New Books in African American Studies

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There―and in many other communities in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Central America―Black people repurposed and regenerated what had been a place of enslavement into a site for imagining alt...

Moving between word and image, the call-and-response collaboration between writer Christopher R. Rogers and photographer karim brown improvises a contemporary portrait of present-day Black Philadelphia, replete with the unfinished activism present since the transnational upsurge of the George Floyd Uprising. Arriving five years after the crucible of that period, this experimental essay-as-LP chall...

Edward Blum interviews David N. Gellman on his book Liberty’s Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York (Cornell UP, 2022). In Liberty's Chain , David N. Gellman shows how the Jay family, abolitionists and slaveholders alike, embodied the contradictions of the revolutionary age. The Jays of New York were a preeminent founding family. John Jay, diplomat, Supreme Court justice, and...

Empire, Race, and Print Culture in the Black Pacific (Cambridge University Press, 2026) is an Element which centers the 'Black Pacific' as a generative site for comparative and intersectional methodologies and transnational frameworks for thinking about racial formations, post-national literary forms, and cultural histories. At the end of the nineteenth century, US overseas expansion into the Paci...

For more than 150 years, Black communities have gathered to honor freedom, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for true liberation. While Juneteenth has recently gained wider recognition, it was one of many Emancipation Day traditions celebrated across the United States. These observances were spaces of joy, remembrance, and resistance—even as the fight for full freedom was unfinished.  Black Fr...

Dr. Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel’s  Seeking Freedom in Indian Country: Slavery, Sovereignty, and Resistance within the Five Tribes, 1790–1861 (LSU Press, 2026) is the first comprehensive study of African chattel slavery within the Five Tribes: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole Nations. Dr. Oertel examines how chattel slavery functioned among all Five Tribes before and d...

Some of the earliest canals in colonial America, referred to as the Inner Passage, were constructed by enslaved people living in the Lowcountry of South Carolina in the early 1700s. In a paradox of history, for over a hundred years enslaved Black people used these canals, constructed for white plantation owners, to travel southward to freedom in Spanish Florida. In The Inner Passage: An Untol...

Black Power! A name with a ring to it on both sides of the Atlantic, taken as a sign of Black American rage incarnated by a few names: Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panthers, Angela Davis. Behind these archetypes of the 1960s and 70s stood a political movement as mutable as it was international, that of Black Power, with the goal of bringing about a global uprising. This insurrection...

In Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival (University of North Carolina Press, 2026), naturalist, forager, and educator Maria Pinto uncovers strange and beautiful connections between the natural and human worlds, mingling reportage, research, memoir, and nature writing, touching on topics that range fro...

An unsettling exploration of the persistence of racism in reproductive healthcare in the US—and why even affluent Black women are imperiled by substandard care. From a leading expert on race, class, maternal health, and reproductive rights. Racism in maternal healthcare is not reserved for the poor. An unsparing picture of inequities in prenatal care and childbirth in the United States, Expecting...

Ella Jenkins (1924–2024) was one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century, although many people have never heard of her. A pioneer in children’s music and an innovative educator, Jenkins recorded forty albums and influenced countless children and adults over a sixty-year career. Gayle Wald places Jenkins’s life and work within the larger contexts of the civil rights movement, the...

In Contested Continent: The Struggle for America, c.1000-1680 (Oxford University Press, 2026), the newest installment of the acclaimed Oxford History of the United States series, Peter C. Mancall recounts how North America was forged from the experiences of millions of Indigenous women and men as well as Europeans and Africans. This history spans the continent from th...

What does Blackness look like? In Forms of Blackness: Race and Visibility in the French-Speaking World (Duke University Press, 2026), Cécile Bishop argues that this seemingly simple question has no straightforward answer. Instead of treating race as something immediately visible, she explores how Blackness emerges through the interplay of perception, language, and history. A central theme of the b...

Gullah-Geechee Diasporas: Knowledge, Culture, and Black Lowcountry Legacies (University of South Carolina Press, 2026) counters romantic portrayals of Gullah-Geechee culture as a static, geographically isolated remnant of the past. Across eight interdisciplinary essays, the book’s contributors trace an arc, described in time and space, from pre-Middle Passage Africa through the Caribbean and coast...

Dan Rood’s In the Shadow of the Great House (W.W. Norton & Co., 2026) is one of the first contemporary books to focus on the primary engine of slavery, race, and capitalism in this country: the plantation. The plantation was invented on the small Atlantic island of São Tomé in the 1500s, and the island also became the site, soon enough, of the first slave revolt. The brutal technology was then per...

The violence that spread across Harlem on the night of March 19, 1935 was the first large-scale racial disorder in the United States in more than a decade and the first occurrence in the nation’s leading Black neighborhood. However, as many observers pointed out, the events were “not a race riot” of the kind that had marked the decades after the Civil War. Racial violence took a new form in 1935....

Owning My Masters (Mastered) is a digital archive of original rap music and spoken word poetry containing two volumes of music, an annotated timeline, videos, and a digital book. In this project, A.D. Carson exposes the artificial boundaries imposed on understood ideas about knowledge production in academia by employing hip-hop creative and compositional practices to interrogate ideas of citizensh...

In Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory (UNC Press, 2026), historian John Garrison Marks tells the story of Americans’ long, fraught struggle to come to terms with Washington’s legacy of slavery. He traces how politicians, abolitionists, educators, activists, Washington’s former slaves and their descendants, and others have remembered, forgott...

A striking triptych once displayed in countless African American households, the Trinity typically features Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy. More than decoration, these portraits were deliberate acts of memory and quiet resistance, a medium through which African Americans asserted their own narratives of hope, leadership, and the fight for justice. In this provocative his...

1. A complete list of University of California Press journals is available at UC Press Journals 2. Clare E. B. Cannon; Advancing sustainable transitions: A spatial analysis of socio-environmental dynamics of landfills across the United States. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 12 January 2024; 12 (1): 00101: Link 3. Morrison, Matthew D. Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United S...

A cemetery as open-air museum? Historian and award-winning author of Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal, Eric K. Washington thinks so. In this compelling discussion, Washington talks about his newly-completed project revealing the hidden stories of Harlem Renaissance figures buried at the historic Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York. Fu...

Mark Twain’s Jim, introduced in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), is a shrewd, self‑aware, and enormously admirable enslaved man, one of the first fully drawn Black fathers in American fiction. Haunted by the family he has left behind, Jim acts as father figure to Huck, the white boy who is his companion as they raft the Mississippi toward freedom. Jim is also a highly polarizing figure: he...

Youssef J. Carter’s The Vast Oceans: Remembering Allah and Self on the Mustafawiyya Sufi Path (UNC Press, 2026) is a stunning meditation on Black Atlantic Sufism, specifically as it travels between South Carolina and Senegal via the Mustafawiyya Sufi community and Shaykh Arona Faye. The book orbits around Sufi conceptual frameworks which are translated through the register of Black and Africana St...

Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2026) is the first fully illustrated history of Juneteenth and other Emancipation Day celebrations, told through photographs, art, and an engrossing narrative. For more than 150 years, Black communities have gathered to honor freedom, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for true liberation. While Juneteen...

Anna O. Law, the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights in the Department of Political Science at City University of New York-Brooklyn Campus, has a deeply researched and important new book that weaves together different approaches to understanding American citizenship, especially in context of immigration and migration in the first century of the U.S. republic. Migration and the Origins of A...