New Books in African American Studies

What would happen if policing disappeared? Would we be safe? This book imagines a world without police. It's evident that policing is a problem. But what is the best way forward? In Beyond Policing, distinguished scholar and writer Philip V. McHarris reimagines the world without police to find answers and reveal how we can make police departments obsolete. Beyond Policing tackles thorny issues wit...

In 2020, Black Americans continued a centuries-long pursuit of racial equality and justice in the streets and at the polls. Arguing that this year was not a deviation from the historic Civil Rights Movement, the contributors to this collection examine the important work of Black men and women during the previous decades to shape, expand, and preserve a multiracial American democracy. The authors o...

Boldly going where few fandom scholars have gone before, Fandom for Us, by Us: The Pleasures and Practices of Black Audiences (NYU Press, 2025) breaks from our focus on white fandom to center Black fandoms. Alfred L. Martin, Jr., engages these fandoms through what he calls the “four C’s”: class, clout, canon, and comfort. Class is a key component of how Black fandom is contingent on distinctions b...

Every year, millions of public school students are suspended. This overused punishment removes students from the classroom, but it does not improve their behavior. Instead, suspension disrupts their education, harming the students, their families, and their schools. Black students suffer most within this broken system, experiencing a far greater risk of school punishment and the significant harms...

In the Nation's Capital, music and sports have played a central role in the lives of African Americans, often serving as a barometer of social conflict and social progress―for sports clubs and ball games, jam sessions and concerts, offered entertainment, enlightenment, and encouragement. At times, they have also offered a means of escape from the harsh realities of everyday life. Rhythms of Resist...

The secret insights of economics, translated for the rest of us. Should I buy or rent? Do I ask for a promotion? Should I tell people I’m pregnant? What salary do I deserve? Should I just quit this job? Common anxieties about life are often grounded in economics. In an increasingly win-lose society, these economic decisions—where to work, where to live, even how to live—have a way of feeling fixed...

For last 100 years, the neighborhood of Harlem in New York City has stood as the capital of Black America and the capital of the global African diaspora. Yet Harlem is so big and so varied that it contains smaller sections with distinct identities and histories of their own. Davida Siwisa James explores two parts of Harlem in her book Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill: Alexander Hamilton’s Old Harle...

Forest Isaac Jones is an award-winning author of non-fiction and essays, specializing in the study of Irish History, the US Civil Rights Movement and Northern Ireland. His latest essay, ‘The Civil Rights Connection Between The USA and Northern Ireland’ was awarded honorable mention in the category of nonfiction essay by Writer’s Digest in their 93rd annual writing competition. In this interview, h...

Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones’s right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: “Who do you think you are?” Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into...

Dancing Black, Dancing White: Rock 'n' Roll, Race, and Youth Culture of the 1950s and Early 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2023) offers a new look at the highly popular phenomenon of the televised teen dance program. These teen shows were incubators of new styles of social and popular dance and both reflected and shaped pressing social issues of the day. Often referred to as "dance parties," the...

Atiya Husain’s No God but Man: On Race, Knowledge and Terrorism (Duke University Press, 2025) uses the FBI Most Wanted lists to rethink theoretical relationships between race and Islam in the United States. Husain traces the genealogy of wanted posters and how theories of the “average man” informs the use of photographs and its accompanying descriptions on most wanted posters. To probe this patter...

Black people, and especially Black women, suffer and die from diseases at much higher rates than their white counterparts. The vast majority of these health disparities are not attributed to behavioral differences or biology, but to the pervasive devaluation of Black bodies. Womanist Bioethics: Social Justice, Spirituality, and Black Women’s Health (NYU Press, 2025), by Dr. Wylin D. Wilson, addres...

In The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Dr. Sam Klug reveals the central but underappreciated importance of global decolonization to the divergence between mainstream liberalism and the Black freedom movement in postwar America. Dr. Klug reconsiders what has long been seen as a matter of primarily domestic policy in light...

Professional baseball has featured a bevy of superstars over the past century and a half, but only a few of them have impacted their sport and cities as deeply as Willie McCovey and Billy Williams. Born just a handful of miles apart in 1938, they grew up in and around one of the sport’s true cradles, Mobile, Alabama, on their way to producing two iconic careers in Major League Baseball. In A Time...

Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality, facing dangerous injuries, few pro-career opportunities, a free but devalued college education, and future financial instability. In one of the first ethnographies about Black college football players, anthropologist Tracie Canada reveals t...

Most people in North America have probably at least heard the name W. E. B. Dubois. In the early twentieth century, DuBois—the first African-American to earn a Ph. D. from Harvard—published and spoke extensively about his vision of equality through education. In particular, he edited The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the NAACP, while also writing such classics as The Souls of Black Folk. But if...

Over the past decade Micaiah Carter has established himself as one of the most exciting and admired young photographers working in the field of portraiture and fashion. With a vision all his own, Carter's images are preternaturally sophisticated. His lighting is intentional but not attention-seeking, and his subjects always seem fully themselves, whether he’s photographing a celebrity, a musician,...

A moving exploration of the life and work of the celebrated American writer, blending biography and memoir with literary criticism. Since James Baldwin's death in 1987, his writing - including The Fire Next Time, one of the manifestos of the Civil Rights Movement, and Giovanni's Room, a pioneering work of gay fiction - has only grown in relevance. Douglas Field was introduced to Baldwin's essays a...

Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) is the first detailed account of Louisiana's unprecedented turn to mass incarceration from 1970 to 2020. Through extensive research, D...

Iconic as a novelist and popular cultural figure, Zora Neale Hurston remains underappreciated as an anthropologist. Is it inevitable that Hurston's literary authority should eclipse her anthropological authority? If not, what socio-cultural and institutional values and processes shape the different ways we read her work? Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall considers the polar receptions to Hurston's two...

Today I’m speaking with Chryl Laird, Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. We are discussing her co-authored book with Ismail White, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior. Published in 2020, this book remains highly relevant for understanding American political behavior. While Trump did make significant gains amon...

Most US history textbooks contain a familiar map: shaded colors stretch across North America, clearly and neatly demarcating the extent of US expansion from 1776 thru the late nineteenth century. In The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limites of Manifest Destiny (UNC Press, 2025), University of Kansas distinguished historian Andrew Isenberg asks us to rethink the clean lines and s...

Michigan's African Americans played critical roles in winning the Civil War and setting millions of fellow Americans forever free. The 1st Michigan Colored Infantry Regiment, more than 1,500 strong, helped overwhelm their enemies on the battlefield. Alongside the soldiers, civilian Black men and women contributed in previously unrecognized ways to defending and extending human liberty. One such un...

The Contemporary African Kitchen: Home Cooking Recipes from the Leading Chefs of Africa (Phaidon Press, 2024) is an elegant collection of 120 home cooking recipes from Africa’s most​ exciting culinary voices today. Extensively researched and thoughtfully​ curated by James Beard Award winning chef, author, and restaurateur​ Alexander Smalls in collaboration with Dine Diaspora CEO Nina Oduro,​ this...

The evolution of basketball, and much of the social and cultural change in America, can be traced through one powerful act on the court: the slam dunk. The dunk's history is the story of a sport and a country changed by the most dominant act in basketball, and it makes Magic in the Air: The Myth, the Mystery, and the Soul of the Slam Dunk (St. Martin's Press, 2025) a rollicking and insightful piec...