New Books in African American Studies

In democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can't always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally. Propped up by white supremacy, whites (as a group) are accustomed to winning; they have generally been able to exercise political rule without having to accept sharing it. Black citizens, on the other hand, are...

On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought (U California Press, 2022) examines the reverberations of anticolonial ideas that spread across the Atlantic between the two world wars. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Black intellectuals in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean established theories of colonialism and racism as structures that must be understood, and resisted, on a g...

Immigrant laborers who came to the New South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found themselves poised uncomfortably between white employers and the Black working class, a liminal and often precarious position. Campaigns to recruit immigrants primarily aimed to suppress Black agency and mobility. If that failed, both planters and industrialists imagined that immigrants might rep...

The 1970s was a golden age for representations of African American life on TV sitcoms: Sanford & Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons. Surprisingly, nearly all the decade’s notable Black sitcoms were made by a single company, Tandem Productions. Founded by two white men, the successful team behind All in the Family, writer Norman Lear and director Bud Yorkin, Tandem gave unprecedented opportunities to...

If you don’t know Tina Turner’s spirituality, you don’t know Tina. When Tina Turner reclaimed her throne as the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll in the 1980s, she attributed her comeback to one thing: the wisdom and power she found in Buddhism. Her spiritual transformation is often overshadowed by the rags-to-riches arc of her life story. But in this groundbreaking biography, Ralph H. Craig III traces Tina’...

In the early United States, anthems, flags, holidays, monuments, and memorials were powerful symbols of an American identity that helped unify a divided people. A language of freedom played a similar role in shaping the new nation. The Declaration of Independence’s assertion “that all men are created equal,” Patrick Henry’s cry of “Give me liberty, or give me death!,” and Francis Scott Key’s “star...

Five years after the Civil War, North Carolina Republican state senator John W. Stephens was found murdered inside the Caswell County Courthouse. Stephens fought for the rights of freedpeople, and his killing by the Ku Klux Klan ultimately led to insurrection, Governor William W. Holden's impeachment, and the early unwinding of Reconstruction in North Carolina. In A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murd...

Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” is notoriously fiery. No doubt part of what’s gripping about it is its internal tension. Douglass begins by sincerely praising the founders and their philosophical principles, and then turns to a devastating critique of the hypocrisy of the United States. Underlying Douglass’s argument is a commitment to the democratic proj...

Zora Neale Hurston, an anthropologist and writer best known for her classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, led a complicated life often marked by tragedy and contradictions. When both she and her writing fell out of favor after the Harlem Renaissance, she struggled not only to regain an audience for her novels but also to simply make ends meet. In The Chase and Ruins: Zora Neale Hurston in Ho...

Where do Asian Americans fit into the U.S. racial order? How do we understand anti-Asian racism in relation to structural anti-Blackness? Are Asian Americans subordinated comparably to Black people or permitted adjacency to whiteness? For Dr. Claire Jean Kim, the police murder of George Floyd and the surge in anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic make these questions urgent – and the answer...

Black Liberation through Action and Resistance: MOVE (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) serves as a call to action for Black millennials and co-conspirators who are immersed in the work of Black liberation or want to begin their own journey toward anti-racism. Its central mission is to provide additional context to an ongoing discussion regarding Black liberation and proper allyship. The theory behind M...

Racial capitalism, invisible but threaded throughout the world, shapes our lives. Focusing on the experiences of white, Black, and Latinx residents of Cincinnati, Sarah Mayorga argues that residents' interpretations of their circumstances, what she calls urban specters, are often partial recognitions of the exploitation and dehumanization produced by racial capitalism.  In Urban Specters: The Ever...

In this interview James Fenelon discusses his new book entitled Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 1492-1790, recently published with Routledge (2023). The book traces 500 years of European-American colonization and racialized dominance, expanding our common assumptions about the ways racialization was used to build capitalism and the modern world-sys...

From the colonial through the antebellum era, enslaved women in the US used lethal force as the ultimate form of resistance. By amplifying their voices and experiences, Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance (Cambridge UP, 2023) strongly challenges assumptions that enslaved women only participated in covert, non-violent forms of resistance, when in fact they consistently...

Debates over the undocumented migration of Latin Americans invariably focus on the southern US border, but most migrants never cross that arbitrary line. Instead, many travel, via water, among the Caribbean islands. The first study to examine literary and artistic representations of undocumented migration within the Hispanophone Caribbean, Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Ca...

The Archaeology of Race and Class at Timbuctoo: A Black Community in New Jersey (UP of Florida, 2023) is the first book to examine the historic Black community of Timbuctoo, New Jersey, which was founded in 1826 by formerly enslaved migrants from Maryland and served as a stop on the Underground Railroad. In collaboration with descendants and community members, Christopher Barton explores the inter...

In this episode of High Theory, Erin Pineda talks about decolonizing praxis. Black American activists in the 1950s and 1960s used strategies of civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action as part of a broader anticolonial movement, and reading their story in an international context can help us rethink the narrative of the US civil rights movement enshrined in American political theory. In the...

During the years between the Civil War and World War II, police in New York City struggled with how to control a diverse metropolis. In Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York (Duke UP, 2023), Matthew Guariglia tells the history of the New York Police Department to show how its origins were built upon and inseparably entwined with the history of race, ethnic...

On June 2, 1892, in the small, idyllic village of Port Jervis, New York, a young Black man named Robert Lewis was lynched by a violent mob. The twenty-eight-year-old victim had been accused of sexually assaulting Lena McMahon, the daughter of one of the town's well-liked Irish American families. The incident was infamous at once, for it was seen as a portent that lynching, a Southern scourge, surg...

How did a Caribbean child, born into plantation slavery, come to defeat Napoleon's armies in battle and crown himself king of the first free black nation in the Americas? Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean's Forgotten Kingdom (Hurst, 2023) is the story of Henry Christophe: one of the most remarkable, yet least known, figures from the Age of Revolution. Christop...

The United States has long been associated with a very harsh criminal justice system with, in some cases, people serving long sentence for minor crimes. But attempts to reform the system have proven very difficult. In her new book Reform Nation: The First Step Act and the Movement to End Mass Incarceration (Stanford UP, 2023), Colleen P. Eren explains why. Listen to her in conversation with Owen B...

In 2013, as Syrians desperate to escape a brutal war fled the country, Brazil took the remarkable step of instituting an open-door policy for all Syrian refugees. Why did Brazil—in contrast to much of the international community—offer asylum to any Syrian who would come? And how do Syrians differ from other refugee populations seeking status in Brazil? In The Color of Asylum: The Racial Politics o...

Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (University of California Press, 2023) boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970...

An evocative and epic story, Nick Tabor's Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created (St. Martin's Press, 2023) charts the fraught history of America from those who were brought here as slaves but nevertheless established a home for themselves and their descendants, a community which often thrived despite persistent racism and environmental pollution. In 1860, a ship called...

A bold rethinking of the Haitian Revolution reveals the roots of the only successful slave uprising in the modern world. Unearthing the progenitors of the Haitian Revolution has been a historical project of two hundred years. In A Secret Among the Blacks: Slave Resistance Before the Haitian Revolution (Harvard UP, 2023), John D. Garrigus introduces two dozen Black men and women and their communiti...