New Books In African American Studies

As US politics becomes increasingly driven by divisions, we need some way of sustaining a shared civic life. Paul Taylor makes the case for democratic virtues. Paul C. Taylor is Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the College of the Liberal Arts and Associate Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at Penn State. His research focuses on philosophy of race, social and political philosophy, Africana philosophy, and aesthetics.  The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

From 1927 until his death in 1979, E.F. Joseph documented the daily lives of African Americans in the Bay Area. His images were printed in the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, but not widely published in his home community. A graduate of the American School of Photography in Illinois, Joseph photographed the likes of such celebrities and activists as Josephine Baker, Mahalia Jackson, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Thurgood Marshall. However, what is perhaps more compelling within these pages are the countless images of everyday citizens teaching, entertaining, worshipping, working, and serving their community and their nation. Emmanuel Francis (E. F.) Joseph (1900-1979) was born on November 8, 1900 in St. Lucia, West Indies. After graduating from the American School of Photography of Illinois, he moved to Oakland, California in 1924 where he served as an apprentice in a photography studio. He was the first professional African American photographer in the San Francisco Bay Area operating a commercial an

Five charismatic women navigate uneven terrain of racial gender and class stereotypes: Dorothy Dandridge, Pam Grier, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and Halle Berry. The quintet charisma, as explored by Dr. Mia Mask in Divas on The Screen: Black Women in American Film (University of Illinois Press, 2009), range from erotic and a phallic idol of perversity and sexuality to comedic, cathartic and capitalistic to beauty in the multicultural age. Dr. Mask, associate professor of film at Vassar College, says they are the building blocks of our black women stars today. And the building blocks focus on what can we learn from the complex and contradictory careers of successful black women? Where do we find African-Americans in the performative, other-directed, narcissistic culture? What does African-American stardom as a social phenomenon reveal about the aspirations of black folks in the 21st Century? How have African-Americans-in their struggle for inclusion in commercial entertainment-complied with dominant cultur

Who’s the black private dick That’s a sex machine to all the chicks? (Shaft) Ya damn right Who is the man that would risk his neck For his brother man? (Shaft) Can you dig it? Who’s the cat that won’t cop out When there’s danger all about? (Shaft) Right on They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother – (Shut your mouth) But I’m talkin’ ’bout Shaft – (Then we can dig it) He’s a complicated man But no one understands him but his woman (John Shaft) –Theme from Shaft by Isaac Hayes Mention Shaft and most people think of Gordon Park’s seminal 1971 film starring Richard Roundtree in a leather coat, walking the streets of Manhattan to Isaac Hayes’ iconic theme music. But the black private dick that inspired the black action cinema/blaxploitation film genre actually made his debut on the printed page as the creation of white novelist Ernest Tidyman, who was a seasoned journalist down on his luck when he decided to try his hand at fiction. Shaft was the result, giving Tidyman the break he was looking for. T

Business. Community. Politics. That’s the making of a barbershop. In Cutting Along the Color Lines: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Dr. Quincy Mills chronicles the history of black barber shops as businesses and civic institutions, demonstrating their central role in Civil Rights struggle throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dr. Mills says what’s most intriguing to him about barbershops is people forget the barbershop is a business first before community and politics. He states, “Barbershops, beauty salons and churches are the remaining institutions rooted in black culture production.” When Mills is not engaged in teaching, reading, writing or teaching he’s running; a space that provides him solitary time to think and work out his ideas. Dr. Mills is an associate professor at Vassar College. He teaches courses on African American history, specifically, Dr. Martin Luther King, race and segregation, black power movement, and consumer culture. Le

In his acclaimed biography Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press (Amistad, Reprint Edition, 2017), James McGrath Morris explores the fascinating life of pioneering black female journalist Ethel Payne. Backed by exhaustive archival research, Morris traces Payne’s role in documenting the civil rights struggle during the decades following World War II, before her later impact as the first female African American radio and television commentator on a national network. The New York Times has described Eyes on the Struggle as an “an important and often absorbing new book,” while the Chicago Tribune has contended that Morris’ beautifully written and carefully researched new book “gives Payne’s ground-breaking work the attention it deserves.” Morris’ other books include Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power, which Booklist placed on its 2010 list of the ten best biographies, and The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journali

This episode of New Books in African American Studies covers Patrick Phillips’ powerful new book Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W.W. Norton and Company, 2016) At the turn of the twentieth century, Forsyth County in Georgia, was home to an diverse African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. However, following the rape and murder of a white girl in 1912, and accusations levied against three black laborers, bands of white “night riders” launched a devastating campaign of arson and terror against Forsyth’s black community. Expanding backwards and forwards from this flashpoint, Blood at the Root is a sweeping tale that spans the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the hope and promise of Reconstruction, and the crushing injustice of Forsyth’s racial cleansing. With bold storytelling and lyrical prose, it breaks the century-long silence of Patrick’s hometown, and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that continues to

What do you know about Houston, Texas? That Houston is the fourth largest city in the United States? That Houston was the home of the 2016 NCAA Final Four in basketball and the home of the NFL’s Super Bowl LI in 2017? That Houston is the home of the world’s largest medical center and is also the hub of the American energy industry? All of the above are true, and even more Houston is noted for its rich diversity of people and blending of cultures. Beginning after World War I, Houston was transformed from a black-and-white frontier town into one of the most ethnically and racially diverse urban areas in the United States. Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City (University of California Press, 2015) draws on social and cultural history to show how, despite Anglo attempts to fix racial categories through Jim Crow laws, converging migrations particularly those of Mexicans from across the border and Creoles from Louisiana complicated ideas of blackness and whiteness and introduced different understand

Have you ever watched a futuristic movie and wondered if there will actually be any black people in the future? Have you ever been surprised, disappointed, or concerned with the lack of diversity demonstrated in many science fiction stories? In Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) the author analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan culture to illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination. Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science reveals new understandings of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature and culture and interrogates the meanings of race and genre through studies of science fiction, fanzines, comics, film and television, and other speculative fiction texts. Author and professor Andre Carrington earned his bachelors degree

The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) presents the history of the nation’s forgotten Dutch slave community and free Dutch-speaking African Americans from seventeenth-century New Amsterdam to nineteenth-century New York and New Jersey and also develops a provocative new interpretation of one of America’s most intriguing black folkloric traditions, Pinkster. The author rejects the usual interpretation of this celebration of a “slave king” as a form of carnival. Instead, he shows that it is a ritual rooted in mutual-aid and slave brotherhood traditions. By placing these traditions in an Atlantic context, he identifies striking parallels to royal election rituals in slave communities elsewhere in the Americas, and traces these rituals to the ancient Kingdom of Kongo and the impact of Portuguese culture in West-Central Africa. The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slav

There has been much talk in the news recently about funding for public education, the emergence of charter schools, and the potential of school vouchers. How much does competition for financing in urban public schools depend on marketing and perpetuating poverty in order to thrive? Are the actors in this drama deliberately playing up stereotypes of race and class? A Good Investment? Philanthropy and the Marketing of Race in an Urban Public School (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) offers a firsthand look behind the scenes of the philanthropic approach to funding public education a process in which social change in education policy and practice is aligned with social entrepreneurship. The appearance of success, equity, or justice in education, the author argues, might actually serve to maintain stark inequalities and inhibit democracy. A Good Investment? Philanthropy and the Marketing of Race in an Urban Public School shows that models of corporate or philanthropic charity in education may in fact reinforc

When you think of black power, do you think about churches and religious institutions, or do you relate them more to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s? How do the social justice struggles of the past relate to those of today? In this vital reassessment of the impact of religion on the black power movement, Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois (University Press of Kentucky, 2016) presents a nuanced discussion of the ways in which black churches supported and shaped the United Front black power organization in Cairo, Illinois during the 1970s. The book deftly challenges conventional narratives of the de-Christianization of the movement, revealing that Cairoites embraced both old-time religion and revolutionary thought. Not only did the faithful fund the mass direct-action strategies of the United Front, but activists also engaged the literature on black theology, invited theologians to speak at their rallies, and sent potential leaders to train at seminaries. In

In Steamboat School (Jump at the Sun, 2016), an historical picture book based on true events, author Deborah Hopkinson recounts the story of Reverend John Berry Meachum’s brave act to defy an 1847 Missouri law designed to prohibit African American children from attending school. This fictional account is told from the point of view of a young boy who is at first a student at Meachum’s secret school, which held in a church basement. But when the Missouri law is passed and it is no longer safe to continue teaching the students there, Meachum enlists his students and decides to build a steamboat to house a new, legal, school set afloat on the Mississippi River and thus on federal property. The book concludes with a nonfiction afterword about Reverend Meachum’s life and the research behind the book. Deborah Hopkinson is the author of more than 40 books for young readers including picture books, middle grade fiction, and nonfiction. In her presentations at schools and conferences, she helps bring history and rese

This week on the podcast, I speak with Carol Hardy-Fanta and Dianne Pinderhughes, the co-authors (along with Pei-te Lien and Christine Marie Sierra) of Contested Transformation: Race, Gender, and Political Leadership in 21st Century America (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Hardy-Fanta is Senior Fellow at the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston; Pinderhughes is University of Notre Dame Presidential Faculty Fellow as well as Professor in the Departments of Political Science and Africana Studies, and chair of the department of Africana Studies. Based on comprehensive data from the Gender and Multicultural Leadership (GMCL) National Database and Survey, Contested Transformations provides a baseline portrait of Black, Latino, Asian American, and American Indian elected officials at national, state, and local levels of government. The book presents a complex picture of office holders across race and gender groups and the various backgrounds,

“There were black Germans?” My students are always surprised to learn that there were and are a community of African immigrants and Afro-Germans that dates back to the nineteenth century (and sometimes earlier), and that this community has at times had an influence on German culture, society, and racial thinking that belied its small size. Germany’s role in colonizing Africa has received increased attention lately, with an exhibit on German colonialism appearing at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in October and recent headway on a deal for Germany to pay reparations to the descendants of Herero and Nama genocide victims in Namibia. In Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Disapora Community, 1884-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken supply a part of the colonial story that gets even less attention than that of Germans in Africa: what about Africans in Germany? Focusing primarily on a community of West-African-born black Germans and their families, Rosenhaft and Ai

As the first substantive account of the birthplace of the Black Panther Party (BPP), Robyn C. Spencer’s The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Duke University Press, 2016) rewrites elitist accounts that narrowly defined the party by its male leaders and masculine militarism. With a panoramic and critical lens on the role that gender politics played in effecting and affecting the Revolution – an internal and external activist project of overcoming oppression – Spencer’s organisational history weaves the urban parameters of Oakland, California, into a national and international narrative of racial consciousness. A book that Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams, has said “tears down myths and distortions,” The Revolution Has Come traverses the BPP’s uncritical embrace of heteropatriachy in self-defense tactics, the dialectic relationship of state oppression and Black Women’s leadership of the party, the role of community programs in reshaping notions of masc

Have you ever wondered about your family history, and how family traditions or secrets through the years may affect you, your behavior, and major aspects of your life? Velvet (AuthorHouse, 2013) begins with Ludie, a young, unwed mother escaping reality down a dusty Southern road. Author Holly Charles also found a way to escape reality; or, rather, found a means to cope with reality years ago when she first began to write about her complicated relationship with her mother. It was through her own extensive research and many meaningful conversations with her grandmother that she identified several common themes in mother/daughter relationships particularly in (but not exclusive to) the African American community. All mothers, regardless of race and culture, seek to protect their children from the demons and disappointments they themselves have been hindered by. Trying to spare their own daughters the pangs of womanhood and colorist ideals causes African American mothers to reproduce their own personal feelings

There has been much discussion recently in the United States about the contentious recent presidential election. Along with the election results, there has also been an increased interest in the so-called “fake news” stories spread on social media as well as on the emergence of the “Alt Right” movement in the past few years. Many scholars and historians have begun to look to the past for comparisons and parallels to the current state of affairs. The Ku Klux Klan was reestablished in Atlanta in 1915, barely a week before the Atlanta premiere of The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s paean to the original Klan. While this link between Griffith’s film and the Klan has been widely acknowledged, White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Klux Klan (Indiana University Press, 2016) explores the little-known relationship between the Klan’s success and its use of film and media in the interwar years when the image, function, and moral rectitude of the Klan was contested on the national stage. By exami

Zombifying a Nation: Race, Gender and the Haitian Loas on Screen (McFarland, 2016) dwells on the intersections of memory, history, and cultural production in both Africa and the African diaspora. The figure of the zombie that entered the popular imagination with the publication of William Seabrook’s book The Magic Island (1929) during the American occupation of Haiti still holds cultural currency around the world. Zombifying a Nation: Race, Gender and the Haitian Loas on Screen calls for a rethinking of zombies in a sociopolitical context through the examination of several films, including White Zombie (1932), The Love Wanga (1935), I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988). A 21st-century film from Haiti, Zombi candidat la presidence … ou les amours dun zombi, is also examined. A reading of Heading South (2005), a film about the female tourist industry in the Caribbean, explores zombification as a consumptive process driven by capitalism. Author Toni Pressley-Sanon holds a Ph.D.

Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. In 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One man was dragged from a jail cell and lynched on the town square, two teenagers were hung after a one-day trial, and soon bands of white “night riders” launched a coordinated campaign of arson and terror, driving all 1,098 black citizens out of the county. In the wake of the expulsions, whites harvested the crops and took over the livestock of their former neighbors, and quietly laid claim to abandoned land. The charred ruins of homes and churches disappeared into the weeds, until the people and places of black Forsyth were forgotten. Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing (W.W. Norton and Company, 2016)in America is a sweeping American tale that spans the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the hope and promise of Recons