New Books in African American Studies

Cultural movements don’t exist in vacuums. Consciously or not, all movements borrow from, and sometimes reject, those that came before. In Hip Hop’s Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement (Lexington Books, 2011), the first in a trilogy of books that cast a critical eye upon hip hop as a social and cultural movement, Reiland Rabaka traces the pre-history of hip hop as a series of separate yet connected movements that dealt with inequalities of race/ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. Using Africana, feminist, and queer critical theories as tools for understanding, Rabaka follows the history of black, women’s, and LGBT resistance to heterosexual white male hegemony in U.S. culture. Rabaka’s focus is always on the roles that art and artists (literary, visual, musical) have in people’s active resistances to oppression. The Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts Movement, Black Women’s Liberation, and Feminist Art Movements are just a few of the cultural happenings that Rabaka details as precursors to today’s “conscious” rap, feminist rap, and Homo-Hop, among others. All along, Rabaka’s message is not simply academic, he is also speaking directly to contemporary hip hoppers, urging them not to forget their past and to learn from the struggles of their forbears. Reiland Rabaka is an Associate Professor of African, African American, and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Humanities Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is also an Affiliate Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Program and a Research Fellow at the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America (CSERA). He has published ten books, including Hip Hop’s Amnesia: From Blues and Black Women’s Club Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Movement (2012) and The Hip Hop Movement: From R&B and the Civil Rights Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Generation (2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

For the launch of the Dance Channel, I thought long and hard about what the first author interview would be. I felt that it was critically important that this channel begins with a rich conversation between myself and a well respected author whose contributions to dance scholarship were substantial.  It seemed to me that this channel could function as a space where the voices of those doing rigorous work with dance at the center, could be invited into conversations that focused on their most recent project, but exposed the challenges and issues they faced along the way in trying to do their work with integrity. To that end, I knew I needed someone whose voice in dance scholarship was strong and consistent and whose contributions were undeniable. When I thought of it that way, it became clear that I needed to have this first interview showcase the work of Dr. Brenda Dixon Gottschild. Brenda Dixon Gottschild‘s newest work, Joan Myers Brown and the Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina: A Biohistory of American Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) chronicles the growth and development of one of the country’s most important dance companies through the life of its creator and her community. Here, the author treats readers to a backstage pass into the mind of one of the toughest ladies in dance, Joan Myers Brown, founder of the Philadelphia School of Dance Arts and later of the Philadelphia Dance Company (known lovingly as Philadanco.) It’s important to understand that this book is a “biohistory” – a work that blends not just Ms. Brown’s biography, but contextualizes it in the history of Black Philadelphia and the development of American concert dance. The book is just the most recent in the line of works written by the author whose work has always focused on bringing invisibilized narratives to light and putting them into their proper historical context. The author, who I am glad to know as “Dr. Brenda,” doesn’t shy away from the realities of race, class, power and gender that can often constrain one’s mobility in the world and her work here makes clear that to that point, the dance world is no exception. Challenges and constraints aside, Joan Myers Brown and the Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina: A Biohistory of American Performance is an example of the some of the finest contemporary scholarship in dance studies. As the fifth book project for Dr. Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, fans of her work won’t be left wanting for anything in this newest book and dance enthusiasts are sure to find a compelling narrative that will leave them satisfied and wanting more of what this author has to offer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Minkah Makalani is the author of a new intellectual history on the efforts of early twentieth century black radicals to organize an international movement, one that would address both racial and class oppression around the globe. The book is called In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2011). As the title suggests, the focus of the study is on two black radical groups: One in Harlem, the African Blood Brotherhood; and the other in London, the International African Service Bureau. The book examines among other things, “how they communicated across continents.” This is important not only because it illustrates that race was a concern outside of the U.S., but to show just how intricately race and class are linked; so much so that the two cannot be separated. This new study explores provocative questions, and also definitively adds to ongoing debates regarding: * African Americans and communism * Tensions about which is more important, race or class? * Definitions of black radicalism * International black figures of the Harlem Renaissance * The relationship among artists, the arts and politics during the Harlem Renaissance * How the Communist Party perceived race in relation to class oppression These and other insightful topics are addressed at length in this wonderful history. But you can find an appetizing introduction to them in this lively interview. Please, listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

When a mother listens to the beats of her own heart, where angst, fear and fortitude compete, and then beautifully weaves emotion into a story about her ongoing journey to support a bipolar son, then you know something significant has happened in African American literature. At least I did, when I read Charlotte Pierce-Baker‘s insightful memoir, This Fragile Life: A Mother’s Story of a Bipolar Son (Lawrence Hill Books, 2012). But what I didn’t know is why Pierce-Baker would “go there” again. I mean, she has already, once before, “gone there,” when she mined personal pain to write about trauma and black women’s narratives of rape. Yet, when I reflect on a line from her son’s poetry, which is what knits the narrative together, I understand. Her son Mark writes: “When mom is gone nothing is right and everything is wrong/A joke is not a joke, and the birds don’t sing their song.” The power of this book for me is that a mother has created a literary space for her son, a black man living with mental illness, to sing about being a father, a husband, a solid citizen, and yet struggling. Mark’s wrangles with his struggles are revealed in poetic opening lines like these: “In the padded room of my heart/ A madman suffers.” “Street vendors here do not sell soft pretzels/They trade toxic pebbles for pocket change until there is just lint left.” “I will love you until God dies.” This book is as much about a black man in America, as it is about a black man dealing with bipolar disorder, as it is about a mother, a family, learning to cope and ultimately to understand. This Fragile Life is a must read. Listen to the interview, and you’ll see why? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Picture the familiar scene: the visiting pastor thanks the local pastor for granting him the use of his pulpit; he sends out the call (“Can I just speak with you this morning?”) and the congregation responds (“Yessir! Amen!”). The disclaimer follows: he is only the vessel through which the Lord will speak. Should he say something with which one disagrees take it up with the Lord. He pats his brow, grips the podium; throws away his notes, transitions to improvisation; cadenced speech follows, and the congregation responds in kind. Erica R. Edwards describes the aforementioned as the charismatic scene in Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). The new author probes charismatic leadership and its interventions found in literature written by African Americans throughout the 20th century. The fundamental questions Edwards, assistant professor of English at the University of California, Riverside asks are: What is the seduction of charismatic leadership? And, how does it shape 20th century African American literary productions? The rise of white supremacy coupled with sharecropping as a system of peonage made emancipation essentially a non-event. In the face of domestic terrorism singular, male leadership became a necessary survival strategy. Still, there is apparent dissonance; reverence for the black male leader in African American culture does not translate to the literature. From W.E.B. DuBois’s stage pageant “The Star of Ethiopia” (1913) to Marcus Garvey’s speech performances in 1920s Harlem, NY; from George Schuyler’s Black Empire (1936-38) to Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939); from Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997) to postulations by Eddie (played by Cedric the Entertainer) in “Barbershop” 1 & 2 (2002, 2004, respectively) Edwards demonstrates when one depends solely on the convention of singular male leadership as the answer to solving the various communal needs of the people much is at stake: gender oppression; the violence of silencing; and, dismissal of all alternative forms of leadership, just to name a few. “The dream” of singular black male leadership has translated to the nightmare for the masses–and women, in particular–time and time again. In the end the book leaves readers with a set of critical questions regarding charisma and leadership. Erica R. Edwards’s Charisma is a critical read for anyone who is interested in the relationship between literature and real life scenes of black leadership–particularly as it plays out in the black political sphere in the post-civil rights era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Koritha Mitchell‘s Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 2012) is, as described on the publisher’s webpage, “the first full-length critical study of lynching plays in American culture.” Drawing from a diverse array of methods and disciplines including American studies, literary criticism, performance studies, and theatre, Mitchell boldly claims and astutely substantiates how early twentieth-century lynching plays provide a literary and even domestic and community space for African Americans to challenge and cope with erratic vigilante racism that threatened black life in America. She also claims that reading these plays can inform our understanding of African American literature, politics, theatre, and the performance of everyday life today. Perhaps what’s most provocative and noteworthy about Mitchell’s study is her insistence that contemporary representations of lynching, such as well-known photographs, perpetuate lynching as a spectacle for white consumption. These representations serve as a buoy and less of a challenge to an ideology of white racial superiority. On the other hand, the performance and readying of lynching plays written by African Americans places black humanity and community, instead of black degradation, at the center of spectatorship and thus serves as a challenge to anti-black ideologies and violence. The assault on the black body is certainly noted in the plays, but the effect of lynching on the lives, families, communities, and even histories and futures of the imagined victims and, from there, the real race, is considered in fuller ways that are limited by the iconic photographic representations of lynching. That said, Mitchell’s discussion of Living with Lynching is a must to consider. Please listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

If images of white robes, pointed hoods, and a burning cross represent racism and violence for you then you are not alone. But do they also evoke ideas of nationalism, Protestantism, and masculinity? In the early twentieth century, the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan tied their faith to patriotism and in the process produced a unique self-fashioned religious identity. Kelly J. Baker, scholar of America religious history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, examines this seemingly reprehensible organization and treats it as she would any other phenomenon, through a critical lens from an objective perspective. In her wonderful new book, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 (University Press of Kansas, 2011), she explores the writings of Klan members and outlines their creative renderings of religion, nationalism, gender, and race. In our conversation we discuss the importance of print culture, the communal act of reading, Jesus as the ideal Klansman, the symbolic meaning of the robes, cross, and flag, and the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK). We end our discussion by looking at the Klan’s legacy of exclusionism and conservatism as a widespread characteristic of American society and how this is manifested in contemporary culture through figures like Terry Jones, who gained notoriety with his call to burn the Qur’an. Kelly does an excellent job of encouraging scholars of religion to reexamine our subjects and tackle issues that make us uneasy and uncomfortable. These topics and individuals are as much a part of religious history as the figures we would want to sit down and have a cup of coffee with. 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 NBA Finals are under way, with the Oklahoma City Thunder facing the Miami Heat. Network executives and the sports punditocracy are elated with the match-up. Ratings for Game 1 of the series were up more than 10 per cent over last year, as casual fans tuned in to see the teams’ marquee players, NBA scoring leader Kevin Durant and three-time MVP LeBron James, face each other. Meanwhile, opinion-makers are happy with teams and personalities that can be easily slotted into arresting narratives. It’s safe to say that the Thunder are cast as the “good guys”: a team of young and talented players, gathered through the draft, who have committed themselves to their coach and to an un-glamorous city on the Plains. Meanwhile, the Heat are a high-priced experiment always teetering on the edge of implosion, a collection of uncoachable stars led by LeBron, who alienated the entire sports world by declaring on an ESPN special in 2010 that he would take his talents to South Beach. While perceptive fans are aware of the media-driven narratives that mold the presentation of sports, we don’t often acknowledge the racial stereotypes at the root of these storylines. Sociologist David Leonard insists that ideas of race are always present with the NBA, a league of predominantly black players watched by predominantly white fans.  When fans or commentators talk about “the NBA player” in the abstract, the picture that typically comes to mind is a black man. In his book After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness (State University of New York Press, 2012), David examines how white American fans and commentators, as well as NBA officials, have struggled with this image of the black player. Once upon a time, when the embodiment of the NBA player was the universally liked Michael Jordan, blackness was not a problem. But after Jordan’s departure, the model of the black player became someone more than Allen Iverson, with his tattoos, braided hair, and sideways cap, ridiculing the idea of attending practice. The perception of the NBA player as overpaid and undisciplined thug burst open with the 2004 “Brawl at the Palace.” In response to scenes of Ron Artest and other players fighting with fans at the close of a game, commentators and fans stated openly that the problem with the NBA player was that he was a product of black, hip-hop culture. David’s book looks at these responses and the efforts of the league to rectify the NBA’s damaged image, by turning players into respectable professionals who would be more acceptable to white fans in the seats, to the wealthy buyers of luxury boxes, and to the league’s corporate sponsors.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Enid Logan‘s At this Defining Moment: Barack Obama: Presidential Candidacy and the New Politics of Race (NYU Press, 2011) examines the campaign and politics around the election of Barack Obama from a sociological perspective. Drawing on a rich array of television, newspaper, and blogs, Logan challenges many of the conventional interpretations of the Obama victory. In trying to define the “new politics of race”, the book is a contribution to the field of political science, where scholars have also grappled with putting the first African American president into political, historical, and social context. One of the more compelling chapters of the book deals with the intersection of Hispanic and Asian Americans and the Obama campaign. The length, clear-writing, and salient topic should make this a considered adoption for many courses in American politics, race and politics, and campaigns/elections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Whoever states the old adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words” grossly underestimates. So Erin D. Chapman shows in Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s (Oxford University Press, 2012). Just consider the images of African Americans in US popular culture throughout the 19th and 20th centuries; consider the power they held in defining an entire people, and we know better–pictures evince far more than 1000 words. Chapman explores what happens when African Americans use old sexist-racist images and/or create fresh ones to tout the Negro at the turn of the 20th century as modern and new. Through an examination of advertisements at the time, the author makes it evident that many saw the commodification and consumption of the black female body as essential to achieving goals for racial advancement or self-determinism. Chapman, professor of History at George Washington University, offers readers something new: she demonstrates the push-pull dynamics of the image-making in the New Negro era. For, as the new public desire for actual black bodies (as opposed to minstrel caricatures) opens space for the nation to view African Americans as human beings, it also allows for the continued dehumanization of those same bodies–particularly those of the African American female body. As Blueswoman Gertrude “Ma” Rainey demonstrates in the lyrics of her 1928 recording, “Prove It On Me”, to define the self through the use of images is tricky business for who one purports to be in their public persona does not necessarily reflect their private selves. Moreover, in judging “right” versus “wrong” images one must consider the sex-race marketplace where selling and buying is the name of the game–regardless of who is selling to and/or buying from whom. If you want to learn more about New Negroes and how they used prominent ideas about gender, race and sexuality to sell and consume various ideas and products Erin D. Chapman’s fine book is what you’re looking for. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies