New Books in African American Studies

W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the most significant American political thinkers of the twentieth century. This volume collects 24 of his essays and speeches on international themes, spanning the years 1900-1956. These key texts reveal Du Bois's distinctive approach to the problem of empire and demonstrate his continued importance in our current global context. The volume charts the development of Du Bois's anti-imperial thought, drawing attention to his persistent concern with the relationship between democracy and empire and illustrating the divergent inflections of this theme in the context of a shifting geopolitical terrain; unprecedented political crises, especially during the two world wars; and new opportunities for transnational solidarity. With a critical introduction and extensive editorial notes, W.E.B. Du Bois: International Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2022) conveys both the coherence and continuity of Du Bois's international thought across his long life and the tremendous range and variety of his preoccupations, intellectual sources, and interlocutors.Adom Getachew is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago.Jennifer Pitts is Professor of Political Science and in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. 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 Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power (Northwestern UP, 2022), Marzia Milazzo offers a transnational account of anti-Blackness and white supremacy that pushes against the dominant emphasis on historical change pervading current racial theory. This emphasis on change, she contends, misses critical lessons from the past.Bringing together a capacious archive of texts on race produced in Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, the United States, and South Africa from multiple disciplines and genres, Milazzo uncovers transnational continuities in structural racism and white supremacist discourse from the inception of colonial modernity to the present. In the process, she traces the global workings of what she calls colorblind tools: technologies and strategies that at once camouflage and reproduce white domination. Whether examining Rijno van der Riet's defense of slavery in the Cape Colony, discourses of racial mixture in Latin American eugenics and their reverberations in contemporary scholarship, the pitfalls of white "antiracism," or Chicana indigenist aesthetics, Milazzo illustrates how white people collectively disavow racism to maintain power across national boundaries, and how anti-Black and colonial logics can be reproduced even in some decolonial literatures. Milazzo's groundbreaking study proves that colorblindness is not new, nor is it a subtype of racist ideology or a hallmark of our era. It is a constitutive technology of racism—a tool the master cannot do without.Omari Averette-Phillips is a History Educator and an Independent scholar based in Southern California. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

From cell phone footage of police killing unarmed Black people to leaked racist messages and even comments from friends and family on social media, online communication exposes how racism operates in a world that pretends to be colorblind. In When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age (U California Press, 2023), Rob Eschmann blends rigorous research and engaging personal narrative to examine the effects of online racism on communities of color and society, and the unexpected ways that digital technologies enable innovative everyday tools of antiracist resistance.Drawing on a wealth of data, including interviews with students of Color around the country and analyses of millions of social media posts over the past decade, Eschmann investigates the influence of online communication on face-to-face interactions. When the Hood Comes Off highlights the power of the internet as an organizing tool, and shows that online racism can be a profound wake-up call. How will we respond? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Through historical and ethnographic research, Blackness in Mexico: Afro-Mexican Recognition and the Production of Citizenship in the Costa Chica (UP of Florida, 2023) delves into the ongoing movement toward recognizing Black Mexicans as a cultural group within a nation that has long viewed the non-Black mestizo as the archetypal citizen. Anthony Jerry focuses on this process in Mexico's Costa Chica region in order to explore the relational aspects of citizenship and the place of Black people in how modern citizenship is imagined. Jerry's study of the Costa Chica shows the political stakes of the national project for Black recognition; the shared but competing interests of the Mexican government, activists, and townspeople; and the ways that the state and NGOs are working to make "Afro-Mexican" an official cultural category. He argues that that the demand for recognition by Black communities calls attention to how the mestizo has become an intuitive point of reference for identifying who qualifies as "other." Jerry also demonstrates that while official recognition can potentially empower African descendants, it can simultaneously reproduce the same logics of difference that have brought about their social and political exclusion. One of few books to center Blackness within a discussion of Mexico or to incorporate a focus on Mexico into Black studies, this book ultimately argues that the official project for recognition is itself a methodology of mestizaje, an opportunity for the government to continue to use Blackness to define the national subject and to further the Mexican national project.Anthony Russell Jerry is Assistant Professor of anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Miriam Thaggert, Professor of English at the University of Buffalo, talks about her book, Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad (University of Illinois Press, 2022), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Riding Jane Crow features creative uses of a wide variety of sources to reconstruct how African American women interacted with Jim Crow railroads as both riders and workers. Thaggert and Vinsel also discuss what kinds of research were necessary to reconstruct these stories and why so many previous histories of the railroad passed over the lives of black women, even when they were noticing black men.Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019. 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 Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to Greenwood, Tulsa, in 1914, his family joined a growing community on the cusp of becoming a national center of black life. But, just seven years later, on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood, laying waste to thirty-five blocks and murdering as many as three hundred people. The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the most brutal acts of racist violence in U.S. history, a ruthless attempt to smother a spark of black independence.But that was never the whole story of Greenwood. The Goodwins and their neighbors soon rebuilt it into “a Mecca,” in Ed’s words, where nightlife thrived, small businesses flourished, and an underworld economy lived comfortably alongside public storefronts. Prosperity and poverty intermixed, and icons from W.E.B. Du Bois to Muhammad Ali ambled down Greenwood Avenue, alongside maids, doctors, and every occupation in between. Ed grew into a prominent businessman and bought a newspaper called the Oklahoma Eagle to chronicle Greenwood’s resurgence and battles against white bigotry. He and his wife, Jeanne, raised an ambitious family, and their son Jim, an attorney, embodied their hopes for the Civil Rights Movement in his work. But by the 1970s, urban renewal policies had nearly emptied the neighborhood, even as Jim and his neighbors tried to hold on to it. Today, while new high-rises and encroaching gentrification risk wiping out Greenwood’s legacy for good, the family newspaper remains, and Ed’s granddaughter Regina represents the neighborhood in the Oklahoma state legislature, working alongside a new generation of local activists.In Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street (Random House, 2023), journalist Victor Luckerson moves beyond the mythology of Black Wall Street to tell the story of an aspirant black neighborhood that, like so many others, has long been buffeted by racist government policies. Through the eyes of dozens of race massacre survivors and their descendants, Luckerson delivers an honest, moving portrait of this potent national symbol of success and solidarity—and weaves an epic tale about a neighborhood that refused, more than once, to be erased.Victor Luckerson is a journalist and author based in Tulsa who works to bring neglected Black history to light. He is a former staff writer at The Ringer and business reporter for Time magazine. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, and Smithsonian. He was nominated for a National Magazine Award for his reporting in Time on the 1923 Rosewood Massacre. He also manages an email newsletter about underexplored aspects of Black history called Run It Back. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Cities are nothing without the streets—the arteries through which goods, people, and ideas flow. Neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, the city streets are where politics begins. In Struggle for the Street: Social Networks and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Pittsburgh (UNC Press, 2023), Jessica D. Klanderud documents the development of class-based visions of political, social, and economic equality in Pittsburgh's African American community between World War I and the early 1970s. Klanderud emphasizes how middle-class and working-class African Americans struggled over the appropriate uses and dominant meanings of street spaces in their neighborhoods as they collectively struggled to define equality.In chapters that move from one community to the next, Klanderud tracks the transformation of tactics over time with a streets-eye view that reveals the coalescing alliances between neighbors and through space. Drawing on oral histories of neighborhood residents, Black newspapers, and papers from the NAACP and Urban League, this study reveals complex class negotiations in the struggle for civil rights at the street level.Jessica D. Klanderud is associate professor of African and African American studies and history at Berea College.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Slavery, Surveillance and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature (Oxford UP, 2022) argues for the existence of deep, often unexamined, interconnections between genre and race by tracing how surveillance migrates from the literature of slavery to crime, gothic, and detective fiction. Attending to the long history of surveillance and policing of African Americans, the book challenges the traditional conception of surveillance as a top-down enterprise, equally addressing the tactics of sousveillance (watching from below) that enslaved people and their allies used to resist, escape, or merely survive racial subjugation.Examining the dialectic of racialized surveillance and sousveillance from fugitive slave narratives to fictional genres focused on crime and detection, the book shows how these genres share a thematic concern with the surveillance of racialized bodies and formal experimentation with ways of telling a story in which certain information is either rendered visible or kept hidden. Through close readings of understudied fugitive slave narratives published in the 1820s and 1830s, as well as texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, Ross analyzes the different ways white and black authors take up these issues in their writing--from calming white fears of enslaved rebellion to abolishing slavery--and demonstrates how literary representations ultimately destabilize any clear-cut opposition between watching from above and below. In so doing, the book demonstrates the importance of race to surveillance studies and claims a greater role for the impact of surveillance on literary expression in the US during the era of slavery.Kendall Dinniene is a PhD candidate in English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their research examines how contemporary American authors respond to anti-fatness in their work, revealing the contours of citizenship and paths toward 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

Part memoir, part cultural critique, In Our Shoes: On Being a Young Black Woman in Not-So 'Post-Racial' America (Plume Books, 2023) uses pop culture and author Brianna Holt’s own lived experience to dissect the stereotypes and preconceived notions that young Black women must overcome in America today. In this fresh exploration of cultural appropriation, wokeness, tone policing, and more, Holt carefully dismantles myths about Black womanhood, allowing readers to assess their biases while examining the roles Black millennial women are forced to take on simply to survive. Through nine thoughtful chapters—such as “Leave the Box Braids for the Black Girls” and “Why Are You So Dark?”—laced with searing commentary, personal anecdotes from Brianna’s own life, and interviews conducted with “everyday” Black women, In Our Shoes reveals the complexities of existence for Black women and creates a thought-provoking book that helps readers to learn, empathize, reflect, and, most importantly, act. A history, a work of criticism, a piece of reporting, and a call to action, In Our Shoes is a timely exploration of race and womanhood that will entertain, inspire, and inform in equal measures.Brianna Holt is an author, screenwriter, and reporter living in New York City. Holt's writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, GQ, The Cut, The Atlantic, Complex, and more, including her own column, Active Voice, through Medium's GEN. In Our Shoes is her first book. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). 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 Caribbean American Narratives of Belonging (Ohio State University Press, 2023), Vivian Nun Halloran analyzes memoirs, picture books, comic books, young adult novels, musicals, and television shows through which Caribbean Americans recount and celebrate their contributions to contemporary politics, culture, and activism in the United States. The writers, civil servants, illustrators, performers, and entertainers whose work is discussed here show what it is like to fit in and be included within the body politic. From civic memoirs by Sonia Sotomayor and others, to West Side Story, Hamilton, and Into the Spider-Verse, these texts share a forward-looking perspective, distinct from the more nostalgic rhetoric of traditional diasporic texts that privilege connections to the islands of origin.There is no one way of being Caribbean. Diasporic communities exhibit a broad spectrum of ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic, and political qualities. Claiming a Caribbean American identity asks wider society to recognize and affirm hybridity in ways that challenge binaristic conceptions of race and nationality. Halloran provides a common language and critical framework to discuss the achievements of members of the Caribbean diaspora and their considerable cultural and political capital as evident in their contributions to literature and popular culture.Vivian Nun Halloran is Professor of English and Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a scholar of Caribbean literature, food studies, ethnic American literature, postmodernism, and popular culture. She previously wrote The Immigrant Kitchen: Food, Ethnicity, and Diaspora (Ohio State University Press, 2016) and Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum (University of Virginia Press, 2009).Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion, and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies