New Books in African American Studies

Poor Black women who benefit from social welfare are marginalized in a number of ways by interlocking systemic racism, sexism, and classism. The media renders them invisible or casts them as racialized and undeserving "welfare queens" who exploit social safety nets. Even when Black women voters are celebrated, the voices of the poorest too often go unheard. How do Afro-descendant women in former slave-holding societies survive amid multifaceted oppression? In The Politics of Survival: Black Women Social Welfare Beneficiaries in Brazil and the United States (Columbia University Press, 2023), Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour offers a comparative analysis of how Black women social welfare beneficiaries in Brazil and the United States defy systems of domination. She argues that poor Black women act as political subjects in the struggle to survive, to provide food for their children and themselves, and challenge daily discrimination even in dire circumstances. Mitchell-Walthour examines the effects of social welfare programs, showing that mutual aid networks and informal labor play greater roles in beneficiaries' lives. She also details how Afro-descendant women perceive stereotypes and discrimination based on race, class, gender, and skin color. Mitchell-Walthour considers their formal political participation, demonstrating that low-income Black women support progressive politics and that religious affiliation does not lead to conservative attitudes. Drawing on Black feminist frameworks, The Politics of Survival confronts the persistent invisibility of poor Black women by foregrounding their experiences and voices. Providing a wealth of empirical evidence on these women's views and survival strategies, this book not only highlights how systemic structures marginalize them but also offers insight into how they resist such forces.Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour is Dan T. Blue Endowed Chair of Political Science at North Carolina Central University. She is the author of The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil (2018). Mitchell-Walthour is a national co-coordinator of the U.S. Network for Democracy in Brazil and former president of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA). Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. 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 Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (NYU Press, 2023), author J. T. Roane shows how working-class Black communities cultivated two interdependent modes of insurgent assembly--dark agoras--in twentieth century Philadelphia. He investigates the ways they transposed rural imaginaries about and practices of place as part of their spatial resistances and efforts to contour industrial neighborhoods. In acts that ranged from the mundane acts of refashioning intimate spaces to expressly confrontational and liberatory efforts to transform the city's social and ecological arrangement, these communities challenged the imposition of Progressive and post-Progressive visions for urban order seeking to enclose or displace them.Under the rubric of dark agoras Roane brings together two formulations of collectivity and belonging associated with working-class Black life. While on their surface diametrically opposed, the city's underground--its illicit markets, taverns, pool halls, unlicensed bars, as well as spaces housing illicit sex and informal sites like corners associated with the economically and socially disreputable--constituted a spatial and experiential continuum with the city's set apart--its house meetings, storefronts, temples, and masjid, as well as the extensive spiritually appropriated architectures of the interwar mass movements that included rural land experiments as well as urban housing, hotels, and recreational facilities. Together these sites incubated Black queer urbanism, or dissident visions for urban life challenging dominant urban reform efforts and their modes of producing race, gender, and ultimately the city itself. Roane shows how Black communities built a significant if underappreciated terrain of geographic struggle shaping Philadelphia between the Great Migration and Black Power. This fascinating book will help readers appreciate the importance of Black spatial imaginaries and worldmaking in shaping matters of urban place and politics.This interview was conducted during an event at Charis Books. Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

As the United States transformed into an industrial superpower, American socialists faced the vexing question of how to approach race. Lorenzo Costaguta balances intellectual and institutional history to illuminate the clash between two major points of view. On one side, some believed labor should accept and apply the ascendant tenets of scientific theories of race. But others stood with International Workingmen's Association leaders J. P. McDonnell and F. A. Sorge in rejecting the idea that racial and ethnic division influenced worker-employer relations, arguing instead that class played the preeminent role.In Workers of All Colors Unite: Race and the Origins of American Socialism (U Illinois Press, 2023), Costaguta charts the socialist movement's journey through the conflict and down a path that ultimately abandoned scientific racism in favor of an internationalist class-focused American socialism. As he shows, the shift had a paradoxical effect: while distancing American socialism from the most hideous forms of white supremacism, it made the movement blind to the racist nature of American capitalism. The position that emerged out of the Gilded Age became American socialism's most common approach to race in the twentieth century and beyond.Omari Averette-Phillips is a History educator and 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

The story of Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and journalists whose accounts claim an outsized place in collective memory. But this pivotal era looked very different to African Americans in the South transitioning from bondage to freedom after 1865. They were besieged by a campaign of white supremacist violence that persisted through the 1880s and beyond. For too long, their lived experiences have been sidelined, impoverishing our understanding of the obstacles post-Civil War Black families faced, their inspiring determination to survive, and the physical and emotional scars they bore because of it.In I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kidada E. Williams offers a breakthrough account of the much-debated Reconstruction period, transporting readers into the daily existence of formerly enslaved people building hope-filled new lives. Drawing on overlooked sources and bold new readings of the archives, Williams offers a revelatory and, in some cases, minute-by-minute record of nighttime raids and Ku Klux Klan strikes. And she deploys cutting-edge scholarship on trauma to consider how the effects of these attacks would linger for decades--indeed, generations--to come.AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Water is often tasked with upholding division through the imposition of geopolitical borders. We see this in the construction of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo on the US-Mexico border, as well as in how the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean are used to delineate the limits of US territory. In stark contrast to this divisive view, Afro-diasporic religions conceive of water as a place of connection; it is where spiritual entities and ancestors reside, and where knowledge awaits.Departing from the premise that water encourages confluence through the sustainment of contradiction, Channeling Knowledges: Water and Afro-Diasporic Spirits in Latinx and Caribbean Worlds (U Texas Press, 2023) fathoms water’s depth and breadth in the work of Latinx and Caribbean creators such as Mayra Santos-Febres, Rita Indiana, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, and the Border of Lights collective. Combining methodologies from literary studies, anthropology, history, and religious studies, Rebeca L. Hey-Colón’s interdisciplinary study traces how Latinx and Caribbean cultural production draws on systems of Afro-diasporic worship—Haitian Vodou, La 21 División (Dominican Vodou), and Santería/Regla de Ocha—to channel the power of water, both salty and sweet, in sustaining connections between past, present, and not-yet-imagined futures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

July 1967. After the arrest, beating, and imprisonment of cab driver John Smith by local police, the city of Newark--already a tinderbox, became a hotbed of protest and retaliation. Over five long days, 26 people were killed by police gunfire and hundreds more were injured, thousands arrested, and millions of dollars in property damage was caused. The scars on the city remained for decades.Bud Lee, a 26-year-old novice photographer for Life magazine, was shooting a portrait of a Wall Street stockbroker when a call came in requesting he leave immediately to cover the civic uprising in Newark, which had already been raging for two days. Lee and Life magazine reporter Dale Wittner arrived in the city late on 14th July. What they found was a majority Black population--already living in deprivation under a thoroughly corrupt local government, and a vicious, authoritarian police force--struggling to maintain some semblance of normalcy under extraordinary circumstances: stores burnt and looted; a city under siege by trigger-happy city and state police; and the young, inexperienced, and exhausted National Guardsmen, sent to patrol it day and night.The War is Here: Newark 1967 (ZE Books, 2023) documents the several days Bud Lee spent in Newark. These photographs, most of which have never been published, capture life in a city transformed into an urban war zone and killing ground, something Lee would witness first-hand on seeing two policemen shoot a man named Billy Furr in the back, murdering him in cold blood. This, Lee captured in a dramatic sequence of images that ran in Life.The same bullets also hit and wounded a 12-year-old boy named Joey Bass Jr., who had been playing at a nearby intersection. Lee's stark, emotional image of Bass, lying bleeding and contorted in pain on dirty concrete, ran on the July 28, 1967 cover of Life, sparking a national conversation on race and police violence, and becoming the defining image of the 'long, hot summer' of '67--a summer of fire and fury, protest and rage across the country. Over half a century later, Bud Lee's raw, desolate, and empathetic photographs of the people of Newark, at a turning point in the city's history, continue to resonate: a testament to their resilience and fortitude. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Ed Mitchell’s journey in the barbeque business began in 1991 with a lunch for his mama, who was grieving the loss of Ed’s father. Ed drove to the nearby Piggly Wiggly to buy a thirty-five-pound pig—that’s a small one—and fired up the coals. As smoke filled the air and the pork skin started to crackle, the few customers at the family bodega started to inquire about lunch and what smelled so good. More than thirty years later, Ed is known simply as “The Pitmaster” in barbeque circles and is widely considered one of the best at what he does.From cracklin to hush puppies, fried green tomatoes to deviled eggs, okra poppers, skillet cornbread, potato salad, and pickled pigs’ feet, Ed Mitchell's Barbeque (Ecco, 2023) is filled with delicious and essential recipes honed over decades. And, of course, there is the barbeque—mouth-watering baby back ribs, smoked pork chops, backyard brisket, and barbequed chicken—all paired with lively and warmly told stories from the Mitchell family. Ed Mitchell’s Barbeque is rich with the history of Wilson, North Carolina, and yet promises to bring barbeque to the next level.Ed’s son Ryan Mitchell, who is a renowned pitmaster in his own right, co-authored the book with his father, along with Zella Palmer.Ryan talks to New Books Network about the unwritten chapters of the rich and complex history of North Carolina whole-hog barbeque – a method passed down through generations over the course of 125 years and hearkens back even further than that, to his ancestors who were plantation sharecroppers and, before that, enslaved. He shares stories of his father’s journey and his own, discusses the impetus behind the cookbook, and offers his views on the future of barbecue.Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger at Vittlesvamp.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

In Afro-Brazilians in Telenovelas: Social, Political, and Economic Realities (Lexington Books, 2022), Samantha Nogueira Joyce examines representations of Blackness on Brazilian TV, interrogating the role of mass media in developing racial equality and social change. Nogueira Joyce challenges assumptions that place the inclusion of Afro-Brazilians in mass media as a step towards racial progress while contextualizing media representation with the social, political, and economic realities of the Brazilian society at large, thus linking media representations to progressive gains and conservative backlashes in the Brazilian public sphere. This book joins conversations with other works on multiculturalism, Blackness, and whiteness within media studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and Latin American studies. This multilayered approach combines textual analysis with studies of political and economic systems and digital media activism to carefully unravel Brazilian racial dynamics.Samantha Nogueira Joyce is Associate Professor of global communication at Saint Mary's College of California. She is the author of Brazilian Telenovelas and the Myth of Racial Democracy (Lexington Books, 2012). Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. 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

Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation (U Georgia Press, 2021) offers a comparative sociocultural and spatial history of white supremacist women involved in massive resistance. The book focuses on segregationist grassroots activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Charleston, South Carolina from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. Dr. Rebecca Brückmann combines theory and detailed case studies to interrogate the “roles, actions, self-understandings, and media representations” of these segregationist women.Dr. Brückmann argues that these women – motivated by an everyday culture of white supremacy – created performative spaces for their segregationist agitation in the public sphere to legitimize their actions. Unlike other studies of mass resistance that have focused on maternalism, Dr. Brückmann argues that women’s invocation of motherhood was varied and primarily served as a tactical tool to continuously expand these women’s spaces. Her book carefully differentiates the circumstances, tactics, and representations used in the creation of performative spaces by working-class, middle-class, and elite women engaged in massive resistance. Brückmann contrasts the transgressive “street politics” of working-class female activists in Little Rock and New Orleans with the more traditional political actions of segregationist, middle-class, and elite women in Charleston. While these women aligned white supremacist agitation with long-standing experience in conservative women’s clubs (e.g., United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Daughters of the American Revolution), working-class women’s groups (who lacked the economic, cultural, and social capital) chose consciously transgressive strategies, including violence, to elicit shock value and create states of emergency to further legitimize their actions and push for white supremacy. Dr. Brückmann’s nuanced work of history uses scholarship from sociology, political science, law, and other relevant disciplines to demonstrate how “interactions between class and status concerns, race, space, and gender shaped these women’s views and actions.”Dr. Rebecca Brückmann is an Associate Professor of History at Carleton College. Her research and teachings interrogate African American history, the transnational history of the Black Diaspora, Southern US history, White Supremacy, and gender.Daniela Lavergne assisted with this podcast.Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Celebrated, censored, canceled: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn cannot be avoided. William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature.” Toni Morrison explained that “the brilliance of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that it is the argument it raises…. The cyclical attempts to remove the novel from classrooms extend Jim’s captivity on into each generation of readers.” Ernest Hemingway claimed “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn… There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” Ralph Waldo Ellison added that “Hemingway missed completely the structural, symbolic and moral necessity for that part of the plot in which the boys rescue Jim. Yet it is precisely this part which gives the novel its significance.” I spoke with Cleo McNelly Kearns, author of a seminal essay on Jim’s role in the book, about Huckleberry Finn as a challenge and an opportunity for 21st-century readers to understand ourselves, our country, and our moral obligations more accurately.Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies