New Books in African American Studies

How do we have a serious conversation about race that moves beyond the brevity of Twitter or an op-ed? In this episode of Post-Script (a New Books in Political Science series from Lilly Goren and Susan Liebell), three scholars engage in a nuanced and fearless discussion grounded in history, data, and theory. There is no way to summarize this hour of engaged and enraged conversation about racism in the United States. The scholars present overlapping narratives with regards to racial violence and unequal citizenship – but they also openly challenge each other on first assumptions, definitions, and the contours of racism in the United States.Dr. Davin Phoenix (Associate Professor, Political Science Department, University of California, Irvine ) focuses on anger and black politics as the “politics of bloodshed”– in which all forms of violence are used to destroy the political standing, well-being, and equal citizenship of Black Americans.Dr. Frank B. Wilderson III (professor and chair of the African American Studies Program, University of California, Irvine) thoughtfully challenges the assumption that citizenship can be equal for Black Americans – even with radical reform.Dr. Cristina Beltrán (associate professor and director of graduate studies in the department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU) interrogates whether American ideals rely upon uninterrogated violence and oppression.Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities (Living Justice Press, 2020) consists of stories that have arisen from the lived experiences of a broad range of seasoned, loving restorative justice practitioners of color—mostly women—who have fiercely unearthed realities about devastation caused by white practitioners who have unthinkingly worked without a racial or social justice consciousness. This book is thus a wake-up call for European-descended restorative justice practitioners as it is validating for Indigenous practitioners and practitioners of color and enlightening for anyone wishing to explore the intersections of indigeneity, racial justice, and restorative justice.The authors of Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities are Desirée Anderson, Rochelle Arms Almengor, Michelle Armster, Belinda Dulin, Leon Dundas, Sharon Goens-Bradley, Janice Jerome, Gaye Lang, Erica Littlewolf, Shameeka Mattis, Abdul-Malik Muhammad, Christianne Paras, Christina Parker, Gilbert Salazar, Victor Jose Santana, Barbara Sherrod, Johonna Turner, Edward C Valandra, Waŋbli Wapȟáha Hokšíla, Anita Wadhwa, Sheryl R. Wilson, and Robert G. Yazzie.Dr. Edward C Valandra, Waŋbli Wapȟáha Hokšíla is Sičáŋǧu Thitȟuŋwaŋ and was born and raised on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation. He has served his Sičáŋǧu Thitȟuŋwaŋ Oyáte nation on the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Council, as an Inter-Tribal Bison Cooperative (ITBC) Board of Directors representative, and as his nation’s seven-member Constitutional Task Force. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Welcome to New Books in African American Studies, a channel on the New Books Network. I am your host Adam McNeil. Today is part 2 of my discussion about Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan’s 2004 Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Instead of Dr. Morgan, who was featured in part 1 of the discussion, I enlisted a few #Blktwitterstorians to pull up to the pod and discuss the importance of Dr. Morgan’s Laboring Women to the field of slavery studies, gender and sexuality studies, and other fields, along with why Laboring Women is so important to each scholar, and also where the field of slavery studies is going.My guests are:Dr. Natasha Lightfoot, associate professor of history at Columbia University, a historian of slavery and emancipation studies, and black identities, politics, and cultures in the fields of Caribbean, Atlantic World, and African Diaspora History.Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson, assistant professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University, a historian of black diasporic freedom struggles from slavery to emancipation + as a digital humanist, Johnson explores ways digital and social media disseminate and create historical narratives, in particular, comparative histories of slavery and people of African descent.Halle Ashby, PhD Student in History at the Johns Hopkins University. Ashby is a historian of Caribbean slavery and emancipation, and her research concerns questions about gender, reproduction, and sexuality. Let me tell y’all, the conversation you are about to witness, is…. *chef’s kiss. Sit back, and enjoy the ride y’all!Adam McNeil is a third-year PhD Student in History at Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey. McNeil is a historian of Black women’s political histories during the American Revolutionary era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Prior to the 1960s, Democrats were seen as having a lock on the South in national and local electoral politics, while Republicans had strengths in other parts of the country. While this was the case for some time, Boris Heersink and Jeffrey A. Jenkins, in their new book,Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865-1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), look a bit more deeply into the role of the Republican Party in the Southern states following the Civil War, and they find some interesting dynamics at play across the next hundred years. Heersink and Jenkins argue that the overly simplified view of the “solid Democratic South” creates an incomplete narrative. Outlining the role of the Republican Party in the former states of the Confederacy, they explain how Southern Republicans had meaningful roles in selecting Republican presidential candidates even if few of those candidates carried any electoral college votes from Southern states.Heersink and Jenkins describe how Southern Republicans, despite their unpopularity in the South, remained nationally important through their regular participation at the Republican national conventions. They explain that Southern delegates made up a sizable portion of the conventions, and candidates often vied for support from these delegates. Southern delegates were so valuable that candidates often turned to corrupt practices, including bribery, to win over these delegates. As a result, many GOP delegates were able to leverage their support for candidates for patronage appointments back home, even if they couldn’t produce broad-based state support for Republican presidential candidates. Heersink and Jenkins created a complex data set that came from census records, delegate rosters, local newspaper articles from the time, and information about patronage appointments. This is a fascinating multi-methods analysis, and they are continuing to expand the analysis to look more closely at these questions of patronage appointments.Additionally, Heersink and Jenkins discuss electoral strategies of the Republican Party over the century that followed the Civil War. They recount the different ways that the GOP, in different states, approached party building and political engagement. This dimension of the research and the book is particularly rich since it dives into how the parties operated at the state level and how the approach of those operations also changed and shifted over time. As Reconstruction ended and as Southern states began to institute laws and regulations that would come to form the Jim Crow era, the various state-level Republican parties (and Democratic Parties) pursued support among voters, especially white voters as Black voters were pushed out of active political participation in the South. This hundred-year span is both nuanced and complex, and Heersink and Jenkins guide the reader through the evolution of the Republican Party, how this paved the way for Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy and partisan realignment of the South in the latter part of the 20th century.Adam Liebell-McLean assisted with this podcast.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Black women intellectuals have traditionally been overlooked in the academic study of American intellectual history. Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger) highlights the important contributions of both well- and lesser-known abolitionists, civil rights activists, preachers, writers, and artists to all spheres of American life and culture, arguing that Black women and their ideas were central to some of the most important social and political campaigns of the 19th and 20th centuries.In this conversation Dr. Hettie V. Williams (Assistant Professor of African American History at Monmouth University), editor, discusses defining and redefining the public intellectual, the various pathways that Black women took into public life, the African American women’s club movement, the impact of bell hooks and Audre Lorde on scholarship around Black sexuality, and bringing Black women’s history into the college classroom.Diana Dukhanova is Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Her work focuses on religion and sexuality in Russian cultural history, and she is currently working on a monograph about Russian religious philosopher Vasily Rozanov. Diana tweets about contemporary events in the Russian religious landscape at https://twitter.com/RussRLGNWatch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

America's Other Muslims: Imam W.D. Mohammed, Islamic Reform, and the Making of American Islam explores the oldest and perhaps the most important Muslim community in America, whose story has received little attention in the contemporary context.Muhammad Fraser-Rahim explores American Muslim Revivalist, Imam W.D. Mohammed (1933–2008) and his contribution to the intellectual, spiritual, and philosophical thought of American Muslims as well as the contribution of Islamic thought by indigenous American Muslims. The book details the intersection of the Africana experience and its encounter with race, religion, and Islamic reform. Fraser-Rahim spotlights the emergence of an American school of Islamic thought, which was created and established by the son of the former Nation of Islam leader.Imam W.D. Mohammed rejected his father’s teachings and embraced normative Islam on his own terms while balancing classical Islam and his lived experience of Islam in the diaspora. Likewise his interpretations of Islam were not only American – they were also modern and responded to global trends in Islamic thought. His interpretations of Blackness were not only American, but also diasporic and pan-African.Muhammad Fraser-Rahim is executive director of Quilliam International and assistant professor at the Citadel. Muhammed Fraser-Rahim on twitter: @mfraserrahimBeth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. 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 2004, Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press) was published. Sixteen years later, Morgan’s Laboring Women stands tall as one of the most important historical texts in the history of the academy.Building on Dr. Deborah Gray White’s literal field building and seminal 1985 monograph, Ar’n’t I A Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, Laboring Women clearly added to White’s tradition, but also helped blaze a trail in her own right. Laboring Women was the first historical text to focus on Black women’s reproductive labor under New World slavery in the early modern period.Laboring Women is also critically important to scholarly understandings about African and African American history, reproduction, gender, sexuality, capitalism, and MORE! To say the least, since 2004, the game wasn’t the same, anymore! Learn why by listening to the conversation! Enjoy New Books in African American Studies listeners.Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan is Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis & History; Chair of the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis where she focuses on the history of the Black Atlantic World; comparative slavery, gender and sexuality studies.Adam McNeil is a third-year PhD Student in the Department of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Adam also regularly contributes to academic blogs Black Perspectives and The Junto, and co-convenes Rutgers’ Center for Cultural Analysis’ Slavery and Freedom Studies Working Group. You can find Adam on Twitter at @CulturedModesty Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Two south side Chicago families are bound together by a violence-infused past. Ruby’s mother, Alice King, has been murdered. Her father, Lebanon King, is an abusive man who endured a terrible childhood. Her best friend, Layla, has always tried to protect Ruby from Lebanon even though her own father and Ruby’s father have been close friends since childhood. And their mothers were friends before them.In this moving debut novel, Saving Ruby King (Park Row Books), Catherine Adel West gives each character a voice, but the voice that binds all of their lives together is that of the Calvary Hope Christian Church, objective witness to the complex ties between Ruby’s grandmother and her two friends, between Ruby’s father and Layla’s father, and between Ruby and Layla. In precise, lyrical writing, West delves into each of their secrets while exploring intergenerational trauma, racial injustice in Chicago, and the power of friendship.Catherine Adel West was born and raised in Chicago, IL where she currently resides. She graduated with both her Bachelors and Masters of Science in Journalism from the University of Illinois - Urbana. Her work is published in Black Fox Literary Magazine, Five2One, Better than Starbucks, Doors Ajar, 805 Lit + Art, The Helix Magazine, Lunch Ticket and Gay Magazine. In between writing and traveling, Catherine works as an editor and is currently obsessed with watching old episodes of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, especially the ones with Vincent D’Onofrio.If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/joinG.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Can’t Be Faded: Twenty Years in the New Orleans Brass Band Game (University of Mississippi Press, 2020) is a collaboration between musician and ethnomusicologist Kyle DeCoste and more than a dozen members of the Stooges Brass Band, past and present. It is the culmination of five years of interviews, research, and writing. Told with humor and candor, it’s as much a personal account of the Stooges’ careers as it is a story of the city’s musicians and, even more generally, a coming-of-age tale about Black men in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century.DeCoste and the band members take readers into the barrooms, practice rooms, studios, tour vans, and streets where the music is made and brotherhoods are shaped and strengthened. Comprised of lively firsthand accounts and honest dialogue, Can’t Be Faded is a dynamic approach to collaborative research that offers a sensitive portrait of the humans behind the horns.The Stooges Brass Band is based in New Orleans, Louisiana. They are known for incorporating elements of hip-hop, funk, and R&B into a more traditional brass band framework. In April 2011, the Stooges Brass Band won the Best Contemporary Brass Band award from the Big Easy Music Awards.This episode features four members of the Stooges Brass Band: Walter Ramsey, tuba player, trombonist, and leader of the group; Al Growe, trombonist; Garfield Bogan, trombonist, drummer, and vocalist; and Andrew Baham, trumpet player and producer.Alongside the Stooges Brass Band is co-author Kyle DeCoste, a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at Columbia University. His dissertation explores the cultural politics of childhood in Black popular music in the United States.Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

“I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America.“I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud.“I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that.” – Shirley Chisholm, January 25, 1972, Announcement of Run for the PresidencyWhat is the political and intellectual legacy of Shirley Chisholm? Recent coverage of Chisholm – especially after the announcement of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s choice of Vice-Present – emphasizes ‘trailblazer talk.’ Chisholm’s extraordinary career included being both the first African-American woman elected to the United States congress and the first to run for the U.S. presidency. But emphasizing these “firsts” obscures Shirley Chisholm’s political and intellectual significance. She was a brilliant political strategist who deftly cultivated relationships that allowed her to accomplish her principled and wide-ranging political agenda. Shirley Chisholm said of herself that her achievement was having the "audacity and nerve" to run for the presidency of the United States: "I want history to remember me not as the first black woman to have be elected to the Congress, not as the first black woman to have made a bid for the presidency of the united states, but as a black woman who lived in the 20th century and who dared to be herself." Chisholm spoke and acted forcefully throughout her long career – Her slogan was “unbought and unbossed” – and she defined empowerment in the second half of the 20th century. She is better understood in the context of #BLM and than Kamala Harris.POSTSCRIPT, a new series from New Books in Political Science, invites authors to react to contemporary political developments that engage their scholarship. Dr. Anastasia Curwood and Dr. Zinga A. Fraser – imminent scholars of Shirley Chisholm’s political strategies and ideals – engage in a remarkable dialogue.Shirley Chisholm is often “disremembered” and Drs. Curwood and Fraser emphasize the importance of evaluating her work in the context of the Black Power movement of the 1970s, Black Women’s history, and Black feminism. Chisholm’s feminism was central to both her principles and her practice. She spoke the language of intersectionality – emphasizing the overlapping identities of gender, race, and class – decades before it was a popular term in Critical Race Theory. She had a majority woman staff with a woman as her top legislative aid. Political Science often equates political strategy with masculinity – failing to adequately explore Chisholm’s brilliant strategy of cultivating relationships that allowed her to deftly construct cross-cutting alliances. Her understanding of power was complex. She did not care who got credit and artfully created unlikely coalitions that allowed her to accomplish her political goals – always her priority.Dr. Anastasia Curwood is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Kentucky and the Director of African-American and Africana Studies in the University of Kentucky’s College of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Zinga A. Fraser is an Assistant Professor in the Africana Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Brooklyn College. In addition to her academic responsibilities she is also the Director of the Shirley Chisholm Project on Brooklyn Women’s Activism at Brooklyn College. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies