New Books in African American Studies

Canadians are proud of their multicultural image both at home and abroad. But that image isn t grounded in historical facts. As recently as the 1960s, the Canadian government enforced discriminatory, anti-Black immigration policies, designed to restrict and prohibit the entry of Black Barbadians and Black West Indians. The Canadian state capitalized on the public s fear of the Black unknown and racist stereotypes to justify their exclusion.In Flying Fish in the Great White North: The Autonomous Migration of Black Barbadians (Fernwood, 2016), Christopher Stuart Taylor utilizes the intersectionality of race, gender and class to challenge the perception that Blacks were simply victims of racist and discriminatory Canadian and international, immigration policies by emphasizing the agency and educational capital of Black Barbadian emigrants during this period. In fact, many Barbadians were middle to upper class and were well educated, and many, particularly women, found autonomous agency and challenged the very Canadian immigration policies designed to exclude them.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

What can a French translator do with a novelist who writes brilliantly about the “confrontation between Englishes?” How can such a confrontation be made legible across the boundaries of language, nation, and history? Renowned scholar and translator Brent Hayes Edwards sits down with publisher and translator Jean-Baptiste Naudy to consider these questions in a wide-ranging discussion about translating the Jamaican American writer Claude McKay. They focus especially on the recent translation into French of McKay’s 1941 Amiable with Big Teeth, which paints a satirical portrait of efforts by 1930s Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia. Brent and Jean-Baptiste consider McKay’s lasting legacy and ongoing revival in the U.S. and France. Translating McKay into French, they note, is a matter of reckoning with France’s own imperial history. That history, along with McKay’s complex understanding of race both in the U.S. and abroad, is illuminated in this conversation about one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most celebrated writers. Be sure to check out this episode’s special bonus material for a dramatic, bilingual reading from Amiable with Big Teeth by Jean-Baptiste!Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. 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 1865, the Confederacy was defeated, but the military victory did not end the tensions of the war or signal acceptance of a new, more equal nation. In Civil War by Other Means: America's Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy (PublicAffairs, 2022), Jeremi Suri argues that, instead, efforts to bolster white supremacy began immediately. The big questions and conflicts of the Civil War lingered, continuing to cause other types of conflict among Americans. From conflicting interpretations of Abraham Lincoln's assassination by John Wilkes Booth to postwar riots to contested elections and stymied presidential agendas, Suri shows how the battles of the Civil War continued in other forms in the decades after the military conflict ended. Suri argues that, in fact, competing visions of democracy, freedom, and race still evident today have their roots in this period. In this episode of the podcast, Suri, who is the Mack Brown Distinguished Professor for Global Leadership, History, and Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, discusses this historical moment, what led him to research and write about it, and what it means for understanding the current challenges facing American democracy.Christine Lamberson, PhD, is a historian. Her research focuses on 20th century U.S. legal, political, and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Today I talked to Matthew Delmont about his new book Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (Viking, 2022)Delmont is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College. A Guggenheim Fellow and expert on African American history and the history of civil rights, he is the author of four books: Black Quotidian, Why Busing Failed, Making Roots, and The Nicest Kids in Town. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, NPR, and several academic journals. Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Delmont earned his B.A from Harvard University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University.Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. 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 African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2022) unearths a buried African archive within widely-read Latinx writers of the last fifty years. It challenges dominant narratives in World Literature and transatlantic studies that ignore Africa's impact in broader Latin American culture. Sarah Quesada argues that these canonical works evoke textual memorials of African memory. She shows how the African Atlantic haunts modern Latinx and Caribbean writing, and examines the disavowal or distortion of the African subject in the constructions of national, racial, sexual, and spiritual Latinx identity. Quesada shows how themes such as the 19th century 'scramble for Africa,' the decolonizing wars, Black internationalism, and the neoliberal turn are embedded in key narratives. Drawing from multilingual archives about West and Central Africa, she examines how the legacies of colonial French, Iberian, British and U.S. Imperialisms have impacted on the relationships between African and Latinx identities. This is the first book-length project to address the African colonial and imperial inheritance of Latinx literature. -From the Cambridge University Press website.Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Communication Department 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 Resistance, Persistence and Resilience of Black Families Raising Children with Autism (Peter Lang, 2020) presents nuanced perspectives in the form of counternarratives of what Black families who have children with autism experience at the intersection of race, class, disability and gender. It intentionally centers the expertise of Black parents, challenging what is considered knowledge, whose knowledge counts, and how knowledge can be co-generated for learning, sharing and advocacy. The book speaks directly to Black parents on the autism journey. To right systemic racial inequities and to cultivate culturally responsive practices, it is critical for practitioners and professionals to understand what is known about Black families' experiences with autism in general and how these experiences differ because of our intersecting identities. University faculty and students in programs involving medicine, speech and language pathology, occupational therapy, nursing, political science, school psychology, teaching, special education and leadership can benefit from the wisdom offered by these parents. This text is perfect for several courses, including those in departments of anthropology, women and gender studies, health sciences, psychology, special education, teacher education and administrative leadership. In addition, given the uniquely Black perspective presented in the text, this text is relevant to other fields, including ethnic studies, cultural studies, urban studies and African American studies. It is relevant to individuals who wish to better understand how issues of race and intra-racial differences shape lived experiences with disability in American society. 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 Texas Revolution has long been cast as an epic episode in the origins of the American West. As the story goes, larger-than-life figures like Sam Houston, David Crockett, and William Barret Travis fought to free Texas from repressive Mexican rule. In Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas (Basic Books, 2022), historian Sam Haynes reveals the reality beneath this powerful creation myth. He shows how the lives of ordinary people—white Americans, Mexicans, Native Americans, and those of African descent—were upended by extraordinary events over twenty-five years. After the battle of San Jacinto, racial lines snapped taut as a new nation, the Lone Star republic, sought to expel Indians, marginalize Mexicans, and tighten its grip on the enslaved.This is a revelatory and essential new narrative of a major turning point in the history of North America.Andrew R. Graybill is professor of history and director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is the author of The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (Liveright, 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

Engaging the past, the present, and the future, The Workings of Diaspora: Jamaican Maroons and the Claims to Sovereignty (Lexington Books, 2021) shows how the lived experience of Jamaican Maroons is linked to the African Diaspora. In so doing, this interdisciplinary undertaking interrogates the definition of Diaspora but mainly emphasizes the term’s use. Mario Nisbett demonstrates that an examination of Jamaican Maroon communities, particularly their socio-political development, can further highlight the significance of the African Diaspora as an analytical tool. He shows how Jamaican Maroons inform resistance to abjection, a denial of full humanity, through claiming their African origin and developing solidarity and consciousness in order to affirm black humanity. This book establishes that present-day Jamaican Maroons remain relevant and engage the African Diaspora to improve black standing and bolster assertions of sovereignty.Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at okaverettephillips@ucdavis.edu. 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 Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (U California Press, 2021), Ross Cole revisits the remarkable upswell of interest in folk songs in fin de siècle Britain and America. While the work of folk collectors such as John Lomax, Cecil Sharp and Hubert Parry seems primarily about the preservation of premodern musical cultures, Cole suggests that the anxieties about the disappearance of these traditions were inseparable from – and constitutive of – a critique of industrial modernity. That is, the preoccupation with folk culture in this period was as much about discontent with the present and imagining new visions for the future as it was motivated by a socio-historical interest in the vernacular musics of the past. Cole shows how the desire for ‘folk culture’ actually occluded the messy, hybrid reality of vernacular music making, and the lives of those who made it, as a result.Cole makes the compelling case that what he calls the ‘folkloric imagination’ is shot through with a twinned politics of nostalgia and utopia, with both radical and reactionary elements lying just beneath the surface. The Folk traces how the invention of folk song by the collectors of the late 19th and early 20th Century was tightly bound up with contentious questions of race, nation, and empire that would come to an ugly head with the advent of fascism. By pursuing these threads into the present day, Cole shows how the same tensions continue to permeate the use and abuse of ‘the folk’ in contemporary political culture.Dr Ross Cole is Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Leeds.Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Lynching is often viewed as a narrow form of violence: either the spontaneous act of an angry mob against accused individuals, or a demonstration of white supremacy against an entire population considered subhuman. However, in this new treatise, historian Guy Lancaster exposes the multiple forms of violence hidden beneath the singular label of lynching.Lancaster, who has written extensively on racial violence, details several lynchings of Blacks by white posses in post-Reconstruction Arkansas. Drawing from the fields of history, philosophy, cognitive science, sociology, and literary theory, and quoting chilling contemporary accounts, he argues that the act of lynching encompasses five distinct but overlapping types of violence. This new framework reveals lynching to be even more of an atrocity than previously understood: that mobs did not disregard the humanity of their victims but rather reveled in it; that they were not simply enacting personal vengeance but manifesting an elite project of subjugation. Lancaster thus clarifies and connects the motives and goals of seemingly isolated lynch mobs, embedding the practice in the ongoing enforcement of white supremacy. By interrogating the substance of lynching, American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching (U Arkansas Press, 2021) shines new light on both past anti-Black violence and the historical underpinnings of our present moment.Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2021) and co-editor of Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020 (Texas A&M University Press, scheduled Spring 2023). Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies