New Books in African American Studies

One hundred and twenty Black leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs share their wisdom and experience across the centuries in Make Your Own History: Timeless Truths from Black American Trailblazers (Dafina, 2023), an inspiring collection of exemplary Black voices--past and present, familiar and unsung--which have the power to guide us today. Celebrating the vast breadth and scope of Black excellen...

In The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History (Routledge, 2015), Jeremy Black presents a compact yet comprehensive survey of slavery and its impact on the world, primarily centered on the Atlantic trade. Opening with a clear discussion of the problems of defining slavery, the book goes on to investigate the Atlantic slave trade from its origins to abolition, including comparisons to other systems o...

As Manifest Destiny took hold in the national consciousness, what did it mean for African Americans who were excluded from its ambitions for an expanding American empire that would shepherd the Western Hemisphere into a new era of civilization and prosperity?  In The Race for America: Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny (UNC Press, 2023), R. J. Boutelle explores how Black intelle...

The Simple Art of Rice: Recipes from Around the World for the Heart of Your Table (Flatiron Books, 2023) is a cookbook celebrating the versatility of this grain. Its recipes are rooted in many cultures from around the globe, including Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Award-winning author Chef JJ Johnson, along with Danica Novgorodoff, produces rice recipes for every meal and event. The Simp...

In A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive (T&T Clark, 2024), Elyse Ambrose looks to an archive of blackqueerness as an authoritative source for religious ethical reflection. This approach counters the disintegrative norms of anti-black and anti-body traditionalism in Christian sexual ethics, even those that strive to be liberative. It builds upon a tradition of bla...

When Sharde M. Davis turned to social media during the summer of racial reckoning in 2020, she meant only to share how racism against Black people affects her personally. But her hashtag, BlackintheIvory, went viral, fostering a flood of Black scholars sharing similar stories. Soon the posts were being quoted during summer institutes and workshops on social justice, equity, diversity, and inclusio...

Historians of early America, slavery, early African American history, the history of science, and environmental history have interrogated the complex ways in which enslaved people were thought about and treated as human but also dehumanized to be understood as private property or chattel. The comparison of enslaved people to animals, particularly dogs, cattle, or horses, was a common device deploy...

Greg Jarrell's book Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods (Fortress Press, 2024) uncovers how race, geography, policy, and religion have created haunted landscapes in Charlotte, North Carolina, and throughout the United States. How do we value our lands, livelihoods, and communities? How does our theology inform our capacity--or lack thereof--for memory? What resp...

"The Movement Made Us takes literature to a momentous Southern Black space to which I honestly never thought a book could take us. This is literally the Movement that made us and both Davids love us whole here with a creation that is as ingenious as it is soulfully sincere. Stunning."--Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy. A dynamic family exchange that pivots between the voices of a father and son, The ...

Broadly speaking, the traditionally conceptualized mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #BlackLivesMatter Movement possess some similar qualities. They both represent dynamic, complex moments of possibility and progress. They also share mass-based movement activities, policy/legislative advocacy, grassroots organizing, and targeted media campaigns. Innovation, growth, and diss...

The story of the fight against fascism across the African diaspora, revealing that Black antifascism has always been vital to global freedom struggles. At once a history for understanding fascism and a handbook for organizing against, The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2024) is an essential book for understanding our present moment and...

The first critical examination of death and remembrance in the digital age—and an invitation to imagine Black digital sovereignty in life and death. In Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife (U California Press, 2023), Tonia Sutherland considers the consequences of digitally raising the dead. Attending to the violent deaths of Black Americans—and the records that document them...

Literacy in a Long Blues Note: Black Women’s Literature and Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries by Coretta M. Pittman (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) traces the evolution of Black women’s literacy practices from 1892 to 1934.  Pittman explores two distinct but related eras of Black women’s writing—the Women’s Era of the 1890s and early 1900s, and the New Negro Moveme...

In Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), historian Jonathan W. White tells the riveting story of Appleton Oaksmith, a swashbuckling sea captain whose life intersected with some of the most important moments, movements, and individuals of the mid-19th century, from the California Gold Rush, filibustering sche...

The cultural memory of plantations in the Old South has long been clouded by myth. A recent reckoning with the centrality of slavery to the US national story, however, has shifted the meaning of these sites. Plantations are no longer simply seen as places of beauty and grandiose hospitality; their reality as spaces of enslavement, exploitation, and violence is increasingly at the forefront of our...

From religion to popular culture, institutions and people have shaped how we conceive forgiveness. Myisha Cherry, associate professor of philosophy, argues that these understandings have been limiting or even narrow. Those ideas, in turn, have been harmful to society. In Failures of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better (Princeton University Press 2023), Cherry offers a new conceptua...

The 2020 toppling of slave-trader Edward Colston's statue by Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol was a dramatic reminder of Britain's role in trans-Atlantic slavery, too often overlooked. Yet the legacy of that predatory economy reaches far beyond bronze memorials; it continues to shape the entire visual fabric of the country. Architect Victoria Perry explores the relationship between the wea...

In Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America (Princeton UP, 2023), Korey Garibaldi explores interracial collaborations in American commercial publishing—authors, agents, and publishers who forged partnerships across racial lines—from the 1910s to the 1960s. Garibaldi shows how aspiring and established Black authors and editors worked closely w...

While the literature on slave flight in nineteenth-century North America has commonly focused on fugitive slaves escaping to the U.S. North and Canada, Conditional Freedom: Free Soil and Fugitive Slaves from the U.S. South to Mexico's Northeast, 1803-1861 (Brill, 2024) provides new insights on the social and political geography of freedom and slavery in nineteenth-century North America by explorin...

Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996) was one of America’s greatest musicians. In this major biography, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer who Transformed American Song (Norton 2023), Judith Tick documents Ella’s importance as a music maker, the ups and downs of her career, and her place in the music industry. Singers are often sidelined in histories of jazz, and jazz critics often celebrated instrum...

In Black Enlightenment (Duke UP, 2023), Surya Parekh reimagines the Enlightenment from the position of the Black subject. Parekh examines the works of such Black writers as the free Jamaican Francis Williams (1697–1762), Afro-British thinker Ignatius Sancho (1729?–1780), and Afro-American poet Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784), placing them alongside those of their white European contemporaries David...

Political Black Girl Magic: The Elections and Governance of Black Female Mayors (Temple UP, 2023) explores black women's experiences as mayors in American cities. The editor and contributors to this comprehensive volume examine black female mayoral campaigns and elections where race and gender are a factor--and where deracialized campaigns have garnered candidate support from white as well as Hisp...

In 1791, Thomas Jefferson hired a Black man to help survey Washington, DC. That man was Benjamin Banneker, an African American mathematician, a writer of almanacs, and one of the greatest astronomers of his generation. Banneker then wrote what would become a famous letter to Jefferson, imploring the new president to examine his hypocrisy, as someone who claimed to love liberty yet was an enslaver....

A total of 305,000 enslaved Africans arrived in the New World aboard American vessels over a span of two hundred years as American merchants and mariners sailed to Africa and to the Caribbean to acquire and sell captives. Using exhaustive archival research, including many collections that have never been used before, historian Sean M. Kelley argues that slave trading needs to be seen as integral t...

Ilyon Woo's Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom (Simon and Schuster, 2023) tells the remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled White man and William posing as “his” slave. In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Elle...