New Books in African American Studies

When The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. looked over into the promised land and tried to discern how we would get there, he called the poor to lead the way. The Poor People’s Campaign was part of a political strategy for building a movement expansive enough to tackle the enmeshed evils of racism, poverty, and war. In Freedom Church of the Poor: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign (Fortress Academic, 2021), Colleen Wessel-McCoy roots King’s political vision solidly in his theological ethics and traces the spirit of the campaign in the community and religious leaders who are responding to the devastating crises of inequality today.Colleen Wessel-McCoy is an Assistant Professor of Peace & Justice Studies and the Director of the Master of Arts in Peace and Social Transformation program at the Earlham School of Religion.Brady McCartney is an interdisciplinary environmental studies scholar at the University of Florida. Email: Brady.McCartney@UFL.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

How did Africans become 'blacks' in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge UP, 2020) tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders' efforts to make blackness synonymous with slavery. Looking closely at three slave societies - Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana - Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross demonstrate that the law of freedom - not slavery - established the meaning of blackness in law. Contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims to citizenship would be tied to racial identity. Laws regulating the lives and institutions of free people of color created the boundaries between black and white, the rights reserved to white people, and the degradations imposed only on black people.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, 202) 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

In this groundbreaking work, Professor Brandon T. Jett unearths how police departments evolved with the urbanization of the Jim Crow South, to target African Americans through a variety of mechanisms of control and violence, such as violent interactions, unjust arrests, and the enforcement of segregation laws and customs. Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South, published by Louisiana State University in July 2021, provides explanation and context to show the way that modern institution of policing in the United States has evolved from, but clings to historical patterns and attitudes that situate African Americans in positions of relative vulnerability in their interactions with police. Still, what surprises in Jett's work is the way that Black residents co-operated and even manipulated the police in aid of crime reduction and to extract services in the urban spaces that they lived. Vivid examples and rich detail provides the reader with a thorough understanding of criminal justice and the way that policing reinforced segregation during the Jim Crow era. Brandon T. Jett is a professor of history at Florida South Western State College. In 2017, he was awarded a William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Early Career Scholar Fellowship. You can listen to him host on New Books in The American South. Race, Crime Policing in the Jim Crow South was the Silver Medal Winner of the Florida Book Award in 2021.Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK 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 Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb (U California Press, 2022), sociologist Sean J. Drake addresses long-standing problems of educational inequality from a nuanced perspective, looking at how race and class intersect to affect modern school segregation. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic observation and dozens of interviews at two distinct high schools in a racially diverse Southern California suburb, Drake unveils hidden institutional mechanisms that lead to the overt segregation and symbolic criminalization of Black, Latinx, and lower-income students who struggle academically. His work illuminates how institutional definitions of success contribute to school segregation, how institutional actors leverage those definitions to justify inequality, and the ways in which local immigrant groups use their ethnic resources to succeed. Academic Apartheid represents a new way forward for scholars whose work sits at the intersection of education, race and ethnicity, class, and immigration.Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

On a near-daily basis, data is being used to narrate our lives. Categorizing algorithms drawn from amassed personal data to assign narrative destinies to individuals at crucial junctures, simultaneously predicting and shaping the paths of our lives. Data is commonly assumed to bring us closer to objectivity, but the narrative paths these algorithms assign seem, more often than not, to replicate biases about who an individual is and could become.While the social effects of such algorithmic logics seem new and newly urgent to consider, Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century Us Literatures (U Michigan Press, 2022) looks to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century U.S. to provide an instructive prehistory to the underlying question of the relationship between data, life, and narrative. Rodrigues contextualizes the application of data collection to human selfhood in order to uncover a modernist aesthetic of data that offers an alternative to the algorithmic logic pervading our sense of data's revelatory potential. Examining the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Rodrigues asks how each of these authors draw from their work in sociology, history, psychology, and journalism to formulate a critical data aesthetic as they attempt to answer questions of identity around race, gender, and nation both in their research and their life writing. These data-driven modernists not only tell different life stories with data, they tell life stories differently because of data.Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.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

Sylvia Chan-Malik is Associate Professor in the Departments of American and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She talks, teaches, and writes about the intersections of race, gender, and religion, with a focus on the history and cultures of Islam and Muslims in the United States. Her research highlights the lives, voices, histories, and representations of Muslim women, and reveals how critical legacies of Black freedom, women’s agency, and global liberation struggles have continually marked U.S. Muslim women’s engagements with Islam.She is the author of Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam (New York University Press, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Drawing inspiration from the life of Harriet Tubman, Cynthia Parker-Ohene's poetic narratives follow a historical arc of consciousness of Black folks: mislaid in potters' fields and catalogued with other misbegotten souls, now unsettled as the unknown Black denominator. Who loved them? Who turned them away? Who dismembered their souls? In death, they are the institutionalized marked Black bodies assigned to parcels, scourged beneath plastic sheets identified as a number among Harriets as black, marked bodies. These poems speak to how the warehousing of enslaved and somewhat free beings belies their humanity through past performances in reformatories, workhouses, and hospitals for the negro insane. To whom did their Black lives belong? How are Black grrls socialized within the family to be out in the world? What is the beingness of Black women? How have the Harriets--the descended daughters of Harriet Tubman--confronted issues of caste and multiple oppressions? The poems in Daughters of Harriet: Poems (UP of Colorado, 2022) give voice to the unspeakable, the unreachable, the multiple Black selves waiting to become. 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 Black Dragon: Afro Asian Performance and the Martial Arts Imagination (Ohio State UP, 2022), Zachary F. Price illuminates martial arts as a site of knowledge exchange between Black, Asian, and Asian American people and cultures to offer new insights into the relationships among these historically marginalized groups. Drawing on case studies that include Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's appearance in Bruce Lee's film Game of Death, Ron van Clief and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Wu-Tang Clan, and Chinese American saxophonist Fred Ho, Price argues that the regular blending and borrowing between their distinct cultural heritages is healing rather than appropriative. His analyses of performance, power, and identity within this cultural fusion demonstrate how, historically, urban working-class Black men have developed community and practiced self-care through the contested adoption of Asian martial arts practice. By directing his analysis to this rich but heretofore understudied vein of American cultural exchange, Price not only broadens the scholarship around sites of empowerment via such exchanges but also offers a compelling example of nonessentialist emancipation for the twenty-first century. 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 Class Struggle and the Color Line: American Socialism and the Race Question, 1900-1930 (Haymarket Books, 2018), Paul Heideman collects, for the first time, source materials from a diverse array of socialist writers and organizers, providing a new perspective on the complex history of revolutionary debates about fighting anti-Black racism.Paul Heideman holds a PhD in American studies from Rutgers University–Newark and is a frequent contributor to Jacobin magazine.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

In 2014 Barbados introduced a vaccine to prevent certain strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) and reduce the risk of cervical cancer in young women. Despite the disproportionate burden of cervical cancer in the Caribbean, many Afro-Barbadians chose not to immunize their daughters. In Suspicion: Vaccines, Hesitancy, and  the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados (Duke University Press, 2022), Nicole Charles reframes Afro-Barbadian vaccine refusal from a question of hesitancy to one of suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, black feminist theory, transnational feminist studies and science and technology studies, Charles foregrounds Afro-Barbadians' gut feelings and emotions and the lingering trauma of colonial and biopolitical violence. She shows that suspicion, far from being irrational, is a fraught and generative affective orientation grounded in concrete histories of mistrust of government and coercive medical practices foisted on colonized peoples. By contextualizing suspicion within these longer cultural and political histories, Charles troubles traditional narratives of vaccine hesitancy while offering new entry points into discussions on racialized biopolitics, neocolonialism, care, affect, and biomedicine across the Black diaspora.Nicole Charles is Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies in Culture and Media, University of Toronto, Mississauga. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies