New Books in African American Studies

The eight elite institutions that comprise the Ivy League, sometimes known as the Ancient Eight—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell—are American stalwarts that have profoundly influenced history and culture by producing the nation’s and the world’s leaders. The few black students who attended Ivy League schools in the decades following WWII not only went on to greatly influence black America and the nation in general, but unquestionably awakened these most traditional and selective of American spaces. In the twentieth century, black youth were in the vanguard of the black freedom movement and educational reform. In Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League (NYU Press, 2018), historian Stefan Bradley illuminates how the Black Power movement, which was borne out of an effort to edify the most disfranchised of the black masses, also took root in the hallowed halls of America’s most esteemed institutions of higher education. Between the close of WWII and 1975, the civil rights and Black Power movements transformed the demographics and operation of the Ivy League on and off campus. As desegregators and racial pioneers, black students, staff, and faculty used their status in the black intelligentsia to enhance their predominantly white institutions while advancing black freedom. Although they were often marginalized because of their race and class, the newcomers altered educational policies and inserted blackness into the curricula and culture of the unabashedly exclusive and starkly white schools. This book attempts to complete the narrative of higher education history, while adding a much needed nuance to the history of the Black Power movement. It tells the stories of those students, professors, staff, and administrators who pushed for change at the risk of losing what privilege they had. Putting their status, and sometimes even their lives, in jeopardy, black activists negotiated, protested, and demonstrated to create opportunities for the generations that followed. The enrichments these change agents made endure in the diversity initiatives and activism surrounding issues of race that exist in the modern Ivy League. Upending the Ivory Tower not only informs the civil rights and Black Power movements of the postwar era but also provides critical context for the Black Lives Matter movement that is growing in the streets and on campuses throughout the country today. As higher education continues to be a catalyst for change, there is no one better to inform today’s activists than those who transformed our country’s past and paved the way for its future. 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 role of the artist in the cause of Black freedom has been a hotly debated topic for generations now. Dr. Jonathan Shandell’s The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era (University of Iowa Press, 2018) focuses the American Negro Theatre, located in Harlem, New York, to argue that the stories told in the theatre transformed and expanded how Black life was and would be portrayed. Ultimately, Shandell shows that the American Negro Theatre was a formative space for many Black artists who ended up shaping the Civil Rights Movement, as well as American popular culture as a whole. 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

The story of Muslims in America has primarily been told through the experiences of men and often revolves around narratives of immigration. Sylvia Chan-Malik, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, expands upon and challenges this scholarly pattern in Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam (NYU Press, 2018). Chan-Malik centers Black Muslim women’s involvement in U.S. communities and the various spaces of social identity that are frequently ignored in scholarship. Crucial to her analysis is how social racial-religious formation informs both lived religion and how Muslim women are represented in public. “Being Muslim,” therefore, can be variously embodied in Black Muslim womanhood. Through an episodic exploration of Islam in twentieth and twenty-first century America Chan-Malik demonstrates the crucial ways race, gender, and religion intersect. In our conversation we discussed the “blackness” of American Islam, the Ahmadiyya Movement, domesticity, the Nation of Islam, Betty Shabazz, cultural representations of Black Muslim women, the problem with feminism and how it can be deployed, American perceptions of Iranian’s 1979 revolution, and environmentalism and food justice. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.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

Austin, Texas has a reputation as a vibrant, youthful capital city buoyed economically and culturally by the University of Texas. In City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Andrew M. Busch argues that this identity was consciously constructed over the course of the twentieth century and came at a price. Busch, an assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies at Coastal Carolina University, uses a bevy of promotional material and other municipal records to credibly argue that Austin’s image as a city of “industry without smokestacks” appealed to white-collar knowledge workers after World War II was a racially coded message that shaped the city’s racial geography. Environmental racism revolving around water rights, noise pollution, gasoline farms, and segregated public space all shaped Austin’s history and continue to do so up to today. City in a Garden is a wonderfully interdisciplinary history that critiques colorblind sustainability and provides an alternate and just vision for the new urbanism of the early twenty-first century. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. 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 Barbaric Culture and Black Critique: Black Antislavery Writers, Religion, and the Slaveholding Atlantic (University of Virginia Press, 2015), Dr. Stefan M. Wheelock analyses a little-discussed episode in the the late Enlightenment, namely, criticism of slavery by black writers such as Ottabah Cuguano, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, and Maria Stewart. These authors marshaled a variety of religious and secular arguments to attack bondage and, in so doing, promoted important ideas concerning democracy, Christianity, freedom, and their race’s role in all of these projects. Adam McNeil is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. 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 New Negro Movement is typically seen as a Harlem-based project. Dr. Treva Lindsey’s important book, Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington D.C. (University of Illinois Press, 2017), however, challenges the centrality of Harlem to the movement. Dr. Lindsey considers how important institutions like Howard University were pivotal centers where Black women fought against gender oppression and institutional restrictions. Washington D.C., simultaneously, was emerging as an essential space for Black women artists to develop their talents in ways also seen in Harlem. Ultimately, Dr. Lindsey centers Washington D.C. as just as important a cultural center to the New Negro Movement as Harlem. Adam McNeil is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. 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 wake of the bloody Civil War, millions of slaves were emancipated. How did those freed slaves, along with African Americans freed before the Civil War, interpret this new post-war world? Dr. Matthew Harper’s The End of Days: African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) answers this question and others by chronicling how Black North Carolinians, through their robust Christian denominational culture, biblically interpreted the world made anew by the Civil War. Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar 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

At the heart of Laila Amine’s book is a crucial question: where is Paris? This question may be surprising for anyone who can readily point to the French capital on a map. Geography is, after all stable, is it not? Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) shows that space and place are anything but stable. Amine focuses on the literal margins of Paris, and on the literary and artistic works that are produced in or about those margins. Rather than reproduce the well-worn trope of the banlieue, the outskirts of Paris, as a tragic space whose inhabitants are unable to integrate so-called French values, Amine carefully examines the work of writers and artists who have engaged with the space and have produced pointed critiques of structural inequality and the legacy of colonialism that calls into question traditional French narratives of cultural and religious alterity. Postcolonial Paris makes the rare and much-needed move of reading across the works of North African and African American writers, artists and filmmakers, thereby expanding traditional scholarly notions of thinkers of African descent in France. From novels to film to graffiti art, Amine writes about spaces that are oft-ignored and that remain productive sites at which to locate Paris and the attendant, highly contested idea of what it means to be French. Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Resistance in the Francophone World, examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements. 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 links between African Americans and the global struggle for decolonization, particularly in Africa are well-documented. Facing similar kinds of repression that were rooted in systemic racism and the denial of political rights, Pan-Africanism became one expression of a transnational fight for equality. The first Pan-African Conference was held in 1900 in London, and in the wake of World War II, the joint struggles for civil rights in the United States and political independence from European powers heated up. Nicholas Grant’s Winning Our Freedoms Together: African Americans and Apartheid, 1945–1960 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) builds on the earlier work of scholars by focusing in closely on the connections between U.S. activists and black South Africans facing dual repression from anticommunism and racist regimes. Grant begins by describing the factors that drove the U.S. government and South African governments together. Increasing financial investment in South Africa by American businessmen created economic linkages and anticommunism pushed the two governments into a Cold War alliance, with the South African government even trying to improve its anticommunist laws by consulting with American lawyers. From there, Grant goes on to describe various ways that African Americans and black South Africans were in conversation with one another. One chapter focuses on the effects of travel, while another focuses on print and musical culture. Grant examines the effect of anticommunist repression on the international black left as well as incarceration and the depictions of imprisonment before concluding with links between African American women and black South African women. Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.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

Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (Oxford, 2017) is a dramatic and vibrant story of a little-known Kentucky school, the Choctaw Academy. Christina Snyder, McCabe-Greer Professor of History at Penn State University, argues that this short-lived institution represented both the promise of a multi-ethnic American society, as well as the withering of that dream during the era of Jacksonian Democracy and Indian Removal. Snyder presents several characters, including the Choctaw scion Peter Pitchlynn, the enslaved nurse and sometime-plantation overseer Julia Chinn, and her mate and master, Vice President Richard M. Johnson. Each person’s story (as well as several others) underscores the complicated hierarchies of race and class in antebellum America, as their histories intertwine with that of the Choctaw Academy and its students. Winner of the 2018 Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, Great Crossings is a richly told and thickly researched tale that upends simple narratives of pre-Civil War American society, Native nations, and enslaved people. In their place, Snyder tells of complex humans acting by turns graciously and selfishly, with cruelty and with kindness, as the diverse population of the antebellum American West fumbled its way into the modern era. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies