New Books In African American Studies

Elizabeth L. Jemison, who teaches American religious history at Clemson University, South Carolina, has written an outstanding new book, Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Post-Emancipation South (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Focusing on the Lower Mississippi River Valley, and working from the 1860s to 1900, Jemison explains how white and African-American protestants developed strikingly different accounts of Christian citizenship. Paying attention to the variety of perspective within and between the Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian and Episcopalian denominations, and to the perspectives of men and women, Jemison asks troubling questions about white violence and the religious character of the segregated society to which the white protestant counter-revolution eventually led. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://new

The middle decades of the 19th century witnessed the expansion of slavery and white settlement and dispossession of Indigenous lands west of the Mississippi River, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire followed by the importation of indentured laborers from India and China into the West Indies, the consolidation of British rule in India followed by the so-called Indian Mutiny, and the expansion of settler colonialism in Australia. These processes were all tied together by commerce, empire, and the spread of racial ideologies, yet their histories have largely been written separately. Until now. Zach Sell’s new book Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) highlights the connections between the “second slavery” in the Deep South of the United States, efforts to socially engineer mono-crop agriculture in India by a British colonial state that lip service to laissez-faire and free labor even as it tried to import plantation management techn

In 1836, an enslaved six-year-old girl named Med was brought to Boston by a woman from New Orleans who claimed her as property. Learning of the girl's arrival in the city, the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) waged a legal fight to secure her freedom and affirm the free soil of Massachusetts. While Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw ruled quite narrowly in the case that enslaved people brought to Massachusetts could not be held against their will, BFASS claimed a broad victory for the abolitionist cause, and Med was released to the care of a local institution. When she died two years later, celebration quickly turned to silence, and her story was soon forgotten. As a result, Commonwealth v. Aves is little known outside of legal scholarship. In The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019), Karen Woods Weierman complicates Boston's identity as the birthplace of abolition and the cradle of liberty, and restores Med to her rightful place in antislave

Nate Chinen's Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century (Vintage, 2019) is an essential guide to 21st century jazz. Named a best book of the year by NPR, GQ, Billboard, JazzTimes and many more, Chinen's book profiles many of the most exciting voices in jazz, from Kamasi Washington to Henry Threadgill to Cécile McLorin Salvant. Chinen shows that contemporary jazz thrives off its interplay with genres including classical, hip-hop, R&B, and rock. Jazz, now as always, is an ever-evolving polyglot genre, not a set of canonical works captured in amber. This is a great book for jazz aficionados looking to expand their knowledge of today's foremost players or for general music fans looking for a window into the diverse and exciting world of jazz.  Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a prem

Today I talked to David A. Lees about his book Memphis Mayhem: A Story of the Music That Shook Up the World (ECW Press, 2020) David Less has studied Memphis music for over 40 years, including work done for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Gibson Guitar Foundation. He’s been published in Rolling Stone and DownBeat, among other places. This episode seizes first on three major events that happened in Memphis: the formal start of the blues (W.C. Handy 1909), the start of rock n’ roll (Elvis Presley 1954), and the tragic assassination of Martin Luther King (1968). Along the way, this episode explores everything from the impact of yellow fever epidemics on Memphis racial dynamics, including the rise of the South’s first (black) millionaire; and later the development of Beale Street into “Black America’s Main Street.” Other highlights include: the creation of America’s first all-female radio station (WHER, 1955) by Sam Phillips of Sun Studio fame; and the wealth of inde

Shelter in A Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) by Dr. Jelani Favors fills the “missing pages” of history by highighting the enduring role that Black colleges have played in African American freedom movements in the long-twentieth century.  Favors shows that Black colleges created freedom fighters whose organizing, dedication, and fearlessness made the Black Freedom Struggle’s most pivotal moments possible. Favors also argues that Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were fortified interstitial spaces for consciousness-raising and solidarity-building among race women and race men. HBCU students, faculty, and administrators were vital players in fashioning blueprints for Black liberation and ensuring the inter-generational transmission of resistance wisdom.  Taking the long view and moving through a tour of Black higher education, Favors theorizes that a hidden second curriculum and a Black college communi

Edited by Drs. Erica Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri L. Snyder, As if She Were Free (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a collective biography of African and African-descended women across the Americas.  This collection of twenty-four beautifully crafted chapters, spans across centuries and geographies, giving us a varied and textured reading of women’s lives and experiences. More importantly than that, and herein lies the revolutionary character of this book, As If She Were Free changes our ways of understanding and conceptualizing freedom and emancipation, ultimately transforming how we narrate the past of our societies and understand our present.  As the editors of the book tell us in this interview, this is a feminist project at its core, a useful history for today because African and African-descended women in the Americas, both in the past and present, have crafted their own understandings of freedom, advocated for new ways of defining and living freely, and achieved revolutionary changes in our socie

In this episode, I interview R.A. Judy, professor of Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, about his book Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black, which was published by Duke University Press in 2020. In Sentient Flesh R. A. Judy takes up freedman Tom Windham’s 1937 remark “we should have our liberty 'cause . . . us is human flesh" as a point of departure for an extended meditation on questions of the human, epistemology, and the historical ways in which the black being is understood. Drawing on numerous fields, from literary theory and musicology, to political theory and phenomenology, as well as Greek and Arabic philosophy, Judy engages literary texts and performative practices such as music and dance that express knowledge and conceptions of humanity appositional to those grounding modern racialized capitalism. Operating as critiques of Western humanism, these practices and modes of being-in-the-world—which he theorizes as “thinking in disorder,” or “poiēsis in black

What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. If being "American" means living in a land of freedom and opportunity, what are we to make of those Americans who were enslaved and who have suffered from the limitations of second-class citizenship throughout their lives? African American history illuminates the United States' core paradoxes, inviting profound questions about what it means to be an American, a citizen, and a human being. Jonathan S. Holloway's The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, 2021) considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called "the cause of freedom." It begins in Jamestown in 1619, when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement. It narrates the creation of a system of racialized chattel slavery, the eventual dismantling of that system in t

William Still looms large in the history of the Underground Railroad, both for his role coordinating the Eastern Line and the records he maintained of the fugitives he saved. In William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), William C. Kashatus provides his readers with both an account of Still’s life and a comprehensive database compiled from the many interviews his subject conducted with the runaway slaves he assisted. Himself the son of former slaves, Still grew up in the free black community of Philadelphia, at that time the largest in America. Employed by the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society (PASS), Still worked alongside many of the leading figures of the abolitionist movement throughout the 1850s, playing a vital role in helping people escape from bondage. Though Still left PASS in 1861 for a successful career in business and philanthropy he remained a prominent figure in the postwar civil rights movement, while his authorship of the first

The Case for Identity Politics: Polarization, Demographic Change, and Racial Appeals (University of Virginia Press, 2020) dives into the discussion and debate surrounding the 2016 primary and how Donald Trump was ultimately nominated by the Republican Party to be their standard bearer and then elected president. But this is not the center of the book—though it is a very important data point. Christopher Stout, Associate Professor of Political Science at Oregon State University, came to this question about identity politics and how this understanding of rhetorical and political levers is at play with different groups of voters in the United States, through the work of Charles Hamilton and considerations of the idea of deracialized strategies in American politics. Hamilton, who has written a forward to The Case for Identity Politics, co-authored, with Kwame Toure, the 1967 text Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, bringing forward this deracialization thesis that provides the jumping off point for Stout’s r

Brian Foster, self-identified Black boy from rural Mississippi, joins us today for a conversation about his book, I Don't Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (The University of North Carolina Press, 2020). In this interview, he shares with us how his experiences growing up in, leaving and returning home to Mississippi shaped his storytelling. Foster first began this ethnographic project as a doctoral student in Sociology at UNC Chapel Hill. As he tells us, the project started as an exploration of educational inequality and race. It became something very different as he let himself be guided by the stories and experiences of the community he was researching. Brian tells us about a few of the folks he met while living in Clarksdale who shaped the direction and core ideas of this book; their stories highlighted perplexing and sometimes uncomfortable contradictions about what it meant to love and not like the Blues. We learn about Clarksdale, MI and the unique history of the Mississippi De

This ambitious work explores the literary and cultural production about Russian peasants and African Americans in the post-emancipation period. Brickell Bellows draws on visual images from advertisements to oil paintings as well as novellas, novels, pamphlets, and reports in English and Russian.  The abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865 transformed both nations as Russian peasants and African Americans gained new rights as subjects and citizens. During the second half of the long nineteenth century, Americans and Russians responded to these societal transformations through a fascinating array of new cultural productions. Analyzing portrayals of African Americans and Russian serfs in oil paintings, advertisements, fiction, poetry, and ephemera housed in American and Russian archives, Amanda Brickell Bellows argues that these widely circulated depictions shaped collective memory of slavery and serfdom, affected the development of national consciousness, and influenced public opinion

This ambitious work explores the literary and cultural production about Russian peasants and African Americans in the post-emancipation period. Brickell Bellows draws on visual images from advertisements to oil paintings as well as novellas, novels, pamphlets, and reports in English and Russian.  The abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865 transformed both nations as Russian peasants and African Americans gained new rights as subjects and citizens. During the second half of the long nineteenth century, Americans and Russians responded to these societal transformations through a fascinating array of new cultural productions. Analyzing portrayals of African Americans and Russian serfs in oil paintings, advertisements, fiction, poetry, and ephemera housed in American and Russian archives, Amanda Brickell Bellows argues that these widely circulated depictions shaped collective memory of slavery and serfdom, affected the development of national consciousness, and influenced public opinion

Duke University officially integrated its student body in the early 1960s, but the University itself did little to make students of color feel as though Duke was their academic home. During this decade, black students organized, agitated, protested, and finally took the bold step of occupying the University's main administrative building for one harrowing day, all in an effort to bring equality and rights to this historically white university campus.  In his deeply researched book, Point of Reckoning: The Fight for Racial Justice (Duke University Press, 2021) Theodore D. Segal tells the story of the students, administrators, and activists who forced Duke to acknowledge and address its segregation and disparity. Lane Davis is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University where he studies American religious history. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member!

JeVon McCormick was born the son of a black pimp father and a white orphan mother. Hear how, as a nine year old, he critiqued the way his father managed prostitutes, to his rejection of concepts such as “hope” and “luck”. When he was in juvenile detention neither of his parents knew where he was. His journey from toughest of upbringings to fame and fortune is unforgettable and inspiring. Kimon and Richard never spoke to an entrepreneur with a history like his. We are sure you will find it as compelling as we did.  The lessons that he shares from his journey about saving, adaptation, learning by doing, the power of asking questions, accountability, and responsibility can benefit entrepreneurs and leaders the world over. McCormick’s book I Got There: How a Mixed-Race Kid Overcame Racism, Poverty, and Abuse to Achieve the American Dream tells his story. About our guest JeVon McCormick is the son of a black pimp and a white mother, and was raised in the most dreadful conditions, three times jailed before he was a

Damaged: Musicality and Race in Early American Punk (University Press of Mississippi, 2020) is the first book-length portrait of punk as a musical style with an emphasis on how punk developed in relation to changing ideas of race in American society from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Drawing on musical analysis, archival research, and new interviews, Damaged provides fresh interpretations of race and American society during this period and illuminates the contemporary importance of that era. Evan Rapport outlines the ways in which punk developed out of dramatic changes to America’s cities and suburbs in the postwar era, especially with respect to race. The musical styles that led to punk included transformations to blues resources, experimental visions of the American musical past, and bold reworkings of the rock-and-roll and rhythm-and-blues sounds of the late 1950s and early 1960s, revealing a historically oriented approach to rock that is strikingly different from the common myths and conceptions abou

Today I talked to Candacy Taylor about her book Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America (Abrams Press, 2020). Taylor is an award-winning author, photographer and cultural documentarian. She’s been a fellow at Harvard University under the direction of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and her projects have been funded by organizations ranging from National Geographic to The National Endowment for the Humanities. Her work has received extensive media coverage in places like the PBS Newshour and The New Yorker. This episode covers the African-American travel guidebook made famous by the Academy-award-winning movie Green Book. Taylor’s book more accurately and completely covers the more than 10,000 former black- and white-owned businesses establishments that served black travelers during the era from 1936-1967, when editions of the guidebook helped black motorists find gas stations, restaurants and lodging that catered to them in segregated America. The episode also addresses the reasons

Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard University Press, 2021) by Dr. Daphne Brooks is a lyrical masterpiece that takes readers on an exhilarating journey through a century of Black sound from Bessie Smith to Beyoncé. In writing alongside the sistas who cared for Black women's musicianship like Pauline Hopkins and Janelle Monaé, Brooks casts contemporary performers as archivists, acclaimed writers as sound theorists, record label originators as music critics, and fans as the vital keepers of Black sound. Brooks’ liner notes are a “requiem” for the oversight of Black women musicians and their intellectual resonance, powerfully uncovering their sonic, visual, and kinesthetic innovations through a Black feminist conceptual lens. On each step of the journey, Brooks presents Black sound women as radical intellectuals, as the creators of modernity, and as the fierce leaders of revolutionary world-making. Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African Am

Folklorist Robert L. Stone presents a rare collection of high-quality documentary photos of the sacred steel guitar musical tradition and the community that supports it. The introductory text and extended photo captions in Can’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus! Photographs from the Sacred Steel Community (University of Mississippi Press, 2020) offer the reader an intimate view of this unique tradition of passionately played music that is beloved among fans of American roots music and admired by folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and other scholars. In 1992, a friend in Hollywood, Florida, introduced Stone to African American musicians who played the electric steel guitar in the African American Holiness-Pentecostal churches House of God and Church of the Living God. With the passion, skill, and unique voice they brought to the instruments, these musicians profoundly impressed Stone. He produced an album for the Florida Folklife Program, which Arhoolie Records licensed and released worldwide. It created a roots music se