New Books in African American Studies

Ella Jenkins (1924–2024) was one of the most influential musicians of
the twentieth century, although many people have never heard of her. A
pioneer in children’s music and an innovative educator, Jenkins recorded
forty albums and influenced countless children and adults over a
sixty-year career. Gayle Wald places Jenkins’s life and work within the
larger contexts of the civil rights movement, the folk revival, and the
changing worlds of children’s education and entertainment in This is Rhythm: Ella Jenkins, Children’s Music, and the Long Civil Rights Movement (University
of Chicago Press, 2025). Committed to civil rights, Jenkins infused her
beliefs in social justice and our shared humanity into her work with
children and her compositions. She viewed music as a way for children to
come together and establish connections with each other rather than as a
gateway to musical achievement or literacy. Based on dozens of
interviews including with Jenkins and her life partner Bernadelle
Richter, Wald traces Jenkins’s life from her childhood in segregated
Chicago, her involvement with the integrated folk music scene, and her
successful career as a music educator. This is Rhythm was given special recognition by the 2026 Pattis Family Foundation Chicago Book Award.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In Contested Continent: The Struggle for America, c.1000-1680 (Oxford University Press, 2026), the newest installment of the acclaimed Oxford History of the United States series, Peter C. Mancall
recounts how North America was forged from the experiences of millions
of Indigenous women and men as well as Europeans and Africans. This
history spans the continent from the North Atlantic to the West Indies
and includes the entire Atlantic basin, telling a new story about the
origins of major aspects of American culture. He illuminates the rise of
a booming trans-Atlantic economy based on the extraction of abundant
American natural resources; the central role that European migrants and
their descendants played in the enslavement of Africans and the
displacement of Indigenous peoples; and the spread of self-governing
polities where many enjoyed religious freedom. None of these
developments was inevitable. Conflicts broke out frequently as different
peoples battled over precious resources. Europeans' appetites for
material gain and expanding Christendom brought horrific consequences
for those brutalized, enslaved, and vulnerable to infectious
diseases. This is a sweeping history of developments crucial to the
eventual founding of the United States. Contested Continent underscores
the titanic struggles between the peoples who had populated the
Americas for centuries and the migrants from the Old World who initiated
changes that created a New World that offered boundless opportunities
for some and crushed the aspirations of others.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

What does Blackness look like? In Forms of Blackness: Race and Visibility in the French-Speaking World (Duke University Press, 2026),
Cécile Bishop argues that this seemingly simple question has no
straightforward answer. Instead of treating race as something
immediately visible, she explores how Blackness emerges through the
interplay of perception, language, and history.

A central theme of the book is that visibility is never neutral.
Through examples ranging from photographs of the Liberation of Paris to
works of art such as Portrait of a Black Woman, Bishop shows that
Blackness cannot be reduced to what is seen. Instead, she introduces the
idea of Blackness as form, emphasizing the importance of representation, opacity, and aesthetic experience.

Engaging with thinkers such as Édouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon,
Bishop invites readers to rethink the assumption that seeing is the same
as knowing. Forms of Blackness offers a thoughtful and original account of how race is shaped not simply by appearance, but by the ways we learn to see.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an
Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of
religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African
diasporic communities in the Netherlands.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Gullah-Geechee Diasporas: Knowledge, Culture, and Black Lowcountry Legacies (University of South Carolina Press, 2026) counters romantic portrayals of Gullah-Geechee culture as a static, geographically isolated remnant of the past. Across eight interdisciplinary essays, the book’s contributors trace an arc, described in time and space, from pre-Middle Passage Africa through the Caribbean and coastal United States into the interior South and beyond. They consider how Gullah-Geechee cultural traditions are simultaneously rooted in the physical Lowcountry homeland and represent a dynamic cultural ethos that is not bounded by geography and has shaped Black life across North America and the Caribbean Basin. Together, these essays reveal the resilience and adaptability of people whose history defies myths of isolation and immobility. Gullah-Geechee Diasporas is a fresh framework for understanding African American cultural origins, migrations, and transformations.

Dr. Muhammad Fraser-Rahim is associate professor of Intelligence and Security Studies at The Citadel. He is the author of America’s Other Muslims and Gullah Geechee Muslims in America. You can find him on Instagram and LinkedIn.Dr. Elizabeth J. West is professor of English and the John B. and Elena Diaz-Verson Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University. Her books include Finding Francis and African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction. She can be found online at Instagram and LinkedIn.

Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Dan Rood’s In the Shadow of the Great House (W.W.
Norton & Co., 2026) is one of the first contemporary books to focus
on the primary engine of slavery, race, and capitalism in this country:
the plantation. The plantation was invented on the small Atlantic
island of São Tomé in the 1500s, and the island also became the site,
soon enough, of the first slave revolt. The brutal technology was then
perfected in Barbados, where planters worked tens of thousands of
African captives to their deaths in sugar factories. But it was in the
United States, Rood shows, that the plantation found its most powerful
manifestations. In Virginia, Carolina, and then the Deep South,
successive plantation revolutions transformed slavery into a much more
rigid and oppressive institution. Incomparably wealthy planters now
insisted on a rightless, eternally available, “increasing” source of
labor, and in the process reinvented human bondage and stamped it onto a
single race. But the plantation did not die after the Civil War. It
metastasized. From the advent of sharecropping in the late nineteenth
century to the rise of cotton in mid-twentieth century California to
today’s chicken processing plants, the plantation has cast a long shadow
over American life. Rood further documents the “dark retreats” carved
out of plantation life by the enslaved. It was the enslaved who offered
the most clear-eyed understanding of what the plantation behemoths told
us, and still tell us, about our country.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies