New Books in African American Studies

In 2020, Black Americans continued a centuries-long pursuit of racial equality and justice in the streets and at the polls. Arguing that this year was not a deviation from the historic Civil Rights Movement, the contributors to this collection examine the important work of Black men and women during the previous decades to shape, expand, and preserve a multiracial American democracy.The authors of these chapters show that Black Americans have long pushed local and national leaders to ensure that all citizens reap the full benefits of the Constitution. They discuss Black women's roles in advancing national voting rights; how Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) developed "race leaders"; discriminatory news coverage and actions against it; antipoverty efforts; and the racial and gender dynamics of activist organizations.These studies show how Black activism from the mid-twentieth century to the present has led to positive changes for all Americans, holding the nation to its democratic ideals and promises. Black Citizens and American Democracy (UP of Florida, 2025) compels recognition of many unsung people who have risked their lives and livelihoods for the good of the country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Boldly going where few fandom scholars have gone before, Fandom for Us, by Us: The Pleasures and Practices of Black Audiences (NYU Press, 2025) breaks from our focus on white fandom to center Black fandoms. Alfred L. Martin, Jr., engages these fandoms through what he calls the “four C’s”: class, clout, canon, and comfort.Class is a key component of how Black fandom is contingent on distinctions between white, nationally recognized cultural productions and multicultural and/or regional cultural productions, as demonstrated by Misty Copeland’s ascension in American Ballet Theatre. Clout refers to Black fans’ realization of their own consumer spending power as an agent for industrial change, reducing the precarity of Blackness within historically white cultural apparatuses and facilitating the production of Black blockbusters like 2018’s Black Panther. Canon entails a communal fannish practice of sharing media objects, like the 1978 film The Wiz, which lead them to take on meanings outside of their original context. Comfort describes the nostalgic and sentimental affects associated with beloved fan objects such as the television show, Golden Girls, connected to notions of Black joy and signaling moments wherein Black people can just be themselves.Through 75 in-depth interviews with Black fans, Fandom for Us, by Us argues not only for the importance of studying Black fandoms, but also demonstrates their complexities by both coupling and decoupling Black reception practices from the politics of representation. Martin highlights the nuanced ways Black fans interact with media representations, suggesting class, clout, canon, and comfort are universal to the study of all fandoms. Yet, for all the ways these fandoms are similar and reciprocal, Black fandoms are also their own set of practices, demanding their own study.Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Every year, millions of public school students are suspended. This overused punishment removes students from the classroom, but it does not improve their behavior. Instead, suspension disrupts their education, harming the students, their families, and their schools. Black students suffer most within this broken system, experiencing a far greater risk of school punishment and the significant harms that accompany it. Many activists and scholars have considered how school punishment increases racial inequity, but few have thought to ask why. Why do we punish students the way we do, and why have we allowed this harmful practice to impact the lives of our nation’s children?In Suspended Education: School Punishment and the Legacy of Racial Injustice (NYU Press, 2025), Aaron Kupchik takes readers to the root of the issue. Suspensions were not intended as a behavior management tool. Instead, they were designed to remove unwanted students from the classroom. Through statistical analysis and in-depth case studies of schools in Massachusetts and Delaware, Kupchik reveals how suspension rates skyrocketed after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, serving as an unofficial means of removing Black children from newly desegregated schools. His groundbreaking research traces the legacy of these segregationist movements, demonstrating that school districts with more desegregation-related legal battles from the 1950s onward suspend more Black students today. Combining expert analysis with compelling, accessible prose, Kupchik makes a powerful case for the end of suspension and other exclusionary punishments. The result is a revelatory explanation of a pressing problem facing all children, parents, and educators today. 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 Nation's Capital, music and sports have played a central role in the lives of African Americans, often serving as a barometer of social conflict and social progress―for sports clubs and ball games, jam sessions and concerts, offered entertainment, enlightenment, and encouragement. At times, they have also offered a means of escape from the harsh realities of everyday life.Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience (Georgetown UP, 2025) tells the story of these musicians and athletes who have used their skills and their determination to achieve success in the face of discrimination. Jackson begins with pioneers such as James Reese Europe, who formed the first musicians' union and fought as a member of the Harlem Hellfighters in World War I, and ends with giants of the twentieth century, such as Duke Ellington and Georgetown University basketball coaching legend John Thompson Jr.Readers interested in the history of Washington, DC, the civil rights movement, racial justice, music, and sports will draw important lessons from these stories of the Black men and women who found in sports and music spaces to combat racial prejudice and bring people in the District of Columbia together.Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, will be out in the fall of 2025. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. 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 secret insights of economics, translated for the rest of us. Should I buy or rent? Do I ask for a promotion? Should I tell people I’m pregnant? What salary do I deserve? Should I just quit this job? Common anxieties about life are often grounded in economics. In an increasingly win-lose society, these economic decisions—where to work, where to live, even how to live—have a way of feeling fixed and mistakes terminal. Daryl Fairweather is no stranger to these dynamics. As the first Black woman to receive an economics PhD from the famed University of Chicago, she saw firsthand how concepts of behavioral economics and game theory were deployed in the real world—and in her own life—to great effect. Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work (U Chicago Press, 2025) combines Fairweather’s elite knowledge of these principles with her singular voice in describing how they can be harnessed. Her great talent, unique among economists, is her ability to articulate economic trends in a way that is not just informative, but also accounts for life’s other anxieties. In Hate the Game, Fairweather fixes her expertise and service on navigating the earliest economic inflection points of adult life: whether to go to college and for how long; partnering, having kids, both, or neither; getting, keeping, and changing jobs; and where to live and how to pay for it. She speaks in actionable terms about what the economy means for individual people, especially those who have the sneaking suspicion they’re losing out. Set against her own experiences and enriched with lessons from history, science, and pop culture, Fairweather instructs readers on how to use game theory and behavioral science to map out options and choose directions while offering readers a sense of control and agency in an economy where those things are increasingly rare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

For last 100 years, the neighborhood of Harlem in New York City has stood as the capital of Black America and the capital of the global African diaspora. Yet Harlem is so big and so varied that it contains smaller sections with distinct identities and histories of their own.Davida Siwisa James explores two parts of Harlem in her book Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill: Alexander Hamilton’s Old Harlem Neighborhood Through the Centuries, published by the Empire State Editions imprint of Fordham University Press. Exploring four centuries of life in a part of upper Manhattan that stretches from 135th Street to 165th Street and from Edgecombe Avenue to the Hudson River, James looks at the encounters between the Lenape and Dutch settlers, the rural village that was Harlem, and the Harlem Renaissance luminaries who lived in Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill.James blends the personal and the historical to illuminate great events, fascinating people, and amazing architecture. In a time when Harlem is going through great demographic and cultural changes, she explores both the long history of Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill and their significance for the history Black America.Robert W. Snyder is Manhattan Borough Historian, professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University, and the author of When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers (Cornell, 2025). Email: rwsnyder@rutgers.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Forest Isaac Jones is an award-winning author of non-fiction and essays, specializing in the study of Irish History, the US Civil Rights Movement and Northern Ireland. His latest essay, ‘The Civil Rights Connection Between The USA and Northern Ireland’ was awarded honorable mention in the category of nonfiction essay by Writer’s Digest in their 93rd annual writing competition.In this interview, he discusses his new book Good Trouble: The Selma, Alabama and Derry, Northern Ireland Connection 1963-1972 (First Hill Books, 2025).Good Trouble investigates the strong connection between the Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the Catholic Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland – specifically the influence of the Montgomery to Selma march on the 1969 Belfast to Derry march through oral history, based on numerous interviews of events leading up to both marches and afterwards. This is close to the author’s heart as both of his parents marched to integrate lunch counters and movie theatres in Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1963 as college students. His mother was at the 1963 March to Washington where Martin Luther King gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.Jones travelled to Dublin, Belfast and Derry to conduct interviews for the book. In all, he did fifteen interviews with people who were involved in the movement in Northern Ireland (including Billy McVeigh – featured in the BAFTA winning documentary, Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland) and in the United States (including Richard Smiley and Dr. Sheyann Webb-Christburg – both were at Bloody Sunday in Alabama and on the Selma to Montgomery march among others). Jones was also able to talk with Eamonn McCann, who took part in the Belfast to Derry march in 1969.Unlike most books on Northern Ireland, this goes into detail about the connection and the influence between the two movements. Also, most focus on Bloody Sunday and not the pivotal incidents at Burntollet Bridge and the Battle of the Bogside. Building off of unprecedented access and interviews with participants in both movements, Jones crafts a gripping and moving account of these pivotal years for both countries.Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones’s right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: “Who do you think you are?”Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into her family’s past for answers. In every generation since her great-great-great-grandmother survived enslavement to raise a free family, color determined her ancestors’ lives. But the color line was shifting and jagged, not fixed and straight. Some backed away from it, others skipped along it, and others still were cut deep by its sharp teeth.Journeying across centuries, from rural Kentucky and small-town North Carolina to New York City and its suburbs, The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir (Basic Books, 2025) is a lyrical, deeply felt meditation on the most fundamental matters of identity, belonging, and family.Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, professor of history, and a professor at the SNF Agora Institute at the Johns Hopkins University. A prizewinning author and editor of four books, most recently Vanguard, she is past copresident of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and has contributed to the New York Times, Atlantic, and many other publications. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Dancing Black, Dancing White: Rock 'n' Roll, Race, and Youth Culture of the 1950s and Early 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2023) offers a new look at the highly popular phenomenon of the televised teen dance program. These teen shows were incubators of new styles of social and popular dance and both reflected and shaped pressing social issues of the day. Often referred to as "dance parties," the televised teen dance shows helped cultivate a nascent youth culture in the post-World War II era. The youth culture depicted on the shows, however, was primarily white. Black teenagers certainly had a youth culture of their own, but the injustice was glaring: Black culture was not always in evident display on the airwaves, as television, like the nation at large, was deeply segregated and appealed to a primarily white, homogenous audience. The crux of the book, then, is twofold: to explore how social and popular dance styles were created and disseminated within the new technology of television and to investigate how the shows both reflected and re-affirmed the racial politics and attitudes of the time. The story of televised teen dance told here is about Black and white teenagers wanting to dance to rock 'n' roll music despite the barriers placed on their ability to do so. It is also a story that fuses issues of race, morality, and sexuality. Dancing Black, Dancing White weaves together these elements to tell two stories: that of the different experiences of Black and white adolescents and their desires to have a space of their own where they could be seen, heard, appreciated, and understood.Julie Malnig is Professor of Dance and Theatre Studies at The Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Atiya Husain’s No God but Man: On Race, Knowledge and Terrorism (Duke University Press, 2025) uses the FBI Most Wanted lists to rethink theoretical relationships between race and Islam in the United States. Husain traces the genealogy of wanted posters and how theories of the “average man” informs the use of photographs and its accompanying descriptions on most wanted posters. To probe this pattern further, she closely considers the activism and Islam of Black revolutionary Assata Shakur and her addition to the FBI Most Wanted Terrorist List in 2013. Shakur was the first woman added to this list and joins Muslims, who are oddly not racialized in the descriptions on the poster. This peculiar pattern forces us to contend with how race as a category oscillates between racelessness and race, and therefore reveals the categorical limitations of the discourses of racialization of Muslims. It is here that the work of Black Studies scholars, such as Sylvia Wynter, offers us necessary conceptual pathways forward. This book will be of interest to anyone thinking about race, Islam, and terrorism, surveillance or security studies, and Black Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies