New Books in African American Studies

Mary Stanton's Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950 (University of Georgia Press, 2019) is the first narrative history of the American communist movement in the South since Robin D. G. Kelley's groundbreaking Hammer and Hoe and the first to explore its key figures and actions beyond the 1930s. Written from the perspective of the district 17 (CPUSA) Reds who worked primarily in...

American masculinity is being critiqued, questioned, and reinterpreted for a new era. In Men in Place: Trans Masculinity, Race, and Sexuality in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), Miriam J. Abelson makes an original contribution to this conversation through in-depth interviews with trans men in the U.S. West, Southeast, and Midwest, showing how the places and spaces men inhabit are fun...

Katherine Franke’s ambitious new book challenges Americans to face our collective responsibility for ongoing racial inequality. Rather than fall back on what Franke calls a “palliative history” that emphasizes granting freedom and rights after the Civil War, Franke insists that Americans acknowledge the failure to provide any meaningful reparation to formerly enslaved people in the 1860s. That fai...

In their new book, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior (Princeton University Press, 2020), political scientists Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird explore the political behavior of African American voters in the United States and examine extensive data to determine how this particular group of voters have operated as a fairly unified voting block over the course o...

In the second half of the eighteenth century, as European imperial conflicts extended the domain of capitalist agriculture, warring African factions fed their captives to the transatlantic slave trade while masters struggled continuously to keep their restive slaves under the yoke. In this contentious atmosphere, a movement of enslaved West Africans in Jamaica (then called Coromantees) organized t...

Jeff Forret is the author of William’s Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and his Cargo of Black Convicts, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. William’s Gang explores the career of prominent slave trader William H. Williams, whose operation was based in Washington D.C. His infamous Yellow House slave pin was a major stop in the domestic slave trade. Forret examines Williams’s life as a sl...

Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life (NYU Press, 2019) by Paula C. Austin, an Assistant Professor of history at Boston University, is not only a history of black youth in Washington D.C. in the 1930s but also a history of social science thought as illustrated in the work of scholars such as sociologists E. Franklin Frazier and William H. Jones. Austin juxtaposes t...

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight...

Has can theatre confront racial inequality? In Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Performing Arts Workforce (Routledge, 2020), Tobie S. Stein, Professor Emerita in the Department of Theater, Brooklyn College, CUNY, analyses the longstanding failure of America’s theatre industry to address issues of diversity. Drawing on interviews with 70 practitioners, as well as a rich and detailed engagement wi...

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Kristen Hoerl (she/hers) on her impressive new book The Bad Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and Black Power Movements (University Press of Mississippi, 2018). The Bad Sixties explores the construction o...

In his dazzling new book The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Spencer Dew treats his readers to a riveting and often counterintuitive account of the interaction of law, race, and citizenship in the discourses of the Moorish Science Temple and other movements inspired by Noble Drew Ali. How do theological visions of democracy serve as cri...

In his newly released book City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763-1856 (University of Georgia Press, 2020), Professor Marcus P. Nevius (Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Rhode Island) tells the interrelated histories of petit marronage, an informal slave's economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great...

Increased redevelopment, the dismantling of public housing, and increasing housing costs are forcing a shift in migration of lower income and transit dependent populations to the suburbs. These suburbs are often missing basic transportation, and strategies to address this are lacking. This absence of public transit creates barriers to viable employment and accessibility to cultural networks, and p...

Ralph Waldo Ellison's masterpiece Invisible Man tells the story of an African-American man who insists on his visibility, agency, and humanity in a country dead-set on not seeing him. Barring him from most opportunities, and denying his humanity. The book charts this young man's course from the segregated South into 1950's New York where the choices seem to be; militant resistance or assimilation,...

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Chorographic Commission of Colombia, an ambitious geographical expedition, set out to define and map a nascent and still unstable republic. The commission’s purpose was to survey the land, its resources and people, and portray Colombia as a nation prone to the “wonders” of modernization. In Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth...

Paul J. Polgar is the author of Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement, published by University of North Carolina Press in 2019. Standard-Bearers of Equality tells the story of a racially inclusive abolition movement which followed in the wake of the American Revolution. Seeking to uphold Revolutionary-era ideals, these “first movement abolitionists,” as Polgar refers to...

In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men--like the testimony of free colonists--was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses about attacks, murders, robberies, and escapes, they answered with stories about themselves, stories that rebutted the premise on which slavery was founded. Focus...

Today, instead of discussing a new book, I am convening a “New Books in African American Studies Roundtable” to talk with two historians early in their careers about their recent transitions from graduate school into the professorate, and some of the scholarly and public projects they are developing at their respective institutions: Dr. Robert Greene II, Assistant Professor in History at Claflin U...

Though the story of emancipation is well known in American history, the roles of many of the key figures involved in it are often overlooked. Among them is James Mitchell Ashley, the Ohio congressman who shepherded the Thirteenth Amendment through the House of Representatives. In The Forgotten Emancipator: James Mitchell Ashley and the Ideological Origins of Reconstruction (Cambridge University Pr...

Professor Ellen Griffith Spears of the University of Alabama, author of Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) discusses the decades long struggle for environmental and civil rights justice in Anniston, Alabama, and broader lessons to be learned from this fight to address one community's exposure to toxic chemicals. In the...

Black New Jersey 1664 to the Present Day (Rutgers University Press, 2018) by Graham Russell Gao Hodges, George Langdon, Jr. Professor of History and Africana and Latin American Studies at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, is a survey history of African Americans in New Jersey. This is the first published scholarly book-length historical study of African Americans in New Jersey covering the...

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books,...

"It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.” This line from Zora Neale Hurston’s masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, captures what is at the heart of all great literature: the irrepressible urge to speak, to be heard and understood. I spoke with Professor Deborah Plant, a scholar of African-American literature and culture, an expert on Hurston, and the editor of Hurston’s posthum...

How has the expansion of the Black American middle class and the increase in the number of Black immigrants among them since the Civil Rights period transformed the cultural landscape of New York City? In her new book The New Noir: Race, Identity & Diaspora in Black Suburbia (University of California Press, 2019), Orly Clergé explores this question and more. Exploring the lived experiences of the...

Argentina promotes itself as a country of European immigrants. This makes it an exception to other Latin American countries, which embrace a more mixed—African, Indian, European—heritage. Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic (University of Alabama Press, 2020) traces the origins of what some white Argentines mischaracterize as a “black disappear...