New Books in African American Studies

For a book to exist, there must be a lot more than a writer. Of course, the writer is the essential component. But what about all the other hard-working professionals who shepherd the text from manuscript to beautiful finished product? There are a bunch of them, and today we talk to one:  Dawn Durante, Senior Acquisitions Editor at the University of Illinois Press for books in African American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, Religion, and Anthropology. She tell us how it all works, from soup to nuts. Naturally, we at the New Books Network are very grateful for Dawn's work, and that of all her colleagues at UPs and trade presses, for without their efforts, there would be no New Books Network and you wouldn't get to listen to all these great authors talk about their great books. On with the show...Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick focusing on Black runaway women during the broad eighteenth 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

Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children’s publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter.Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas's book The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (NYU Press, 2019) is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC’s Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world.In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, “we dark girls deserve more, because we are more.” 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 Herbin-Triant is the author of Threatening Property: Race, Class, and Campaigns to Legislate Jim Crow Neighborhoods, published by Columbia University Press in 2019. Threatening Property examines the campaigns for residential segregation in early-20th century North Carolina. Looking at the intersections of both race and class, Herbin-Triant explores how white supremacy was divided along class, pitting elite whites against their poorer counterparts, as Jim Crow America increasingly held back Black Americans.Elizabeth Herbin-Triant is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She studies U.S. history, with a particular interest in African-American history, urban history, and histories of racial capitalism, slavery, and segregation.Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), by Ashanté M. Reese, examines the ways in which residents of the Deanwood neighborhood navigate the surrounding area to acquire food. Reese examines the historical processes that gave rise to the decrease of supermarkets, general stores, and other locations to purchase food thus constraining options. Residents articulated a commitment to self-reliance in meeting their culinary needs through their strategies for accessing food markets, nostalgia for and memories of the past, practice of connection and community, and belief in personal responsibility. Reese emphasizes the role of structural racism and inequality in generating the conditions of decreased food options while holding in tension residents’ insistence upon relying on their own actions to forge futures of abundance and community. Reese examines a corner store and a community garden as local sites for residents to work towards and articulate responses to their current situation. The term food desert tends to emphasize lack and emptiness, occlude agency, and sideline the historical processes that conditioned such limited food options. Black Food Geographies offers a powerful critique of the food desert by emphasizing the agency of African American people, the forces of racism and inequality, and by showing that these spaces are rich with the lives, hopes, and outlooks of the people who live there.Ashanté M. Reese is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on race, blackness, and visual representation in Brazil. She is on Twitter @ReighanGillam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Claudia Leal’s Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia (University of Arizona Press, 2018), narrates the unknown history of the transition from slavery to freedom in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia. Not only does Leal centers a region long neglected in histories of Colombia—and more generally in histories of slavery and manumission in Latin America—but she also asks us to use this case to understand the centrality of the environment in any historical account. According to Leal, the particularities of the environment of the Pacific lowlands in Colombia explains the formation of a black peasantry that was able to attain high levels of freedom and autonomy. Here we hear about the importance of rainforests, of minerals, of vegetable ivory, and we learn that through extractive practices black Colombians were able to carve and maintain degrees of freedom perhaps only comparable to the maroons of Surinam.This history, however, does not start in 1851 with the total abolition of slavery in Colombia, for Leal goes back to the colonial period in order to explain why a political economy of extraction was established in the first place. In fact, Leal tracks how blacks appropriated an environment that originally didn’t belong to them, how they negotiated with whites their access to resources and power, and how even in moments in which mining companies challenged their autonomy, they nonetheless found ways to maintain their hard-won freedom. Paradoxically, even if blacks of the Pacific lowlands fulfilled one of the main values of the republican order of the Colombian national state (freedom!), they were not recognized as contributors to the national project. Quite to the contrary, white elites equated them to an environment deemed unhealthy, and allegedly suitable only for savages. The pacific lowlands, and its recently created cities of Tumaco and Quibdó, were thus built as racialized landscapes; geographies plagued by ideologies of racism and biological determinism. Whites’ project to control and “civilize” the territory was ultimately a failed one, for black culture crept into cities and forests. Eventually, with the advent of the 1991 Colombian constitution, black ethnicity became a part and asset of the nation as Colombia entered the era of multiculturalism.Lisette Varon-Carvajal is a graduate student in history at Rutger’s 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

In the summer of 1928, William Alexander Scott began a small four-page weekly with the help of his brother Cornelius. By 1932 the Atlanta World had become a daily paper and the basis of Scott's vision for a massive Southern newspaper chain - the Southern Newspaper Syndicate, later renamed as the Scott Newspaper Syndicate. At its peak, more than 240 papers were associated with the Syndicate, making it one of the largest black press institutions in the country. However, the extent of the Syndicate's reach and its centrality to Black southern life has remained largely overlooked.In The Grapevine of the Black South: The Scott Newspaper Syndicate in the Generation before the Civil Rights Movement (University of Georgia Press, 2018), Thomas Aiello offers the first critical history of this influential newspaper syndicate, tracing its roots in the early 1930s through to its eventual dissolution in the 1950s. During this critically important period preceding the the "civil rights era" ushered in by the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on school segregation, the Syndicate helped to shape the collective identity and community networks of the Black South. While providing local editors with a large degree of control and the flexibility to emphasize regional concerns and interests, the Syndicate gave its readers a similar set of tools from which to craft their understanding of Black life and culture, a means to document racial injustice and oppression, and an unparalleled grapevine of information and news coverage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Scott Heerman is the author of The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2018. The Alchemy of Slavery examines how slavery and emancipation developed in the Illinois Country from the 18th Century through the 19th Century. Drawing on the regions mixed legacies of Native American, French, Spain, English, and eventually American rule, Heerman shows how the deep history of Illinois Country influenced slavery, and set it apart from slavery on the eastern seaboard of North America.Scott Heerman is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Miami. He studies 18th and 19th century U.S. history, particularly slavery and emancipation.Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland. 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 this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with Jennifer Jensen Wallach about the her book Getting What We Need Ourselves: How Food has Shaped African American Life (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). The book covers a wide chronology and geography from the continent of Africa pre-Transatlantic slave trade to lunch counter sit-ins of the Civil Rights Era to haute cuisine of Harlem in the present. Wallach’s wide-ranging history demonstrates that there is not one story of African American foodways. Instead, as Wallach writes, “The history of black food traditions can be most accurately conceptualized as a web of ongoing conversations, debates, and reinventions rather than as a single, uninterrupted line leading directly back to the African continent.” In each chapter, Wallach contextualizes and complicates key moments of the story of African American foodways to emphasize the multiplicity of meanings that food may have and the “cultural compromises” that people of color have had to make throughout American history. Wallach calls for historians and students of food culture to accept a difficult lesson: “there are often multiple plausible theories for how certain recipes and techniques were created,” and so we must be content to leave these multiple origin stories to stand side by side, resisting the temptation to simplify.Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her new book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and 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

In an incisive analysis of over two dozen clauses as well as several 'unwritten' rules and practices, The Constitutional Origins of the American Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2019) shows how the Constitution aggravated the sectional conflict over slavery to the point of civil war. Going beyond the fugitive slave clause, the three-fifths clause, and the international slave trade clause, Michael F. Conlin, Professor of History at Eastern Washington University, demonstrates that many more constitutional provisions and practices played a crucial role in the bloody conflict that claimed the lives of over 750,000 Americans. He also reveals that ordinary Americans in the mid-nineteenth century had a surprisingly sophisticated knowledge of the provisions and the methods of interpretation of the Constitution. Lastly, Conlin reminds us that many of the debates that divide Americans today were present in the 1850s: minority rights vs. majority rule, original intent vs. a living Constitution, state's rights vs. federal supremacy, judicial activism vs. legislative prerogative, secession vs. union, and counter-majoritarianism vs. democracy.Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire 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

Mahalia Jackson, the great mid-twentieth century gospel singer, thought of herself as an embodiment of the history of African Americans in the United States. She understood that her family’s background, as they moved from enslavement in Louisiana to farming in the same rural area to New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth century and then her own move to Chicago with the Great Migration was emblematic of the experiences of generations of black people. In Mahalia Jackson & the Black Gospel Field (Oxford University Press, 2018), Mark Burford describes Jackson as both an exemplary figure and an exceptional figure. Ending the book in 1955 just as Jackson reached the height of her career after she released her first recording with a major label and was hosting her own television show, Burford uses the first part of Jackson’s career to tell the story of the development of gospel music set against her experiences, the networks within which she moved, and the overlapping contexts of black culture and American political history. Adapting Pierre Bordieu’s ideas, he argues that to study gospel music we must understand the cultural field created by all the players in the industry—the performers, composers, business owners, churches, audiences, and media company executives that shaped gospel music. For a time, Mahalia Jackson was in the center of this network, and Burford uses her connections to explore this field. She grew up with the industry and eventually became one of the best-known gospel singers in the United States by navigating the gospel music industry with her potent combination of a great voice, charisma, and business acumen. Besides telling the compelling story of gospel music and Mahalia Jackson, Burford analyzes Jackson’s voice and her early Apollo recordings using innovative techniques grounded in the listener’s experience. Much more than a biography of Mahalia Jackson, this book is a reimagining of the study of gospel music.Mark Burford is Associate Professor of Music at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he is also chair of the American Studies program. His research and teaching focuses on twentieth-century popular music in the United States, with particular focus on African American music, and late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Austro-German concert music. His scholarship has appeared in numerous journals and edited collections. His article “Sam Cooke as Pop Album Artist—A Reinvention in Three Songs” received the Society for American Music’s 2012 Irving Lowens Award for the outstanding article on American music.  He is the author of Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field, released last fall by Oxford University Press, and editor of the forthcoming Mahalia Jackson Reader, an anthology of writings on Jackson that he is editing for Oxford’s Readers on American Musicians series.Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies