New Books in African American Studies

This week on the podcast, I speak with Carol Hardy-Fanta and Dianne Pinderhughes, the co-authors (along with Pei-te Lien and Christine Marie Sierra) of Contested Transformation: Race, Gender, and Political Leadership in 21st Century America (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Hardy-Fanta is Senior Fellow at the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Mas...

“There were black Germans?” My students are always surprised to learn that there were and are a community of African immigrants and Afro-Germans that dates back to the nineteenth century (and sometimes earlier), and that this community has at times had an influence on German culture, society, and racial thinking that belied its small size. Germany’s role in colonizing Africa has received increased...

As the first substantive account of the birthplace of the Black Panther Party (BPP), Robyn C. Spencer’s The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Duke University Press, 2016) rewrites elitist accounts that narrowly defined the party by its male leaders and masculine militarism. With a panoramic and critical lens on the role that gender politics played in...

Have you ever wondered about your family history, and how family traditions or secrets through the years may affect you, your behavior, and major aspects of your life? Velvet (AuthorHouse, 2013) begins with Ludie, a young, unwed mother escaping reality down a dusty Southern road. Author Holly Charles also found a way to escape reality; or, rather, found a means to cope with reality years ago when...

There has been much discussion recently in the United States about the contentious recent presidential election. Along with the election results, there has also been an increased interest in the so-called “fake news” stories spread on social media as well as on the emergence of the “Alt Right” movement in the past few years. Many scholars and historians have begun to look to the past for compariso...

Zombifying a Nation: Race, Gender and the Haitian Loas on Screen (McFarland, 2016) dwells on the intersections of memory, history, and cultural production in both Africa and the African diaspora. The figure of the zombie that entered the popular imagination with the publication of William Seabrook’s book The Magic Island (1929) during the American occupation of Haiti still holds cultural currency...

Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. In 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One man was dragged from a jail cell and lynched on the town square, two teenagers were hung after a one-d...

The real story behind the origin of gangsta rap is difficult to discern. Between the bombastic rhetoric and imagery, the larger-than-life characters, and the subsequent success of many of the individuals, it is hard to know exactly what to believe. Ben Westhoff’s new book, Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur and the Birth of West Coast Rap (Hachette Books...

Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She was born in India and received her Ph. D from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. Her book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016) centers the role of African Americans in ending slavery in the US by detailing the actions they took...

When and where do African American religions begin? Sylvester Johnson, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Religious Studies at Northwestern University, disrupts the traditional temporal and geographical boundaries in the academic study of black religion in the Americas in his new book, African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge University...

Timothy S. Huebner, the Irma O. Sternberg Professor of History at Rhodes College in Memphis, has written Liberty & Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism (University Press of Kansas, 2016), a one-volume history of the constitutional debates regarding slavery and sovereignty from the Declaration of Independence through the end of Reconstruction. Huebner brings together three strand...

Born just five years after the abolition of slavery, W. E. B. Du Bois died the night before Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech at the March on Washington in 1963. In the many decades between, W. E. B. Du Bois contributed as much to the political and social advancement of African Americans as any other figure in history. W. E. B. Du Bois: Revolutionary Across the Color Line...

The remarkable story of Henry Ossian Flipper, a young man born into slavery on the eve of the Civil War, and his struggle for recognition left its mark on our nations history. Through extensive research of military documents, court records, appeals, and from Flippers personal journals and published papers, Henry Ossian Flipper: West Point’s First Black Graduate (Wild Horse Press, 2015) captures th...

Runaway slave Sojourner Truth gained fame in the nineteenth century as an abolitionist, feminist, and orator and earned a living partly by selling photographic carte de visite portraits of herself at lectures and by mail. Cartes de visite, similar in format to calling cards, were relatively inexpensive collectibles that quickly became a new mode of mass communication. Despite being illiterate, Tru...

The 2016 election cycle will be remembered as one for the history books. Many people are left asking questions as to what happened to lead to such an expected outcome, while still others are left wondering after such a tumultuous and divisive campaign season what is next. There were a significant number of African American religious and political leaders who emerged during this presidential campai...

Why is it controversial to cast light-skinned actress Zoe Saldana as the lead character in a film about the performer Nina Simone? How should we understand the coexisting desire and revulsion of the black body that traces its roots to Thomas Jefferson’s longstanding relationship with his slave Sally Hemings and extends to contemporary attitudes towards black hair? In Black is Beautiful: A Philosop...

Now in its fifth printing of a very short life, Ashaki Jackson’s Surveillance examines the relationship between acts of violence, the witnessing of violence, the witnessing of the witnessing of violence, and the internalization of all three. Media offers no escape from trauma, instead it creates a cyclical nature where the traumatized are re-traumatized and forced to live out fear after dread afte...

Patrick Moynihan’s Report on the Negro Family was a seminal document in Great Society-era racial politics and public policy. Join us as we talk with Susan Greenbaum about her new book, Blaming the Poor: The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images about Poverty (Rutgers University Press, 2015), which chronicles the lasting legacy of The Moynihan Report and the ways in which housing, crim...

LaShawn Harris is an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University. Sex Workers, Psychics and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy, (University of Illinois Press, 2016) offers a colorful look at the lives of black urban women who worked and lived in the space between the legitimate and illegal economy. Her subjects are women not previously considered in...

In his new book The Defender: How The Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), Ethan Michaeli charts the riveting history of the Chicago Defender, one of the nation’s longest running and most significant black periodicals. Founded in 1905 by publisher Robert S. Abbott, the Defender came to play a central role in regional and national black politics; drawing Afri...

Savage Portrayals: Race, Media, and the Central Park Jogger Story (Temple University Press, 2014) offers a timely reminder of how racial bias and prejudice continue to shape political perspectives and dominant media narratives. Drawing on her unique experience as a journalist covering the case, Natalie Byfield explores the media response to and framing of the Central Park Jogger case which gained...

Dr. Damien M. Sojoyner, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, joins the New Books Network to discuss his recently published book, entitled First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Through both ethnographic and historical analyses, First Strike explores the tragic relationship between education and the pr...

Thomas Aiello is associate professor of history and African American studies at Valdosta State University. In The Battle for the Souls of Black Folk: W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and the Debate that Shaped the Course of Civil Rights (ABC-CLIO, 2016) Aiello focuses on the conversation between Washington and Du Bois in order to fully examine its contours. The book serves as both a document...

In Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2016), Jack Hamilton examines major American and British recording artists of the 1960s to explain what happened during the decade to turn rock-n-roll white. By pairing musicians such as Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan or The Beatles and Motown, Hamilton explores the connections among artists and how artists influ...

Elizabeth Reich is an assistant professor of film studies at Connecticut College in New London. Militant Visions: Black Soldiers, Internationalism, and the Transformation of American Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2016) examines how, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the cinematic figure of the black soldier helped change the ways American moviegoers saw black men, for the first time presenting Afri...