NB AfroAm Studies (2024)

29/06/2022

THE FAMILIES' CIVIL WAR: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice (University of Georgia Press) tells the stories of freeborn northern African Americans in Philadelphia struggling to maintain families while fighting against racial discrimination. Taking a long view, from 1850 to the 1920s, Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. shows how Civil War military service worsened already difficult circumstances due to its negative effects on family finances, living situations, minds, and bodies. At least seventy-nine thousand African Americans served in northern USCT regiments. Many, including most of the USCT veterans examined here, remained in the North and constituted a sizable population of racial minorities living outside the former Confederacy. Check out Pinheiro's NBN interview ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-families-civil-war

14/06/2022

In CLAIMING UNION WIDOWHOOD: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South (Duke University Press), Brandi Clay Brimmer analyzes the US pension system from the perspective of poor black women during and after the Civil War. Reconstructing the grassroots pension network in New Bern, North Carolina, through a broad range of historical sources, she outlines how the mothers, wives, and widows of black Union soldiers struggled to claim pensions in the face of evidentiary obstacles and personal scrutiny. Brimmer exposes and examines the numerous attempts by the federal government to exclude black women from receiving the federal pensions that they had been promised. Her analyses illustrate the complexities of social policy and law administration and the interconnectedness of race, gender, and class formation. Expanding on previous analyses of pension records, Brimmer offers an interpretive framework of emancipation and the freedom narrative that places black women at the forefront of demands for black citizenship. Brimmer joins us on the podcast ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/claiming-union-widowhood

13/06/2022

THE TRAYVON GENERATION (Grand Central) expands upon Elizabeth Alexander’s gripping essay — under the same name — originally published in The New Yorker amid the 2020 summer social unrest. This collection is a mediation on race by recounting the pervasiveness of racial violence in American culture. THE TRAYVON GENERATION weaves prose, poetry, and art to cast historical and cultural resonances to understand the human experience while also humanizing the Black dead and living. This slender and exquisite book is a profound assertation that even though Black pain has become normalized, African Americans have always sought to memorialize their people to keep their spirits, memories, and joy alive. PODCAST LINK ⬇️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-trayvon-generation

10/06/2022

We are living in an era of unprecedented access to popular culture: contemporary digital infrastructure provides anyone with an internet connection access to a dizzying array of cultural objects past and present, which mingle and connect in fascinating, bizarre and sometimes troubling ways.

In BLACK EPHEMERA: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive (NYU Press), Mark Anthony Neal considers the opportunities and challenges that this vast archive represents for Black American culture, with a particular focus on music and sound. Neal’s explorations have a wide historical scope and operate simultaneously in microscopic and conjunctural registers. The book includes analyses of legendary Memphis record label Stax, the place of Aretha Franklin and Mavin Gaye’s overlooked early recordings in/as the Great American Songbook, the use of musical citation to try and combat the erasure of Black women’s experience from the historical archive, and the significance of archival ephemera to Black mourning practices from Pattie LaBelle to Kendrick Lamar. Author-interview podcast link ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/black-ephemera

09/06/2022

Echoing the energy of Nina Simone's searing protest song that inspired the title, this book is a call to action in our collective journey toward just futures.

AMERICA, GODDAM: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice (University of California Press) explores the combined force of anti-Blackness, misogyny, patriarchy, and capitalism in the lives of Black women and girls in the United States today.

Through personal accounts and hard-hitting analysis, Black feminist historian Treva B. Lindsey starkly assesses the forms and legacies of violence against Black women and girls, as well as their demands for justice for themselves and their communities. Combining history, theory, and memoir, AMERICA, GODDAM renders visible the gender dynamics of anti-Black violence. Black women and girls occupy a unique status of vulnerability to harm and death, while the circumstances and traumas of this violence go underreported and understudied. Give Lindsey's NBN interview a listen ⬇️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/america-goddam

16/05/2022

SISSY INSURGENCIES: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness (Duke University Press) focuses on the figure of the "sissy" in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how it constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Demonstrating that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy, he also shows how it constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender. Give Ross' NBN interview a listen ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/sissy-insurgencies

11/05/2022

In CLASS STRUGGLE and the COLOR LINE: American Socialism and the Race Question, 1900-1930 (Haymarket Books), Paul Heideman collects, for the first time, source materials from a diverse array of socialist writers and organizers, providing a new perspective on the complex history of revolutionary debates about fighting anti-Black racism. Tune in as Heideman joins NBN host Zalman Newfield to discuss the book on the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/class-struggle-and-the-color-line

05/05/2022

“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black le****ns with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests.

But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests. Learn more about ELITE CAPTURE: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) (Haymarket Books) on the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/elite-capture

04/05/2022

Curtis Mayfield. The Chi-Lites. Chaka Khan. Chicago’s place in the history of soul music is rock solid. But for Chicagoans, soul music in its heyday from the 1960s to the 1980s was more than just a series of hits: it was a marker and a source of black empowerment.

In MOVE ON UP: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power (University of Chicago Press), Aaron Cohen tells the remarkable story of the explosion of soul music in Chicago. Drawing on more than 100 interviews and a music critic’s passion for the unmistakable Chicago soul sound, Cohen shows us how soul music became the voice of inspiration and change for a city in turmoil. Check out his NBN interview ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/move-on-up

02/05/2022

When Hurricanes Irma and María made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, their destructive force further devastated an archipelago already pummeled by economic austerity, political upheaval, and environmental calamities. To navigate these ongoing multiple crises, Afro-Puerto Rican women have drawn from their cultural knowledge to engage in daily improvisations that enable their communities to survive and thrive.

MAKING LIVABLE WORLDS: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice (University of Washington Press) weaves together autobiography, ethnography, interviews, memories, and fieldwork to recast narratives that continuously erase Black Puerto Rican women as agents of social change. In doing so, Hilda Lloréns serves as an "ethnographer of home" as she brings to life the powerful histories and testimonies of a marginalized, disavowed community that has been treated as disposable. Check out her NBN interview ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/making-livable-worlds-1

28/04/2022

Medicine and slavery went hand-in-hand. But what was the nature of this vile partnership? In MEDICALIZING BLACKNESS: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (University of North Carolina Press), Rana Hogarth shows how science and medicine grafted during times and in places where slavery was secure—where white elites had no need to justify the violent practice with medical ideas because slavery was taken for granted. How and why did medicine and slavery fuse, Hogarth asks, in the Atlantic World of the newly invented United States and ascendant imperial Britain? Delve deeper as Hogarth discusses the book on the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/medicalizing-blackness

26/04/2022

Jails are the principal people-processing machines of the criminal justice system. Mostly they hold persons awaiting trial who cannot afford or have been denied bail. Although jail sentences max out at a year, some spend years awaiting trial in jail-especially in counties where courts are jammed with cases. City and county jails, detention centers, police lockups, and other temporary holding facilities are regularly overcrowded, poorly funded, and the buildings are often in disrepair. American jails admit over 10 million people every year, but very little is known about what happens to them while they're locked away.

INDEFINITE: Doing Time in Jail (Oxford University Press) is an ethnographic study of a California county jail that reflects on what it means to do jail time and what it does to men. Michael L. Walker spent several extended spells in jail, having been arrested while trying to pay parking tickets in graduate school. This book is an intimate account of his experience and in it he shares the routines, rhythms, and subtle meanings that come with being incarcerated. Check out his NBN interview ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/indefinite

21/04/2022

What if, Joseph Darda asks, our desire to solve racism--with science, civil rights, antiracist literature, integration, and color blindness--has entrenched it further? In THE STRANGE CAREER of RACIAL LIBERALISM (Stanford University Press), he traces the rise of liberal antiracism, showing how reformers' faith in time, in the moral arc of the universe, has undercut future movements with the insistence that racism constitutes a time-limited crisis to be solved with time-limited remedies. Most historians attribute the shortcomings of the civil rights era to a conservative backlash or to the fracturing of the liberal establishment in the late 1960s, but the civil rights movement also faced resistance from a liberal "frontlash," from antiredistributive allies who, before it ever took off, constrained what the movement could demand and how it could demand it.

Telling the stories of Ruth Benedict, Kenneth Clark, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Howard Griffin, Pauli Murray, Lillian Smith, Richard Wright, and others, Darda reveals how Americans learned to wait on time for racial change and the enduring harm of that trust in the clock. He joins us on the podcast ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-strange-career-of-racial-liberalism

18/04/2022

In SPEAKING of RACE: Language, Identity, and Schooling Among African American Children (Rowman & Littlefield), Jennifer Delfino explores the linguistic practices of African American children in an after school program in Washington, DC. Drawing on ethnographic research, Delfino illustrates how students’ linguistic practices are often perceived as barriers to learning and achievement and provides an in-depth look at how students challenge this perception by using language to transform the meaning of race in relation to ideas about academic success. listen in as Delfino joins us on the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/speaking-of-race

14/04/2022

THE SENTENCES THAT CREATE US: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison (Haymarket Books) is an expansive resource for incarcerated writers. With over 50 contributors like Reginald Dwayne Betts, Randall Horton, and Nicole Shawan Junior, this resource provides the foundations for crafting a vibrant literary life with the carceral state. The guide offers advice including editing, publishing works, and developing prison writing groups while weaving first-person narratives. Learn more about the project on the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-sentences-that-create-us

13/04/2022

In SELLING BLACK BRAZIL: Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Salvador, Bahia (University of Texas Press), Anadelia Romo argues that visual images were central to the shift from emulating Europe to valuing Brazil’s own local culture, which took place from the late 19th to the early 20th century. The book focuses on Salvador, Bahia, a city in the northeast of Brazil known for its rich Black culture, history of slavery, and tourism industry. Using print culture associated with tourism, Romo shows how representations of Afro-Brazilians engaged ideas of race and nation at the time. Learn more on the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/selling-black-brazil

07/04/2022

She was born the 20th child in a family that had lived in the Mississippi Delta for generations, first as enslaved people and then as sharecroppers. She left school at 12 to pick cotton, as those before her had done, in a world in which white supremacy was an unassailable citadel. She was subjected without her consent to an operation that deprived her of children. And she was denied the most basic of all rights in America--the right to cast a ballot--in a state in which Blacks constituted nearly half the population. And so Fannie Lou Hamer lifted up her voice. Starting in the early 1960s and until her death in 1977, she was an irresistible force, not merely joining the swelling wave of change brought by civil rights but keeping it in motion.

WALK WITH ME: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer (Oxford University Press) is the most complete biography of Hamer ever written, drawing on recently declassified sources on both Hamer and the civil rights movement, including unredacted FBI and Department of Justice files. Listen in as Kate Clifford Larson fills us in on the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/kate-clifford-larson-walk-with-me-a-biography-of-fannie-lou-hamer-oxford-up-2021

28/03/2022

In the first major biography of Baldwin in more than a decade, JAMES BALDWIN: Living in Fire (Pluto Press), Bill V. Mullen celebrates the personal and political life of the great African-American writer who changed the face of Western politics and culture. As a lifelong anti-imperialist, black q***r advocate, and feminist, Baldwin (1924-1987) was a passionate chronicler of the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, the US war against Vietnam, Palestinian liberation struggle, and the rise of LGBTQ rights. Mullen explores how Baldwin's life and work channel the long history of African-American freedom struggles, and explains how Baldwin both predicted and has become a symbol of the global Black Lives Matter movement. Listen in ⤵️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/james-baldwin

28/03/2022

Mark Christian Thompson's book, PHENOMENAL BLACKNESS: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory (University of Chicago Press), examines the changing interdisciplinary investments of key mid-century African American writers and thinkers, showing how their investments in sociology and anthropology gave way to a growing interest in German philosophy and critical theory by the 1960s. Thompson analyzes this shift in intellectual focus across the post-war decades, pinpointing its clearest expression in Amiri Baraka's writings on jazz and blues, in which he insisted on philosophy as the critical means by which to grasp African American expressive culture. PODCAST LINK ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/phenomenal-blackness

28/03/2022

Cedric Robinson – political theorist, historian and activist – was one of the greatest black radical thinkers of the 20th century.

In CEDRIC ROBINSON: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition (Polity), the first major book to tell the story of Cedric Robinson, Joshua Myers shows how Robinson's work interrogated the foundations of Western political thought, modern capitalism, and the changing meanings of race. Tracing the course of Robinson's journey from his early days as an agitator in the 60s against the US's reactionary foreign policy to his publication of such seminal works within Black Studies as BLACK MARXISM, Myers frames Robinson's mission as one that aimed to understand and practice resistance to "the terms of order." Check out the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/cedric-robinson

22/02/2022

In the context of slavery, science is usually associated with slaveholders' scientific justifications of racism. But abolitionists were equally adept at using scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders.

Looking beyond the science of race, THE SCIENCE of ABOLITION: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress (Yale University Press) shows how Black and white scientists and abolitionists drew upon a host of scientific disciplines--from chemistry, botany, and geology, to medicine and technology--to portray slaveholders as the enemies of progress. Learn more as Eric Herschthal joins Adam McNeil on the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/eric-herschthal-the-science-of-abolition-how-slaveholders-became-the-enemies-of-progress-yale-up-2021

22/02/2022

ARISE AFRICA, ROAR CHINA: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press) explores the close relationships between 3 of the most famous 20th century African Americans, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, and their little-known Chinese allies during World War II and the Cold War--journalist, musician, and Christian activist Liu Liangmo, and Sino-Caribbean dancer-choreographer Sylvia Si-lan Chen. Charting a new path in the study of Sino-American relations, Gao Yunxiang foregrounds African Americans, combining the study of Black internationalism and the experiences of Chinese Americans with a transpacific narrative and an understanding of the global remaking of China's modern popular culture and politics. Learn more on the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/arise-africa-roar-china-1

18/02/2022

Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism, Kyle T. Mays, an Afro-Indigenous historian, argues that the foundations of the US are rooted in anti-blackness and settler colonialism, and that these parallel oppressions continue into the present. Listen in as Mays fills us in on AN AFRO-INDIGENOUS HISTORY of the UNITED STATES (Beacon Press) ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/an-afro-indigenous-history-of-the-united-states

07/02/2022

Getting Something to Eat in Jackson uses food—what people eat and how—to explore the interaction of race and class in the lives of African Americans in the contemporary urban South.

04/02/2022

Police put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold for selling ci******es on a New York City street corner. George Floyd was killed by police outside a store in Minneapolis known as “the best place to buy menthols.” Black smokers overwhelmingly prefer menthol brands such as Kool, Salem, and Newport. All of this is no coincidence.

In PUSHING COOL: Big To***co, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette (University of Chicago Press) , Keith Wailoo tells the intricate and poignant story of menthol ci******es for the first time. He pulls back the curtain to reveal the hidden persuaders who shaped menthol buying habits and racial markets across America: the world of to***co marketers, consultants, psychologists, and social scientists, as well as Black lawmakers and civic groups including the NAACP. Learn more as he joins us on the podcast ↙

https://newbooksnetwork.com/pushing-cool

14/12/2021

IN the SHADOW of the IVORY TOWER: How Universities are Plundering our Cities (Bold Type Books) by Davarian Baldwin examines the political economy of the American university over the 20th and 21st centuries. He brings a Black Studies lens to interrogate the ways that universities hide behind the notion of administering public goods to protect their tax-exempt status while generating astronomical profits off of the backs of working-class people, graduate student teachers and researchers, and underpaid and contingent faculty. We discuss the securitization and development implications of growing university wealth and how it engenders forms of radicalized plunder, racist policing, gentrification, and exploitation by the 1%. With a focus on this and more, we talk about what it means to live in the shadow of ivory tower. 👂👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/in-the-shadow-of-the-ivory-tower

22/11/2021

Although more than 50 years apart, the murders of Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin share a commonality: Black children are not seen as children. Time and time again, excuses for police brutality and aggression—particularly against Black children— concern the victim “appearing” as a threat. But why and how is the perceived “appearance” of Black persons so completely separated from common perceptions of age and time?

BLACK AGE: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life (NYU Press) posits age, life stages, and lifespans as a central lens through which to view Blackness, particularly with regard to the history of transatlantic slavery. Focusing on Black literary culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Habiba Ibrahim examines how the history of transatlantic slavery and the constitution of modern Blackness has been reimagined through the embodiment of age. Listen in ↙

https://newbooksnetwork.com/black-age

18/11/2021

How have Black women lead a digital revolution? In DIGITAL BLACK FEMINISM (NYU Press), Catherine Knight Steele places digital Black feminism within the longer-term context of Black feminism and Black women’s experiences in America. The book considers examples from the Black feminist blogosphere and offers a comparative analysis of early Black feminist pioneers and key contemporary voices. Posing questions as to the dangers of commodification and the limits of the digital sphere, as well as celebrating Black feminist success, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences and for anyone interested in digital life today. Learn more ↙

https://newbooksnetwork.com/digital-black-feminism

18/11/2021

What can southern Black joy teach us about agency? What role does refusal have in liberation? What more might there be to root work than resistance? In THE POLITICS of BLACK JOY: Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism (Northwestern UP), Lindsey Stewart explores Hurston’s contributions to political theory and philosophy of race to develop a politics of joy that owes much to indifference, refusal, and tactical misrecognition. Contending with white supremacy and countering neo-abolitionist approaches that reduce southern Black life to tales of tragedy, Stewart suggests how a politics of Black joy can broaden our imaginations to think emancipation anew. Listen in ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-politics-of-black-joy

21/12/2020

The New Books Network is a consortium of author-interview podcast channels dedicated to raising the level of public discourse via new media.

NB AfroAm Studies

29/06/2022

14/06/2022

13/06/2022

10/06/2022

09/06/2022

16/05/2022

11/05/2022

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28/04/2022

26/04/2022

21/04/2022

18/04/2022

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07/04/2022

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