New Books in African American Studies

In August 1831, a group of enslaved people in Southampton County, Virginia, rose up to fight for their freedom. They attacked the plantations on which their enslavers lived and attempted to march on the county seat of Jerusalem, from which they planned to launch an uprising across the South. After the rebellion was suppressed, well over a hundred people, Black and white, lay dead or were hanged. As news of the revolt spread, it became apparent that it was the idea of a single man: Nat Turner. An enslaved preacher, he was as enigmatic as he was brilliant. He was also something more—a prophet, one who claimed to have received visions from the Spirit urging him to act.Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History (FSG, 2024) is the fullest recounting to date of Turner’s uprising, and the first that refuses to tame or overlook his divine visions. Instead, it takes those visions seriously, tracing their emergence from the world of nineteenth-century Methodism, with its revivals, camp meetings, interracial churches, and Black preachers. The rebellion and its aftermath would hasten the end of this world, as Southern states further restricted the personal freedoms of the enslaved, even as the ongoing threat of revolt shaped the country’s politics. With this work of narrative history, the late historian Anthony E. Kaye and his collaborator Gregory P. Downs have given us a new understanding of one of the nineteenth century's most decisive events.Nat Turner, Black Prophet was named a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year and one of Literary Hub's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year.Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. 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 Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas (Dundurn Press, 2025) by Gloria Blizzard is a diasporic collection of essays on music, memory, and motion.In this powerful and deeply personal essay collection, Gloria Blizzard, in an international diasporic quest, moves up and down an urban subway line; between Canada and Trinidad; to and from a hospital emergency room; back and forth in time — and as a descendent of Africa living in the Americas, negotiates the complexities of culture, geography, race, and language. Through food, music, dance, and family history, Blizzard explores the art of belonging — to a family, a neighbourhood, a group, or a country. Using traditional narrative and the tools of poetry, Blizzard’s essays hover at the crossroads, in the spaces where art, science, and spirit collide. The intimate becomes universal, the questions are all relevant, and the answers of our times require a sleight of hand — the holding of simultaneous and overlapping worlds.About Gloria Blizzard:Gloria Blizzard is an award-winning writer and poet, and a Black Canadian woman of multiple heritages. Her work explores spaces where music, dance, spirit, and culture collide. She lives in Toronto.About Hollay Ghadery:Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.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

Derek W. Black, a Professor and author of "Dangerous Learning: The South's Long War on Black Literacy," delves into the historical battles for Black literacy in the South. He discusses how literacy became a powerful tool for freedom and resistance against oppression. The conversation highlights Denmark Vesey's rebellion and the tragic consequences imposed by white authorities. Black also connects past struggles to contemporary issues in education, emphasizing the ongoing fight for equality and the importance of open discourse in realizing true democratic principles.

In Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (U Chicago Press, 2024), Robin Bernstein tells the story of an Afro-Native teenager named William Freeman who was convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit and sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn’s prison. Incensed at being forced to work without pay, Freeman demanded wages. His challenge triggered violence: first against him, then by him. Freeman committed a murder that terrified and bewildered white America. And white America struck back—with aftereffects that reverberate into our lives today in the persistent myth of inherent Black criminality. William Freeman’s unforgettable story reveals how the North invented prison for profit half a century before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery “except as a punishment for crime”—and how Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and other African Americans invented strategies of resilience and resistance in a city dominated by a citadel of unfreedom.Through one Black man, his family, and his city, Bernstein tells an explosive, moving story about the entangled origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

As the first book-length study of auctions in early America, America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) follows this ubiquitous but largely overlooked institution to reveal how, across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, price became an accepted expression of value. From the earliest days of colonial conquest, auctions put Native land and human beings up for bidding alongside material goods, normalizing new economic practices that turned social relations into economic calculations and eventually became recognizable as nineteenth-century American capitalism.Starting in the eighteenth century, neighbors collectively turned speculative value into economic “facts” in the form of concrete prices for specific items, thereby establishing ideas about fair exchange in their communities. This consensus soon fractured: during the Revolutionary War, state governments auctioned loyalist property, weaponizing local group participation in pricing and distribution to punish political enemies. By the early nineteenth century, suspicion that auction outcomes were determined by manipulative auctioneers prompted politicians and satirists to police the boundaries of what counted as economic exchange and for whose benefit the economy operated. Women at auctions—as commodities, bidders, or beneficiaries—became a focal point for gendering economic value itself. By the 1830s, as abolitionists attacked the public sale of enslaved men, women, and children, auctions had enshrined a set of economic ideas—that any entity could be coded as property and priced through competition—that have become commonsense understandings all too seldom challenged.In contrast to histories focused on banks, currencies, or plantations, America Under the Hammer highlights an institution that integrated market, community, and household in ways that put gender, race, and social bonds at the center of ideas about economic worth. Women and men, enslaved and free, are active participants in this story rather than bystanders, and their labor, judgments, and bodies define the resulting contours of the American economy.Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and author of The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. 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 April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth carried out the first presidential assassination in United States history. The euphoria resulting from General Lee's surrender evaporated at the news of Abraham Lincoln's murder. The nation--excepting many white Southerners--found itself consumed with grief, and no group mourned Lincoln more deeply than people of color. African Americans did not speak with a monolithic voice on social or political issues, but even Lincoln's Black contemporaries who may not have approved of him while he was alive mourned his death, understanding its implications for their future.Beginning with the assassination itself and chronicling Lincoln's three-week-long national funeral, historian Leonne M. Hudson captures the profound sadness of Black Americans as they mourned the crafter of the Emancipation Proclamation and the man they thought of as their earthly Moses, father, friend, and benefactor. Hudson continues the narrative by detailing the postwar efforts of African Americans to gain citizenship and voting rights.Black Americans in Mourning: Reactions to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Southern Illinois UP, 2024) includes the tributes of prominent figures such as Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany, and Elizabeth Keckley, who raised their voices to honor Lincoln, as well as formal expressions of grief by institutions and organizations such as the United States Colored Troops. In a triumph of research, Hudson also features the voices of lesser-known Black people who mourned Lincoln across the country, showing that the outpouring of individual and collective grief helped set the stage for his enduring glorification. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Henry Christophe was born to an enslaved mother on the Caribbean island of Grenada, and fought to overthrow the British in North America before helping his fellow enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue—as Haiti was then called—to end slavery. He rose to power and became their king. In his time, he was popular and famous the world over. So how did he become an enigma?In The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe, Dr. Marlene L. Daut reclaims the life story of this controversial revolutionary and only king of Haiti, drawing from a trove of previously overlooked sources to paint a captivating history of his life and the awe-inspiring kingdom he built. Peeling back the layers of myth and misconception reveals a man driven by both noble ideals and profound flaws, as unforgettable as he is enigmatic. More than just a biography, The First and Last King of Haiti is an exploration of power, ambition, and the human spirit. From his pivotal role in the Haitian Revolution to his coronation as king and eventual demise, this book is testament to the enduring allure of those who dare to defy the odds and shape the course of nations. The First and Last King of Haiti is a story of not only geopolitical clashes on a grand scale but also of friendship and loyalty, treachery and betrayal, heroism and strife in an era of revolutionary upheaval. Slave, revolutionary, traitor, king, and suicide, Henry Christophe was, in his time, popular and famous the world over. Born in 1767 to an enslaved mother on the Caribbean island of Grenada, Christophe first fought to overthrow the British in North America, before helping his fellow enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then called, to gain their freedom from France. Yet in an incredible twist of fate, Christophe ended up fighting with Napoleon’s forces against the very enslaved men and women he had once fought alongside. Later, euniteng with those he had betrayed, he offered to lead them and made himself their king. But it all came to a sudden and tragic end when Christophe—after nine years of his rule as King Henry I—shot himself in the heart, some say with a silver bullet.Why did Christophe turn his back on Toussaint Louverture and the very revolution with which his name is so indelibly associated? How did it come to pass that Christophe found himself accused of participating in the plot to assassinate Haiti’s first ruler, Dessalines? What caused Haiti to eventually split into two countries, one ruled by Christophe in the north, who made himself king, the other led by President Pétion in the south?The First and Last King of Haiti is a riveting story of not only geopolitical clashes on a grand scale but also of friendship and loyalty, treachery and betrayal, heroism and strife in an era of revolutionary upheaval.Our guest is: Dr. Marlene Daut, who is Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University. Her books include Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism; Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865; Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution; and The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe. She is co-editor of the Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology, and her articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, Essence Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The Conversation, New Literary History, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Comparative Literature, among others. She is the co-creator and co-editor of H-Net Commons’ digital platform, H-Haiti.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and producer of the Academic Life podcast.Listeners might also enjoy: We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance Never Caught, with Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar Selling Anti-Slavery Running From Bondage Leading from the Margins Shoutin in the Fire Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Can older racists change their tune, or will they haunt us further once they're gone? Rich in mystery and life's lessons, God's Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life's End (Rutgers University Press, 2024) considers what matters in the end for older white adults and the younger Black nurses who care for them. An innovation in creative nonfiction, Casey Golomski's story of his years of immersive research at a nursing home in South Africa, thirty years after the end of apartheid, is narrated as a one-day, room-by-room tour. The story is told in breathtakingly intimate and witty conversations with the home's residents and nurses, including the untold story of Nelson Mandela's Robben Island prison nurse, and readers learn how ageism, sexism, and racism intersect and impact health care both in South Africa and in the United States, as well as create conditions in which people primed to be enemies find grace despite the odds.Casey Golomski is an associate professor of anthropology and women's and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire in Durham and lives in Medford, Massachusetts. He is the author of Funeral Culture: AIDS, Work, and Cultural Change in an African Kingdom.Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). 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 Finding God in All the Black Places: Sacred Imaginings in Black Popular Culture (Rutgers UP, 2024), Beretta E. Smith-Shomade contends that Black spirituality and Black church religiosity are the critical crux of Black popular culture. She argues that cultural, community, and social support live within the Black church and that spirit, art, and progress are deeply entwined and seal this connection. Including the work of artists such as Mary J. Blige, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Prince, Spike Lee, and Oprah Winfrey, the book examines contemporary Black television, film, music and digital culture to demonstrate the role, impact, and dominance of spirituality and religion in Black popular culture. Smith-Shomade believes that acknowledging and comprehending the foundations of Black spirituality and Black church religiosity within Black popular culture provide a way for viewers, listeners, and users not only to endure but also to revitalize.This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Born into the Civil Rights Movement, author Anthony Walton observed firsthand the opening of opportunity for racial reconciliation. He also saw systemic racism and the vicious backlash against Black progress embodied in the Southern Strategy, Tea Party, and MAGA. Over time, Walton came to believe that moving forward requires a "Third Reconstruction" to accomplish what remains: better health outcomes, secure voting rights, and sustained economic and educational opportunity. Only this approach, he believes, will accomplish what remains unfinished for true African American equality.Blending social history, bracing analysis, and autobiography, this dazzling collection includes essays published in The New York Times and The Atlantic--including "Willie Horton and Me" and the much-anthologized "Technology vs. African Americans"--as well as new work that probes Walton's earlier thinking. Throughout, the author delivers insights that wrestle with the hydra-headed, ever-changing realities of an American society in which the more things change, the more they stay the same.The End of Respectability: Notes of a Black American Reckoning with His Life and His Nation (David R. Godine, 2024) illuminates recent American history as experienced by a writer who has remained open to hope, unfazed by failures, and unflinchingly dedicated to the truth. This book will leave you changed. And just may incite you to be a part of the change we need. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies