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
Elizabeth McRae, “Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy” (Oxford UP, 2017)
Much attention has been drawn to the role of white women in the recent Alabama senate election and the earlier election of Donald J. Trump as president…
- New Books in African American Studies
Kay Wright Lewis, “A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World” (U. Georgia Press, 2017)
In her new book, A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World (University of Georgia Press, 2017), Howard…
- New Books in African American Studies
Corey D. Fields, “Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans” (UC Press, 2016)
What is it about Black Republicans that makes them fodder for comedy? How do Black Republicans view their participation in their political group? Corey D…
- New Books in African American Studies
Ashley D. Farmer, “Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era” (UNC Press, 2017)
Black Power was one of the most iconic movements of the twentieth century. Recent documentary treatments like The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 in 2011 and The…
- New Books in African American Studies
Patrick Breen, “The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt” (Oxford UP, 2015)
How did African-American slaves react to slavery? What factors, particularly religion, might shape those reactions, even making them violent? Patrick Breen, in…
- New Books in African American Studies
Sowande Mustakeem, “Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage” (U. Illinois Press, 2016)
Most scholars and members of the public believe the process of enslavement was confined to the Western Hemispheric plantation or other locations of…
- New Books in African American Studies
Nikki M. Taylor, “Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio” (Ohio U. Press, 2016)
You may know Toni Morrison’s famed novel Beloved, but do you know much about the true story of the woman depicted in that story? You will know about the real…
- New Books in African American Studies
Stephane Robolin, “Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African American and South African Writing” (U. Illinois Press, 2015)
Writers have long created networks and connections by exchanging letters or writing back to one another in their poetry and fiction. Letters between Ernest…
- New Books in African American Studies
Michelle Kuo, “Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, A Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship” (Random House, 2017)
It takes courage to walk into a classroom when students don’t look like you. It takes courage to return every day to teach a class when students devalue…
- New Books in African American Studies
Melissa Milewski, “Litigating Across the Color Line: Civil Cases between Black and White Southerners from the End of Slavery to the Civil Rights Era” (Oxford UP, 2017)
Drawing on materials from archives in eight southern US states, Melissa Milewski’s Litigating Across the Color Line: Civil Cases Between Black and White…
- New Books in African American Studies
David Goldstein, “Alley-Oop To Aliyah: African American Hoopsters in The Holy Land” (Skyhorse Publishing, 2017)
Today we are joined by David A. Goldstein, author of the book Alley-Oop To Aliyah: African American Hoopsters in The Holy Land (Skyhorse Publishing, 2017.)…
- New Books in African American Studies
Martha J. Cutter, “The Illustrated Slave: Empathy, Graphic Narratives, and the Visual Culture of the Transatlantic Abolition Movement, 1800-1853” (U. Georgia Press, 2017)
Slavery as a system of torture and bondage has fascinated the optical imagination of the transatlantic world for centuries. Scholars have examined various…
- New Books in African American Studies
James Forman Jr., “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017)
In this podcast I talk with James Forman Jr. about his book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). Mass…
- New Books in African American Studies
Lisa M. Corrigan, “Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation” (U. Press of Mississippi, 2016)
In the black liberation movement, imprisonment emerged as a key rhetorical, theoretical, and media resource. Imprisoned activists developed tactics and…
- New Books in African American Studies
Steve Sheinkin, “The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights” (Roaring Brook, 2014)
On July 17, 1944, a massive explosion rocked the segregated Navy base at Port Chicago, California, killing more than 300 sailors who were at the docks…
- New Books in African American Studies
Vincent J. Intondi, “African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement” (Stanford UP, 2015)
For the first time, African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement (Stanford University Press, 2015) tells…
- New Books in African American Studies
Anne C. Bailey, “The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History” (Cambridge UP, 2017)
Contemporary conversations and debates over Confederate monuments underline how memory-making and the legacies of U.S. slavery and the Civil War remains raw…
- New Books in African American Studies
Sarah Haley, “No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity” (UNC Press, 2016)
Recent popular and scholarly interest has highlighted the complex and brutal system of mass incarceration in the United States. Much of this interest has…
- New Books in African American Studies
Ben H. Winters, “Underground Airlines” (Mulholland Books, 2016)
Underground Airlines (Mulholland Books, 2016) is a ground-breaking novel, a wickedly imaginative thriller, and a story of an America that is more like our own…
- New Books in African American Studies
Keri Leigh Merritt, “Masterless Men: Poor Whites in the Antebellum South” (Cambridge UP, 2017)
Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Masterless Men: Poor Whites in the Antebellum South (Cambridge University Press, 2017) reveals what happens to…
- New Books in African American Studies
Beverly Jenkins, “Chasing Down a Dream: A Blessings Novel” (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2017)
The Blessings Series continue with a heartwarming novel, Chasing Down a Dream (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2017), about what makes a family when trials test…
- New Books in African American Studies
Joanna Dee Das, “Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora” (Oxford UP, 2017)
By drawing on a vast, never-utilized trove of archival materials along with oral histories, choreographic analysis, and embodied research, Katherine Dunham…
- New Books in African American Studies
Johari Jabir, “Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War’s ‘Gospel Army'” (Ohio State UP, 2017)
What is the labor for Black soldiers of the regiment? That is the question Johari Jabir asks in his book Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil…
- New Books in African American Studies
Juilet Hooker, “Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos” (Oxford UP, 2017)
In 1845 two thinkers from the American hemisphere – the Argentinean statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and the fugitive ex-slave, abolitionist leader, and…
- New Books in African American Studies
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, “Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris between the Two World Wars (SUNY Press, 2015)
When Dorothy Sterling wrote her book about nineteenth-century black women in America, she stated in the introduction that the book was not a definitive history…
- New Books in African American Studies
Mitch Kachun, “First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory” (Oxford UP, 2017)
First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory (Oxford University Press, 2017) explores how Crispus Attucks’ death in the 1770 Boston Massacre led…
- New Books in African American Studies
Marcia Walker-McWilliams, “Reverend Addie: Faith and the Fight for Labor, Gender, and Racial Equality (U. Illinois Press, 2016)
Addie Wyatt stands at the intersection of unionism, feminism, and civil rights activism in post-World War II America. In Reverend Addie Wyatt: Faith and the…
- New Books in African American Studies
Tanya Ann Kennedy, “Historicizing Post-Discourses: Postfeminism and Postracialism in United States Culture” (SUNY Press, 2017)
Tanya Ann Kennedy‘s book, Historicizing Post-Discourses: Postfeminism and Postracialism in United States Culture (SUNY Press, 2017), is a complex and important…
- New Books in African American Studies
Rosalind Rosenberg, “Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray” (Oxford UP, 2017)
Rosalind Rosenberg‘s book Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a multi-layered and rich biography of Pauli Murray, an…
- New Books in African American Studies
Tommy J. Curry, “The Man-Not: Race, Class, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood” (Temple UP, 2017)
The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press, 2017) is a book-length justification for the burgeoning field of…
- New Books in African American Studies
Ira Dworkin, “Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State” (UNC Press, 2017)
In his 1903 hit “Congo Love Song,” James Weldon Johnson recounts a sweet if seemingly generic romance between two young Africans. While the song’s title may…
- New Books in African American Studies
Patricia Spears Jones, “A Lucent Fire: New and Collected Poems” (White Pines Press, 2015)
Jackson Poetry Prize Winner Speaks Patricia Spears Jones has been writing poetry since she was twenty and then she was “good.” Today, the prolific poet is the…
- New Books in African American Studies
Leigh Fought, “Women in the World of Frederick Douglass” (Oxford UP, 2017)
Leigh Fought is an assistant professor of history at Le Moyne College. Her book Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (Oxford University Press, 2017) offers…
- New Books in African American Studies
Max Krochmal, “Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era” (UNC, 2016)
Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) is about the “other” Texas, not…
- New Books in African American Studies
Marlene Banks, “Ruth’s Redemption” (Lift Every Voice, 2012)
It’s A Love Story. Set in the 1800s, Ruth’s Redemption (Lift Every Voice, 2012), is an unusual depiction of the lives of slaves and free blacks in pre-Civil…
- New Books in African American Studies
Brittney C. Cooper, “Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women” (U. Illinois Press, 2017)
Dr. Brittney C. Cooper, who is an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, explores the intellectual genealogy and geography of…
- New Books in African American Studies
Jeanine Michna-Bales, “Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2017)
When the Sun comes back And the first quail calls Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd. For the old man is a-waiting for to carry you to freedom If you follow the…
- New Books in African American Studies
Michelle D. Commander, “Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic” (Duke UP, 2017)
In Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Duke University Press, 2017), Michelle D. Commander examines the (im)possibility of…
- New Books in African American Studies
Kathy Wilson Florence, “Jaybird’s Song” (Kathy Wilson Florence, 2017)
Josie Flint, known as Jaybird, narrates her story of life in Atlanta during the turbulent South as Jim Crow laws come to an end. Her school desegregates. The…
- New Books in African American Studies
Michael W. Twitty, “The Cooking Gene: A Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South” (Amistad, 2017)
The “ownership” of Southern food is a divisive cultural issue, reflective of the ongoing struggle for racial justice in America. Michael Twitty shares with us…
- New Books in African American Studies
Tom Adam Davies, “Mainstreaming Black Power” (U. Cal Press, 2017)
What is Black Power? Does it still exist in the so-called post-racial 21st Century? How does Black Power relate to similar movements, like Black Lives Matter?…
- New Books in African American Studies
Shelvy Haywood Keglar, “Underdog to Top Dog: An Improbable Rise” (IBJ, 2017)
Most psychology books are written by experts with knowledge deriving from professional experience–for which we are grateful. Occasionally, a psychologist…
- New Books in African American Studies
John P. Langellier, “Fighting for Uncle Sam: Buffalo Soldiers in the Frontier Army” (Schiffer, 2016)
From the American Revolution to the present day, African Americans have stepped forward in their nation’s defense. Fighting for Uncle Sam: Buffalo Solders in…
- New Books in African American Studies
Bruce D. Haynes and Syma Solovitch, “Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family” (Columbia UP, 2017)
Public scholarship takes many forms, from op-eds to activism to blog posts. In their new book, Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family…
- New Books in African American Studies
Paul Youngquist, “A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism” (U. Texas Press, 2016)
The legendary band leader Sun Ra said he came from Saturn. Known on Earth for his inventive music and extravagant stage shows, he pioneered free-form…
- New Books in African American Studies
Christopher Mele, “Race and the Politics of Deception: The Making of an American City” (NYU Press, 2017)
Urban sociologists typically use a few grand narratives to explain the path of the American city through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. These…
- New Books in African American Studies
Britt Rusert, “Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture” (NYU Press, 2017)
Traversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African…
- New Books in African American Studies
Ashon T. Crawley, “Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility” (Fordham UP, 2016)
Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press, 2016) is innovative and lyrical, challenging and beautiful. Ashon Crawley…
- New Books in African American Studies
Melissa L. Cooper, “Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination” (UNC Press, 2017)
Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) is a wide-ranging history that…
- New Books in African American Studies
Stanley Corkin, “Connecting the Wire: Race, Space, and Postindustrial Baltimore” (U. Texas Press, 2017)
Critically acclaimed as one of the best television shows ever produced, the HBO series The Wire (2002-2008) is a landmark event in television history, offering…
- New Books in African American Studies
Sarah Bracey White, “Primary Lessons: A Memoir” (CavanKerry Press, 2013)
As an African-American child growing up in the segregated pre-Civil Rights South, Sarah Bracey White pushed against the social conventions that warned her not…
- New Books in African American Studies
Stafanie Deluca, et.al. “Coming of Age in the Other America” (Russell Sage Foundation, 2016)
Do you think that what poor people most need to escape poverty is grit? Join us as we speak with Stefanie Deluca, co-author, along with Susan Clampet-Lundquist…
- New Books in African American Studies
Samuele F.S. Pardini, “In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen” (Dartmouth, 2017)
In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen (Dartmouth, 2017) emphasizes the…
- New Books in African American Studies
James A. Cosby, “Devil’s Music, Holy Rollers and Hillbillies: How America Gave Birth to Rock and Roll” (McFarland, 2016)
Do you love Rock and Roll or is Rock and Roll music dead? Are you old enough to have put any money in a jukebox to hear your favorite song, watched American…
- New Books in African American Studies
Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, “Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico” (Duke UP, 2015)
Puerto Rico is often depicted as a “racial democracy” in which a history of race mixture has produced a racially harmonious society. In Remixing Reggaeton: The…
- New Books in African American Studies
Marlene Banks, “Son of A Preacher Man” and “Greenwood and Archer” (Lift Every Voice, 2012)
The tragic Tulsa Race Riots plus a smidgeon of romance equals to a compelling historical saga. Marlene Banks weaves fact and fiction together illustrating how…
- New Books in African American Studies
Daina Ramey Berry, “The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation” (Beacon Press, 2017)
A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a…
New Books in African American StudiesRace and Democratic Virtue with Paul C. Taylor
As US politics becomes increasingly driven by divisions, we need some way of sustaining a shared civic life. Paul Taylor makes the case for democratic virtues…
- New Books in African American Studies
Ruth Beckford and Careth Reid, “The Picture Man: From the Collection of Bay Area Photographer E. F. Joseph” (Arcadia, 2017)
From 1927 until his death in 1979, E.F. Joseph documented the daily lives of African Americans in the Bay Area. His images were printed in the Pittsburgh…
- New Books in African American Studies
Mia Mask, “Divas on the Screen: Black Women in American Film” (U. of Illinois Press, 2009)
Five charismatic women navigate uneven terrain of racial gender and class stereotypes: Dorothy Dandridge, Pam Grier, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and Halle…