New Books In African American Studies

W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the most significant American political thinkers of the twentieth century. This volume collects 24 of his essays and speeches on international themes, spanning the years 1900-1956. These key texts reveal Du Bois's distinctive approach to the problem of empire and demonstrate his continued importance in our current global context. The volume charts the development of Du Bois's anti-imperial thought, drawing attention to his persistent concern with the relationship between democracy and empire and illustrating the divergent inflections of this theme in the context of a shifting geopolitical terrain; unprecedented political crises, especially during the two world wars; and new opportunities for transnational solidarity. With a critical introduction and extensive editorial notes, W.E.B. Du Bois: International Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2022) conveys both the coherence and continuity of Du Bois's international thought across his long life and the tremendous range and variety o

From cell phone footage of police killing unarmed Black people to leaked racist messages and even comments from friends and family on social media, online communication exposes how racism operates in a world that pretends to be colorblind. In When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age (U California Press, 2023), Rob Eschmann blends rigorous research and engaging personal narrative to examine the effects of online racism on communities of color and society, and the unexpected ways that digital technologies enable innovative everyday tools of antiracist resistance. Drawing on a wealth of data, including interviews with students of Color around the country and analyses of millions of social media posts over the past decade, Eschmann investigates the influence of online communication on face-to-face interactions. When the Hood Comes Off highlights the power of the internet as an organizing tool, and shows that online racism can be a profound wake-up call. How will we respond? Learn more abo

In Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power (Northwestern UP, 2022), Marzia Milazzo offers a transnational account of anti-Blackness and white supremacy that pushes against the dominant emphasis on historical change pervading current racial theory. This emphasis on change, she contends, misses critical lessons from the past. Bringing together a capacious archive of texts on race produced in Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, the United States, and South Africa from multiple disciplines and genres, Milazzo uncovers transnational continuities in structural racism and white supremacist discourse from the inception of colonial modernity to the present. In the process, she traces the global workings of what she calls colorblind tools: technologies and strategies that at once camouflage and reproduce white domination. Whether examining Rijno van der Riet's defense of slavery in the Cape Colony, discourses of racial mixture in Latin American eugenics and their reverberations in contemporary scholarship, the

Through historical and ethnographic research, Blackness in Mexico: Afro-Mexican Recognition and the Production of Citizenship in the Costa Chica (UP of Florida, 2023) delves into the ongoing movement toward recognizing Black Mexicans as a cultural group within a nation that has long viewed the non-Black mestizo as the archetypal citizen. Anthony Jerry focuses on this process in Mexico's Costa Chica region in order to explore the relational aspects of citizenship and the place of Black people in how modern citizenship is imagined. Jerry's study of the Costa Chica shows the political stakes of the national project for Black recognition; the shared but competing interests of the Mexican government, activists, and townspeople; and the ways that the state and NGOs are working to make "Afro-Mexican" an official cultural category. He argues that that the demand for recognition by Black communities calls attention to how the mestizo has become an intuitive point of reference for identifying who qualifies as "other."

Cities are nothing without the streets—the arteries through which goods, people, and ideas flow. Neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, the city streets are where politics begins. In Struggle for the Street: Social Networks and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Pittsburgh (UNC Press, 2023), Jessica D. Klanderud documents the development of class-based visions of political, social, and economic equality in Pittsburgh's African American community between World War I and the early 1970s. Klanderud emphasizes how middle-class and working-class African Americans struggled over the appropriate uses and dominant meanings of street spaces in their neighborhoods as they collectively struggled to define equality. In chapters that move from one community to the next, Klanderud tracks the transformation of tactics over time with a streets-eye view that reveals the coalescing alliances between neighbors and through space. Drawing on oral histories of neighborhood residents, Black newspapers, and papers from the NAAC

When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to Greenwood, Tulsa, in 1914, his family joined a growing community on the cusp of becoming a national center of black life. But, just seven years later, on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood, laying waste to thirty-five blocks and murdering as many as three hundred people. The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the most brutal acts of racist violence in U.S. history, a ruthless attempt to smother a spark of black independence. But that was never the whole story of Greenwood. The Goodwins and their neighbors soon rebuilt it into “a Mecca,” in Ed’s words, where nightlife thrived, small businesses flourished, and an underworld economy lived comfortably alongside public storefronts. Prosperity and poverty intermixed, and icons from W.E.B. Du Bois to Muhammad Ali ambled down Greenwood Avenue, alongside maids, doctors, and every occupation in between. Ed grew into a prominent businessman and bought a newspaper called the Ok

Miriam Thaggert, Professor of English at the University of Buffalo, talks about her book, Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad (University of Illinois Press, 2022), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Riding Jane Crow features creative uses of a wide variety of sources to reconstruct how African American women interacted with Jim Crow railroads as both riders and workers. Thaggert and Vinsel also discuss what kinds of research were necessary to reconstruct these stories and why so many previous histories of the railroad passed over the lives of black women, even when they were noticing black men. Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Pres

In Caribbean American Narratives of Belonging (Ohio State University Press, 2023), Vivian Nun Halloran analyzes memoirs, picture books, comic books, young adult novels, musicals, and television shows through which Caribbean Americans recount and celebrate their contributions to contemporary politics, culture, and activism in the United States. The writers, civil servants, illustrators, performers, and entertainers whose work is discussed here show what it is like to fit in and be included within the body politic. From civic memoirs by Sonia Sotomayor and others, to West Side Story, Hamilton, and Into the Spider-Verse, these texts share a forward-looking perspective, distinct from the more nostalgic rhetoric of traditional diasporic texts that privilege connections to the islands of origin. There is no one way of being Caribbean. Diasporic communities exhibit a broad spectrum of ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic, and political qualities. Claiming a Caribbean American identity asks wider society to recogniz

Part memoir, part cultural critique, In Our Shoes: On Being a Young Black Woman in Not-So 'Post-Racial' America (Plume Books, 2023) uses pop culture and author Brianna Holt’s own lived experience to dissect the stereotypes and preconceived notions that young Black women must overcome in America today. In this fresh exploration of cultural appropriation, wokeness, tone policing, and more, Holt carefully dismantles myths about Black womanhood, allowing readers to assess their biases while examining the roles Black millennial women are forced to take on simply to survive. Through nine thoughtful chapters—such as “Leave the Box Braids for the Black Girls” and “Why Are You So Dark?”—laced with searing commentary, personal anecdotes from Brianna’s own life, and interviews conducted with “everyday” Black women, In Our Shoes reveals the complexities of existence for Black women and creates a thought-provoking book that helps readers to learn, empathize, reflect, and, most importantly, act. A history, a work of critic

Slavery, Surveillance and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature (Oxford UP, 2022) argues for the existence of deep, often unexamined, interconnections between genre and race by tracing how surveillance migrates from the literature of slavery to crime, gothic, and detective fiction. Attending to the long history of surveillance and policing of African Americans, the book challenges the traditional conception of surveillance as a top-down enterprise, equally addressing the tactics of sousveillance (watching from below) that enslaved people and their allies used to resist, escape, or merely survive racial subjugation. Examining the dialectic of racialized surveillance and sousveillance from fugitive slave narratives to fictional genres focused on crime and detection, the book shows how these genres share a thematic concern with the surveillance of racialized bodies and formal experimentation with ways of telling a story in which certain information is either rendered visible or kept hidden. Through close

Glenn Ford, a Black man, spent thirty years on Louisiana’s death row for a crime he did not commit. He was released in 2014—and given twenty dollars—when prosecutors admitted they did not have a case against him. Ford’s trial was a travesty. One of his court-appointed lawyers specialized in oil and gas law and had never tried a case. The other had been out of law school for only two years. They had no funds for investigation or experts. The prosecution struck all the Black prospective jurors to get the all-white jury that sentenced Ford to death. In The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts (The New Press, 2023), legendary death penalty lawyer Stephen B. Bright and legal scholar James Kwak offer a heart-wrenching overview of how the criminal legal system fails to live up to the values of equality and justice. The book ranges from poor people squeezed for cash by private probation companies because of trivial violations to people executed in violation

From the colonial through the antebellum era, enslaved women in the US used lethal force as the ultimate form of resistance. By amplifying their voices and experiences, Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance (Cambridge UP, 2023) strongly challenges assumptions that enslaved women only participated in covert, non-violent forms of resistance, when in fact they consistently seized justice for themselves and organized toward revolt.  Nikki M. Taylor expertly reveals how women killed for deeply personal instances of injustice committed by their owners. The stories presented, which span centuries and legal contexts, demonstrate that these acts of lethal force were carefully pre-meditated. Enslaved women planned how and when their enslavers would die, what weapons and accomplices were necessary, and how to evade capture in the aftermath. Original and compelling, Brooding Over Bloody Revenge presents a window into the lives and philosophies of enslaved women who had their own ideas about jus

In 2018, Emily Flitter received a tip that Morgan Stanley had fired a Black employee without cause. Flitter had been searching for a way to investigate the deep-rooted racism in the American financial industry, and that one tip lit the sparkplug for a three-year journey through the shocking yet normalized corruption in our financial institutions. Examining local insurance agencies and corporate titans like JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock, and Wells Fargo and reveals the practices that have kept the racial wealth gap practically as wide as it was during the Jim Crow era. Flitter exposes hiring and layoff policies designed to keep Black employees from advancing to high levels; racial profiling of customers in internal emails between bank tellers; major insurers refusing to pay Black policyholders’ claims; and the systematic denial of funding to Black entrepreneurs. She also gives a voice to victims, from single mothers to professional athletes to employees themselves: people who were scammed, lied to, and defrauded b

Why do American Black people generally have worse health than American White people? To answer this question, Keisha Ray's book Black Health: The Social, Political, and Cultural Determinants of Black People's Health (Oxford UP, 2023) dispels any notion that Black people have inferior bodies that are inherently susceptible to disease. This is simply false racial science used to justify White supremacy and Black inferiority. A genuine investigation into the status of Black people's health requires us to acknowledge that race has always been a powerful social category that gives access to the resources we need for health and wellbeing to some people, while withholding them from other people.  Systemic racism, oppression, and White supremacy in American institutions have largely been the perpetrators of differing social power and access to resources for Black people. It is these systemic inequities that create the social conditions needed for poor health outcomes for Black people to persist. An examination of soc

Isaac Murphy, born enslaved in 1861, still reigns as one of the greatest jockeys in American history. Black jockeys like Murphy were at the top of the most popular sport in America at the end of the nineteenth century. They were internationally famous, the first African American superstar athletes—and with wins in three Kentucky Derbies and countless other prestigious races, Murphy was the greatest of them all. At the same time, he lived through the seismic events of Emancipation and Reconstruction and formative conflicts over freedom and equality in the United States. And inevitably he was drawn into those conflicts, with devastating consequences. In Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey (Yale UP, 2023), Katherine C. Mooney uncovers the history of Murphy’s troubled life, his death in 1896 at age thirty-five, and his afterlife. In recounting Murphy’s personal story, she also tells two of the great stories of change in nineteenth-century America: the debates over what a multiracial democracy might

From one of the country's most distinguished journalists, a revisionist and riveting look at the American politician whom history has judged a loser, yet who played a key part in the greatest social movement of the 20th century. During one sweltering week in July 1948, the Democratic Party gathered in Philadelphia for its national convention. The most pressing and controversial issue facing the delegates was not whom to nominate for president -the incumbent, Harry Truman, was the presumptive candidate -but whether the Democrats would finally embrace the cause of civil rights and embed it in their official platform. Even under Franklin Roosevelt, the party had dodged the issue in order to keep a bloc of Southern segregationists-the so-called Dixiecrats-in the New Deal coalition. On the convention's final day, Hubert Humphrey, just 37 and the relatively obscure mayor of the midsized city of Minneapolis, ascended the podium. Defying Truman's own desire to occupy the middle ground, Humphrey urged the delegates to

In his new book, Down Deep in My Soul: An African American Catholic Theology of Preaching (Orbis Books, 2023), Father Maurice Nutt, a doctor of preaching from the Aquinas Institute of Theology and a Redemptorist priest, teaches us about African American oratorical and homiletic tradition and shows how it can enrich preaching in every church. This is a discussion about history, cultural anthropology, and the Roman Catholic Church. As always, we ask how we got here and where do we go next. I also ask Father Maurice to respond to Pope Francis’s recommendation that homilies should be kept under ten minutes. Finally, Father Maurice gives guidance that will benefit all preachers—and, in fact, all public speakers. Father Maurice’s webpage Father Maurice’s book, Deep Down in My Soul (Orbis, 2023) Father Maurice’s spiritual direction ministry Father Maurice on Almost Good Catholics, episode 21: We Shall Overcome: Sister Thea Bowman and the Black Catholic Experience Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval

Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism (MIT Press, 2022), edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the way to hip-hop enlightenment. Hip-hop permeates our world, and yet it is continually misunderstood. Hip-hop's intersections with Afrofuturism and science fiction provide fascinating touchpoints that enable us to see our todays and tomorrows. This book can be, for the curious, a window into a hip-hop-infused Alter Destiny--a journey whose spaceship you embarked on some time ago. Are you engaging this work from the gaze of the future? Are you the data thief sailing into the past to U-turn to the now? Or are you the unborn child prepping to build the next universe? No, you're the superhero. Enjoy the journey.--from the introduction by Ytasha L. Womack Through essays by some of hip-hop's most interesting thinkers, theorists, journalists, writers, emcees, and DJs, Boogie Down Predictions embarks on a quest to unde

Disease is thought to be a great leveler of humanity, but in antebellum New Orleans acquiring immunity from the scourge of yellow fever magnified the brutal inequities of slave-powered capitalism. Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America’s slave and cotton kingdoms. It was also where yellow fever epidemics killed as many as 150,000 people during the nineteenth century. With little understanding of mosquito-borne viruses—and meager public health infrastructure—a person’s only protection against the scourge was to “get acclimated” by surviving the disease. About half of those who contracted yellow fever died. Repeated epidemics bolstered New Orleans’s strict racial hierarchy by introducing another hierarchy, what Kathryn Olivarius terms “immunocapital.” As this highly original analysis shows, white survivors could leverage their immunity as evidence that they had paid their biological dues and could then pursue economic and political advancement. For enslaved Blacks, the story was different. Immunity

The story of how Black and Brown parents, students and members of low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their local schools and built a movement that spread across the country.  In Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline (Oxford UP, 2021), Mark R. Warren documents how Black and Brown parents, students, and low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their local schools and built an intersectional movement that spread across the country. Examining organizing processes in Mississippi, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other localities, he shows how relatively small groups of community members built the power to win policy changes to reduce suspensions and expulsions by combining deep local organizing with resources from the national movement. As a result, over the course of twenty years, the movement to combat the school-to-prison pipeline resulted in falling suspension rates across the countr