1,514 episodes

Interviews with Scholars of African America about their New Books
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

New Books in African American Studies New Books Network

    • Society & Culture
    • 4.5 ‱ 146 Ratings

Interviews with Scholars of African America about their New Books
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

    Tonia Sutherland, "Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife" (U California Press, 2023)

    Tonia Sutherland, "Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife" (U California Press, 2023)

    The first critical examination of death and remembrance in the digital age—and an invitation to imagine Black digital sovereignty in life and death.
    In Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife (U California Press, 2023), Tonia Sutherland considers the consequences of digitally raising the dead. Attending to the violent deaths of Black Americans—and the records that document them—from slavery through the social media age, Sutherland explores media evidence, digital acts of remembering, and the right and desire to be forgotten.
    From the popular image of Gordon (also known as "Whipped Peter") to photographs of the lynching of Jesse Washington to the video of George Floyd's murder, from DNA to holograms to posthumous communication, this book traces the commodification of Black bodies and lives across time. Through the lens of (anti-)Blackness in the United States, Sutherland interrogates the intersections of life, death, personal data, and human autonomy in the era of Google, Twitter, and Facebook, and presents a critique of digital resurrection technologies. If the Black digital afterlife is rooted in bigotry and inspires new forms of racialized aggression, Resurrecting the Black Body asks what other visions of life and remembrance are possible, illuminating the unique ways that Black cultures have fought against erasure and oblivion.
    Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.
    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

    • 58 min
    Coretta M. Pittman, "Literacy in a Long Blues Note: Black Women’s Literature and Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries" (UP of Mississippi, 2022)

    Coretta M. Pittman, "Literacy in a Long Blues Note: Black Women’s Literature and Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries" (UP of Mississippi, 2022)

    Literacy in a Long Blues Note: Black Women’s Literature and Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries by Coretta M. Pittman (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) traces the evolution of Black women’s literacy practices from 1892 to 1934. 
    Pittman explores two distinct but related eras of Black women’s writing—the Women’s Era of the 1890s and early 1900s, and the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Casting a wide net, Pittman analyzes fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic writing by Black women along with songs performed and written by classic blues singers like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Victoria Spivey. This innovative approach allows Pittman to show how women from these two generations approached issues of class, respectability, uplift, and empowerment.
    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

    • 50 min
    Jonathan W. White, "Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)

    Jonathan W. White, "Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)

    In Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), historian Jonathan W. White tells the riveting story of Appleton Oaksmith, a swashbuckling sea captain whose life intersected with some of the most important moments, movements, and individuals of the mid-19th century, from the California Gold Rush, filibustering schemes in Nicaragua, Cuban liberation, and the Civil War and Reconstruction. Most importantly, the book depicts the extraordinary lengths the Lincoln Administration went to destroy the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade. 
    Using Oaksmith’s case as a lens, White takes readers into the murky underworld of New York City, where federal marshals plied the docks in lower Manhattan in search of evidence of slave trading. Once they suspected Oaksmith, federal authorities had him arrested and convicted, but in 1862 he escaped from jail and became a Confederate blockade-runner in Havana. The Lincoln Administration tried to have him kidnapped in violation of international law, but the attempt was foiled. Always claiming innocence, Oaksmith spent the next decade in exile until he received a presidential pardon from U.S. Grant, at which point he moved to North Carolina and became an anti-Klan politician. Through a remarkable, fast-paced story, this book will give readers a new perspective on slavery and shifting political alliances during the turbulent Civil War Era.
    Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.
    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

    • 39 min
    Myisha Cherry, "Failures of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better" (Princeton UP, 2023)

    Myisha Cherry, "Failures of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better" (Princeton UP, 2023)

    From religion to popular culture, institutions and people have shaped how we conceive forgiveness. Myisha Cherry, associate professor of philosophy, argues that these understandings have been limiting or even narrow. Those ideas, in turn, have been harmful to society. In Failures of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better (Princeton University Press 2023), Cherry offers a new conceptualization of forgiveness rooted in a holistic approach.
    ï»żDr. N'Kosi Oates is a curator and assistant professor. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University. Find him on Twitter at DrNKosiOates.
    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

    • 42 min
    Whitney Nell Stewart, "This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations" (UNC Press, 2023)

    Whitney Nell Stewart, "This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations" (UNC Press, 2023)

    The cultural memory of plantations in the Old South has long been clouded by myth. A recent reckoning with the centrality of slavery to the US national story, however, has shifted the meaning of these sites. Plantations are no longer simply seen as places of beauty and grandiose hospitality; their reality as spaces of enslavement, exploitation, and violence is increasingly at the forefront of our scholarly and public narratives. Yet even this reckoning obscures what these sites meant to so many forced to live and labor on them: plantations were Black homes as much as white.
    Insightfully reading the built environment of plantations, considering artifact fragments found in excavations of slave dwellings, and drawing on legal records and plantation owners' papers, Whitney Nell Stewart illuminates how enslaved people struggled to make home amid innumerable constraints and obstacles imposed by white southerners. 
    In This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations (UNC Press, 2023), Stewart demonstrates how homemaking was a crucial part of the battle over slavery and freedom, a fight that continues today in consequential confrontations over who has the right to call this nation home.
    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

    • 1 hr 30 min
    Victoria Perry, "A Bittersweet Heritage: Slavery, Architecture and the British Landscape" (Hurst, 2022)

    Victoria Perry, "A Bittersweet Heritage: Slavery, Architecture and the British Landscape" (Hurst, 2022)

    The 2020 toppling of slave-trader Edward Colston's statue by Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol was a dramatic reminder of Britain's role in trans-Atlantic slavery, too often overlooked. Yet the legacy of that predatory economy reaches far beyond bronze memorials; it continues to shape the entire visual fabric of the country.
    Architect Victoria Perry explores the relationship between the wealth of slave-owning elites and the architecture and landscapes of Georgian Britain. She reveals how profits from Caribbean sugar plantations fed the opulence of stately homes and landscape gardens. Trade in slaves and slave-grown products also boosted the prosperity of ports like Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, shifting cultural influence towards the Atlantic west. New artistic centers like Bath emerged, while investment in poor, remote areas of Wales, Cumbria and Scotland led to their "reimagining" as tourist destinations: Snowdonia, the Lakes and the Highlands. The patronage of absentee planters popularized British ideas of "natural scenery"--viewing mountains, rivers and rocks as landscape art--and then exported the concept of "sublime and picturesque" landscapes across the Atlantic.
    A Bittersweet Heritage: Slavery, Architecture and the British Landscape (Hurst, 2022) unearths the slavery-tainted history of Britain's manors, ports, roads and countryside, and powerfully explains what this legacy means today.
    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

    • 54 min

Customer Reviews

4.5 out of 5
146 Ratings

146 Ratings

technique over topics ,

Host needs moderation work

First, honor and excitement for this podcast — Listened to the “Silencing the Past” Trouillot episode which brought together some stellar scholars to a round table to discuss the impact of the text in our recent years, in and following 2020. Interspersed between scholars’ remarks about the text or social events, McNeil might chime in, “that’s really interesting” or “wow, that’s incredible” or but added so very little in the way of building, or drawing connections between ideas, I found myself skipping past his commentary and back to the scholars. Interviewing is a craft to be sure, and I’m not sure this host has it down yet, which makes listening to what is otherwise a powerful source for AfAm literature and scholarship a bit painful.

😉💙🙃 ,

15 January 2023

Very informative, thank you.

Clone B. ,

Really

Are there African Americans who write books on African American history? Really!?!? Do better or end this.

Top Podcasts In Society & Culture

The Viall Files
Nick Viall
MeSsy with Christina Applegate & Jamie-Lynn Sigler
Wishbone Production
Stuff You Should Know
iHeartPodcasts
This American Life
This American Life
Unlocking Us with Brené Brown
Vox Media Podcast Network
Shawn Ryan Show
Shawn Ryan | Cumulus Podcast Network

You Might Also Like

New Books in Critical Theory
Marshall Poe
The Dig
Daniel Denvir
Code Switch
NPR
Democracy Now! Audio
Democracy Now!
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
Know Your Enemy
Matthew Sitman

More by New Books Network

New Books in Psychoanalysis
Marshall Poe
New Books in History
Marshall Poe
New Books in Philosophy
New Books Network
New Books in Native American Studies
Marshall Poe
New Books in Intellectual History
New Books Network
New Books in Military History
Marshall Poe