New Books In African American Studies

The little-known and under-studied 1807 Insurrection Act was passed to give the president the ability to deploy federal military forces to fend off lawlessness and rebellion, but it soon became much more than the sum of its parts. Its power is integrally linked to the perceived threat of black American equity in what lawyer and critic Hawa Allan demonstrates is a dangerous paradox. While the Act was initially used to repress rebellion against slavery, during Reconstruction it was invoked by President Grant to quell white-supremacist uprisings in the South. During the civil rights movement, it enabled the protection of black students who attended previously segregated educational institutions. Most recently, the Insurrection Act has been the vehicle for presidents to call upon federal troops to suppress so-called “race riots” like those in Los Angeles in 1992, and for them to threaten to do so in other cases of racial justice activism. Yet when the US Capitol was stormed in January 2021, the impulse to restore

M. K. Beauchamp's Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815 (LSU Press, 2021) examines the challenges that resulted from U.S. territorial expansion through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. With the acquisition of this vast region, the United States gained a colonial European population whose birthplace, language, and religion often differed from those of their U.S. counterparts. This population exhibited multiple ethnic tensions and possessed little experience with republican government. Consequently, administration of the territory proved a trial-and-error endeavor involving incremental cooperation between federal officials and local elites. As Beauchamp demonstrates, this process of gradual accommodation served as an essential nationalizing experience for the people of Louisiana. After the acquisition, federal officials who doubted the loyalty of the local French population and their capacity for self-governance denied the territory of Orleans--easily t

In Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s (UNC Press, 2019), Traci Parker examines the movement to racially integrate white-collar work and consumption in American department stores, and broadens our understanding of historical transformations in African American class and labor formation. Built on the goals, organization, and momentum of earlier struggles for justice, the department store movement channeled the power of store workers and consumers to promote black freedom in the mid-twentieth century. Sponsoring lunch counter sit-ins and protests in the 1950s and 1960s, and challenging discrimination in the courts in the 1970s, this movement ended in the early 1980s with the conclusion of the Sears, Roebuck, and Co. affirmative action cases and the transformation and consolidation of American department stores. In documenting the experiences of African American workers and consumers during this era, Parker highlights the department s

Since slavery, Black women have struggled to liberate themselves from racism and sexism. Yet despite these hurdles and under the most difficult circumstances, they managed to achieve greatness. Trailblazers: Black Women Who Helped Make America Great, American Firsts/American Icons (2leaf Press, 2021) shines a light on these their accomplishments, which often led to widespread cultural change. Trailblazers is a six-volume series that examines the lives and careers of over four hundred brilliant women from the eighteenth century to the present who blazed uncharted paths in every conceivable way. Each Trailblazers volume is organized into several sections. Along with biographical information and powerful photographs, David provides a historical timeline for each section--written from the viewpoint of Black women--that maps out the significance of the featured women that follow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.su

It’s stardate 99040.01 and lead producer Jay Cockburn is temporarily taking over command of Darts and Letters for an episode. For this episode, as part of the week’s theme of “ideas in strange places” we boldly go into the strange new worlds of science fiction, revealing how it’s long been a vehicle for radical thought. We dig into post-scarcity, Afrofuturism, and feminist speculative fiction as we set our phasers to fun and go where no podcast has gone before. This episode is a rebroadcast from our catalogue. We’re revisiting some of our favourites until the new season of Darts and Letters launches on September 18th. First (@10:54), Cory Doctorow is a journalist, activist, blogger, and author of many books including the post-scarcity speculative fiction novel Walkaway. He takes us through the idea of a post-scarcity world as he breaks down the idea of abundance and what we might do with it, or not. Then, (@34:52), Nalo Hopkinson is a science fiction writer, editor, professor, and author of Brown Girl in th

In The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom (Duke UP, 2022) Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. This interdisciplinary history shows that these circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid. Mapping the emancipation circuits, Davis shows the geography of ideas of freedom---circulating on shipping routes, via army maneuvers, and with itinerant activists---that became the basis for the first mass Black political movement for equal citizenship in the United States. In this work, she reconfigures understandings of the evolu

What is unfeeling? According to today’s guest, Xine Yao, unfeeling includes “a broad range of affective modes, including withholding, disregard, growing a thick skin, refusing to care, opacity, numbness, dissociation, inscrutability, frigidity, insensibility, obduracy, flatness, insensitivity, disinterest, coldness, heartlessness, fatigue, desensitization, and emotional unavailability.”  In short, Xine argues in a new book from Duke University Press, titled Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America, “people who are disaffected break from affectability and present themselves as unaffected” (11). Xine is a Lecturer of English before 1900 at University College London. Xine is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker and the co-host of the PhDivas Podcast which focuses on social justice and academia across the STEM/Humanities divide. Disaffected is an urgent book that examines how sentimentality was (and is) a part of the political architecture of white supremacy and governmen

Marquis Bey talks about the radical and abolitionist project of Black Trans Feminism. Rather than an identity formation, it is a politics and modality of being that vitiates the limits of subjectivity. Black Trans Feminism finds joy in irreverence, just like we try to do on High Theory. You can recalibrate your understanding of the subject by reading Marquis’s forthcoming book Black Trans Feminism, published by Duke University Press. Released next week! On February 25th. In the episode Marquis references a wonderful quote from Saidiya Hartman, that “A Black revolution makes everyone freer than they actually want to be.” It’s a hard quote to find, but it appears in Frank Wilderson’s interview with C.S. Soong, “Blacks and the Master/Slave Relation” in Afropessimism: An Introduction (Racked & Dispatched, 2017). Marquis is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University. They also serve as Faculty Affiliate and Advisory Board Member in Gender & Sexuality Studies and Advisory

Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals the unexplored impact of utopian thought on the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement. Utopian thinking is often dismissed as unrealistic, overly idealized, and flat-out impractical-in short, wholly divorced from the urgent conditions of daily life. This is perhaps especially true when the utopian ideal in question is reforming and repairing the United States' bitter history of racial injustice. But as Victoria W. Wolcott provocatively argues, utopianism is actually the foundation of a rich and visionary worldview, one that specifically inspired the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement in ways that haven't yet been fully understood or appreciated. Wolcott makes clear that the idealism and pragmatism of the Civil Rights Movement were grounded in nothing less than an intensely utopian yearning. Key figures of the time, from Martin Luther King Jr. and Pauli Murray to Father Divine and Howard Thurman, al

In reggae song after reggae song Bob Marley and other reggae singers speak of the Promised Land of Ethiopia. "Repatriation is a must!" they cry. The Rastafari have been travelling to Ethiopia since the movement originated in Jamaica in 1930s. They consider it the Promised Land, and repatriation is a cornerstone of their faith. Though Ethiopians see Rastafari as immigrants, the Rastafari see themselves as returning members of the Ethiopian diaspora.  In Visions of Zion: Ethiopians and Rastafari in the Search for the Promised Land (NYU Press, 2014), Erin C. MacLeod offers the first in-depth investigation into how Ethiopians perceive Rastafari and Rastafarians within Ethiopia and the role this unique immigrant community plays within Ethiopian society. Rastafari are unusual among migrants, basing their movements on spiritual rather than economic choices. This volume offers those who study the movement a broader understanding of the implications of repatriation. Taking the Ethiopian perspective into account, it ar

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many African Americans moved westward as Greater Reconstruction came to a close. Though, along with Euro-Americans, Black settlers appropriated the land of Native Americans, sometimes even contributing to ongoing violence against Indigenous people, this migration often defied the goals of settler states in the American West. In Black Montana: Settler Colonialism and the Erosion of the Racial Frontier, 1877-1930 (U Nebraska Press, 2021), Anthony W. Wood explores the entanglements of race, settler colonialism, and the emergence of state and regional identity in the American West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By producing conditions of social, cultural, and economic precarity that undermined Black Montanans' networks of kinship, community, and financial security, the state of Montana, in its capacity as a settler colony, worked to exclude the Black community that began to form inside its borders after Reconstruction. Black Montana depicts the history of

A legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, Brazil is home to the largest number of African descendants outside Africa and the greatest number of domestic workers in the world. Drawing on ten years of interviews and ethnographic research, Second-Class Daughters: Black Brazilian Women and Informal Adoption as Modern Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2022) examines the lives of marginalized informal domestic workers who are called 'adopted daughters' but who live in slave-like conditions in the homes of their adoptive families. Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman traces a nuanced and, at times, disturbing account of how adopted daughters, who are trapped in a system of racial, gender, and class oppression, live with the coexistence of extreme forms of exploitation and seemingly loving familial interactions and affective relationships. Highlighting the humanity of her respondents, Hordge-Freeman examines how filhas de criação (raised daughters) navigate the realities of their structural constraints and in the context of

They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people found their lives indelibly shaped by the Southern environment. By day, they plucked worms and insects from the crops, trod barefoot in the mud as they hoed rice fields, and endured the sun and humidity as they planted and harvested the fields. By night, they clandestinely took to the woods and swamps to trap opossums and turtles, to visit relatives living on adjacent plantations, and at times to escape slave patrols and escape to freedom. Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South (Oxford UP, 2022) is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape. Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple calculation had profound consequences: rather than measuri

Elizabeth McHenry talks about the moment in the history of African American literature in the decade following the 1896 legalization of segregation, the subject of her new book To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship. She redirects attention to overlooked archives of unpublished and unsuccessful literary production and thereby offers a radically alternative genealogy of Black literature. Elizabeth McHenry is Professor of English at New York University and author of Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies, also published by Duke University Press. The book relies on a number of theoretical and disciplinary lenses to understand the epistemological and social conditions of print culture and literary community for African Americans between 1830 and 1940. It expands our definition of literacy and urges of us think about literature as broadly as it was conceived of in the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. Image: Th

In Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle (Duke UP, 2022), Shannen Dee Williams, provides the first full history of Black Catholic nuns in the United States, hailing them as the forgotten prophets of Catholicism and democracy. Drawing on oral histories and previously sealed Church records, Williams demonstrates how master narratives of women’s religious life and Catholic commitments to racial and gender justice fundamentally change when the lives and experiences of African American nuns are taken seriously. For Black Catholic women and girls, embracing the celibate religious state constituted a radical act of resistance to white supremacy and the sexual terrorism built into chattel slavery and segregation. Williams shows how Black sisters—such as Sister Mary Antona Ebo, who was the only Black member of the inaugural delegation of Catholic sisters to travel to Selma, Alabama, and join the Black voting rights marches of 1965—were pioneering religious leaders, educat

Rosa Parks Beyond the Bus: Life, Lessons, and Leadership (R. H. Boyd, 2022) is a collection of inspiring and instructive memories compiled from the decade that Mrs. Parks was a guest in author H.H. Leonard’s Washington, DC home. During those years, Mrs. Leonards was able to know the heart, mind, and spirit of the woman who refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama city bus on December 1, 1955. The author shares her remembrances, both delightful and somber, in a way that offers readers an intimate and personal glimpse into the personhood of Mrs. Parks. Mrs. Parks is a seminal point in the history of civil, human, and women’s rights. Her story, as told through the eyes of H. H. Leonards, also touches the journey of African-American women who have somehow managed to survive a system that cared little about the indignities they suffered—from discrimination to sexual assault. While many of her contemporaries attempted to define her as the woman who refused to give up her seat on the bus, she was more th

In Black Masculinity and Hip-Hop Music: Black Gay Men Who Rap (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), XinLing Li offers an interdisciplinary study of hip-hop music written and performed by rappers who are black gay men. This study examines the storytelling mechanisms of gay themed lyrics, and how these form protests and become enabling tools for (black) gay men to discuss issues such as living on the down-low and HIV/AIDS. It considers how the biased promotion of feminized gay male artists/characters in the mainstream entertainment industry have rendered masculinity an exclusively male heterosexual property, providing a representational framework for men to identify with a form of “homosexual masculinity” – one that is constructed without having to either victimize anything feminine or necessarily convert to femininity. The book makes a strong case that it is possible for individuals (like gay rappers) to perform masculinity against masculinity, and open up a new way of striving for gender equality. XinLing Li received h

Soul is the most powerful expression of American music--a distinct combination of roots, migration, race, culture, and politics packaged together for your dancing pleasure. But if you thought the sounds of Motown or Stax Records died along with 8-tracks and macramé, you'd be wrong. For two decades, Daptone Records has churned out hard funk and such beautiful soul that these records sparked a musical revolution. Run by a collective of soul-obsessed producers and musicians, the Brooklyn-based independent label launched the careers of artists such as Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, Charles Bradley, and Bruno Mars. Daptone's records--and those of the larger soul revival scene--pay homage but never lip service to the original artists, proving that soul is still culturally relevant, and just as exciting as ever. It Ain't Retro: Daptone Records and the 21st-Century Soul Revolution (Jawbone, 2021) charts this revival's players, sounds, and tectonic shifts over the past twenty years, taking you from dingy

Between 1848 and 1899, miners extracted more gold from the earth than in the previous 3,000 years of human history combined. Each gold rush in this period, from the Sierra Nevada to the highlands of Australia to the Transvaal, was a global event, drawing argonauts and others seeking new lives from all corners of the world, including from China. In her Bancroft-Prize winning book, The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (Norton, 2021), Columbia University Professor of Asian American Studies and History Mae Ngai seeks to dispel a long held myth that Chinese gold-seekers arrived as unfree labor to sites of gold rushes. Instead, Mae describes in great detail not just the global nature of gold rushes, but the complicated lives and politics of Chinese participation in imperial-era gold mining. Using a comparative study of three gold rushes in California, Australia, and South Africa, Ngai explains why "The Chinese Question" became a driving social and political question among White settlers in each

In Ugly Freedoms (Duke UP, 2022), Elisabeth R. Anker reckons with the complex legacy of freedom offered by liberal American democracy, outlining how the emphasis of individual liberty has always been entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, climate destruction, economic exploitation, and patriarchy. These "ugly freedoms" legitimate the right to exploit and subjugate others. At the same time, Anker locates an unexpected second type of ugly freedom in practices and situations often dismissed as demeaning, offensive, gross, and ineffectual but that provide sources of emancipatory potential. She analyzes both types of ugly freedom at work in a number of texts and locations, from political theory, art, and film to food, toxic dumps, and multispecies interactions. Whether examining how Kara Walker's sugar sculpture A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby reveals the importance of sugar plantations to liberal thought or how the impoverished neighborhoods in The Wire blunt neoliberalism's violence, Anker