New Books in African American Studies

Photography emerged in the 1840s in the United States, and it became a visual medium that documents the harsh realities of enslavement. Similarly, the photography culture grew during the Civil War, and it became an important material that archived this unprecedented war. Deborah Willis's The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (New York University Press, 2021) con...

At the end of the American Revolution, Elizabeth Freeman was an enslaved widow and mother living in Massachusetts. Hearing the words of the new Massachusetts state constitution which declared liberty and equality for all, she sought the help of a young lawyer named Theodore Sedgwick, later Speaker of the House and one of America's leading Federalist politicians. The lawsuit that she and Sedgwick p...

In this episode, S. Sayyid talks with Barnor Hesse (Northwestern University) on the Antimonies of Afropessimism. Professor Barnor Hesse teaches in the department of African American Studies, at Northwestern University, he is the author of Raceocracy: White Sovereignty and Black Life Politics (forthcoming); co-editor of After #Ferguson, After #Baltimore: The Challenge of Black Death and Black Life...

In Missiology Reimagined: The Missions Theology of the Nineteenth-Century African American Missionary (Pickwick, 2024), Kent Michael Shaw I examines the lives and theology of early African American missionaries of the Antebellum and Reconstruction era. The enslaved and formerly enslaved constructed a hermeneutic and interpreted the sacred text through a lens that contradicted the enslaver's versio...

The story of the driver is the story of Atlantic slavery. Starting in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, enslavers developed the driving system to solve their fundamental problem: how to extract labor from captive workers who had every reason to resist. In this system, enslaved Black drivers were tasked with supervising and punishing other enslaved laborers. In The Driver’s Story: Labor and Power...

James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” is a powerful short story that describes the life of Jesse, a 42-year-old white police officer whose experiences alternate between his present-day struggles with impotence and his memories of racial violence. As the narrative unfolds a pivotal childhood memory of a lynching, sets the tone and comes to represent the fundamental weakness of white supremacy. Hi...

A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs (UNC Press, 2024) tells the little-known story of "segregation scholarships" awarded by states in the US South to Black students seeking graduate education in the pre-Brown v. Board of Education era. Under the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, decades earlier, southern states could provide graduate opp...

In December of 1850, a faculty wife in Brunswick, Maine, named Harriet Beecher Stowe hid a fugitive slave in her house. While John Andrew Jackson stayed for only one night, he made a lasting impression: drawing from this experience, Stowe began to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the most influential books in American history and the novel that helped inspire the overthrow of slavery in the United...

A conversation with Dr. Sylviane Diouf on enslaved Muslim in the Americas. Diouf is the author of Slavery's Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (NYU Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory (Duke UP, 2024), Jennifer C. Nash examines how Black feminists use beautiful writing to allow writers and readers to stay close to the field’s central object and preoccupation: loss. She demonstrates how contemporary Black feminist writers and theorists such as Jesmyn Ward, Elizabeth Alexander, Christina Sharpe, and Natasha Trethewey mobilize...

Detroit has an essential relationship to genre in American literature and popular culture. The contemporary formations of the suburban sitcom, the post-apocalyptic genre, the sci-fi dystopia, crime fiction, the superhero genre, and contemporary horror would not exist in the way they do today without the aesthetic material and racial history of Detroit. When DC Comics wanted to compete with Marvel...

How can Black Atlantic literature challenge conventions and redefine literary scholarship? Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice (U Minnesota Press, 2024) is an invitation to reenvision abolitionist justice through literary studies. Placing critical race theory, queer theory, critical prison studies, and antiprison activism in conversation with an archive of Black Atlantic literature...

By the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultural idioms for and understandings of poison. Europeans considered poison a gendered “weapon of the weak” while Africans viewed it as an abuse by the powerful. Though distinct, both idioms centered on fraught power relationships. When translated to th...

In James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues (Oxford University Press, 2024), Tom Jenks follows a scene-by-scene, sometimes line-by-line, discussion of the pattern by which Baldwin indelibly writes "Sonny's Blues" into the consciousness of readers. It provides ongoing observations of the aesthetics underlying the particulars of the story, with references to Edward P. Jones (whose magnificent story "All Aunt H...

The processes of secularization and desegregation were among the two most radical transformations of the American public school system in all its history. Many regard the 1962 and 1963 US Supreme Court rulings against school prayer and Bible-reading as the end of religion in public schools. Likewise, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case is seen as the dawn of school racial equality. Yet, thes...

During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, more than twelve million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas in cramped, inhumane conditions. Many of them died on the way, and those who survived had to endure further suffering in the violent conditions that met them onshore. Covering more than three hundred years, Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery (U Chicago Pr...

In 1980, Charles Wetli---a Miami-based medical examiner and self-proclaimed “cult expert” of Afro-Caribbean religions---identified what he called “excited delirium syndrome.” Soon, medical examiners began using the syndrome regularly to describe the deaths of Black men and women during interactions with police. Police and medical examiners claimed that Black people with so-called excited delirium...

From their founding, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) educated as many as 90 percent of Black college students in the United States. Although many are aware of the significance of HBCUs in expanding Black Americans' educational opportunities, much less attention has been paid to the vital role that they have played in enhancing American democracy. In The Power of Black Excellen...

The phrase "racial capitalism" was used by Cedric Robinson to describe an economy of wealth accumulation extracted from cheap labor, organized by racial hierarchy, and justified through white supremacist logics. Now, in the twenty-first century, the biotech industry is the new capitalist whose race-based exploitation engages not only labor but racialized consumption. This arrangement is upheld thr...

In Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequity (Cornell UP, 2024), Matthew Gardner Kelly takes aim at the racial and economic disparities that characterize public education funding in the United States. With California as his focus, Kelly illustrates that the use of local taxes to fund public education was never an inadvertent or de facto product of past practices,...

Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits (Routledge, 2024) examines the dilution and commodification of Black Rage--conceived as a constructive response to the conquest of resources, land, and human beings--in a spatial and historical critique of the capitalist State. Interweaving academic criticism with journalistic essays, it presents a thoughtful challeng...

During her keynote speech at the 1976 Democratic Party convention, Barbara Jordan of Texas stood before a rapt audience and reflected on where Americans stood in that bicentennial year. "Are we to be one people bound together by a common spirit, sharing in a common endeavor, or will we become a divided nation? For all of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future." The civil rights movement had ch...

More men than ever are refusing loving partnerships and commitment, and instead seeking out “situationships.” When these men deign to articulate what they are looking for in a steady partner, they’ll often rely on superficial norms of attractiveness rooted in whiteness and anti-Blackness. Connecting the past to the present, in The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance (Beacon Press...

On July 22, 1847, a group of about forty refugees entered the Salt Lake Valley. Among them were three enslaved men, two of whom shared the religion, Mormonism, that had caused them to flee. The valley was also home to members of the Ute tribe, who would sometimes barter captive women and children to Spanish colonizers. Thus, the question of whether the Latter-day Saints would accept or reject slav...

With The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State (University of Georgia Press, 2024), Dr. Elizabeth Garner Masarik shows how middle-class women, both white and Black, harnessed the nineteenth-century “culture of sentiment” to generate political action in the Progressive Era. While eighteenth-century rationalism had relied upon the development of the analytic mind a...