New Books in African American Studies

Julian E. Zelizer is the author of The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (Penguin Press, 2015). Zelizer is the Malcom Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a fellow at New America. In the Fierce Urgency of Now, Zelizer focuses on the heated period of 1963-1966, and President Lyndon Johnson’s effort to pass a civil rights bill. Johnson has been credited as the chief architect of the passage of the ultimate bill, but Zelizer shifts focus to Congress and the variety of interest groups lobbying for and against the bill. In doing so, Zelizer argues that credit for the civil rights acts must be more widely shared. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox are the authors of Running from Office: Why Young Americans Are Turned off to Politics (Oxford UP,2015). Lawless is a Professor of Government and the Director of the Women & Politics Institute at American University. Fox is a Professor of Political Science at Loyola Marymount University. The two conducted surveys of over 4,000 younger Americans. What they find is that their young Americans rarely think, talk or consider politics. While many seem to care about the world, this infrequently translates to running for office or aspirations to work in politics. They find: Just 11 percent of respondents said that they had thought about running office “many times” while 61 percent said they “never” considered it. Asked if various jobs paid the same, they find just 13 percent of respondents said they would want to be a member of Congress, versus 37 percent who chose business executive and 27 percent school principal; only 19 percent indicated that a future goal was to become a political leader. And less than 10% of respondents said that their parents would want them to pursue a job as a member of Congress, compared to around 50 percent for owning a business. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

People living in the modern west generally have no problem criticizing religiously-justified violence. It’s therefore always interesting when I discuss John Brown, a man who legitimized anti-slavery violence Biblically. My most recent batch of students sought to resolve this tension by declaring John Brown to be “crazy but right.” In his new book Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics (Stanford University Press, 2014), Ted A. Smith unravels the tensions that led to my students’ ambiguous conclusion. By providing a profound ethical meditation on Brown and his fellow raiders to challenge how people, particularly Americans, think about morality; the relationship between religion, the state, and violence; and to the possibilities of judgment and redemption, Smith illustrates how an ethical and philosophical reading of history can help us to better understand the world we live in, what we should do, and of the importance of going beyond just what we ought to do. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Philip A. Wallach is the author of To The Edge: Legality, Legitimacy, and the Responses to the 2008 Financial Crisis (Brookings Institution Press, 2015). Wallach is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. There has been a lot written about the financial crisis of the late 2000s, but little with the attention to important concepts from political science. Wallach investigates the various federal strategies to address the meltdown of the financial sector from the perspective of legitimacy, seeking to understand what we can learn about this idea from the unprecedented expansion of federal power. From efforts to save the failing investment banks, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, to the passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), federal officials applied a largely ad-hoc approach that Wallach deems “adhocracy” often substituting expedience for legal authority. While this worked in the short-term, Wallach probes where this leaves the country and speculates about what will come in the 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 historiography of the southern Civil Rights Movement has long focused on the tactic of non-violence. With only a few notable exceptions, most scholarship locates the use of armed self-defense and other forms of armed resistance in northern cities while temporally, we usually think of these strategies as rising to prominence only later in the movement. Akinyele Omowale Umoja, Professor and Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Georgia State University, tells us this common narrative omits a long and rich history of armed resistance in the southern Black Freedom Struggle. His new book, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York University Press, 2013), traces the roots of this armed resistance in Mississippi. His book shows black Mississippians had a long tradition of armed self-defense extending well before the iconic Civil Rights campaigns in the state. Moreover, when the movement came, self-defense remained. The book shows armed self-defense co-existed with non-violence–sometimes cooperatively, sometimes uneasily, and often both–throughout the period usually strongly associated with non-violence, such as during Freedom Summer. We Will Shoot Back goes on to examine the growing prominence of armed resistance in the mid to late 1960s. He shows the many different forms armed resistance took. Some of those forms were advocated by small groups or were short-lived, while others were quite successful. In this episode of the podcast, Umoja discusses how he came to study this topic and his research process, including many oral histories. He also explains the importance of broadening our understanding of Civil Rights activism to include this longer history of armed resistance. 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 Hartman is associate professor of history at Illinois State University. His book A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2015) provides a whirlwind tour through the most salient debates of what became known as the culture wars of the late twentieth century. As a set of debates and political tussles the culture wars reflected America’s struggle to deal with the vast changes left by 1960s and more complex than a simple left/right, secular/religious binary that characterized public discussion. Beginning with the normative Americanism fragmenting under the influence of the New Left, Hartman shows us how the watershed decade set the terms for the cultural wars. Public intellectuals such as Paul Goodman and C. Wright Mills to rock stars such as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the comedy duo the Smothers Brothers marked the changes. Seemingly everything about American life from sexual mores to national history was up for renegotiation. Hartman places the genesis of the debate for the American future in the struggle between the New Left and their chief ideological opponents, and former liberals, neoconservatives. Soon this initial intellectual battle fueled a popular war for the social, religious, and economic future drawing in the newly formed Christian Right, self-identified ethnic groups, feminist and others. The struggles over school curriculum, the rewriting of history, cultural power, the family, religion, and the nature of truth, was the process of coming to terms with a new reality – a situation of a permanent culture revolution and the loss of a normative shared culture. With the heat of the battle significantly cooled, we are left with what Hartman calls an “antiauthoritarian individualism” under intransigent capitalism weakening the hope for social democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Historically, Venezuela is known as one of the most stable Latin American nations of the twentieth century. The subsequent discovery of oil transformed Venezuela into a petrostate. Yet wealth inequality dramatically increased. Against this economic and social disparity, Hugo Chavez rose to power, becoming one of a number of dynamic Latin American politicians. But what legacy did Chavez leave behind after his death in 2013, and how has his successor, Nicholas Madruo, fared in continuing the Bolivarian Revolution? Rory Carroll is a journalist with The Guardian and spent a number of years in Venezuela. His book, Comandante: Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela (Penguin Books, 2013), recounts his time in Latin America. Speaking to Venezuelans on both side of the political spectrum, from farmers to ex-politicians and government insiders, Carroll discovers that opinions of Chavez’s presidency are sharply divided. However, many agree that Hugo fundamentally changed the destiny and vision of Venezuela. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Charis Thompson‘s Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research (MIT Press, 2013) is an important book. Good Science explores the “ethical choreography” of the consolidation of human embryonic stem cell research in the first decade of the twenty-first century, drawing important implications for the possible futures of stem cell research by looking carefully at its past and developing an approach to what Thompson calls “good science.” The book compellingly argues that “a high level of political attention to the ethics of the life sciences and biomedicine…is a good thing for science and democracy,” especially as we have now reached “the end of the beginning of human pluripotent stem cell research.” Part I of the book (Stem Cell Biopolitics) explores early attention to the embryo debate. Ch. 2 looks at stem cell research as it’s widely understood to engage ethical concerns, describing the “pro-curial frame” of stem cell research in the period under scrutiny, when promoting stem cell innovation involved aspirations to be pro-cure and there was an ethical focus on the procurement of stem cells and cell lines for research. Pt. II of the book (Stem Cell Geopolitics) looks at what happened domestically as the debate over stem cells moved from the federal to the state levels and back in the US, and then turns to consider transnational circuits that were crucial to those practices and conversations. Ch. 3 looks at three phases that made up the beginning of human pluripotent stem cell research in the US: the time around President Bush’s 2001 policy, the period when states “seceded” from that policy (exemplified by California’s Proposition 71), and the period around Obama’s 2009 policy. Ch. 4 looks at the transnational geopolitics of stem cell research in an era when stem cell research became increasingly international and research advocates were deeply concerned with international competition and “brain drain.” Thompson takes readers into laboratory environments in South Korea and Singapore in order to undermine a popular rhetorical binary of East/West that contrasted an “East” that had a pro-science spirit and lack of concern with the moral status of the embryo, and a “West” that had been taken over by anti-science religious fanatics and technophobes. Pt. III of the book (Thinking of Other Lives) looks carefully at questions of research subjecthood. Ch. 7 focuses on human-human relationships and practices of donation at a time when a number of norms came under renewed scrutiny – including altruism, anonymity, and the alienation of tissue from donors – and this led to the conclusion that the old model for donation wasn’t working. In this context, there were increasing demands for reciprocity in various forms, and Thompson considers various models in California that rethought the relationships between donor/recipient and biomaterial/bioinformation. Ch. 6 focuses on the logic of using animals as substitutive research subjects for human-focused research, and calling for a move away from using animals as research subjects and toward using in vitro systems instead. To do all of this, Thompson develops a methodology she calls “triage” which we talk about early in the interview. Good Science is a wonderful and critical book, and well worth reading and teaching widely! 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 Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Shaped the Sixties (W.W. Norton, 2015), Kevin M. Schultz has given us a lively and colorful narrative history that captures the character of two complex men and the times in which they lived. Juxtaposing a conservative William F. Buckley Jr. and the radical Norman Mailer against a liberal establishment brings into sharp relief what the men shared and the source of their conflict. Both men agreed that there was something amiss of about American society and sought to build a movement against the entrenchment of liberal bureaucratic control and the threat of totalitarianism. With clashing visions for a new national politic, they were both surprised by the constituency that they each attracted and grew more alike as they responded to the movements they had fomented. Through their writings, public and private encounters, and an overlapping network of friends and political acquaintances we get a glimpse in the elite power dynamics that shaped the sixties. By attending to a flurry of lectures, debates, parties, letters, and the striking personalities of these two men, Schultz shows us was right and wrong with America at mid-century and the transition from a rules based to a rights based society. The relationship of Buckley and Mailer not only reflected the nation’s struggles in the sixties, but also captures the continual conflict over the future of America. Kevin M. Shultz is an associated professor of history at University of Illinois at Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Michael Gould-Wartofsky is the author of The Occupiers: The Making of the 99 Percent Movement (Oxford University Press, 2015). He is a PhD candidate in Sociology at New York University. There has been a lot written about the Occupy Wall Street movement, but little with the sophistication and personal touch of Gould-Wartofsky’s new book. What emerged in the fall of 2011 in Lower Manhattan had roots in similar protests going on across Europe, but soon spread to over a thousand US cities. As a participant observer from the very earliest days of the movement, Gould-Wartofsky blends writing styles and perspectives as he deepens what we know about social movements, in general. He maps the various tactics, factions, and motivations that drove the movement, but also what it felt like to be in Zuccotti Park. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies