New Books in African American Studies New Books Network

In Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated US City: Designs for Vitality (Bloomsbury, 2022), Frederick Klaits compares how members of one majority white and two African American churches in Buffalo, New York receive knowledge from God about their own and others' life circumstances.
In the Pentecostal Christian faith, believers say that they acquire divinely inspired insights by developing a "relationship with God." But what makes these insights appear necessary? This book offers a novel approach to this question, arguing that the inspirations believers receive from God lead them to take critical stances on what they regard as ordinary understandings of space, time, care, and personal value. Using a shared Pentecostal language, believers occupying different positions within racial, class, and gender formations reflect in divergent ways on God's designs. In the process, they engage critically with late liberal imaginaries of eventfulness and vitality to envision possibilities of life in a highly unequal society.
This text incorporates commentaries on Klaits' ethnography by LaShekia Chatman and Michael Richbart, junior scholars who have also studied and been part of Pentecostal communities in Buffalo.
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In Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction (Ohio State UP, 2024), Jerry Rafiki Jenkins examines four types of human monsters that frequently appear in Black American horror fiction--the monsters of White rage, respectability, not-ness, and serial killing. Arguing that such monsters represent specific ideologies of American anti-Blackness, Jenkins shows that despite their various motivations for harming and killing Black people, these monsters embody the horrors that emerge when Black American is disassociated from American. Although these monsters of anti-Blackness are dangerous because they can terrorize Black people with virtual impunity, their "anti-Black sadism," as Jenkins calls it, is what makes them repulsive. 
Jenkins examines a variety of these monstrous forms in Tananarive Due's The Between, Victor LaValle's The Changeling, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death, and many other works. While these monsters and the texts that they populate ask us to think about the role that anti-Blackness plays in being or becoming American, they also offer intellectual resources that Black and non-Black people might use to combat the everyday versions of human monstrosity.
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The first podcast in this series was inspired by a documentary film made in 2014 called “Black Analysts Speak” as well as some of the findings in the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis published in 2023. It also considered the reasons why racism has persisted so long in America including perspectives from a psychoanalytic vantage point. Mechanism of defense, particularly projective identification was discussed as one specific reason why change has been slow. The host and co-host also talked about the some of the reasons why it is important for white people to listen to the Black experience. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s book, Where do we go from here, Chaos or Community was also considered because of its relevance today.
Dr. Karyne E. Messina is a psychologist and child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst. In addition to maintaining a full-time private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland, she is on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland which is part of Johns Hopkins Medicine. She is a podcast host for the New Books Network and chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Scholarship and Writing section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA). She is a member of the AI Council of APsA (CAI). She has also written and edited six books. Her topics focus on applying psychoanalytic ideas to real-world issues we all face in our complex world.
Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is a child and adolescent supervising psychoanalyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies in Houston, Texas, where she also holds the position of President of Board of Directors. Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is also a faculty member in the Child and Adult Training Programs. In addition, she provides clinical supervision for the State of Texas licensing board, as well as supervision as a Registered Play Therapist-Supervisor with the Association for Play Therapy. She is also the chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Diversity section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA).
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Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions: African American Women Radical Activists (U Georgia Press, 2024) explores the significant contributions of African American women radical activists from 1955 to 1995. It examines the 1961 case of African American working-class self-defense advocate Mae Mallory, who traveled from New York to Monroe, North Carolina, to provide support and weapons to the Negroes with Guns Movement. Accused of kidnapping a Ku Klux Klan couple, she spent thirteen months in a Cleveland jail, facing extradition. African American women radical activists Ethel Azalea Johnson of Negroes with Guns, Audrey Proctor Seniors of the banned New Orleans NAACP, the Trotskyist Workers World Party, Ruthie Stone, and Clarence Henry Seniors of Workers World founded the Monroe Defense Committee to support Mallory. Mae’s daughter, Pat, aged sixteen also participated, and they all bonded as family. When the case ended, they joined the Tanzanian, Grenadian, and Nicaraguan World Revolutions. Using her unique vantage point as Audrey Proctor Seniors’s daughter, Paula Marie Seniors blends personal accounts with theoretical frameworks of organic intellectual, community feminism, and several other theoretical frameworks in analyzing African American radical women’s activism in this era.
Essential biographical and character narratives are combined with an analysis of the social and political movements of the era and their historical significance. Seniors examines the link between Mallory, Johnson, and Proctor Seniors’s radical activism and their connections to national and international leftist human rights movements and organizations. She asks the underlying question: Why did these women choose radical activism and align themselves with revolutionary governments, linking Black human rights to world revolutions?
Seniors’s historical and personal account of the era aims to recover Black women radical activists’ place in history. Her innovative research and compelling storytelling broaden our knowledge of these activists and their political movements.
Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.
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Linked by declarations of emancipation within the same five-year period, two countries shared human rights issues on two distinct continents. In When Emancipation Came: The End of Enslavement on a Southern Plantation and a Russian Estate (McFarland, 2022), readers will find a case-study comparison of the emancipation of Russian serfs on the Yazykovo Selo estate and American slaves at the Palmyra Plantation. Although state policies and reactions may not follow the same paths in each area, there were striking thematic parallels. These findings add to our understanding of what happens throughout an emancipation process in which the state grants freedom, and therefore speaks to the universality of the human experience. 
Despite the political and economic differences between the two countries, as well as their geographic and cultural distances, this book re-conceptualizes emancipation and its aftermath in each country: from a history that treats each as a separate, self-contained story to one with a unified, global framework.
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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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