New Books in African American Studies

Steve Phillips is the author of Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority (The New Press, 2016). Phillips is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Several weeks ago, Matt Lewis came on the podcast to assess the state-of-affairs for conservatives. This week, Steve Phillips offers his new book on how progressives might reposition their electoral coalition in the future. Drawing on demographic data and the changing electoral map, Phillips argues for a shift from focusing on white swing voters to a new coalition of African American, Latino, and progressive white voters. The podcast is hosted by Heath Brown, assistant professor of public policy at the City University of New York, John Jay College and The Graduate Center. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

This terrific book follows the itinerary of Eric Walrond’s peripatetic life. Born in Guyana in 1898, Walrond lived in Barbados, Panama, New York, Paris, London. As a writer and sharp observer of those around him, he produced trenchant critiques of racial dynamics, imperialism, and labor relations in short stories, journalism, essays, and historical narratives. His book Tropic Death (1926), a searing rendition of Caribbean life, was widely read. Yet he struggled toward the end of his life as he became increasingly isolated both professionally and socially. In Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean (Columbia University Press, 2015), James Davis draws on numerous and surprising sources to build a complex but eminently readable portrait of this man, his work, his friends and acquaintances in diasporic communities of the transatlantic Caribbean.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

George Whitefield was a complex man driven by a simple idea, the new birth that brought salvation. Because of such passion, Whitefield received both enthusiastic support, preaching to audiences numbering in the thousands, and bitter criticism for violating religious doctrine or political convention. As such, Whitefield remains someone who continues to stir debate and devotion even to this day. In her fascinating new book, Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon (University Press of Mississippi, 2015), Dr. Jessica Parr explores the life and afterlife of George Whitfield, focusing particularly on how the conflict he spurred and the veneration he received have shaped memories of him. Parr’s work is fascinating and accessible, making it a good read for both the scholar of American religious history and for students in an undergraduate classroom. 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 hip hop defined by its artists or by its audience? In Home With Hip Hop Feminism, Aisha Durham returns hip hop scholarship to its roots by engaging in an ethnographic and autoethnographic approach to studying hip hop. Rooting her study in the Diggs Park Public Housing Project in Norfolk, Virginia, Durham examines what hip hop means to ordinary and everyday women who see themselves as hip hop, equals to the rappers and other artists who receive greater recognition and scholarly attention. By focusing on gender and social class, Durham explores the sexual scripts that women find and negotiate within hip hop and how hip hop continually navigates socio-economic boundaries. She also considers how the very act of studying and writing about hip hop can turn a hip hop “insider” into an outsider. The book spends considerable attention looking at Queen Latifah and Beyonce as key figures who both reinforce and interrogate dominant representations of African American women. Aisha Durham is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of South Florida. Her research about Black popular culture explores the relationship between media representations and everyday life. She examines how controlling images or power-laden stereotypes are produced by media makers and interpreted by media audiences to make sense of blackness in the “post” era. She is co-editor of Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology (2007) and Globalizing Cultural Studies: Ethnographic Interventions in Theory, Method, and Policy (2007). 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 this podcast I talk with Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University about his book, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015). Per the book jacket, “More than any other scholar, Eric Foner has influenced our understanding of America’s history. Now, making brilliant use of extraordinary evidence, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian once again reconfigures the national saga of American slavery and freedom. A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Slaves could be found in the streets of New York well after abolition, traveling with owners doing business with the city’s major banks, merchants, and manufacturers. New York was also home to the North’s largest free black community, making it a magnet for fugitive slaves seeking refuge. Slave catchers and gangs of kidnappers roamed the city, seizing free blacks, often children, and sending them south to slavery. To protect fugitives and fight kidnappings, the city’s free blacks worked with white abolitionists to organize the New York Vigilance Committee in 1835. In the 1840s vigilance committees proliferated throughout the North and began collaborating to dispatch fugitive slaves from the upper South, Washington, and Baltimore, through Philadelphia and New York, to Albany, Syracuse, and Canada. These networks of antislavery resistance, centered on New York City, became known as the underground railroad. Forced to operate in secrecy by hostile laws, courts, and politicians, the city’s underground-railroad agents helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Until now, their stories have remained largely unknown, their significance little understood. Building on fresh evidence,including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York–Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to sweeping history. The story is inspiring–full of memorable characters making their first appearance on the historical stage–and significant–the controversy over fugitive slaves inflamed the sectional crisis of the 1850s. It eventually took a civil war to destroy American slavery, but here at last is the story of the courageous effort to fight slavery by ‘practical abolition,’ person by person, family by family.” Some of the topics we discuss are: -How vigilance committees provided fugitives with legal representation if they were apprehended. -Why the unwillingness of local juries to convict persons who took part in widely publicized rescues influenced congressional debates over slavery. -The ways resistance to Fugitive Slave Law forced ordinary northerners who had no connection with the abolitionist movement to confront the relationship between individual conscience and legal obligation. 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 does it mean to be free? How can paying attention to the relationship between freedom and slavery help construct a concept and practice of freedom that is “perpetual, unfinished, and rooted in acts of flight” (181)? In his book Freedom as Marronage University of Chicago Press, 2015), Neil Roberts (Africana Studies, Religion, and Political Science, Williams College) explores this and many other questions. Proceeding from and working with the concept and practice of marronage – modes of escape from slavery emerging from the Caribbean – Roberts articulates a theory of freedom that is historically specific while having trans-historical reverberations, and that is attentive to lived experiences of freedom and slavery. In doing so, he engages histories of the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, diaspora, the Haitian Revolution, and American slavery. Arguing for the need to creolize political theory and philosophy, Roberts also takes up the thought and practice of W.E.B. DuBois, Hannah Arendt, Philip Petit, Frederick Douglass, Angela Davis, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Edouard Glissant, Rastafari, and much more. 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 Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature (New York University Press, 2013), Jodi Eichler-Levine, associate professor of Religion Studies and Berman Professor of Jewish Civilization at Lehigh University, analyses a theme in American religious history–suffering–through the lens of Jewish and African American children’s literature. In her analysis of works by authors such as Maurice Sendak, Julius Lester, Jane Yolen, Sydney Taylor, and Virginia Hamilton, Eichler-Levine deftly examines the ways in which historical narratives of suffering are used by religious communities to claim their status as citizens. 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 hip? Can a piece of music be hip? Or is hipness primarily a way of engaging with music which recognizes the hip potential of the music? Or primarily a manner of being, which allows the hip individual to authentically engage with the hip artwork? Whatever the case may be, we know that the hip is meant to be authentic. We know that it is opposed to the square:all that is inauthentic, conformist, and authoritarian. And we know that attempts to understand hipness tend to locate it in the sonorous immediacy of musical experience. Phil Ford‘s, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013) uses these attempts to understand hipness as an entry into the altogether more intractable problem of defining hipness itself. Ford traces the hip sensibility from its roots in the African-American subcultures that arose in cities such as New York and Chicago in the aftermath of the Great Migration, through its adoption (or appropriation) by the beat poets of the 1950s and the counterculture movement of the 1960s. In doing so, he marshals a wide array of sources:newspaper columns, jazz improvisations, political posters, liner notes, diaries, and amateur acetate recordings, all grappling — in creative, illuminating, and sometimes painful ways — with the impossibility of capturing the lived experience of hipness. In the closing chapters of the book, he turns to two specific figures, Norman Mailer (a major writer), and John Benson Brooks (a somewhat peripheral jazz musician), reevaluating their works — and perhaps more importantly, their methods of working — in the light of the hip aesthetics described in the earlier sections of the book. Further Listening/Viewing/Reading: John Benson Brooks Trio: Avant Slant Thomas Frank: The Conquest of Cool Fruity Pebbles Rap Rip Torn attacks Norman Mailer with a Hammer 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 Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights (The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, a writer and former journalist, introduces us to the larger-than-life personality Harry Golden. A writer, publisher, and humorist, as well as activist, Golden used his popularity and incredibly wide network for a variety of causes, most notably the civil rights movement. Hartnett explores the ways Golden utilized his talents (he was, at his core, a salesman) to make America more equal and free. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Colson Whitehead’s fiction has drawn varied criticism. On the one hand, there’s the scholarship of the African diaspora, a tradition that takes the long view of Whitehead–extrapolating him from their existing canon (of Du Bois, Hurston, Ellison, etc.); on the other hand, there’s the conversation on Whitehead’s work that’s happening more in the literary main stream. On Kimberly Fain‘s view, the last word is somewhere in between, and in her Colson Whitehead: The Postracial Voice of Contemporary Literature (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), she considers a more integral fiction: one both a product of a long history and of an intermediating pop culture. The big task of Colson Whitehead is to position the fictionist as a “postracial” figure–a figure who represents a changing attitude on the concept and reality of race. What would it mean to live a really, truly colorblind America? You can see inklings in Whitehead, especially in his latter work. And while it is clear from Whitehead’s own (critical) writing that postracialism is–to us, now–still an ideal, it’s in the same writing where race begins to matter not less, but perhaps just in a different way. That race might begin to signify culture, community, a legacy in art–and something less sociopolitical or less economic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies