Exporting Reconstruction: Ulysses S. Grant and a New Empire of Liberty - REVIEW

by Ryan P. Semmes

Exporting Reconstruction examines Ulysses S. Grant's Reconstruction-era policy, both foreign and domestic, as an integrated whole. Grant's vision for America's international role in the aftermath of the Civil War was best articulated in his 1869 memorandum, considering whether the United States should annex the Dominican Republic. Grant envisioned a combined domestic and foreign policy of Reconstruction, one predicated on spreading the values of liberty, equality, and the rights of citizenship to not only the Dominican Republic but also other Caribbean nations as well as to Native Americans and Chinese immigrants living in the United States but seen as aliens within the nation.

Author Ryan P. Semmes interprets the Grant-era policy of Reconstruction as an all-encompassing agenda that imagined the United States as the arbiter of civil rights for the Western Hemisphere. Exporting Reconstruction shows readers that, unlike presidents before and after his administration, Grant hoped to increase not only the United States' imperial reach but also extend freedom and liberty to people beyond the borders of North America.

Ryan P. Semmes is professor and director of research at the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library, housed at Mississippi State University.

University of South Carolina Press
ISBN-13 ‎ 978-1643365176

Black Revolutionaries: A History of the Black Panther Party - REVIEW

by Joe Street

Black Revolutionaries is an accessible yet rigorously argued history of the Black Panther Party (BPP), one of the emblematic organizations of the 1960s. Joe Street highlights the complexity of the BPP’s history through three key themes: the BPP’s intellectual history, its political and social activism, and the persecution its members endured. Together, these themes confirm the BPP’s importance in understanding Black America’s response to white oppression in the 1960s and 1970s.

Based on a wealth of archival material, Black Revolutionaries reveals the enduring importance of leftist political philosophy to 1960s and 1970s radicalism, and how the BPP helps us to understand more deeply the role of public space and public protest in the 1960s.Street shows how the BPP were key to the transformation of political activism in the post-civil rights era. As the BPP faced the psychological and organizational impacts of FBI surveillance, police repression, and imprisonment, Street examines how these negative forces helped to shape and destroy the BPP.

Most significantly, Black Revolutionaries demonstrates that an understanding of African American grassroots politics and protest, racial injustice, and police brutality in the post-civil rights era is only comprehensible through engagement with the BPP’s history.

University of Georgia Press
ISBN-13: 978-0820366944

Symphony of Secrets: A novel - REVIEW

by Brendan Slocumb

A gripping page-turner from the celebrated author of book club favorite The Violin Conspiracy: Music professor Bern Hendricks discovers a shocking secret about the most famous American composer of all time—his music may have been stolen from a Black Jazz Age prodigy named Josephine Reed. Determined to uncover the truth that a powerful organization wants to keep hidden, Bern will stop at nothing to right history's wrongs and give Josephine the recognition she deserves.

Bern Hendricks has just received the call of a lifetime. As one of the world’s preeminent experts on the famed twentieth-century composer Frederick Delaney, Bern knows everything there is to know about the man behind the music. When Mallory Roberts, a board member of the distinguished Delaney Foundation and direct descendant of the man himself, asks for Bern’s help authenticating a newly discovered piece, which may be his famous lost opera, RED, he jumps at the chance. With the help of his tech-savvy acquaintance Eboni, Bern soon discovers that the truth is far more complicated than history would have them believe.

In 1920s Manhattan, Josephine Reed is living on the streets and frequenting jazz clubs when she meets the struggling musician Fred Delaney. But where young Delaney struggles, Josephine soars. She’s a natural prodigy who hears beautiful music in the sounds of the world around her. With Josephine as his silent partner, Delaney’s career takes off—but who is the real genius here?

In the present day, Bern and Eboni begin to uncover more clues that indicate Delaney may have had help in composing his most successful work. Armed with more questions than answers and caught in the crosshairs of a powerful organization who will stop at nothing to keep their secret hidden, Bern and Eboni will move heaven and earth in their dogged quest to right history’s wrongs.

Brendan Nicholaus Slocumb was raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and holds a degree in music education (with concentrations in violin and viola) from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. For more than twenty years he has been a public and private school music educator and has performed with orchestras throughout Northern Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, DC.

Vintag
ISBN-13 ‎ 978-0593315453

Divisions: A New History of Racism and Resistance in America's World War II Military - REVIEW

by Thomas A. Guglielmo

Divisions offers a decidedly different view. Prizewinning historian Thomas A. Guglielmo draws together more than a decade of extensive research to tell sweeping yet personal stories of race and the military; of high command and ordinary GIs; and of African Americans, white Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans. Guglielmo argues that the military built not one color line, but a complex tangle of them. Taken together, they represented a sprawling structure of white supremacy. Freedom struggles arose in response, democratizing portions of the wartime military and setting the stage for postwar desegregation and the subsequent civil rights movements. But the costs of the military's color lines were devastating. They impeded America's war effort; undermined the nation's rhetoric of the Four Freedoms; further naturalized the concept of race; deepened many whites' investments in white supremacy; and further fractured the American people.

Offering a dramatic narrative of America's World War II military and of the postwar world it helped to fashion, Guglielmo fundamentally reshapes our understanding of the war and of mid-twentieth-century America.

Thomas A. Guglielmo is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of American Studies at George Washington University. He is the author of White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1940 (OUP, 2003), which won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians.

Oxford University Press
ISBN-13 978-0195342659

Karla's Choice: A John le Carré Novel - REVIEW

by Nick Harkaway 

An extraordinary new novel set in the world of John le Carré's most iconic spy, George Smiley, written by acclaimed novelist Nick Harkaway. It is spring in 1963 and George Smiley has left the Circus. With the wreckage of the West’s spy war against the Soviets strewn across Europe, he has eyes only for a more peaceful life. And indeed, with his marriage more secure than ever, there is a rumor that George Smiley might almost be happy. But Control has other plans. A Russian agent has defected in the most unusual of circumstances, and the man he was sent to kill in London is nowhere to be found. Smiley reluctantly agrees to one last simple task: interview Szusanna, a Hungarian émigré and employee of the missing man, and sniff out a lead. But in his absence, the shadows of Moscow have lengthened. Smiley soon finds himself entangled in a perilous mystery that will define the battles to come and set him on a collision course with the greatest enemy he will ever make. Set in the missing decade between two iconic instalments in John le Carré's George Smiley saga, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Karla’s Choice marks a momentous return to the world of spy fiction's greatest writer.

Viking
ISBN-13 978-0593833490

Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies – REVIEW

by Dalila Scruggs

Accomplished printmaker and sculptor, avowed feminist, and lifelong activist Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) built a remarkable career around intersecting passions for formal rigor and social justice. This book, accompanying a major traveling retrospective, offers a revelatory look at the artist and her nearly century-long life, highlighting overlooked works alongside iconic masterpieces.

Catlett’s activism and artistic expression were deeply connected, and she protested the injustices of her time throughout her life. Her work in printmaking and sculpture draws on organic abstraction, the modernism of the United States and Mexico, and African art to center the experiences of Black and Mexican women. Catlett attended Howard University, studied with the painter Grant Wood, joined the Harlem artistic community, and worked with a leftist graphics workshop in Mexico, where she lived in exile after the US accused her of communism and barred her re-entry into her home country.

The book’s essays address a range of topics, including Catlett’s early development as an artist-activist, the impact of political exile on her work, her pedagogical legacy, her achievement as a social realist printmaker, her work with the arts community of Chicago’s South Side, and the diverse influences that shaped her practice.

"A deft sculptor and printmaker, devout feminist, and lifelong social justice advocate, Catlett was uniquely committed to both her creative process and political convictions. Growing up during the Great Depression, she witnessed class inequality, racial violence, and U.S. imperialism firsthand, all while pursuing an artistic education grounded in the tenets of modernism. Catlett would protest injustices for nearly a century, via both soaring artworks and on-the-ground activism. Born in Washington, DC, Catlett settled permanently in Mexico in 1946 and for the rest of her life she worked to amplify the experiences of Black and Mexican women. Inspired by sources ranging from African sculpture to works by Barbara Hepworth and Kathe Kollwitz, Catlett never lost sight of the Black liberation struggle in the United States. Characterized by bold lines and voluptuous forms, her powerful work continues to speak directly to all those united in the fight against poverty, racism, and imperialism."

Dalila Scruggs is the Augusta Savage Curator of African American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has held curatorial and education positions at the Williams College Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.

University of Chicago Press
ISBN-13 978-0226836577

Higher Flight: Refocusing Black/Africana Studies for the 21st Century - REVIEW

by James B. Stewart

In the open access book Higher Flight, pre-eminent scholar and activist James B. Stewart offers a much-needed critical assessment of the current state of Black/Africana studies in order to chart a path forward. In three equally groundbreaking sections, Stewart clarifies and refines the distinctive approaches that currently define the field; shows how creative production in particular can serve as a unique means of cultural analysis and political mobilization; and suggests how to restore the balance between intellectual inquiry and direct action in order to improve the actual lived experiences of people of African descent. Each section incorporates various forms of expression, including Stewart’s essays, speeches, and poems, and the book as a whole covers a vast range of figures, issues, and phenomena, from W.E.B, Du Bois to James Baldwin, from conscious hip-hop to the Black Lives Matter movement, from Hurricane Katrina to Covid-19, and very much in between. Written with an accessible authoritativeness few Black/Africana scholar-activists can match, Stewart offers a must-read not only for researchers, but also for graduate students and advanced undergraduate students interested in Black/Africana studies, diaspora studies, ethnic studies, Black womanist/feminist studies, and American studies, as well as in African American history, culture, politics, economics, literature, and philosophy.

James B. Stewart is Professor Emeritus of African and African American Studies at Penn State University, USA. He previously served as Vice Provost for Educational Equity and Director of the Black studies Program at Penn State, as President of the National Council for Black Studies, as President of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and as Editor of The Review of Black Political Economy. He has published numerous articles and books, including the field-defining Introduction to Black Studies: Transdisciplinary Approaches and Implications (1992) and Flight in Search of Vision (2004).

Zed Books
ISBN-13 978-1350380295

Racial Domination - REVIEW

by Loïc Wacquant

Race is arguably the single most troublesome and volatile concept of the social sciences in the early 21st century. It is invoked to explain all manner of historical phenomena and current issues, from slavery to police brutality to acute poverty, and it is also used as a term of civic denunciation and moral condemnation. In this erudite and incisive book based on a panoramic mining of comparative and historical research from around the globe, Loïc Wacquant pours cold analytical water on this hot topic and infuses it with epistemological clarity, conceptual precision, and empirical breadth.

Drawing on Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu, Wacquant first articulates a series of reframings, starting with dislodging the United States from its Archimedean position, in order to capture race-making as a form of symbolic violence. He then forges a set of novel concepts to rethink the nexus of racial classification and stratification: the continuum of ethnicity and race as disguised ethnicity, the diagonal of racialization and the pentad of ethnoracial domination, the checkerboard of violence and the dialectic of salience and consequentiality. This enables him to elaborate a meticulous critique of such fashionable notions as “structural racism” and “racial capitalism” that promise much but deliver little due to their semantic ambiguity and rhetorical malleability-notions that may even hamper the urgent fight against racial inequality.

Wacquant turns to deploying this conceptual framework to dissect two formidable institutions of ethnoracial rule in America: Jim Crow and the prison. He draws on ethnographies and historiographies of white domination in the postbellum South to construct a robust analytical concept of Jim Crow as caste terrorism erected in the late 19th century. He unravels the deadly symbiosis between the black hyperghetto and the carceral archipelago that has coproduced and entrenched the material and symbolic marginality of the African-American precariat in the metropolis of the late 20th century. Wacquant concludes with reflections on the politics of knowledge and pointers on the vexed question of the relationship between social epistemology and racial justice.

Both sharply focused and wide ranging, synthetic yet controversial, Racial Domination will be of interest to students and scholars of race and ethnicity, power and inequality, and epistemology and theory across the social sciences and humanities.

Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Research Associate at the Centre de sociologie européenne, Paris.

Polity
ISBN-13: 978-1509563029