start listening more astutely to the type of talk they express, particularly in that corner barbershop on the West Side of Chicago.

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Randy Roberts, “Joe Louis: Hard Times Man” (Yale UP, 2010) Jan 17, 2012

“I’m sure if it wasn’t for Joe Louis,” acknowledged Jackie Robinson, “the color line in baseball would not have been broken for another ten years.” To Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis was an inspiration and an idol. “I just give lip service to being the greatest,” said Ali in 1981, after Louis’ death. “He was the greatest.”

Yet, while Jackie Robinson is now one of the most revered athletes in American history and Ali remains a cultural icon, the man who paved the way for both is lesser known today, more a distant folk hero than a historical figure whose accomplishments are understood and respected. Unlike Robinson, Louis was not the pioneering black athlete in his sport, and unlike Ali, he did not translate his success in the ring into a platform for larger media fame and political statements. Nevertheless, as Randy Roberts shows in his acclaimed biography Joe Louis: Hard Times Man (Yale University Press, new in paperback in February 2012), the heavyweight champion was an athlete without peer in his sport, one of the most talked-about celebrities of the day, and a man who did effect change, in some positive way, in white Americans’ perceptions of black athletes. He was a symbolic figure of the Thirties and Forties and, as Randy argues, an essential character for understanding the history of that era.

A distinguished professor of history at Purdue University, award-winning teacher, and author of books on Jack Dempsey, Jack Johnson, Charles Lindbergh, and John Wayne, Randy brings to the book an expert understanding of sports and celebrity in American history and a lively, arresting style. With attention to colorful detail and to the larger context of early 20th-century American history, he describes Joe Louis as a man of his times–and as a giant of the age. This is a story that certainly deserves retelling.

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Keith Gilyard, “True to the Language Game: African American Discourse, Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy” (Routledge, 2011) Dec 22, 2011

In the preface to this book, Keith Gilyard describes his career as 30 years of roaming the areas of rhetoric, composition, sociolinguistics, creative writing, applied linguistics, education theory, literary study, history, and African American studies. That gives some impression of the range of topics covered in this compilation of selected highlights of his work, including several brand new contributions. He goes on to affirm that he is “not great in any of these fields”, but on this evidence he is being too modest.

True to the Language Game: African American Discourse, Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy (Routledge, 2011) is an engaging, entertaining and challenging book. Moving from the author’s ‘disciplinary birth’ as a teacher of composition, through an overview of some of the language controversies in the US classroom, to his recent work in literary history, it serves as an introduction not only to Gilyard’s research and ideas but to those of many other educational, cultural and literary theorists.

In this interview, we cover a little of this ground. We talk about the importance to society of critical thinking, the role of AAVE in bilingual education, the construction of race as a tool for social progress, and the status of the Black American literary canon.

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Jerald Walker, “Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption” (Bantam Books, 2010) Nov 17, 2011

Jerald Walker‘s critical autobiography, Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption (Bantam, 2010), is a sheer pleasure to read. A book-length series of vignettes, reflections that alternate between his present life (he’s currently an English professor at Emerson College) and his life as a wannabe thug and habitual drug user on the streets of Chicago, Walker ponders thorny questions of racial identity in such chapters as “Orientation,” where he decides it’s better to identify with other writers (who happen to be white) than with fellow blacks. However, Walker isn’t always this decisive. Indeed the book is filled with stony ambivalence. But the beauty of Walker’s writing is that he uses sharp, searing prose not to probe but to crack ambivalence in the face and ape its gory middle.

Although he ends up at times sounding just like the black neo-conservative Shelby Steele, Walker is much more complicated–since he also sounds sometimes like the black radical, Al Sharpton! Ultimately treating such subjects as interracial dating, adolescent rebellion, disability, dooms-day religious cults, homophobia, college education, myths about black sexual prowess, and, yes, love (if nothing else, you know he unequivocally loves his wife, Brenda), Walker’s Street Shadows is a very good book.

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Kitty Kelley, “Oprah: A Biography” (Three Rivers Press, 2011) Nov 15, 2011

When she emerged triumphant in a legal battle with the Texas beef industry, Oprah Winfrey took to the steps of the Amarillo court house and declared: “Free speech rocks!” She was likely a little less enthusiastic about the First Amendment following the publication of Kitty Kelley‘s unauthorized book Oprah: A Biography, which is now out in paperback.

The match-up of the daytime television queen and the unauthorized biographer, Kitty Kelley, is one for the ages. The author of eight books– five of them New York Times number one bestsellers, all of them about living people and none of them authorized– Kelley has spent thirty years writing unflinchingly candid accounts of the most influential celebrities of our age. Even the New Yorker allowed that “A Kitty Kelley biography of Oprah Winfrey is one of those King Kong vs. Godzilla events in celebrity culture.”

With the help of over 800 interviews and four years of research, she provides an insightful analysis of Winfrey’s cultural significance, as an African-American woman and a survivor of sexual abuse. But, perhaps the biggest contribution of Oprah: A Biography is that it picks away at the seemingly impenetrable persona Winfrey has presented and paints a nuanced portrait of a woman far more complicated, ambitious and interesting than the one seen on TV.

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Daniel Sharfstein, “The Invisible line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White” (Penguin, 2011) Nov 01, 2011

Daniel Sharfstein‘s The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin Press, 2011) is the latest and perhaps best book in the growing genre of neo-passing narratives. The Invisible Line easily rests between Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and Blis Broyard’s One Drop, though it is different and in ways richer than both. Part American history, part legal analysis (Sharfstein is a legal scholar), part ethnographic study, it is a wholly gripping and exquisitely written narrative that tracks the racial passing of three black families over several centuries, leading us right up to their living “white” descendents today. You will certainly learn a lot about the history of race in the United States from The Invisible Line and, if you’re like me, you won’t be able to put it down.

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Lester K. Spence, “Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-hop and Black Politics” (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) Oct 25, 2011

Hip-hop has, within a short time span, moved from a free-flowing expression of urban youth to a global–and highly marketable–musical genre. Its influence in culture, fashion, film, and music is ubiquitous, and theories about hip-hop’s importance in the political sphere abound. But what, exactly, is the relationship between hip-hop and politics? Does hip-hop influence the expression and formation of political thought? Does it influence the expression and formation of political action? If the influence exists, what are its boundaries? These are some of the questions tackled in Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-Hop and Black Politics by Lester K. Spence. Spence traces the concurrent neoliberal turn in hip-hop and American politics and examines the implications of both for the politics of black Americans. He infuses the narrative of neoliberal transformation with empirical examination of hip-hop’s impact on the political attitudes of the hip-hop generation and of urban youth. Analyzing track lyrics, survey data, and original experiments, Spence theorizes the boundaries of the space in black American life that is occupied by both hip-hop and politics.

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Pierre W. Orelus, “The Agony of Masculinity: Race, Gender, and Education in the Age of the ‘New’ Racism and Patriarchy” (Peter Lang, 2010) Oct 17, 2011

In his new book, The Agony of Masculinity: Race, Gender, and Education in the Age of the “New” Racism and Patriarchy (Peter Lang, 2010), Pierre Orelus analyzes the “heartfelt stories of fifty men of African descent who vary in age, social class, family status, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, and ability” (1). One of the purposes of the book is to allow black men to share how they both perpetuate and are negatively impacted by heteronormativity, that is, the oppression of women and other men on the basis of how well they perform heterosexuality.

During my interview with Pierre, I was surprised that he labeled some of the men as closeted bisexuals and homosexuals simply because they did not disclose their sexualities to him. This was surprising since the book itself seeks to undo heteronormativity, which enforces the requirement to announce a heterosexual identity. This announcement is made both by how a man performs his masculinity, and in his actual sex life. Since the bedroom is private (we don’t know who people actually have sex with), one is supposed to feel unrestrained in disclosing his sexual practice by stating that he is heterosexual. If a man doesn’t make this pronouncement, he is deemed non-normative (otherwise, it’s assumed that he would proudly proclaim his straightness). What’s more, Orelus gives the men the choice to remain silent regarding their sexuality, yet when some take the option, it is read as a fear of coming out. This may be an instance when Orelus himself perpetuates the exact crisis he hopes to end.

This isn’t a criticism of this good book. Orelus begins by placing himself as a subject of analysis. He states that he has his own ongoing personal struggle with patriarchy, a fact often brought to his attention by his wife. It’s this experience he shares with other black men that prompted him to write the book. Please, listen in to our discussion of it.

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Dave Zirin, “The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment that Changed the World” (Haymarket Books, 2011) Oct 04, 2011

There are beautiful sports photos, and dramatic sports photos. There are sports photos that are funny, and others that are poignant. There are photos that capture athletic brilliance, and tenacity, and passion. But there are few images from the modern history of sports that have transcended the games, photos that have inspired and provoked those with little interest in athletics. Perhaps the only image to have had such a far-reaching effect is that of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the medal stand at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

But some would object–and many did in 1968–that what Smith and Carlos did on the medal stand after the 200-meter finals was not a sports moment. It was a political moment, a protest, and therefore it was outside the boundary of athletics. Smith and Carlos had violated a fundamental principle of sport by mixing it with politics. But those who made that criticism in 1968 likely did not denounce George Foreman ten days later, when he waved the American flag in the ring after winning the boxing gold medal. Likewise, fans who objected to NBA player Steve Nash’s criticism of Arizona’s law on illegal immigrants likely did not oppose the prominent military presence in NFL commemorations of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, or the contributions that sports owners make to political parties and candidates. As sports journalist Dave Zirin notes in our interview, politics are always present in sports. People get upset, though, when their sports are mixed with somebody else’s politics. And in 1968–and the years that followed–people were furious with the politics of Smith and Carlos.

Dave Zirin has written a number of books on sports in U.S. history and contemporary society, and he comments regularly on sports and politics for The Nation and the weekly Sirius XM program, Edge of Sports Radio. As co-author of The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World (Haymarket Books, 2011), he helps tell the story of an extraordinary athlete and activist. In the interview, we talk of Carlos’ youth in Harlem, the events that led him and teammate Tommie Smith to make their shocking protest, and the burdens that Carlos endured after 1968. And we talk about the hard work of telling another man’s life, of trying to convey not only his experiences but also his motivations, his commitments, and the way he understands the legacy of one transcendent act.

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Ron Christie, “Acting White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur” (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010) Sep 26, 2011

In his new bookActing White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010), former White House aide Ron Christie recounts the history of the pejorative term “acting white.” He traces its lineage from the present day through the Black Power movement back to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, unraveling a fascinating history in the process. In our interview, we talked about Ron’s experiences as an African-American Republican, his ambitious vow to eradicate the term “acting white,” and his hopes for the future of America’s African-American community. Read all about it, and more, in Christie’s thought-provoking new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook, if you haven’t already.

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Scott Brooks, “Black Men Can’t Shoot” (University of Chicago Press, 2009) Sep 19, 2011

With the NBA in the midst of a labor disagreement, players from the world’s premier basketball league are scattering in different directions to maintain their skills (and get paid). This past summer, a number of NBA players returned to their roots, so to speak, by playing in summer leagues in places like DC, LA, New York, and Baltimore. For many black players who grew up in big cities, summer leagues were the place where they first learned basketball, under the watchful eyes of older men who had also played the game–and made names for themselves–on the same courts.

Scott Brooks spent four years coaching youth basketball in one of these leagues in South Philadelphia, bringing the perspective of a sociologist to this institution of inner-city neighborhoods. The book based on his experiences and his research, Black Men Can’t Shoot (University of Chicago Press, 2009), follows two of the league’s young players, Jermaine and Ray, as they learn the game, develop their skills, and work to “get known” in the world of Philadelphia basketball. As Scott explains in the interview, “getting known” is a complicated and demanding process of gaining status on the court and in the community. Like athletes in other sports, young basketball players like Jermaine and Ray seek to get the attention of scouts and recruiters by participating in multiple leagues, traveling teams, and regional tournaments. But “getting known” in South Philly basketball is about much more than a coveted college scholarship. Being a known player brings social prestige at school and the protection and patronage of older men in the neighborhood, the chorus of elders known as “old heads.” Attaining this status, Scott explains, is not a matter of simple ability, the so-called natural athleticism of blacks. Instead, it is the product of disciplined work, careful networking, and study of the game.

Scott’s book is not about the hoop dreams of Jermaine and Ray. Instead, it is about hoop reality–about basketball as part of the social fabric of an inner-city neighborhood and the ways that black men, young and old, use the game to improve their personal situations and better their communities.

If you enjoy the New Books in Sports podcast, be sure to subscribe on the iTunes store and link to our Facebook page.

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Charles McKinney, Jr., “Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina” (UPA, 2010) Sep 16, 2011

When I was an undergraduate, I noticed that there were certain books that seemed to be unavoidable (at least at my liberal arts college). They were assigned in many classes, and they were discussed in many others. Reading them seemed to be a secret requirement for graduation. These “liberal-arts essentials” included Plato’s Republic, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Lockes’ Two Treatises on Government (especially the second), Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, and John Bergers’ Ways of Seeing.

Another was William Sheridan Allen’s The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945 (Quadrangle Books, 1965). It explained the rise of National Socialism in a new and revealing way: from the bottom up. In Sheridan Allen’s story, the local politicians, shopkeepers, and housewives of Northeim (Hanover) moved to the fore, while Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels remained in the background. Here the locals “made history,” and they did so ways that we would all recognize from our own local communities.

Charles McKinney, Jr has written a similar book, though one with a much happier ending. Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina (UPA, 2010) tells the tale of how one small city in the South negotiated the rough transition from Jim Crow to Civil Rights and beyond. In McKinney’s telling, the people of Wilson (North Carolina) make history; Martin Luther King, et al. remain off stage. These common folks–both Black and White–discuss, argue, protest, sue, threaten, fight, organize, lobby, and vote their way to a “greater freedom” over the course of many decades. In the pages of McKinney’s fine book, we see how Civil Rights actually happened “on the ground.” I hope it becomes required reading as Sheridan Allen’s book once was.

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James Unnever and Shaun L. Gabbidon, “A Theory of African American Offending: Race, Racism, and Crime” (Routledge, 2011) Sep 15, 2011

Is comedian and cultural critic Bill Cosby right–that black youth suffer from a cultural pathology that leads them to commit more crimes than their white counterparts? Is the remedy to the high rate of offending by African American men the “shape up or get shipped out” perspective? Is there more to African American offending than poor parenting or lousy schools? James D. Unnever is the co-author (with Shaun L. Gabbidon) of the new book A Theory of African American Offending: Race, Racism, and Crime (Routledge, 2011). This book builds on the assertion of sociologist and cultural critic W. E. B. Du Bois that theories of African American life, culture, and especially crime must deal with the unique circumstances and worldview of black people living in America. Unnever and Gabbidon take this assertion seriously as they develop a theory that the reading public in general and criminologists and lawyers specifically, indeed all associated with the criminal justice system, should read.

I’ve recommended this book to colleagues at the collegiate level in African American Studies, as well as to junior high and high school teachers working in predominantly African American schools. This book is a must read!

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Miriam Thaggert, “Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010) Aug 31, 2011

Miriam Thaggert’s study Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), is an exceptional contribution to the discussion of both modernism and the the period of intense African American artistic production known as the Harlem Renaissance. Black Modernism is particularly invaluable because it explores the techniques, devices, and politics of blackness as both a cultural and literary concept, even as it examines modernism in the same way. It is a well-written and meticulously researched study.

The University of Massachusetts Press’s website explains that “Thaggert identifies and analyzes an early form of black American modernism characterized by a heightened level of experimentation with visual and verbal techniques for narrating and representing blackness. The work of the writers and artists under discussion reflects the creative tension between the intangibility of some forms of black expression, such as spirituals, and the materiality of the body evoked by other representations of blackness, such as “Negro” dialect.”

I am especially enthralled with Thaggert’s deft analyses of James Weldon Johnson’s famous introductions to his volumes on African American poetry and African American spirituals. She handles the cross influences between black and white writers of the early period of the Harlem Renaissance with insight and respect. This undeniable academic study can easily be handled by educated critics, working outside of university environments. It also offers a heuristic investigation for those within the academy.

Thaggert is a careful and intelligent writer, and she brings her fresh perspective alive in our hour-long discussion. Please listen in.

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Daniel Black, “Perfect Peace” (St. Martin’s Press, 2010) Aug 24, 2011

If a mother raises her biologically male child as a daughter instead of a son, what would be the effects on the family, the community, the church? Indeed what would be the psychosocial, psychoemotional effects on the daughter once she discovers she’s a “he”? And what would all this reveal about the mother? What’s more, would the male-daughter’s brothers, father, friends come to agree with gender philosopher Judith Butler and accept the prevailing academic wisdom that gender and sex are social constructions, discourses that inform how we perform our lives? Or would they agree with some conservative Christian groups that a boy is a son. That’s how God made him, and that’s that! End of story. And what if the male-daughter is African American? What would race reveal about the social dynamics of gender in America?

Novelist Daniel Black deftly explores the above questions and so much more in his lyrical new novel Perfect Peace (St. Martin’s Press, 2010). Not to give too much away, but Perfect is the name of the male-daughter; Peace is her family name. For seven years, she’s a girl. At age eight, she is told she’s a boy. What ensues disturbs the Peace family and the black Southern community where they live. Yet Perfect learns lessons that Daniel Black believes America as a whole must learn to face.

There is never a dull moment in this intense interview. The discussion with Daniel Black is just as engaging as his fascinating novel.

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Robert Thurston, “Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective” (Ashgate, 2011) Aug 05, 2011

It takes a brave historian to take on the orthodoxy regarding the rise and fall of lynching in the United States. That orthodoxy holds that lynching in the South was a ‘system of social control’ in which whites used organized terror to oppress blacks. You can find this thesis in numerous monographs, textbooks, and in the popular press. It’s one of those things “everybody knows.”

But according to Robert Thurston’s provocative new book Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective (Ashgate, 2011) the standard ‘social control’ line is inadequate. It cannot explain when lynching started or when it ended; why lynching occurred in some places often and others never; and why the period in question witnessed a considerable amount of intra-racial lynching. The ‘social control’ thesis fails because it tries to put a square peg (the evidence) in a round hole (the concept of systematic oppression through terror). Thurston shows that lynching, though hardly accidental, was simply too occasional and too random to be called ‘systemic.’ He argues that lynching was–and remains where we find it today–a collective response to political instability, especially instability caused by a lack of legitimate and effective authority. When people don’t trust the sheriff or there is no sheriff, they are going to take matters into their own hands. This sort of ‘rough justice’ is wildly imperfect: the mob often gets the wrong man. And it is not only about justice: the mob often cynically takes the chaos provided by ‘rough justice’ to settle old scores, some of which may be racist (Post-Reconstruction America) or classist (Revolutionary Russia) or both. But there is no ‘system’ here, except in the sense of a widespread pattern of collective action triggered by a reasonably common political situation, namely the lack of legitimate, effective authority.

Thurston’s emphasis on authority (or the lack of it) in explaining lynching enables him to present a new thesis as to why lynching abated considerably in the U.S. after 1892. The primary reason, he says, is that Whites succeed in creating a true system of social control, namely, Jim Crow. What was chaotic and unstable became structured and steady, though in a manner that to us (rightly) seems manifestly unjust. Thurston also points to other factors that contributed to the decline of lynching, for example the rising status of blacks in the South and changing international attitudes about race. These factors–Jim Crow, black advancement, anti-racism–did not destroy a ‘system of social control.’ They simply made ‘rough justice’ impracticable for and unacceptable to most white and black citizens.

This is an important book and should be widely read and discussed. I hope that Ashgate will bring out a paperback edition, or that the author will be persuaded to write and publish a shorter, popularly-oriented version.

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Houston A. Baker, “Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era” (Columbia UP, 2008) Aug 04, 2011

In his new book Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (Columbia University Press, 2008), Houston A. Baker makes the argument that many contemporary black public intellectuals, otherwise known as African American “academostars,” are self-serving individuals who distort the message of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and belie the overall aims of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 60’s. He calls out five main figures: Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and even Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson.

Betrayal has been described both as a “brave and funny vernacular broadside” and “an important and absorbing meditation” on contemporary discussions of American politics. This book is immensely important not only for the way it clarifies the often misconstrued and misapplied rhetoric of Dr. King, but also the way in which it takes pains to historicize the plight of African Americans. I am personally persuaded by this book, and I highly recommend it.

While Betrayal was published in the same year as the election of America’s first president of African descent, it offers us a framework for understanding our “now”: the upcoming 2012 election season, much of the Tea Party rhetoric, and even the political challenges that Barack Obama faces in relation to contemporary racial conflict.

Baker is a distinguished university professor of English at Vanderbilt University, and he is a well-known literary and cultural critic, focusing on African American arts and politics. He is also a creative writer, with a recently published volume of poetry entitled Passing Over. I hope to have him on the show again to discuss that book. Till then, I’m certain you’ll be thoroughly engaged in this lively interchange.

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Frank Dobson, Jr., “Rendered Invisible: Stories of Blacks and Whites, Love and Death” (Plain View Press, 2010) Jul 21, 2011

Frank Dobson, Jr.‘s Rendered Invisible: Stories of Blacks and Whites, Love and Death (Plain View Press, 2010) is a single-authored collection of fiction. It includes the opening, gripping novella “Rendered Invisible,” which gives the book its title. That’s followed by five notable short stories: “Black Messiahs Die,” about a black college basketball player who is murdered by police officers; “Homeless M.F,” about a homeless, ex-convict who is picked up by a rich woman for sex; “Junior Ain’t,” which features a fatherless boy who is antagonized by his wealthier, two-parent cousins; “Another Continent,” a study of unrequited love between professors; and “It Falls between,” a meditation on white racial anxiety and its affect on a working class black man. The stories are nice complements to the opening “Rendered,” the fictionalized account of the factual serial killing of black men in 1980 in Buffalo, New York. Dobson discussed his book, black life, the role of literature in society, and why he loves his job as an educator and writer. Listen in. You’ll enjoy it.

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Deborah Whaley, “Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities” (SUNY, 2010) Jul 15, 2011

Deborah Whaley’s new book Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities (SUNY Press, 2010) may be the first full-length study of a Black Greek-Letter Organization (BGLO) written by a non-BGLO member. But that’s not the only reason to read her book. Whaley takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study, which includes a personal rumination on her family’s relation to BGLO’s, interviews with sorority sisters, ethnographic participant observations, and literary and film analyses. Her foray into popular black culture is enriched by deep critical engagement with such texts as Spike Lee’s canonical film “School Daze” and the recent cinematic representation of Black Greek life “Stomp the Yard.” Whaley takes her subject matter seriously, but not so much so that her book lacks wit and charm. Indeed, her prose is just as pleasant, inviting, and engaging as she is in the interview. Check it out.

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Nikky Finney, “Head Off and Split: Poems” (TriQuarterly/Northwestern UP, 2010) Jul 06, 2011

UPDATE: Nikky Finney’s Head Off and Split has been named a finalist for a National Book Award. Congratulations, Nikky, from the folks at New Books in African American Studies and the New Books Network!)

Poet Nikky Finney’s new book Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011) has made an immediate splash, receiving well-deserved critical acclaim from the literary world and wide attention from the reading public. Although her book has only been out a few months, it has already been widely reviewed, with Finney featured on the cover of the prestigious literary journal Poets and Writers.

Finney is among the who’s who of writers, a poet about whom Nikki Giovanni says, “We all, especially now, need.” And yet Finney is unpretentious, caring, and inspirational. All this is illustrated in her interview for New Books in African American Studies, where she discusses the autobiographical impulse behind the book’s title, pays homage to black womanhood, worries about black boys, and she speaks on her love of love, of life, of words, of laughter. Finney is deep. And while that description might seem trite, think metaphorically, think still waters. There is much to mine in both Head Off and Split and in this interview.

Finney has a generous spirit, giving much of herself to the world. But don’t be fooled. She doesn’t give all away. She reserves a little for herself, hones her spirit, cultivates it, as any good writer would. Then she lays some aesthetics on it, on what she has kept for herself, and blesses us, the world, when we’re ready. That’s what she has done in her latest volume. Enjoy it.

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Harvey Young, “Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body” (University of Michigan, 2010) Jun 20, 2011

With the election of Barack Obama, the first U.S. president of African descent, many people believed that America had ushered in an era of post-racial harmony. Harvey Young is not one of them. When it comes to the racial experience of black people, particularly, though not exclusively, of black men, Young takes James Baldwin’s sage advice: “Take no one’s word for anything, including mine–but trust your experience.” I interviewed Young about his new book Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (University of Michigan Press, 2010). In it, Harvey examines five “spectacular events,” including an opening autobiographical one, that persuasively reveal his argument “that embodied experiences develop, in part, from racial (mis)recognition and spotlight how an idea of the black body materially affects actual bodies” (11). In other words, Young points out how despite the multifarious identities that constitute what we know as the “African American” identity (i.e., it ain’t monolithic), all black bodies in America are subject to “compulsory visibility” (12). This hyper and unavoidable visibility didn’t begin yesterday. It is historical and is recorded in what Harvey calls the “repository of experience” (23), as revealed in a range of artifacts that he examines. These include such things as daguerreotypes of black captives to theatrical productions such as Susan Lori Parks play “Venus” (based on the “Hottentot Venus”).

What I learned from Harvey’s book is that being recognized as black is certainly not always negative. But when it is, and it is often enough, it’s very painful. And I would say, as I said to Harvey, that he has written one of the best books on contemporary identity politics in this still “retrograde racial” America. His book seeks to diminish the causes of that pain. Listen in. Read the book. And let me know your opinion.

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Eric C. Schneider, “Smack: Heroin and the American City” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) Jun 15, 2011

When I arrived at college in the early 1980s, drugs were cool, music was cool, and drug-music was especially cool. The coolest of the cool drug-music bands was The Velvet Underground. They were from the mean streets of New York City (The Doors were from the soft parade of L.A….); they hung out with Andy Warhol (The Beatles hung out with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi…); they had a female drummer (The Grateful Dead had two drummers, but that still didn’t help…); and, of course, they did heroin. Or at least they wrote a famous song about it. We did not do heroin, but we thought that those who did–like Lou Reed and the rest–were hipper than hip. I imagine we would have done it if there had been any around (thank God for small favors).

We thought we had discovered something new. But as Eric C. Schneider points out in his marvelous Smack: Heroin and the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), the conjunction of music, heroin, and cool was hardly an invention of my generation. The three came together in the 1940s, when smack-using bebop players (think Charlie Parker) taught the “Beat Generation” that heroin was hip. Neither was my generation the last to succumb to a heroin fad. The triad of music, heroin, and cool united again in the 1990s, when drug-addled pop-culture icons such as Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries), Kurt Cobain (Nirvana), and Calvin Klein (of “heroin chic” fame) taught “Generation X” the same lesson. History, or at least the history of heroin, repeats itself.

For white, middle-class folks like me heroin chic was an episode, a rebellious moment in an otherwise “normal” American life. But as Schneider makes clear, the passage of heroin from cultural elites to the population at large was not always so benign, particularly in the declining inner-cities of the 1960s and 1970s. Here heroin had nothing to do with being cool and everything to do with earning a living and escaping reality. For millions of impoverished, hopeless, urban-dwelling hispanics and blacks, heroin was a paycheck and a checkout. The drug helped destroy the people in the inner-city, and thus the inner-city itself.

In response to the “heroin epidemic” of the 1960s and 1970s, the government launched the first war on drugs, focusing its energy on “pushers.” But there were no “pushers” because–and this is the greatest insight in a book full of great insights–pushing was not the way heroin use spread, either among middle-class college kids or the down-and-out of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. No one pushed heroin on anyone. Rather, users taught their friends how to use; in turn, those friends–now users–taught their friends, and so on. Heroin stealthily spread through personal networks. The only part of the process that was visible was the result: in the case of suburban college kids, bad grades and rehab; in the case of poor urban hispanics and blacks, crime and incarceration.

Not surprisingly, when the heroin “epidemic” ended, it was not due to the war on drugs. Heroin simply fell out of fashion, in this case being replaced by another fashionable drug, powder and crack cocaine. Today we are fighting cocaine just as we fought heroin, and, by all appearances, with similar success.

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Kwasi Konadu, “The Akan Diaspora in the Americas” (Oxford UP, 2010) Jun 09, 2011

How can those in African, Africana, and African American Studies strengthen their disciplinary ties? What do these connections have to do with Kwasi Konadu‘s recent study The Akan Diaspora in the Americas (Oxford 2010)? How can the scholarship produced in African, Africana, and African American Studies serve the interests of people of African descent across the globe? Indeed, how can the history of the Akan people help us to better understand slavery and the history of the Americas? What does it mean for a scholar who is the descendant of Ghanaians, born in Jamaica and reared in America to make his life work about African history? And how does that scholar feel about his personal role in the legacy of the Diaspora, about a being a Black father in the U.S.? Kwasi Konadu speaks about all of this and more in his New Books in African American Studies interview.

Konadu’s intellectual commitment to uncovering and explaining the Akan people, their language, culture, and performative practices is inspiring. In fact, he seeks to encourage his colleagues in Africana Studies–broadly construed to include African American and African studies–“to get the story straight,” that is, to cultivate a rich appreciation for the narrative histories of the peoples of the African Diasporas (plural) and to explore what those narrative histories mean for our teaching and even our lives. I am persuaded by Konadu and personally plan to take up his call in my own teaching and research. I ask myself, “How could I not after talking to him, especially since he gives suggestions that are easy to implement?” I bet that after listening to him that you too will become a believer. Enjoy the interview, and let us know what you think!

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Elizabeth Abel, “Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow” (University of California Press, 2010) Jun 07, 2011

I think this is really interesting. Among the thousands of iconic and easily recognizable photographs of segregated water fountains in the American South, you will almost never find one that features a black woman, a white woman or a white man drinking. They are nearly all of black men drinking. Why is that?

In her fine and thoughtful book Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (University of California Press, 2010), Elizabeth Abel tells us why. Segregation, like many social phenomena, had a triple life. 1) It was a thing, part of an objective reality now past (one wants to cite Ranke here). 2) It was a thing seen, an object filtered through the subjective experience of viewers (one wants to cite Kant here). 3) And it was a thing shown, a sign made by one person to be communicated to others (one wants to cite Saussure here). We can see these three lives in the sources Abel examines: photographs of segregation signs: “Whites Only”, “No Negroes”, “Colored Entrance”, and so on. They simultaneously tell us about the way segregation actually worked (Ranke), the way participants observed it (Kant), and the way photographers tried to show it to their audiences (Saussure). Able analyses all three lives, but her focus–and the explanation for the black-man-at-a-water-fountain photographic clichÃ©–is really to be found in her investigation of the third. The photographers, most of whom were white liberal northerners, framed the depictions of the signs so as to convince spectators that segregation was degrading to blacks. Thus they usually moved whites completely out of the frame. Moreover, they elected to focus attention on the subject who could be most humiliated because that subject had, relatively speaking, the most status. So black men (high status) were shown rather than black women (low status).

This example is only one of Abel’s many fine readings of these photographs. There are many others. I encourage you to pick up the book and see for yourself.

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Alan Nadel, “August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth-Century Cycle” (University of Iowa Press, 2010) May 30, 2011

Many scholars consider August Wilson to be the premier American playwright of the 20th Century. Alan Nadel is surely one of their number. In the early 1990s, he focused our attention on Wilson’s plays in the outstanding collection of essays May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson (University of Iowa Press, 1993). Since the publication of that work, Wilson completed his magnum opus–a ten-play cycle–shortly before his death in 2005. So now Nadel has followed up his first essay collection on Wilson with a second: August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth-Century Cycle (University of Iowa Press, 2010). This volume, as Nadel asserts, is for the trained cultural critic and everyday reader. My opinion is that the volume, like the first one, is centrally important to literary critics, performance scholars, and your average serious theatre goer, as well as to anyone interested in 20th-Century American culture. Listen to the interview, read the book, and share your thoughts.

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Blair Ruble, “Washington’s U Street: A Biography” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010) May 18, 2011

I used to live in Washington DC, not far from a place I learned to call the “U Street Corridor.” I really had no idea why it was a “corridor” (most places in DC are just “streets”) or why a lot of folks seemed to make a big deal out if it. Don’t get me wrong. It was nice. There are coffee shops, jazz clubs, and the place is full of beautiful late Victorian architecture. But I confess I really didn’t understand what the “U Street Corridor” was.

Having read Blair Ruble‘s terrific Washington’s U Street: A Biography (Johns Hopkins UP/Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010), I can confidently say that now I get it. U Street was arguably the first urban area in the post-bellum United States in which African Americans formed a vital, sophisticated, wealthy, and identifiably modern “negro” (as they would have said) culture. Today we take it for granted that African Americans make a vital contribution to the cultural life (though not only that) of the United States. At the end of the Civil War, that wasn’t so. The vast majority of Blacks were southern, rural, and poor. If they appeared on the stage of national culture (and they almost never did), it was through the devices of minstrels in black-face. As Ruble points out, all that changed on U Street in the early 20th century, the birthplace of modern African American culture. Now I know, and I’m glad I do. Read the book, and you’ll know to0.

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Chad L. Williams, “Torchbearers of Democracy: African-American Soldiers in the World War I Era” (The University of North Carolina Press, 2010) May 13, 2011

One of the great “grey” areas of World War I historiography concerns the African-American experience. Even as the war was ending, white historians, participants, and politicians strove to limit the record of the African-American soldiers’ participation, while also casting the standard narrative of the war as a white American crusade against German militarism. The rich experience of the African-American community–from the quest for legitimacy and equality by educated black social and political leaders, to the Great Migration of thousands of families out of the Deep South in search of wartime work and opportunity; from the battles waged by black soldiers against both Germans and Jim Crow abroad and at home, to the violent white backlash against entire black communities–has far too long been hidden away from public view. While there have been some efforts since the war ended to restore this history to its rightful place, until recently too many of these accounts have focused on specific units, individuals, or events, often by well-meaning amateurs, driven by their own zeal to correct injustices and set the record straight as any desire to assist in crafting a solid historical narrative.

Chad Williams‘ new book Torchbearers of Democracy: African-American Soldiers in the World War I Era (UNC Press, 2010) is part of the effort by a new generation of scholars to recount the history of the African-American wartime experience. Grounded in extensive archival research, Williams offers a painstakingly constructed narrative, balanced with insightful analyses on how World War I and the immediate post-war period, for all of their disappointments and challenges, should be considered as the founding point of the modern Civil Rights movement. An assistant professor at Hamilton College, Chad Williams has received the 2011 Society of Military History Distinguished Book Award for Torchbearers of Democracy.

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Jonathan Metzl, “The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease” (Beacon Press, 2010) May 04, 2011

Schizophrenia is a real, frightening, debilitating disease. But what are we to make of the fact that several studies show that African Americans are two to three times more likely than white Americans to be diagnosed with this malady, and that black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean are six to nine times more likely to be judged schizophrenic than other residents of the United States. Is there a racist–or, at the very least, racialized–element in diagnoses of schizophrenia? According to psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl, the answer is “yes.”

In The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia became a Black Disease (Beacon Press, 2010), Metzl argues that psychiatrists at the height of the Civil Rights movement used the example of supposedly ‘volatile,’ ‘belligerent’ and ‘unstable’ African American men to define schizophrenia. Drawing on a variety of sources–patient records, psychiatric studies, racialized drug advertisements, and metaphors for schizophrenia–Metzl shows how schizophrenia and blackness evolved in ways that directly reflected the white status quo’s anxiety and uneasiness with growing racial tensions and upheaval. Schizophrenia, Metzl explains, went from being a mostly white, middle-class mental illness in the 1950s to one identified with blackness, madness, and civil strife in the decades that followed.

Jonathan Metzl is a contributor to Public Books.

As you listen to the interview take a look at some the pharmaceutical advertisements that Metzl cites in his research, and how schizophrenia went from being code for white and docile, to later black and threatening…

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Charles Lane, “The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction” (Henry Holt, 2008) Mar 11, 2011

Why did Reconstruction fail? Why didn’t the post-war Federal government protect the civil rights of the newly freed slaves? And why did it take Washington almost a century to intercede on the behalf of beleaguered, oppressed African Americans in the South? In a terrific new book, Charles Lane explains why. The Day Freedom Died. The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (Henry Holt, 2008) tells the tale of a little-known though remarkably important incident: the murder of close to 100 freedmen by a posse of White supremacists in Louisiana in 1873. Charles does an excellent job of narrating this heart-wrenching and disturbing event. The book would be worth reading for that story alone. But he really comes into his own in describing the legal aftermath of the slaughter. With all the skill of a seasoned reporter–which he is–Charles chronicles the passage of the Colfax case from the courts of New Orleans to the U.S. Supreme Court. The result was a landmark decision–United States v. Cruikshank–that effectively placed the civil rights of Southern African Americans in the hands of Southern Whites for almost a century, with predictable results. A must-read for anyone interested in Reconstruction, constitutional law, and the sad history of race-relations in the United States. Please become a fan of “New Books in African American Studies” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

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Nell Irvin Painter, “The History of White People” (Norton, 2010) Jan 14, 2011

We in the West tend to classify people by the color of their skin, or what we casually call “race.” But, as Nell Irvin Painter shows in her fascinating new book The History of White People (Norton, 2010), it wasn’t always so. The Greeks didn’t do it, at least very seriously. The Romans didn’t do it, at least very often. And the folks of the Middle Ages didn’t do it, at least with much gusto. In fact, the people who invented the modern concept of “race” and the classification of people by skin color were Europeans and Americans of the Enlightenment and Romantic Era.

Why then and there? As Painter points out, a number of historical trends coincided to produced “racial science” and its child “whiteness” in Europe and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These trends included: the “discovery” of New Worlds (and the people in them) in the Americas, Asia, and Africa; the evolution of the African slave trade and with it the historically novel identification of “negroes” with slavery; the birth of proto-anthoropology and with its ancillary sciences (e.g., “craniometry”); nationalism, and desire of nationalists (especially Germans) to discover the intrinsic “greatness” of particular nations (notably theirs); the massive influx of “undesirable” Irish and Eastern Europeans into the United States; and the “progressive” idea that human populations could be bred for “superior traits,” that is, eugenics. All these things forced European and American elites to think hard about what kind of people they were.

The conclusion they reached was that they were (variously) “Anglo Saxons,” “Nordics,” “Aryans” and eventually just “Whites.” That they believed themselves to be superior to all other “races” should not surprise us (humans being naturally prideful). But the muddle-headed quality of their thought on matters racial should raise some eyebrows, for these people were not dumb. They were, however, afraid, and fear often drives even well-intentioned, intelligent people to say foolish things. This they certainly did. Alas, some people still do. They should read Nell Painter’s fine book.

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Kyra Hicks, “This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers’ Bible Quilt and Other Pieces” (Black Threads Press, 2009) Nov 19, 2010

I’ll tell you something I’ve never really understood: the difference between “art” and “craft.” Yes, I get the sociological difference (“art” is made in New York and Paris; “craft” is made in Omaha and Wichita), but what about the substantive difference? One common way to differentiate the two is to say “art” is not functional and “craft” is functional. You can’t sit on a painting but you can sit on a chair. If that’s the difference, then the “Museum of Modern Art” in New York should be called the “Museum of Modern Art and Craft,” because it’s full of (not very comfortable) furniture. I also cannot really comprehend the difference between “insider art” and “outsider art.” Again, I get the sociological distinction (see above), but who gets to say who’s inside and who’s outside? And if there’s “insider art” and “outsider art,” is there “insider craft” and “outsider craft?”

In the world of quilting (which is much bigger than you think), Powers is a bit like Vermeer: not many pieces, but all highly valued. And like Vermeer, she’s interesting because we don’t know a lot about her.

All I know is this: there was a freed slave named Harriet Powers who made really beautiful, highly literate, and deeply religious quilts. In the world of quilting (which is much bigger than you think), Powers is a bit like Vermeer: not many pieces, but all highly valued. And like Vermeer, she’s interesting because we don’t know a lot about her. In This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers’ Bible Quilt and Other Pieces (2010), Kyra Hicks does her best to fill in the many blanks. The book is a combination detective story, journey of discovery, and guide to further research. Hicks, a master quilter herself, doggedly pursues every lead she can find regarding the mysterious Powers, and they take her to some very unexpected places (for example, Keokuk, Iowa). The picture of Powers that emerges from This I Accomplish is that of a skilled, religiously-inspired artist, confident and proud of her work, moving through a long-forgotten world of African American quilters.

If you know any quilters (and I know you do), this book would make an excellent gift. If you’d like to see Powers’ quilts for yourself, they are held by the National Museum of American History (part of the Smithsonian) in Washington and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

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Aram Goudsouzian, “King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution” (University of California, 2010) Oct 12, 2010

I imagine the guys who first faced Bill Russell felt like I did when I had to guard Antoine Carr in high school. I “held” Carr to 32 points. But no dunks! Russell’s opponents in college and the NBA rarely fared any better. Sports talk is full of hyperbole, but in Russell’s case most of it is true. In his time, he was far and away the best player to ever step on the court and, for most of his career, he completely owned every court he stepped on. He was so dominant that they changed the rules so less gifted players would have a chance.

Bill Russell, however, was not only a surpassingly great basketball player, he was also an African American star in an era in which being an African American star (or just being an African American) was very complicated. Today we are used to seeing outstandingly successful blacks in all (or almost all) spheres of life. In the mid-1950s that just wasn’t true. The American ruling elite was lily white, and that’s the way most white Americans thought it should be. Bill Russell (and Jackie Robinson, Althea Gibson, Willie Mays, Cassius Clay, Jim Brown, among others) were anomalies: they were black, but they were both extraordinarily accomplished and remarkably famous. They couldn’t just be athletes; they had to be symbols of some promising (or frightening) new world as well. That’s quite a burden to bear.

In King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution (University of California Press, 2010), Aram Goudsouzian has done a great service by detailing the ways Russell bore this weight, and the ways in which he fought to throw it off. Aram makes clear that Russell was a conflicted soul. He lacked self-confidence, but he was brusk and even arrogant. He was friendly and gregarious to some, but often simply rude to others. He was hot tempered, but he affected a cool, distant demeanor. He believed he was a man of principle (and convinced others he was), but he periodically abandoned his family for a playboy lifestyle. If Russell couldn’t be honest about himself, he insisted on being honest about everything and everyone around him. He meant what he said and said what he meant–about race, about sports, about anything that bothered him. He was a sort of athletic Socrates, always questioning and never fully accepting the way things were. And, like Socrates, Russell was willing to suffer for his beliefs. As Aram points out, he did in many ways. But in the process he gained the respect of almost everyone he encountered. He was a hard man to like, but he was an easy man to admire.

I should add that if you like white-hot game narratives, this book is full of them. Remember this?: “Greer is putting the ball in play. He gets it out deep and Havlicek steals it! Over to Sam Jones… Havlicek stole the ball! It’s all over… It’s all-l-l-l over!” Johnny Most, RIP.

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Todd Moye, “Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II” (Oxford UP, 2010) Jul 23, 2010

In the 1940s, the United States military performed an “experiment,” the substance of which was the formation of an all-black aviation unit known to history as the “Tuskegee Airmen.” In light of the honorable service record of countless African Americans, allowing blacks to become fighter and bomber pilots might not seem very “experimental” to you, but you have to put yourself in the mindset of the era in question to understand how “experimental” it was. Jim-Crow segregation was nearly universal, especially, though not exclusively, in the South. The armed forces were similarly segregated, with blacks serving in what might be mildly called “auxiliary roles” and whites doing all the commanding and fighting. There were few black officers (and they never supervised white troops) and no black military pilots. Most of the (nearly all white) “brass” could not conceive of integrated units and doubted the ability of African Americans to serve as line officers; most of those in the majority white voting public shared these views. When the argument to native ability failed (after all, black units had performed well in the Civil War and World War I), opponents of integration fell back on a familiar argument: if “we” allow “them” to serve with “us,” chaos will ensue and fighting effectiveness will suffer.

But black leaders didn’t buy it; they wanted integration. The Roosevelt administration sat on the fence. It clearly couldn’t embark on full-scale integration (and, it must be said, FDR himself had doubts about it), but it couldn’t forgo black votes. So it compromised: blacks would get one high-profile flying unit, but integration would be deferred. And so the great experiment began. Todd Moye has mined the archives and talked to the airmen to tell the tale of how said experiment proceeded in his terrific Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II (OUP, 2010). It’s a tale I found both uplifting and shocking. I’m not usually one to heap praise on people, but the pilots themselves were remarkably brave. It is hard for me to imagine what they went through to get their wings and fight for the country they loved. I found myself again and again asking “How could they do that?” Todd does a terrific job of setting the scene and helping us understand their struggle. I confess I find it just as hard to enter the mindset of those whites who stood against them. They were racists and more frighteningly racists with absolutely clean consciences. When they said that blacks didn’t have the “right stuff” to become pilots, to command troops, to serve in integrated units, they believed it. Their testimony, again very ably related by Todd, is simply difficult to read. Here too I found myself asking again and again “How could they do that?”

It was a different world. Parts of it, however, are obviously still with us. What is “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” but the executive branch’s attempt to find a “middle way” between integrationists and their opponents? Harry Truman, where are you now?

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Amy Bass, “Those About Him Remained Silent: The Battle Over W. E. B. Du Bois” (Minnesota UP, 2009) Apr 15, 2010

I asked my wife if she knew who W. E. B. Du Bois was. She did, as would most Americans. I then asked her if she knew where Du Bois was born and raised. She did not, and most Americans wouldn’t either. The odd thing is that Du Bois, who was one of the founders of the American civil rights movement and perhaps the most famous black public intellectual of the 20th century, was born and raised a stone’s throw from where my wife grew up in Western Massachusetts. If you are from Illinois, you know it is the “Land of Lincoln.” If you are from Virginia, you know that Jefferson was a Virginian. If you are from Kansas (as I am), you know that Eisenhower is a native son (even though he’s not, really). But the people of Western Massachusetts forgot Du Bois was one of their own. Or did they just choose not to remember? Amy Bass explores this question in her challenging new book Those About Him Remained Silent: The Battle Over W. E. B. Du Bois (Minnesota UP, 2009). Those who wanted to commemorate Du Bois saw a deep thinker who had overcome racism and helped found the civil rights movement; those who did not want to remember him saw Du Bois the communist who had abandoned the United States for Africa. Du Bois was both and much, much more. But historical monuments cannot reflect such complexity; they are all about simplification through selective recollection. Du Bois, however, just couldn’t be made simple. So the battle was joined and, to some degree, is still going on today.

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Jack Greene and Philip Morgan, “Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal” (Oxford UP, 2008) Oct 02, 2009

This is the first in a series of podcasts that New Books in History is offering in conjunction with the National History Center. The NHC and Oxford University Press have initiated a book series called “Reinterpreting History.”The volumes in the series aim to convey to readers how and why historians revise and reinterpret their understanding of the past, and they do so by focusing on a particular historical topic, event, or idea that has long gained the attention of historians. The first contribution to the “Reinterpreting History” series is Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2008). Today we’ll be talking to the editors of the volume, Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan. You may think that historians normally study states or nations, like France and China. But they also study areas of international or imperial interaction. The most famous example of this sort of “international” history is Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949), but there are many others. Among them one finds contributions to “Atlantic History,” itself a relatively new field. Its object is the “Atlantic World,” roughly, the history of the interaction of four continents (Africa, Europe, North America, and South America) from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. In this podcast, Greene and Morgan talk about the origin of the field, its work to date, and its prospects.

For an introduction to Atlantic history, see Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History. Concepts and Contours (Harvard University Press, 2005) andJ. H. Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World. Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (Yale University Press, 2006).There is also a lively Atlantic history discussion list. See H-Atlantic.

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Leslie Schwalm, “Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest” (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) Jul 31, 2009

You’ve heard of “Reconstruction,” that is, the reform of the South after the Civil War. But have you heard of “Northern Reconstruction?” Probably not. I hadn’t either until I read Leslie Schwalm’s superb new book Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). We tend to think of the Civil War as a Northern fight against Southern slavery. It was that to some extent. But, in our rush to congratulate ourselves on liberating those in Southern bondage, we tend to overlook the fact that blacks living in the North were treated none too well by the majority white residents. Being anti-slavery didn’t mean being pro-African American. In this meticulously researched book, Leslie traces the history of the African American migration to the Upper Midwest (Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota) during and after the war. It’s not a very pretty picture. The whites in the area were not at all receptive to the idea that emancipated slaves would live among them. White Midwesterners had deprived African Americans of their civil rights before the war and they had every intention of doing the same after the war. They were hostile to the emancipated migrants and did everything they could to see that they were kept “in their place.” That’s why even the North had to be “reconstructed.” Read this book. It will change what you think, and that can’t be said for every history.

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Matt Wasniewski, et al., “Black Americans in Congress, 1870-2007” (U.S. House of Representatives, 2008) Jan 15, 2009

In just a few days, the United States will inaugurate its first black president, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. And though it’s a momentous day for the cause of equality, Mr. Obama is hardly the first African American to come to DC to serve the people of the United States. His way was paved by well over one hundred black legislators who served over the past 140 years in the House and Senate. Happily, you can read all about them in wonderful Black Americans in Congress, 1870-2007 (U.S. House of Representatives, Office of the Clerk, Office of History and Preservation, 2008). This is book has three cardinal virtues. First, it’s timely, as we’ve said. The editors and authors deserve praise for seeing it into print at exactly the right moment. Second, it’s well researched and written. The entries–one for each black legislator–are at once informative, rich in detail, and full of humor and pathos. Finally, it’s a beautifully designed and produced work. This book is, like its companion Women in Congress 1917-2006, a work of great craftsmanship, and should be acknowledged as such. Black Americans in Congress, 1870-2007 is the sort of book you buy to keep and hand down to your children. So buy it, hand it down, and preserve the memory of those who came before President Obama.

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Colin Grant, “Negro With A Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey” (Oxford UP, 2008) Jun 13, 2008

Today we are happy to have Colin Grant on the show. Colin is that rare breed of writer who is also an excellent historian. Or is that “rare breed of historian who is also an excellent writer?” I’m not sure, but I can tell you that Negro With A Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (Oxford UP, 2008) is a great book. The subject matter couldn’t be more interesting and the prose is as delightful as it is instructive. There are many laugh-out-loud, I-wish-I were-that-clever sentences in this book: “Scott was not to know that the UNIA leader was of the school of thought that translated ‘no’ as ‘maybe’ and maybe’ as ‘yes.'” And many others that will make you sad. Grant is that kind of writer and Garvey that kind of figure. Go buy this book. Then read it.

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Colin Gordon, “Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) May 09, 2008

This week we have Professor Colin Gordon of the University of Iowa on the show talking about his new book Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Professor Gordon is the author of two previous monographs, Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth Century America (Princeton University Press, 2004) and New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920-1935 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Mapping Decline breaks new ground not only in our understanding of the decay of the American inner-city, but also in its use of quantitative data in combination with GIS mapping technologies. The book is full of beautiful maps that paint a vivid, if somewhat depressing, picture of American urban history. Philip J. Ethington of the University of Southern California calls Mapping Decline “a searing indictment of policymakers, realtors, and mortgage lenders for deliberate decisions that sacrificed their own city of St. Louis on the altar of race.” That it is.

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Eric Gardner, “Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West” (University Press of Mississippi, 2008) Apr 09, 2008

Today we talked with Eric Gardner, who is chair and professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University. The interview focuses on Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), a new book which Dr. Gardner both authored an introduction to and edited. This is the first collection from an African American journalist writing for the San Francisco based newspaper, the Elevator. Gardner’s introduction does an excellent job of placing Carter into both the context of the history and literature of the American West. Dr. Gardner is also the editor of Major Voices: The Drama of Slavery and has authored works which appear in the African American Review, the African American National Biography, and Legacy.

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Kevin Mumford, “Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America” (New York UP, 2007) Feb 15, 2008

Today we feature an interview with Kevin Mumford about his new book Newark: A History of Race, Rights and Riots in America (New York University Press, 2007). Dr. Mumford is an Associate Professor of History and African-American Studies at the University of Iowa, where he also serves as the current Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of History and the Academic Coordinator of the Sexual Studies Program. He is the author of many articles and the book, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 1997). In this week’s interview, we discussed Dr. Mumford’s latest book, Newark: A History of Race, Rights and Riots in America. David Roediger of the University of Illinois raves that “Meticulously researched and engagingly written, Newark tells an important story.”

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