New Books in African American Studies

The Rediscovery of George "Nash" Walker: : The Price of Black Stardom in Jim Crow America (SUNY Press, 2025) is the first biography dedicated to the life and cultural contributions of this actor, writer, and producer who revolutionized Black American theatre during the early twentieth century. In 1892, Walker left his hometown with a medicine show and quickly formed a partnership with comedian Bert Williams that would last nearly eighteen years. Under the moniker of “The Two Real Coons,” Williams and Walker used their comedy to erode the stereotyped White image of minstrel-style “cooning.” Their theatrical company produced many popular plays, including Clorindy/A Lucky Coon (1899–1900), Policy Players (1900–1901), Sons of Ham (1901–1902), In Dahomey (1902–1905), Abyssinia (1905–1906), Bandanna Land (1907–1909), and Mr. Lode of Koal (1909–1910), even performing on Broadway and abroad. An activist at heart, Walker insisted that audiences receive carefully curated Black entertainment, told from a uniquely Afro-American perspective. Unfortunately, Walker contracted syphilis and was forced to retire in 1909, marking the end of the first golden age of Black theatre. Despite his landmark contributions, Walker’s story has been largely forgotten. Drawing on archival resources, newspaper accounts, memoirs, oral histories, and manifestos written by Walker, this book celebrates the accomplishments of the vanguard generation of Black artists who were active between the close of the Civil War and the start of World War I.
Daniel Atkinson’s research and commitment to the legacy of George Walker and his generation is deep and authentic. Listen in on this fantastic conversation and check out also previous episodes with Dr. Cheryl Thompson and Es-pranza Humphry, both scholars of this era. And when you’re finished, head over to the Additions to the Archive Substack where we continued our conversation.
Daniel E. Atkinson is an independent scholar who earned his doctorate in ethnomusicology from the University of Washington where he specialized in Afro-American music and culture. You can find Daniel on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.

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From Reconstruction to Redemption, from the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation to the execution of the Southern strategy, from 2020’s multiracial protests to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive society, Americans regularly experience periods of racial reckoning followed by walloping retrenchment.
In Black Evidence: A History and a Warning (W.W. Norton, 2026), political scientist Candis Watts Smith shows that this pattern is the result of an American habit: denying the truths about our society that Black people experience and remember. Smith then delivers a warning: the effects of this habit ripple out, dulling our ability to identify the signs of authoritarianism and heightening our tolerance for cruelty. Still, she shows how these same truths offer models to overcome our repeated predicament.
Through a curation of critical moments across four centuries, Smith invites us to review the evidence that has been obscured, distorted, and denied. She rigorously investigates the practices that turn Black witnesses into liars in the court room, Black patients into superbodies that don’t feel pain in health care settings, Black people into subhumans in scientific experiments, and Black children into superpredators. She reveals what happens when Black voices are subject to exclusion—their communities are terrorized, their memories are refuted, and their resistance is pathologized.
Written with compassion and tempered optimism, Black Evidence prescribes a cure and encourages readers to practice the skills needed to build a truly multiracial democracy: confront our past, acknowledge the damage of inequality in our present, and listen to the voices of those who experience the problems we wish to solve for an equitable future.
Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.

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From the preeminent scholar on Black masculinity in America, Save a Seat for Me: Notes on American Fatherhood (Simon & Schuster, 2026) is Mark Anthony Neal’s attempt to bring his scholarship on fatherhood to a broader audience. Save a Seat for Me embraces the nuances of how contemporary frameworks of masculinity informed by unprecedented advances in women and LGBTQ communities have necessitated a reimagining of the societal expectations a father plays in the public and private sectors of their homes. The soul of this book centers on Neal’s confrontation of the various political, cultural, historical narratives and messages that inform the role of Black fatherhood, and fatherhood at large, which has put him at odds with the way he fathers his own children. Raised by a working class father, during a time when American society conceived of the role of father as protector, provider, and disciplinarian, Neal struggles with these expectations as his education (a doctorate's degree), profession (tenured professor at one of the best colleges in the country), and financial position (making more money than his father ever did) are drastically different than that of his father. Linking his father to his own fathering of his two daughters, Neal grounds his intellectual arguments about Black fatherhood in experience and emotion makes for a vulnerable read, as well as a transformative one. In our culture, the public performance of fatherhood keeps us from wondering what the practice of being a father looks like in private. Neal is opening a long overdue door to the interiority that Black men particularly—and men living in a patriarchal society generally—have only learned existed in the last twenty years.

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Distinguished Oxford historian Sudhir Hazareesingh has written a stunning new study documenting the inevitable resistance that New World enslavement produced throughout its long terrible history. Joining John to speak with Sudhir is George Boulukos of SIU Carbondale, author of The Grateful Slave.
Daring to Be Free Rebellion and Resistance of the Enslaved in the Atlantic World (a suitable companion to Hazareesingh's earlier biography of the Haitian nation builder Toussaint Louverture, Black Spartacus) opens up four crucial topics that reshape the stories we tell about slavery's "social death.” One is persistent resistance during the Middle Passage, another is the omnipresence of successful marronage (meaning escape to highlands or remote refuges). Third is the strikingly omnipresent hope inspired by slaves' widespread knowledge the successful Haitian revolution. Finally, Sudhir emphasizes the striking way a sense of agency and autonomy among enslaved persons persisted in the New World–by way both of culture (frequently marked by durable religious practice) and by way of violent, frequently fatal rebellions, which were systematically under-acknowledged or swept under the rug within enslaving societies.
As he sums it up: "Resistance during middle passage, marronage, resistance based on culture, insurrections." Moreover, he persuasively makes the case that the role of benevolent actors within enslaving societies (the William Wilberforces of the world...) "has been greatly exaggerated, and in fact, their interventions were more often than not...actually prompted by the resistance of the enslaved themselves."
Mentioned in the episode:
Sylvaine Diouf on hinterland marronage, Slavery's Exiles: The Story of America's Maroons.
Aime Cesaire, "The Verb 'Marooner'" (1950, English version 1972)
Francois Mackandal: Haitian religious leader who alluded to and educated Haitians a longer pre-Revolutionary tradition there.
Julia C. Scott, The Common Wind. on communicative structures within the African-American slave world.
Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (1982) introduced much-debated and frequently misunderstood category, one that is brilliantly explicated and extended by Vincent Brown, "Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery." (2009).
Recallable Books
Rebecca Hall, Wake (graphic novel)
Marcelo D'Salete Angola Janga (Graphic novel about Brazilian Marronage)
C. L. R. James, Black Jacobins (1938)
Richard Price, First Time.
Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (2015)
Read Transcript here.

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From the inside flap:
In Alive in the Sound: Black Music as Counterhistory (Duke UP, 2025), Ronald Radano proposes a new understanding of US Black music by focusing on the key matter of value, manifested musically in its seemingly embodied qualities—spirit, soul, and groove. While acknowledging these qualities are always embedded in Black music, Radano shows they developed not simply from performance but from musicians’ status as laborers inhabiting an enduring racial-economic contradiction: Black music originated publicly as an exchangeable property owned by people whose subhuman status granted them—as “natural” musicians—indelible properties of sound. As a contradiction of the rules of ownership, wherein enslaved property was forbidden the right to own, modern Black music emerges after emancipation as a primary possession, moving dialectically into commercial markets and counterhistorically back into Black worlds. Slavery’s seminal contest of ownership underlie modern musical sensations of aliveness, which become the chief measure of value in popular music. By reconceiving US Black music history as a history of value, Radano rethinks the music’s place in US and global culture.
Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University
nathan.smith@yale.edu

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