New Books in African American Studies

Interviews with Scholars of African America about their New Books

Society & Culture
History
1026
Connor Towne O’Neill, "Down Along with That Dev...
O’Neill takes a deep dive into American history, exposing the still-raging battles over monuments dedicated to one of the most notorious Confederate generals, Nathan Bedford Forrest...
59 min
1027
Brandi T. Summers, "Black in Place: The Spatial...
While Washington, D.C., is still often referred to as “Chocolate City,” it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade. In D.C., no place represents this shift better than the H Street corridor.
34 min
1028
Zakkiyah Iman Jackson, "Becoming Human: Matter ...
In a world where black(ened) flesh, particularly feminine flesh, is considered the ontological zero of humanness, what interventions and complications are available from art and speculative fiction of the African disapora?
53 min
1029
Kathryn A. Mariner, "Contingent Kinship: The Fl...
Mariner offers an ethnography of adoption processes in the United States through the inner workings of a private adoption agency in Chicago, IL...
34 min
1030
Eddie Cole, "The Campus Color Line: College Pre...
Cole sheds light on the important place of college presidents in the struggle for racial parity.,,
26 min
1031
Emily J. Lordi, "The Meaning of Soul: Black Mus...
Lordi takes on the challenge of explaining “soul,” through a book that zooms in and out between sweeping ideas about suffering and resilience in Black culture and fine-grained, close readings of individual performances by soul musicians...
51 min
1032
Warren Hoffman, "The Great White Way: Race and ...
Hoffman explores the ways that race and racism have shaped the American musical from Show Boat to Hamilton....
53 min
1033
Karlos K. Hill, "The Murder of Emmett Till: A G...
Hill tells the story of this crime, placing it in the context of both the African American experience and the practice of white supremacy...
61 min
1034
Felicia Angeja Viator, "To Live and Defy in LA:...
Viator describes how rap leapt across the continent from its New York roots in the mid-1980s and took hold in Los Angeles..
74 min
1035
Lisa B. Thompson, "Underground, Monroe, and the...
Lisa B. Thompson is equally renowned as a scholar of African and African-American studies and as a playwright...
57 min
1036
Simone C. Drake, "Are You Entertained?: Black P...
The authors offer an engaging and interdisciplinary exploration of contemporary black popular culture and how to think about this broad and diverse landscape, especially in relation to power, capitalism, gender identity, and presidential politics...
53 min
1037
Dan Royles, "To Make the Wounded Whole: The Afr...
In the decades since it was identified in 1981, HIV/AIDS has devastated African American communities...
69 min
1038
Nadia Nurhussein, "Black Land: Imperial Ethiopi...
Nurhussein explores late nineteenth and twentieth century African American cultural engagement with and literary depictions of imperial Ethiopia...
37 min
1039
Chinua Thelwell, "Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface...
Thelwell offers a rich, well-researched, and sobering investigation of blackface minstrelsy as the “visual bedrock of a transcolonial cultural imaginary.”
74 min
1040
Tamura Lomax, “Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Bl...
One of the central threads in the public discourse on Black womanhood is the idea of the “Jezebel"...
68 min
1041
Alexandra J. Finley, "An Intimate Economy: Ensl...
Finley examines the history of American slavery and capitalism by foregrounding women’s labor in the Antebellum slave trade...
42 min
1042
Why are Blacks Democrats?: An Interview with Is...
Black Americans are by far the most unified racial group in American electoral politics, with 80 to 90 percent identifying as Democrats—a surprising figure given that nearly a third now also identify as ideologically conservative, up from less than 10 percent in the 1970s.
51 min
1043
Hannah L. Walker, "Mobilized by Injustice: Crim...
Walker brings together the political science and criminal justice disciplines in exploring how individuals are mobilized to engage in political participation by their connection to the criminal justice system in the United States...
44 min
1044
Jerry Gershenhorn, "Louis Austin and the Caroli...
Gershenshorn offers a history of the struggle for Black equality in North Carolina from 1927 to 1971 as told through the life and activism of Black newspaperman Louis Austin...
54 min
1045
Armstrong Williams, "What Black and White Ameri...
Willliams explores the complexity of race and culture in the United States....
32 min
1046
Laura J. Arata, "Race and the Wild West" (U Okl...
Arata provides a compelling biography of Sarah Bickford and the larger story of black life in the rural West....
42 min
1047
Laura Briggs, "Taking Children: A History of Am...
Weaving together histories of Black communities (in the US and the Americas more broadly), Native Americans, and multiple Latin Americans countries, Briggs tells us how taking of children has been used as a strategy to terrorize communities that demand social justice and change...
75 min
1048
Ariella Rotramel, "Pushing Back: Women of Color...
Rotramel explores women of color’s grassroots leadership in organizations that are not singularly identified with feminism....
94 min
1049
William L. Patterson, "We Charge Genocide: The ...
It has been nearly 70 years since William Patterson and Paul Roberson when before the UN and charged the US government with genocide...
37 min
1050
Jennifer Cobbina, "Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: Why t...
Cobbina draws on in-depth interviews with nearly two hundred residents of Ferguson and Baltimore, conducted within two months of the deaths of Brown and Gray....
53 min