New Books in African American Studies

Cesar Chavez founded a labor union. Launched a movement. And inspired a generation. Two Decades after his death, Chavez remains the most significant Latino figure in U.S. history.” So reads the inside flap ofMiriam Pawel’s new biography The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (Bloomsbury Press, 2014). However, while many are acquainted with the iconography of Chavez as the leader of the Farmworker Movement that took on California’s powerful grape industry during the mid-to-late 1960s, much less is known about Chavez himself and his personal and organizational background prior to the formation of the National Farm Workers Association (the precursor to the United Farm Workers or UFW) or the internal dynamics and struggles between Chavez and his top brass. With great detail and empathy, Pawel provides a complex portrait of Chavez as a visionary and tireless organizer whose humility, strategic brilliance, and improbable success was matched only by his own arrogance, tactical blunders, and embarrassing defeats. We hope you enjoy listening to our fascinating conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Why would Bert Williams, famous African-American vaudeville performer of the early twentieth century, feel it necessary to apply burnt cork blackface make-up to his already dark skin, in order to emphasize “blackness”? According to Michelle Ann Stephens, this was one question about the space between realness, race, and performance that led her to write Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and the Black Male Performer (Duke University Press, 2014). Stephens investigates the history of the concept of the skin, especially in relation to the notion of the flesh, and how they are both re-written by colonialization, and the idea of racial difference. Stephens turns to the work of four iconic black male stars whose careers span the twentieth century–including Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte  and Bob Marley–and explores the dynamic between the gaze, representation and technology, and how these performers challenged notions of race, sexuality, and skin/flesh in the act of performing. Stephens uses psychoanalytic theory to understand the role of the viewer and the viewed and how the gaze operates as a racial and racializing object. Calling on the work of cultural theorists, Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, Lacan, Jessica Benjamin, and Sylvia Winter among so many others, Stephens takes the reader along on a bold new attempt to relate psychoanalysis, race, and gender identity in fresh, optimistic, and clinically promising ways. Michelle Stephens teaches in the Departments of English and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Originally from Jamaica, West Indies, she graduated from Yale University with a Ph.D. in American Studies and teaches courses in African American, American, Caribbean and Black Diaspora Literature and Culture. She is the author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914 to 1962 (Duke University Press, 2005).She is currently in training at the The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Disputes over the definitions or legality of ‘rights’ and ‘rationing’ in their various guises have animated much of the debate around the United States Affordable Care Act. Many legislators and vocal members of their constituency have strong convictions about the state of our current national health care system and where it is going. Far fewer, however, understand how our current state of affairs is the product of a quite recent and contingent history, which is precisely what Beatrix Hoffman‘s Health Care for Some: Rights and Rationing in the United States since 1930 (University of Chicago, 2012) sets out to explain. While Hoffman’s scope is the U.S. as a whole, she draws out the local consequences of sweeping wartime and post-war reform by focusing on various cities, notably Chicago. Using a framework that addresses the reciprocal roles of rights and rationing as articulated by physicians, policymakers, and patients throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, she presents a concise history that speaks to far greater questions. Throughout Health Care for Some, we learn much about the institutional transformations of modern U.S. healthcare: how the expansive yet exclusive county hospital system was not inevitable but fell in line with other infrastructural imperatives, while war-wrecked European nations actually improved primary care coverage through austerity policies; how doctors increasingly struggled with poor state management and strictures that, despite being legally sanctioned, discouraged providing care to the most needy; how Medicare and Medicaid were motivated as much by the civil rights movement as arguments for dignity of old age as a social right. Importantly, the human dimensions of care are never hidden from sight, as Hoffman unravels narratives of entangled structures and subjectivities that evince the personal damage wrought by a system too diffuse to overhaul. Her book is an engaging, informative, and concise read, as capable of becoming a valuable reference as it is of fomenting thought and action. 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 recent decades, as Democrats and Republicans have grown more and more polarized ideologically, and gridlock has becoming increasingly standard in Congress, there has been a noticeable pining for the good old days when bipartisanship was common, and strongmen like Lyndon B. Johnson occupied the White House, ready to twist a few arms or trade a little pork when narrow interests threatened the general welfare. Liberals have perhaps been most vulnerable to this myth of late, with journalists repeatedly calling on Obama to bust through the unprecedented obstruction of the last few years by channeling the spirit of LBJ, who delivered more progressive legislation than anyone, save FDR. But as the eminent political historian Julian E. Zelizer writes in his new book The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (Penguin Press, 2015), this view of the past falls short on a number of counts. When LBJ first took over, he faced the same “do-nothing” Congress that had imprisoned domestic reform under JFK, Eisenhower, Truman, and the late New Deal, too. The South, an increasingly small part of the national population (counting the millions who could not vote), nonetheless dominated the old committee system, thanks to mass incumbency in the one-party region, America’s uncommon deference to seniority in the legislature and its local delegation of voter law. Leaguing frequently with the GOP’s right wing, Southern chairmen prevented a host of reforms from escaping the drafting stage and reaching a floor vote, even where legislation had popular support. A golden age of bipartisanship. Johnson understood, where many have forgotten, that it was these giants of Congress, not the White House, which held all the power. And these legislators boasted as much, often protected by districts with vanishingly small electorates. What opened the floodgates to the Great Society was not LBJ, “master of the Senate,” famed author of “The Treatment,” but the liberal supermajority of the “Fabulous eighty-ninth” Congress. When these votes disappeared in the midterm, a standard historical pattern, reform came to a screeching halt. (One reason Johnson urged House terms–the shortest in the democratic world–be extended to four years.) Liberals had major advantages in the 1960s that they have since lost: huge unions with crucial manpower and funding, a massive civil rights groundswell, “modern” Republican allies, brain-trust and whip organizations in Congress that Zelizer here thankfully recovers from obscurity. But one thing that has not changed is America’s uniquely divided governmental system. Reformers dream of Great Men and focus on the White House, not Capitol Hill and the built-in features of gridlock, to their peril. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Lawrence Jacobs is the author (with James Druckman) of Who Governs? Presidents, Public Opinion, and Manipulation (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Jacobs is the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Just how responsive is the president to the public? In theory, we all hope very, but increasingly we worry that presidents have grown more distant from the wishes of the public. In Who Governs?, we get an empirical answer to that question that is at once novel and also deeply disturbing. Jacobs and Druckman explore how presidents, since Kennedy, have used public opinion polling to craft public messages and shape public priorities. Polling has grown significantly since the 1960s, both in its utilization, and also its sophistication, and presidents, especially Ronald Reagan, have given increasing attention to their results. But rather than using polls to closely adhere to the average voter, many presidents have catered to narrow segments of the populace, rending polling another tool used to undermine democratic governance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Mariana Candido‘s book An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World. Benguela and its Hinterland (Cambridge University Press, 2013) is a powerful and moving exploration of the history and development of the port of Benguela. Founded by the Portuguese in the early seventeenth century, Benguela, located on the central coast of present-day Angola, was the third largest port of slave embarkation on the coast of Africa. In discussing the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on African societies, Candido looks at the formation of new elites, the collapse of old states, and the emergence of new ones. Her book offers a new perspective on the importance of the South Atlantic as a space for the circulation of people, ideas, and crops. But what makes this book truly distinctive is how Candido digs beneath the surface of her evidence to give readers a sense of the lived experiences and feelings of all involved in the trade: the unfortunate victims and those who benefited from the violent capture and selling of human beings. As historian John Thornton observes, Candido’s book “will be a starting point for studies of the region for years to come.” 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 to Kirt von Daacke about his 2012 work, Freedom Has a Face:Race, Identity, and Community in Jefferson’s Virginia (University of Virginia Press, 2012). Professor von Daacke is Associate Professor of History and Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. In this interview a few topics we discuss are: * Sources and methods for piecing together a picture of life in Albemarle County and the use of legal documents as a window into a past society * The relationship between law on the books and the actual behavior of the inhabitants of Albemarle County * Free people of color’s experiences with the legal system * The possibilities and the pitfalls awaiting unmarried women of color in the rural antebellum South * Some implications of Freedom Has a Face for future work on African American history 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 “peculiar institution” upon which the US nation was founded is still rich for examination.Perhaps this is why it is a subject to which 21st century authors continue to return. In this exploration of slavery, Paula T. Connolly, author of Slavery in American Children’s Literature 1790 – 2010 (University of Iowa, 2013), provides an expansive study of the ways in which proslavery and abolitionist literature framed discussions of slavery for the future of the nation: children. One of the questions to which Connolly’s investigation responds is whether US authors of children’s literature frame discussions of slavery in similar ways that writers of adult literature do. In the course of our conversation Connolly notes, “Many of us like to believe that we frame slavery differently for adults and children, but it’s simply not true.” Thus, readers will find that, similar to books for adults, children’s literature has conventional motifs of the subservient and grateful slave, or the kind and heroic master, for example. Additionally, character demonstration that he can properly manage his responsibility as master — a rite of passage — remains a shared theme. Connolly, Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, reminds readers of the various genres of abolitionist and/or proslavery literature. She includes sharp analysis of popular plantation stories, slave narratives, post-plantation novels, proslavery adventure novels, confederate textbooks, Freedman’s schoolbooks, and neo-abolitionist texts throughout the various historical periods of her extensive research. Along the way, readers learn, interestingly, that at times both abolitionist and proslavery texts upheld the same old notions of white supremacy despite their oppositional goals. That both adult literature and/or children’s literature frame slavery through similar cultural lenses makes sense. After all, adults are the ones writing for children. Indeed, ideologies of the “white savior” or “needy slave” for example, remain firmly rooted as we learn that children’s literature long after the Civil War continues to reflect old beliefs.  It remains clear that the act of emancipation did nothing to destroy deeply entrenched white hegemony in the nation. Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790-2010 — the first expansive study of slavery in children’s literature — is a fine example of the ways in which interdisciplinarity enhances the study of slavery in the US. The text brings together History, Literary Studies, Education, studies in Visual Arts, and what results is an enriching, multi-dimensional perspective on US pedagogy of race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Geographer Carolyn Finney wrote Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), out of a frustration with the dominant environmental discourse that, she asserts, doesn’t fully take into consideration the perspectives and interests of African Americans.Finney takes care to recognize the multiplicity of African American relationships to the natural environment and to the environmental movement, broadly understood.Finney’sapproach to the subject matter, in which the personal (family history and herpersonal politics) is fully integrated into her scholarly project, is deliberately directed to a diverse audience in order to allowthe broadest possible cross section of readers to engage meaningfully with issues surrounding the environmental movement and natural resource management in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos are the authors of Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America (Oxford University Press, 2014). McAdam is The Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and the former Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Kloos is a scholar of political sociology and social movements at Stanford University, where she is a PhD candidate. What has gotten us to this point of high political polarization and high income inequality? McAdam and Kloos offer a novel answer to what divides us as a country that focuses on the role social movements have in pulling parties to the extremes or pushing parties to the middle. They argue that the post-World War II period was unusual for its low levels of social movement activities and the resulting political centrism of the 1950s. The Civil Rights movement that followed – and the related backlash politics of the Southern Democrats – pushed the parties away from the center and toward regional realignment. Along the way, activists re-wrote party voting procedures that reinforced the power of vocal minorities within each party, thereby entrenching political polarization for the decades to come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies