New Books In African American Studies

In December 1958, US Senator Hubert H. Humphery recalled that at some point during an eight hour meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier “tore off on a whole long lecture” that the Senator wished he could remember because it was “the best speech I could ever make in my life on antiracialism. Boy, he really gave me a talking to.” Thus beings Meredith Roman‘s fascinating book Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of US Racism, 1928-1937 (Nebraska UP, 2012). At first read, the image of animated Khrushchev haranguing a US Senator with “the best speech” the latter ever heard on the topic of race seems out of place, odd, and to some extent even comical. After all, what could Khrushchev really have known about race in America to impress an American? Khrushchev’s fluency in “speaking antiracism” was no mere preformative dig at the United States. In fact, many African American travelers and expatriates to the Soviet Union in the 1930s were astonished how much its citizens knew and

Sikivu Hutchinson‘s book Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars (Infidel Books, 2011) is a brave examination of African American religious perspectives vis a vis progressive racial politics, gender relations, and cultural values. She tackles uncomfortable questions about the possibly excessive role of religiosity among African Americans, especially woman. And she wonders even as she offers a critique about the abundance of storefront churches in communities that need essential resources. Why so many churches? Why so few activist cultural institutions? A prolific cultural critic and writer, Hutchinson received a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and has taught women’s studies, cultural studies, urban studies and education at UCLA, the California Institute of the Arts and Western Washington University. She is also the author of Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles (Lang, 2003) and has published fiction, essays and critical t

With elegant and accessible prose, Catherine Higgs takes us on a journey in Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa (Ohio University Press, 2012). It is a fascinating voyage fueled by the correspondence of Joseph Burtt, a man who had helped found a utopian commune before being sent by the chocolate magnate William Cadbury in the early 1900s to investigate labor conditions on cocoa plantations in Africa. For almost two years, Burtt observed and wrote and fevered his way to the large Portuguese colony of Angola, to Mozambique in Portuguese East Africa, and finally to Transvaal in British southern Africa. Higgs’s wonderfully evocative account uses Burtt’s journey to tell a much larger story about competing British and Portuguese colonial interests in Africa that was fueled, in part, by tensions over very different notions of “labor” and “slavery.” It is a story of the co-creation of two vital commodities of the twentieth century – chocolate and human beings – that invites readers into the hospital

Racism is a process by which people are segregated and discriminated against based on their race, and race is defined as a set of physical characteristics which certain groups share. Or is it? In Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (Verso Books, 2012), Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields argue that racism does not come from race. In fact, racism is the very act of creating race, by transforming it from something an aggressor does, into something the target is. So-called physical characteristics are red herrings in the discourse, conveniently there to justify certain kinds of racism, but certainly not necessary for them (anti-Semitism being an example). In this highly original book, the Fields’ draw a fascinating parallel between our everyday concept of race and the outdated notion of witchcraft, two beliefs firmly held by the societies which birthed them, reproduced and recreated in daily life by what was, in their time, “evidence,” and both which are, quite plainly, false. This is a fascinat

For some time now I’ve been in spaces with dancers and dance scholars who lament the amount of available research on some of the black luminaries in our field. Sometimes the need for a particular project is present for so long that its absence is taken for granted and treated as the norm. One of the “missing” but “much needed” projects I’ve heard talked about over the years is a book length treatment of the work of modern dance pioneer and scholar Dr. Pearl Primus. I’m really glad that her dear friends, Peggy and Murray Schwartz decided to fill that empty space with their latest project that is as much scholarly research as it is a homage to their very dear friend. For the entirety of her 74-year lifespan, Dr. Primus worked tirelessly and diligently as a dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist bringing the value of African culture to students and audience members around the globe. Though Primus studied and honed her approach to contemporary dance right alongside well known artists like Martha Graham, Doris

“What are you?” The question can often comes out of nowhere One can be going about her quotidian activities, or she might have just finished a meeting at work. “What are you?” The question is disorienting for most, but for others who are racially ambiguous it is commonplace. The ostensibly benign question suggests that it is about the person being asked. However, one might argue that it is more about the one who does the asking. In The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millenium (Stanford University Press, 2011), Michele Elam critically discusses the rise of the Mixed Race Studies. To demonstrate the new sub-genre of cultural studies in both art and academia Elam shows elements of what mixed-racedness looks like in the classroom, as well as in the public sphere here at the turn of the 21st century. One of the contributions of Elam’s Souls makes to Mixed Race Studies is her careful outline of the ways people of mixed biological ancestry have historically worked for the goal of soc

Of all American sports, baseball has contributed the greater number of folk heroes to the larger culture. Fictional characters of awe-inspiring ability, like the mighty Casey and Roy Hobbs, or quirky sages such as Casey Stengel and Yogi Berra are broadly known in a way that few representatives of other sports are. And one of baseball’s great folk heroes–a man of both extraordinary talent and peculiar sagacity–is Satchel Paige. As a pitcher in the Negro Leagues and the barnstorming circuits of the Twenties and Thirties, Paige’s exploits on the field were the stuff of legend. Rearing back his tall, lanky body, with a double and sometimes triple wind-up of his arm, Paige would unload rocket pitches that buzzed like a bee as they flew past the batter. There were innings when Paige would tell his fielders to sit down, or even stay on the bench. He didn’t need fielders when the batters weren’t even close to hitting his pitches. But Paige also understood that fans not only wanted to see impressive displays of prowes

“A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop, a-lop-bam-boom!”And so rock and roll was born. And so American culture changed forever. So says David Kirby in Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll (Continuum, 2009). “Tutti Frutti,” Little Richard’s first hit, recorded by Robert “Bumps” Blackwell at Cosimo Matassa’s J & M Studio in New Orleans in September 1955, co-written and sanitized by Dorothy LaBostrie after Richard’s original lyric (“A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop, a-good-goddamn/Tutti Frutti, good booty”) was deemed a bit too racy for a recorded release (it was, after all, a song about anal copulation, writes the author), is the lynchpin around which Kirby builds a biography of one of the greats of twentieth-century American music and art. His story moves from Richard’s childhood in Macon, Georgia, to his place among the greats of the old, weird America, to his legacy as the Architect of Rock. It’s Kirby’s contention, really, that Richard’s story is America’s story. It’s filled with entrepreneurs, con artists, straights, gays, gospels

In Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739 (Oxford, 2010), Peter C. Hoffer offers a succinct and refreshing new look at the Stono slave rebellion of 1739, an event that has been the subject of much historical scholarship. His main departure from previous interpretations of what actually happened on that fateful night on that lowcountry South Carolina road is that the event was not premeditated, as other historians often argue. Instead, as Dr. Hoffer reveals in this meticulously researched volume, the true story is likely one of contingency. His nuanced examination of the few primary sources that exist is commendable and make his argument that the insurrection was not planned all the more convincing. The book–other than forcing us to revisit other possible underlying motivations for rebellion–draws into question larger issues surrounding the writing of history and the authorial decisions made by professional historians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the history of American sports, few athletes were as famous and hated in their day as Jack Johnson. The first African American boxing champion, Johnson was an astonishingly brash figure who flouted the prejudices held by white Americans. His 1910 victory over James J. Jeffries, the former champion dubbed the “Great White Hope,” set off clashes between whites and blacks in cities across America–one of the most widespread and notorious episodes of racial violence in U.S. history. But Johnson was far more than a figure of American sports. He was, in the fullest sense, the world heavyweight champion. He won the title in 1908 in Australia, and lost it seven years later in Cuba. When he fought, news of the matches was reported around the world. And during and after his years as champion, Johnson lived abroad as an exile. Charged in the U.S. with trafficking a white woman for immoral purposes, Johnson spent seven years moving between England, France, Russia, Spain, Argentina, Barbados, Cuba, and Mexico. At every

Cultural movements don’t exist in vacuums. Consciously or not, all movements borrow from, and sometimes reject, those that came before. In Hip Hop’s Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement (Lexington Books, 2011), the first in a trilogy of books that cast a critical eye upon hip hop as a social and cultural movement, Reiland Rabaka traces the pre-history of hip hop as a series of separate yet connected movements that dealt with inequalities of race/ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. Using Africana, feminist, and queer critical theories as tools for understanding, Rabaka follows the history of black, women’s, and LGBT resistance to heterosexual white male hegemony in U.S. culture. Rabaka’s focus is always on the roles that art and artists (literary, visual, musical) have in people’s active resistances to oppression. The Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts Movement, Black Women’s Liberation, and Feminist Art Movements are just a few of the cultural happenings that Rabaka det

For the launch of the Dance Channel, I thought long and hard about what the first author interview would be. I felt that it was critically important that this channel begins with a rich conversation between myself and a well respected author whose contributions to dance scholarship were substantial.  It seemed to me that this channel could function as a space where the voices of those doing rigorous work with dance at the center, could be invited into conversations that focused on their most recent project, but exposed the challenges and issues they faced along the way in trying to do their work with integrity. To that end, I knew I needed someone whose voice in dance scholarship was strong and consistent and whose contributions were undeniable. When I thought of it that way, it became clear that I needed to have this first interview showcase the work of Dr. Brenda Dixon Gottschild. Brenda Dixon Gottschild‘s newest work, Joan Myers Brown and the Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina: A Biohistory of American

Minkah Makalani is the author of a new intellectual history on the efforts of early twentieth century black radicals to organize an international movement, one that would address both racial and class oppression around the globe. The book is called In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2011). As the title suggests, the focus of the study is on two black radical groups: One in Harlem, the African Blood Brotherhood; and the other in London, the International African Service Bureau. The book examines among other things, “how they communicated across continents.” This is important not only because it illustrates that race was a concern outside of the U.S., but to show just how intricately race and class are linked; so much so that the two cannot be separated. This new study explores provocative questions, and also definitively adds to ongoing debates regarding: * African Americans and communism * Tensions about which

When a mother listens to the beats of her own heart, where angst, fear and fortitude compete, and then beautifully weaves emotion into a story about her ongoing journey to support a bipolar son, then you know something significant has happened in African American literature. At least I did, when I read Charlotte Pierce-Baker‘s insightful memoir, This Fragile Life: A Mother’s Story of a Bipolar Son (Lawrence Hill Books, 2012). But what I didn’t know is why Pierce-Baker would “go there” again. I mean, she has already, once before, “gone there,” when she mined personal pain to write about trauma and black women’s narratives of rape. Yet, when I reflect on a line from her son’s poetry, which is what knits the narrative together, I understand. Her son Mark writes: “When mom is gone nothing is right and everything is wrong/A joke is not a joke, and the birds don’t sing their song.” The power of this book for me is that a mother has created a literary space for her son, a black man living with mental illness, to si

Picture the familiar scene: the visiting pastor thanks the local pastor for granting him the use of his pulpit; he sends out the call (“Can I just speak with you this morning?”) and the congregation responds (“Yessir! Amen!”). The disclaimer follows: he is only the vessel through which the Lord will speak. Should he say something with which one disagrees take it up with the Lord. He pats his brow, grips the podium; throws away his notes, transitions to improvisation; cadenced speech follows, and the congregation responds in kind. Erica R. Edwards describes the aforementioned as the charismatic scene in Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). The new author probes charismatic leadership and its interventions found in literature written by African Americans throughout the 20th century. The fundamental questions Edwards, assistant professor of English at the University of California, Riverside asks are: What is the seduction of charismatic leadership? And, how does it

Koritha Mitchell‘s Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 2012) is, as described on the publisher’s webpage, “the first full-length critical study of lynching plays in American culture.” Drawing from a diverse array of methods and disciplines including American studies, literary criticism, performance studies, and theatre, Mitchell boldly claims and astutely substantiates how early twentieth-century lynching plays provide a literary and even domestic and community space for African Americans to challenge and cope with erratic vigilante racism that threatened black life in America. She also claims that reading these plays can inform our understanding of African American literature, politics, theatre, and the performance of everyday life today. Perhaps what’s most provocative and noteworthy about Mitchell’s study is her insistence that contemporary representations of lynching, such as well-known photographs, perpetuate l

If images of white robes, pointed hoods, and a burning cross represent racism and violence for you then you are not alone. But do they also evoke ideas of nationalism, Protestantism, and masculinity? In the early twentieth century, the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan tied their faith to patriotism and in the process produced a unique self-fashioned religious identity. Kelly J. Baker, scholar of America religious history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, examines this seemingly reprehensible organization and treats it as she would any other phenomenon, through a critical lens from an objective perspective. In her wonderful new book, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 (University Press of Kansas, 2011), she explores the writings of Klan members and outlines their creative renderings of religion, nationalism, gender, and race. In our conversation we discuss the importance of print culture, the communal act of reading, Jesus as the ideal Klansman, the

The NBA Finals are under way, with the Oklahoma City Thunder facing the Miami Heat. Network executives and the sports punditocracy are elated with the match-up. Ratings for Game 1 of the series were up more than 10 per cent over last year, as casual fans tuned in to see the teams’ marquee players, NBA scoring leader Kevin Durant and three-time MVP LeBron James, face each other. Meanwhile, opinion-makers are happy with teams and personalities that can be easily slotted into arresting narratives. It’s safe to say that the Thunder are cast as the “good guys”: a team of young and talented players, gathered through the draft, who have committed themselves to their coach and to an un-glamorous city on the Plains. Meanwhile, the Heat are a high-priced experiment always teetering on the edge of implosion, a collection of uncoachable stars led by LeBron, who alienated the entire sports world by declaring on an ESPN special in 2010 that he would take his talents to South Beach. While perceptive fans are aware of the m

Enid Logan‘s At this Defining Moment: Barack Obama: Presidential Candidacy and the New Politics of Race (NYU Press, 2011) examines the campaign and politics around the election of Barack Obama from a sociological perspective. Drawing on a rich array of television, newspaper, and blogs, Logan challenges many of the conventional interpretations of the Obama victory. In trying to define the “new politics of race”, the book is a contribution to the field of political science, where scholars have also grappled with putting the first African American president into political, historical, and social context. One of the more compelling chapters of the book deals with the intersection of Hispanic and Asian Americans and the Obama campaign. The length, clear-writing, and salient topic should make this a considered adoption for many courses in American politics, race and politics, and campaigns/elections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Whoever states the old adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words” grossly underestimates. So Erin D. Chapman shows in Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s (Oxford University Press, 2012). Just consider the images of African Americans in US popular culture throughout the 19th and 20th centuries; consider the power they held in defining an entire people, and we know better–pictures evince far more than 1000 words. Chapman explores what happens when African Americans use old sexist-racist images and/or create fresh ones to tout the Negro at the turn of the 20th century as modern and new. Through an examination of advertisements at the time, the author makes it evident that many saw the commodification and consumption of the black female body as essential to achieving goals for racial advancement or self-determinism. Chapman, professor of History at George Washington University, offers readers something new: she demonstrates the push-pull dynamics of the image-making in the New Ne