New Books in African American Studies

An event-by-event look at how institutionalized racism harms the health of African Americans in the twenty-first century A crucial component of anti-Black racism is the unconscionable disparity in health outcomes between Black and white Americans.  Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States (U Minnesota Press, 2021) examines this institutionalized inequality through dramatic, concrete events from the past two decades, revealing how unequal living conditions and inadequate medical care have become routine. From the spike in chronic disease after Hurricane Katrina to the lack of protection for Black residents during the Flint water crisis--and even the life-threatening childbirth experience for tennis star Serena Williams--author Anne Pollock takes readers on a journey through the diversity of anti-Black racism operating in healthcare. She goes beneath the surface to deconstruct the structures that make these events possible, including mass incarceration, police brutality, and the hypervisibility of Black athletes' bodies. Ultimately, Sickening shows what these shocking events reveal about the everyday racialization of health in the United States. Concluding with a vital examination of racialized healthcare during the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter rebellions of 2020, Sickening cuts through the mind-numbing statistics to vividly portray healthcare inequalities. In a gripping and passionate style, Pollock shows the devastating reality and consequences of systemic racism on the lives and health of Black Americans. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

From the 1520s through the 1580s, thousands of African slaves fled captivity in Spanish Panama and formed their own communities in the interior of the isthmus. African Maroons in Sixteenth-Century Panama (U Oklahoma Press, 2021), a primary source reader, edited by Robert C. Schwaller, documents this marronage in the context of five decades of African resistance to slavery.The self-sufficiency of the Maroons, along with their periodic raids against Spanish settlements, sparked armed conflict as Spaniards sought to conquer the maroon communities and kill or re-enslave their populations. After decades of struggle, Maroons succeeded in negotiating a peace with Spanish authorities and establishing the first two free Black towns in the Americas. The little-known details of this dramatic history emerge in these pages, traced through official Spanish accounts, reports, and royal edicts, as well as excerpts from several English sources that recorded alliances between Maroons and English privateers in the region. The contrasting Spanish and English accounts reveal Maroons' attempts to turn European antagonism to their advantage; and, significantly, several accounts feature direct testimony from Maroons. Most importantly, this reader includes translations of the first peace agreements made between a European empire and African Maroons, and the founding documents of the free-Black communities of Santiago del Príncipe and Santa Cruz la Real—the culmination of the first successful African resistance movement in the Americas.Schwaller has translated all the documents into English and presents each with a short introduction, thorough annotations, and full historical, cultural, and geographical context, making this volume accessible to undergraduate students while remaining a unique document collection for scholars.Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. 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 Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba (University of Florida Press, 2021), Dr. Takkara Brunson examines the political strategies used by Afro-Cuban women between 1886 and 1959 to call for greater rights and opportunities for Afro-Cubans. Afro-Cuban women channeled their energy for Black rights through letter writing, sitting for photographs and comportment, founding their own organizations, and seeking and winning political offices in the Communist Party, to name a few of their strategies. While pursuing the political avenues available to them, Black women also navigated and had to contend with patriarchy and racelessness. In putting together this compelling story, Brunson undertook research in archives in Cuba and the United States. She hones in on the lives of particular women in each chapter to show how they advanced calls for Black citizenship and rights. Brunson builds on the work of Latin American and Cuban history as well as Black feminist scholarship to center Black women as critical protagonists in the struggle for Black rights and freedom.Dr. Takkara Brunson is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Texas A&M University.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

Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in the City of Angels (University of Chicago Press, 2021) by Pamela J. Prickett is an ethnographic study of an African American Muslim community in South Central Los Angeles. The accessible study follows the believers of Masjid al-Quran (MAQ) as they live their Islam in and around the mosque community, such as during prayers or Ramadan, but also while conducting business or interacting with one another. Masjid al-Quran’s institutional history dates back to the Nation of Islam, which then later transitioned to Sunni Islam through the leadership of W. D. Mohammad. MAQ is also located in South Central, a community that has changed demographically and socio-economically overtime. Embedded in this complex urban geography, Prickett's study masterfully illuminates the deep entanglements of class, race, and gender in the defining of faith and ritual for members of MAQ. The study interrogates tenuous realities of giving and receiving charity, the intricate agentic Muslim expressions of African American femininity and womanhood, and the positionality of African American Muslims and diasporic Muslim Americans. This book is also a stunning ethnography. It is attentive to many methodological concerns of positionality, access, and immersive fieldwork, but it is also a story of friendship, love, and loss. This book will be of interest to those who think and reflect on Islam in America, African American Islam, and race, gender, class, and lived religion, but it will also be a productive text to incorporate into methods courses, especially on ethnography.Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. 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 local community around the Nat Turner rebellion The 1831 Southampton Rebellion led by Nat Turner involved an entire community. Vanessa M. Holden rediscovers the women and children, free and enslaved, who lived in Southampton County before, during, and after the revolt. Mapping the region's multilayered human geography, Holden draws a fuller picture of the inhabitants, revealing not only their interactions with physical locations but also their social relationships in space and time. In Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community (U Illinois Press, 2021), Holden recasts the Southampton Rebellion as one event that reveals the continuum of practices that sustained resistance and survival among local Black people. Holden follows how African Americans continued those practices through the rebellion's immediate aftermath and into the future, showing how Black women and communities raised children who remembered and heeded the lessons absorbed during the calamitous events of 1831. A bold challenge to traditional accounts, Surviving Southampton sheds new light on the places and people surrounding Americas most famous rebellion against slavery. Purchase a copy of Surviving Southampton through the University of Illinois Press until September 30, 2021, using the Promo Code: ASALH21 in recognition of the 2021 Association for the Study of African American Life and History Annual Meeting and Conference! 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

In Domestic Contradictions: Race and Gendered Citizenship from Reconstruction to Welfare Reform (Duke UP, 2021), Priya Kandaswamy analyzes how race, class, gender, and sexuality shaped welfare practices in the United States alongside the conflicting demands that this system imposed upon Black women. She turns to an often-neglected moment in welfare history, the advent of the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction, and highlights important parallels with welfare reform in the late twentieth century. Kandaswamy demonstrates continuity between the figures of the "vagrant" and "welfare queen" in these time periods, both of which targeted Black women. These constructs upheld gendered constructions of domesticity while defining Black women's citizenship in terms of an obligation to work rather than a right to public resources. Pushing back against this history, Kandaswamy illustrates how the Black female body came to represent a series of interconnected dangers-to white citizenship, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist ideals of productivity -and how a desire to curb these threats drove state policy. In challenging dominant feminist historiographies, Kandaswamy builds on Black feminist and queer of color critiques to situate the gendered afterlife of slavery as central to the historical development of the welfare 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

Oklahoma's Black towns aren't just places of the past - they maintain an enduring allure, and look toward the future, argues Karla Slocum in her new book, Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West (UNC Press, 2019). Dr. Slocum, the Thomas Willis Lambeth Chair of Public Policy and a professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, traveled extensively through Oklahoma and conducted many interviews in researching this book, and the result is a vibrant and at times personal look at the past, present, and future of Black places in Oklahoma and the West. From rodeos to heritage tourism, these towns offer a fascinating case study in the relationship between storytelling, Blackness, and Americanness in the 21st century West, and affirm the place of Black communities in the region's history.Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Minna Salami's book Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2021) is a collection of thought provoking essays that explore questions central to how we see ourselves, our history, and our world.-What does it mean to be oppressed?-What does it mean to be liberated?-Why do women choose to follow authority even when they can be autonomous?-What is the cost of compromising one’s true self?-What narratives particularly subjugate women and people of African heritage?-What kind of narrative can heal and empower?As she considers these questions, Salami offers fresh insights on key cultural issues that impact women’s lives, including power, beauty, and knowledge. She also examines larger subjects, such as Afrofuturism, radical Black feminism, and gender politics, all with a historical outlook that is also future oriented. Combining a storyteller’s narrative playfulness and a social critic’s intellectual rigor, Salami draws upon a range of traditions and ideologies, feminist theory, popular culture—including insights from Ms. Lauryn Hill, Beyoncé, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and others—science, philosophy, African myths and origin stories, and her own bold personal narrative to establish a language for change and self-liberation.Sensuous Knowledge inspires reflection and challenge us to formulate or own views. Using ancestral knowledge to steer us toward freedom, Salami reveals the ways that women have protested over the years in large and small ways—models that inspire and empower us to define our own sense of womanhood today.In this riveting meditation, Salami ask women to break free of the prison made by ingrained male centric biases, and build a house themselves—a home that can nurture us all.Learn more about author Minna Salami at the MsAfropolitan blog. Lee M. Pierce (she/they) is an Assistant Professor at SUNY Geneseo specializing in rhetoric, race, and U.S. political culture. They also host the Media & Communications and Language channels for New Books Network and their own podcast titled RhetoricLee Speaking. 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 July 1947, not even three months after Jackie Robinson debuted on the Brooklyn Dodgers, snapping the color line that had segregated Major League Baseball, Larry Doby would follow in his footsteps on the Cleveland Indians. Though Doby, as the second Black player in the majors, would struggle during his first summer in Cleveland, his subsequent turnaround in 1948 from benchwarmer to superstar sparked one of the wildest and most meaningful seasons in baseball history.In intimate, absorbing detail, Luke Epplin's Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball (Flatiron Books, 2021) traces the story of the integration of the Cleveland Indians and their quest for a World Series title through four key participants: Bill Veeck, an eccentric and visionary owner adept at exploding fireworks on and off the field; Larry Doby, a soft-spoken, hard-hitting pioneer whose major-league breakthrough shattered stereotypes that so much of white America held about Black ballplayers; Bob Feller, a pitching prodigy from the Iowa cornfields who set the template for the athlete as businessman; and Satchel Paige, a legendary pitcher from the Negro Leagues whose belated entry into the majors whipped baseball fans across the country into a frenzy.Together, as the backbone of a team that epitomized the postwar American spirit in all its hopes and contradictions, these four men would captivate the nation by storming to the World Series - all the while rewriting the rules of what was possible in sports.Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in September 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Before Farah Jasmine Griffin’s father died, he wrote to her a note ending with a line “read until you understand.” He would die years later when she was nine, and that line has guided her literary curiosity. In Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature (Norton, 2021), Griffin shares the indispensable lessons of Black wisdom that rooted her from the searing rhetoric of David Walker and Frederick Douglass to compelling Black prose of Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, to the Black soul sounds of Gladys Knight and the Pips and Marvin Gaye. Weaving memoir, history, and culture, Griffin explores the themes such as mercy, love, death, beauty, and grace to help readers wrestle with the continuing struggle for freedom and American democracy.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