New Books In African American Studies

Thanks in no small part to John K. Thornton, professor of history at Boston University, the field of Atlantic history has emerged as one of the most exciting fields of historical research over the past quarter century. Thornton has long insisted that the the age of discovery fostered linkages between the Americas, Europe, and Africa that transformed the diverse peoples of all three regions. Europeans did not simply impose their will upon Africans and Native Americans. A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2012) showcases Thornton’s deep research in the primary source material of multiple nationalities — and languages — to provide the most comprehensive interpretation we have of how the first era of globalization transformed the cultures of all the peoples of the Atlantic basin. 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 public don’t understand jazz music as we musicians do. A diminished seventh don’t mean a thing to them, but they go for high notes. After all, the public is paying. If musicians depended on musicians at the box office they would starve to death.”–Louis Armstrong Brian Harker’s Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings (Oxford University Press, 2011) is an artful jambalaya of rigorous musical analysis, thoughtful cultural contexts, and some provocative informed speculation as to how Armstrong absorbed, innovated, and consolidated the music we call jazz. Harker focuses his analysis and discussion on seven of Louis Armstrong’s “Hot Five” recordings, made during the period between 1925 and 1928. Harker’s recording-as-“snap-shot” approach illuminates how Armstrong used novelty, musical narrative, rhythmic variation, harmonic changes, “sweet” and “hot” elements,  and technical virtuosity in his vast recording repertoire. Harker also details how Armstrong relentlessly wedded his drive for self-impr

Why does it seem like everyone in the atheist movement is white and male? Are African-American women less interested in secularism? In her book, Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels (Infidel Books, 2013), Dr. Sikivu Hutchinson critiques the mainstream atheist movement’s lack of diversity and uncovers some of the reasons why African-Americans seem so connected to religion. She reveals that racism and social and economic disadvantage has led to a dearth of resources in black communities – a gap that churches often end up filling. Though there is a strong tradition of African-American secular humanism, it has focused on social justice issues and the intersection of racism, classism, capitalism and religion, topics usually ignored by the media and the mainstream secular movement. Dr. Hutchinson also criticizes the new atheism’s singularfocus on science and reason to the detriment of social justice and anti-racist consciousness. Sikivu’s blog can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap

Whiteness studies has confirmed that race is a social construction, even for whites, and that the identity we understand as white is also a social invention. Those who benefit from this invention accrue privileges that others either must pay dearly to obtain or cannot have at all. But there are those who are willing to give up this privilege in the name of equality (white anti-racists) and those who ask ‘Why should we have to?’ (white nationalists). Of course this summary is a reduction. To get a fuller, more meaningful account of what drives anti-racists and white nationalists read Matthew W. Hughey‘s insightfully written book White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race (Stanford University Press, 2012). In it, he reveals that both groups appeal to many of the same discourses on race and also share some of the same underlying narratives. If both groups then ascribe to the same stories and beliefs, what’s the difference between the two and how can anti-racists help the struggle for

Jesus has inspired millions of people to both strive for social justice and commit horrific acts of violence. In the United States, Jesus has remained central in the construction of American identities and debates about Jesus have frequently revolved around his skin color and bodily appearance. In The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), we get a history of Americans’ encounters with images of Jesus and the creation of them. Edward J. Blum, professor of history at San Diego State University, and Paul Harvey, professor of history at University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, have carefully mined a plethora of sources, including paintings, drawings, music, poetry, sermons, visions, and other historical documents, to reveal the rich conversation Americans have had around religion and race. The Color of Christ offers a chronological history from the colonial period to the present that weaves through the construction of Jesus’ image in various C

You know you are not going to get the same old story about progressive literacies and education from Carmen Kynard, who ends the introduction to her book with a saying from her grandmother: “Whenever someone did something that seemed contradictory enough to make them untrustworthy, my grandmother simply called it runnin’ with the rabbits but huntin’ with the dogs.” Kynard persuasively illustrates throughout her book the extent to which progressive and liberal educationalists hold up progress toward truly liberatory education for African Americans and Latinos because they seek to please both rabbits and dogs in the 21st Century. In her own words, Kynard begins with this critique: “American schools and universities, through their scholarship and instructional designs, have often upheld a racial status quo alongside a rhetoric of dismantling it. These [are] not the workings of contradictory and confused individuals merely locked within their space and time. My grandmother understood that such contradictions hap

The American Temperance Movement remains an interesting and important topic. Considering the various attitudes that influenced laws about alcohol sale and consumption of the past are often referred to when reviewing issues related to liquor legislation today. However, what may not be as readily considered is the role that interracial race relations affected and may still impact legislation today. In H. Paul Thomspon Jr.’s A Most Stirring and Significant Episode: Religion and the Rise and Fall of Prohibition in Black Atlanta, 1865-1887 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2012), we are given a front row seat to a 22 year period, from the end of slavery to the failure of Reconstruction, when blacks and whites in Atlanta, Georgia, were negotiating, wrangling and vying for various iterations of temperance, from prohibition to anti-prohibition. Thompson uncovers not only the role that race played in this period, but that religion and region (the North’s relationship to the South) played as well. This fascinating

What do you do if you accompany a friend on her research trip to Boston University’s Gotlieb Archival Research Center and end up finding a treasure trove of letters, news articles, hand written notes, and original drafts of nonfiction by one of your favorite authors? Keith Clark wrote a book. A truly insightful and wonderful one on the known but understudied Ann Petry. The title? The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry (Louisiana State University Press, 2013). Those familiar with the work of Petry probably know her mid-century, naturalist novel The Street and probably place among the likes of Richard Wright. However, Clark expands our notion of Petry’s work, takes us on a journey that shows her work within other traditions, such as gothic, modernism and realism. He also shows her as a politically active figure, even writing letters to presidents. This book is a must read for any interested in any of the topics Clark undertakes, since he handles each with care, deft, and discernment. He’s equally loquacious and info

The American penitentiary model began as not merely a physical construct, but as a philosophical and religious one. Prisoners were to use their time in silence and isolation to contemplate their crimes/sins and to pursue God’s grace. Alexis de Tocqueville’s trip to America began not as a study of American democracy, but of its prisons, though he would go on to write about both arguing that arguing that American social reformers were beginning to view prisons as the “remedy for all of the evils of society”. As with many of his other observations Tocqueville was both accurate and prescient. Today America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, more than four times the number of second place contender Russia. Regions like upstate NY that used to rely on logging, dairy farms, and manufacturing now rely on prison jobs for economic stability, while states like Mississippi release prisoners in the thousand because they cannot afford to continue to house them. Private prisons trade shares on the NASDAQ,

The relationship between music and religion is a site of increasing interest to scholars within Religious Studies. Monica Miller, Assistant Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Lehigh University, explores the social processes and human activity related to Hip Hop music and its accompanying cultural expressions. In Religion and Hip Hop (Routledge, 2012) she introduces us to the various methods that have been used to examine Hip Hop culture and the descriptive terrain of previous scholarship. What is possibly the most laudable aspect of Miller’s efforts are her continued and repeated explorations into the purposes, effects, and operations of theory and method in the study of religion. In this regard, she does not perform a theological or religious analysis of music or lyrics as a search for meaning but rather examines the material productions of Hip Hop culture and the manufactured zones of significance within various discourses. Miller looks at the public context of Hip Hop culture and its relationshi

When I think of the name “Billy Wilson” certain things come to mind immediately. I think of his sparkling career as director and choreographer of “Bubbling Brown Sugar” on Broadway. I am still stunned by his ability to shift from Broadway and back again so readily into making master works for the concert dance stage – Wilson’s works are in the repertory today of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Philadanco (Philadelphia Dance Company) and the Dance Theater of Harlem. I am all warm inside when I remember seeing the lush, rhythmic and striking choreography he created to the music of Dizzy Gillespie for his last work of concert dance, “The Winter in Lisbon” (1992.)  A tour de force, Wilson was a passionate and celebrated dancer during his time as a soloist with the Dutch National Ballet and was later founder of the Dance Theater of Boston. For me, Billy Wilson is one of those names in dance history that is all too often reduced to a footnote that obfuscates his career and

How were black women manumitted in the Old South, and how did they live their lives in freedom before the Civil War? Historian, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers (Associate Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University in Bloomington) answers this complex question by explaining the precarious nature freedom for African American women in Charleston before the Civil War in Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston (UNC Press, 2011). In three tightly woven sections, she tells stories that reveal what it meant to glimpse, build and experience freedom from the early national period to the end of the antebellum era. Her beautifully written prose, coupled with thorough research to understand black women’s experiences in antebellum Charleston, makes her work an important contribution to the historical literature. Furthermore, her book has been awarded several prizes, namely the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize (2012) from the Southern Association of Women Historians, the George

If the moniker of the slave ship Amistad brings to mind images of Anthony Hopkins, Djimon Hounsou, and Morgan Freeman you are likely not alone. The monumental success of Steven Spielberg’s cinematic depiction of this antebellum event swept the nation when it hit theaters in 1997. However, the event itself–the insurrection onboard the slaving vessel–made up only a small portion of the film and the tale Spielberg tells, which instead focuses on the courtroom drama. In fact, nearly all of the histories written about the Amistad focus solely on the triumphs of the American legal system, leaving the story of the true protagonists–the Africans–by the wayside. Marcus Rediker‘s The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (Viking, 2012) corrects this historical oversight by peeling back the layers of the often told “top down” history to tell the story of the rebellion from the perspective of the African captives, the story from below. Rediker artfully employs newly discovered evidence to piece t

The Louisiana Purchase was a perfect illustration of the challenges, yet seemingly boundless opportunities that slavery presented statesmen like Thomas Jefferson. Napoleon Bonaparte had been dealt a significant military defeat at the hands of a slave revolt in Haiti, forcing him to reconsider his interests in the Americas and the Caribbean. So, when Jefferson’s emissaries began negotiating to buy the port city of New Orleans, Napoleon instead offered them the entire Louisiana Territory: a deal that essentially doubled the size of the United States at 3 cents an acre and expanded slavery into new regions. Decades earlier Jefferson had argued for ending the slave trade and enfranchising blacks. As a young lawyer he had taken the case of a black indentured servant pro-bono and fought for his freedom. He had included language in the Declaration of Independence denouncing the slave trade. Jefferson wrote the Ordinance of 1784 which would have banned slavery in any new territory in the US, officially ended it in 1

Andrei Williams‘ provocative new book on African American class divisions in Post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow America is sure to spark spirited debate among those interested in how the interplay of economic status and racial identity influence what has been called “the black experience.” Her insightful book is called Dividing Lines: Social Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction (University of Michigan, 2013). Specifically, the book examines how late-nineteenth-century black authors represent intra-racial stratification and class mobility. Analyzing works by such authors as Frances Harper, Sutton Griggs, Paul L. Dunbar, and Charles Chesnutt, Williams casts doubt on the now two-easy distinction between sell out and black nationalist when it comes to class ascension as she historicizes the moment when blacks were seeking to compete in the mainstream. Her look at representations of class at the turn of the 20th Century is fresh and illuminating. Please, listen in to the discussion. Learn more about your ad c

After his incendiary performance at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, Jimi Hendrix almost immediately went from obscure musician to pop superstar in America. But as Steven Roby and Brad Schreiber reveal in Becoming Jimi Hendrix: From Southern Crossroads to Psychedelic London, the Untold Story of a Musical Genius, Hendrix was far from an overnight sensation. Drawing on an impressive research base, the authors have unearthed the early 1960s prehistory of Hendrix’s well-known but all-too-short life in the spotlight. They show that before his artistic and cultural breakthrough Hendrix had worked as a guitar-playing sideman for some of the biggest R & B acts of the 1960s, including Ike and Tina Turner, the Isley Brothers, and the incomparable Little Richard. In doing so, they paint a vivid and compelling portrait of a massively influential musician whose genius did not suddenly emerge after he formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1966, but rather evolved during endless nights of gigging in backwater j

The moral arguments in defense of slavery hinged on the claim that it was the best arrangement for all parties involved, especially the slaves. Thomas Jefferson, for example, argued that the differences between black slaves and white masters were ‘fixed in nature’, with blacks being condemned to an existence driven more by ‘sensation than reflection’, thus making them incapable of comprehending the full weight of their predicament, let alone improving it. Freedom, according to John C. Calhoun, was the enemy of the black slave and would condemn him or her to the miserable life of a ‘pauper in the poor house’, rather than the ‘superintending’ care of masters and mistresses. When Jefferson returned from long trips, according to some biographers, he would have to wade through a throng of slaves eager to touch him, to thank him, to celebrate their master’s return. The minstrel, to many African Americans, is the physical embodiment of these arguments: the word made flesh. The minstrel stalks our collective imagina

German military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz observed that many of the important variables in war exist in ‘clouds of great uncertainty’ which create disconnects and confusion that persist even after the fighting has ended. The conflict between the Black Panther Party and the United States government is in ways illustrative of this phenomenon–or ‘the fog of war’ as it has come to be called–and helps explain why the Party is so well known yet misunderstood. For many, the Black Panther Party exists in image fragments: bullet-pocked storefronts, raised fists, drawings of mutant-pig policemen, Huey P. Newton on a wicker throne. For others, it exists in biographies of its leaders: Revolutionary Suicide, Seize the Time, This Side of Glory, A Taste of Power, just to name a few. Historians and political theorists have weighed in as well exploring the excesses of COINTELPRO, the failures of party leaders, gender inequity, missed opportunities, failed alliances, and endless betrayals. Yet there is still much to learn.

Vladimir Alexandrov‘s new book The Black Russian (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013) tells the epic and often tragic story of Fredrick Bruce Thomas, an African American born to recently freed slaves, who would go on to make a fortune in Russia as a club owner and entrepreneur. Mr. Thomas was a pioneer in many respects. He migrated North in search of opportunity decades before the Great Migration. He fled the states in pursuit of greater prospects in Europe before it was fashionable for blacks to do so. He confronted and combated many of the forces that would shape the 20th century – racism, classism, and nativism – yet his story was little known to us until now. 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

Who is Motown’s first real star? The answer, of course, is Mary Wells, singer of such classics as “My Guy,” “Bye Bye Baby,” “The One Who Really Loves You,” “You Beat Me to the Punch,” and “Two Lovers,” among others. All of these hits were released in just four years between 1960 and 1969. In Mary Wells: The Tumultuous Life of Motown’s First Superstar (Chicago Review Press, 2012) author Peter Benjaminson chronicles the life of this singular performer from her early days as a young rock ‘n’ roll diva to her last years struggling with cancer. Along the way we learn that Wells was a tireless performer. She never stopped touring, never stopped reaching for the brass ring of financial success that eluded her for much of her career. It seems she never did receive the money she felt she deserved for the songs she released for Motown, while the record company appeared to rake in a handsome profit. She left Motown in 1964, released records with a number of different labels over the next twenty-six years, and finally re