Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood - REVIEW

It is impossible to imagine New Orleans, and by extension American history, without the vibrant and singular Creole culture. In the face of an oppressive white society, members of the Société d'Economie et d'Assistance Mutuelle built a community and held it together through the era of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow terrorism. Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood follows Ludger Boguille, his family, and friends through landmark events from the Haitian Revolution to the birth of jazz that shaped New Orleans and the United States.

The story begins with the author's father rescuing a century's worth of handwritten journals, in French, from a trash hauler's pickup truck. From the journals' pages emerged one of the most important multiethnic, intellectual communities in the US South: educators, world-traveling merchants, soldiers, tradesmen, and poets. Although Louisiana law classified them as men of color, Negroes, and Blacks, the Economie brothers rejected racism and colorism to fight for suffrage and education rights for all.

A descendant of the Economie's community, author Fatima Shaik has constructed a meticulously detailed nonfiction narrative that reads like an epic novel.

Fatima Shaik was born in the historic Seventh Ward of New Orleans and bred on the oral histories told by her Creole family and neighbors. A former assistant professor at Saint Peter's University (NJ), she worked for more than a decade as a reporter and editor for daily news outlets. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, The Root, and In These Times. Shaik is a trustee of PEN America and former board member of The Writers Room in New York City. She is the author of six books of fiction. Economy Hall is her first nonfiction work.

Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood
 by Fatima Shaik
The Historical New Orleans Collection | ISBN: 978-0-917860-80-5

The Time of Illusion - REVIEW

An analytical account of the nation's political life and key related events and presidential activities during the Nixon years, ascribing to them a logic, coherence, and meaning not discernable at the time.

"By persuasively connecting the Nixon years to the larger dilemmas of our time, Mr. Schell has elevated a shabby political story to the level of tragedy. And one closes his deeply intelligent book not with feelings of vindication or outrage, but with a sense of understanding and equanimity that only tragedy can evoke."
- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

The Things They Carried - REVIEW

     A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.

     Tim O’Brien was already an established writer when he penned The Things They Carried. He had won the National Book Award in 1979 for Going After Cacciato, and subsequent works such as The Nuclear Age were met with much acclaim. The Things They Carried, classified as fiction, recalls many of the incidents O’ Brien witnessed as a soldier in the Vietnam War. In his novel, he names the protagonist after himself and believes the best way to convey the horrific effect of war is to blend elements of fiction and nonfiction. O’Brien uses the words “things” soldiers “carry” as more of an emotional than physical metaphor. The author has been called one of the finest writers ever to focus on the Vietnam War. 

     The Library of Congress 2016 exhibit "America Reads" considers The Things They Carried one of "the most influential books written and read in America and their impact on our lives".

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Mariner | ISBN: 978-0-618-70641-9

Women's Liberation!: Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution & Still Can - REVIEW

     Two pioneering feminists present a groundbreaking collection recovering a generation's revolutionary insights for today.

     When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the book exploded into women’s consciousness. Before the decade was out, what had begun as a campaign for women’s civil rights transformed into a diverse and revolutionary movement for freedom and social justice that challenged many aspects of everyday life long accepted as fixed: work, birth control and abortion, childcare and housework, gender, class, and race, art and literature, sexuality and identity, rape and domestic violence, sexual harassment, pornography, and more. This was the women’s liberation movement, and writing—powerful, personal, and prophetic—was its beating heart. 

     Fifty years on, in the age of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, this visionary and radical writing is as relevant and urgently needed as ever, ready to inspire a new generation of feminists. Activists and writers Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore have gathered an unprecedented collection of works—many long out-of-print and hard to find—that catalyzed and propelled the women’s liberation movement. Ranging from Friedan’s Feminine Mystique to Backlash, Susan Faludi’s Reagan-era requiem, and framed by Shulman and Moore with an introduction and headnotes that provide historical and personal context, the anthology reveals the crucial role of Black feminists and other women of color in a decades long mass movement that not only brought about fundamental changes in American life—changes too often taken for granted today—but envisioned a thoroughgoing revolution in society and consciousness still to be achieved.

     Alix Kates Shulman's 1972 debut novel, the million-copy best seller Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, is now a feminist classic. Hailed by The New York Times as: the voice that has for three decades provided a lyrical narrative of the changing position of women in American society," she has written five novels, three memoirs, a biography of anarchist feminist Emma Goldman, and the collection A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays. Her memoir Drinking the Rain was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and in 2018 she received a Clara Lemlich Award for a lifetime of social activism.

     Honor Moore is the author of Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury; The White Blackbird, a life of her grandmother, the painter Margarett Sargent; The Bishop's Daughter, a finalist for the National Book Critics Award; and three collections of poems. For Library of America, she edited Amy Lowell: Selected Poems and Poems from the Women's Movement. She is on the faculty of the graduate writing program at the New School, where she heads nonfiction.

Women's Liberation!: Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution & Still Can edited by Alix Kates Shulman & Honor Moore
Library of America | ISBN: 978-1-59853-678-2

Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change - REVIEW

     In 2015, Ellen K. Pao sued a powerhouse Silicon Valley venture capital firm, calling out workplace discrimination and retaliation against women and other underrepresented groups. Her suit rocked the tech world—and exposed its toxic culture and its homogeneity. Her message overcame negative PR attacks that took aim at her professional conduct and her personal life, and she won widespread public support—Time hailed her as “the face of change.” Though Pao lost her suit, she revolutionized the conversation at tech offices, in the media, and around the world. In Reset, she tells her full story for the first time.

     The daughter of immigrants, Pao was taught that through hard work she could achieve her dreams. She earned multiple Ivy League degrees, worked at top startups, and in 2005 was recruited by Kleiner Perkins, arguably the world’s leading venture capital firm at the time. In many ways, she did everything right, and yet she and other women and people of color were excluded from success—cut out of decisive meetings and email discussions, uninvited to CEO dinners and lavish networking trips, and had their work undercut or appropriated by male executives. It was time for a system reset.

     After Kleiner, Pao became CEO of reddit, where she took forceful action to change the status quo for the company and its product. She banned revenge porn and unauthorized nude photos—an action other large media sites later followed—and shut down parts of reddit over online harassment. She and seven other women tech leaders formed Project Include, an award-winning nonprofit for accelerating diversity and inclusion in tech. In her book, Pao shines a light on troubling issues that plague today’s workplace and lays out practical, inspiring, and achievable goals for a better future.

     Ellen K. Pao’s Reset is a rallying cry—the story of a whistleblower who aims to empower everyone struggling to be heard, in Silicon Valley and beyond.

     Ellen K. Pao is a tech investor, a diversity and inclusion activist at the Kapor Center for Social Impact, the former CEO of reddit, and a cofounder of the award-winning diversity and inclusion nonprofit Project Include. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Time, Lenny, and Recode. She has earned an electrical engineering degree from Princeton and law and business degrees from Harvard.

Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change by Ellen K. Pao
Random House Books | ISBN: 978-0-399-59101-3

The Great Influenza - REVIEW

 In the winter of 1918, at the height of World War I, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide.  It killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision between modern science and epidemic disease.  Magisterial in its breath of perspective and depth of research, The Great Influenza weaves together multiple narratives, with characters ranging from William Welch, founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School, to John D. Rockefeller and Woodrow Wilson. Ultimately a tale of triumph amid tragedy, this crisis provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon.

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
by John M. Barry (2005)
ISBN 978-0-14-303649-4

Protecting Whiteness: Whitelash and the Rejection of Racial Equality – REVIEW

by Cameron D. Lippard (Editor), J. Scott Carter (Editor), David G. Embrick (Editor), Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Foreword)

The standoff at Cliven Bundy's ranch, the rise of white identity activists on college campuses, and the viral growth of white nationalist videos on YouTube vividly illustrate the resurgence of white supremacy and overt racism in the United States. White resistance to racial equality can be subtle as well--like art museums that enforce their boundaries as elite white spaces, "right on crime" policies that impose new modes of surveillance and punishment for people of color, and environmental groups whose work reinforces settler colonial norms.

In this incisive volume, twenty-four leading sociologists assess contemporary shifts in white attitudes about racial justice in the US. Using case studies, they investigate the entrenchment of white privilege in institutions, new twists in anti-equality ideologies, and "whitelash" in the actions of social movements. Their examinations of new manifestations of racist aggression help make sense of the larger forces that underpin enduring racial inequalities and how they reinvent themselves for each new generation.

Cameron Lippard is professor of sociology at Appalachian State University. J.Scott Carter is associate professor of sociology at the University of Central Florida.  David G. Embrick is associate professor of sociology and Africana studies at the University of Connecticut.

University of Washington Press  uwapress.uw.edu
ISBN 978-0-295-74799-6
275 pages

Daily Life of African Americans in Primary Documents - REVIEW

Daily Life of African Americans in Primary Documents [2 volumes]

Herbert C. Covey and Dwight Eisnach, Editors

This two-volume set provides readers with a balanced collection of materials that captures the wide-ranging experiences of African American people over the history of America. Volume One begins with the enslavement and transportation of slaves to North America and ends with the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction; Volume Two continues with the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction through the election of Barack Obama to the American presidency.

Each volume provides a chronology of major events, a historic overview, and sections devoted to the domestic, material, economic, intellectual, political, leisure, and religious life of African Americans for the respective time spans. Volume One covers a wide variety of topics from a multitude of perspectives in such areas as enslavement, life during the Civil War, common foods, housing, clothing, political opinions, and similar topics. Volume Two addresses the civil rights movement, court cases, life under Jim Crow, Reconstruction, busing, housing segregation, and more.

Each volume includes 100-110 primary sources with suggested readings from government publications, court testimony, census data, interviews, newspaper accounts, period appropriate letters, Work Progress Administration interviews, sermons, laws, diaries, and reports.

Herbert C. Covey has a PhD in sociology from the University of Colorado at Boulder and is acting director of the Adams County Human Services Department.

Dwight Eisnach has a BA in journalism from the University of Colorado at Boulder and is a freelance writer.

Greenwood Publishers

ISBN: 978-1-4408-6666-1

Invisible Men: The Trailblazing Black Artists of Comic Books - REVIEW

Invisible Men: The Trailblazing Black Artists of Comic Books
by Ken Quattro

The riveting stories of groundbreaking Black artists who – mostly covertly – drew superhero, horror, and romance comics birth of the industry through the Golden Age!  These men’s life stories demonstrate how they emerged to break through barriers into a world formerly occupied only be white artists.  Invisible Men: The Trailblazing Black Artists of Comic Books is gorgeously illustrated with photos and the creators’ remarkable work, from mainstream comics to rare titles like All-Negro Comics.  Invisible Men feature’s Ken Quattro’s impeccable research detailing the social and cultural environments that formed these extraordinary, yet invisible men!

The life stories of each man's personal struggles and triumphs are represented as they broke through into a world formerly occupied only by whites. Using primary source material from World War II-era Black newspapers and magazines, this compelling book profiles pioneers like E.C. Stoner, a descendant of one of George Washington's slaves, who became a renowned fine artist of the Harlem Renaissance and the first Black artist to draw comic books. Perhaps more fascinating is Owen Middleton who was sentenced to life in Sing Sing. Middleton's imprisonment became a cause célèbre championed by Will Durant, which led to Middleton's release and subsequent comics career. Then there is Matt Baker, the most revered of the Black artists, whose exquisite art spotlights stunning women and men, and who drew the first groundbreaking Black comic book hero, Vooda!

Ken Quattro was a historical consultant on the Hollywood film Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. Quattro is the author of hundreds of books, magazines, and online articles.  He has provided source material for television programs and many other comics histories. Quattro attended Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan, studying Fine Art and Journalism.

ISBN: 978-1-68405-586-9

IDW Publishing Company  idwpublishing.com

248 pages.

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song - REVIEW

"For more than 250 years," writes poet and scholar Kevin Young in his introduction to this landmark new anthology, "African Americans have written and recited and published poetry about beauty and injustice, music and muses, Africa and America, freedoms and foodways, Harlem and history, funk and opera, boredom and longing, jazz and joy." Across a turbulent history, from such vital centers as Harlem, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. Cap­turing the power and beauty of this diverse tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry reveals as never before its centrality and its challenge to American poetry and culture.

One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people like Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voice their passionate resistance to slavery. Young's fresh, revelatory presentation of the Harlem Renaissance reexamines the achievements of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen alongside works by lesser-known poets such as Gwendolyn B. Bennett and Mae V. Cowdery. The later flowering of the still influential Black Arts Movement is represented here with breadth and originality, including many long out-of-print or hard-to-find poems.

Here are all the significant movements and currents: the nineteenth-century Francophone poets known as Les Cenelles, the Chicago Renaissance that flourished around Gwendolyn Brooks, the early 1960s Umbra group, and the more recent work of writers affiliated with Cave Canem and the Dark Noise Collective. Here too are poems of singular, hard-to-classify figures: the enslaved potter David Drake, the allusive modernist Melvin B. Tolson, the Cleveland-based experimentalist Russell Atkins. This Library of America volume also fea­tures biographies of each poet and notes that illuminate cultural references and allusions to historical events.

Only now, in the 21st century, can we fully grasp the breadth and range of African American poetry: a magnificent chorus of voices, some familiar, others recently rescued from neglect. With AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America; October 20, 2020; 978-1­59853-666-9; $45), a monumental new anthology expertly curated by poet and scholar Kevin Young, this precious living heritage is revealed for the first time in all its power, beauty. and multiplicity. Here are 675 poems in all, including many never before anthologized, along with newly researched biographies of every poet.

Discover, in these pages, how an enslaved person like Phillis Wheatley confronted her legal status in verse and how an activist like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voiced her own passionate resistance to slavery. Read nuanced. provocative poetic meditations on identity and self-assertion stretching from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Amiri Baraka to Lucille Clifton and beyond. Experience the transformation of poetic modernism in the works of Langston Hughes. Fenton Johnson, and Jean Toomer. Understand the threads of poetic history-in movements such as the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, Black Arts, Cave Canem, Dark Noise Collective - and the complex bonds of solidarity and dialogue among poets across time and place. See how these poets have celebrated their African heritage and have connected with other communities in the African Diaspora. Enjoy the varied but distinctly black music of a tradition that draws deeply from jazz, hip-hop, and the rhythms and cadences of the pulpit the barbershop. and the street.

Taking the measure of the tradition in a single authoritative volume, AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY: 250 Years of Struggle & Song sets a new standard for a deep, authentic engagement with Black poetry and its essential expression of American genius.

This anthology is the centerpiece of Lift Every Voice: Why African American Poetry Matters, a yearlong national public humanities initiative that engages participants in a multifaceted exploration of African American poetry; with signature events in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Kansas City, and Los Angeles, regional programming in public libraries nationwide, as well as a companion website featuring video readings, commentary, programming support, and much more. Lift Every Voice is presented in partnership with The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture with generous support from The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Emerson Collective.

About the editor: Kevin Young is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, recently named a National Historic Landmark, and poetry editor of The New Yorker. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Brown (Knopf, 2018) as featured on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah; and Bunk (Graywolf, 2017), which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction, was longlisted for the National Book Award. and named a New York Times Notable Book. He is the editor of nine other volumes, including the Library of America anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (2020). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020. He will be the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture starting in January 2021.

 

AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY: 250 Years of Struggle & Song

edited by Kevin Young

Library of America; October 20, 2020

978-1-59853-666-9

U.S. $45.00 / Can. $60.00

www.africanamericanpoetry.org

Now in its fourth decade, Library of America is a nonprofit organization that champions the nation's cultural heritage by publishing America's greatest writing in authoritative new editions and providing resources for readers to explore this rich, living legacy.

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All - REVIEW

The epic history of African American women's pursuit of political power -- and how it transformed America.

Popular accounts of the suffrage crusade often begin in Seneca Falls in 1848 and end with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women’s movement did not win the vote for most Black women. To secure their rights, Black women needed a movement of their own.

In Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, prizewinning historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women’s political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond. Jones excavates the lives and work of Black women who were the vanguard of women’s rights: the pioneering lecturer Maria Stewart, abolitionist and suffrage advocate Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, community organizer Fannie Lou Hamer, and many more. She shows how these women again and again called on America to realize its best ideals as they set the pace in the quest for justice and collective liberation.

In the twenty-first century, Black women’s power at the polls and in our politics is undeniable. Vanguard reveals that this power is not at all new. It is the culmination of two centuries of dramatic struggle that transformed America for the better.

In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women's movement did not win the vote for most black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own.

"Jones has written an elegant and expansive history of Black women who sought to build political power where they could.... Jones is an assiduous scholar and an absorbing writer, turning to the archives to unearth the stories of Black women who worked alongside white suffragists only to be marginalized."
— New York Times

"In her important new book, Jones shows how African American women waged their own fight for the vote, and why their achievements speak mightily to our present moment as voters, regardless of gender or race."
— Washington Post

"Jones' book is a welcome addition to the spate of books on woman suffrage that have been published this year in honor of the Centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment. Through her rigorous scholarship and out-of-the-box perspective, she sheds new and important light on the crucial role of Black women in winning and ensuring the right to vote... Jones' scholarship addresses a gaping hole in suffrage literature."
— New York Journal of Books

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. She is president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, the oldest and largest association of women historians in the United States, and she sits on the executive board of the Organization of American Historians. Author of Birthright Citizens and All Bound Up Together.  She has written for The Washington Post, The Atlantic, USA Today, and is editor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women. She lives in Baltimore, MD. For more information on the author visit marthasjones.com

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All
by Martha S. Jones  |  2020  |  ISBN 978-1-5416-1861-9  |  339 pages
Basic Books  |  Hachette Book Group
www.basicbooks.com

The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy - REVIEW

 “The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people… American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto.”

These words, written by Albert Murray at the height of the Black Power movement, cut against the grain of their moment, announcing the arrival of a new kind of “militant integrationist.”  Against narratives of marginalization and racial pathology, Murray argued that black art and culture, particularly jazz and blues, stand at the very headwaters of the American mainstream – that “American culture” and “black American culture” were one and the same.  As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., makes clear in his foreword, Murray’s poetic voice, impassioned argumentation, and pluralistic vision have only become more urgently needed today.

Albert Murray (1916-2013) was the author of Train Whistle Guitar, The Spyglass Tree, The Seven League Boots, The Magic Keys, and Stomping the Blues, among many other works.  His collected writings are published in two volumes by Library of America.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African American Research at Harvard University and an award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, culture critic, and institution builder.

Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope - REVIEW

Reading Scripture from the perspective of Black church tradition can help us connect with a rich faith history and address the urgent issues of our times. Demonstrating an ongoing conversation between the collective Black experience and the Bible, New Testament scholar Esau McCaulley shares a personal and scholarly testament to the power and hope of Black biblical interpretation.

Growing up in the American South, Esau McCaulley knew firsthand the ongoing struggle between despair and hope that marks the lives of some in the African American context. A key element in the fight for hope was the practice of Bible interpretation coming from his traditional Black church. This ecclesial tradition is often disregarded by much of the wider church and academy, but it has something to say.

Reading While Black is a personal and scholarly testament to the power and hope of Black biblical interpretation. At a time in which some within the African American community are questioning the place of the Christian faith in the struggle for justice, New Testament scholar McCaulley argues that reading Scripture from the perspective of Black church tradition is invaluable for connecting with a rich faith history and addressing the urgent issues of our times. He advocates for a model of interpretation that involves an ongoing conversation between the collective Black experience and the Bible, in which the particular questions coming out of Black communities are given pride of place and the Bible is given space to respond by affirming, challenging, and, at times, reshaping Black concerns. McCaulley demonstrates this model with studies on how Scripture speaks to topics often overlooked by white interpreters, such as ethnicity, political protest, policing, and slavery.

Ultimately McCaulley calls the church to a dynamic theological engagement with Scripture, in which Christians of diverse backgrounds dialogue with their own social location as well as the cultures of others. Reading While Black moves the conversation forward.

Esau McCaulley (PhD, St. Andrews) is assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. He is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America where he serves as a Canon Theologian in his diocese C4SO (Churches for the Sake of Others). Esau also serves the Province of the ACNA (Anglican Church in North America) as director of the Next Generation Leadership Initiative, a province-wide effort to raise the next generation of Anglican lay and ordains leaders. Esau is a contributing writer for the New York Times and has written for numerous outlets such as Christianity Today, The Witness, and the Washington Post. His publications include Sharing in the Son’s Inheritance and The New Testament in Color (forthcoming). He is a highly sought-after speaker, hosts The Disrupters podcast, and speaks at many conferences.  Throughout his career in ministry and academia, Esau has served in a variety of contexts, including as a pastor at All Souls Episcopal/Anglican Church in Okinawa, Japan, assistant to the pastor at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Portsmouth, Virginia, and assisting priest at All Saints Episcopal Church in St. Andrews, Scotland. He is a military spouse and is married to his beautiful wife, Mandy, a pediatrician. Together, they have four wonderful children

Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope 

by Esau McCaulley

September 1, 2020 \ $20 \ 200 pages \ paperback \ ISBN: 978-0-8308-5486-8 

Contact: Karin DeHaven, academic publicity
800.846.4587 ext. 4096 or kdehaven@ivpress.com
www.ivpress.com/media

The Buck, the Black, and the Existential Hero: Refiguring The Black Male Literary Canon, 1850 to Present - REVIEW

 

            The Buck, the Black, and the Existential Hero combines philosophy, literary theory, and jazz studies with Africana studies to develop a theory of the black male literary imagination. In doing so, James B. Haile III seeks to answer fundamental aesthetic and existential questions: How does the experience of being black and male in the modern West affect the telling of a narrative, the shape or structure of a novel, the development of characters and plot lines, and the nature of criticism itself?

            Haile argues that, since black male identity is largely fluid and open to interpretation, reinterpretation, and misinterpretation, the literature of black men has developed flexibility and improvisation, which he terms the “jazz of life.” Reading this literature requires the same kind of flexibility and improvisation to understand what is being said and why, as well as what is not being said and why. The book attempts to offer this new reading experience by placing texts by well-known authors, such as Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Colson Whitehead, in conversation with texts by less well-known figures who are largely forgotten, in particular, Cecil Brown. Doing so challenges the reader to visit and revisit these novels with a new perspective on the social, political, historical, and psychic realities of black men.

“James B. Haile III has fashioned a penetrating lens through which to examine the African American male subject in literature, as well as how this subject is conventionally discussed within literary criticism and philosophy . . . This will be an important work.”
-Anthony Stewart, author of George Orwell, Doubleness, and the Value of Decency

James B. Haile III is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Rhode Island

The Buck, the Black, and the Existential Hero: Refiguring The Black Male Literary Canon, 1850 to Present by James B. Haile III
Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 978-0-8191-4166-7, 214 pages

Humane Insights: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death - REVIEW

      Americans have long viewed historical images of the mortal, wounded, and dead black body from a safe distance. Questioning the relationship between spectator and victim, Courtney R. Baker urges viewers to move beyond the safety of the “gaze” to cultivate a capacity for humane insight toward representations of human suffering. She utilizes the visual studies concept termed the “look” to examine how people articulated and recognized notions of humanity in oft-referenced moments within the African American experience: the graphic brutality of the 1834 Lalaurie affair; Without Sanctuary, the groundbreaking photographic exhibition of lynching; Emmett Till’s murder and funeral; and the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Contemplating these and other episodes, Baker traces how proponents of black freedom and dignity use the visual display of violence against the black body to galvanize action against racial injustice.

An innovative cultural study that connects visual theory to African American history, Humane Insight asserts the importance of ethics in our analysis of race and visual culture, and reveals how representations of pain can become the currency of black liberation from injustice.

“With perceptive and original analysis, Baker moves us through a series of historical moments when images of black pain and death made black suffering legible to a wider public.”
-Amy Louise Wood, author of Lynching and Spectacle; Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940

“This groundbreaking book is a corrective to recent arguments that have misunderstood the role of representations of black suffering and death in empowering a people. With insight and keen observation, it illuminates how proponents of black freedom and dignity employed difficult images to alter public opinion and spur change.”
-Maurice Berger, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Courtney R. Baker is an associate professor of American studies and Black studies at Occidental College.

Humane Insights: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death
ISBN: 978-0-252-08299-3
University of Illinois Press, 139 pages

God Help the Child: Race, Culture, and History – REVIEW

New Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s ‘God Help the Child’: Race, Culture, and History, a collection of eight essays by both seasoned Morrison scholars as well as new and rising scholars, takes on the novel in a nuanced and insightful analysis, interpreting it in relation to Morrison’s earlier work as well as locating it within ongoing debates in literary and other academic disciplines engaged with African American literature.

“New Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s ‘God Help the Child’: Race, Culture, and History is very well and quite deliberately situated within Morrison scholarship. The collection offers a wide-ranging, diverse, and fresh ray of concepts (from trauma theory, queer theory, intersectional feminism, deconstruction, postcolonial theory, etc.) in dialogue with God Help the Child. Students-both undergraduates and postgraduates-and scholars would be most interested in this book.”
- Pelagia Goulimari, author of Women’s Writing Across Cultures: Present, Past, Future

Alice Knox Eaton is professor of English and has served as chair of the Humanities Department at Springfield College. She contributed to Contested Boundaries: New Critical Essays on the Fiction of Toni Morrison, and her work has appeared in Chronicle of Higher Education and A Review of International English Literature.

Maxine Lavon Montgomery is professor of English at Florida State University. She is editor of Contested Boundaries: New Critical Essays on the Fiction of Toni Morrison; Conversations with Edwidge Danticat; and Conversations with Gloria Naylor, the later two published by University Press of Mississippi.

Shirley A. Stave is professor of English and assistant director of the Louisiana Scholars’ College at Northwestern State University. She is editor of Toni Morrison and the Bible: Contested Intertextualities and coeditor of Toni Morrison’s “A Mercy”: Critical Approaches.

University Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 978-1-4968-2888-0  165 pages

Tacit Racism - REVIEW

 
Every time we interact with another human being, we unconsciously draw on a set of expectations to guide us through the encounter. What many of us in the United States-especially White people-do not recognize is that centuries of institutional racism have inescapably molded those expectations into taken-for-granted practices that reproduce the biases in our society. These practices can shape everything from how we greet our neighbors to whether we take a second look at a resume. That is tacit racism, and it is one of the most pernicious threats to our nation.

In Tacit Racism, Anne Warfield Rawls and Waverly Duck draw on real-world examples to illustrate the many ways in which racism is coded into the everyday social expectations of Americans, in what they call Interaction Orders of Race. They argue that these interactions can produce racial inequality, whether the people involved are aware of it or not, and that by overlooking tacit racism in favor of the fiction of a “color-blind” nation, we are harming not only our society’s most disadvantaged-but endangering society itself. Ultimately, by exposing this legacy of racism in ordinary social interactions, Rawls and Duck hope to stop us from merely pretending we are a democratic society and show us how we can truly become one.

Anne Warfield Rawls is professor of sociology at Bentley University, research professor of socio-informatics at the University of Siegen, German, and senior fellow with the Yale Urban Ethnography Project. She is the author of Epistemology and Practice: Durkheim’s “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life” and the editor of Harold Garfinkle’s work Towards a Sociological Theory of Information; Seeing Sociologically; and Parsons’ Primer.

Waverly Duck is associate professor of sociology and director of urban studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing, published by the University of Chicago Press.

Tacit Racism
The University of Chicago Press, 289 pages.
ISBN: 978-0-226-70369-5

Liberty Brought Us Here: The True Story of American Slaves Who Migrated to Liberia - REVIEW

by Susan E. Lindsey 

Between 1820 and 1913, approximately 16,000 black people left the United States to start new lives in Liberia, Africa, in what would become the largest out-migration in US history. When Tolbert Major, a Kentucky slave and single father, was offered his own chance for freedom, he accepted. He, several family members, and almost seventy other people boarded the Luna on July 5, 1836. After they arrived in Liberia, Tolbert penned a letter to his former owner, Ben Major: "Dear Sir, We have all landed on the shores of Africa and got into our houses .... None of us have been taken with the fever yet." 

Drawing on extensive research and fifteen years' worth of surviving letters, author Susan E. Lindsey illuminates the trials and triumphs of building a new life in Liberia, where settlers were free, but struggled to acclimate in an unfamiliar land, coexist with indigenous groups, and overcome disease and other dangers. Liberty Brought Us Here: The True Story of American Slaves Who Migrated to Liberia explores the motives and attitudes of colonization supporters and those who lived in the colony, offering perspectives beyond the standard narrative that colonization was solely about racism or forced exile. 

Susan E. Lindsey is coauthor and editor of Speed Family Heritage Recipes, a historical cookbook of recipes from the Speed family, who built Farmington Plantation in Louisville. Lindsey has also published several essays and short stories. 

ISBN 978-0-8131-7933-9
280 pages · 6 x 9 · 21 b/w photos
Hardcover $45.00

The Collaborators: What Causes People to Abandon Their Principles in Support of a Corrupt Regime? And How do They Find Their Way Back?

The Collaborators: What Causes People to Abandon Their Principles in Support of a Corrupt Regime? And How do They Find Their Way Back?

by Anne Applebaum. The Atlantic, July 2020 (excerpt)

     This instinct has an American variation. Politicians here who have spent their lives following rules and watching their words, calibrating their language, giving pious speeches about morality and governance, may feel a sneaking admiration for someone like Trump, who breaks all the rules and gets away with it. He lies; he cheats; he extorts; he refuses to show compassion, sympathy, or empathy; he does not pretend to believe in anything or to abide by any moral code. He simulates patriotism, with flags and gestures, but he does not behave like a patriot; his campaign scrambled to get help from Russia in 2016 (“If it’s what you say, I love it,” replied Donald Trump Jr., when offered Russian “dirt” on Hillary Clinton), and Trump himself called on Russia to hack his opponent. And for some of those at the top of his administration, and of his party, these character traits might have a deep, unacknowledged appeal: If there is no such thing as moral and immoral, then everyone is implicitly released from the need to obey any rules. If the president doesn’t respect the Constitution, then why should I? If the president can cheat in elections, then why can’t I? If the president can sleep with porn stars, then why shouldn’t I?

     This, of course, was the insight of the “alt-right,” which understood the dark allure of amorality, open racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny long before many others in the Republican Party. Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher and literary critic, recognized the lure of the forbidden a century ago, writing about the deep appeal of the carnival, a space where everything banned is suddenly allowed, where eccentricity is permitted, where profanity defeats piety. The Trump administration is like that: Nothing means anything, rules don’t matter, and the president is the carnival king.

     My side might be flawed, but the political opposition is much worse. When Marshal Philippe Pétain, the leader of collaborationist France, took over the Vichy government, he did so in the name of the restoration of a France that he believed had been lost. Pétain had been a fierce critic of the French Republic, and once he was in control, he replaced its famous creed—Liberté, égalité, fraternité, or “Liberty, equality, fraternity” — with a different slogan: Travail, famille, patrie, or “Work, family, fatherland.” Instead of the “false idea of the natural equality of man,” he proposed bringing back “social hierarchy” — order, tradition, and religion. Instead of accepting modernity, Pétain sought to turn back the clock.

     By Pétain’s reckoning, collaboration with the Germans was not merely an embarrassing necessity. It was crucial, because it gave patriots the ability to fight the real enemy: the French parliamentarians, socialists, anarchists, Jews, and other assorted leftists and democrats who, he believed, were undermining the nation, robbing it of its vitality, destroying its essence. “Rather Hitler than Blum,” the saying went — Blum having been France’s socialist (and Jewish) prime minister in the late 1930s. One Vichy minister, Pierre Laval, famously declared that he hoped Germany would conquer all of Europe. Otherwise, he asserted, “Bolshevism would tomorrow establish itself everywhere.”

     To Americans, this kind of justification should sound very familiar; we have been hearing versions of it since 2016. The existential nature of the threat from “the left” has been spelled out many times. “Our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature,” wrote Michael Anton, in “The Flight 93 Election.” The FoxNews anchor Laura Ingraham has warned that “massive demographic changes” threaten us too: “In some parts of the country it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore.” This is is the Vichy logic: the nation is dead or dying—so anything you can do to restore it is justifed. Whatever criticisms might be made of Trump, whatever harm he has done to democracy and the rule of law, whatever corrupt deals he might make while in the White House—all of these shrink in comparison to the horrific alternative: the liberalism, socialism, moral decadence, demographic change, and cultural degradation that would have been the inevitable result of Hillary Clinton’s presidency.

     The three most important members of Trump’s Cabinet—Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William Barr—are all profoundly shaped by Vichyite apocalyptic thinking. All three are clever enough to understand what Trumpism really means, that it has nothing to do with God or faith, that it is self-serving, greedy, and unpatriotic. Nevertheless, a former member of the administration (one of the few who did decide to resign) told me that both Pence and Pompeo “have convinced themselves that they are in a biblical moment.” All of the things they care about— outlawing abortion and same-sex marriage, and (though this is never said out loud) maintaining a white majority in America — are under threat. Time is growing short. They believe that “we are approaching the Rapture, and this is a moment of deep religious signicance.” Barr, in a speech at Notre Dame, has also described his belief that “militant secularists” are destroying America, that “irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith.” Whatever evil Trump does, whatever he damages or destroys, at least he enables Barr, Pence, and Pompeo to save America from a far worse fate. If you are convinced we are living in the End Times, then anything the president does can be forgiven.

Race to the Bottom - How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics - REVIEW

Race to the Bottom by LaFleur Stephen-Dougan

   African American voters are a key demographic to the modern Democratic base, and conventional wisdom has it that there is political cost to racialized “dog whistles,” especially for Democratic candidates. However, politicians from both parties and from all racial backgrounds continually appeal to negative racial attitudes for political gain.

   Challenging what we think we know about race and politics, LaFleur Stephen-Dougan argues that candidates across the racial and political spectrum engage in “racial distancing,” or using negative racial appeals to communicate to racially moderate and conservative whites – the overwhelming majority of white – that they will not disrupt the racial status quo.  Race to the Bottom closely examines empirical data on racialized partisan stereotypes to show that engaging in racial distancing through political platforms that do not address the needs of nonwhite communities and charged rhetoric that targets African Americans, immigrants, and others can be politically advantageous. Radicalized communication persists as a well-worn campaign strategy because it has real electoral value for both white and black politicians seeking to broaden their coalitions. Stephen-Dougan reveals that claims of racial progress have been overstated as out politicians are incentivized to employ racial prejudices at the expense of the most marginalized in our society.

   “Stephen-Dougan lays out a novel theoretical framework for understanding how candidates and politicians might strategically use racial messaging to gain the support of white voters. Departing from earlier research on racial priming, which examined the use of racial messaging primarily by white Republican candidates, Stephen-Dougan argues that the electoral incentives that exist for candidates to engage in racially inflammatory messaging are so great that even candidates of color running in these districts often find racially derogatory campaign appeals effective. This title makes an important contribution to the study of American political behavior and race and ethnic politics.” Ismail K. White, Duke University

LaFleur

   Stephen-Dougan is assistant professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University.