New Books in African American Studies

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Society & Culture
History
1451
McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One ...
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention...
61 min
1452
Adam Malka, "The Men of Mobtown: Policing Balti...
Criminal justice, policing, and mass incarceration have gained significant political attention recently, and the problems of these systems have drawn increasingly frequent calls for reform from the right and left....
59 min
1453
Aram Goudsouzian and Charles McKinney, "An Unse...
Most people will know that Memphis, Tennessee is where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968...
44 min
1454
John C. Hajduk, "Music Wars: Money, Politics, a...
In his new book Music Wars: Money, Politics, and Race in the Construction of Rock and Roll Culture, 1940–1960 (Lexington Books, 2018)...
60 min
1455
Sharon Block, "Colonial Complexions: Race and B...
Today we have a certain idea of "race"; it's socially constructed, conventional, and not really biological-grounded in any sense.
58 min
1456
Keisha Lindsay, "In a Classroom of Their Own: T...
52 min
1457
Michael E. Staub, “The Mismeasure of Minds: Deb...
The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision required desegregation of America’s schools, but it also set in motion an agonizing multi-decade debate over race, class, and IQ. In The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence Between Brown and...
36 min
1458
Ruma Chopra, “Almost Home: Maroons between Slav...
After being exiled from their native Jamaica in 1795, the Trelawney Town Maroons endured in Nova Scotia and then in Sierra Leone. In Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone (Yale University Press,
37 min
1459
Yael Ben-zvi, “Native Land Talk: Indigenous and...
Histories of rights have too often marginalized Native Americans and African Americans. Addressing this lacuna, Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories (Dartmouth College Press, 2018), expands our understanding of freedom by examining...
77 min
1460
Vernon Keeve III, “Southern Migrant Mixtape” (N...
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.
45 min
1461
Tracy Fessenden, “Religion Around Billie Holida...
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),
58 min
1462
Alisha Gaines, “Black for a Day: White Fantasie...
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” temp...
56 min
1463
Bernard Fraga, “The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicit...
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 gr...
19 min
1464
R. C. Romano and C. B. Potter, “Historians on H...
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.
64 min
1465
Caitlin C. Rosenthal, “Accounting for Slavery: ...
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 turno...
37 min
1466
Stefan M. Bradley, “Upending the Ivory Tower: C...
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 produc...
42 min
1467
Jonathan Shandell, “The American Negro Theatre ...
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,
52 min
1468
Sylvia Chan-Malik, “Being Muslim: A Cultural Hi...
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,
67 min
1469
Andrew M. Busch, “City in a Garden: Environment...
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,
62 min
1470
Stefan M. Wheelock, “Barbaric Culture and Black...
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,
51 min
1471
Treva Lindsey, “Colored No More: Reinventing Bl...
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,
39 min
1472
Matthew Harper, “The End of Days: African Ameri...
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 Rel...
61 min
1473
Laila Amine, “Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of I...
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?
35 min
1474
Nicholas Grant, “Winning Our Freedoms Together:...
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,
63 min
1475
Christina Snyder, “Great Crossings: Indians, Se...
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,
55 min