New Books in African American Studies

In The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought (Ohio State UP, 2021), Professor Roger Sneed illuminates the interplay of Black religious thought with science fiction narratives to present a bold case for Afrofuturism as an important channel for Black spirituality. In the process, he challenges the assumed primacy of the Black church as the arbiter of Black religious life. Incorporating analyses of Octavia Butler’s Parable books, Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturistic saga, Star Trek’s Captain Benjamin Sisko, Marvel’s Black Panther, and the philosophies of Sun Ra and the Nation of Islam, Sneed demonstrates how Afrofuturism has contributed to Black visions of the future. He also investigates how Afrofuturism has influenced religious scholarship that looks to Black cultural production as a means of reimagining Blackness in the light of the sacred. The result is an expansive new look at the power of science fiction and Afrofuturism to center the diversity of Black spirituality.Roger A. Sneed is Professor and Chair of Religion at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. His work involves the intersections of African American religious thought and culture, Christian thought and gay male sexualities, and religious ethics. He is a contributor for Huffington Post and has previously published the book Representations of Homosexuality: Black Liberation Theology and Cultural Criticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Dannelle Gutarra Cordero's expansive study incorporates writers, cultural figures and intellectuals from antiquity to the present day to analyze how discourses on emotion serve to create and maintain White supremacy and racism. Throughout history, scientific theories have played a vital role in the accumulation of power over colonized and racialized people. Scientific intellectual discourses on race, gender, and sexuality characterized Blackness as emotionally distinct in both deficiency and excess, a contrast with the emotional benevolence accorded to Whiteness. Ideas on racialized emotions have simultaneously driven the development of devastating body politics by enslaving structures of power. Bold and thought provoking, She Is Weeping: An Intellectual History of Racialized Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World (Cambridge UP, 2022) provides a new understanding of racialized emotions in the Atlantic World, and how these discourses proved instrumental to the rise of slavery and racial capitalism, racialized sexual violence, and the expansion of the carceral state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Examining infanticide cases in the United States from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Felicity M. Turner's Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America (UNC Press, 2022) documents how women—Black and white, enslaved and free—gradually lost control over reproduction to male medical and legal professionals. In the first half of the nineteenth century, community-based female knowledge played a crucial role in prosecutions for infanticide: midwives, neighbors, healers, and relatives were better acquainted with an accused woman's intimate life, the circumstances of her pregnancy, and possible motives for infanticide than any man. As the century progressed, women accused of the crime were increasingly subject to the scrutiny of white male legal and medical experts educated in institutions that reinforced prevailing ideas about the inferior mental and physical capacities of women and Black people. As Reconstruction ended, the reach of the carceral state expanded, while law and medicine simultaneously privileged federal and state regulatory power over that of local institutions. These transformations placed all women's bodies at the mercy of male doctors, judges, and juries in ways they had not been before.Reframing knowledge of the body as property, Felicity M. Turner shows how, at the very moment when the federal government expanded formal civil and political rights to formerly enslaved people, the medical profession instituted new legal regulations across the nation that restricted access to knowledge of the female body to white men.Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

By any reasonable metric, prisons as they exist in the United States and in many other countries are normatively unacceptable. What is the proper moral response to this? Can prisons and the practices surrounding incarceration feasibly be reformed, or should the entire enterprise be abolished? If the latter, then what? If the former, what are the necessary reforms?In The Idea of Prison Abolition (Princeton UP, 2022), Tommie Shelby undertakes a systematic and critical examination of the arguments in favor of prison abolition. Although he ultimately rejects abolitionism as a philosophical position, he builds from the abolitionist program’s crucial insights a positive view of what it would take to create a prison and incarceration system that is consistent with justice.Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. 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 marginalisation of Black voices from the academy is a problem in the Western world. But Black Studies, where it exists, is a powerful, boundary-pushing discipline, grown out of struggle and community action. In The Future of Black Studies (Pluto Press, 2022), Abdul Alkalimat, one of the founders of Black Studies in the US, presents a reimagining of the future trends in the study of the Black experience.Taking Marxism and Black Experientialism, Afro-Futurist and Diaspora frameworks, he projects a radical future for the discipline at this time of social crisis. Choosing cornerstones of culture, such as the music of Sun Ra, the movie Black Panther and the writer Octavia Butler, he looks at the trajectory of Black liberation thought since slavery, including new research on the rise in the comparative study of Black people all over the world.Turning to look at how digital tools enhance the study of the discipline, this book is a powerful read that will inform and inspire students and activists.Amanda Joyce Hall is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the Department of African American Studies. She's on Twitter @amandajoycehall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

"History recalls Wallace’s inaugural address as a set piece in the larger drama of defending Southern segregation, which it was. But the speech was about something even more profound, more enduring, even more virulent than segregation. Aside from his infamous “Segregation Forever” slogan, Wallace mentioned “segregation” only one other time that afternoon. In contrast, he invoked “freedom” twenty-five times in his speech—more than Martin Luther King Jr. would use the term later that year in his “I Have a Dream” address at the March on Washington. “Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us,” Wallace told his audience, “and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South.” Those rattling shackles of oppression were forged by the enemy of the people of his beloved Barbour County: the federal government."– Jefferson Cowie, Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (Basic Books, 2022).Professor Cowie titles his latest book’s introduction ‘George Wallace and American Freedom’, which frames part of the historical narrative within which he reexamines one of our most celebrated values within the purview of local history. But as The New York Times review of the book in December by author Jeff Shesol articulately summarized:‘Freedom’s Dominion is local history, but in the way that Gettysburg was a local battle or the Montgomery bus boycott was a local protest. The book recounts four peak periods in the conflict between white Alabamians and the federal government: the wild rush, in the early 19th century, to seize and settle lands that belonged to the Creek Nation; Reconstruction; the reassertion of white supremacy under Jim Crow; and the attempts of Wallace and others to nullify the civil rights reforms of the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout, as Cowie reveals, white Southerners portrayed the oppression of Black people and Native Americans not as a repudiation of freedom, but its precondition, its very foundation.’This book is an engrossing read and check this from Shesol’s review about Wallace and his attraction:‘Racism was central to his appeal, yet its common note was grievance; the common enemies were elites, the press and the federal government. “Being a Southerner is no longer geographic,” he declared in 1964, during the first of his four runs for the White House. “It’s a philosophy and an attitude.” That attitude, we know, is pervasive now — a primal, animating principle of conservative politics. We hear it in conspiracy theories about the “deep state”; we see it in the actions of Republican officials like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who built a case for his re-election in 2022 by banning — in the name of “individual freedom” — classroom discussions of gender, sexuality and systemic racism.’Some of Professor Cowie’s other books mentioned in this interview: Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor (1999) received the 2000 Phillip Taft Prize for the Best Book in Labor History in 2000 Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (2010) awarded the Francis Parkman Prize for the Best Book in American History in 2011 The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (2016) Professor Cowie’s work in social and political history focuses on how class, inequality, and labor shape American politics and culture. Formerly at Cornell, he is currently the James G. Stahlman Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.Sydney Business School at Shanghai University - can be reached at keith.krueger1@uts.edu.au or keithNBn@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

Pedro Lebrón Ortis's book The Philosophy of Marronage (Filosofía del cimarronaje) theorizes the broader context behind the notion of "cimarronaje," marronage. Usually conceived of as enslaved peoples' flight from the plantation during colonial times, cimarronaje is an expansive term referring to the mentality of living beyond oppressive societal norms. Lebrón Ortiz synthesizes philosophical notions behind cimarronaje to argue that we can see evidence of cimarronaje that continue today. Other praise:"Comenzar por la experiencia de quienes no pueden librarse de nada –y mucho menos detener otra voluntad que no sea con los recursos de su propia fuerza– es partir de una experiencia totalmente distinta a la descrita habitualmente en los libros de filosofía política. Se trata de comenzar a pensar la libertad desde la perspectiva de quien experimenta el mundo como una molienda y del que no tiene más vínculos con el poder que una cita pautada con la muerte. Para el esclavizado, la libertad está en salir de esa condición impuesta que lo define todo. Es el camino a otro sitio. Una puerta que se abre cuando menos se espera."-Anayra O. Santory Jorge"La filosofía del cimarronaje que se elabora en este texto apunta a la necesidad de pensar la filosofía, no a la manera de admiración desinteresada con respecto a las simplicidades y misterios del mundo, sino como escándalo ante las violencias genocidas y las contradicciones profundas del mundo moderno/colonial."-Nelson Maldonado-TorresAnna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. 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

The long and pernicious relationship between fast food restaurants and the African American community. Today, fast food is disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods and marketed to Black Americans through targeted advertising. But throughout much of the twentieth century, fast food was developed specifically for White urban and suburban customers, purposefully avoiding Black spaces. In White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation (U Minnesota Press, 2023), Naa Oyo A. Kwate traces the evolution in fast food from the early 1900s to the present, from its long history of racist exclusion to its current damaging embrace of urban Black communities. Fast food has historically been tied to the country's self-image as the land of opportunity and is marketed as one of life's simple pleasures, but a more insidious history lies at the industry's core. White Burgers, Black Cash investigates the complex trajectory of restaurant locations from a decided commitment to Whiteness to the disproportionate densities that characterize Black communities today. Kwate expansively charts fast food's racial and spatial transformation and centers the cities of Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C., in a national examination of the biggest brands of today, including White Castle, KFC, Burger King, McDonald's, and more. Deeply researched, grippingly told, and brimming with surprising details, White Burgers, Black Cash reveals the inequalities embedded in the closest thing Americans have to a national meal. 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 Ayers Trotti's The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion and Punishment in the American South (The University of North Carolina Press, 2022) documents the complex religious and cultural textures of post-Civil War executions in the U.S. South. Before 1850, all legal executions in the South were performed before crowds that could number in the thousands; the last legal public execution was in 1936. This study focuses on the shift from public executions to ones behind barriers, situating that change within our understandings of lynching and competing visions of justice and religion. Intended to shame and intimidate, public executions after the Civil War had quite a different effect on southern Black communities. Crowds typically consisting of as many Black people as white behaved like congregations before a macabre pulpit, led in prayer and song by a Black minister on the scaffold. Black criminals often proclaimed their innocence and almost always their salvation. This turned the proceedings into public, mixed-race and mixed-gender celebrations of Black religious authority and devotion. In response, southern states rewrote their laws to eliminate these crowds and this Black authority, ultimately turning to electrocutions in the bowels of state penitentiaries. In just the same era when a wave of lynchings crested around the turn of the twentieth century, states transformed the ways that the South's white-dominated governments controlled legal capital punishment, making executions into private affairs witnessed only by white people.Lane Davis is an Instructor of Religion at Huntingdon College. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis 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 The New Freedom and the Radicals: Woodrow Wilson, Progressive Views of Radicalism, and the Origins of Repressive Tolerance (Temple University Press, 2015), Jacob Kramer examines how progressivism emerged at a time of critical transformation in American life. Kramer presents a study of Wilsonian-era politics to convey an understanding of the progressives’ views on radical America.Jacob Kramer is an Associate Professor of History at Borough of Manhattan Community College.Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.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