New Books in African American Studies New Books Network

In Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science (University of California Press, 2024), Duana Fullwiley has penned an intimate chronicle of laboratory life in the genomic age. She presents many of the influential scientists at the forefront of genetics who have redefined how we practice medicine and law and understand ancestry in an era of big data and waning privacy. Exceedingly relatable and human, the scientists in these pages often struggle for visibility, teeter on the tightrope of inclusion, and work tirelessly to imprint the future. As they actively imagine a more equal and just world, they often find themselves ensnared in reproducing timeworn conceits of race and racism that can seed the same health disparities they hope to resolve. Nothing dynamic can live for long as a blank slate, an innocent tabula rasa. But how the blank slate of the once-raceless human genome became one of racial differences, in various forms of what Fullwiley calls the tabula raza, has a very specific and familiar history--one that has cycled through the ages in unexpected ways.
Duana Fullwiley is an anthropologist of science and medicine at Stanford University. She is the author of the award-winning book The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa.
Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).
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Since the 1990s, many of Houston’s African American residents have customized cars and customized the sound of hip hop. Cars called “slabs” swerve a slow path through the city streets, banging out a distinctive local music that paid tribute to those very same streets and neighborhoods.
Folklorist and Houston native Langston Collin Wilkins studies slab culture and the “screwed and chopped” hip hop that rattles the slabs and serves as the culture’s soundtrack. Wilkins shows us how sonic creativity turns a space—a collection of buildings and streets—into a place that is known, respected, and loved.
In this show we hear the slow, muddy, psychedelic sounds of DJ Screw and The Screwed Up Click, including rappers such as Lil Keke, Fat Pat, Big Hawk, and UGK–as well as songs by Geto Boys, Willie Dee, Swishahouse, Point Blank, Biggie Smalls, and MC T Tucker & DJ Irv.
 
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Housing experts and activists have long described the foundational role race has played in the creation of mass homeownership. This book insistently tracks the inverse: the role of mass homeownership in changing the definition, perception, and value of race.
In The Residential Is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership (Stanford University Press, 2024) Dr. Adrienne Brown reveals how mass homeownership remade the rubrics of race, from the early cases realtors made for homeownership's necessity to white survival through to the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Reading real estate archives and appraisal textbooks alongside literary works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, and Thomas Pynchon, Dr. Brown goes beyond merely identifying the discriminatory mechanisms that the real estate industry used to forestall black homeownership. Rather, she reveals that redlining and other forms of racial discrimination are perceptual modes, changing what it means to sense race and assign it value.
Resituating residential discrimination as a key moment within the history of perception and aesthetics as well as of policy, demography, and democracy, we get an even more expansive picture of both its origins and its impacts. This book discovers that the racial honing of perception on the block—seeing race like a bureaucrat, an appraiser, and a homeowner—has become central to the functioning of the residential itself.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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In this special episode, we talk to two authors about the role of financial institutions in enslavement. Sharon Ann Murphy, associate professor of history, argues in Banking on Slavery Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States (University of Chicago Press, 2023) that Southern banks’ willingness to use enslaved people as loan collateral led to the exponential growth of Southern enslavement during the 1820-30s. In filmmaker, producer, and author David Montero’s book, The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations (Hatchette Book Group, 2024), he follows Wall Street bankers and large Northern banks were critical to the financing of slavery and, in turn, who massed incredible wealth from enslavement.
Dr. N’Kosi Oates is a curator and assistant professor. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at DrNKosiOates.
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In Vibe: The Sound and Feeling of Black Life in the American South (University of Mississippi Press, 2023), Corey J. Miles narrates how southern Black sound, feeling, and being is constantly policed, surveilled, and criminalized. In doing so, he re-narrates the region as the "carceral South," to capture the ways people in the South and beyond can feel the emotional weight of the criminalization of Blackness. Where exactly does the South begin and end? Current maps are too rigid to account for the ways Black people have built the South while being simultaneously excluded from it. 
Drawing from the different ways Black artists in the 2-5-2 area code in North Carolina use "vibe" as a mode of knowing and communication, Miles illustrates how Black feeling and unfeeling offer entry points into the contemporary South that challenge static and monolithic notions of the region. Placing the local artists in conversation with other southern cultural creators such as 2 Chainz, Rod Wave, and Rapsody, these ethnographic narratives demonstrate that there are multiple Souths, with overlapping and distinct commitments to working through pain, sound, and belonging. Pain music, a subgenre of trap music, is used to take the listener to moments of violence to allow them to hear the desires, anger, and silences that bind Black life in community. Through conceptions of ratchet, hood, and ghetto, Black artists turn away from respectable images and unmap the South. In trap music, they move the South to a space where multiple modes of being find respect and care.
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The largest slave uprising in the 18th century British Caribbean was also a node of the global conflict called the Seven Year’s War, though it isn’t usually thought of that way. In the first few days of the quarantine and our current geopolitical and epidemiological shitshow, John and Elizabeth spoke with Vincent Brown, who recently published Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Harvard UP, 2019), centered on a group of enslaved West Africans, known under the term “Coromantees” who were the chief protagonists in this war.
Tracing the vectors of this war within the Caribbean, the North Atlantic, and West Africa, Vince shows us how these particular enslaved Africans, who are caught in the gears of one of human history’s most dehumanizing institutions, constrained by repressive institutions, social-inscribed categories of differences and brutal force, operate tactically within and across space in complex and cosmopolitan ways.
Vince locates his interest in warfare (as an object of study) in emergence of new world order and disorder through the Gulf Wars. His attention to routes and mobilities he credits to an epidemiological turn of mind–perhaps inherited from his father Willie Brown, a medical microbiologist now retired from UCSD.
The idea of the vector shaped his first book as well. Vince’s “cartographic narrative” “A Slave Revolt in Jamaica: 1760-1761” and the film he produced with director Llewellyn Smith, Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (which traces African studies and anthropology’s understanding of cultural movements from between Africa and the Americas) also explore these burning questions.
Along the way, Vince discusses C.L.R. James’ notion of conflict, war and global connectedness in The Black Jacobins and the ways that categories of social difference both are constituted by global capital (reminding us of our conversation on caste, class and whiteness with Ajantha Subramanian) and those bumper stickers from the early 1980s in which the Taliban were the good guys.
Mentioned in this episode:


Rambo III (1988)


The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by himself (1789)

Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688)

Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (2002)

C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938)

John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic World-1400-1800 (1992)


Derrick ‘Black X’ Robinson on his advocacy to make Tacky a national hero in Jamaica

Black X walks barefoot across Jamaica to make Tacky a national hero


Recallable Books:

Marlon James, The Book of Night Women (2009)

John Tutino, Making a New World (2011)

Angel Palerm, The First Economic World-System (1980)


Listen and Read Here: 34 The Caribbean and Vectors of Warfare: Vincent Brown
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