New Books in African American Studies

This is part of our Special Series on Malcolm X and Black Nationalism. In this series, we delve into the background of Malcolm X's action and thought in the context of Black Nationalism, correcting the fundamentally mistaken notion that Malcolm X was a civil rights leader. He certainly did not see himself in that way, and explicitly argued otherwise. This helps us place the Afro-American struggle...

Whether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomic injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists’ work throughout the black diaspora.  In Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and...

For six years, anthropologist and artist Maya Stovall enacted a series of dance performances outside of liquor stores in the McDougall-Hunt neighborhood on Detroit’s east side. Stovall conceptualized these performances as prompts for people that may pass by and as a means to open up space for conversation with Detroit residents.  These filmed performances and the interviews that followed make up L...

On today’s podcast, I am chatting with Dorothy Berry, Houghton Library's Digital Collections Program Manager. In it, we discuss why she became an archivist, what digital archivists do, and about the great project she created and is leading at Houghton: Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom: Primary Sources from Houghton Library. Dorothy Berry received her MLS from Indiana University, as we...

In Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Segregated Churches in the Early American North (NYU Press, 2020), Richard J. Boles argues that, contrary to traditional American religious historiography, interracial worship was a common and accepted practice in many northern Protestant churches in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As Northern states outlawed slavery, Christians hardened their sta...

Today on New Books in African American Studies I am chatting with Carleton College Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly. Dr. Burden-Stelly is a critical Black Studies scholar of political theory, political economy, intellectual history, and historical sociology. On today's episode we discuss Dr. Burden-Stelly's path from graduate school through,...

Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918-1927 (Columbia University 2020) by Jeffrey B. Perry, independent scholar and archivist, is an extensive intellectual history of the life and work of Black radical and autodidact Hubert Harrison. Perry is also editor of A Hubert Harrison Reader (Wesleyan, 2001) and author of Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 (Columbia, 2008)....

Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family (Columbia UP, 2019) tells the story of one Harlem family across three generations, connecting its journey to the historical and social forces that transformed Harlem over the past century. Bruce D. Haynes and Syma Solovitch capture the tides of change that pushed blacks forward through the twentieth century--the Great Migration, the Harle...

Today I talked to Rachel Berenson Perry about her book The Life and Art of Felrath Hines: From Dark to Light (Indiana University Press, 2019). Felrath Hines (1913–1993), the first African American man to become a professional conservator for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, was born and raised in the segregated Midwest. Leaving their home in the South, Hines's parents migrated to Indiana...

This is a Special Series on Third World Nationalism. In the wake of a rise in nationalism around the world, and its general condemnation by liberals and the left, in addition to the rise of China and Russia, we have put together this series on Third World Nationalism to nuance the present discourse on nationalism, note its centrality to anti-imperial, anti-colonial politics around the world, the r...

One of the most notable African American intellectuals of his generation, Lawrence Reddick helped to spearhead the early Black history movement, served as the second curator of the Schomburg Library during the 1930s, guided the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the Cold War, mentored Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. throughout his entire public life, and played a major role in the Black S...

In Black Lives and Spatial Matters: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis (Cornell University Press, 2020), Dr. Jodi Rios examines relationships between blackness, space, and racism, in the northern suburbs of St. Louis. She argues that the “double bind of living as Black in North St. Louis County means that Black residents both suffer from, and pay for, the loss of econo...

During the eighteenth century, hundreds of thousands of free descendants of Africans in Mexico faced a highly specific obligation to the Spanish crown, a tax based on their genealogy and status. This royal tribute symbolized imperial loyalties and social hierarchies. As the number of free people of color soared, this tax became a reliable source of revenue for the crown as well as a signal that co...

Placing the West's failure to acknowledge the Haitian Revolution--the most successful slave revolt in history--alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a stunning meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history. Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1995) is a modern classic....

In Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (New Press, 2020), historian Marjoleine Kars tells the story of a massive eighteenth-century slave rebellion in the Dutch colony of Berbice (in present-day Guyana). Drawing on some nine hundred pages of interrogation transcripts and letters that provide rare first person accounts from enslaved African-born rebels, Kars chro...

In The Haitians: A Decolonial History (UNC Press, 2020), leading Haitian intellectual Jean Casimir argues that the story of Haiti should not begin with the usual image of Saint-Domingue as the richest colony of the eighteenth century. Rather, it begins with a reconstruction of how individuals from Africa, in the midst of the golden age of imperialism, created a sovereign society based on political...

The Antebellum Origins of the Modern Constitution: Slavery and the Spirit of the American Founding (Cambridge University Press, 2020) argues that conflicts over slavery and abolition in the early American Republic generated a mode of constitutional interpretation that remains powerful today: the belief that the historical spirit of founding holds authority over the current moment. Simon J. Gilhool...

This is part of our Special Series on Third World Nationalism. In the wake of a rise in nationalism around the world, and its general condemnation by liberals and the left, in addition to the rise of China and Russia, we have put together this series on Third World Nationalism to nuance the present discourse on nationalism, note its centrality to anti-imperial, anti-colonial politics around the wo...

This is part of our Special Series on Malcolm X and Black Nationalism. In this series, we delve into the background of Malcolm X's action and thought in the context of Black Nationalism, correcting the fundamentally mistaken notion that Malcolm X was a civil rights leader. He certainly did not see himself in that way, and explicitly argued otherwise. This helps us place the Afro-American struggle...

In The Lonely Letters (Duke UP, 2020), A tells Moth: “Writing about and thinking with joy is what sustains me, daily. It nourishes me. I do not write about joy primarily because I always have it. I write about joy, Black joy, because I want to generate it, I want it to emerge, I want to participate in its constant unfolding.” But alongside joy, A admits to Moth, come loneliness, exclusion, and unf...

In Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020), Dr. Kim Gallon examines how Black newspaper editors and journalists created and fostered Black sexual publics during the 1920s and 1930s. She demonstrates that editors strategically elected to publish stories about marital scandals, divorces, homosexuality, and gender non-con...

This episode is part of a Special Series on Malcolm X and Black Nationalism. In this series, we delve into the background of Malcolm X's action and thought in the context of Black Nationalism, correcting the fundamentally mistaken notion that Malcolm X was a civil rights leader. He certainly did not see himself in that way, and explicitly argued otherwise. This helps us place the Afro-American str...

A startling and eye-opening look into America’s First Family, Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (Simon and Schuster, 2017) is the powerful narrative of Ona Judge, George and Martha Washington’s runaway slave who risked everything to escape the nation’s capital and reach freedom. When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left his...

The epic history of African American women's pursuit of political power-and how it transformed America In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women's movement did not win the vote for most black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own. In Vangu...

Brandon Mills is the author of The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2020. The World Colonization Made explores the beginnings and ends of the colonization movement from the late-18th century to the coming of the Civil War. Mills uses African colonization to explore how ideas of American empire developed dur...