New Books in African American Studies

Revolutionary New York: 250 Years of Social Change (SUNY Press, 2026), edited by Bruce Dearstyne and published by SUNY Press, examines what the volume calls the “unfinished revolutions” of the Empire State. In sixteen essays by a varied cast of authors, the book explores efforts to achieve what the editor describes as the full promise of the revolution. Central to the book are ordinary New Yorkers who faced great challenges, such as the Oneida who tried to maintain sovereignty in the era of the American Revolution, women winning the vote, and African American soldiers who served in the United States Army in World War I. Together, Dearstyne writes, they tell a story of “the two-and-a-half century struggle to realize the Revolution’s ideals and bring increased freedom and opportunities to marginalized populations.”

Dearstyne is the editor of this volume and the author of several books, including The Spirit of New York: Defining Events in the Empire State’s History and The Crucible of Public Policy: New York Courts in the Progressive Era.

Robert Snyder, interviewing for the New Books Network and the Gotham Center for New York Cit History, is professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers (Cornell, 2025), winner of the Fiorello LaGuardia Book Prize. [email protected]
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Offering a novel approach to contemporary landscape studies, Explosivity: Following What Remains (U Minnesota Press, 2025) unearths the hidden legacies of violence that have shaped the physical and cultural environment of the San Francisco Bay area. As he sifts through the historical debris of previous centuries, Dr. Javier Arbona-Homar analyzes a series of explosions that took place between 1866 and 2011 to call attention to the scattered remnants of militarism and racialized capitalism embedded in the region’s geography.

From incidents involving nineteenth-century explosives manufacturing and World War II munitions loading to radical activism and contemporary television productions, Dr. Arbona-Homar locates a pattern of historical violence that refocuses the broader racial and colonial context. Citing the material, social, and political conditions that gave rise to these disparate episodes, he reviews the historic erasure of those driving forces and puts forth alternative possibilities for how such disasters might be memorialized.

Synthesizing a diverse set of field research methods, including oral histories and site visits, and supplemented by specially commissioned landscape photographs by Andrea Gaffney, Explosivity presents a radical exercise in the exposition of public memory.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with editor, poet, and author, Terese Mason Pierre about As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories (Spiderline, 2025).

A ground-breaking anthology of haunting speculative stories by
contemporary Black Canadian writers that explore growth, futurity, and
joy.

Edited by esteemed poet Terese Mason Pierre, this bold and innovative
anthology of speculative short fiction reveals and uplifts the
spectacular imaginings, reveries, reflections, experiments, and hopes of
Black writers in Canada. A masseuse attends her mother's fourth
funeral, only to encounter family she's never met. A postdoc instructor
navigates an almost-life in an Elsewhere realm of safety and comfort.
After societal collapse, an immigrant leaves her precarious station, and
her memories, behind. A woman isolating from a new virus starts
hallucinating. A young nanny accepts a job with a peculiar employer in
search of immortality. A medium is tasked with summoning a spirit that
hits too close to home. And two teenagers test a friendship over magic
carpet flying practice.

These ten breathtaking stories explore natural and urban landscapes,
living and dead relationships, economic catastrophe, love, and
desire--all while celebrating the persistent and ever-changing self, and
envisioning beautiful Black futures.

Featuring stories by:Trynne Delaneyfrancesca ekwuyasiWhitney FrenchAline-Mwezi NiyonsengaChimedum OhaegbuSuyi Davies OkungbowaChinelo OnwualuLue PalmerTerese Mason PierreZalika Reid-Benta

TERESE MASON PIERRE (she/her) is a writer, poet, and editor whose work has appeared in the Walrus, ROOM, Brick, Quill & Quire, Uncanny, and Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Her work has been nominated for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, Best of
the Net, the Aurora Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Ignyte Award. She
is one of ten winners of the Writers’ Trust Journey Prize and was named
a Writers’ Trust Rising Star. Terese is the chief programming officer
at Augur, a speculative arts nonprofit, and co-director of AugurCon,
Augur’s biennial speculative arts conference. Terese lives in Toronto.
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In 1898, vaudeville actors Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown joyously embraced in a short silent film titled Something Good—Negro Kiss.
The first known film to portray African American affection, it was lost
for over a century until its rediscovery inspired contemporary
audiences with a powerful and enduring depiction of Black love. More
than a missing piece in an untold history of Black cinematic
performance, Something Good—and the magnetism of Suttle and
Brown—attests to the power of Black performance on stage and screen from
the nineteenth century to today.

In Acts of Love: Black Performance and the Kiss That Changed Film History (University of California Press, 2026), Allyson Nadia Field tells the story of Something Good
and recovers the forgotten yet fascinating lives of its performers and
their world. Drawing a vivid picture from sparse historical records, Acts of Love
examines popular culture's negotiation of blackness to reconsider the
intersections of minstrelsy, vaudeville, and cinema in ragtime America.
This book not only presents the story of Something Good, its
performers, and the drama of its rediscovery; it shows how the
rediscovery of this short early film changes our understanding of
American film history.
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David Cunningham joins John to speak about his pathbreaking article about visiting each of the 113 communities that removed or relocated Confederate symbols between 2015 and 2023. After discussing his co-authored Social Problems article, “Contesting Commemorative Landscapes” which first got him thinking about monument removal, he posits that “expungement, amplification, and repositioning” are three ways contemporary communities contest the monuments of the past.. The conversation from there ranges onward through various kinds of contested removal, ending with Cesar Chavez and his ongoing de-monumentalization.

David is author of There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence and the award-winning Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era KKK,, a member of the City of St. Louis Reparations Commission and recently has been engaged in exploring political signalling in public art and monuments, including a forthcoming article on the political and cultural work of murals in Protestant and Catholic communities and in the interface areas that connect them in Belfast. His earlier Recall This Book episodes include on racialized policing in the US, on January 6th , and also on the 2024 presidential election–and a conversation with Glenn Patterson, author of Lapsed Protestant about the mural culture and politicized spaces of Belfast and Northern Ireland.

Read the episode here.

Mentioned in the episode

By David Cunmningham himself: “What Richmond got Right about taking down Confederate Monuments” and a 2023 article coauthored with Christina Simko, “Montgomery’s Monumental Truths”

On place vs space there is wonderful work by Pierre Nora and Henri Lefebvre.

Interface zones and the strategic cul de sacs that continue to divide Belfast neighborhoods have been brilliantly detailed and studied by various historians; eg this tour by Neil Jarman.

The lucid John Guillory article (mentioned but not discussed) is “Monuments and Documents: On the Object of Study in the Humanities.”

Confederate generals whose statues were erected essentially to glorify the KKK famously include Nathaniel Bedford Forrest. Private parks built up to collect Confederate monuments (with an underlying anti-government bias) include North Carolina’s Valor Memorial Park, and in Texas the SS American Memorial Foundation’s military retreat space now adorned with removed Confederate statues. In Bentonville, this park glorifies a Confederate statue that has now been (dubiously) linked to Governor James H. Berry.

The MOCA/Brick reimagined MONUMENTS Exhibition includes work by Kara Walker and Bethany Collins.

https://www.nps.gov/boaf/learn/historyculture/shaw.htm

Sylva North Carolina Confederate plaque debate.

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant and the Nietzschean problem of “creative forgetting.”

The idea of Productive creative cognitive dissonance is drawn from MLK’s idea of “creative tension.”


Hajar Yazdiha, Struggle for the People’s King

How long will the Chavez National Monument last? The statue at UC Fresno is already gone…” Is The Trail of Tears a historical site the same way Confederate statues are?


Denmark Vescey’s Garden by Ethan J. Kytle and, Blain RobertsZore Neale Hurston Their Eyes were Watching God

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