New Books in African American Studies

In Black Dragon: Afro Asian Performance and the Martial Arts Imagination (Ohio State UP, 2022), Zachary F. Price illuminates martial arts as a site of knowledge exchange between Black, Asian, and Asian American people and cultures to offer new insights into the relationships among these historically marginalized groups. Drawing on case studies that include Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's appearance in Bruce Lee's film Game of Death, Ron van Clief and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Wu-Tang Clan, and Chinese American saxophonist Fred Ho, Price argues that the regular blending and borrowing between their distinct cultural heritages is healing rather than appropriative. His analyses of performance, power, and identity within this cultural fusion demonstrate how, historically, urban working-class Black men have developed community and practiced self-care through the contested adoption of Asian martial arts practice. By directing his analysis to this rich but heretofore understudied vein of American cultural exchange, Price not only broadens the scholarship around sites of empowerment via such exchanges but also offers a compelling example of nonessentialist emancipation for the twenty-first 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

Drawing inspiration from the life of Harriet Tubman, Cynthia Parker-Ohene's poetic narratives follow a historical arc of consciousness of Black folks: mislaid in potters' fields and catalogued with other misbegotten souls, now unsettled as the unknown Black denominator. Who loved them? Who turned them away? Who dismembered their souls? In death, they are the institutionalized marked Black bodies assigned to parcels, scourged beneath plastic sheets identified as a number among Harriets as black, marked bodies. These poems speak to how the warehousing of enslaved and somewhat free beings belies their humanity through past performances in reformatories, workhouses, and hospitals for the negro insane. To whom did their Black lives belong? How are Black grrls socialized within the family to be out in the world? What is the beingness of Black women? How have the Harriets--the descended daughters of Harriet Tubman--confronted issues of caste and multiple oppressions? The poems in Daughters of Harriet: Poems (UP of Colorado, 2022) give voice to the unspeakable, the unreachable, the multiple Black selves waiting to become. 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 Class Struggle and the Color Line: American Socialism and the Race Question, 1900-1930 (Haymarket Books, 2018), Paul Heideman collects, for the first time, source materials from a diverse array of socialist writers and organizers, providing a new perspective on the complex history of revolutionary debates about fighting anti-Black racism.Paul Heideman holds a PhD in American studies from Rutgers University–Newark and is a frequent contributor to Jacobin magazine.Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.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 2014 Barbados introduced a vaccine to prevent certain strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) and reduce the risk of cervical cancer in young women. Despite the disproportionate burden of cervical cancer in the Caribbean, many Afro-Barbadians chose not to immunize their daughters. In Suspicion: Vaccines, Hesitancy, and  the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados (Duke University Press, 2022), Nicole Charles reframes Afro-Barbadian vaccine refusal from a question of hesitancy to one of suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, black feminist theory, transnational feminist studies and science and technology studies, Charles foregrounds Afro-Barbadians' gut feelings and emotions and the lingering trauma of colonial and biopolitical violence. She shows that suspicion, far from being irrational, is a fraught and generative affective orientation grounded in concrete histories of mistrust of government and coercive medical practices foisted on colonized peoples. By contextualizing suspicion within these longer cultural and political histories, Charles troubles traditional narratives of vaccine hesitancy while offering new entry points into discussions on racialized biopolitics, neocolonialism, care, affect, and biomedicine across the Black diaspora.Nicole Charles is Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies in Culture and Media, University of Toronto, Mississauga. 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

In Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination: An Artist's Reckoning with the South (UNC Press, 2022), Glenda Gilmore meticulously documents and interprets the artistic life of Romare Bearden. Gilmore details four generations of the Bearden family and grounds the reader in places formative to Bearden like North Carolina, New York, and Pennsylvania. By centering Bearden’s art, Gilmore mines the historical record and this artist’s recollections which were at times conflicting, but nevertheless, shaped his creative imagination. This text weaves archival depth with visual art analysis, illuminating a richer understanding of this important twentieth-century artist and his work.Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She tweets from @amandajoycehall.N’Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. Candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter @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

Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century (Goldsmiths Press, 2021) uses three Black electronic musics – footwork, grime, and the work of the producer Actress – to provide a theory of how Black musical experimentation has disrupted the circuits of racialized domination and exclusion in the 21st Century city. The book carefully attends to the unique ‘sonic ecologies’ produced by these three musical forms in South/West Chicago; East London and South London respectively, steering a course between uncritical celebration narratives of ‘resistant’ cultural production and dystopian analyses of urban decay.Brar instead theorises these musics as forms of popular experimentalism which are not just inseparable from questions of space, race and class, but are productive of social and spatial relations. The book draws upon, and intervenes in, Black Studies literature to contribute a set of examples, questions and provocations that help readers to think about how the ‘Blackness of Black electronic dance music’ has produced (and continues to produce) a fugitive urban aesthetic sociality that has flourished in spite of the degradations of state and capital.At the end of the interview, Dhanveer recommended some music as good entry points into the three musical worlds that we discuss and that he analyses in the book:Actress – Splazsh (2010)DJ Rashad – Just a Taste Vol. 1 (2011)Slimzee/Wiley/Dizzee Rascal and more – Sidewinder sessions (2002-2004)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

“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests.But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests.Táíwò’s book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) (Haymarket, 2022) both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better 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

Curtis Mayfield. The Chi-Lites. Chaka Khan. Chicago’s place in the history of soul music is rock solid. But for Chicagoans, soul music in its heyday from the 1960s to the 1980s was more than just a series of hits: it was a marker and a source of black empowerment. In Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power (U Chicago Press, 2019), Aaron Cohen tells the remarkable story of the explosion of soul music in Chicago. Together, soul music and black-owned businesses thrived. Record producers and song-writers broadcast optimism for black America’s future through their sophisticated, jazz-inspired productions for the Dells and many others. Curtis Mayfield boldly sang of uplift with unmistakable grooves like “We’re a Winner” and “I Plan to Stay a Believer.” Musicians like Phil Cohran and the Pharaohs used their music to voice Afrocentric philosophies that challenged racism and segregation, while Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire and Chaka Khan created music that inspired black consciousness. Soul music also accompanied the rise of African American advertisers and the campaign of Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983. This empowerment was set in stark relief by the social unrest roiling in Chicago and across the nation: as Chicago’s homegrown record labels produced rising stars singing songs of progress and freedom, Chicago’s black middle class faced limited economic opportunities and deep-seated segregation, all against a backdrop of nationwide deindustrialization.Drawing on more than one hundred interviews and a music critic’s passion for the unmistakable Chicago soul sound, Cohen shows us how soul music became the voice of inspiration and change for a city in turmoil. Aaron Cohen covers the arts for numerous publications and teaches English, journalism, and humanities at City Colleges of Chicago. He is the author of Aretha Franklin's "Amazing Grace."Aaron Cohen on Twitter.Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan 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

What are the rights and wrongs of toppling statues? Sometimes everyone agrees it’s a good idea. After the second world war, for example, the defeat of fascism meant that all over Europe Hitler statues were toppled and destroyed. After the collapse of communism some statues of Stalin actually survived. Just a couple of years ago Black Lives Matter protests led to the hauling down statues of slaveholders and imperialists – for example in the UK a statue of slaver – and philanthropist, Edward Colston was hurled into a harbour. Some argued Colston should be left alone because he was just a man of his time. So, when is it right to tear down a statue and do you need a democratically elected committee to make the decision? A discussion with screenwriter and historian Alex Von Tunzelmann, author of Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History.Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University 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

Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness (Duke University Press, 2022) by Marlon B. Ross focuses on the figure of the sissy in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how it constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Demonstrating that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy, he also shows how it constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender.Dr. Marlon B. Ross is professor of English at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 2001. Before that, he was professor of English and African American & African Studies at the University of Michigan. His interests include a variety of fields related to race, gender, sexuality, and culture. He is also the author of Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era and The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry.Isabel Machado is a cultural historian whose work often crosses national and disciplinary boundaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies