Faculty Bookshelf

In Moving Home, Sandra Gunning examines nineteenth-century African diasporic travel writing to expand and complicate understandings of the Black Atlantic. Gunning draws on the writing of missionaries, abolitionists, entrepreneurs, and explorers whose work challenges the assumptions that travel writing is primarily associated with leisure or scientific research. For instance, Yoruba ex-slave turned Anglican bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther played a role in the Christianization of colonial Nigeria. Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a formerly enslaved girl "gifted" to Queen Victoria, traveled...

From Brazil to Germany, New York to Ghana, Dialogues of Dispersal examines intersections of gender and sexuality within Afro-diasporic communities.

• Considers communities in Brazil, the Caribbean, Germany, the UK, the US, and West Africa, and how they overlap.
  
• Contains innovative analyses of knowledge production, globalization, popular culture, identity, colonialism, maternalism, dress, and transnational networks.
  
• Features interdisciplinary work by both established and emerging scholars.
  
• Acknowledges the accomplishments...

This teaching edition of Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1901 novel about racial conflict in a Southern town features an extensive selection of materials that place the work in its historical context. Organized thematically, these materials explore caste, gender, and race after Reconstruction; postbellum laws and lynching; the 1898 Wilmington riot upon which the narrative is based; and the fin de siecle culture of segregation. The thematic sections are rich with documents such as letters, photographs, editorials, speeches, legal decisions, journalism, and essays from leading periodicals...

In the late nineteenth century, the stereotype of the black male as sexual beast functioned for white supremacists as an externalized symbol of social chaos against which all whites would unite for the purpose of national renewal. The emergence of this stereotype in American culture and literature during and after Reconstruction was related to the growth of white-on-black violence, as white lynch mobs acted in “defence” of white womanhood, the white family, and white nationalism. This book investigates American literary encounters with the conditions, processes, and consequences of such violence...

On May 9, 1990, a bottle of Jack Daniels, a ring with letter, a Purple Heart and Bronze Star, a baseball, a photo album, an ace of spades, and a pie were some of the objects left at the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial. For Kristin Hass, this eclectic sampling represents an attempt by ordinary Americans to come to terms with a multitude of unnamed losses as well as to take part in the ongoing debate of how this war should be remembered. Hass explores the restless memory of the Vietnam War and an American public still grappling with its commemoration. In doing so it considers the ways Americans ...

Blunt Instruments is a field guide to the memorials, museums, and practices that commemorate white supremacy in the United States—and how to reimagine a more deeply shared cultural infrastructure for the future.

Cultural infrastructure has been designed to maintain structures of inequality, and while it doesn’t seem to be explicitly about race, it often is. Blunt Instruments helps readers identify, contextualize, and name elements of our everyday landscapes and cultural practices that are designed to seem benign or natural but which, in fact, work tirelessly to tell...

An analysis that traces the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity.

Technoprecarious advances a new analysis for tracing how precarity unfolds across disparate geographical sites and cultural practices in the digital age. Digital technologies—whether apps like Uber, built on flexible labor or platforms like Airbnb that shift accountability to users—have assisted in consolidating the wealth and influence of a small number of players. These platforms have also exacerbated increasingly insecure conditions of work and life for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities...

This book examines Zoombombing, the racist harassment and hate speech on Zoom.

While most accounts refer to Zoombombing as simply a new style or practice of online trolling and harassment in the wake of increased videoconferencing since the outbreak of COVID-19, this volume examines it as a specifically racialized and gendered phenomenon that targets Black people and communities with racialized and gendered harassment. Racist Zoombombing brings together histories of online racism and algorithmic warfare with in-depth interviews by Black users on their experiences. The...

The last sixteen years of James Baldwin’s life (1971–1987) unfolded in a village in the south of France, in a sprawling house nicknamed “Chez Baldwin.” In Me and My House Magdalena J. Zaborowska employs Baldwin’s home space as a lens through which to expand his biography and explore the politics and poetics of blackness, queerness, and domesticity in his com‑ plex and underappreciated later works. Zaborowska shows how the themes of dwelling and black queer male sexuality in The Welcome Table, Just Above My Head, and If Beale Street Could Talk directly stem from Chez Baldwin’s influence on the...

What difference does law make in immigration policymaking? Since the 1970s, networks of progressive attorneys in both the U.S. and France have attempted to use litigation to assert rights for non-citizens. Yet judicial engagement - while numerically voluminous - remains doctrinally curtailed. This study offers new insights into the constitutive role of law in immigration policymaking by focusing on the legal frames, narratives, and performances forged through action in court. Challenging the conventional wisdom that "cause litigation" has little long term impact on policymaking unless...

Dancers as Diplomats chronicles the role of dance and dancers in American cultural diplomacy. In the early decades of the Cold War and the twenty-first century, American dancers toured the globe on tours sponsored by the U.S. State Department. Dancers as Diplomats tells the story of how these tours shaped and sometimes reimagined ideas of the United States in unexpected, often sensational circumstances - pirouetting in Moscow as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded and dancing in Burma shortly before the country held its first democratic elections. Based on more than seventy interviews with dancers...

Invisibility and Influence: A Literary History of AfroLatinidades 
(University of Texas Press, 2024)

A rich literary study of AfroLatinx life writing, this book traces how AfroLatinxs have challenged their erasure in the United States and Latin America over the last century.

Invisibility and Influence demonstrates how a century of AfroLatinx writers in the United States shaped life writing, including memoir, collective autobiography, and other formats, through depictions of a wide range of “Afro-Latinidades.” Using a woman-of-color feminist...

A special issue of The Black Scholar

Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades convenes social commentary and scholarly critiques on the post-soul aesthetic’s ideological entanglement with Afro-Latino subjectivity, expressive culture, and political thought in the US and Latin America. Historical and cultural contiguity provide the rationale for this long overdue intervention. The post-soul condition and sustained interest in Afro-Latinidad by US scholars emerged simultaneously in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power/Black Arts movements. Recognizing this harmonic convergence, the co-guest...