New Books in 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

What the United States dubs “freedom” is inherently tied to methods of violence. The United States’s abolitionist movement was not free from this connection. This is in spite of one of the best known white abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison, being a pacifist, and many contemporary politicians referencing his method of non-violent resistance as a way to thwart present-day movements that grapple with the subject of revolutionary violence as a method to gain freedom from oppression. The abolitionist movement’s Black activists saw how the repression of their freedoms in the north were directly tied to the oppression of their enslaved sisters and brothers. In her new book Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Kellie Carter Jackson chronicles how violence was harnessed by Black abolitionists in their quest to rid the United States of chattel slavery. Force and Freedom explores why for many Black abolitionists, slavery could only be obliterated through violent means.Adam McNeil is PhD student in History at the University of Delaware where he is an African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar. He received his M.A. in History at Simmons College in 2018 and his B.S. in History at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2015. Follow him @CulturedModesty on Twitter to learn more about upcoming interviews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Andrew T. Fede is a lawyer in private practice in northern New Jersey and an adjunct professor of law at Montclair State University.  His new book Homicide Justified: The Legality of Killing Slaves in the United States and Atlantic World (University of Georgia Press, 2017) is a comparative account of slave homicide law in the American colonies and states, covering the period from the early 17th century through the American Civil War.  Professor Fede’s account traces the variations in restrictions on slave owners and third parties’ treatment upon the murder of a slave.  The harsh, often lethal, conditions of servitude in the Caribbean seem to have shaped the willingness (usually unwillingness) of slave owners and elected officials in these island to restrict what masters could do to their slaves.  Whereas in the mid-Atlantic and northeastern colonies, restrictions were somewhat more easily countenanced.  Fede reveals the details of murder prosecutions against slave masters, overseers and third-party non-owners and the limits such prosecutions faced in courts.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

Elizabeth Todd-Breland’s new book A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) tells the story of the struggle for educational reform in one of America's biggest and most segregated cities. By highlighting the activism of local Black women and Black teachers, Todd-Breland uncovers hidden histories of how Black women have been at the forefront of this fight from the 1960s to the present. 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, in her excellent new book Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America(Cambridge University Press, 2018), weaves together the legal and constitutional dimensions of citizenship—from the Founding documents and law cases with which  many scholars and students are familiar—with the daily civic engagement of African-Americans as they took part in public life and the rights of citizens. This political, historical, and legal analysis focuses particularly on the antebellum experiences of black Americans in Baltimore, Maryland, just miles from the U.S. Capital, but also vital as the largest free black community in the U.S. in one of the largest cities in the United States before the Civil War. Birthright Citizens takes the question of what defines and makes an individual a citizen, legally, and how that is performed and engaged in a granular or daily way, and delves into the historical record of black Americans in Baltimore, exploring how individuals took on the qualities and actions of citizens before the 14th Amendment. Jones’ deeply researched work is, as she notes, “a history, told through a series of disruptive vignettes, that suggests how people without rights still exercised them.” This is a fascinating marrying together of the structural and legal parameters of citizen rights and denials of those rights for many black Americans, both free and enslaved, and the ideas and actions pursued and taken by African-Americans in an effort to act like and thus be citizens. As we continue to consider the idea of citizenship, which remains less fixed and clear as a concept or legal construct, this analysis lays out the fluid and evolving understanding of the idea and daily functioning of citizenship in the early years of the republic and, particularly, in context of free, formerly enslaved, and enslaved black Americans in the United States.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Though overshadowed today by more celebrated figures, Walter Francis White was one of the most prominent campaigners for civil rights in mid-20th-century America. As Ronald L. Lewis and Robert L. Zangrando detail in Walter F. White: The NAACP’s Ambassador for Racial Justice(West Virginia University Press, 2019), for all his relative obscurity today White’s accomplishments did much to lay the groundwork for the civil rights victories won later in the century. Growing up in Atlanta, White enjoyed the benefits of a middle-class upbringing and a college education. His work to establish a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Atlanta brought him to the attention of James Weldon Johnson, who brought him to New York in 1918 to work full time for the organization. Throughout the 1920s White worked to expose the atrocities of lynching as part of the NAACP’s unsuccessful campaign to ban such violence. Upon succeeding Johnson as executive secretary of the organization in 1931, White dealt with both the ongoing problems of racism and the challenges imposed by the Great Depression, which he worked to surmount with constant organizing and lobbying. During the 1940s White used his relationships with both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to win greater federal action to surmount discrimination, though in his later years he faced a series of frustrations that were exacerbated both by his ill health and the controversy surrounding his divorce and remarriage to a white woman. 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 intersection of religion and politics in the United States is one of the nation's most enduring conversations. Christian: The Politics of a Word in America(Harvard University Press, 2018) by Dr. Matthew Bowman at Henderson State University, was recently named one of the five Best Books in Religion for 2018 by Publishers Weekly. It is out now from Harvard University Press. Please enjoy this conversation with Dr. Matthew Bowman.Greg Soden is the host "Classical Ideas," a podcast about religion and religious ideas. You can find it on iTunes 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

In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approaches to race that show the breadth and depth of the kinds of racial thinking in medieval society. In creating a detailed impression of the medieval race-making that would be reconfigured into the biological racism of the modern era, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaches beyond medievalists and race-studies scholars to anyone interested in the long history of race.Throughout the study, Heng treats race-making as a repeating tendency to demarcate human beings through differences that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental. Thus constituted, these categories are then used to guide the differential apportioning of power. Scholars working in critical race studies have clearly demonstrated that culture predisposes notions of race. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaffirms that insight by examining the era before the dominance of biological discourses. Race has always been about strategically creating a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. By exploring race in the European middle ages, Heng lays bare the skeleton of racial thinking as a sorting mechanism, a structural relationship for the management of human differences.In Heng's hands, the tools of critical race studies make it possible to name the systems and atrocities of the Middle Ages for what they were, revealing race-making before the modern vocabulary of race coalesced. Bringing together a group of specialized archives that aren't usually in conversation, Heng in many cases allows the medieval past to powerfully testify to the pre-modern history of race-formation, racial administration, and racist exploitation and oppression.Beginning with the violent and sweeping anti-Semitism of thirteenth century England, showing the ways that Jews became the template by which other races were measured, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages launches a careful exposure of the way that minority groups were (and are) manipulated to create the sense of a national majority. A short but potent comparison to the English treatment of Irish subjects drives the analysis home.A researcher, writer, editor, and educator, Carl Nellis digs in archives and academic libraries for the critically-acclaimed Lore Podcast and as research lead for Unobscured Podcast. Studies on both sides of the Atlantic left him chasing the tangled colonial history that threads the culture of the Middle Ages into today’s United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Adrienne Brown joins the New Books Network this week to talk about her fascinating 2017 book, The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (John Hopkins University Press, 2017), which was a recent recipient of the Modern Studies Association's First Book prize.Tracing the interconnected histories of the skyscraper and racial thought between the 1880s and the 1930s, Brown provides a sophisticated account of how vertical as well as horizontal expansion within the modern American city helped to shape perceptions and understandings of race and racial difference.Drawing on a rich array of material, including art, literature, architectural design and urban planning records, The Black Skyscraper explores architecture's effects on the process of seeing and being seen as a racialized subject. In this bold and deeply interdisciplinary work, Brown demonstrates the centrality of race to modern architectural design and the impact of the skyscraper on perceptions of race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Analyses of the lives of black women in the United States often focus on narratives of struggle and sorrow, as black women must contend daily with the intersecting oppressions of sexism and racism. However, in her new book The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2018), Bianca Williams offers her readers a different starting point by asking: What about Black women’s experiences of happiness, pleasure, leisure, desire, travel? This book follows the journeys of middle-aged Black women who travel from the US to Jamaica, often many times over, on trips organized by Girlfriend Tours International. These women are seeking to fulfill diasporic dreams of finding connections with other people of African descent even as they hope to experience respite from the everyday realities of racism in the US and a fuller sense of freedom to express and care for themselves. Williams traces the complicated threads of these women’s emotional lives and relationships through a multi-sited ethnography that includes various places within Jamaica and the US as well as online sites where travelers share their stories of journeys to Jamaica. This book will be of interest to readers in a variety of fields, including Black feminist studies, diaspora and transnational studies, affect studies, and the anthropology of tourism and mobility. Dannah Dennis is an anthropologist currently working as a Teaching Fellow at New York University Shanghai. You can find her on Twitter @dannahdennis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies