Shows / New Books in African American Studies
New Books in African American Studies
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in African American Studies
Kathryn Gin Lum, "Heathen: Religion and Race in American History" (Harvard UP, 2022)
In Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022), Kathryn Gin Lum shows how the idea of the “heathen” has been maintained…
- New Books in African American Studies
David Silkenat, "Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South" (Oxford UP, 2022)
They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people found their…
- New Books in African American Studies
Muggsy Bogues and Jake Uitti, "Muggsy: My Life from a Kid in the Projects to the Godfather of Small Ball" (Triumph, 2022)
Growing up, Muggsy Bogues was always told he should do something else, anything besides basketball. He never acknowledged his many doubters except to prove…
New Books in African American StudiesOn Toni Morrison's "Beloved"
In 1987, Toni Morrison published her fourth novel, Beloved, based on the story of Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery with her child. Garner and her…
- New Books in African American Studies
Todd Meyers, "All That Was Not Her" (Duke UP, 2022)
While studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Meyers met a…
- New Books in African American Studies
Aisha Khan, "The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World" (Harvard UP, 2021)
In The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2021), Aisha Khan explores how colonial categories of race and…
- New Books in African American Studies
Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach, "Dream Books and Gamblers: Black Women's Work in Chicago's Policy Game" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
Ubiquitous illegal lotteries known as policy flourished in Chicago's Black community during the overlapping waves of the Great Migration. Policy "queens" owned…
- New Books in African American Studies
Guthrie P. Ramsey, "Who Hears Here?: On Black Music, Pasts and Present" (U California Press, 2022)
Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., is an award-winning musicologist, music historian, composer, and pianist whose prescient theoretical and critical interventions have…
- New Books in African American Studies
Christopher Stuart Taylor, "Flying Fish in the Great White North: The Autonomous Migration of Black Barbadians" (Fernwood, 2016)
Canadians are proud of their multicultural image both at home and abroad. But that image isn t grounded in historical facts. As recently as the 1960s, the…
- New Books in African American Studies
4.5 The Best Error You Can Make: Brent Hayes Edwards and Jean-Baptiste Naudy on Claude McKay
What can a French translator do with a novelist who writes brilliantly about the “confrontation between Englishes?” How can such a confrontation be made…
- New Books in African American Studies
Jeremi Suri, "Civil War by Other Means: America's Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy" (PublicAffairs, 2022)
In 1865, the Confederacy was defeated, but the military victory did not end the tensions of the war or signal acceptance of a new, more equal nation. In Civil…
- New Books in African American Studies
Matthew Delmont, "Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad" (Viking, 2022)
Today I talked to Matthew Delmont about his new book Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (Viking, 2022)…
- New Books in African American Studies
Elizabeth Drame et al., "The Resistance, Persistence and Resilience of Black Families Raising Children with Autism" (Peter Lang, 2020)
The Resistance, Persistence and Resilience of Black Families Raising Children with Autism (Peter Lang, 2020) presents nuanced perspectives in the form of…
- New Books in African American Studies
Sarah Quesada, "The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2022) unearths a buried African archive within widely-read Latinx writers…
- New Books in African American Studies
Sam W. Haynes, "Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas" (Basic Books, 2022)
The Texas Revolution has long been cast as an epic episode in the origins of the American West. As the story goes, larger-than-life figures like Sam Houston…
- New Books in African American Studies
Mario Nisbett, "The Workings of Diaspora: Jamaican Maroons and the Claims to Sovereignty" (Lexington Books, 2021)
Engaging the past, the present, and the future, The Workings of Diaspora: Jamaican Maroons and the Claims to Sovereignty (Lexington Books, 2021) shows how the…
- New Books in African American Studies
Ross Cole, "The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination" (U California Press, 2021)
In The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (U California Press, 2021), Ross Cole revisits the remarkable upswell of interest in folk songs in…
- New Books in African American Studies
Guy Lancaster, "American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching" (U Arkansas Press, 2021)
Lynching is often viewed as a narrow form of violence: either the spontaneous act of an angry mob against accused individuals, or a demonstration of white…
- New Books in African American Studies
Jose O. Fernandez, "Against Marginalization: Convergences in Black and Latinx Literatures" (Ohio State UP, 2022)
In Against Marginalization: Convergences in Black and Latinx Literatures (Ohio State University Press, 2022), Jose O. Fernandez examines thematic, aesthetic…
- New Books in African American Studies
Kelisha B. Graves, ed., "Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Documentary Portrait of an Early Civil Rights Pioneer, 1900-1959" (U Notre Dame Press, 2019)
Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879-1961) is just one of the many African American intellectuals whose work has long been excluded from the literary canon. In her…
- New Books in African American Studies
Lynn M. Hudson, "West of Jim Crow: The Fight Against California's Color Line" (U Illinois Press, 2020)
California was born "under the shadow of slavery," writes Lynn Hudson, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In West of Jim Crow: The…
- New Books in African American Studies
Dan Immergluck, "Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First-Century Atlanta" (U California Press, 2022)
Atlanta, the capital of the American South, is at the red-hot core of expansion, inequality, and political relevance. In recent decades, central Atlanta has…
- New Books in African American Studies
Kenyon Gradert, "Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
Modern imagination of the Puritans typically casts them in a repressive, conservative light. But that wasn't always the case. Abolitionist activists in the…
- New Books in African American Studies
Kwame Edwin Otu, "Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana" (U California Press, 2022)
Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana (University of California Press, 2022) is an ethnographic study…
- New Books in African American Studies
On Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin"
By the early 19th century, slavery was still a brutal reality in southern U.S. states, and a growing movement to abolish slavery nationwide was taking hold. In…
- New Books in African American Studies
Scott Bukatman, "Black Panther" (U Texas Press, 2022)
Black Panther was the first Black superhero in mainstream American comics. Black Panther was a cultural phenomenon that broke box office records. Yet it wasn’t…
- New Books in African American Studies
David Weinfeld, "An American Friendship: Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, and the Development of Cultural Pluralism" (Cornell UP, 2022)
In An American Friendship: Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, and the Development of Cultural Pluralism (Cornell UP, 2022), David Weinfeld presents the biography of…
- New Books in African American Studies
Patricia A. Turner, "Trash Talk: Anti-Obama Lore and Race in the Twenty-First Century" (U California Press, 2022)
Barack Obama and his family have been the objects of rumors, legends, and conspiracy theories unprecedented in US politics. Outbreaks of anti-Obama lore have…
- New Books in African American Studies
Radicalism, Humility, and Racism in America
Today’s episode focuses on the new book by Lydia Moland, who is a Professor of Philosophy at Colby College. Her book, Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American…
- New Books in African American Studies
Charles Sawyer, "B. B. King: From Indianola to Icon: A Personal Odyssey with the 'King of the Blues'" (Schiffer Publishing, 2022)
Want to take a trip with the king of the Blues? As B.B. King’s photographer and original biographer, Charlie Sawyer was along for the ride. In B.B. King from…
- New Books in African American Studies
Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan W. Concannon, "Does Scripture Speak for Itself?: The Museum of the Bible and the Politics of Interpretation" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Is the Bible the unembellished Word of God or the product of human agency? There are different answers to that question. And they lie at the heart of this…
- New Books in African American Studies
Sami Schalk, "Black Disability Politics" (Duke UP, 2022)
In Black Disability Politics (Duke UP, 2022) Sami Schalk explores how issues of disability have been and continue to be central to Black activism from the…
- New Books in African American Studies
Anima Adjepong, "Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra" (UNC Press, 2021)
Beyond simplistic binaries of the dark continent or Africa Rising, Africans at home and abroad articulate their identities through their quotidian practices…
- New Books in African American Studies
Emerald Garner, "Finding My Voice" (Haymarket, 2022)
In this unforgetable memoir, Emerald Garner recounts her father's cruel and unjust murder, the immense pain that followed, the pressures of an exploitative…
- New Books in African American Studies
Kathryn Gin Lum, "Heathen: Religion and Race in American History" (Harvard UP, 2022)
If an eighteenth-century parson told you that the difference between "civilization and heathenism is sky-high and star-far," the words would hardly come as a…
- New Books in African American Studies
Adam Elliott-Cooper, "Black Resistance to British Policing" (Manchester UP, 2021)
As police racism unsettles Britain's tolerant self-image, Black Resistance to British Policing (Manchester UP, 2021) details the activism that made movements…
New Books in African American StudiesOn Trafficking Hadassah and Book of Esther
Ericka Shawndricka Dunbar (she/her/hers) is an adjunct professor at Spelman College (Atlanta, GA) in the Religious Studies Department. She received her Ph.D…
- New Books in African American Studies
NBN Classic: Anne Balay, "Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers" (UNC Press, 2018)
This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. In this multi-layered ethnography that…
- New Books in African American Studies
NBN Classic: Courtney Pace, "Freedom Faith: The Womanist Vision of Prathia Hall" (U Georgia Press, 2019)
This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. Freedom Faith: The Womanist Vision of…
- New Books in African American Studies
Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean, "Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing" (Verso, 2022)
Black Communist women throughout the early to mid-twentieth century fought for and led mass campaigns in the service of building collective power in the fight…
- New Books in African American Studies
NBN Classic: Erica Armstrong Dunbar, "She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman" (37 Ink, 2019)
This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. Harriet Tubman is best known as one of…
- New Books in African American Studies
NBN Classic: Garrett Felber, "Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State" (UNC Press, 2020)
This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. Challenging incarceration and policing…
- New Books in African American Studies
NBN Classic: Alys Eve Weinbaum, "The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of History" (Duke UP, 2019)
This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. In The Afterlife of Reproductive…
- New Books in African American Studies
NBN Classic: Marcia Chatelain, "Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America" (Liveright, 2020)
This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black…
- New Books in African American Studies
Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019)
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is…
- New Books in African American Studies
Charles L. Chavis Jr., "The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)
On December 4, 1931, a mob of white men in Salisbury, Maryland, lynched and set ablaze a twenty-three-year-old Black man named Matthew Williams. His gruesome…
- New Books in African American Studies
Abby L. Goode, "Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability" (UNC Press, 2022)
In this book, Abby L. Goode reveals the foundations of American environmentalism and its enduring connections to racism, eugenics, and agrarian ideals…
- New Books in African American Studies
Kaysha Corinealdi, "Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century" (Duke UP, 2022)
In Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century (Duke UP, 2022), Kaysha Corinealdi traces the multigenerational activism of…
- New Books in African American Studies
Raúl Pérez, "The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy" (Stanford UP, 2022)
Having a "good" sense of humor generally means being able to take a joke without getting offended—laughing even at a taboo thought or at another's expense. The…
- New Books in African American Studies
Aria S. Halliday, "Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture (U Illinois Press, 2022) examines the role American Black women play in Black consumption in the US and…
- New Books in African American Studies
Derek H. Alderman et al., "Remembering Enslavement: Reassembling the Southern Plantation Museum" (U Georgia Press, 2022)
Remembering Enslavement: Reassembling the Southern Plantation Museum (U Georgia Press, 2022) explores plantation museums as sites for contesting and reforming…
- New Books in African American Studies
Jodi Skipper, "Behind the Big House: Reconciling Slavery, Race, and Heritage in the U.S. South" (U Iowa Press, 2022)
When residents and tourists visit sites of slavery, whose stories are told? All too often the lives of slaveowners are centered, obscuring the lives of…
- New Books in African American Studies
Lorgia García Peña, "Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective" (Duke UP, 2022)
In Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (Duke University Press, 2022), Lorgia García Peña considers Black Latinidad in a global…
- New Books in African American Studies
Decoteau Irby, "Stuck Improving: Racial Equity and School Leadership" (Harvard Education Press, 2021)
An incisive case study of changemaking in action, Stuck Improving: Racial Equity and School Leadership (Harvard Education Press, 2021) analyzes the complex…
- New Books in African American Studies
Marcus Nevius on Becoming a Historian, Marronage, Slave Resistance, and More!
Today's episode of "New Books in African American Studies" is special. Why, you might ask? Because today's episode marks my 100th episode on the NBN! To…
- New Books in African American Studies
Aria S. Halliday, "Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
In Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2022), Aria Halliday negotiates the line between "sell out" and "for…
- New Books in African American Studies
John M. Kinder and Jason A. Higgins, "Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)
Wartime military service is held up as a marker of civic duty and patriotism, yet the rewards of veteran status have never been equally distributed. Certain…
- New Books in African American Studies
Kate Phillips, "Bought & Sold: Scotland, Jamaica and Slavery" (Luath Press, 2022)
Bought & Sold: Scotland, Jamaica and Slavery (Luath Press, 2022) by Kate Phillips traces the story of how and why thousands of Scots made money from buying and…
- New Books in African American Studies
E. James West, "Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr." (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)
Journalist, activist, popular historian, and public intellectual, Lerone Bennett Jr. left an indelible mark on twentieth-century American history and culture…
- New Books in African American Studies
Jeroen Dewulf, "Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America's First Black Christians" (U Notre Dame Press, 2022)
Black Christianity in America has long been studied as a blend of indigenous African and Protestant elements. Jeroen Dewulf redirects the conversation by…