New Books In African American Studies

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

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

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

Monica A. Coleman's great-grandfather asked his two young sons to lift him up and pull out the chair when he hanged himself, and that noose stayed in the family shed for years. The rope was the violent instrument, but it was mental anguish that killed him. Now, in gripping fashion, Coleman examines the ways that the legacies of slavery, war, sharecropping, poverty, and alcoholism mask a family history of mental illness. Those same forces accompanied her into the black religious traditions and Christian ministry. All the while, she wrestled with her own bipolar disorder. Bipolar Faith: A Black Woman’s Journey with Depression and Faith (Fortress Press, 2016) is both a spiritual autobiography and a memoir of mental illness. In this powerful book, Monica Coleman shares her life-long dance with trauma, depression, and the threat of death. Citing serendipitous encounters with black intellectuals like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Angela Davis, and Renita Weems, Coleman offers a rare account of how the modulated highs of

Popular culture helps shape how audiences imagine Biblical personalities in our contemporary moment. For many, Warner Sallman’s portrait of Jesus fixes him as white, others envision Moses as Charlton Heston because of Cecil B. DeMille’s film, The Ten Commandments, and the Jezebel stereotype is more well known than the Biblical figure. This merging of cultural productions and scripture clearly intersect in the modern understanding of Hagar as a Black woman. In Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and Bible (Oxford University Press, 2019), Nyasha Junior, Associate Professor in Temple University’s Department of Religion, sought to understand how Hagar become Black and what purposes that served. Junior lays out the primary sources and the divergent interpretive terrain where this identity makes sense to its readers. In our conversation we discuss Hagar in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Muslim sources, categories of color, ethnicity, and race in ancient contexts, Biblical interpretation in nineteenth-century US deba

Although it has largely been erased from the collective memory of American Christianity, the debate over eugenics was a major factor in the history of 20th-century religious movements, with many churches actively supporting the pseudoscience as a component of the Social Gospel. In Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion (University of California Press, 2020), Dr. Melissa J. Wilde, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, demonstrates that support for contraception among some of America’s most prominent religious groups was tied to white supremacist views of race, immigration, and manifest destiny. We discuss how birth control use and promotion was conceived as a religious duty, how Biblical exegesis was used in support of eugenics, how the fear of “race suicide” motivated predominantly White denominations to limit reproduction among marginalized people, how groups like the Catholics and the Orthodox Jews pushed back against the pro-eugenics tide, the hidden racist

In Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from AfroNet to Black Lives Matter (Oxford Univeristy Press), Charlton McIlwain, Vice Provost for Faculty Engagement and Development and professor of media, culture, and communication at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, examines the intersection of racial justice movements, technology, and culture. McIlwain names the often ignored or neglected African American pioneers of computer and Internet technology. At the same time, he explores how technological innovations are deployed on Black and other marginalized communities. In connecting these threads, McIlwain demonstrates the centrality of African Americans to both the history and future of the Internet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do we move police forces from a warrior culture to connecting better with communities they serve? Today I talked to David A. Harris about his new book A City Divided: Race, Fear and the Law in Police Confrontations (Anthem Press, 2020). Harris is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s law school and is the leading U.S. authority on racial profiling. Also the author of Profiles in Injustice (2002). he hosts the podcast Criminal Injustice. Topics covered in this episode include: Harris’s vantage point on what the Minnesota legislature got right and only half-right in recently approving a police accountability measure in the wake of the George Floyd killing. Why navigating fear and anger is so hard for both black suspects and the police alike. What role a lack of familiarity – and trust – plays for officers and suspects in trying to avoid escalating their encounters. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://

In his book Black Transhuman Liberation Theology: Technology and Spirituality (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Philip Butler explores what might happen if Black people in the United States merged technology and spirituality in their fight towards materializing liberating realities. The discussions shaping what it means for humans to exist with technology and as part of technology are already underway: transhumanism suggests that any use of technology to augment intellectual, psychological, or physical capability makes one transhuman. In an attempt to encourage Black people in the United States to become technological progenitors as a spiritual act, Butler asks whether anyone has ever been 'just' human? Butler then explores the implications of this question and its link to viewing the body as technology. Re-imagining incarnation as a relationship between vitality, biochemistry, and genetics, the book also takes a critical scientific approach to understanding the biological embodiment of Black spiritual practices.

The Blackface minstrel show is typically thought of a form tied to the 19th century. While the style was indeed developed during the Antebellum period, its history stretches well into 20th- and even 21st-century America. Far from being the endpoint posited by much of the existing literature on the topic, the Jazz age of the 1920s actually saw a flourishing of Minstrel activity, as new forms of media allowed the circulation of Blackface images in ever greater profusion. This circulation, these images, and the performances that lay behind them make up the focus of Dr. Kevin James Byrne’s Minstrel Traditions: Mediated Blackface in the Jazz Age (Routledge, 2020). Minstrel Traditions examines the technologically-mediated interactions that developed between live performances and their circulating images during this fraught period. It does so through a set of case studies: the last musical of Bert Williams, the live career of (now-former) pancake brand/performer Aunt Jemima, amateur minstrel shows and the companies

In her prize-winning study Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Colonial Louisiana (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2019), award-winning historian Sophie White (Professor of American Studies, Africana Studies, History, and Gender Studies, and Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame) beautifully brings to life the lives and experiences of a number of enslaved women and men whose individual stories have heretofore never been told. In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men--like the testimony of free colonists--was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses about attacks, murders, robberies, and escapes, they answered with stories about themselves, stories that rebutted the premise on which slavery was founded. Focusing on four especially dramatic court cases, Voices of

With such high levels of residential segregation along racial lines in the United States, gentrifying neighborhoods present fascinating opportunities to examine places with varying levels of integration, and how people living in them navigate the thorny politics of race. Among the many conflicts revolving around race under gentrification is crime and its relationship with the displacement and marginalization of a neighborhood’s existing low-income minority groups. Contributing to this conversation is sociologist Jan Doering, whose new book Us versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods (Oxford University Press, 2020) examines the strategic practices of two groups in that city’s Rogers Park and Uptown neighborhoods: “public safety” advocates, or people who were very concerned with crime and active in a variety of local initiatives to address it; and “social justice” advocates, or people who were more concerned with resisting gentrification and keeping their neighborhood racially and s

When children become entangled with the law, their lives can be disrupted irrevocably. When those children are underrepresented minorities, the potential for disruption is even greater. The Legacy of Racism for Children: Psychology, Law and Public Policy (Oxford University Press) examines issues that arise when minority children's lives are directly or indirectly influenced by law and public policy. Uniquely comprehensive in scope, this trailblazing volume offers cutting-edge chapters on the intersections of race/ethnicity within the context of child maltreatment, child dependency court, custody and adoption, familial incarceration, school discipline and the "school-to-prison pipeline," juvenile justice, police/youth interactions, and jurors' perceptions of child and adolescent victims and defendants. The book also includes chapters focused on troubling situations that are less commonly researched, but growing in importance, including the role of race and racism in child sex trafficking and US immigration law