New Books in African American Studies

In the United States, the stoicism and importance of the “working class” is part of the national myth. The term is often used to conjure the contributions and challenges of the white working class – and this obscures the ways in which Black workers built institutions like the railroads and universities – but also how they transformed unions, changed public policy, and established community. 
In Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (LIveright, 2023), Dr. Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story by interrogating the lives of laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers. The book is both a personal journey and a history of Black labor in the United States from enslavement to the present day with a focus on a critical era: after Southern Emancipation to the early 20th century, when the first generations of Black working people carved out a world for themselves.
Dr. Kelley captures the character of the lives of Black workers not only as laborers, activists, or members of a class but as individuals whose daily experiences mattered – to themselves, to their communities, and to “the nation at large, even as it denied their importance.” As she weaves together rich oral histories, memoirs, photographs, and secondary sources, she shows how Black workers of all genders were “intertwined with the future of Black freedom, Black citizenship, and the establishment of civil rights for Black Americans.” She demonstrates how her own family’s experiences mirrors this wider history of the Black working class – sometimes in ways that she herself did not realize before writing the book.
Even as the book confronts violence, poor working conditions, and a government that often legislated to protect the interests of white workers and consumers, Black Folk celebrates the ways in which Black people “built and rebuilt vital spaces of resistance, grounded in the secrets that they knew about themselves, about their community, their dignity, and their survival.” Black Folk looks back but also forward. In examining the labor and challenges of individuals, Dr. Kelley sheds light on reparations and suggests that Amazon package processing centers, supermarkets, and nursing homes can be spaces of resistance and labor activism in the 21st century.
Dr. Blair LM Kelley is the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and incoming director of the Center for the Study of the American South, the first Black woman to serve in that role in the center’s thirty-year history. She is also the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson from the University of North Carolina Press.
Dr. Kelley mentions Dr. Tera W. Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, Duke University’s Behind the Veil oral history project, and Philip R. Rubio’s There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality.
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Breaking the World: Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculation (Duke UP, 2026) takes Black speculative fiction as a central archive for understanding global security culture from the Reagan administration to the present. Drawing on black feminist, critical race, and queer of color theoretical traditions, Justin L. Mann posits that world-breaking is an ethical and aesthetic orientation to the dangerous, worldmaking process of securitization--the process by which state and parastate agents augment and build up the tools, techniques, and infrastructures intended to make people safer. World-breaking appears in the fiction of Octavia E. Butler, Colson Whitehead, N.K. Jemisin, in the music and video work of Janelle Monae, as well as unexpected places such as the Marvel and DC Cinematic Universes. Breaking the World charts the difference between securitization and "Black insecurity." Linking securitization to mass incarceration and the militarization of policing, Mann contributes to Black feminist and abolitionist conversations that seek an end to institutional and structural violence. Breaking the World emphasizes that world-breaking is an important aspect of the Black radical imagination, showing that speculation is an essential response to the dangerous worlds of securitization"-- Provided by publisher.
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Despite reform efforts that have grown in scope and intensity over the last two decades, the machine of American mass incarceration continues to flourish. In Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine: Reform, White Supremacy, and an Abolitionist Future, formerly incarcerated activist and organizer Emile Suotonye DeWeaver argues that the root of the problem is white supremacy.

During twenty-one years in prison, DeWeaver covertly organized to pass legislation impacting juveniles in California’s criminal legal system; was a culture writer for Easy Street Magazine; and co-founded Prison Renaissance, an organization centering incarcerated voices and incarcerated leadership. DeWeaver draws on these experiences to interrogate the central premise of reform efforts, including prisoner rehabilitation programs, arguing that they demand self-abnegation, entrench white supremacy, and ignore the role of structural oppression.

DeWeaver intervenes in contemporary debates on criminal justice and racial justice efforts with his eye-opening discussion of the tools we need to end white supremacy—both within and outside the carceral setting. Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine adds a sharp and unique perspective to the growing discourse on racial justice, incarceration, and abolition.

This episode considers: parole boards; hidden factors that extend sentences; how power is structured; why most reforms repackage inequality; and ways to restructure power.

Our guest is: Emile Suotonye DeWeaver, who is a formerly-incarcerated activist and a 2022 Soros Justice Fellow. California’s Governor Brown commuted his life sentence after twenty-one years for his community work. He has written for publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, Colorlines, The Appeal, The Rumpus, and Seventh Wave.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Hands Up, Don't Shoot

Freemans Challenge

Stitching Freedom

Education Behind The Wall

What Might Be

Carceral Apartheid

No Common Ground

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You help support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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In honor of the twentieth anniversary of Mark Anthony Neal’s pivotal text New Black Man (Routledge, 2015), Mickell Carter interviews Neal about the book’s revolutionary model of Black masculinity for the twenty-first century—one that moves beyond patriarchy to embrace feminism and confront homophobia.

Now more vital than ever, New Black Man urges us to imagine a redefined Black masculinity grounded in family, community, and diversity. Part memoir and part manifesto, the book celebrates the Black man of our time in all his vibrancy and complexity.

The tenth-anniversary edition (2015) of this classic text includes a new foreword by Joan Morgan, as well as a new introduction and postscript by Neal, which bring the book’s central questions into the present.
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Alaina Morgan's Atlantic Crescent: Building Geographies of Black and Muslim Liberation in the African Diaspora (UNC Press, 2025) introduces the conceptual framework of the “Atlantic Crescent” to capture the overlapping encounters between Black, Afro-Caribbean, and South Asian Muslims in the United States and the Caribbean. Using rich archival material, such as the Nation of Islam’s Muhammad Speaks, we learn about 20th century Black Muslim movements such as the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam as they encounter and engage with South Asian Muslim communities, like the Ahmadiyya movement in the US, as their discourses of global anti-imperial and decolonial struggles shaped or overlapped with each other. The second half of the book takes us to Bermuda to trace the translation of these Black Muslim liberation movements into the Caribbean. By focusing on the flow and encounters of these overlapping diasporas, we learn how anti-imperial and ant-colonial discourses were inhabited by varied South Asian, Black, and Afro-Caribbean diasporic communities, and how organizing, be it around labour and education, framed Islam through Black and Afro-diasporic liberatory registers. Morgan’s sharp analysis of these rich diasporic flows charts new imagined geographies of freedom struggles and resistance. This study will be of interest to scholars who think and write on Islam in the global west and the Caribbean, diaspora studies, anti-colonial and anti-imperial Muslim organizing and much more.
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