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C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins remains one of the great works of the twentieth century and the cornerstone of Haitian revolutionary studies. In Making The Black Jacobins, Rachel Douglas traces the genesis, transformation, and afterlives of James's landmark work across the decades from the 1930s on. Examining the 1938 and 1963 editions of The Black Jacobins, the 1967 play of the same name, and James's 1936 play, Toussaint Louverture—as well as manuscripts, notes, interviews, and other texts—Douglas shows how James continuously rewrote and revised his history of the Haitian Revolution as his politics and engagement with Marxism evolved. She also points to the vital significance theater played in James's work and how it influenced his views of history. Douglas shows The Black Jacobins to be a palimpsest, its successive layers of rewriting renewing its call to new generations.

Mapping Diversity in Latin America offers ample critical coverage of recent approaches to the historical study of race and ethnicity in Latin America since the arrival of Spanish and Portuguese colonizers to the present. Bringing together the work of leading scholars, this volume presents readers with a thorough and updated examination of the formation and evolution of ideas surrounding race and ethnicity, social movements, and political processes in Latin America that provides multiple routes for future research on the topic. The book’s nineteen chapters establish the basis for a productive comparative analysis of racial developments in the whole continent to allow for a combination of diachronic and synchronic study of regional processes. Both the scope of the book and the historical and geocultural coverage on these topics are unique in the field of Latin American Studies.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach to understanding issues of collective identity, otherness, alterity, and the like, Mapping Diversity in Latin America sheds light on histories that have been traditionally overlooked in texts on race in Latin America, such as the rich history of diasporic Asian, Syrian Lebanese, and Jewish communities, and the more recent emergence of Latinx populations in the United States. The book includes a critical examination of fundamental concepts such as mestizaje, mulataje, creolization, negritud, and blanquitud, as well as critical and theoretical approaches to the study of these issues in postcolonial societies.

Marginal People in Deviant Places revisits twentieth-century ethnographic studies of deviance, arguing that ethnographies that focus on marginal subcultures—ranging from Los Angeles hoboes to men who have sex with other men in St. Louis bathrooms, to taxi dancers in Chicago, to elderly Jews in Venice, California—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 offered an early challenge to then-dominant narratives of scientific racism and then offers a social history of certain American outsiders and a prehistory of the academic fields of ethnic studies and sexuality studies. Through the stories Irvine recounts in this book, she identifies an American paradox represented in a simultaneous desire for and rejection of outsiders and describes the rise of an outsider capitalism that integrates difference into American society by marketing it.

Place plays a crucial role in this work as Irvine examines its role in shaping ethnographies about outsiders and therefore understandings of social difference. Irvine has visited the sites of each of the ethnographies about which she writes, collecting photos, videos, and archival materials that will help readers understand the importance of place in the generation of particular ethnographic stories. The open-access online edition of this book is richly illustrated to help convey the deep sense of emplacement of the ethnographies discussed in this book and includes a series of interviews with sociologists about how they conduct their work and understand their forebears.

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.

 

Critical studies of the prophetic voice that reshaped a nation. 

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Sermonic Power of Public Discourse presents a rich and illuminating examination of Dr. King’s rhetorical mastery, revealing how his most iconic speeches and writings drew deeply from African American sermonic traditions to articulate a moral vision capable of transforming public consciousness. Through nine incisive essays, the volume explores how King’s oratory fused theology, ethics, metaphor, and call‑and‑response patterns to mobilize audiences and frame the civil rights movement as a universal moral struggle. 

The collection focuses on five pivotal works—“Death of Evil on the Seashore,” “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “I Have a Dream,” “A Time to Break Silence,” and “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”—each analyzed for its rhetorical structure, historical context, and thematic force. These pieces span the full arc of King’s public career, illustrating not only his evolving political and theological commitments but also his sustained effort to envision and communicate a “beloved community” rooted in justice, equality, and human dignity. 

In addition to unpacking King’s metaphoric language, ethical appeals, and theological grounding, several essays highlight the ways his rhetoric bridged diverse audiences and invited collective participation in social change. Scholars examine how King re‑constructed the rhetorical situation in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” framed equality as a universal ideal, and used orality and performance to elevate “I Have a Dream” into one of the most resonant speeches in American history.

Far more than an anthology of commentary, this volume provides a nuanced, interdisciplinary understanding of King as a rhetorician whose discourse transcended political advocacy to become a powerful form of moral persuasion. It is an essential resource for readers interested in rhetoric, communication, civil rights history, and the enduring power of prophetic speech.

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.

For too long, the approach to seemingly universal experiences like love, death, and even time in film has been dominated by the Global North. But what if such explorations developed horizontally instead? Drawing from both European and African cultural theorists, including Gilles Deleuze and Wole Soyinka, Vlad Dima invites us to consider what happens to postcolonial African film if we no longer privilege the idea of time. How else might we understand the cinematic image, and how would its meanings change? Meaninglessness: Time, Rhythm, and the Undead in Postcolonial Cinema is a study of meaning and meaninglessness through the figure of the undead, beginning with francophone Africa and extending to postcolonial France. Through the analysis of films like Mati Diop’s Atlantics and Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Miraculous Weapons, Dima shows how the African cinematic image may produce meaning without any attachment to European time, and how that meaning is connected instead to the philosophy of negritude and to the notion of rhythm. Meaninglessness introduces the concept of the rhythm-sequence as a new way to understand the African moving image.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Black German women began to play significant roles in challenging the discrimination in their own nation and abroad. Their grassroots organizing, writings, and political and cultural activities nurtured innovative traditions, ideas, and practices. These strategies facilitated new, often radical bonds between people from disparate backgrounds across the Black Diaspora.

Tiffany N. Florvil examines the role of queer and straight women in shaping the contours of the modern Black German movement as part of the Black internationalist opposition to racial and gender oppression. Florvil shows the multifaceted contributions of women to movement making, including Audre Lorde’s role in influencing their activism; the activists who inspired Afro-German women to curate their own identities and histories; and the evolution of the activist groups Initiative of Black Germans and Afro-German Women. These practices and strategies became a rallying point for isolated and marginalized women (and men) and shaped the roots of contemporary Black German activism.

Richly researched and multidimensional in scope, Mobilizing Black Germany offers a rare in-depth look at the emergence of the modern Black German movement and Black feminists’ politics, intellectualism, and internationalism.

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.
 

Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations uses reflections on the Black experience to consider the “unasked question of blackness” in modern migration and movement. The editors and contributors use the lens of Black Studies to show how migration—compelled by force or suggestion, from the transatlantic African slave trade to the Great Migration and the current refugee crisis—has been structured to reinforce white supremacy.

Focusing on antiblackness in immigration and examining restrictions on freedom of movement and on settling alike, chapters address how Black im/mobility operates and how it can be distinguished from that of the migrant and the colonial settler, as well as from the transgressive mobilities of Indigenous populations. Looking at blackness, borders and border practices, and displacement, Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations investigates racialized boundaries that determine immigration policy, citizenship, legality, and inclusion. Additional chapters analyze communities, such as the Haitian diaspora in Miami, antiblackness in the context of Australian migration, and explore literary representations of justice, slavery and Black feminist consciousness.

Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations uses (anti)blackness to rethink the way we understand borders, immigrant identity, barriers to integration, and the dynamics of migrant exclusion, while also providing an understanding of “otherness” for Black populations across nationalities.  

Contributors: Maya Hislop, P. Khalil Saucier, Hyacinth Udah, Paula von Gleich, Tryon P. Woods, and the editors

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.
 

In Moving Home, Sandra Gunning examines nineteenth-century African diasporic travel writing to expand and complicate understandings of the Black Atlantic. Gunning draws on the writing of missionaries, abolitionists, entrepreneurs, and explorers whose work challenges the assumptions that travel writing is primarily associated with leisure or scientific research. For instance, Yoruba ex-slave turned Anglican bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther played a role in the Christianization of colonial Nigeria. Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a formerly enslaved girl "gifted" to Queen Victoria, traveled the African colonies as the wife of a prominent colonial figure and under the protection of her benefactress. Alongside Nancy Gardiner Prince, Martin R. Delany, Robert Campbell, and others, these writers used their mobility as African diasporic and colonial subjects to explore the Atlantic world and beyond while they negotiated the complex intersections between nation and empire. Rather than categorizing them as merely precursors of Pan-Africanist traditions, Gunning traces their successes and frustrations to capture a sense of the historical and geographical specificities that shaped their careers.