New Books in African American Studies

We are joined today by Alison Phipps, Professor in Gender Studies and the University of Sussex to talk about her newest book, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism (Manchester University Press, 2020).The Me Too movement, started by Black feminist Tarana Burke in 2006, went viral as a hashtag eleven years later after a tweet by white actor Alyssa Milano. Mainstream movements like #MeToo have often built on and co-opted the work of women of colour, while refusing to learn from them or centre their concerns. Far too often, the message is not ‘Me, Too’ but ‘Me, Not You’. Alison Phipps argues that this is not just a lack of solidarity. Privileged white women also sacrifice more marginalised people to achieve their aims, or even define them as enemies when they get in the way. Me, not you argues that the mainstream movement against sexual violence expresses a political whiteness that both reflects its demographics and limits its revolutionary potential. Privileged white women use their traumatic experiences to create media outrage, while relying on state power and bureaucracy to purge ‘bad men’ from elite institutions with little concern for where they might appear next. In their attacks on sex workers and trans people, the more reactionary branches of this feminist movement play into the hands of the resurgent far-right.Dr. Phipps is the author of Women in Science, Engineering and Technology: Three Decades of UK Initiatives (Trentham Books, 2008), an examination of the mixed results of the UK’s attempts to address gender disparity STEM fields through policy and The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age (Polity Press, 2014) an award-winning look at the way feminists find themselves negotiating a very tight passage between the Scylla and Charybdis of neoconservatives and neoliberals, as well as a bevy or articles on similar issues.Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

As right-wing nationalism and authoritarian populism gain momentum across the world, liberals, and even some conservatives, worry that democratic principles are under threat. In The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (Princeton UP, 2018), Michael Hanchard argues that the current rise in xenophobia and racist rhetoric is nothing new and that exclusionary policies have always been central to democratic practices since their beginnings in classical times. Contending that democracy has never been for all people, Hanchard discusses how marginalization is reinforced in modern politics, and why these contradictions need to be fully examined if the dynamics of democracy are to be truly understood.Hanchard identifies continuities of discriminatory citizenship from classical Athens to the present and looks at how democratic institutions have promoted undemocratic ideas and practices. The longest-standing modern democracies —France, Britain, and the United States—profited from slave labor, empire, and colonialism, much like their Athenian predecessor. Hanchard follows these patterns through the Enlightenment and to the states and political thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and he examines how early political scientists, including Woodrow Wilson and his contemporaries, devised what Hanchard has characterized as “racial regimes” to maintain the political and economic privileges of dominant groups at the expense of subordinated ones. Exploring how democracies reconcile political inequality and equality, Hanchard debates the thorny question of the conditions under which democracies have created and maintained barriers to political membership.Showing the ways that race, gender, nationality, and other criteria have determined a person’s status in political life, The Spectre ofRace offers important historical context for how democracy generates political difference and inequality.Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

We think we know the story of women's suffrage in the United States: women met at Seneca Falls, marched in Washington, D.C., and demanded the vote until they won it with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. But the fight for women's voting rights extended far beyond these familiar scenes. From social clubs in New York's Chinatown to conferences for Native American rights, and in African American newspapers and pamphlets demanding equality for Spanish-speaking New Mexicans, a diverse cadre of extraordinary women struggled to build a movement that would truly include all women, regardless of race or national origin. In Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (The University of North Carolina Press, 2020), Cathleen D. Cahill tells the powerful stories of a multiracial group of activists who propelled the national suffrage movement toward a more inclusive vision of equal rights. Cahill reveals a new cast of heroines largely ignored in earlier suffrage histories: Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša), Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Carrie Williams Clifford, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, and Adelina "Nina" Luna Otero-Warren. With these feminists of color in the foreground, Cahill recasts the suffrage movement as an unfinished struggle that extended beyond the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.As we celebrate the centennial of a great triumph for the women's movement, Cahill's powerful history reminds us of the work that remains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Tavia Nyong’o's Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (NYU Press, 2018), examines a broad range of artists and disciplines, from Adrian Piper to Kara Walker to the meaning of the auroch's in the film Beasts of the Southern Wild. Throughout the book, Nyong’o draws the reader's attention to the ways Black and queer artists construct alternative worlds in a context of brutality and discrimination. Negotiating between the twin poles of Afro-futurism and Afro-pessimism, Nyong’o summons the poetic powers of queer world-making that have always been immanent to the fight and play of black life. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

The familiar story of Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, who sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads in exchange for guitar virtuosity, and the violent stereotypes evoked by legendary blues "bad men" like Stagger Lee undergird the persistent racial myths surrounding "authentic" blues expression. Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020) unpacks the figure of the American blues performer, moving from early singers such as Ma Rainey and Big Mama Thornton to contemporary musicians such as Amy Winehouse, Rhiannon Giddens, and Jack White to reveal that blues makers have long used their songs, performances, interviews, and writings to invent personas that resist racial, social, economic, and gendered oppression. Using examples of fictional and real-life blues artists culled from popular music and literary works from writers such as Walter Mosley, Alice Walker, and Sherman Alexie, Kimberly Mack demonstrates that the stories blues musicians construct about their lives (however factually slippery) are inextricably linked to the "primary story" of the narrative blues tradition, in which autobiography fuels musicians' reclamation of power and agency.Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Jim Crow Sociology: The Black and Southern Roots of American Sociology (U Cincinnati Press, 2020) is an extraordinary new volume that examines the origin, development, and significance of Black Sociology through the accomplishments of early African American sociologists at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) such as Atlanta University, Tuskegee Institute, Fisk University, and Howard University. Black Sociology is a concept that weaponizes the discipline for that which is “right and good" and prioritizes scholar-activist inspired research directed at impacting real world conditions of African Americans.Guided by this approach, this book debunks the idea that the sociology practiced by early African Americans does not exemplify scholarly excellence. Instead, Earl Wright II demonstrates that Tuskegee Institute, under the leadership of Booker T. Washington, established the first applied program of rural sociology. Fisk University, first under the guidance of George Edmund Haynes then Charles S. Johnson, developed one of the earliest and most impactful programs of applied urban sociology. Wright extends our understanding of W. E. B. Du Bois's Atlanta Sociological Laboratory with an articulation of the contributions of women to the first American school of sociology. Jim Crow Sociology forces contemporary scholars to grapple with who are and who are not included in the disciplinary canon. Specifically, this book forces us to ask why early African American sociologists and HBCUs are not canonized. What makes this book most consequential is that it provides evidence supporting the proposition that sociology began in earnest in the United States as a Black and southern enterprise.C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In the early 1970s, a new wave of public service announcements urged parents to help end an American tradition of child abuse. The message, relayed repeatedly over television and radio, urged abusive parents to seek help. Support groups for parents, including Parents Anonymous, proliferated across the country to deal with the seemingly burgeoning crisis. At the same time, an ever-increasing number of abused children were reported to child welfare agencies, due in part to an expansion of mandatory reporting laws and the creation of reporting hotlines across the nation. In Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way (University of North Carolina Press Books, 2020), Mical Raz examines this history of child abuse policy and charts how it changed since the late 1960s, specifically taking into account the frequency with which agencies removed African American children from their homes and placed them in foster care. Highlighting the rise of Parents Anonymous and connecting their activism to the sexual abuse moral panic that swept the country in the 1980s, Raz argues that these panics and policies--as well as biased viewpoints regarding race, class, and gender--played a powerful role shaping perceptions of child abuse. These perceptions were often directly at odds with the available data and disproportionately targeted poor African American families above others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Gretchen Sorin’s book, Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights (Liveright, 2020) is Sorin’s ode to a part of history that has not been told to its fullest. Its pages include 75 powerful images that together, demonstrate that the car—the ultimate symbol of independence and possibility—has always held particular importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the dangers presented them by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. Melding new archival research with her family’s story, Sorin recovers a lost history and shows how, when combined with black travel guides, including the famous Green Book, the automobile encouraged a new way of resisting oppression.Gretchen Sorin is the director and a distinguished professor of the State University of New York (SUNY) Oneonta Cooperstown Graduate Program in Museum Studies—one of the oldest museum studies programs in the United States and still “at the forefront of the profession today.” She holds a bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Rutgers University, a master’s degree in Museum Studies from SUNY Oneonta, and a Ph.D. in History from SUNY Albany and has for over thirty years curated innumerable exhibits for organizations like the Smithsonian, the Jewish Museum, and the New York State Historical Association.One can find Dr. Sorin’s book in print, digital, and audio formats. Its Steeplechase Films documentary, directed by Ric Burns, Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America, can be streamed online on PBS for free via a link on its documentary page: http://www.dwbfilm.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In his book, Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity (Baylor UP, 2016), Sheldon George treats an old idea--that African Americans must transform their relationship to the history of slavery and to their identification with race—in an entirely new way.What follows is a quite truncated encapsulation of the book’s central argument which I will attempt if only because it struck me as a very original use of Lacanian thought. It also produced something I value very much: the development of fresh ideas for this psychoanalyst to ponder.George argues that owning human property, slaves, offered a surplus of "jouissance" to slave owners. Meanwhile the enslaved, denuded of family, of history and claims to nationality, were often valued solely for muscle mass and fecundity. Psychically emptied--seen only for their capacity to serve the master's needs, and I want to add, also emptying preemptively, and defensively their psychic lives, enslaved people were forbidden access to being, from which flows, following Lacan, crucial early fantasies of a wholeness that must be shattered if one is to become subjectivized. Fantasies of repletion provide a kind of protective “crested shield" with which to endure the rough first brush with the Symbolic.Living under a racist, white animating Master Signifier, slaves were often absent of the requisite psychic buffering with which to enter the Symbolic without undue suffering. Barred from the rudiments of being and lacking a constructive Master Signifier from which to generate vitalizing associations, the gaze of the enslaved was horrifyingly riveted to the “very lack that is masked in the Lacanian subject,” (p.21). Here George offers an apt description of what the sociologist of slavery, Orlando Patterson, refers to as "social death."Rather than celebrate the ways in which the burden of “double consciousness” aided African Americans in generating new linguistic vistas, we find no fan of Henry Louis Gates Jr’s “signifying monkey” here. George declares the project of "resignification" as not going far enough, and crucially, as missing the impact of the unconscious on language. Arguing against a powerful trend in African-American studies to value African-American racial identity as such, George boldly declares, “insistences on race perform a rite, an endless repeated act as a means to commemorate the not very memorable encounter that I call the trauma of slavery.” (p.42) How, George asks, can one have an identity based on insult, negation, and injury? Following his argument, the lure of racial pride loses its force majeur. Suddenly we see it as but papering over a potentially productive encounter with lack. And if it is lack that must be faced so as to open the door to a life driven by enlivening, elusive yet worthwhile desire, at what cost is it avoided?The idea of having love of the race and “the race man” become rather quickly tragic in George’s intellectual hands. Furthermore, embracing the narrative that “we come from slavery”, like Sethe in Toni Morrison's Beloved, (a novel George writes beautifully about in this text) one is quickly cornered, metonymically, by the suffocating relationship between race and enslavement. The need for the space to metaphorize is undeniable.To learn more about the work of Sheldon George, please go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

The era of the Enlightenment, which gave rise to our modern conceptions of freedom and democracy, was also the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. America, a nation founded on the principle of liberty, is also a nation built on African slavery, Native American genocide, and systematic racial discrimination. White Freedom traces the complex relationship between freedom and race from the eighteenth century to today, revealing how being free has meant being white.Tyler Stovall explores the intertwined histories of racism and freedom in France and the United States, the two leading nations that have claimed liberty as the heart of their national identities. He explores how French and American thinkers defined freedom in racial terms and conceived of liberty as an aspect and privilege of whiteness. He discusses how the Statue of Liberty—a gift from France to the United States and perhaps the most famous symbol of freedom on Earth—promised both freedom and whiteness to European immigrants. Taking readers from the Age of Revolution to today, Stovall challenges the notion that racism is somehow a paradox or contradiction within the democratic tradition, demonstrating how white identity is intrinsic to Western ideas about liberty. Throughout the history of modern Western liberal democracy, freedom has long been white freedom.A major work of scholarship that is certain to draw a wide readership and transform contemporary debates, White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2021) provides vital new perspectives on the inherent racism behind our most cherished beliefs about freedom, liberty, and human rights.Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies