New Books in African American Studies

Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole blazed paths that salvaged socially conscious rap at a pivotal time in history. Conscious rap, a subgenre of hip-hop music that engages in dialogue about social and political issues and often challenges systems of oppression, ascended with pioneers like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Public Enemy, Ice Cube, A Tribe Called Quest, and other acts at the helm. But in recent decades, it lost much of its favor in pop culture and mainstream hip-hop. In Raps of Resistance: How Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole Reignited a Hip-Hop Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2026) Jeremy C. McCool and Earl Hopkins explore the evolution of the subgenre and chronicle the rise of Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole. The two rappers are synonymous with chart-topping hits and platinum-selling albums, but their confessional poetry and soul-stirring lyrics establish them as the two biggest names in conscious rap within the new millennia. While many new artists have abandoned the subgenre in exchange for music trends linked to instantaneous success and acclaim, Cole and Lamar have preserved the lyrical prowess and revolutionary spirit of their hip-hop forefathers. They tackle issues such as drug addiction, poverty, systemic racism, and domestic violence while still appealing to mainstream audiences. McCool and Hopkins provide a fascinating look into Lamar and Cole's ascension: their humble upbringings, their past personal and musical challenges, and their eventual rise to becoming the two most prolific rap artists of their time.

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Youth workers are essential to the fabric of society. Schools, families, and many of our social institutions rely heavily on their work, yet their contributions often go unrecognized. Laboring in the Shadows: Precarity and Promise in Black Youth Work (Stanford UP, 2026) explores the critical role of Black youth workers, especially in the lives of vulnerable youth, and the challenges they face in their unstable, underappreciated position. Bianca J. Baldridge situates the experiences of Black youth workers within the broader context of anti-Blackness and historical inequities. Drawing on rich interview data from across the United States, Baldridge offers a nuanced analysis of how the precarity of this work—marked by high turnover rates, low wages, and housing insecurity—compounds the challenges these workers face. She highlights how Black youth workers resist these structural harms by adopting and implementing innovative pedagogical practices alongside practices of "freedom dreaming" and joy as forms of resistance and pathways to agency for youth despite their precarious roles. Positioning Black youth workers within a broader network of informal care workers in the United States, Baldridge underscores the significance, fragility, precarity, and power of these dedicated professionals, their essential work, and the possibilities they create for youth.

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Saladin Ambar, a political scientist and senior scholar at the Center on the American Governor at Rutgers University Eagleton Institute of Politics, has authored a fascinating and propulsive new book focusing on Abraham Lincoln’s 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. The book, Murder on the Mississippi: The Shocking Crimes that Shaped Abraham Lincoln (Diversion Books, 2025), focuses on the violent events that transpired in the 1830s that contributed to Abraham Lincoln’s political thought and this important speech that he gave long before he became a political figure in the United States. The title of the speech, On the Perpetuations of Our Political Institutions, is a bit of an interesting feint, since Lincoln spends most of the speech explaining that American citizens need to understand their own role as the foundation of those very political institutions, and they need to take on what he calls a “civic religion” to imbue the country with a reverence for the laws and the Constitution. Ambar takes a two-pronged approach to the narrative of this book, and both are important to our understanding of the speech itself and Abraham Lincoln’s political thinking. Threaded throughout the book is an ongoing analysis of Lincoln’s thinking in terms of the content of the Young Men’s Lyceum speech, and, in order to best understand that thinking, Ambar also traces the historical incidents, particularly the lawless murders of both black and white individuals, that are going on around Lincoln, in Kentucky, in Illinois, in Missouri, and also further south, in Mississippi. The twin issues of mob violence and slavery shape Lincoln’s words in 1838, but they do so in different ways. This speech is not taking on slavery directly, but slavery haunts the narrative of the speech. Mob violence, on the other hand, drove Lincoln towards writing and delivering this speech, and Ambar takes the reader through the key episodes that shape and contribute to Lincoln’s thinking.
In Murder on the Mississippi, Ambar digs into the various incidents of mob violence, in different places along the Mississippi River. He starts with the five white gamblers who were killed in Vicksburg, Mississippi. This story, along with another group of white individuals murdered in Mississippi—because they may have had a hand in helping a Black insurrection—are among the lesser known events that contributed to Lincoln’s Lyceum speech. In both of these Mississippi incidents, the individuals were white, but they existed on the outside of what was considered appropriate or acceptable behavior within the societies where they were living. Ambar notes that “it is Lincoln’s speech that stands alone for connecting the fears of Black rebellion and moral decline with racial treason.”[1] The next section of the book focuses on the violent lynchings of Francis McIntosh (to whom the book is dedicated) and Elijah P. Lovejoy, and how McIntosh’s gruesome death among a crowd numbering in the hundreds “galvanized the forces of abolition like other.”[2] Lovejoy’s death stems from his protests about McIntosh’s lynching, and these deaths transpired in much closer proximity to Lincoln himself, taking place in southern Illinois and Missouri. These events, detailed in Murder on the Mississippi, help us to understand the various dimensions of Lincoln’s speech in 1838 to the Springfield audience. They also contribute to a broader understanding of Lincoln’s perspective on the American republic, the fragility of the commitment to the law and political institutions as established by the Constitution, and the ways in which race and slavery undergird civil society in the United States.
Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social
[1] Saladin Ambar. Murder on the Mississippi: The Shocking Crimes that Shaped Abraham Lincoln. Diversion Books, 2025, p. xxxiii
[2] Ibid.

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Gentrification is often considered through a visual lens, where development, progress, and neighborhood changes are observed. But what does gentrification sound like?
In Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC, (Oxford UP, 2025), author Allie Martin engages this question in Washington, DC, asking how Black people experience gentrification as a sonic, racialized process. Drawing from music, interviews, soundscape recordings, and more, Martin argues that gentrification ultimately serves to silence some voices and amplify others. Martin employs a combination of methodologies from ethnomusicology, Black Studies, geography, and digital humanities to make audible the ways in which gentrification disrupts and disturbs community. Throughout, she centers Black feminist listening practices, thinking through digital modes of listening and imagining emancipatory soundscapes.
Intersectional Listening benefits from an innovative combination of sources, from interviews and soundwalks to passive acoustic recording and machine learning. Martin shares compelling stories of music and sound in the nation’s capital, and in doing so shifts conversations about how we listen to Black life. By foregrounding how processes of gentrification systematically seek to devalue, mishear, and ultimately silence Black possibility, Intersectional Listening posits how we can challenge ourselves to refute the consistent mishearing of Black people in Washington, DC and beyond.​
Allie Martin is an ethnomusicologist and artist from Prince George’s County, Maryland. She is an assistant professor in the Music Department and the Cluster for Digital Humanities and Social Engagement. Her work is attuned to questions of race, sound and power. Her first book, Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC, explores the relationships between race, sound, and gentrification in the nation's capital. Allie is the director of the Black Sound Lab, a research environment dedicated to amplifying Black life and decriminalizing Black sound through digital practice.

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The Rediscovery of George "Nash" Walker: : The Price of Black Stardom in Jim Crow America (SUNY Press, 2025) is the first biography dedicated to the life and cultural contributions of this actor, writer, and producer who revolutionized Black American theatre during the early twentieth century. In 1892, Walker left his hometown with a medicine show and quickly formed a partnership with comedian Bert Williams that would last nearly eighteen years. Under the moniker of “The Two Real Coons,” Williams and Walker used their comedy to erode the stereotyped White image of minstrel-style “cooning.” Their theatrical company produced many popular plays, including Clorindy/A Lucky Coon (1899–1900), Policy Players (1900–1901), Sons of Ham (1901–1902), In Dahomey (1902–1905), Abyssinia (1905–1906), Bandanna Land (1907–1909), and Mr. Lode of Koal (1909–1910), even performing on Broadway and abroad. An activist at heart, Walker insisted that audiences receive carefully curated Black entertainment, told from a uniquely Afro-American perspective. Unfortunately, Walker contracted syphilis and was forced to retire in 1909, marking the end of the first golden age of Black theatre. Despite his landmark contributions, Walker’s story has been largely forgotten. Drawing on archival resources, newspaper accounts, memoirs, oral histories, and manifestos written by Walker, this book celebrates the accomplishments of the vanguard generation of Black artists who were active between the close of the Civil War and the start of World War I.
Daniel Atkinson’s research and commitment to the legacy of George Walker and his generation is deep and authentic. Listen in on this fantastic conversation and check out also previous episodes with Dr. Cheryl Thompson and Es-pranza Humphry, both scholars of this era. And when you’re finished, head over to the Additions to the Archive Substack where we continued our conversation.
Daniel E. Atkinson is an independent scholar who earned his doctorate in ethnomusicology from the University of Washington where he specialized in Afro-American music and culture. You can find Daniel on Instagram and LinkedIn.
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