New Books in African American Studies

Carol McCabe Booker is a Washington, D.C. attorney and former journalist. In the 1960s and 70s, she covered civil rights for the Voice of America, freelanced articles for The Washington Post, Readers Digest, Ebony, Jet, and Black Stars, and reported from Africa, including the Nigerian warfront, for Westinghouse Broadcasting stations. After retiring in 2008, she helped her husband, journalist Simeon Booker, write Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement, which received widespread critical acclaim following its publication by the University Press of Mississippi. After Simeon and trailblazing reporter Alice Dunnigan were inducted into the black journalists Hall of Fame in 2013, Carol tracked down Dunnigan’s out-of-print autobiography to recover her fascinating story for a modern audience. The daughter of a sharecropper born in rural Kentucky, Dunnigan went on to become the first African American female reporter accredited by the White House, the Supreme Court, and the Senate, and fashioned an illustrious career in journalism and politics in the nation’s capital. Alone Atop The Hill: The Autobiography of Alice Dunnigan, Pioneer of the National Black Press (University of Georgia Press, 2015) is an updated, annotated edition of a classic yet forgotten memoir which illustrates how Dunnigan overcame race and gender barriers to break into the highest echelons of the national press. James West is a historian of the twentieth-century United States. His research focuses on African American business enterprise and print culture, with a particular interest in Chicago. His current book project examines the role of EBONY magazine as an outlet for popular black history. He tweets @chitownanddown. 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 decades leading up to the Civil War, antebellum African Americans elites turned to the newspaper as a means of translating their belief in black “chosenness” into programs for black liberation. Benjamin Fagan’s The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (University of Georgia Press, 2016) demonstrates how the belief that God had marked black Americans as his chosen people on earth became a central article of faith in many northern African American communities throughout the nineteenth century. Directed by varying understandings of black “chosenness,” black periodicals helped to frame public debate, shape the black public sphere and to define forms of respectability and strategies for racial uplift. Fagan joins podcast host James West to discuss many of the key protagonists and periodicals of his work in more detail, shedding new light on prominent editors such as Frederick Douglass, Samuel Cornish and Mary Ann Shadd, and important early black periodicals such as Freedoms Journal, the North Star and the Provincial Freeman. As Fagan ably demonstrates, the idea of black “chosenness” played a major role in the early development of the black press, and helped to shape broader understandings of freedom, equality and nationhood on both a translocal and transnational scale. James West is a historian of the twentieth century United States. His research focuses on African American business enterprise and print culture, with a particular interest in Chicago. His current book project examines the role of EBONY magazine as an outlet for popular black history. He tweets @chitownanddown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Russell Rickford is an assistant professor of history at Cornell University. We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power and the Radical Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers an intellectual history of the Pan African nationalist schools that emerged in the late 1960s from dissatisfaction with urban school desegregation and its failure to provide an equal education and foster racial pride. Influenced by Third World theories and African anti-colonial campaigns, these black institutions promoted self-determination and black political sovereignty. Beginning with the campaigns for the community control of schools to visions of a Black University, Rickford identifies the key ideological strengths and weaknesses that ultimately resulted in the failure to build strong independent institutions necessary for cultural renewal. The Afrocentric ideas and schools that survived were congruent with a neoliberal ideology that elided the socio-economic conditions of African Americans. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Comes of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Dr. Jon Hale, Assistant Professor of Educational History, Department of Teacher Education, College of Charleston, joins the New Books Network to discuss his new book, entitled The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (Columbia University Press, 2016). Through primary interviews and in-depth historical analysis, the author provides a bottom-up view of the Mississippi Freedom Schools, part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, an important legacy to the US Civil Rights Movement. For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. 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 struggle for representation within the art museum is the focus of a timely and important new book by Susan Cahan, Associate Dean for the Arts at Yale College. Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power (Duke University Press, 2016) charts a pivotal moment for the American Art Museum and reflects on the progress, or lack thereof, for African American Art’s place within the US museum system. Focusing on 4 key institutions and range of exhibitions beginning in the late 1960s, the book offers a rich and detailed reading of the institutional context, the aesthetic practices, and the historical lineages that explain both the period and the current museum settlement. The book is replete with illustrations and is accessible, readable and interesting, representing an important and urgent intervention to how we understand the role of the museum today. Dave O’Brien is the host of New Books in Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr. Peter Matthews). He tweets@Drdaveobrien. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

April R. Haynes is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth- Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Haynes shows how the campaign against masturbation redefined women’s sexuality and reformulated the battle for political rights. Beginning with Sylvester Graham’s “Lecture to Mothers” to reform-minded women to the black abolitionists Sarah Mapps Douglas’s sex education lectures to African American women, masturbation became a topic with both gender and racial import. After a long history of neglect, it became tied to issues of purity, virtue and self-government. Through women reformers the proscriptions against masturbation were popularized and institutionalized. Haynes sheds light on the continued attention given to masturbation in American culture and the women’s movement, demonstrating its political significance. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Is it possible to lay claim to ownership of a dance? Is choreography intellectual property? How have shifting conceptions of race and gender shaped the way we think of dance, property and ownership? In Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance, Anthea Kraut wrestles mightily with these questions as she presents the first book by a dance scholar to focus explicitly on matters of copyright and choreography. Combining archival research with critical race and gender theory, Kraut offers new perspectives in this cross-genre history of American Dance. Professor Kraut’s research addresses the interconnections between American performance and cultural history and the raced and gendered dancing body. Her first book, Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2008, and received a Special Citation from the Society of Dance History Scholars de la Torre Bueno Prize for distinguished book of dance scholarship. Her teaching interests include American and African American dance history, critical race theory, and methods and theories of dance studies. Dr. Anthea Kraut is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Dance at the University of California, Riverside. 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’s missing from contemporary discussions of aesthetics and representation within the natural hair movement? Bert Ashe generously offers a response in Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, an unprecedented account of black male identity as seen through our culture’s perceptions of hair. In this personal story that weaves together the cultural and political history of dreadlocks with the authors own mid-life journey to lock his hair, Ashe addresses the significance of black hair in the 20th and 21st centuries through an engaging and humorous literary style. Professor Ashe’s research focuses on late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literature and culture. He teaches and writes about contemporary American culture, primarily post-Civil Rights Movement African American literature and culture (often referred to as post-blackness or the post-soul aesthetic), as well as the black vernacular triumvirate of black hair, basketball, and jazz. His first book, From Within the Frame: Storytelling in African-American Fiction (Routledge, 2002) tracks the development of the African American frame text, from Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman through John Edgar Wideman’s Doc’s Story. Dr. Bert Ashe is Associate Professor of English at the University of Richmond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Few composers dominate a genre of music as completely as did Scott Joplin. From the publication of his iconic Maple Leaf Rag in 1899 onward his ragtime compositions came to serve as the soundtrack of his age. Yet Joplin aspired to be recognized not just as a successful writer of popular tunes but as a respected composer of classical music, an ambition that led him to write a ballet and two operas. In a new edition of his biography of Scott Joplin, King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era, the eminent ragtime scholar Ed Berlin reveals many new details that sharpen our understanding of Joplin’s life and the times in which it was lived. Tracing his life from his childhood in rural Texas to his death in New York City in 1917, he describes Joplin’s career as a musician and composer, setting it within the context of an African American community seeking to define its place within American society. Through his extensive research, Berlin sheds new light on Joplin’s personal life, his business affairs, and the public reception of his music, helping us to better understand the impact and legacy of this great American artist. 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 his 1948 essay, “Harlem is Nowhere,” Ralph Ellison decried the psychological disparity between formal equality and discrimination faced by Blacks after the Great Migration as leaving “even the most balanced Negro open to anxiety.” In Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry (Cornell University Press, 2015), Gabriel Mendes undertakes an engaging study of race and mental health in the 20th century through the lens of an overlooked Harlem clinic. While providing the first in-depth history of the Lafargue Clinic (1946-58), the book focuses on the figures who came together in a seemingly unlikely union to found it: Richard Wright, the prominent author; Fredric Wertham, a German Jewish emigre psychiatrist now known for his advocacy for censorship of comic books; and The Reverend Shelton Hale Bishop, an important Harlem pastor. Wright’s literary prowess, work for the Communist party, and brush with Chicago School sociology met with Wertham’s socially-conscious and uncompromising brand of psychoanalysis to challenge mainstream psychiatric theory and its discriminatory practices in the Jim Crow North. Those who could afford it were charged 25 cents for sessions in the basement of St. Philip’s Episcopal church in Harlem, and 50 cents for court testimonials. A thoroughgoing grassroots effort, ignored by philanthropists and state funding, the Lafargue Clinic throws mid-20th Century mental health and race relations into relief, and is sure to stir interest in the untold stories of projects like it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies