New Books in African American Studies
Episodes
Rebeca L. Hey-Colón, "Channeling Knowledges: Water and Afro-Diasporic Spirits in Latinx and Caribbean Worlds" (U Texas Press, 2023)
30 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Water is often tasked with upholding division through the imposition of geopolitical borders. We see this in the construction of the Rio Grande/Río B...
Chris Campion and Bud Lee, "The War is Here: Newark 1967" (ZE Books, 2023)
28 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
July 1967. After the arrest, beating, and imprisonment of cab driver John Smith by local police, the city of Newark--already a tinderbox, became a hot...
Ed Mitchell et al., "Ed Mitchell's Barbeque" (Ecco, 2023)
26 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ed Mitchell’s journey in the barbeque business began in 1991 with a lunch for his mama, who was grieving the loss of Ed’s father. Ed drove to the ...
Samantha Nogueira Joyce, "Afro-Brazilians in Telenovelas: Social, Political, and Economic Realities" (Lexington Books, 2022)
22 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Afro-Brazilians in Telenovelas: Social, Political, and Economic Realities (Lexington Books, 2022), Samantha Nogueira Joyce examines representatio...
Rebecca Brückmann, "Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation" (U Georgia Press, 2021)
22 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation (U Georgia Press, 2021) offers a comparative sociocultural and spatia...
Book Talk 60: Cleo McNellly Kearns on Mark Twain’s "Huckleberry Finn"
20 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Celebrated, censored, canceled: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn cannot be avoided. William Faulkner called Twain “the father of Amer...
Meredith Broussard, "More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech" (MIT Press, 2023)
18 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The word "glitch" implies an incidental error, as easy to patch up as it is to identify. But what if racism, sexism, and ableism aren't just bugs in m...
Virginia Jackson, "Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric" (Princeton UP, 2023)
18 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton UP, 2023) examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late eighteenth a...
America & Democracy Ep. 5: Brandon Terry on MLK
17 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the final episode of this series, Brandon Terry, political theorist and African American Studies scholar at Harvard discusses the life and work o...
Daniel Ruiz-Serna, "When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories" (Duke UP, 2023)
13 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories (Duke University Press, 2023) Daniel Ruiz-Serna follo...
Bill Steigerwald, "30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South" (Lyons Press, 2017)
13 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The dangerous, trailblazing work of a white journalist and black leader who struck a shocking early blow against legal segregation In 1948, most white...
Alvin J. Henry, "Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
13 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel (U Minnesota Press, 2021) reinterprets key African American novels from the H...
John Klaess, "Breaks in the Air: The Birth of Rap Radio in New York City" (Duke UP, 2022)
12 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Breaks in the Air: The Birth of Rap Radio in New York City (Duke UP, 2022), John Klaess tells the story of rap's emergence on New York City's air...
Karin Chenoweth, "Districts That Succeed: Breaking the Correlation Between Race, Poverty, and Achievement" (Harvard Education Press, 2021)
09 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Districts That Succeed: Breaking the Correlation Between Race, Poverty, and Achievement (Harvard Education Press, 2021), long-time education writ...
Kyla Sommers, "When the Smoke Cleared: The 1968 Rebellion and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights in the Nation's Capital" (New Press, 2023)
08 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In April 1968, following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., a wave of uprisings swept across America. None was more visible—or resulted in more p...
Jonathan Eig, "King: A Life" (FSG, 2023)
07 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig's King: A Life (FSG, 2023) is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights ico...
Chad Williams, "The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War" (FSG, 2023)
05 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When W. E. B. Du Bois, believing in the possibility of full citizenship and democratic change, encouraged African Americans to "close ranks" and suppo...
Cedric Johnson, "After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle" (Verso, 2023)
04 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The historic uprising in the wake of the murder of George Floyd transformed the way Americans and the world think about race and policing. Why did it ...
Philip Ewell, "On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone" (U Michigan Press, 2023)
03 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On Music Theory and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (University of Michigan Press, 2023) by Philip Ewell is an unflinching look at white su...
Mauro Porto, "Mirrors of Whiteness: Media, Middle-Class Resentment, and the Rise of the Far Right in Brazil" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023)
01 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Mirrors of Whiteness: Media, Middle-Class Resentment, and the Rise of the Far Right in Brazil (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023), Mauro P. Porto examines...
Evie Shockley, "Suddenly We" (Wesleyan UP, 2023)
01 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In her new poetry collection Suddenly We (Wesleyan UP, 2023), Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes ...
Charles Reagan Wilson, "The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South" (UNC Press, 2023)
29 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How does one begin to understand the idea of a distinctive southern way of life--a concept as enduring as it is disputed? In this examination of the A...
Tatiana D. McInnis, "To Tell a Black Story of Miami" (UP of Florida, 2022)
28 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In To Tell a Black Story of Miami (UP of Florida, 2022), Tatiana McInnis examines literary and cultural representations of Miami alongside the city'...
Paul R. Semendinger, "Roy White: From Compton to the Bronx" (Artemesia, 2023)
26 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Roy White played on the New York Yankees from 1965 through the 1979 season. Roy grew up on the tough streets of Compton and created a successful all-s...
Beth Bailey, "An Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era" (UNC Press, 2023)
25 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
By the Tet Offensive in early 1968, what had been widely heralded as the best qualified, best-trained army in US history was descending into crisis as...
Arleen Tuchman, "Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease" (Yale UP, 2020)
23 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Arleen Marcia Tuchman’s book, Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease (Yale UP, 2020), tells the American history of a disease that continues to ...
Rachel Anne Gillett, "At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris" (Oxford UP, 2021)
22 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Rachel Gillett's At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021) explores the world of ...
Thomas Aiello, "Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration: The Cultural Geography of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate" (U Georgia Press, 2023)
22 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Thomas Aiello joins E. James West to discuss Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration: The Cultural Geography of the Scott News...
Keith Brian Wood, "Memphis Hoops: Race and Basketball in the Bluff City,1968-1997" (U Tennessee Press, 2021)
21 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Memphis Hoops: Race and Basketball in the Bluff City, 1968-1997 (U Tennessee Press, 2021) tells the story of basketball in Tennessee’s southwester...
Lorgia García Peña, "Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective" (Duke UP, 2022)
19 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Writing Latinos, from Public Books, is a new podcast featuring interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing co...
Nicholas Guyatt, "The Hated Cage: An American Tragedy in Britain's Most Terrifying Prison" (Basic Books, 2022)
18 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
After the War of 1812, more than five thousand American sailors were marooned in Dartmoor Prison on a barren English plain; the conflict was over but ...
Shelly M. Jones, "Women Who Count: Honoring African American Women Mathematicians" (American Mathematical Society, 2019)
17 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
African-Americans and women are increasingly visible in professional mathematical institutions, organizations, and literature, expanding our mental mo...
Gregory J. Kaliss, "Beyond the Black Power Salute: Athlete Activism in an Era of Change" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
16 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Unequal opportunity sparked Jim Brown's endeavors to encourage Black development while Billie Jean King fought so that women tennis players could earn...
Joshua Myers, "Of Black Study" (Pluto Press, 2022)
15 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Joshua Myers considers the work of thinkers who broke with the racial and colonial logic of academic disciplinarity and how the ideas of Black intelle...
Tomiko Brown-Nagin, "Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality" (Pantheon Books, 2022)
15 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
With the US Supreme Court confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, “it makes sense to revisit the life and work of another Black woman who profoundly ...
Cristina Mejia Visperas, "Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory" (NYU, 2022)
14 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
An abolitionist approach to STS and the history of the life sciences: this is the model that Cristina Mejia Visperas offers in her book, Skin Theor...
Tina Post, "Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression" (NYU Press, 2023)
12 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Explores expressionlessness, inscrutability, and emotional withholding in Black cultural production. Arguing that inexpression is a gesture that acq...
Celeste Day Moore, "Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France" (Duke UP, 2021)
10 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Celeste Day Moore is a historian of African American culture, media, and Black internationalism in the twentieth century. Her first book, Soundscapes...
Mari N. Crabtree, "My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching" (Yale UP, 2023)
08 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching (Yale UP, 2023), Mari N. Crabtree traces the long afterlife of lynching in the South t...
Bettina Judd, "Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought" (Northwestern UP, 2022)
08 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Feeling is not “feelin”. Feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: i...
Leah Mickens, "In the Shadow of Ebenezer: A Black Catholic Parish in the Age of Civil Rights and Vatican II" (NYU Press, 2022)
07 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The history and practices of African American Catholics has been vastly understudied, and Black Catholics are often written off as a fringe sector of ...
Jonathan A. C. Brown, "Islam and Blackness" (Oneworld Academic, 2022)
07 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Jonathan Brown’s Islam and Blackness (Oneworld Academic, 2022) is a thorough and thoroughly riveting study of the tensions and conceptions of Bla...
Charles Price, "Rastafari: The Evolution of a People and Their Identity" (NYU Press, 2022)
04 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Misunderstood, misappropriated, belittled: though the Rastafari feature frequently in media and culture, they have most often been misrepresented, the...
Katherine Johnston, "The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World" (Oxford UP, 2022)
03 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World (Oxford UP, 2022) interrogates how people with an interest in Afr...
Julia H. Lee, "The Racial Railroad" (NYU Press, 2022)
01 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Despite the seeming supremacy of car culture in the United States, the train has long been and continues to be a potent symbol of American exceptional...
Geoff Harkness, "DVS Mindz: The Twenty-Year Saga of the Greatest Rap Group to Almost Make It Outta Kansas" (Columbia UP, 2023)
30 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
99.9% of aspiring rappers never make it in the music industry. So why do we only hear the stories of the ones who do? DVS Mindz might be the greatest ...
Leslie M. Alexander, "Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
27 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The emergence of Haiti as a sovereign Black nation lit a beacon of hope for Black people throughout the African diaspora. Leslie M. Alexander's study ...
David Wright Faladé, "Black Cloud Rising" (Grove Press, 2022)
26 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
By fall of 1863, Union forces had taken control of Tidewater Virginia, and established a toehold in eastern North Carolina, including along the Outer ...
Robin M. Morris, "Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right" (U Georgia Press, 2022)
23 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right (U Georgia Press, 2022) is a statewide study of women’s part in ...
Aaron Spencer Fogleman and Robert Hanserd, "Five Hundred African Voices: A Catalog of Published Accounts by Africans Enslaved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1586-1936" (APS, 2022)
22 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The importance of published accounts by African slave ship survivors is well-known but not their existence in large numbers. Fogleman and Hanserd cata...
Alvin Hall, "Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance" (HarperOne, 2023)
21 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For countless Americans, the open road has long been a place where dangers lurk. In the era of Jim Crow, Black travelers encountered locked doors, hos...
Woody Holton, "Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution" (Simon and Schuster, 2021)
21 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A “deeply researched and bracing retelling” (Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian) of the American Revolution, showing how the ...
Magdalena J. Zaborowska, "James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile" (Duke UP, 2009)
18 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Between 1961 and 1971 James Baldwin spent extended periods of time in Turkey, where he worked on some of his most important books. In this first in-de...
Jessica Wilson, "It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women's Bodies" (Hachette Go, 2023)
17 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women's Bodies (Hachette Go, 2023) eating disorder specialist and storyteller Jessica Wilson ...
R. J. M. Blackett, "Samuel Ringgold Ward: A Life of Struggle" (Yale UP, 2023)
15 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817–c. 1869) escaped enslavement and would become a leading figure in the struggle for...
Traveling Black, A Story of Race and Resistance: A Conversation with Mia Bay
13 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Mia Bay, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Chair in American History at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about her book Traveling Black: A Sto...
Damian Alan Pargas, "Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
13 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Damian Alan Pargas introduces a new conceptualization of 'sp...
Susan J. Stanfield, "Rewriting Citizenship: Women, Race, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture" (U Georgia Press, 2022)
12 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Rewriting Citizenship: Women, Race, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture (U Georgia Press, 2022) provides an interdisciplinary approach to antebellum...
Brian Harker, "Sportin' Life: John W. Bubbles, an American Classic" (Oxford UP, 2022)
11 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
John W. Bubbles was an actor, singer, comedian, and most importantly, a dancer. Born in 1902, Bubbles was an innovator in the jazz tap style and half ...
Theresa Runstedtler, "Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation That Saved the Soul of the NBA" (Bold Type Books, 2023)
11 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Against a backdrop of ongoing resistance to racial desegregation and strident calls for Black Power, the NBA in the 1970s embodied the nation’s imag...
Robin L. Owens, "'My Faith in the Constitution Is Whole': Barbara Jordan and the Politics of Scriptures" (Georgetown UP, 2022)
11 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
US Congresswoman Barbara Jordan is well-known as an interpreter and defender of the Constitution, particularly through her landmark speech during Rich...
Hilbourne A. Watson, "Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Transformation of Barbados: The Late Colonial Period" (U The West Indies Press, 2019)
09 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Beginning in the 1920s, Barbadians and other British West Indians began organizing politically in an international environment that was marked by a se...
Joan Flores-Villalobos, "The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
06 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West India...
Jovan Scott Lewis, "Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa" (Duke UP, 2022)
05 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke UP, 2022), Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tul...
Nicola Rollock, "The Racial Code: Tales of Resistance and Survival" (Penguin, 2022)
05 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Why do racial inequalities persist? In The Racial Code: Tales of Resistance and Survival (Penguin, 2023), Nicola Rollock, a Professor of Social Po...
Hilbourne A. Watson, "Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Transformation of Barbados: The Independence Period, 1966-1976" (U West Indies Press, 2020)
04 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Hilbourne A. Watson's Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Transformation of Barbados: The Independence Period, 1966-1976 (U West Indies Press, 2020)...
Thomas Aiello, "Dixieball: Race and Professional Basketball in the Deep South, 1947-1979" (U Tennessee Press, 2019)
03 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Dixieball: Race and Professional Basketball in the Deep South, 1947-1979 (U Tennessee Press, 2019), Thomas Aiello considers the cultural functio...
Marcus Rediker, "The Slave Ship: A Human History" (Penguin, 2008)
03 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this widely praised history of an infamous institution, award-winning scholar Marcus Rediker shines a light into the darkest corners of the British...
Damien M. Sojoyner, "Joy and Pain: A Story of Black Life and Liberation in Five Albums" (U California Press, 2022)
01 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This highly original story reflects on how the carceral state shapes daily life for young Black people--and how Black Americans resist, find joy, and ...
Lerone A. Martin, "The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism" (Princeton UP, 2023)
01 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On a Sunday morning in 1966, a group of white evangelicals dedicated a stained glass window to J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI director was not an evangelica...
Celeste Vaughan Curington et al., "The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance" (U California Press, 2021)
01 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance (U California Press, 2021) is the first comprehensive look at "digital-sexual racism,...
Saida Grundy, "Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man" (U California Press, 2022)
28 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How does it feel to be groomed as the "solution" to a national Black male "problem"? This is the guiding paradox of Respectable: Politics and Paradox...
Helena Hansen et al., "Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America" (U California Press, 2023)
28 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? Some...
Leslie M. Alexander, "Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
27 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The emergence of Haiti as a sovereign Black nation lit a beacon of hope for Black people throughout the African diaspora. Leslie M. Alexander’s stud...
Jonathan W. White and Lydia J. Davis, ed., "My Work Among the Freedmen: The Civil War and Reconstruction Letters of Harriet M. Buss" (U Virginia Press, 2021)
26 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Between 1863 and 1871, Harriet M. Buss of Sterling, Massachusetts, taught former slaves in three different regions of the South, in coastal South Caro...
Mitchell Schwarzer, "Hella Town: Oakland's History of Development and Disruption" (U California Press, 2022)
26 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Oakland grew up on the shadow of the dynamo of the nineteenth century West, always the "other" city on San Francisco Bay. But as Mitchell Schwarzer,...
Mary Crossley, "Embodied Injustice: Race, Disability, and Health" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
26 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Black people and people with disabilities in the United States are distinctively disadvantaged in their encounters with the health care system. These ...
Ian C. Hartman and David Reamer, "Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest" ( U Washington Press, 2022)
24 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The history of Black Alaskans runs deep and spans generations. Decades before statehood and earlier even than the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s, Bla...
Jeffrey J. Matthews, "Colin Powell: Imperfect Patriot" (U Notre Dame Press, 2019)
24 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Until he passed away in 2021, Colin Powell was revered as one of America's most trusted and admired leaders. Jeffrey J. Matthews' Colin Powell: Imper...
Ashley Brown, "Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson" (Oxford UP, 2023)
24 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career...
Chris Bongie, trans. and ed., "The Colonial System Unveiled by Baron de Vastey" (Liverpool UP, 2014)
21 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Long neglected in mainstream history books, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is now being claimed across a range of academic disciplines as an event...
Gerald F. Goodwin, "Race in the Crucible of War: African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)
19 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When African American servicemen went to fight in the Vietnam War, discrimination and prejudice followed them. Even in a faraway country, their milita...
Nicholas Mirzoeff, "White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness" (MIT Press, 2023)
19 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
From the author of How to See the World comes a new history of white supremacist ways of seeing—and a strategy for dismantling them. White suprema...
Philip Nel, "Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books" (Oxford UP, 2017)
16 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Racism is resilient, duplicitous, and endlessly adaptable, so it is no surprise that America is again in a period of civil rights activism. A signific...
Lauron J. Kehrer, "Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance" (U Michigan Press, 2022)
14 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Notions of hip hop authenticity, as expressed both within hip hop communities and in the larger American culture, rely on the construction of the rapp...
Lee D. Baker, "From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954" (U California Press, 1998)
13 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On today’s podcast we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of Dr. Lee D. Baker’s book From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and ...
Lesly Deschler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago, "Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing" (Leuven UP, 2022)
12 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Lesly Deschler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago's edited volume Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (Leuven ...
Winston James, "Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik" (Columbia UP, 2022)
11 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
One of the foremost Black writers and intellectuals of his era, Claude McKay (1889–1948) was a central figure in Caribbean literature, the Harlem Re...
Hannah Noel, "Deflective Whiteness: Coopting Black and Latinx Identity Politics" (Ohio State UP, 2022)
10 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Deflective Whiteness: Coopting Black and Latinx Identity Politics (Ohio State UP, 2022), Hannah Noel repositions Whiteness studies in relation to...
Kate Masur, "Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction" (Norton, 2021)
10 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that ...
Energy Costs, Poverty, and Race
09 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Destenie Nock, an assistant professor in the Engineering and Public Policy and Civil and Environmental Engineering Departments at Carnegie Mellon Univ...
Dianne M. Stewart, "Black Women, Black Love: America's War on African-American Marriage" (Seal Press, 2020)
08 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
According to the 2010 US census, more than seventy percent of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love: America's War on African...
Michael Lawrence Dickinson, "Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680-1807" (U Georgia Press, 2022)
02 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Beginning in the late seventeenth century and concluding with the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in t...
Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh, "Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
02 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Identity is often fraught for multiracial Douglas, people of both South Asian and African descent in the Caribbean. In this groundbreaking volume tit...
Derrick Darby, "A Realistic Blacktopia: Why We Must Unite to Fight" (Oxford UP, 2022)
01 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the United States, unjust disparities in things like income, opportunity, health, safety, and education tightly track racial categorizations of the...
J. Brent Morris, "Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp" (UNC Press, 2022)
31 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early sev...
Above the Veil: Beyond Segregationism and Assimilationism
29 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The work of Ibram X. Kendi distinguishes between two forms of racism: segregationism and assimilationism. Segregationists argue that some groups are i...
Anthony Reed, "Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production" (Duke UP, 2020)
28 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke UP, 2020), Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and ...
Shaun M. Anderson, "The Black Athlete Revolt: The Sport Justice Movement in the Age Of #BlackLivesMatter" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
27 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the age of social media, athletes have a powerful influence like never before. Many Black athletes have used that power in positive ways, galvanizi...
Stephen C. Finley, "In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam" (Duke UP, 2022)
27 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
With In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam (Duke University Press, 2022), Stephen C. Finley, Inaugu...