New Books in African American Studies

Today, I spoke with LaTanya McQueen, whose new collection of essays reckons with intriguing and timely questions about history, race, family, place, and self. It’s called And It Begins Like This(Black Lawrence Press, 2018), and I immediately found myself asking, “What’s it? What’s this?” Not until over halfway through the book did McQueen make the answer clear, when she writes: “There is a story I once believed and it begins like this—a woman named Leanna Brown was a slave to Bedford Brown, Senator of North Carolina. Sometime during her enslavement she had a relationship with a white man who lived on a neighboring farm, and the results of their relationship produced three children, one of them my ancestor.” McQueen’s book is, in part, her attempt to learn the full and complicated truth of this story, to discover, as much as the record will allow, the history of her great-great grandmother. This search, it turns out, asks her no less than to grapple with the history of race relations in the United States and the ways in which it manifests in her own life and family. And It Begins Like This is a clear-eyed and powerful account not only of the experience of being an African American woman right now, but also a testament to the importance of this experience and the insight it brings for all Americans.Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Racquel J. Gates’ new book, Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2018), interrogates understandings of African-American representations on screen.  This book is an important analysis of the concepts of negative and positive representations, especially in regard to the narrow space that these binary classifications create. Gates takes on not only the concept of representation, but also the texts where the images are presented, leading the reader through a variety of popular culture venues. Double Negative presents a careful typology of negativity, with extensive and diverse examples of each distinct variation. This analysis also integrates texts that are often dismissed or undermined. Instead, Gates provides valuable and nuanced interpretations of genres, reclaiming popular culture artifacts that are often excluded from scholarly or critical analysis. Gates explores many of the less respectable images and presentations of African-Americans, considering not only the images themselves and the narratives in which they are presented, but also the historical context in which the popular culture artifacts are engaged and consumed. Double Negative also takes up a metanalysis of celebrity in context of representation, especially in the entwining of race and gender. This is a fascinating book, examining important political questions and understandings through popular culture texts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Histories of the British occupation of Havana in 1762 have focused on imperial rivalries and the actions and decisions of European planters, colonial officials, and military officers. In her stunning revision, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Elena Schneider restores the central roles of enslaved Africans in all stages of the story. The relevance of the slave trade and the multiple and essential roles of African and African descended people in battle and in urban life emerge in this beautifully written account. In the aftermath, their valor and loyalty were omitted from contemporary accounts and the ensuing historiography. This book draws from a wide range of sources and multiple archives in a careful narrative that connects the Atlantic worlds of Spain, London, Havana, Kingston and the colonial United States, and zooms in on the enslaved individuals that made that world possible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. In her new book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (Yale University Press, 2019) historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave‑owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave‑owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave‑owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding. 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 an empire built on racial slavery, what roles do blood purity and citizenship play in the creation of subject citizens? This is one of the many questions broached by Dr. Brooke Newman in her new book A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (Yale University Press, 2018), Newman tells the story of how racial mixing affected the status of many different groups of people in colonial Jamaica. In doing so, Newman interrogates how notions of race were largely dependent on government’s role in shaping the meaning(s) of it. Largely, such discussions were based on the sexual violation and rape of enslaved women. Such violations were exacerbated by British print culture’s dissemination of what could only be termed a sort of modern-day rape tourism. A Dark Inheritance ultimately shifts our understandings of British notions of race, sex, and national belonging.Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and  Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @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

Candis Watts Smith and Christina Greer are the editors of Black Politics in Transition: Immigration, Suburbanization, and Gentrification (Routledge, 2019). Smith is assistant professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina; Greer is associate professor of political science and American Studies at Fordham University.Black Politics in Transition examines the role of three themes—immigration, suburbanization, and gentrification—in Black politics today. Immigration has resulted in demographic changes in Black populations throughout the US. In addition, the movement of Black populations out of the cities to which they migrated a generation ago—a reverse migration to the American South or a movement from cities to suburbs shifts the locus of Black politics. At the same time, middle class and white populations are returning to cities, displacing low income Blacks and immigrants alike in a process of gentrification. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Why do people live where they do? What explains the persistence of residential segregation? Why is it complicated to address residential segregation? Please join me as I meet with Dr. Ingrid Gould Ellen and Dr. Justin Peter Steil to discuss The Dream Revisited: Contemporary Debates about Housing, Segregation, and Opportunity (Columbia University Press, 2019). This interview takes a heartfelt approach to discussing the ever-changing presence of urban inequality and possible solutions that would foster a more integrated America. We begin the interview with a discussion of what brought the authors to develop this anthology and the strategies they used to select a wide range of expert viewpoints on the causes and consequences of segregation and unequal living patterns in the United States of America. The leading scholars and practitioners who contributed to this anthology include civil rights advocates, affordable housing developers, elected officials, and fair housing lawyers. Together they discuss the nature and policy responses to residential segregation; scrutinize how barriers to mobility and complex neighborhood preferences allow segregation to persist; as well as identify the consequence that residential segregation has on health, home finance, local policing, and local politics. They editors of this book conclude with the debate in how government can intervene in housing markets to foster integration and at what level it should occur at (i.e., individual residence, neighborhood, or community).In addition to The Dream Revisited, listeners can access additional contemporary debates about housing, segregation, and opportunity from the NYU Furman Center The Dream Revisited blog (the blog that served as a platform for the launch of this anthology).Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is currently conducting research on the placemaking associated with the development of farmers’ market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dr. Anne Cheng (she/hers)--Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University--to discuss an inimitable work of critique: Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford University Press, 2017). Moving fluidly and with suspense through Baker’s performances, personal journals, museums, architectural designs, and the lyrics of Cole Porter--to name a few--Cheng draws on the oft-studied but little considered Josephine Baker as a figure of articulation for the nuanced contradictions of primitivism, modernism, and theory. Through Baker, Cheng invites us to reconsider the mutual imbrication of object/subject, surface/depth, and exploitation/fascination. Cheng’s careful eye and beautiful command of texture illustrates that dissolving Baker into pure particularity--into pure surface--is the best way to capture her unique agency. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Steve Luxenberg has created an unusual history of the famous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson and the 19th century’s segregationist practices in his book Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation (Norton, 2019)  It is unusual because it is chiefly an ensemble biography of Henry Brown, John Marshall Harlan, and Albion Tourgee, three men intimately connected with the Plessy case.  The book covers the Antebellum period youth of the three men, each from a different part of the young nation and each encountering freedmen, slaves, and the institution of slavery in different social and political contexts.  We follow these men through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the post-Reconstruction period leading up to the Plessy decision.  The Plessy case helped solidify official, state-enforced segregationist practices throughout the United States.  It made the now-infamous phrase “separate but equal” a constitutional doctrine that was the law of the land until the 1950s and 1960s.Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. 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 information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge.You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies