New Books in African American Studies

When she emerged triumphant in a legal battle with the Texas beef industry, Oprah Winfrey took to the steps of the Amarillo court house and declared: “Free speech rocks!” She was likely a little less enthusiastic about the First Amendment following the publication of Kitty Kelley‘s unauthorized book Oprah: A Biography, which is now out in paperback. The match-up of the daytime television queen and...

Daniel Sharfstein‘s The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin Press, 2011) is the latest and perhaps best book in the growing genre of neo-passing narratives. The Invisible Line easily rests between Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and Blis Broyard’s One Drop, though it is different and in ways richer than both. Part American history, part legal a...

Hip-hop has, within a short time span, moved from a free-flowing expression of urban youth to a global–and highly marketable–musical genre. Its influence in culture, fashion, film, and music is ubiquitous, and theories about hip-hop’s importance in the political sphere abound. But what, exactly, is the relationship between hip-hop and politics? Does hip-hop influence the expression and formation o...

In his new book, The Agony of Masculinity: Race, Gender, and Education in the Age of the “New” Racism and Patriarchy (Peter Lang, 2010), Pierre Orelus analyzes the “heartfelt stories of fifty men of African descent who vary in age, social class, family status, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, and ability” (1). One of the purposes of the book is to allow black men to share how they both...

There are beautiful sports photos, and dramatic sports photos. There are sports photos that are funny, and others that are poignant. There are photos that capture athletic brilliance, and tenacity, and passion. But there are few images from the modern history of sports that have transcended the games, photos that have inspired and provoked those with little interest in athletics. Perhaps the only...

In his new bookActing White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010), former White House aide Ron Christie recounts the history of the pejorative term “acting white.” He traces its lineage from the present day through the Black Power movement back to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, unraveling a fascinating history in the process. In our interview, we talked about Ron’s experiences as an...

With the NBA in the midst of a labor disagreement, players from the world’s premier basketball league are scattering in different directions to maintain their skills (and get paid). This past summer, a number of NBA players returned to their roots, so to speak, by playing in summer leagues in places like DC, LA, New York, and Baltimore. For many black players who grew up in big cities, summer leag...

When I was an undergraduate, I noticed that there were certain books that seemed to be unavoidable (at least at my liberal arts college). They were assigned in many classes, and they were discussed in many others. Reading them seemed to be a secret requirement for graduation. These “liberal-arts essentials” included Plato’s Republic, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Lockes’ Two Treatises on Government...

Is comedian and cultural critic Bill Cosby right–that black youth suffer from a cultural pathology that leads them to commit more crimes than their white counterparts? Is the remedy to the high rate of offending by African American men the “shape up or get shipped out” perspective? Is there more to African American offending than poor parenting or lousy schools? James D. Unnever is the co-author (...

Miriam Thaggert’s study Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), is an exceptional contribution to the discussion of both modernism and the the period of intense African American artistic production known as the Harlem Renaissance. Black Modernism is particularly invaluable because it explores the techniques, devic...

If a mother raises her biologically male child as a daughter instead of a son, what would be the effects on the family, the community, the church? Indeed what would be the psychosocial, psychoemotional effects on the daughter once she discovers she’s a “he”? And what would all this reveal about the mother? What’s more, would the male-daughter’s brothers, father, friends come to agree with gender p...

It takes a brave historian to take on the orthodoxy regarding the rise and fall of lynching in the United States. That orthodoxy holds that lynching in the South was a ‘system of social control’ in which whites used organized terror to oppress blacks. You can find this thesis in numerous monographs, textbooks, and in the popular press. It’s one of those things “everybody knows.” But according to R...

In his new book Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (Columbia University Press, 2008), Houston A. Baker makes the argument that many contemporary black public intellectuals, otherwise known as African American “academostars,” are self-serving individuals who distort the message of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and belie the overall aims of the Civil Ri...

Frank Dobson, Jr.‘s Rendered Invisible: Stories of Blacks and Whites, Love and Death (Plain View Press, 2010) is a single-authored collection of fiction. It includes the opening, gripping novella “Rendered Invisible,” which gives the book its title. That’s followed by five notable short stories: “Black Messiahs Die,” about a black college basketball player who is murdered by police officers; “Home...

Deborah Whaley’s new book Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities (SUNY Press, 2010) may be the first full-length study of a Black Greek-Letter Organization (BGLO) written by a non-BGLO member. But that’s not the only reason to read her book. Whaley takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study, which includes a personal ruminat...

UPDATE: Nikky Finney’s Head Off and Split has been named a finalist for a National Book Award. Congratulations, Nikky, from the folks at New Books in African American Studies and the New Books Network!) Poet Nikky Finney’s new book Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011) has made an immediate splash, receiving well-deserved critical acclaim from the literary world...

With the election of Barack Obama, the first U.S. president of African descent, many people believed that America had ushered in an era of post-racial harmony. Harvey Young is not one of them. When it comes to the racial experience of black people, particularly, though not exclusively, of black men, Young takes James Baldwin’s sage advice: “Take no one’s word for anything, including mine–but trust...

When I arrived at college in the early 1980s, drugs were cool, music was cool, and drug-music was especially cool. The coolest of the cool drug-music bands was The Velvet Underground. They were from the mean streets of New York City (The Doors were from the soft parade of L.A….); they hung out with Andy Warhol (The Beatles hung out with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi…); they had a female drummer (The Grate...

How can those in African, Africana, and African American Studies strengthen their disciplinary ties? What do these connections have to do with Kwasi Konadu‘s recent study The Akan Diaspora in the Americas (Oxford 2010)? How can the scholarship produced in African, Africana, and African American Studies serve the interests of people of African descent across the globe? Indeed, how can the history o...

I think this is really interesting. Among the thousands of iconic and easily recognizable photographs of segregated water fountains in the American South, you will almost never find one that features a black woman, a white woman or a white man drinking. They are nearly all of black men drinking. Why is that? In her fine and thoughtful book Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (Unive...

Many scholars consider August Wilson to be the premier American playwright of the 20th Century. Alan Nadel is surely one of their number. In the early 1990s, he focused our attention on Wilson’s plays in the outstanding collection of essays May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson (University of Iowa Press, 1993). Since the publication of that work, Wilson completed his...

I used to live in Washington DC, not far from a place I learned to call the “U Street Corridor.” I really had no idea why it was a “corridor” (most places in DC are just “streets”) or why a lot of folks seemed to make a big deal out if it. Don’t get me wrong. It was nice. There are coffee shops, jazz clubs, and the place is full of beautiful late Victorian architecture. But I confess I really didn...

One of the great “grey” areas of World War I historiography concerns the African-American experience. Even as the war was ending, white historians, participants, and politicians strove to limit the record of the African-American soldiers’ participation, while also casting the standard narrative of the war as a white American crusade against German militarism. The rich experience of the African-Ame...

Schizophrenia is a real, frightening, debilitating disease. But what are we to make of the fact that several studies show that African Americans are two to three times more likely than white Americans to be diagnosed with this malady, and that black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean are six to nine times more likely to be judged schizophrenic than other residents of the United States. Is th...

Why did Reconstruction fail? Why didn’t the post-war Federal government protect the civil rights of the newly freed slaves? And why did it take Washington almost a century to intercede on the behalf of beleaguered, oppressed African Americans in the South? In a terrific new book, Charles Lane explains why. The Day Freedom Died. The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruc...