New Books in African American Studies

The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2022) unearths a buried African archive within widely-read Latinx writers of the last fifty years. It challenges dominant narratives in World Literature and transatlantic studies that ignore Africa's impact in broader Latin American culture. Sarah Quesada argues that these canonical works evoke textual memorials of African memory. She shows how the African Atlantic haunts modern Latinx and Caribbean writing, and examines the disavowal or distortion of the African subject in the constructions of national, racial, sexual, and spiritual Latinx identity. Quesada shows how themes such as the 19th century 'scramble for Africa,' the decolonizing wars, Black internationalism, and the neoliberal turn are embedded in key narratives. Drawing from multilingual archives about West and Central Africa, she examines how the legacies of colonial French, Iberian, British and U.S. Imperialisms have impacted on the relationships between African and Latinx identities. This is the first book-length project to address the African colonial and imperial inheritance of Latinx literature. -From the Cambridge University Press website.Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Communication Department at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On Twitter. 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 Texas Revolution has long been cast as an epic episode in the origins of the American West. As the story goes, larger-than-life figures like Sam Houston, David Crockett, and William Barret Travis fought to free Texas from repressive Mexican rule. In Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas (Basic Books, 2022), historian Sam Haynes reveals the reality beneath this powerful creation myth. He shows how the lives of ordinary people—white Americans, Mexicans, Native Americans, and those of African descent—were upended by extraordinary events over twenty-five years. After the battle of San Jacinto, racial lines snapped taut as a new nation, the Lone Star republic, sought to expel Indians, marginalize Mexicans, and tighten its grip on the enslaved.This is a revelatory and essential new narrative of a major turning point in the history of North America.Andrew R. Graybill is professor of history and director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is the author of The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (Liveright, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Engaging the past, the present, and the future, The Workings of Diaspora: Jamaican Maroons and the Claims to Sovereignty (Lexington Books, 2021) shows how the lived experience of Jamaican Maroons is linked to the African Diaspora. In so doing, this interdisciplinary undertaking interrogates the definition of Diaspora but mainly emphasizes the term’s use. Mario Nisbett demonstrates that an examination of Jamaican Maroon communities, particularly their socio-political development, can further highlight the significance of the African Diaspora as an analytical tool. He shows how Jamaican Maroons inform resistance to abjection, a denial of full humanity, through claiming their African origin and developing solidarity and consciousness in order to affirm black humanity. This book establishes that present-day Jamaican Maroons remain relevant and engage the African Diaspora to improve black standing and bolster assertions of sovereignty.Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at okaverettephillips@ucdavis.edu. 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 Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (U California Press, 2021), Ross Cole revisits the remarkable upswell of interest in folk songs in fin de siècle Britain and America. While the work of folk collectors such as John Lomax, Cecil Sharp and Hubert Parry seems primarily about the preservation of premodern musical cultures, Cole suggests that the anxieties about the disappearance of these traditions were inseparable from – and constitutive of – a critique of industrial modernity. That is, the preoccupation with folk culture in this period was as much about discontent with the present and imagining new visions for the future as it was motivated by a socio-historical interest in the vernacular musics of the past. Cole shows how the desire for ‘folk culture’ actually occluded the messy, hybrid reality of vernacular music making, and the lives of those who made it, as a result.Cole makes the compelling case that what he calls the ‘folkloric imagination’ is shot through with a twinned politics of nostalgia and utopia, with both radical and reactionary elements lying just beneath the surface. The Folk traces how the invention of folk song by the collectors of the late 19th and early 20th Century was tightly bound up with contentious questions of race, nation, and empire that would come to an ugly head with the advent of fascism. By pursuing these threads into the present day, Cole shows how the same tensions continue to permeate the use and abuse of ‘the folk’ in contemporary political culture.Dr Ross Cole is Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Leeds.Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879-1961) is just one of the many African American intellectuals whose work has long been excluded from the literary canon. In her time, Burroughs was a celebrated African American (or, in her era, a race woman) female activist, educator, and intellectual. Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Documentary Portrait of an Early Civil Rights Pioneer, 1900-1959 (U Notre Dame Press, 2019) represents a landmark contribution to the African American intellectual historical project by allowing readers to experience Burroughs in her own words. This anthology of her works written between 1900 and 1959 encapsulates Burroughs's work as a theologian, philosopher, activist, educator, intellectual, and evangelist, as well as the myriad of ways that her career resisted definition. Burroughs rubbed elbows with such African American historical icons as W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Mary McLeod Bethune, and these interactions represent much of the existing, easily available literature on Burroughs's life. This book aims to spark a conversation surrounding Burroughs's life and work by making available her own tracts on God, sin, the intersections of church and society, black womanhood, education, and social justice. Moreover, the volume is an important piece of the growing movement toward excavating African American intellectual and philosophical thought and reformulating the literary canon to bring a diverse array of voices to the table. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

California was born "under the shadow of slavery," writes Lynn Hudson, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In West of Jim Crow: The Fight Against California's Color Line (U of Illinois Press, 2020), Hudson argues that despite its reputation as a land of opportunity and freedom, California's deeply racist past extended well into the twentieth century. As one Black Californian put it, the only difference between California and Mississippi was the way they were spelled. Yet, African Americans in the state nonetheless resisted Jim Crow in the West at every turn, from founding all Black communities to struggling to integrate public facilities such as swimming pools. West of Jim Crow is a fascinating look at how the myths about where Jim Crow segregation began and ended hide important truth's about segregation and discrimination's extent.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

In Against Marginalization: Convergences in Black and Latinx Literatures (Ohio State University Press, 2022), Jose O. Fernandez examines thematic, aesthetic, historical, and cultural commonalities among post-1960s Black and Latinx writers, showing how such similarities have propelled their fight against social, cultural, and literary marginalization by engaging, adopting, and subverting elements from the larger American literary tradition. Drawing on the work of scholars in both literary traditions--including those who engage with the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s--Fernandez finds intriguing points of convergence. His cross-cultural and comparative analysis puts Black and Latinx authors and literary works into the same frame as he considers the plays of Amiri Baraka and Luis Valdez, the fiction of James Baldwin and Rudolfo Anaya, the essays of Ralph Ellison and Richard Rodriguez, novels by Alice Walker and Helena María Viramontes, and the short fiction of Edward P. Jones and Junot Díaz. Against Marginalization thus uncovers points of correspondence and convergence among Black and Latinx literary and cultural legacies, interrogating how both traditions have moved from a position of literary marginalization to a moment of visibility and critical recognition. Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Communication Department at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Lynching is often viewed as a narrow form of violence: either the spontaneous act of an angry mob against accused individuals, or a demonstration of white supremacy against an entire population considered subhuman. However, in this new treatise, historian Guy Lancaster exposes the multiple forms of violence hidden beneath the singular label of lynching.Lancaster, who has written extensively on racial violence, details several lynchings of Blacks by white posses in post-Reconstruction Arkansas. Drawing from the fields of history, philosophy, cognitive science, sociology, and literary theory, and quoting chilling contemporary accounts, he argues that the act of lynching encompasses five distinct but overlapping types of violence. This new framework reveals lynching to be even more of an atrocity than previously understood: that mobs did not disregard the humanity of their victims but rather reveled in it; that they were not simply enacting personal vengeance but manifesting an elite project of subjugation. Lancaster thus clarifies and connects the motives and goals of seemingly isolated lynch mobs, embedding the practice in the ongoing enforcement of white supremacy. By interrogating the substance of lynching, American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching (U Arkansas Press, 2021) shines new light on both past anti-Black violence and the historical underpinnings of our present moment.Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2021) and co-editor of Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020 (Texas A&M University Press, scheduled Spring 2023). Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Modern imagination of the Puritans typically casts them in a repressive, conservative light. But that wasn't always the case. Abolitionist activists in the nineteenth century, especially in New England, understood their Puritan heritage as one with radical political and spiritual responsibilities. Kenyon Gradert's new book, Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination (U Chicago Press, 2020) tells the surprising story of unexpected connections between the English Civil Wars and the literary drumbeats for a holy war in late antebellum America. Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Atlanta, the capital of the American South, is at the red-hot core of expansion, inequality, and political relevance. In recent decades, central Atlanta has experienced heavily racialized gentrification while the suburbs have become more diverse, with many affluent suburbs trying to push back against this diversity. Exploring the city’s past and future, Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First-Century Atlanta (U California Press, 2022) tracks these racial and economic shifts and the politics and policies that produced them.Dan Immergluck documents the trends that are inverting Atlanta’s late-twentieth-century “poor-in-the-core” urban model. New emphasis on capital-driven growth has excluded low-income people and families of color from the city’s center, pushing them to distant suburbs far from mass transit, large public hospitals, and other essential services. Revealing critical lessons for leaders, activists, and residents in cities around the world, Immergluck considers how planners and policymakers can reverse recent trends to create more socially equitable cities.Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on his next book where he conducted research on an annual canoeing and kayaking event that takes place on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies