New Books In African American Studies

In this episode, we speak with Vernon Keeve III about his book Southern Migrant Mixtape (Nomadic Press, 2018), a collection published by Nomadic Press. Memoir comes in many forms, be it poetry or prose. Keeve’s work is a bridge between both worlds. In a manner that is simultaneously universal and intimate, his book is an unflinching view at what it is to be black, queer, disenfranchised, jubilant, and resilient. Via his deft pen, Keeve turns his focus on how his own personal history is deeply connected to, and is bolstered by, the black experience in society. It is via this collection, Keeve hopes to create a legacy for the story of his family, his culture, and the future. As he writes in “The decomposition of Emmett,” There is a dis- ease in the land. This collection dissects the diss, the unease, and the sickness of American generations as a means of healing and reconciliation. Born and raised in Northeast Ohio, Athena Dixon is a poet, essayist, and editor. She is Founder of Linden Avenue Literary J

Billie Holiday is one of the most iconic jazz performers of all time. Her voice is certainly unmistakable but for many her religious sensibilities may be invisible. In Religion Around Billie Holiday (Penn State University Press, 2018), Tracy Fessenden, Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University, delineates the religious worlds that shaped Holiday and her music. Fessenden takes the reader through Holiday’s short but full life by placing it within the contexts of Catholicism, black vernacular music, Jazz compositions, and the culture of American celebrity. She shows how race, gender, and religious conditions guided her sound and formed the prism through which her genius shone. In our conversation we discussed Holiday’s early Catholic formation, the Jewishness of the American songbook, Afro-Protestant notions of redemption, confessional performance, the eclectic religious orbits of her jazz contemporaries, Strange Fruit and the vigilante faith of some

How does one show empathy towards someone across racial lines?  In her new book Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) Dr. Alisha Gaines analyzes the history of sympathetic whites “becoming” temporarily black (often going beyond simple “blackface”) to understand (and explain to their peers) what it was “like” to be black in America.  Dr. Gaines details the limits of racial empathy and vouches, rather, for an anti-racist sensibility for those seeking to work on behalf of oppressed people everywhere. Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and  Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Following a historic election, we return again to the question of turnout. Who turned out in large numbers to shift power in the House back to the Democrats? What we know about the past is that there are substantial gaps in turnout between different groups. White Americans have turned out in larger numbers that many other racial and ethnic groups. This much is well-know, but what explains these gaps? Is it political interest, barrier to voting, or something else? Such is the focus of Bernard Fraga’s new book The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Fraga is assistant professor of political science at Indiana University. Fraga finds that the common explanations don’t always hold up when you examine rigorous data and use advanced methods. He argues for a theory of electoral influence based on the relative size of the racial and ethnic population in a voting district. In districts where minority groups make up a relatively small po

Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past (Rutgers University Press, 2018), edited by Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, is a collection of essays about Lin Manuel Miranda’s hit musical, Hamilton. The show has taken Broadway and much of the United States by storm and is currently running on the West End in London as well. The popular interest in Alexander Hamilton prompted by the show’s success has generated new museum exhibits, numerous hot takes in the media, and even a successful effort to preserve Hamilton’s likeness on the ten dollar bill. The essays in this collection take on some of the questions and issues raised by the musical and its popularity. Some of the authors comment on the ways that Miranda’s interpretation of American history diverges from many historians’ understandings, while others take him to task for his portrayals of women and slavery. Miranda’s decision to cast non-white actors in most of the roles also comes under scrutiny in several essays. A

The familiar narrative of American business development begins in the industrial North, where paternalistic factory owners, committed to a kind of Protestant ethic, scaled up their operations into ‘total institutions’—an effort to forestall labor turnover by providing housing and fulfilling community needs. Many of these firms were, of course, dependent on the availability of cotton from the South where, as Caitlin C. Rosenthal argues, modern management practices were expanded and refined through experimentation with enslaved workers. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Harvard University Press, 2018) resituates the development of scientific record-keeping and labor optimization practices within the Atlantic slave trade. The book pays close attention to how sophisticated reporting practices, emerging from the standard record books that circulated throughout the Atlantic world, allowed planters to rate and categorize enslaved people in a generalizable way. The book is an invitation to rethink the g

The eight elite institutions that comprise the Ivy League, sometimes known as the Ancient Eight—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell—are American stalwarts that have profoundly influenced history and culture by producing the nation’s and the world’s leaders. The few black students who attended Ivy League schools in the decades following WWII not only went on to greatly influence black America and the nation in general, but unquestionably awakened these most traditional and selective of American spaces. In the twentieth century, black youth were in the vanguard of the black freedom movement and educational reform. In Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League (NYU Press, 2018), historian Stefan Bradley illuminates how the Black Power movement, which was borne out of an effort to edify the most disfranchised of the black masses, also took root in the hallowed halls of America’s most esteemed institutions of higher education. Between the close of W

The role of the artist in the cause of Black freedom has been a hotly debated topic for generations now. Dr. Jonathan Shandell’s The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era (University of Iowa Press, 2018) focuses the American Negro Theatre, located in Harlem, New York, to argue that the stories told in the theatre transformed and expanded how Black life was and would be portrayed. Ultimately, Shandell shows that the American Negro Theatre was a formative space for many Black artists who ended up shaping the Civil Rights Movement, as well as American popular culture as a whole. Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and  Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

The story of Muslims in America has primarily been told through the experiences of men and often revolves around narratives of immigration. Sylvia Chan-Malik, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, expands upon and challenges this scholarly pattern in Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam (NYU Press, 2018). Chan-Malik centers Black Muslim women’s involvement in U.S. communities and the various spaces of social identity that are frequently ignored in scholarship. Crucial to her analysis is how social racial-religious formation informs both lived religion and how Muslim women are represented in public. “Being Muslim,” therefore, can be variously embodied in Black Muslim womanhood. Through an episodic exploration of Islam in twentieth and twenty-first century America Chan-Malik demonstrates the crucial ways race, gender, and religion intersect. In our conversation we discussed the “blackness” of American Islam, the Ahmadiyya Move

Austin, Texas has a reputation as a vibrant, youthful capital city buoyed economically and culturally by the University of Texas. In City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Andrew M. Busch argues that this identity was consciously constructed over the course of the twentieth century and came at a price. Busch, an assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies at Coastal Carolina University, uses a bevy of promotional material and other municipal records to credibly argue that Austin’s image as a city of “industry without smokestacks” appealed to white-collar knowledge workers after World War II was a racially coded message that shaped the city’s racial geography. Environmental racism revolving around water rights, noise pollution, gasoline farms, and segregated public space all shaped Austin’s history and continue to do so up to today. City in a Garden is a wonderfully interdisciplinary history that cri

In Barbaric Culture and Black Critique: Black Antislavery Writers, Religion, and the Slaveholding Atlantic (University of Virginia Press, 2015), Dr. Stefan M. Wheelock analyses a little-discussed episode in the the late Enlightenment, namely, criticism of slavery by black writers such as Ottabah Cuguano, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, and Maria Stewart. These authors marshaled a variety of religious and secular arguments to attack bondage and, in so doing, promoted important ideas concerning democracy, Christianity, freedom, and their race’s role in all of these projects. Adam McNeil is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

The New Negro Movement is typically seen as a Harlem-based project. Dr. Treva Lindsey’s important book, Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington D.C. (University of Illinois Press, 2017), however, challenges the centrality of Harlem to the movement. Dr. Lindsey considers how important institutions like Howard University were pivotal centers where Black women fought against gender oppression and institutional restrictions. Washington D.C., simultaneously, was emerging as an essential space for Black women artists to develop their talents in ways also seen in Harlem. Ultimately, Dr. Lindsey centers Washington D.C. as just as important a cultural center to the New Negro Movement as Harlem. Adam McNeil is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In the wake of the bloody Civil War, millions of slaves were emancipated. How did those freed slaves, along with African Americans freed before the Civil War, interpret this new post-war world? Dr. Matthew Harper’s The End of Days: African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) answers this question and others by chronicling how Black North Carolinians, through their robust Christian denominational culture, biblically interpreted the world made anew by the Civil War. Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

At the heart of Laila Amine’s book is a crucial question: where is Paris? This question may be surprising for anyone who can readily point to the French capital on a map. Geography is, after all stable, is it not? Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) shows that space and place are anything but stable. Amine focuses on the literal margins of Paris, and on the literary and artistic works that are produced in or about those margins. Rather than reproduce the well-worn trope of the banlieue, the outskirts of Paris, as a tragic space whose inhabitants are unable to integrate so-called French values, Amine carefully examines the work of writers and artists who have engaged with the space and have produced pointed critiques of structural inequality and the legacy of colonialism that calls into question traditional French narratives of cultural and religious alterity. Postcolonial Paris makes the rare and much-needed move of reading across the works of N

The links between African Americans and the global struggle for decolonization, particularly in Africa are well-documented. Facing similar kinds of repression that were rooted in systemic racism and the denial of political rights, Pan-Africanism became one expression of a transnational fight for equality. The first Pan-African Conference was held in 1900 in London, and in the wake of World War II, the joint struggles for civil rights in the United States and political independence from European powers heated up. Nicholas Grant’s Winning Our Freedoms Together: African Americans and Apartheid, 1945–1960 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) builds on the earlier work of scholars by focusing in closely on the connections between U.S. activists and black South Africans facing dual repression from anticommunism and racist regimes. Grant begins by describing the factors that drove the U.S. government and South African governments together. Increasing financial investment in South Africa by American businessme

Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (Oxford, 2017) is a dramatic and vibrant story of a little-known Kentucky school, the Choctaw Academy. Christina Snyder, McCabe-Greer Professor of History at Penn State University, argues that this short-lived institution represented both the promise of a multi-ethnic American society, as well as the withering of that dream during the era of Jacksonian Democracy and Indian Removal. Snyder presents several characters, including the Choctaw scion Peter Pitchlynn, the enslaved nurse and sometime-plantation overseer Julia Chinn, and her mate and master, Vice President Richard M. Johnson. Each person’s story (as well as several others) underscores the complicated hierarchies of race and class in antebellum America, as their histories intertwine with that of the Choctaw Academy and its students. Winner of the 2018 Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, Great Crossings is a richly told and thickly researched tale that upends

How do schools empower but also potentially emasculate young black men? In his new book, Black Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Public Schools (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), Freeden Blume Oeur uses observational and interview methods to better understand the lived experiences of young black men in two all-male schools. Situating the book in “privilege, power, and politics” (p. 7), Blume Oeur encourages the reader to think beyond typical narratives around race and masculinity. The book elaborates on how the two all-male school come to be, structurally — through policies like No Child Left Behind, but also theoretically–through narratives of racial uplift and resilience. Blume Oeur explores gender dynamics in the schools as well, addressing issues like contradictory discourses around girls as competition or distraction, as well as the “adultification” of young black men.  Overall, this book encourages the reader to think beyond traditional narratives, think more about the “hidden

Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man is a milestone of American literature and the idea of invisibility has become a key way for understanding social marginalization. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology (NYU Press, 2017), M. Cooper Harriss, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University, explores the theological dimensions of invisibility within the intersection of race, religion, and secularism through the life and literary career of Ralph Ellison. Harris places Invisible Man and its reception within its contemporary context of literary and theological inquiry. Pairing this with a genealogy of Ellison’s proximity to religious scholars and writers reveals how his secular accounts are steeped in theological appeal. In our conversation we discussed the life of Ralph Ellison, writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Ellison’s second novel, Ellison’s relationship with scholar of religion and literature, Nathan A. Scott Jr., Ellison’s love of nineteenth century American literature

In their new edited volume Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power (University Press of Florida, 2018), Keri Leigh Merritt and Matthew Hild provide an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the historical development of southern labor. The essays in this volume demonstrate that the “southern working class”–far from being a kind of white, Trump-supporting monolith–is actually a complicated beast. Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins (Duke University Press, 2017), David García reminds us that how culture is understood and interpreted not only reflects the political and social discourses of the day, but also shapes those discussions. Drawing on figures as diverse as academics like Melville Herskovitz, performers such as Duke Ellington, and those like dancer/anthropologist Katherine Dunham who filled multiple roles, García lays bare the ways that people in the Americas from the 1930s until the 1950s understood the African origins of black music and dance. He is particularly interested in how the discourse about African retentions in black diasporic culture intensified cultural, political, and social dichotomies: primal vs. civilized, science vs. magic, black vs. white, and most importantly, modernity vs. primitivity. García argues these concepts were defined in terms of each other through the discourse he analyzes, with the politically dominant group