New Books in African American Studies

Historically, how have marginalized and minority groups pushed the boundaries of representative government to pass legislation that benefits them? Political Scientist Shamira Gelbman, the Daniel F. Evans Associate Professor in Social Sciences at Wabash College, answers this question in her new book, The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction (Temple UP, 2021). Gelbman examines the history of The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) throughout the 1950s and 60s, teasing out the individuals who engaged in lobbying, advocacy, training, and other capacities to push civil rights legislation forward while also helping to block segregationist and white supremacy advocacy in Congress. Gelbman’s case study of the LCCR uses archival and scholarly resources to paint a picture of the Civil Rights Movement’s policy achievements by evaluating the role of lobbying and coalitional building.The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Second Reconstruction begins by exploring what it takes to create coalitional groups and the uniqueness of the political climate of the 20th century. The arguments about coalitional interest groups are presented alongside the informative history of the LCCR and the policy achievements of the Civil Rights Movement. Gelbman uses interest group theory to explain many of the teachings from this case study. Coalitional groups can often function as a “weapon for the weak,” and Gelbman takes notice of both the benefits of interest group lobbying as well as the setbacks of in-fighting between lobbyists in a broad coalition like the LCCR. The work of structuring the coalition, of working through different goals and approaches, is key in understanding the complicated process for moving forward with civil rights policy creation and implementation. The LCCR was made up of a wide array of groups and members, including a diversity of religious organizations, labor unions, and a constellation of civil rights organizations. Gelbman showcases the LCCR as an organization that mobilized professional and grassroots lobbying by distinguishing commonalities among the members to develop broad-based supports for legislators to pursue civil rights legislation.Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Elizabeth Korver-Glenn's book Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America (Oxford UP, 2021) examines how housing market professionals-including housing developers, real estate agents, mortgage lenders, and appraisers-construct 21st century urban housing markets in ways that contribute to or undermine racial segregation. Drawing on extensive ethnographic and interview data collected in Houston, Texas, Race Brokers shows that housing market professionals play a key role in connecting people-or refusing to connect people-to housing resources and opportunities. They make these brokering decisions through reference to racist or anti-racist ideas. Typically, housing market professionals draw from racist ideas that rank-order people and neighborhoods according to their perceived economic and cultural housing market value, entwining racism with their housing market activities and interactions. Racialized housing market routines encourage this entwinement by naturalizing racism as a professional tool. Race Brokers tracks how professionals broker racism across the housing exchange process-from the home's construction, to real estate brokerage, mortgage lending, home appraisals, and the home sale closing. In doing so, it shows that professionals make housing exchange a racialized process that contributes to neighborhood inequality and racial segregation. However, in contrast to the racialized status-quo, a small number of housing market professionals draw on anti-racist ideas and strategies to extend equal opportunities to individuals and neighborhoods, de-naturalizing housing market racism. Race Brokers highlights the imperative to interrupt the racism that pervades housing market professionals' work, dismantle the racialized routines that underwrite such racism, and cultivate a truly fair housing market.Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Who governs political parties? Recent insurgent campaigns, such as those of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, have thrust this critical question to the center of political debate for casual observers and scholars alike. Yet the dynamics of modern party politics remain poorly understood. Assertions of either elite control or interest group dominance both fail to explain the Trump victory and the surprise of the Sanders insurgency and their subsequent reverberations through the American political landscape.In True Blues: The Contentious Transformation of the Democratic Party (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), Adam Hilton tackles the question of who governs parties by examining the transformation of the Democratic Party since the late 1960s. Reconceiving parties as “contentious institutions,” Hilton argues that Democratic Party change was driven by recurrent conflicts between groups and officeholders to define and control party identity, program, and policy. The outcome of this prolonged struggle was a wholly new kind of party—an advocacy party—which institutionalized greater party dependence on outside groups for legitimacy and organizational support, while also, in turn, fostering greater group dependency on the presidency for the satisfaction of its symbolic and substantive demands. Consequently, while the long conflict between party reformers and counter-reformers successfully opened the Democratic Party to new voices and identities, it also facilitated the growth of presidential power, rising inequality, and deepening partisan polarization.Tracing the rise of the advocacy party from the fall of the New Deal order through the presidency of Barack Obama, True Blues explains how and why the Democratic Party has come to its current crossroads and suggests a bold new perspective for comprehending the dynamics driving American party politics more broadly.Adam Hilton is Assistant Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He earned his PhD from the Department of Political Science at York University, Toronto. His current research focuses on the relationship between movements, interest groups, and political parties, and the agency of political entrepreneurs in transforming them. In addition to True Blues, he is also working on an edited book with Jessica Hejny, tentatively titled Placing Parties in American Political Development.Joe Renouard is Resident Professor of American Studies and Fei Yi-Ming Journalism Foundation Chair of American Government and Comparative Politics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Nanjing, China. 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 To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship (Duke UP 2021), Elizabeth McHenry locates a hidden chapter in the history of Black literature at the turn of the twentieth century, revising concepts of Black authorship and offering a fresh account of the development of "Negro literature" focused on the never published, the barely read, and the unconventional.Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelledmonds.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

Lee B. Wilson is the author of Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660-1783, published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. Bonds of Empire explores how English law gave the institution of slavery its ability to thieve and grow. By looking at how law was practiced, instead of solely focusing on how it was written, Wilson follows the development of the institution of slavery in South Carolina and the English law of slavery in the colony. The day to day legal life of slavery in the colon shows just how much English law was crucial, and not opposed, to the enslavement of people.Dr. Wilson is an Associate Professor at Clemson University.Derek Litvak is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland—College Park. His dissertation, "The Specter of Black Citizens: Race, Slavery, and Citizenship in the Early United States," examines how citizenship was used to both bolster the institution of slavery and exclude Black Americans from the body politic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

James Beard and NAACP Image Award-winning chef and educator, Bryant Terry calls Black Food a “communal shrine to the shared culinary histories of the African diaspora.” Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora (4 Color Books, 2021) weaves together a diverse collection of more than 100 different contributors, including food writers, chefs, scholars, activists, and leaders exploring the food, experience, and community across the diaspora. As the editor, Terry extends the cookbook genre by curating a stunning gathering of over 50 recipes, song titles, essays, and poems, spanning over 300 pages while discussing issues like land ownership, race and gender, and self-care. Black Food is an impactful and enduring tribute to Black foodways.N’Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates. 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 Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering our Cities (Bold Type Books, 2021) by Dr. Davarian Baldwin examines the political economy of the American university over the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries. He brings a Black Studies lens to interrogate the ways that universities hide behind the notion of administering public goods to protect their tax-exempt status while generating astronomical profits off of the backs of working-class people, graduate student teachers and researchers, and underpaid and contingent faculty. We discuss the securitization and development implications of growing university wealth and how it engenders forms of radicalized plunder, racist policing, gentrification, and exploitation by the 1%. With a focus on this and more, we talk about what it means to live in the shadow of ivory tower.Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @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

When Cassandra Lane finds herself pregnant at thirty-five, the knowledge sends her on a poignant exploration of memory to prepare for her entry into motherhood. She moves between the twentieth-century rural South and present-day Los Angeles, reimagining the intimate life of her great-grandparents Mary Magdelene Magee and Burt Bridges, and Burt's lynching at the hands of vengeful white men in his southern town.We Are Bridges: A Memoir (Feminist Press, 2021) turns to creative nonfiction to reclaim a family history from violent erasure so that a mother can gift her child with an ancestral blueprint for their future. Haunting and poetic, this debut traces the strange fruit borne from the roots of personal loss in one Black family--and considers how to take back one's American story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU Press, 2017), by Professor Britt Rusert (UMass-Amherst), [Insert link] has already earned accolades from the American Studies Association and the MLA following its publication in 2017. Now book is also getting traction in the fields of STS, history of science, and history of medicine. It’s easy to see why.At the level of documentation, the book chronicles the empirical work, rhetorical strategies, and material worlds of Black and African American scientists (avant la lettre) during the US antebellum period. The book connects a lineage of Black naturalists, ethnologist, and physicians who were creating and circulating empirical evidence of the moral and political equality of Black Americans relative to White people to argue against the institution of slavery, racist discrimination and violent dispossession. And they were pursuing their own empirical research questions—not only working in response to White racist science—about the pasts and potential emancipatory futures of Black Americans. The documentary work of the book is indispensable it its own right.For scholars in STS and in history of science and medicine the book is important for anyone interested in speculative methods and speculative histories; anyone who takes seriously theories of history and wants to—or already is—practicing transformative justice through their own narrative craft. The book models one way of creating an anticolonial, antiracist “counter-archive” through an intentionally magpie accrual of material culture and through the rigorous use of imagination as interpretive method.In the interview we also talk about Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation, Donna Haraway’s method of critical speculation, and Marissa Fuentes’ technique of “reading with the archive bias” – as well as why HBCUs are the places where transformative fugitive science is happening in the present day. Rusert also published with Whitney Battle-Baptiste W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America – another important book for STS scholars and historians of science and medicine, enthusiastically reviewed in the New York Review of Books (Aug 2021).This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and STS scholars at Vanderbilt University: Kaelee Belleto, Hannah Crook, Aaron Hunt, Will Krause, Dionne Lucas, Esther Park, Grace Smith, McKenzie Yates, and Jaehyeong Yu. Please email Laura Stark with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Mobility has been central to the American identity—think of the automobile, the perceived freedom that comes with it, the open road—but Black Americans have never possessed the same freedom to move around as whites. From the slave patrols policing the movement of Black Americans in the nineteenth century to the indignities and violence that Blacks suffered on road-trips in the twentieth, Black travelers in the United States have faced violence, indignities, and a confusing and contradictory set of racist rules. This history—the history of the Black experience of travel in the United States—is expertly and beautifully told by Mia Bay in her new book Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Harvard UP, 2021)In addition to examining the white-supremacist restrictions on Black travel, Bay—the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Chair in American History at the University of Pennsylvania—foregrounds how Black Americans coped (The Negro Motorist Green Book is one such example) and even resisted travel segregation. In fact, by putting travel at the center of her analysis, Bay sheds new light on the the civil rights movement. Finally, Bay concludes the book with an epilogue on the continuities into the present, writing that “there's no need to travel back in time to travel Black.”Dexter Fergie is a doctoral student in US and global history at Northwestern University. His research examines the history of ideas, infrastructure, and international organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies