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Perceptive and original, Ain’t I an Anthropologist is an overdue reassessment of Zora Neale Hurston’s place in American cultural and intellectual life.

Langston Hughes called it "a great dark tide from the South": the unprecedented influx of blacks into Cleveland that gave the city the nickname "Alabama North." Kimberley L. Phillips reveals the breadth of working class black experiences and activities in Cleveland and the extent to which these were shaped by traditions and values brought from the South. 

Migrants' moves north established complex networks of kin and friends and infused Cleveland with a highly visible southern African American culture. Phillips examines the variety of black fraternal, benevolent, social, and church-based organizations that working class migrants created and demonstrates how these groups prepared the way for new forms of individual and collective activism in workplaces and the city. Giving special consideration to the experiences of working class black women, AlabamaNorth reveals how migrants' expressions of tradition and community gave them a new consciousness of themselves as organized workers and created the underpinning for new forms of black labor activism.

Reimagining America Through the Blues, Jazz, and the Cultural Vision of Albert Murray.

This collection consists of essays written by prominent African American literature, jazz, and Albert Murray scholars, reminiscences from Murray protégés and associates, and interviews with Murray himself. It illustrates Murray’s place as a central figure in African American arts and letters and as an American cultural pioneer.

Born in Nokomis, Alabama, and raised in Mobile, Albert Murray graduated from Tuskegee University, where he later taught, but he has long resided in New York City. He is the author of many critically acclaimed novels, memoirs, and essay collections, among them The Omni-Americans, South to a Very Old Place, Train Whistle Guitar, The Spyglass Tree, and The Seven League Boots. He is also a critic and visual artist, as well as a lifelong friend of and collaborator with artistic luminaries such as Ralph Ellison, Duke Ellington, and Romare Bearden. As such, his life and work are testaments to the centrality of southern and African American aesthetics in American art. Murray is widely viewed as a figure who, through his art and criticism, transforms the “fakelore” of white culture into a new folklore that illustrates the centrality of the blues and jazz idioms and reveals the black vernacular as what is most distinct about American art.
 

Winner, John G. Cawelti Award for the Best Textbook/Primer, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, 2019
MPCA/ACA Book Award, Midwest Popular Culture Association / Midwest American Culture Association, 2020

Taking a multifaceted approach to attitudes toward race through popular culture and the American superhero, All New, All Different? explores a topic that until now has only received more discrete examination. Considering Marvel, DC, and lesser-known texts and heroes, this illuminating work charts eighty years of evolution in the portrayal of race in comics as well as in film and on television.

Beginning with World War II, the authors trace the vexed depictions in early superhero stories, considering both Asian villains and nonwhite sidekicks. While the emergence of Black Panther, Black Lightning, Luke Cage, Storm, and other heroes in the 1960s and 1970s reflected a cultural revolution, the book reveals how nonwhite superheroes nonetheless remained grounded in outdated assumptions. Multiculturalism encouraged further diversity, with 1980s superteams, the minority-run company Milestone’s new characters in the 1990s, and the arrival of Ms. Marvel, a Pakistani-American heroine, and a new Latinx Spider-Man in the 2000s. Concluding with a discussion of contemporary efforts to make both a profit and a positive impact on society, All New, All Different? enriches our understanding of the complex issues of racial representation in American popular culture.

What does it mean to belong in a nation? All Work Is Cultural Work examines how Haitian women living in diaspora find and create status through their work outside the home. Nikita Carney draws on ethnographic data gathered over several years in Boston, Montreal, and Paris with women who left Haiti in search of other things: safety, financial security, and opportunity. Ranging from administrative assistants to dancers to preschool teachers, the women in this study share their rich experiences, teaching us how they found a place in their new host nations through paid labor. Focusing on small, daily interactions in the workplace, these women’s narratives highlight the ways in which often invisible daily cultural practices build and re-build both the nation and the home. Taking into account the overlapping and interlocking systems of oppression her participants face both nationally and globally, Carney uses an intersectional analysis to illuminate how the workplace serves as a central site in which Haitian women become raced, gendered, and classed within the nation. Ultimately, the lives and experiences of these women point to one conclusion: culture is indivisible from labor and labor from culture, with paid labor providing a vital method for national culture to be created and recreated each and every day.
 

In this significant recovery project, Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach investigates the institutions and streetscapes of Black Chicago that fueled an entire literary and artistic movement. She argues that African American authors and artists--such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, painter Archibald Motley, and many others--viewed and presented black reality from a specific geographic vantage point: the view along the streets of Bronzeville. Schlabach explores how the particular rhythms and scenes of daily life in Bronzeville locations, such as the State Street "Stroll" district or the bustling intersection of 47th Street and South Parkway, figured into the creative works and experiences of the artists and writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance. She also covers in detail the South Side Community Art Center and the South Side Writers' Group, two institutions of art and literature that engendered a unique aesthetic consciousness and political ideology for which the Black Chicago Renaissance would garner much fame.

Life in Bronzeville also involved economic hardship and social injustice, themes that resonated throughout the flourishing arts scene. Schlabach explores Bronzeville's harsh living conditions, exemplified in the cramped one-bedroom kitchenette apartments that housed many of the migrants drawn to the city's promises of opportunity and freedom. Many struggled with the precariousness of urban life, and Schlabach shows how the once vibrant neighborhood eventually succumbed to the pressures of segregation and economic disparity. Providing a virtual tour South Side African American urban life at street level, Along the Streets of Bronzeville charts the complex interplay and intersection of race, geography, and cultural criticism during the Black Chicago Renaissance's rise and fall.

Alternative Maternities: Bodies, Death, and Argentine Citizenship Since 1820 interrogates the intimate and symbolic relationship between maternity and nationhood in Argentina through the lens of post-mortem maternal bodies. This interdisciplinary study brings together literary analysis, archival research, visual culture, and political history to examine how cultural productions deploy the image of the dead mother to define — and challenge — the boundaries of Argentine citizenship, especially for women, trans/travesti individuals, and those of Indigenous heritage. It focuses on the 200-year period between independence in 1820, when Argentine identity began to be defined, until the legalization of abortion at the end of 2020, which codified the right to non-maternity.

By tracing hagiographic and sacrificial depictions of figures like La Difunta Correa and Eva Perón across poetry, literature, visual art, and contemporary protest culture, the book reveals how narratives of Republican Motherhood continue to structure political and social belonging. Ultimately, this work shows how contemporary artists and authors are reconfiguring these maternal myths to queer, expand, and decolonize national identity.

In southeastern Morocco, around the oasis of Tafilalet, the Ait Khabbash people weave brightly colored carpets, embroider indigo head coverings, paint their faces with saffron, and wear ornate jewelry. Their extraordinarily detailed arts are rich in cultural symbolism; they are always breathtakingly beautiful—and they are typically made by women. Like other Amazigh (Berber) groups (but in contrast to the Arab societies of North Africa), the Ait Khabbash have entrusted their artistic responsibilities to women. Cynthia Becker spent years in Morocco living among these women and, through family connections and female fellowship, achieved unprecedented access to the artistic rituals of the Ait Khabbash. The result is more than a stunning examination of the arts themselves, it is also an illumination of women's roles in Islamic North Africa and the many ways in which women negotiate complex social and religious issues.

One of the reasons Amazigh women are artists is that the arts are expressions of ethnic identity, and it follows that the guardians of Amazigh identity ought to be those who literally ensure its continuation from generation to generation, the Amazigh women. Not surprisingly, the arts are visual expressions of womanhood, and fertility symbols are prevalent. Controlling the visual symbols of Amazigh identity has given these women power and prestige. Their clothing, tattoos, and jewelry are public identity statements; such public artistic expressions contrast with the stereotype that women in the Islamic world are secluded and veiled. But their role as public identity symbols can also be restrictive, and history (French colonialism, the subsequent rise of an Arab-dominated government in Morocco, and the recent emergence of a transnational Berber movement) has forced Ait Khabbash women to adapt their arts as their people adapt to the contemporary world. By framing Amazigh arts with historical and cultural context, Cynthia Becker allows the reader to see the full measure of these fascinating artworks.

How the best intentions of African socialism became the useful tools of capitalism.

In the mid-twentieth century, skilled labor was seen as the key to national development. For newly independent African countries, this posed a formidable challenge: to build thriving economies, they needed to rapidly educate workers. As it turns out, that wasn’t their only obstacle.

Ambition and Adjustment reveals how responses to this human capital problem from the political left and right converged in unlikely ways to block Africa’s postcolonial progress. Focusing on nation-building projects in Zambia and Tanzania, Priya Lal recounts how the first generations of Africa’s professional class faced pressures on all sides—from foreign planners prioritizing economic growth and from local socialists decrying higher education and professionalization as wasteful and elitist. When African development stalled, international institutions like the World Bank took up parts of both approaches, justifying structural adjustment programs that defunded African universities and hospitals in the name of social equity. Indeed, Lal shows that neoliberal austerity in the 1990s was packaged in Africa’s socialist narratives from the 1960s.

By unearthing this forgotten history, Ambition and Adjustment upends traditional accounts of postcolonial development, exposing how socialism and capitalism both conflicted and overlapped to shape Africa’s trajectory since independence.

Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua traces Brooklyn's transformation from a freedom village into a residential commuter satellite that supplied cheap labor to the city and the region. He examines why Brooklyn remained unindustrialized while factories and industrial complexes were built in nearly all the neighboring white-majority towns. As Brooklyn's population tilted more heavily toward single young men employed in the factories and as the city's cheaper retail businesses drew the town's consumer dollars, local businesses--except those catering to nightlife and vice--withered away.

Drawing on town records, regional and African American newspapers, census data, and other sources, Cha-Jua provides a detailed social and political history of America's first Black town. He places Brooklyn in the context of Black-town development and African American nationalism and documents the dedicated efforts of its Black citizens to achieve political control and build a thriving, autonomous, Black-majority community.

America's First Black Town challenges scholarly assumptions that Black political control necessarily leads to internal unity and economic growth. Outlining dynamics that presaged the post-1960s plight of Gary, Detroit, and other Black-dominated cities, Cha-Jua confirms that, despite Brooklyn's heroic struggle for autonomy, Black control was not enough to stem the corrosive tide of internal colonialism.

The first book to explore the forgotten terrestrial and celestial globes of early America—and the global imagination they shaped. 

Ranging from early modern Europe to the modern United States, American Cosmos introduces the objects, people, practices, and ideas that constituted the long-forgotten world of globes. As Tamara Plakins Thornton shows, paired terrestrial and celestial globes were important components of early American social, cultural, and intellectual life. They served as markers of learnedness and social status, provided a material vision of a human-centered cosmos, and as 3-D problem-solving devices, offered distinctive imaginative perspectives on global connections and human difference. Only some had access to these globes—including genteel families, men of science, navigators, and students in colleges, academies, and missionary schools—but in the nineteenth century, many more encountered mass-produced, stripped-down globes in common school classrooms and parlors. Yet with new cultural concerns taking root, these modern globes assumed a much-diminished role in American life and thought, and an older world of globes, rich with meaning and possibility, disappeared.

As we increasingly encounter global-scale experience—climate change, pandemics, human migrations, the economy—and as American historians strive to look beyond national borders, we can learn about the origins of American global thinking by looking at globes themselves and the people who used them.

Surveying the American fascination with the Far East since the mid-eighteenth century, this book explains why the Orient had a fundamentally different meaning in the United States than in Europe or Great Britain. David Weir argues that unlike their European counterparts, Americans did not treat the East simply as a site of imperialist adventure; on the contrary, colonial subjugation was an experience that early Americans shared with the peoples of China and India. 

In eighteenth-century America, the East was, paradoxically, a means of reinforcing the enlightenment values of the West: Franklin, Jefferson, and other American writers found in Confucius a complement to their own political and philosophical beliefs. In the nineteenth century, with the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, the Hindu Orient emerged as a mystical alternative to American reality. During this period, Emerson, Thoreau, and other Transcendentalists viewed the “Oriental” not as an exotic other but as an image of what Americans could be, if stripped of all the commercialism and materialism that set them apart from their ideal. A similar sense of Oriental otherness informed the aesthetic discoveries of the early twentieth century, as Pound, Eliot, and other poets found in Chinese and Japanese literature an artistic purity and intensity absent from Western tradition. For all of these figures the Orient became a complex fantasy that allowed them to overcome something objectionable, either in themselves or in the culture of which they were a part, in order to attain some freer, more genuine form of philosophical, religious, or artistic expression.