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.
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1551
Anne C. Bailey, “The Weeping Time: Memory and t...
Contemporary conversations and debates over Confederate monuments underline how memory-making and the legacies of U.S. slavery and the Civil War remains raw and highly contested in public discourse. In her new book,
42 min
1552
Sarah Haley, “No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment...
Recent popular and scholarly interest has highlighted the complex and brutal system of mass incarceration in the United States. Much of this interest has focused on recent developments while other scholars have revealed the connections between the deve...
54 min
1553
Ben H. Winters, “Underground Airlines” (Mulholl...
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 than we’d like to believe. In an alternative world,
46 min
1554
Keri Leigh Merritt, “Masterless Men: Poor White...
Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Masterless Men: Poor Whites in the Antebellum South (Cambridge University Press, 2017) reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor.
30 min
1555
Beverly Jenkins, “Chasing Down a Dream: A Bless...
The Blessings Series continue with a heartwarming novel, Chasing Down a Dream (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2017), about what makes a family when trials test relationships. And in Henry Adams, Kansas, there’s never a dull day. After a horrendous storm,
21 min
1556
Joanna Dee Das, “Katherine Dunham: Dance and th...
By drawing on a vast, never-utilized trove of archival materials along with oral histories, choreographic analysis, and embodied research, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora (Oxford University Press,
46 min
1557
Johari Jabir, “Conjuring Freedom: Music and Mas...
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 War’s “Gospel Army” (Ohio State University Press, 2017).
27 min
1558
Juilet Hooker, “Theorizing Race in the Americas...
In 1845 two thinkers from the American hemisphere – the Argentinean statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and the fugitive ex-slave, abolitionist leader, and orator from the United States, Frederick Douglass – both published their first works.
53 min
1559
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, “Bricktop’s Paris: ...
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 of black women but a sourcebook to lead others to “compile a complete history.
19 min
1560
Mitch Kachun, “First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus...
First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory (Oxford University Press, 2017) explores how Crispus Attucks’ death in the 1770 Boston Massacre led to his achieving mythic significance in African Americans’ struggle to incorporate their exp...
58 min
1561
Marcia Walker-McWilliams, “Reverend Addie: Fait...
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 Fight for Labor, Gender, and Racial Equality (University of Illinois Press, 2016),
47 min
1562
Tanya Ann Kennedy, “Historicizing Post-Discours...
Tanya Ann Kennedy‘s book, Historicizing Post-Discourses: Postfeminism and Postracialism in United States Culture (SUNY Press, 2017), is a complex and important exploration of our collective understanding of questions of racial and gender equality,
71 min
1563
Rosalind Rosenberg, “Jane Crow: The Life of Pau...
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 activist, lawyer and Episcopal priest whose life intersected with the most significant civil and hum...
60 min
1564
Tommy J. Curry, “The Man-Not: Race, Class, and ...
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 Black Male Studies. The author posits that we should conceptualize the black male as a victim,...
60 min
1565
Ira Dworkin, “Congo Love Song: African American...
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 appear consistent with that narrative, it also invokes the site of King Leopold II of Belgium’s...
54 min
1566
Patricia Spears Jones, “A Lucent Fire: New and ...
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 winner of one of the most prestigious poetry prizes–the Jackson Poetry Prize.
29 min
1567
Leigh Fought, “Women in the World of Frederick ...
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 a detailed and rich portrait of Frederick Douglass’ private and public life and his many rel...
59 min
1568
Max Krochmal, “Blue Texas: The Making of a Mult...
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 the state known for its cowboy conservatism, but a mid-twentieth-century hotbed of community...
53 min
1569
Marlene Banks, “Ruth’s Redemption” (Lift Every ...
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 War America. Although a slave, Bo is educated. When he gets his freedom,
27 min
1570
Brittney C. Cooper, “Beyond Respectability: The...
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 the work of African-American women over the course of more than a century in her book,
51 min
1571
Jeanine Michna-Bales, “Through Darkness to Ligh...
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 Drinkin’ Gourd. -“Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd” author unknown (possibly Peg Leg Joe) They left in the ...
39 min
1572
Michelle D. Commander, “Afro-Atlantic Flight: S...
In Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Duke University Press, 2017), Michelle D. Commander examines the (im)possibility of literal and figurative returns to Africa of African-descended peoples throughout the diaspora.
80 min
1573
Kathy Wilson Florence, “Jaybird’s Song” (Kathy ...
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 country meanders through new ideas brought about by the Civil Rights movement.
20 min
1574
Michael W. Twitty, “The Cooking Gene: A Journey...
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 that struggle in The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the...
104 min
1575
Tom Adam Davies, “Mainstreaming Black Power” (U...
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? There as so many questions, but there may now be a scholar and text to help answer many of th...
40 min