New Books in African American Studies

Moving between word and image, the call-and-response collaboration between writer Christopher R. Rogers and photographer karim brown improvises a contemporary portrait of present-day Black Philadelphia, replete with the unfinished activism present since the transnational upsurge of the George Floyd Uprising.Arriving five years after the crucible of that period, this experimental essay-as-LP challenges us to prioritize the urgency of reckoning with our own hang-ups and half-steps and to reground ourselves within the daily, prefigurative life-work of rehearsing Black liberation. This is a hyperlocal, future-forward recommitment to ongoing principled struggle and a hopeful model of contemporary self-criticism.Taking its title from a song by the late, beloved Uptown Philadelphia rapper PnB Rock, My City Need Something (Common Notions, 2026) challenges readers to strive for clarity in a time of Black suffering, in a city resplendent with Black joy.

Christopher R. Rogers, PhD is a Philadelphia-based cultural organizer and educator hailing from Chester, PA with more than a decade of experience in supporting radical arts, culture, and community-building. He is a Facilitator with the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction and co-coordinates the Friends of The Tanner House, incubating a revitalized National Historic Landmark rowhome that Dr. Carter G. Woodson once dubbed the “center of Black intellectual life in Philadelphia.” He previously published with Common Notions as Lead Editor for How We Stay Free: Notes on a Black Uprising (2022) alongside novelist Fajr Muhammad. You can find Chris on Instagram @justmaybechris.

After listening to this episode, head over to the Additions to the Archive Substack, where Chris and Sullivan talk further about community education and activism.

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Edward Blum interviews David N. Gellman on his book Liberty’s Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York (Cornell UP, 2022).

In Liberty's Chain, David N. Gellman shows how the Jay family, abolitionists and slaveholders alike, embodied the contradictions of the revolutionary age. The Jays of New York were a preeminent founding family. John Jay, diplomat, Supreme Court justice, and coauthor of the Federalist Papers, and his children and grandchildren helped chart the course of the Early American Republic.Liberty's Chain forges a new path for thinking about slavery and the nation's founding. John Jay served as the inaugural president of a pioneering antislavery society. His descendants, especially his son William Jay and his grandson John Jay II, embraced radical abolitionism in the nineteenth century, the cause most likely to rend the nation. The scorn of their elite peers—and racist mobs—did not deter their commitment to end southern slavery and to combat northern injustice.John Jay's personal dealings with African Americans ranged from callousness to caring. Across the generations, even as prominent Jays decried human servitude, enslaved people and formerly enslaved people served in Jay households. Abbe, Clarinda, Caesar Valentine, Zilpah Montgomery, and others lived difficult, often isolated, lives that tested their courage and the Jay family's principles.

The personal and the political intersect in this saga, as Gellman charts American values transmitted and transformed from the colonial and revolutionary eras to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond. The Jays, as well as those who served them, demonstrated the elusiveness and the vitality of liberty's legacy. This remarkable family story forces us to grapple with what we mean by patriotism, conservatism, and radicalism. Their story speaks directly to our own divided times.
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Empire, Race, and Print Culture in the Black Pacific (Cambridge University Press, 2026) is an Element which centers the 'Black Pacific' as a generative site for comparative and intersectional methodologies and transnational frameworks for thinking about racial formations, post-national literary forms, and cultural histories. At the end of the nineteenth century, US overseas expansion into the Pacific brought white supremacy and colonial rule into alignment. It also threw into greater relief the contradictions of US
citizenship and national identity as legalized segregation and rising anti-Black violence foreclosed Reconstruction's possibilities. Race accrued dynamic new meanings in the age of new imperialism.

Focusing on the earliest of African American literary magazines, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine (1900–09) and its southern rival, the Atlanta-based Voice of the Negro (1904–7), in this Element, Dr. Edlie L. Wong examines the formative role of magazine and periodical writings in the development of early Black transpacific internationalism.

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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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. 
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