New Books in African American Studies

Hip Hop turned 50 this year. It has been five decades since DJ Cool Herc played a party in the Bronx that gave birth to a global cultural revolution. To honor this anniversary and teach this history, the New York City Department of Education has published The Graphic History of Hip Hop. Dr. Walter Greason wrote the text, which is beautifully illustrated by Afrofuturist graphic artist Tim Fielder. As the first in a series of collaborative graphic novels, The Graphic History of Hip Hop brings together a powerful blend of music, art, and history drawn from over sixty years of research by hundreds of professional historians and other scholars from the humanities and social sciences. The book is designed to engage students as they will see, hear and experience how the world of Hip Hop evolved in response to the rapidly changing political and environments from the 1970s through the 2000s. This work is an essential resource to enhance modern urban and world history curriculums and create a unique and engaging classroom settings for students. This shorter version is free to download as PDF and a longer hardcover version will be published soon.Also see the project website, here. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, 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

In There's a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life (Duke UP, 2022), Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls “Black gay habits of mind.” In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory, historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. Throughout, Allen renarrates Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and fantasies of Black people throughout the world.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 brittneymichelleedmonds.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 Unseen Flesh: Gynecology and Black Queer Worth-Making in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2023) Nessette Falu explores how Black lesbians in Brazil define and sustain their well-being and self-worth against persistent racial, sexual, class, and gender-based prejudice. Focusing on the trauma caused by interactions with gynecologists, Falu draws on in-depth ethnographic work among the Black lesbian community to reveal their profoundly negative affective experiences within Brazil’s deeply biased medical system. In the face of such entrenched, intersectional intimate violence, Falu’s informants actively pursue well-being in ways that channel their struggle for self-worth toward broader goals of social change, self care, and communal action. Demonstrating how the racist and heteronormative underpinnings of gynecology erase Black lesbian subjecthood through mental, emotional, and physical traumas, Falu explores the daily resistance and abolitionist practices of worth-making that claim and sustain Black queer identity and living. Falu rethinks the medicalization of race, sex, and gender in Brazil and elsewhere while offering a new perspective on Black queer life through well-being grounded in relationships, socioeconomic struggles, the erotic, and freedom strivings.Nessette Falu is Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.Reighan Gillam is an 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

Women’s college basketball is big business—top teams bring in millions of dollars in revenue for their schools. Women’s NCAA games are broadcast regularly on sports networks, and many of the top players and coaches are household names. Yet these athletes face immense pressure to be more than successful at their sport. They must also conform to expectations about gender, sexuality, and race—expectations that are often in direct contrast to success in the game. They are not supposed to have muscles that are too big, they are not supposed to be too tough, they are not supposed to be too masculine or “look like men,” and they are not supposed to be queer.A former college athlete herself, Michelle J. Manno spent a full season with a highly competitive NCAA Division I women’s basketball program as one of the team’s managers. In vivid detail, she takes us on the court, on the team bus, into the locker room, and to championship games to show the intense dedication that these women give to the game. She found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that these extremely talented women were strictly policed around the presentation of their gender and sexuality, especially the athletes who were Black. They were routinely monitored, banned from engaging in certain activities, and often punished for behavior that put their queerness, Blackness, and masculinity on display. Convincingly conforming to conventional expectations of gender and sexuality—from the clothes they wore to the people they dated—was yet another challenge at which they needed to excel. Importantly, Manno also highlights several well-known contemporary professional athletes—Brittney Griner, Serena Williams, Gabby Douglas, and Caster Semenya, among others—to show that fame and performing at the highest levels in sport does not protect women athletes from having to navigate the conflicting and often contradictory expectations of identity.A riveting portrait of an elite basketball program, Denied: Women, Sports, and the Contradictions of Identity (NYU Press, 2023) will forever change our understanding of women athletes and the sports they play.Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Despite their literary and cultural significance, Afro-Latino memoirs have been marginalized in both Latino and African American studies. Trent Masiki remedies this problem by bringing critical attention to the understudied African American influences in Afro-Latino memoirs published after the advent of the Black Arts movement. In The Afro-Latino Memoir: Race, Ethnicity and Literary Interculturalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) Masiki argues that these memoirs expand on the meaning of racial identity for both Latinos and African Americans. Using interpretive strategies and historical methods from literary and cultural studies, Masiki shows how Afro-Latino memoir writers often turn to the African American experience as a model for articulating their Afro-Latinidad. African American literary production, expressive culture, political ideology, and religiosity shaped Afro-Latino subjectivity more profoundly than typically imagined between the post-war and post-soul eras. Masiki recovers this neglected history by exploring how and why Black nationalism shaped Afro-Latinidad in the United States.Trent Masiki is assistant professor of Africana Studies at Worchester Polytechnic Institute. Reighan Gillam is an 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

Black vaudevillians and entertainers joked that T.O.B.A. stood for "tough on black artists." But the Theater Owner's Booking Association (T.O.B.A.) played a foundational role in the African American entertainment industry. T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owners’ Booking Association in Jazz-Age America by Michelle R. Scott (University of Illinois Press, 2023) examines this circuit of vaudeville theaters active between 1920 and 1930 which booked blues singers, comedians, dancers, and many other kinds of entertainers into Black-serving theaters throughout the United States. T.O.B.A. launched and nurtured the careers of many Black performers including Cab Calloway, Sammy Davis Jr., Count Basie, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Hattie McDaniel. Scott traces T.O.B.A.’s antecedents in the first decades of the twentieth century and documents the ten years of its existence. She contextualizes T.O.B.A. within the politics of segregated America, the Black communities served by its theaters, and its effect on the lives and careers of thousands of Black performers.Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth 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

Examining identity and nationalism in the Reconstruction-era South, Jack Noe’s Contesting Commemoration: The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-Era South (Louisiana State University Press, 2021) investigates debates concerning the One Hundredth Anniversary of American Independence. This commemoration, which came only seven years after the conclusion of the Civil War, provided a crucible for whites, Blacks, northerners, and southerners to reflect on their identity as Americans and their memories of the recent conflict.Using a rich archive, including a variety of newspapers, Contesting Commemoration illustrates how the Centennial became embroiled in the fierce political and racial debates of Reconstruction. African Americans celebrated this opportunity to assert their Americanness, while White Southerners approached the celebration with a profound pragmatism and flexibility, only partially re-embracing American nationalism as they attempted to maintain Southern distinctiveness.Contesting Commemoration follows events in Philadelphia, where ten million visitors came to celebrate the Centennial, and in communities across the South. It is a searching interrogation of the powers of American memory, the bitter debates of Reconstruction, and continued contestations over Southern distinctiveness.Jack Noe is a Teaching Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London and also lectures at Durham University. A native of Birmingham, Alabama, but a long-time resident of the United Kingdom, he earned his PhD from the University of Leeds in 2018.Thomas Cryer is a PhD Student in American History at University College London, where he studies race, nationhood, and memory through the life, scholarship, and activism of the historian John Hope Franklin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Today we are joined by the sports journalist David Steele, who has written for the Sporting News, AOL, the Baltimore Sun and the San Francisco Chronicle, and won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, the Association of Black Media Workers, the Associated Press Sports Editors, and the Society of Professional Journalists. He is also the author of It Was Always a Choice: Picking up the Baton of Athlete Activism (Temple UP, 2022). In our conversation, we discuss the beginnings of black athlete activism in the 20th century, the different approaches pursued by black and white athletes across the century, and whether or not athletes should use their privileged position to promote positive change in the world.In It Was Always A Choice, Steele explores two interconnected histories: the longer durée story of black athlete activism in the 20th and 21st centuries, beginning with Jack Johnson in the 1910s, and the history of the Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protests and how contemporary athlete activists have engaged with the broader Black Lives Matter movement.The book moves both chronologically and thematically, alternating between past and contemporary activist moments to tie them together. His chapters centre on specific questions: “Your Presence Is an Act of Protest: Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, and Jackie Robinson” looks at American sports idols and illustrates the significant challenges that they faced to competition but also the limits of their protest. In their case, their presence was often the only kind of protest available to them. In some instances – for example Jesse Owen’s case – they later stood up against the more radical protests of the 1960s.Steele was influenced by Kaepernick’s protest and the Black Lives Matter movement to write the book, and that alone would have been an interesting story, but the real strength of the work is how he finds the echoes of these movements in earlier radical efforts by male and female black athletes to change American society. He makes references in many chapters to Tommie Smith and John Carlos, whose work with the Olympic Project for Human Rights and raised fist protest acted as a spiritual predecessor to Colin Kaepernick’s protest. He also notes early flag protests such as Eroseanna “Rose” Robinson’s refusal to stand for the US National Anthem during the 1959 Pan America Games.His work also points out the ways that athlete activists have succeeded and failed to change the broader culture. Although black athletes have won significantly inside of sporting organizations, Colin Kaepernick’s protests have highlighted how far American society still must go. The WNBA might be the most progressive league: the Atlanta Dream’s players forced out an owner that they opposed and then successfully campaigned against her running for the US Senate.It Was Always A Choice raises interesting questions about the nature of athlete protests. Steele’s chapter “Peter Norman, Chris Long, and Gregg Popovich: White Allies” shows the ways that white athletes can support their black teammates and players; some members of the public and sporting leagues seem more receptive to the Black Lives Matter message from white athletes. Steele offers a strong but nuanced criticism of Micheal Jordan, OJ Simpson and Tiger Woods who “dropped the baton” and privileged their own financial success over their politics. White House visits both offer opportunities for the government to promote the popularity of the president but also a chance for athletes to protest against them.Steele’s work demands that athletes (and readers) make a choice. It is a must read for people interested in the history of athlete protest and as a whole or in individual chapters it would be useful for teaching the history of sport.Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Genealogy, in Charles Darwin’s terms, is the study of “descent with modification.” Taken as an analogy for the study of history, genealogy can guard against the potential dangers of claiming modernity. Against the effort to erase the past, genealogy asserts that our ancestry will always be with us. Against the effort to master the past, genealogy reminds us that our descendants have the freedom to create new futures. Sociologist Alondra Nelson tells the story of how African Americans have used DNA-informed genealogy to recover African identity despite slavery’s erasure of family history. Genealogical thinking can help us shape a disposition to the past that recognizes the legacy of injustice while also fostering human flourishing in the future.Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Ryan McDermott, Associate Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh; Senior Research Fellow, Beatrice InstituteFeatured Scholars: Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced StudyCaro Pirri, Assistant Professor of English, University of PittsburghMichael Puett, Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, Harvard UniversitySpecial thanks to: Eduard Fiedler, Christopher Firestone, Thomas A. Lewis, Thomalind Martin Polite, Sara TrevisanFor transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, click 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

Who dresses the astronauts for flight? Why are the suits orange? And how are they cared for? Sharon Caples McDougle joins us to talk about her work as a modern day hidden figure, a space suit technician responsible for processing the orange launch and re-entry pressure suit assemblies worn by all NASA space shuttle astronauts. She explains how she became one of only two women CEE Suit Technicians, led the first and only all-female suit tech crew, and how she made history when she suited up Dr. Mae Jemison.Our guest is: Sharon Caples McDougle, who began her aerospace career in the Air Force where she served proudly as an Aerospace Physiology Specialist at Beale Air Force Base, in California. She was the first female and first Black Crew Chief in CEE. As Crew Chief she had the honor of leading the first and only all-female suit tech crew. McDougle went on to become the first, and only female, and Black person, to become the Manager of the CEE Processing Department. She managed the team of more than twenty-five employees responsible for the equipment worn by the astronaut crews aboard the space shuttle. This team suited up the astronauts, tested the equipment, strapped the astronauts into the space shuttle before launch, and recovered the crew upon landing. McDougle is a United States Air Force (USAF) veteran, and the author of Suit Up for Launch with Shay.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the host and producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.Listeners may also be interested in: Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, by Margot Lee Shetterly The 100 Year Starship, by Mae Jemison and Dana Meachen Rau Suit Up for Launch with Shay, by Sharon Caples McDougle NASA.gov Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 175+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived 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