New Books In African American Studies

In his powerful new book, A Long, Long Way: Hollywood’s Unfinished Journey from Racism to Reconciliation (Oxford University Press, 2020), Greg Garrett brings his signature brand of theologically motivated cultural criticism to bear on this history. After more than a century of cinema, he argues, movies have altered our cultural perspectives in the same way that religious narratives have. And in fact, religious traditions offer powerful correctives to our cultural narratives. A Long, Long Way incorporates both cinematic and religious truth-telling to the subject of race and reconciliation. In acknowledging the racist history of America's national art form, Garrett offers the possibility of hope for the future. Greg Garrett is a professor at Baylor University, teaching classes in creative writing & religion and culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Robert T. Chase about his book, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (UNC Press, 2020). In the early twentieth century, the brutality of southern prisons became a national scandal. Prisoners toiled in grueling, violent conditions while housed in crude dormitories on what were effectively slave plantations. This system persisted until the 1940s when, led by Texas, southern states adopted northern prison design reforms. Texas presented the reforms to the public as modern, efficient, and disciplined. Inside prisons, however, the transition to penitentiary cells only made the endemic violence more secretive, intensifying the labor division that privileged some prisoners with the power to accelerate state-orchestrated brutality and the internal sex trade. Reformers' efforts had only made things worse--now it was up to the prisoners to fight for change. Drawing from three decades of legal documents compiled by prisoners, Chase

How did Africans become 'blacks' in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge University Press, 2020) tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders' efforts to make blackness synonymous with slavery. Looking closely at three slave societies - Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana - Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross demonstrate that the law of freedom - not slavery - established the meaning of blackness in law. Contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims to citizenship would be tied to racial identity. Laws regulating the lives and institutions of free people of color created the boundaries between black and white, the rights reserved to white people, and the degradations imposed only on black people. Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D

In Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke University Press, 2020), Shana Redmond explores the ways in which Paul Robeson, silenced by state repression in his lifetime, still speaks to us today. Through explorations of Robeson’s genre-defying genius as well as reflections on how Robeson’s legacy continues today, Redmond re-contextualizes Robeson as a thoroughly contemporary figure. Robeson’s brutal mistreatment by the US government provides a case study in how far our supposed democracy will go to crush dissent, particularly black radical dissent. Still, his vision of anti-racism grounded in global solidarity and anti-capitalism is perhaps more necessary now than ever. Redmond points out that the word that Robeson sang about Joe Hill are true also of him: “I never died, said he.” Shana Redmond is Professor, Global Jazz Studies Musicology, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia Univ

Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America from the Beginning to Raisin in the Sun (Rutgers University Press, 2020) by Clifford Mason, celebrated actor, director, writer, and playwright, and author of thirty-four plays, is a sweeping history of Black theatre from the early nineteenth century through 1959. With an “Introduction” section, and six concise chapters, Macbeth in Harlem traverses such subjects as the Black hero, plot, narrative, and the African American intellectual in the history of African American theater including an entire chapter on Paul Robeson. From the Black Shakespearean troupe formed in 1821 Greenwich Village, that performed Richard III, Othello, and Macbeth in the 1820s, through the emergence of minstrelsy in the mid-nineteenth century, to the work of Robeson and Lorraine Hansberry at the rise of the Civil Rights Era, Mason tells the story of Black performers, and intellectuals, in the development of American theater. He details how integral Black artists have been in the history of Ame

Over recent years, scholarship centering Afrolatinidad has pushed the bounds of the field towards greater forms of racial and ethnic understanding. Dr. Monika Gosin’s monograph, The Racial Politics of Division: Interethnic Struggles For Legitimacy in Multicultural Miami (Cornell University, 2019), adds to this burgeoning literary canon. By examining how controversial waves of Cuban immigration during the late 20th century intensified the friction between African Americans and the existing Cuban immigrant population in Miami, Gosin reveals how differing notions of “worthy citizenship” encouraged interethnic conflict. Dr. Gosin’s The Politics of Division “forces a relooking at the poles of black and white as they operate in the lives of people who are phenotypically black” (20). The author’s ability to hold and move between so many complex identities, histories, and frameworks is exemplary of the approach necessary to conduct relational research. Gosin’s communities of study include African American, white Cuba

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay of Oakland University on their new book Women Rapping Revolution.(University of California Press, 2020). Detroit, Michigan, has long been recognized as a center of musical innovation and social change. Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay draw on seven years of fieldwork to illuminate the important role that women have played in mobilizing a grassroots response to political and social pressures at the heart of Detroit’s ongoing renewal and development project. Focusing on the Foundation, a women-centered hip-hop collective, Women Rapping Revolution argues that the hip-hop underground is a crucial site where Black women shape subjectivity and claim self-care as a principle of community organizing. Through interviews and sustained critical engagement with artists and activists, this study also articulates the substantial role of cultural production in social, racial, and economic justice efforts. Resources men

In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America (NYU Press, 2019) is an intellectual and cultural history of the educational activism of African American women and girls in the long nineteenth century. Kabria Baumgartner focuses her narrative on the actions of “African American women and girls living in the antebellum Northeast” in cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. These women including individuals such as Sarah Mapps Douglas and Sarah Parker Remond wrote essays about education, built schools, and became educators in their own right while living their lives with a “sense of purpose” defined as a “purposeful womanhood”. Activism is “broadly construed” by the author to note that Black women engaged in “concerted efforts to procure advancing schooling (beyond the primary level) and teaching opportunities for themselves and their community”. Baumgartner notes that not only did these women advocate for entrance into educational institutions for themselves, but t

Black Political Thought: From David Walker to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a nuanced and long-needed anthology interrogates the “never ending issue” of the unequal positioning of black Americans by combining primary documents that highlight black political ideas and ideals with incisive scholarly commentary. In words of the editor, this collection “focuses how and why blacks in the United States, as individuals and as a group, have historically conceptualized, analyzed, and responded to the ill will of ordinary whites those in power who through laws, policies and customs, and cultural practice have made blacks into inferior beings as a justification to deny them their rights of equality, in such a way that the interest of the dominant class are upheld and preserved and which today have not disappeared.” Highlighting the importance of resistance, the book begins with David Walker and – using thematic chapters – ends in the 21st century. The book aims to make sense of past, present, and fut

Aaron Kamugisha reads CLR James and Sylvia Wynter to glean from them ways to navigate the “beyond” of coloniality. In his new book Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition (Indiana University Press, 2019), reminds us of a Caribbean radical tradition that is fiercely critical of racism, middle-class complacencies and the incursions of neoliberalism. It is also full of hope, and brings our attention to James’ “newforms of existence that are a gift of the Caribbean to the world” as well as Wynter’s enormous contribution to our understanding of the black experience in the Americas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Race remains a potent and divisive force in our society. Whether it is the shooting of minority people by the police, the mass incarceration of people of color, or the recent KKK rallies that have been in the news, it is clear that the scars from the United States’ histories of slavery and racial discrimination run too deep to simply be ignored. But what are the most productive ways to deal with the toxic and torturous legacies of American racism? In Slavery's Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation(Rutgers UP, 2019), editors Jill Strauss and Dionne Ford have brought together contributors from a variety of racial backgrounds, all members or associates of a national racial reconciliation organization called Coming to the Table, to tell their stories of dealing with America’s racial past through their experiences and their family histories. Some are descendants of slaveholders, some are descendants of the enslaved, and many are descendants of both slaveholders and slaves. What they all have in c

By 2024, global sales of skin lighteners are projected to reach more than $30 billion. Despite the planetary scale of its use, skin lightening remains a controversial cosmetic practice. Lynn M. Thomas’ new book, Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners (Duke University Press, 2020), investigates what she calls its “layered history.” Focused principally on South Africa, the book quickly makes evident how closely connected skin lightening is to the history of the United States and other parts of the African continent. Over the course of the twentieth century, and particularly in the context of minority rule in South Africa, skin lighteners have raised thorny debates about race, respectability and self-regard. Thomas examines these questions but shows how class and gender intersect with race to complicate our understanding of who brightens, and why. A complex history of capitalism, medicine, media and technology informs Thomas’ intimate portrayal of these perilous cosmetics. Beneath the Su

Paige Glotzer is the author of How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890-1960, published by Columbia University Press in 2020. How the Suburbs Were Segregated examines the history surrounding how modern housing segregation was purposefully planned out beginning at the turn of the 20th Century. Looking at the intersection of transnational finance, suburban developers, and local, regional, and federal policymaking, Glotzer illustrates the myriad of people and institutions involved in simultaneously creating the idea of the modern suburb and racializing housing. Paige Glotzer is an Assistant Professor of history and John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair in the History of American Politics, Institutions, and Political Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On March 31, 1968, over 500 Black nationalists convened in Detroit to begin the process of securing independence from the United States. Many concluded that Black Americans' best-remaining hope for liberation was the creation of a sovereign nation-state, the Republic of New Afrika (RNA). New Afrikan citizens traced boundaries that encompassed a large portion of the South including South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana as part of their demand for reparation. As champions of these goals, they framed their struggle as one that would allow the descendants of enslaved people to choose freely whether they should be citizens of the United States. New Afrikans also argued for financial restitution for the enslavement and subsequent inhumane treatment of Black Americans. The struggle to "Free the Land" remains active to this day. Edward Onaci's Free The Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) is the first book to tell th

Where do good ideas come from? How does an idea go from creation to a research project? How is historical research done? And how does research find its way into a finished book? And what impact can a book have? Today, I discuss these topics and more with my colleague and friend Dr. Neil Roberts. Dr. Roberts teaches Africana studies, political theory, and the philosophy of religion at Williams College. Roberts is also the Chair and Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Faculty Affiliate in Political Science and Religion. Additionally, Roberts is the W. Ford Schumann Faculty Fellow in Democratic Studies. Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Throughout US history, black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard University Press, 2020) delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal figure―the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, and the shark―in the works of black authors such as Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the simultaneous valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people―all are sites made unforgettable by literature in which we find black and animal life in fraught proximity. Joshua Bennett argues that animal figures are deployed in these texts to assert a theory of black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. Bennett also turns to the black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of antiblackness

No Fascist USA!: The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Social Movements (City Lights Publishing, 2020) by Hilary Moore and James Tracy recounts the stories of fearless organizers and activists who created an anti-racist social movement that fought against the normalization of white supremacy during the 1970s and 1980s. As white allies to contemporaneous Black-led movements against police brutality and incarceration, environmental racism, and government surveillance, organizers of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee supported Black activists’ revolutionary calls for Black Liberation and self-determination. Committee members developed a militant practice of anti-racism that targeted the resurgence of white supremacist terrorist groups and racist cops under President Ronald Reagan and a conservative dispensation that implicitly sanctioned anti-Black violence. The national network aimed to confront and expose Klan members and white supremacist organizations at a time when these groups sought t

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Scott Seider from Boston College and Dr. Daren Graves from Simmons University on their new book, Schooling for Critical Consciousness: Engaging Black and Latinx Youth in Analyzing, Navigating, and Challenging Racial Injustice (Harvard Education Press, 2020). Over the past thirty years, we have seen a steady increase in students of color in American public schools. The Public School Review reported that from 1997 to 2019, the number of white students in American public schools has declined from over 63 percent to 49.7 percent. One of the key questions that we need to ask is how we shall prepare students of color to become competent and responsible future citizens, especially given the increasingly widening racial disparity in almost all aspects of the social life. Schooling for Critical Consciousness addresses how schools can help Black and Latinx youth to understand these racial disparities, resist the negative effects of racial injustice and challenge its root causes. Docume

Are we asleep at the (common)wheel? Civil rights attorney and law professor Gilda R. Daniels insists that contemporary voter ID laws, voter deception, voter purges, and disenfranchisement of felons constitute a crisis of democracy – one that should remind us of past poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and physical intimidation – that should spur us to action. Uncounted combines law, history, oral history, and democratic theory to illuminate a 21st century, premediated legal strategy to disenfranchise voters of color. In Uncounted: The Crisis of Voter Suppression (NYU Press, 2020), Daniels establishes the context of 21st-century voter suppression then focuses on the importance of the Voting Rights Act in discouraging voter suppression – and the negative impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013). She elucidates the types – and impacts – of voter deception with attention to possible impacts on the presidential election in 2020. Throughout the work, she connects past an

How should we understand the pervasiveness – and virulence – of anti-Black violence in the United State? Why and how is anti-Black racism different from other forms of racism? How does it permeate our moral and political ideals? Frank Wilderson III combines memoir and works of political theory, critical theory, literature, and film to offer a philosophy of Blackness. In his new book Afropessimism (Liveright, 2020), Wilderson insists that the social construct of slavery – as seen through pervasive anti-Black subjugation and violence – permeates our principled and practical assumptions. It is not a relic but a worldview that supports our conception of, for example, what it means to be human. For Wilderson, Blacks remain slaves in the human world because “at every scale of abstraction, violence saturates Black life.” To define what it means to be human, we require people who are slaves. While the podcast highlights the theory, the book uses accessible autobiographical stories as examples of the philosophical cla