New Books in African American Studies

The “ownership” of Southern food is a divisive cultural issue, reflective of the ongoing struggle for racial justice in America. Michael Twitty shares with us that struggle in The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South (Harper Collins: Amistad 2017). He brings to life the unsung heroes of American food history, the black cooks in slavery and freedom who created an innovative and syncretic cuisine. Like them, he builds upon the South’s diverse botanical ecosystems, a continent of indigenous nations, and the long roots of memory, extending back across the middle passage to West Africa. For Twitty, this is also a tale of family. He shares his ancestors experiences through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents. He travels from abandoned cotton plantations to black-owned organic farms, from synagogues in Georgia to vodun rituals in New Orleans. As Twitty takes us on this journey, he shows how food and memory together can heal. He reminds that as uncomfortable as honest conversation about racism’s legacy can be, its the only path to rejuvenating body, soul, and American community. Jeremy Wood is a Seattle appellate attorney. Much of his scholarly work has concerned Native American interests. He also serves as Co-Chair for the Seattle City Human Rights Commission and as a Jewish educator. You can learn more about his work by visiting https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyfwood. He can be reach at jeremywood10@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

What is Black Power? Does it still exist in the so-called post-racial 21st Century? How does Black Power relate to similar movements, like Black Lives Matter? There as so many questions, but there may now be a scholar and text to help answer many of them. Mainstreaming Black Power (University of California Press, 2017) upends the narrative that the Black Power movement allowed for a catharsis of black rage but achieved little institutional transformation or black uplift. Retelling the story of the 1960s and 1970s across the United States and focusing on New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles this book reveals how the War on Poverty cultivated black self-determination politics and demonstrates that federal, state, and local policies during this period bolstered economic, social, and educational institutions for black control. Mainstreaming Black Power shows more convincingly than ever before that white power structures did engage with Black Power in specific ways that tended ultimately to reinforce rather than challenge existing racial, class, and gender hierarchies. The author emphasizes that Black Power’s reach and legacies can be understood only in the context of an ideologically diverse black community. Author Tom Adam Davies is a lecturer and a school visits representative in American History at the University of Sussex. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Leeds and is a specialist in twentieth-century postwar political and social American history, with a particular focus on the history of race in the United States and the relationship between public policy and mainstream political institutions and movements for social, economic and political change. Davies has also written and recorded a six-part podcast lecture series on the American Civil Rights and Black Power movements for Massolit, a company which produces audio-visual online educational content primarily for A-Level students across the United Kingdom. Mainstreaming Black Power is his first book. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Most psychology books are written by experts with knowledge deriving from professional experience–for which we are grateful. Occasionally, a psychologist ventures to write a book that draws from intimate personal experience to illuminate important psychological phenomena. Such is the case with our guest this week, Shelvy Haywood Keglar. In his book Underdog to Top Dog: An Improbable Rise (published in 2017 in association with IBJ Book Publishing), Dr. Keglar describes his journey from poverty and rural life, through racism and segregation, to the fulfillment and success he enjoys now. He talks with me about what inspired him to document his personal journey and the hard-earned lessons he imparts to young Black men in search of hope and guidance. To the extent that dreaming is a basic human enterprise, Dr. Keglar’s experiences and wisdom strike universal chords. Shelvy Haywood Keglar is a psychologist, and founder and president of Midwest Psychological Center, Inc. He also serves as staff member at Community Hospital and Fairbanks Hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana. He has taught at Indiana University Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry. Prior publications have been in the areas of personality assessment, addictions, and adolescent psychology. Listen to the interview by clicking below. To subscribe to the New Books in Psychology podcast, click here. Eugenio Duarte is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship problems. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

From the American Revolution to the present day, African Americans have stepped forward in their nation’s defense. Fighting for Uncle Sam: Buffalo Solders in the Frontier Army (Schiffer, 2016) breathes new vitality into a stirring subject, emphasizing the role men who have come to be known as “buffalo soldiers” played in opening the Trans-Mississippi West. This concise overview reveals a cast of characters as big as the land they served. Over 150 images painstakingly gathered nearly a half century from public and private collections enhance the written word as windows to the past. Now 150 years after Congress authorized blacks to serve in the Regular Army, the reader literally can peer into the eyes of formerly enslaved men who bravely bought their freedom on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War, then trekked westward, carried the “Stars and Stripes” to the Caribbean, and pursued Pancho Villa into Mexico with John “Black Jack” Pershing. Growing up in Tucson, Arizona, historian and author John P. Langellier spent four decades working in public history after earning a B.A. and M.A. in history from the University of San Diego and his Ph.D. in military history from Kansas State University. He spent a dozen years with the U.S. Army, helped found California’s Autry Museum of the American West, and served as director for Wyoming State Museum, deputy director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, executive director of Arizona’s Sharlot Hall Museum, and director of Arizona Historical Society’s Central Division. He was also awarded an honorary membership into the 9th and 10th U.S. Horse Calvary Association. He has written dozens of published books, served as a Hollywood film consultant, a Smithsonian Institution fellow, and produced history documentaries for television networks A&E, History, and PBS. Langellier officially “retired” to Tucson in 2015, but still continues his work as one of the preeminent military historians in the United States. After Fighting for Uncle Sam: Blacks in the Frontier Army, one of his current research projects is a book-length work on the connections between the Western art of Frederic Remington and the U.S. Army 10th Calvary (Buffalo Soldiers) in Arizona. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Public scholarship takes many forms, from op-eds to activism to blog posts. In their new book, Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family (Columbia University Press, 2017), Associate Professor Bruce Haynes and freelance writer, developmental editor, and educator Syma Solovitch (both co-authors and a married couple) use a “sociological memoir” to show a variety of social science concepts in the fields of urban studies, social class, and race. The subject is Haynes’s family, whose members were at the heart of several key events, periods, and organizations in African American life in the twentieth century. His grandfather was a leading scholar of the Great Migration and founded the National Urban League, while his grandmother was a noted children’s book author of the Harlem Renaissance. The couple became members of the new black Harlem. His parents, who made great sacrifices, such as the gradual deterioration of their house, to send their three sons to private school, resembled the tenuous position African Americans held in the middle class. And Haynes and his brothers came of age in an equally exciting and dangerous period in New York City’s history: the turbulence of the 60s, decline of the 70s, and devastation of the 80s. Interweaving a variety of sociological concepts and historical examinations with intimate portraits of this singular family, Down the Up Staircase takes readers on an entertaining and provocative tour of twentieth-century urban America. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale mens barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge; 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. 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 legendary band leader Sun Ra said he came from Saturn. Known on Earth for his inventive music and extravagant stage shows, he pioneered free-form improvisation in an ensemble setting with the devoted band he called the “Arkestra,” Sun Ra took jazz from the inner city to outer space, infusing traditional swing with far-out harmonies, rhythms, and sounds. Described as the father of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra created “space music” as a means of building a better future for American blacks here on earth. A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism (University of Texas Press, 2016) offers a spirited introduction to the life and works of this legendary but underappreciated musician, composer, and poet. The book explores and assesses Sun R’as wide-ranging creative output–music, public preaching, graphic design, film and stage performance, and poetry–and connects his diverse undertakings to the culture and politics of his times, including the space race, the rise of technocracy, the civil rights movement, and even space-age bachelor-pad music. By thoroughly examining the astro-black mythology that Sun Ra espoused, A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism masterfully demonstrates that he offered both a holistic response to a planet desperately in need of new visions and vibrations and a new kind of political activism that used popular culture to advance social change. In a nation obsessed with space and confused about race, Sun Ra aimed not just at assimilation for the socially disfranchised but even more at a wholesale transformation of American society and a more creative, egalitarian world. Author Paul Youngquist teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is a professor in the English Department and associate chair of Graduate Studies. His current areas of research focus are British literature, cultural studies, literacy theory, popular culture, film/digital media, and Romanticism. He is the author or editor of six books, including Cyberfiction: After the Future, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism, and Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic. Dr. Youngquist now devotes much of his energy to studying the histories written and oral of resistance and creativity in the Caribbean. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Urban sociologists typically use a few grand narratives to explain the path of the American city through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. These include industrialization, mass immigration, the “Great Migration,” deindustrialization, suburbanization (or “white flight”), gentrification, and postindustrial/neoliberal growth policies, among others. In Race and the Politics of Deception: The Making of an American City (New York University Press, 2017) , Associate Professor Christopher Mele shows readers the more granular details of this history. Focusing on growth, decline, and revitalization of Chester, a small city in Pennsylvania near Philadelphia, Mele specifically reveals how race, or an ideology and discourse of racial blindness, have been used as a strategy of exclusion since World War I. Proceeding chronologically, the book examines how the politics of growth in Chester have revolved on ideas of race, from housing segregation to civil rights clashes. It culminates with the present-day realities of life in Chester, in which the city boasts a casino, a soccer stadium, and a redeveloped waterfront, mainly for visitors, while its majority population of low-income minorities get labeled as either compliant participants in (e.g. as low-wage workers) or obstructions to (e.g. as criminals or deviants) this image and growth. The imagery ignores the structural conditions that create their poverty. Mele provides a new, fascinating lens for looking at the relationship between race and space in the city. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge; 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Traversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York University Press, 2017), uncovers the dynamic experiments of a group of black writers, artists, and performers. The author chronicles a little-known story about race and science in America. While the history of scientific racism in the nineteenth century has been well-documented, there was also a counter-movement of African Americans who worked to refute its claims. Far from rejecting science, these figures were careful readers of antebellum science who linked diverse fields–from astronomy to physiology–to both on-the-ground activism and more speculative forms of knowledge creation. Routinely excluded from institutions of scientific learning and training, they transformed cultural spaces like the page, the stage, the parlor, and even the pulpit into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation. From the recovery of neglected figures like Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, to new accounts of Martin Delany, Henry Box Brown, and Frederick Douglass, Fugitive Science makes natural science central to how we understand the origins and development of African American literature and culture. Britt Rusert received her Ph.D. in English and certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University. Her research and teaching focus on African American literature, American literatures to 1900, speculative fiction, the history of race and science, U.S. print cultures, and critical theory. She is currently working on a book-length research study of William J. Wilson’s “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” a text that imagines the first museum of black art in the United States. She is also editing W.E.B. Du Bois short genre fiction with scholar Adrienne Brown. Their edition of W.E.B. Du Bois’ fantasy story, “The Princess Steel,” was recently published in PMLA, the journal of Modern Language Association of America. Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture is her first book. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press, 2016) is innovative and lyrical, challenging and beautiful. Ashon Crawley brings together black studies, queer theory, theology, and continental philosophy to theorize the ways in which what he calls “otherwise worlds of possibility” can serve as disruptions against marginalization and violence and also produce possibilities for flourishing. Examining the whooping, shouting, noise-making, and tongue speaking of Black Pentecostalism, Crawley reveals how these aesthetic practices allow for the emergence of alternative modes of social organization. In the process, he does much more: suggesting a hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture when people are under siege. Ashon Crawley is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia. Hillary Kaell is associate professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) is a wide-ranging history that upends a long tradition of scrutinizing the Low Country blacks of Sapelo Island by outsiders. The book promotes a refocusing, and the observational lens is instead focused on those white and black scholars who the Gullah of Sapelo Island during the early 20th Century. The author uses a wide variety of sources to unmask the connections between the rise of the social sciences, the voodoo craze during the interwar years, the black studies movement, and black land loss and land struggles in coastal black communities in the Low Country. What emerges is a fascinating examination of Gullah people’s heritage, and how it was reimagined and transformed to serve vastly divergent ends over the decades. During the 1920s and 1930s, anthropologists and folklorists became obsessed with uncovering connections between African Americans and their African roots. At the same time, popular print media and artistic productions tapped the new appeal of black folk life, highlighting African-styled voodoo as an essential element of black folk culture. A number of researchers converged on one site in particular, Sapelo Island, Georgia, to seek support for their theories about “African survivals,” bringing with them a curious mix of both influences. The legacy of that body of research is the area’s contemporary identification as a Gullah community. Melissa L. Cooper is an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark. She specializes in African American cultural and intellectual history, and the history of the African Diaspora. In addition to Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination Cooper is also the author of Instructor’s Resource Manual Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents and a contributing writer to Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line. Her current research concerns the connections between Afrocentricism and its portrayals in mass media and popular culture. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies