New Books in African American Studies

For more than 150 years, Black communities have gathered to honor
freedom, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for true liberation. While
Juneteenth has recently gained wider recognition, it was one of many
Emancipation Day traditions celebrated across the United States. These
observances were spaces of joy, remembrance, and resistance—even as the
fight for full freedom was unfinished. Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2026) brings
together stirring essays and striking images from Juneteenth and
beyond, offering a sweeping portrait of how Black people have created
and sustained rituals of remembrance, a testament to the generations
who, through celebration and storytelling, demanded that their
contributions to the making of America be fully recognized.

Blair L.M. Kelley, Ph.D. is a renowned author, historian, and scholar
of the African American experience. She is the seventh president of the
National Humanities Center,
the only independent center for advanced study in the world dedicated
exclusively to the humanities. Blair previously held senior leadership
roles at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the Joel R.
Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies and Director of
the Center for the Study of the American South and at North Carolina
State University where she served as Associate Dean for
Interdisciplinary Affairs and Partnerships and the Alumni Graduate
Professor of History. You can find her on all social platforms
@profblmkelley.

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Dr. Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel’s Seeking Freedom in Indian Country: Slavery, Sovereignty, and Resistance within the Five Tribes, 1790–1861 (LSU Press, 2026) is the first comprehensive study of African chattel
slavery within the Five Tribes: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw,
Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole Nations. Dr. Oertel examines how chattel
slavery functioned among all Five Tribes before and during the removal
process, how the tribes reconstituted slavery post-removal in Indian
Territory, and how enslaved Black people promoted freedom-seeking
strategies at each stage. Furthermore, her work considers how the
conflict over slavery in Indian Territory contributed to the larger
national debate over slavery’s fate on the eve of the Civil War.

Historians
have examined how the practice of African enslavement emerged within
one or two tribes, how forced migration affected slavery within
particular nations,
and how the debate over slavery divided multiple Indigenous nations.
Dr. Oertel, however, is the first to examine Indian Territory as a
whole, its significance to the sectional debates, and its role as an
incubator of emancipation policies in the United States. Knitting
together these individual tribal narratives and supplementing them with
extensive primary research on how slavery functioned across Indian
Territory, she integrates Indian country into the antebellum march
toward the Civil War.

Seeking Freedom in Indian Country
joins a rising chorus of studies that integrate southern and western
history, which, by default, also pulls together the history of the
so-called Indian Wars with the Civil War. Dr. Oertel suggests that we
cannot fully understand the causes of the Civil War without also
considering the changes brought about by the forced removal of Indians.
She argues that settler colonialism and the expansion of African chattel
slavery together set the stage for sectional conflict to explode in the
West. Ironically, both Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism and
Black resistance to slavery challenged white supremacy in ways that
foretold the end of slavery but also furthered the settler colonial
project.

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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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.
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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.
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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.

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