New Books In African American Studies

Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country’s landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.Professor Weathersby takes us from the streets of his childhood in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward to the Whitney Plantation; from the graffitied pedestals of Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, to the location of a racist terror attack in Charlottesville; from the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota to a Kara Walker art installation at a former sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. Along the way, he challenges the creation myths embedded in America’s landmarks and meets artists, curators, and city plan

This episode features Dr. Kit W. Myers, associate professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced, discussing his book The Violence of Love: Race, Family and Adoption in the United States, which was published by the University of California Press in January 2025. The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents—a narrative that is especially pervasive with transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Myers comparatively examines the adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families in the United States. He shows how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures—in contrast to others that are not—and argues that violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. Propelled by diffe

Teacher By Teacher traces the journey of the tenth U.S. Secretary of Education and is a deeply personal love letter to all the teachers in our lives. The story of John B. King Jr.’s inspiring path to President Obama’s Cabinet begins the day that his mother died. He insisted on going to school that day, knowing he would find comfort in his classroom. As he navigated living alone with a father dying from undiagnosed Alzheimer’s, it was public school teachers who saved his life, believed in him and saw his potential. They made school a safe, supportive, and engaging place where he could be a kid despite the challenges at home. While some might have dismissed a rebellious young Black and Puerto Rican teen whose life was in crisis, King’s teachers and counselors gave him a second chance. He went on to earn degrees from Harvard, Columbia, and Yale and committed his career to trying to do for other young people what educators did for him. Teacher By Teacher shows how dedicated educators—both Dr. King’s own teachers

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. 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

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Black press provided a blueprint to help Black Americans transition from slavery and find opportunities to advance and define African American citizenship. Among the vanguard of the Black press was Jefferson Lewis Edmonds, founder and editor of The Liberator newspaper. His Los Angeles-based newspaper championed for women's rights, land and business ownership, education, and civic engagement, while condemning lynchings and other violent acts against African Americans. It encouraged readers to move westward and build new communities, and it printed stories about weddings and graduations as a testament to the lives and moments not chronicled in the White-owned press. Edmonds took this fierce perspective in his career as a journalist, for he himself was born into slavery and dedicated his life to creating pathways of liberation for those who came after him. Across the pages of his newspaper, Edmonds painted a different perspective on Black life in America and championed

Classicism and Other Phobias (Princeton University Press, 2025) shows how the concept of “classicism” lacks the capacity to affirm the aesthetic value of Black life and asks whether a different kind of classicism—one of insurgence, fugitivity, and emancipation—is possible. Engaging with the work of Sylvia Wynter and other trailblazers in Black studies while drawing on his own experiences as a Black classicist, Dan-el Padilla Peralta situates the history of the classics in the racial and settler-colonialist settings of early modern and modern Europe and North America. He argues that immortalizing ancient Greek and Roman authors as “the classical” comes at the cost of devaluing Black forms of expression. Is a newfound emphasis on Black classicism the most effective counter to this phobia? In search of answers, Padilla Peralta ranges from the poetry of Juan de Castellanos to the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and paintings by contemporary artists Kehinde Wiley and Harmonia Rosales. Based on the prestigious W.E.B. Du

Against! is the first book-length study of Afro-Caribbean and African immigrant and second-generation writing in the United States. In it, Asha Jeffers evaluates the relationship between Blackness and immigranthood in the US as depicted through the recurring theme of rebellious Black immigrant daughters. Considering the work of Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Taiye Selasi, Jeffers untangles how rebellion is informed by race, gender, ethnicity, and migration status. Immigrant and second-generation writers mobilize often complicated familial relationships to comment on a variety of political, social, and psychic contexts. Jeffers argues that rather than categorizing Black migrants as either immediately fully integrated into an African American experience or seeing them as another category altogether that is unbound by race, Marshall, Danticat, Adichie, and Selasi identify the unstable position of Black migrants within the American racial landscape. By highlighting the diverse wa

Although Portland, Oregon, is sometimes called “America’s Whitest city,” Black residents who grew up there made it their own. The neighborhoods of Northeast Portland, also called “Albina,” were a haven for and a hub of Black community life. But between 1990 and 2010, Albina changed dramatically—it became majority White.In We Belong Here, sociologist Dr. Shani Adia Evans offers an intimate look at gentrification from the inside, documenting the reactions of Albina residents as the racial demographics of their neighborhood shift. As White culture becomes centered in Northeast, Black residents recount their experiences with what Evans refers to as “White watching,” the questioning look on the faces of White people they encounter, which conveys an exclusionary message: “What are you doing here?” This, Evans shows, is a prime example of what she calls “White spacemaking”: the establishment of White space—spaces in which Whiteness is assumed to be the norm and non-Whites are treated with suspicion—in formerly non-W

More than a century and a half after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, historians are still searching for exactly when the U.S. Civil War ended. Was it ten weeks afterward, in Galveston, where a federal commander proclaimed Juneteenth the end of slavery? Or perhaps in August of 1866, when President Andrew Johnson simply declared “the insurrection is at an end”?  That the answer was elusive was baffling even to a historian of the stature of Michael Vorenberg, whose previous work served as a key source of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Vorenberg was inspired to write this groundbreaking book, finding its title, Lincoln's Peace, in the peace Lincoln hoped for but could not make before his assassination. A peace that required not one but many endings, as Vorenberg reveals in these pages, the most important of which came well more than a year after Lincoln’s untimely death. To say how a war ends is to suggest how it should be remembered, and Vorenberg’s search is not just for the Civil War’s endpoint bu

In 1977, The Combahee River Collective, a group of Black American feminists issued a statement communicating the harrowing following: “The psychological toll of being a Black woman…can never be underestimated. There is a low value placed on Black women’s psyches in this society, which is both racist and sexist. We are dispossessed psychologically and on every other level and yet we feel the need to struggle to change the condition of all Black women.” Almost 50 years later, we have a book that responds to this important group’s felt need. Foluke Taylor’s Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room, delivers an archive of Black feminisms that are leveraged to explore certain psychoanalytic truths. This ambitious trajectory is however delightfully embedded within a text that also includes the potential of musical accompaniment: she prompts us to tune into Billy Paul, Sault, Norman Connors and many other musicians. Read Taylor and turn up your speakers: let your senses rise and fa

The criminalization of Black youth was central to policing in urban America during the civil rights era and continued in Detroit even after the rise of Black political control in the 1970s. Wildcat of the Streets documents how the “community policing” approach of Mayor Coleman Young (1974–1993)—including neighborhood police stations, affirmative action hiring policies, and public participation in law enforcement initiatives—transformed Detroit, long considered the nation’s symbol of racial inequality and urban crisis, into a crucial site of experimentation in policing while continuing to subject many Black Detroiters to police brutality and repression. In response, young people in the 1970s and 1980s drew on the city’s storied history of labor radicalism as well as contemporary shopfloor struggles to wage a “wildcat of the streets,” consisting of street disturbances, decentralized gang activity, and complex organizations of the informal economy. In this revelatory new history of the social life of cities, Mi

In the financial chaos of the last few decades, increasing wealth inequality has shaken people's expectations about middle-class stability. At the same time, demographers have predicted the "browning" of the nation's middle class--once considered a de facto "white" category--over the next twenty years as the country becomes increasingly racially diverse. In this book, Joseph O. Jewell takes us back to the turn of the twentieth century to show how evidence of middle-class mobility among Black, Mexican American, and Chinese men generated both new anxieties and varieties of backlash among white populations.Blending cultural history and historical sociology, Jewell chronicles the continually evolving narratives that linked whiteness with middle-class mobility and middle-class manhood. In doing so, Jewell addresses a key issue in the historical sociology of race: how racialized groups demarcate, defend, and alter social positions in overlapping hierarchies of race, class, and gender. New racist narratives about no

This episode features Dr. Ashley Howard, assistant professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Iowa, discussing her book, Midwest Unrest: 1960s Urban Rebellions and the Black Freedom Movement, which was published by the University of North Carolina Press in June 2025. In six thoroughly researched chapters, Midwest Unrest argues that urban rebellions were a working-class response to the failure of traditional civil rights activism and growing fissures between the Black working and middle classes in the 1960s. Howard focuses on three Midwestern sites–Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Omaha–to explore the ways region, race, class, and gender all played critical and often overlapping roles in shaping Black people's resistance to racialized oppression. Using arrest records, Kerner Commission documents, and author-conducted oral history interviews, Howard registers the significant impact the rebellions had in transforming African Americans' consciousness and altering the relationship between Bl

Dr. Karyne Messina and Dr. Felicia Powell-Williams, the host and co-host of “Psychoanalytic Perspectives of Racism in America” sponsored by The American Psychoanalytic Association explored how employing mechanisms of defense perpetuates racial injustice’s movement forward and the resistance it faces as a tug of war, i.e., progress followed by backlash. They examined the symbolic removal of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s bust from the White House and its implications for societal values, while also talking about the impact of Dr. King’s assassination and the current state of racial justice initiatives. The conversation included a discussion about the challenges of tolerating difficult truths and emotions in both psychoanalysis and society, including the persistence of white supremacy and its modern manifestations. It also underscored how symbols of the civil rights movement have been honored at the highest level of government yet in this case defense mechanisms initiated the physical removal of the bust. Other

Traversing teeming metropolises and tiny towns, Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores (Random House, 2025) explores these spaces, chronicling these Black bookstore’s past and present lives. Combining narrative prose, eye-catching photography, one-on-one interviews, original essays, and specially curated poetry, Prose to the People is a reader’s road trip companion to the world of Black books. Thoughtfully curated by writer and Black bookstore owner Katie Mitchell, Prose to the People is a must-have addition to the shelves of anyone who loves book culture and Black history. Though not a definitive guide, this dynamic book centers profiles of over fifty Black bookstores from the Northeast to the mid-Atlantic, the South, and the West Coast, complete with stunning original and archival photography. Interspersed throughout are essays, poems, and interviews by New York Times bestsellers Kiese Laymon, Rio Cortez, Pearl Cleage, and many more journalists, activists, authors, academics, and poets th

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 Ma

What are dominant narratives of mixed race identity? What are those narratives doing, in everyday life and within philosophical discourse? How can attending to the narratives and actions of people who identify as mixed race not just interrupt these dominant narratives, but change our understandings of ancestry, race, sexuality, and much more? In Critical Mixed Race Philosophy: Rethinking Kinship and Identity (Lexington Books, 2025), Sabrina L. Hom tackles these questions to argue for the view that many mixed race people have taken up their positioning within and between racial groups in critical and transformative ways. If we disrupt the dominant tropes of objectifying mixed race people, Hom shows us, to attend to what they say and do, we can find a critical standpoint that adds much to our thinking about and collective action in regards to kinship, embodiment, and identity. Sabrina L. Hom is associate professor of philosophy and affiliate faculty of women's and gender studies at Georgia College and State U

A rethinking of African American religious history that focuses on the development and evolution of Africana spiritual traditions in Jim Crow New Orleans. When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space. Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an antiblack world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms--ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more--to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come. In recovering these spiritual innovations, Underworld Work celebrates the resilience and creativity of Africana religions. Lea

The American Civil War may have been more consequential to American history (and its global supremacy) than its Revolutionary War and participation in all other world wars. The influence of this war is not just reduced to the victory of the north and its economic infrastructure, but the fact of Union success ushered in the notion of 'what it means to be American' that even the revolution could not instill. European military historian Jeremy Black reorients readers to see what was extraordinary in the civil war of 'the American colonies' and why this was warfare unlike anything that could be properly understood on the world stage at that time. He also examines with expertise the role of foreign powers (or lack thereof). Black's treatment might be the doom of civil war counterfactuals. Was the south destined to fail? Was it weaker motive, faulty strategy, or lack of European support? Was the north just lucky, or possessed of foresight and providential endowment? Black dispels romanticism and sentimentalist hi

Andrew S. Berish. 2025. Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse. (U of Chicago Press, 2025) Some good words from the inside flap: “ A deep dive into the meaning behind the hatred of jazz.A rock guitarist plays four notes in front of one thousand people, while a jazz guitarist plays one thousand notes in front of four people. You might laugh or groan at this jazz joke, but what is it about jazz that makes people want to disparage it in the first place?Andrew S. Berish’s Hating Jazz listens to the voices who have denounced, disparaged, and mocked the music. By focusing on the rejection of the music, Berish says, we see more holistically jazz’s complicated place in American cultural life. Jazz is a display of Black creativity and genius, an art form that is deeply embedded in African American life. Though the explicit racial tenor of jazz jokes has become muted over time, making fun of jazz, either in a lighthearted or aggressive way, is also an engagement with the plac