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Marilyn Halter combines oral history with analyses of ships' records to chart the history and adaptation patterns of the Cape Verdean Americans. Though identifying themselves in ethnic terms, Cape Verdeans found that their African-European ancestry led their new society to view them as a racial group. Halter emphasizes racial and ethnic identity formation to show how Cape Verdeans set themselves apart from the African Americans while attempting to shrug off white society's exclusionary tactics. She also contrasts rural life on the bogs of Cape Cod with New Bedford’s urban community to reveal the ways immigrants established their own social and religious groups as they strove to maintain their Crioulo customs.

The typical image of a Dreamer is an undocumented Latinx youth—brought to the U.S. through no choice of their own—who excels academically and aspires to contribute to the U.S. economy. This image has engendered political good will and helped push through an executive order that created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, but it is limited. It fails to account for the full spectrum of diversity among undocumented youth. It also leaves the Dreamer figure stuck in a stage of youth and innocence waiting for immigration reform to allow them to finally transition to adulthood. There is little room in the Dreamer narrative for navigating complex family obligations, employment, entering adult relationships, or other markers of adulthood. In Beyond Dreamers, sociologists Sofya Aptekar and Amy Hsin examine how undocumented young adults navigate the transition to adulthood.

Drawing on more than one hundred interviews with a racially and ethnically diverse group of undocumented college students in New York City, with and without DACA authorization, Aptekar and Hsin show that there is no single undocumented experience. They find that while legal status matters enormously, its impacts are influenced by race, national origin, gender, class, sexuality, family resources, educational institutions, neighborhood contexts, and access to local and transnational co-ethnic communities and labor markets. These forces not only shape the kinds of opportunities available to undocumented young adults, but how they choose to approach disclosing their undocumented status and interact with family, peers, employers, professors, and police. 

Aptekar and Hsin pay particular attention to the effect of one’s mode of entry into the United States, highlighting the distinction between visa overstayers and those who entered the country without inspection. This highly consequential divide shapes early experiences of illegality, labor market options, exposure to surveillance and precarity, and the possibility of adjusting status. Individuals who overstay their visas have more avenues to adjust their undocumented status, including family sponsorship and marriage to U.S. citizens. Opportunities for legalization are much more restricted for those who made unauthorized border crossings. If these immigrant youth want to adjust their status, they are required to leave the country and remain abroad for at least ten years to do so. Other methods of adjusting their status, such as claiming extreme hardship on their American families or trying to obtain visas for victims of crime or parental abuse or neglect, are extremely difficult to obtain, costly, and can lead to division in families, making legalization all but impossible and, therefore, limiting youths’ opportunities. Thus, mode of entry strongly influences how some young adults imagine their future lives in the U.S. and beyond.

Beyond Dreamers deftly underscores how deeply legal uncertainty continues to structure the lives of undocumented young adults.

A radical assessment of the racial motives underlying the conception of photography and cinema

Conventional histories have long traced the origins of photography and cinema to the goal of reproducing the visible world. Black Light offers a radical counter to this understanding. Investigating the optical, cosmological, and racial thought that surrounded their conception, Christophe Wall-Romana argues that these media developed out of a desire to visualize what cannot be seen.

Taking as its starting point the concurrent invention of the telescope and industrialization of the transatlantic slave trade, Black Light shows how photography and cinema are entangled with two key preoccupations of the Enlightenment: visualizing the mysteries of the cosmos and managing Blackness. Wall-Romana uses literary and technological sources to demonstrate how racial and astronomical thinking interwove throughout the long development of our modern visual media. Retracing the impulses behind nonmimetic photoimaging and dynamic modeling, he exposes the racial underpinnings of research on photosensitive compounds such as silver nitrate and the racist lenses applied in post-Copernican cosmology.

Black Light charts the pivotal period from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century when Europeans were reckoning with “multiple worlds” and natural philosophy was giving way to “mechanical objectivity.” Wall-Romana shows how engagement with the nature of light was always entangled with racist discourses on Blackness—especially after the 1801 discovery of the invisible spectrum and its paradox of “black light.” Deprovincializing media archaeology, this book presents a groundbreaking historical framework with which to reenvision our dominant modes of seeing and understanding the world.

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Black Tech Ecosystems reports on a year-long ethnographic study of low-income Black adult learners attending Clearwater Academy, a nonprofit computer code bootcamp that teaches coding literacy to help end racism and poverty. While Clearwater Academy offers pathways into a lucrative career that promotes Black social mobility and a diverse tech industry, Antonio Byrd describes a more complicated story. The core challenges of weak social-support networks, embedded cultures in tech, financial strains, and racism persistently present roadblocks to Clearwater Academy’s Black adult learners’ success. However, through this experience, Black adult learners develop new knowledge and frameworks that change their relationship with coding literacy and labor. Instead of solely focusing on learning computer programming for work, Black Tech Ecosystems describes a liberatory and transformative use of computer programming that centers Black lives instead of the tech industry.

A vital guide to centering community knowledge to generate effective solutions to inequality

When organizations take on social problems, from school reform to conservation to healthcare disparities, community members are sometimes “invited to the table” to share their insights. But if the table has already been set with institutional assumptions about the issue at hand, the solutions that emerge often have little to do with the people and places they are meant to help. When this is the case, inclusion can only go so far: as Dr. Brittany Lewis argues, it’s time to build a new table.

Drawing on her work as a community researcher and nonprofit consultant, Dr. Lewis developed the Equity in Action (EIA) model as a framework for closing the gaps between communities, researchers, and institutions. By centering the knowledge of the community members who ostensibly benefit from the work of various organizations, EIA makes research questions more relevant and the research process more targeted, getting at the roots of social inequality to find sustainable, impactful solutions. In Building a New Table, Dr. Lewis guides readers through the steps of EIA: assessing the landscape, building the community action council, co-developing a research approach, data collection, community review, and identifying solutions. Along the way, she highlights the values imbued in each step and the skills needed for success as well as how the model can be adapted for different organizations.

Practical and hands-on, Building a New Table explores each phase of the Equity in Action model through case studies featuring commentary from organizational leaders and staff who have used it to reshape their engagement with the communities they serve. Demonstrating how to ground solutions in lessons from lived experience, this book teaches how authentic community engagement and community-driven research creates reciprocal, generative relationships that can enact real, systemic change.

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Beginning in the 1830s and continuing for more than a century, blackface minstrelsy—stage performances that claimed to represent the culture of black Americans—remained arguably the most popular entertainment in North America. A renewed scholarly interest in this contentious form of entertainment has produced studies treating a range of issues: its contradictory depictions of class, race, and gender; its role in the development of racial stereotyping; and its legacy in humor, dance, and music, and in live performance, film, and television. The style and substance of minstrelsy persist in popular music, tap and hip-hop dance, the language of the standup comic, and everyday rituals of contemporary culture. The blackface makeup all but disappeared for a time, though its influence never diminished—and recently, even the makeup has been making a comeback. 

This collection of original essays brings together a group of prominent scholars of blackface performance to reflect on this complex and troublesome tradition. Essays consider the early relationship of the blackface performer with American politics and the antislavery movement; the relationship of minstrels to the commonplace compromises of the touring “show” business and to the mechanization of the industrial revolution; the exploration and exploitation of blackface in the mass media, by D. W. Griffith and Spike Lee, in early sound animation, and in reality television; and the recent reappropriation of the form at home and abroad.

In addition to the editor, contributors include Dale Cockrell, Catherine Cole, Louis Chude-Sokei, W. T. Lhamon, Alice Maurice, Nicholas Sammond, and Linda Williams.