New Books in African American Studies

Some of the earliest canals in colonial America, referred to as the Inner Passage, were constructed by enslaved people living in the Lowcountry of South Carolina in the early 1700s. In a paradox of history, for over a hundred years enslaved Black people used these canals, constructed for white plantation owners, to travel southward to freedom in Spanish Florida.

In The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway (MIT Press, 2026), Virginia McGee Richards documents the lost narrative of the Inner Passage through 60 extraordinary photographs of landscapes altered by slavery and portraits of Lowcountry descendants, along with an essay describing her discovery of this untold history. In an accompanying essay, Imani Perry writes about her own journey on the Inner Passage, putting Black resistance to enslavement and Southern history into an immediate context. James Estrin brings decades of insight about photography and the power of visual storytelling to his affecting foreword. Together, these words and images offer a powerful living map of history.
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

Black Power! A name with a ring to it on both sides of the Atlantic,
taken as a sign of Black American rage incarnated by a few
names: Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panthers, Angela Davis.

Behind
these archetypes of the 1960s and 70s stood a political movement as
mutable as it was international, that of Black Power, with the goal of
bringing about a global uprising. This insurrection of Black worlds has
haunted the West for centuries, rumbling beneath the words of Frantz
Fanon and Lorraine Hansberry, the films of Melvin Van Peebles and Sarah
Maldoror, in the albums of Sun Ra and Archie Shepp, the poems of Amiri
Baraka and Sonia Sanchez. In Fantômes de la révolution noire: Une Histoire culturelle transatlantique ([Ghosts of the Black Revolution: A Transatlantic Cultural History] Éditions Ròt-Bò-Krik,
2026), Grégory Pierrot evokes the ghosts of Black Power and shows that
the arts are real laboratories where the Black Revolution is formed,
reinvented, and broadcast.

Guest Grégory Pierrot is Associate
professor of English at the University of Connecticut, where he studies
the cultural and artistic networks of the Black Atlantic. In addition to Fantômes de la révolution noire published
by Ròt-Bò-Krik earlier this year, Dr. Pierrot has translated and
co-translated a series of essays and novels from and into French, and
edited or co-edited several volumes concerning the literature of and
about the Haitian revolution in French and English. He is also the
author of The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture and Decolonize Hipsters.

Host
Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of
Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and
speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism
to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan
France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript under
review on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.
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 Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival (University
of North Carolina Press, 2026), naturalist, forager, and educator Maria
Pinto uncovers strange and beautiful connections between the natural
and human worlds, mingling reportage, research, memoir, and nature
writing, touching on topics that range from Black farmers’ domestication
of the unforgettable aroma of truffles, to the possibility that
enslaved people wielded mycological poisons against their enslavers.

Pinto
brings a new perspective and a distinctive literary voice to this mix
of environmental and lived history, and every page sings with her
enthusiasm for the networks in which we are embedded: fungal,
ecological, ancestral, and communal. Join us in pursuit of beautiful,
perplexing, delicious, and deadly mushrooms as we explore this
understudied kingdom’s awe-inspiring diversity, discovering how fungi
have been used by people, especially those on the margins, for survival,
pleasure, revelation, and revolution.

When she’s not in the
woods (and sometimes when she is), Maria Pinto is a writer, editor, and
educator. She teaches writing for various literary organizations. She
reads fiction for Peripheries Journal and serves on the board
of Hale, an outdoor education and land conservancy nonprofit. Her
writing has been supported by Assets for Artists at Massachusetts Museum
of Contemporary Art, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Vermont Studio
Center, the Mass Cultural Council, the Writers’ Room of Boston, The
Mastheads, and The Garrett on the Green. You can find Maria at her Website and on Instagram.

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

An unsettling exploration of the persistence of racism in reproductive healthcare in the US—and why even affluent Black women are imperiled by substandard care.From a leading expert on race, class, maternal health, and reproductive rights.Racism in maternal healthcare is not reserved for the poor. An unsparing picture of inequities in prenatal care and childbirth in the United States, Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans (MIT Press, 2026) reveals that not only are black people three to four times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause, but racial disparities in maternal mortality persist across income levels. That is, wealthier black people are much more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or the postpartum period than their white counterparts. Focusing on a San Francisco obstetrics clinic that caters to the affluent, Khiara Bridges looks at the choices around prenatal care and childbirth that class-privileged, pregnant black people are making in order to survive what has been called the “black maternal health crisis.”Bridges, whose previous work exposed how race and racism are embedded in maternal healthcare for the poor, draws on two years of participant-observation to show how wealthier black people try to leverage their class privilege to avoid some of the negative effects of their blackness—only to discover that in a country that has never reckoned with its horrific racial past, there is no escaping racism’s reach. Throughout the book, engaging, heartbreaking, infuriating stories of women’s experiences with pregnancy and prenatal care illustrate how race and racism matter regardless of wealth or status.
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

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