New Books In African American Studies

In 2004, Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press) was published. Sixteen years later, Morgan’s Laboring Women stands tall as one of the most important historical texts in the history of the academy. Building on Dr. Deborah Gray White’s literal field building and seminal 1985 monograph, Ar’n’t I A Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, Laboring Women clearly added to White’s tradition, but also helped blaze a trail in her own right. Laboring Women was the first historical text to focus on Black women’s reproductive labor under New World slavery in the early modern period. Laboring Women is also critically important to scholarly understandings about African and African American history, reproduction, gender, sexuality, capitalism, and MORE! To say the least, since 2004, the game wasn’t the same, anymore! Learn why by listening to the conversation! Enjoy New Books in African American Studies listeners. Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan

America's Other Muslims: Imam W.D. Mohammed, Islamic Reform, and the Making of American Islam explores the oldest and perhaps the most important Muslim community in America, whose story has received little attention in the contemporary context. Muhammad Fraser-Rahim explores American Muslim Revivalist, Imam W.D. Mohammed (1933–2008) and his contribution to the intellectual, spiritual, and philosophical thought of American Muslims as well as the contribution of Islamic thought by indigenous American Muslims. The book details the intersection of the Africana experience and its encounter with race, religion, and Islamic reform. Fraser-Rahim spotlights the emergence of an American school of Islamic thought, which was created and established by the son of the former Nation of Islam leader. Imam W.D. Mohammed rejected his father’s teachings and embraced normative Islam on his own terms while balancing classical Islam and his lived experience of Islam in the diaspora. Likewise his interpretations of Islam were not o

Two south side Chicago families are bound together by a violence-infused past. Ruby’s mother, Alice King, has been murdered. Her father, Lebanon King, is an abusive man who endured a terrible childhood. Her best friend, Layla, has always tried to protect Ruby from Lebanon even though her own father and Ruby’s father have been close friends since childhood. And their mothers were friends before them. In this moving debut novel, Saving Ruby King (Park Row Books), Catherine Adel West gives each character a voice, but the voice that binds all of their lives together is that of the Calvary Hope Christian Church, objective witness to the complex ties between Ruby’s grandmother and her two friends, between Ruby’s father and Layla’s father, and between Ruby and Layla. In precise, lyrical writing, West delves into each of their secrets while exploring intergenerational trauma, racial injustice in Chicago, and the power of friendship. Catherine Adel West was born and raised in Chicago, IL where she currently resides. S

“I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America. “I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. “I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that.” – Shirley Chisholm, January 25, 1972, Announcement of Run for the Presidency What is the political and intellectual legacy of Shirley Chisholm? Recent coverage of Chisholm – especially after the announcement of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s choice of Vice-Present – emphasizes ‘trailblazer talk.’ Chisholm’s extraordinary career included being both the first African-American woman elected to the United States congress and the first to run for the U.S. presidency. But emphasizing these “firsts” obscures Shirley Chisholm’s political and intellectual significance. She was a brilliant political strategist who deftly cultivated relationships that allowed her to accomplish her principled and wide-ranging po

Can’t Be Faded: Twenty Years in the New Orleans Brass Band Game (University of Mississippi Press, 2020) is a collaboration between musician and ethnomusicologist Kyle DeCoste and more than a dozen members of the Stooges Brass Band, past and present. It is the culmination of five years of interviews, research, and writing. Told with humor and candor, it’s as much a personal account of the Stooges’ careers as it is a story of the city’s musicians and, even more generally, a coming-of-age tale about Black men in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century. DeCoste and the band members take readers into the barrooms, practice rooms, studios, tour vans, and streets where the music is made and brotherhoods are shaped and strengthened. Comprised of lively firsthand accounts and honest dialogue, Can’t Be Faded is a dynamic approach to collaborative research that offers a sensitive portrait of the humans behind the horns. The Stooges Brass Band is based in New Orleans, Louisiana. They are known for incor

In his new book Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s (Faber, 2020), Simon Hall, a Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds, colorfully details an extraordinary visit by Fidel Castro to New York in the Autumn of 1960 for the opening of the UN General Assembly. Holding court from the iconic Hotel Theresa in Harlem, Castro's riotous stay in New York saw him connect with leaders from within the local African American community, as well as political and cultural luminaries such as Gamal Abdel Nasser, Nikita Khrushchev, Kwame Nkrumah and Allen Ginsberg. Through exploring the local and global impact of these ten days, Hall recovers Castro's visit as a critical turning point in the trajectory of the Cold War and the development of the 'The Sixties.' E. James West is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in American History at Northumbria University. He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (Illinois, 2020). Learn more about yo

Why is the scholarship and advocacy work of W.E.B. Du Bois so relevant for 21st century politics? Does his unique combination of both serve as a possible template for today’s freedom movements? Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly (assistant professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College and 2020-2021 Visiting Scholar with the Race and Capitalism Project at the University of Chicago) new book in called W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History (ABC-CLIO, 2019). In it, she argues that the application of Du Bois’s ideology, epistemology, and theory to practical action elucidates a road map for struggle against myriad forms of exploitation – and enduring features of his praxis provide lessons for our contemporary understanding and our ability to potential challenging of imperialism and racism. Dr. Burden-Stelly works at the intersection of Critical Theory, Africana Studies, political theory, and political economy – and her analysis of Du Bois’s political and methodological contributions reflect t

The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent. And it pivots on the self-conscious choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Slavery's rise in the Americas was institutional, carnal, and reproductive. The intimacy of bondage whet the appetites of slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials with fantasies of domination that trickled into every social relationship—husband and wife, sovereign and subject, master and laborer. Intimacy—corporeal, carnal, quotidian—tied slaves to slaveowners, women of African descent and their children to European and African men. In Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), Jessica Marie Johnson explores the nature of these complicated intimate and kinship ties and how they were used by black women to const

By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures? In On the Spirit of Rights (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the rights regimes enshrined in the American and French Revolutions. With a lively attention to detail, he surveys a sprawling series of debates among rulers, jurists, philosophers, political reformers, writers, and others, who were all engaged in laying the groundwork for our contemporary systems of constitutional governance. Every seemingly new claim about rights turns out to be a variation on a theme, as late medieval notions were subtly repeated and refined to yield the talk of “rights” we recognize today. From the Wars of Religion to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the 1948 Universal

Welcome to New Books in African American Studies, a channel on the New Books Network. I am your host, Adam McNeil. Today on the podcast I have the honor of chatting with a good friend, Dr. J. T. Roane, assistant professor of African and African American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Dr. Roane is on New Books in African American Studies to discuss a range of topics from his upbringing in Tappahannock, Virginia, to his days in undergrad and grad school at the University of Virginia and Columbia University, discussions about his writing process, and the importance of Black rural Southern life, to name a few. I hope and pray y’all enjoy the discussion! J.T. Roane is assistant professor of African and African American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. He received his PhD in history from Columbia University and he is a 2008 graduate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. He is an out-going co-senior ed

In White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue ... and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation (Beacon, 2019), Lauren Michele Jackson analyzes Christina Aguilera, high fashion, the conceptual poetry of Kenneth Goldsmith, digital blackface, and the dearly departed video platform Vine. She demonstrates that cultural appropriation (especially of Black culture by white artists) is prevalent and deeply rooted in America’s history of inequality. Beyond that, though, she explores why white artists feel drawn to appropriate Blackness: what does appropriated Blackness give to white artists? Status? Sex appeal? Avant-garde credibility? Funding? And why doesn’t it give those same things to Black artists? White Negroes is a timely and engrossing (and funny) work of cultural criticism from a major new critical voice. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been prod

Khary Oronde Polk is the author of Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898-1948, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. Contagions of Empire examines how the shifting views of Black military through the first half of the 20th century, as the U.S. increased its global empire and warfare. At once viewed as both contagious and immune, Black workers attempted to navigate the complex pathways that were left open in the military, even as they were seen as simultaneously integral and threatening to both the U.S. military and nation state. Polk’s work shows not just how scientific racism developed during this period and how U.S. militarism expanded, but how the Black community responded at each step. Khary Oronde Polk is an Associate Professor of Black Studies and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College. Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland. Learn more about your ad choices.

In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press) by Benjamin Talton is a transnational history that explores the influence of African American leaders on US foreign policy towards Africa in the 1980s. By examining the life and labors of the political activist turned Texas congressman, Mickey Leland, Talton traces the afterlives of 1960s-era Black radicalism in the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) after Leland’s election in 1978. Leland shaped the CBC’s outlook on famine in Ethiopia and established the Committee on Hunger where he developed a broad transformative vision for ending world hunger. Talton analyzes Leland’s career alongside contemporaneous political developments in Ethiopia and apartheid South Africa, an issue which ultimately became the focal point of CBC endeavors. Talton investigates the ways that anti-apartheid limited Black Congressional action on other African-related foreign policy issues throughout the decade. Talton paints a portrait

On the eve of the Civil War, the estimated value of the U.S. enslaved population exceeded $3 billion--triple that of investments nationwide in factories, railroads, and banks combined, and worth more even than the South's lucrative farmland. Not only an object to be traded and used, the slave was also a kind of currency, a form of value that anchored the market itself. And this value was not destroyed in the war. Slavery still structured social relations and cultural production in the United States more than a century after it was formally abolished. As Aaron Carico reveals in Black Market: The Slave's Value in National Culture after 1865 (UNC Press, 2020), slavery's engine of capital accumulation was preserved and transformed, and the slave commodity survived emancipation. Through both archival research and lucid readings of literature, art, and law, from the plight of the Fourteenth Amendment to the myth of the cowboy, Carico breaks open the icons of liberalism to expose the shaping influence of slavery's p

Florida A&M University professor and former Miss FAMU Kimberly Brown Pellum, Ph.D., recently released her book, Black Beauties: African American Pageant Queens in the Segregated South (History Press, 2020). The book explores the glamorous history of African American beauty queens by using the stories of former contestants to address colorism and racism still prevalent in the industry. “My mother and grandmother took me to parades to see Miss Alabama State and Miss Tuskegee University…I loved the glamour,” Pellum said. “I wrote the book to capture that experience and address the politics of beauty within our own culture.” Kimberly Brown Pellum served as the model for the new Rosa Parks monument in Montgomery, Alabama. The allure of pageants, Pellum said, often masked the social and political challenges experienced by contestants. She said their personal stories not only illustrated their unique definitions of beauty, but also served to explain the political identities contestants created for themselves in the

In 1933, the Chicago Symphony performed the Symphony in E Minor by Florence B. Price. It was the first time a major American orchestra played a composition by an African American woman. Despite her success, Price sank into obscurity after her death in 1953. Dr. Rae Linda Brown spent much of her career researching and writing about Price’s life and music, as well as advocating for African American representation in academia and in the concert hall. Three years after her death, University of Illinois Press published the manuscript she left largely complete at her passing: Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price (University of Illinois Press, 2020). Two guests join this podcast to talk about the biography—Dr. Carlene Brown, Rae Linda’s sister, and Dr. Guthrie Ramsey, who edited the book and prepared it for publication. Heart of a Woman places Price’s life and music within the context of genteel middle-class African American culture and the active black classical music scene in Chicago in the 19

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz. Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry’s challenges in the wake of the Great Depression. Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literat

What explains voting behavior in local elections? More specifically, what explains how ethnic and racial blocs vote in local elections, especially when the candidate may be of a different race or ethnicity? These are the main question animating the research in Racial Coalition Building in Local Elections: Elite Cues and Cross-Ethnic Voting (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Political Scientist Andrea Benjamin examines the coalitions that form in local elections and the roles that they play in those elections. Racial Coalition Building in Local Elections outlines not only the most successful form of coalitions between different groups of people, but also tries to get at what might prompt the elite members of those groups to advocate to voters to cast their ballots for a candidate, especially a candidate from a different ethnic or racial group. Using a variety of complex data sets, including experimental surveys to try to tease out distinctions within racial and ethnic groups in terms of mayoral candidate sele

In 1918 Lucile Berkeley Buchanan Jones received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado, becoming its first female African American graduate (though she was not allowed to "walk" at graduation, nor is she pictured in the 1918 CU yearbook). In Remembering Lucile: A Virginia Family's Rise from Slavery and a Legacy Forged a Mile High (University Press of Colorado), author Polly McLean depicts the rise of the African American middle class through the historical journey of Lucile and her family from slavery in northern Virginia to life in the American West, using their personal story as a lens through which to examine the greater experience of middle-class Blacks in the early twentieth century. The first-born daughter of emancipated slaves, Lucile refused to be defined by the racist and sexist climate of her times, settling on a career path in teaching that required great courage in the face of pernicious Jim Crow laws. Embracing her sister’s dream for higher education and W. E. B. Du Bois’s ideology

In Finna: Poems (One World), his new collection of poetry, Nate Marshall examines the way that pop culture influences Black vernacular, the role of storytelling, family, and place. Marshall defines finna as: fin·na /ˈfinə/ contraction: (1) going to; intending to [rooted in African American Vernacular English] (2) eye dialect spelling of “fixing to” (3) Black possibility; Black futurity; Blackness as tomorrow. His poems focus on the language of hope when Black lives and Black bodies are confronted with white supremacy, racism, and violence in our present culture. Finna uses Black vernacular to explore the erasure of peoples in the American narrative, ask how gendered language can provoke violence; and how it expands notions of possibility and hope. Timely and lyrical, Marshall’s work is what is needed in language during this time in our history. Sharp, lyrical poems celebrating the Black vernacular—its influence on pop culture, its necessity for familial survival, its rite in storytelling and in creating the s