New Books in African American Studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Instruments of Empire: Filipino Musicians, Black Soldiers, and Military Band Music during US Colonization of the Philippines published 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies