The island nation of Iceland is known for many things—majestic landscapes, volcanic eruptions, distinctive seafood—but racial diversity is not one of them. So the little-known story of Hans Jonathan, a free black man who lived and raised a family in early nineteenth-century Iceland, is improbable and compelling, the stuff of novels.
            In The Man Who Stole Himself, Gisli Palsson lays out the story of Hans Jonathan (also known as Hans Jónatan) in stunning detail. Born into slavery in St. Croix in 1784, Hans was taken as a slave to Denmark, where he eventually enlisted in the navy and fought on behalf of the country in the 1801 Battle of Copenhagen. After the war, he declared himself a free man, believing that he was due freedom not only because of his patriotic service, but because while slavery remained legal in the colonies, it was outlawed in Denmark itself. He thus became the subject of one of the most notorious slavery cases in European history, which he lost. Then Hans ran away—never to be heard from in Denmark again, his fate unknown for more than two hundred years. It’s now known that Hans fled to Iceland, where he became a merchant and peasant farmer, married, and raised two children. Today, he has become something of an Icelandic icon, claimed as a proud and daring ancestor both there and among his descendants in America.
            The Man Who Stole Himself brilliantly intertwines Hans Jonathan’s adventurous travels with a portrait of the Danish slave trade, legal arguments over slavery, and the state of nineteenth-century race relations in the Northern Atlantic world. Throughout the book, Palsson traces themes of imperial dreams, colonialism, human rights, and globalization, which all come together in the life of a single, remarkable man. Hans literally led a life like no other. His is the story of a man who had the temerity—the courage—to steal himself.

Marginal People in Deviant Places revisits early- to mid-twentieth-century ethnographic studies, arguing that their focus on marginal subcultures—ranging from American hobos, to men who have sex with other men in St. Louis bathrooms, to hippies, to taxi dancers in Chicago, to elderly Jews in Venice, California—helped produce new ways of thinking about social difference more broadly in the United States. Irvine demonstrates how the social scientists who told the stories of these marginalized groups represented an early challenge to then-dominant narratives of scientific racism, prefiguring the academic fields of gender, ethnic, sexuality, and queer studies in key ways. In recounting the social histories of certain American outsiders, Irvine identifies an American paradox by which social differences are both despised and desired, and she describes the rise of an outsider capitalism that integrates difference into American society by marketing it.

Winner of the 2022 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize​

This ethical and poetic ethnography analyses the upheavals to gender roles and marital relationships brought about by Somali refugee migration to the UK. Unmoored from the socio-cultural norms that made them men and women, being a refugee is described as making "everything" feel "different, mixed up, upside down." Marriage, Gender and Refugee Migration details how Somali gendered identities are contested, negotiated, and (re)produced within a framework of religious and politico-national discourses, finding that the most significant catalysts for challenging and changing harmful gender practices are a combination of the welfare system and Islamic praxis. Described as “an important and urgent monograph," this book will be a key text relevant to scholars of migration, transnational families, personal life, and gender. Written in a beautiful and accessible style, the book voices the participants with respect and compassion, and is also recommended for scholars of qualitative social research methods.

 

Who are the Black heroines of Latin America and the Caribbean? Where do we turn for models of transcendence among women of African ancestry in the region? In answer to the historical dearth of such exemplars, Mayaya Rising explores and celebrates the work of writers who intentionally center powerful female cultural archetypes. In this inventive analysis, Duke proposes three case studies and a corresponding womanist methodology through which to study and rediscover these figures. The musical Cuban-Dominican sisters and former slaves Teodora and Micaela Ginés inspired Aida Cartagena Portalatin’s epic poem Yania tierra; the Nicaraguan matriarch of the May Pole, “Miss Lizzie,” figures prominently in four anthologies from the country’s Bluefields region; and the iconic palenqueras of Cartagena, Colombia are magnified in the work of poets María Teresa Ramírez Neiva and Mirian Díaz Pérez. In elevating these figures and foregrounding these works, Duke restores and repairs the scholarly record.

1993 Mid-South Sociological Association Book Award

Robert E. Park has long been recognized as one of the most influential thinkers in early American sociology, yet virtually all of his works appearing before 1913 were published in popular magazines and were dismissed as nonsociological muckraking. In Militarism, Imperialism, and Racial Accommodation: An Analysis and Interpretation of the Early Writings of Robert E. Park, Stanford M. Lyman examines and reprints many of these little-known works, including Park’s essays on German military organization, his exposés of the atrocities committed by Belgium’s Leopold II in the Congo State, his studies of the black community in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and of Booker T. Washington’s agricultural education program at Tuskegee, Alabama.

Lyman shows clearly that Park’s essays, written outside the academy, formulated a far more complex perspective on modern modes of evil than any proposed by his contemporaries, thereby influencing sociological debates for decades to come. By writing his essays on topical subjects and by publishing them for a public audience, Park dramatized his profound belief that the struggle to achieve racial accommodation and to establish a true and lasting democracy is a concern for all.

A richly researched account of the social, racial, and political history of a major Deep South infantry division at home and in the Pacific
 
Chris Rein’s study of the Thirty-First Infantry Division, known officially as the “Dixie Division,” illuminates the complexities in mobilizing American reserve units to meet the global emergency during World War II. Citizen soldiers from Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi formed the core of one of the ninety infantry divisions the Army successfully activated, trained, equipped, and deployed to defeat fascism in Europe and race-based imperialism in the Pacific. But the Army mobilized ideas along with manpower, and soldiers from across the Jim Crow South brought their racial ideas and views with them into the ranks and then exported these across the South Pacific. If the American victory in World War II represents a “double victory” over racism abroad and at home, the division’s service is a cogent reminder that the same powerful force could pull in opposite directions.

While focused on the division’s operational service during the war years, Mobilizing the South: The Thirty-First Infantry Division, Race, and World War II spans the division’s entire service from 1917 to 1967, from an interwar period highlighted by responses to natural disasters and facing down lynch mobs through a postwar service that included protecting activists in the most important struggles of the civil rights era. But the division’s extended service as a training establishment highlights lingering resentments and tensions within the American military system between the active and reserve components. Despite this, the division performed well in General Douglas MacArthur’s island-hopping campaign across the South Pacific. Using official records as well as details drawn from correspondence and oral histories, Rein captures how individual soldiers framed their exposure to a larger world, and how service alongside African American, New Guinean, and Filipino units both reinforced and modified views on race and postwar American society.
 

Between 1964 and 1974 Tanzania came to be regarded as a model nation and a leading frontline state in the struggle for African liberation on the continent and beyond. During this time, a number of African American and Caribbean nationalists, leftists, and pan-Africanists traveled to and settled in Tanzania to join the country that many believed to be leading Africa’s liberation struggle. This historical study examines the political landscape of that crucial moment when African American, Caribbean, and Tanzanian histories overlapped, shedding light on the challenges of creating a new nation and the nature of African American and Caribbean participation in Tanzania’s nationalist project. In examining the pragmatic partnerships and exchanges between socialist Tanzania and activists and organizations associated with the Black Power movements in the United States and the Caribbean, this study argues that the Tanzanian one-party government actively engaged with the diaspora and sought to utilize its political, cultural, labor, and intellectual capital to further its national building agenda, but on its own terms, creating tension within the pan-Africanism movement. An excellent resource for academics and nonacademics alike, this work is the first of its kind, revealing the significance of the radical political and social movements of Tanzania and what it means for us today.

In 1968, as protests shook France and war raged in Vietnam, the giants of black radical politics descended on Montreal to discuss the unique challenges and struggles facing their black comrades all over the world. Against a backdrop of widespread racism in the West and ongoing colonialism and imperialism in the Global South, this group of activists, writers, and political figures gathered to discuss the history and struggles of people of African descent and the meaning of black power.

For the first time since 1968, David Austin brings alive the speeches and debates of the most important international gathering of black radicals of the era. With never-before-seen texts from Stokely Carmichael, Walter Rodney, and C. L. R. James, these documents will prove invaluable to anyone interested in black radical thought and political activism of the 1960s.
 

Moving Blackness: Black Circulation, Racism and Relations of Homespace delves into the intricate connections between communication, culture, power, and racism in relation to blackness. Through a blend of interviews, oral histories, and meticulous archival research, this book sheds light on the multifaceted narratives surrounding Black identity. It explores how these stories circulate, serving as tools of resistance, negotiation, and affirmation of diverse manifestations and representations of blackness. By emphasizing the significance of storytelling as a means through which blackness affirms itself, transcending time and space, the book underscores how communicative embodiments of Black identity enable individuals to persevere within marginalized contexts.
 
Engaging with theories of anti-Black racism, modernity, coloniality, and the Black diaspora, the book frames storytelling, and the circulation of narratives as performances deeply rooted in the everyday lives of Black people across the diaspora. Starting with an examination of the racial construction of movement during colonialism and slavery, the book traces how this history shapes contemporary interactions. With its exploration of how Black circulation transforms movement and space, the book introduces a forward-thinking approach to the Black diaspora, anchored in a politics of identification rather than being confined to the past or a specific location. Moving Blackness argues that the desire for homespace, a yearning for belonging that transcends any particular physical space, fuels this envisioned future, rooted in the historical and material conditions of racism and marginalization.