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A transformative study by Daniel S. Cozart, Afro-Peruvian Mestizos redefines the narrative of mestizaje in post-abolition Peru, uncovering the hidden histories and enduring strength of Afro-Peruvian communities.

Afro-Peruvian Mestizos: The Invisibility of Blackness in Post-Abolition Peru by Daniel S. Cozart investigates the ideologies of mestizaje, or racial mixing, that Latin American elites used to construct modern national identities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through close reading of archival records, legal documents, and literary works, Cozart uncovers the systematic exclusion of Afro-Peruvians from the nation's narrative of progress, revealing how their presence was deliberately omitted from official histories and censuses. The abolition of slavery in 1855 marked the beginning of a process where Afro-Peruvians were marginalized, their identities overshadowed by a national narrative that prioritized Indigenous heritage and whiteness.

Drawing on Michel-Rolph Trouillot's framework of historical production, the book traces the contradictions inherent in liberal and positivist ideologies that sought to forge a "raceless" society, all while silencing Afro-Peruvian voices and erasing their history. The conclusion reflects on the significance of erasure for Afro-Peruvians in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as they now demand to be seen. This book is a powerful examination of historical silences and the ongoing struggle for recognition in the face of systemic racism.

2025 Most Significant Scholarly Book, Texas Institute of Letters

A history of racism and segregation in twentieth-century Houston and beyond.

Through the 1950s and beyond, the Supreme Court issued decisions that appeared to provide immediate civil rights protections to racial minorities as it relegated Jim Crow to the past. For black Houstonians who had been hoping and actively fighting for what they called a “raceless democracy,” these postwar decades were often seen as decades of promise. In Houston and the Permanence of Segregation, David Ponton argues that these were instead “decades of capture”: times in which people were captured and constrained by gender and race, by faith in the law, by antiblack violence, and even by the narrative structures of conventional histories. Bringing the insights of Black studies and Afropessimism to the field of urban history, Ponton explores how gender roles constrained thought in black freedom movements, how the “rule of law” compelled black Houstonians to view injustice as a sign of progress, and how antiblack terror undermined Houston’s narrative of itself as a “heavenly” place.

Today, Houston is one of the most racially diverse cities in the United States, and at the same time it remains one of the most starkly segregated. Ponton’s study demonstrates how and why segregation has become a permanent feature in our cities and offers powerful tools for imagining the world otherwise.

I Saw Her in My Dreams is a powerful novel about interpersonal and systemic violence, examined through the lens of a relationship between Zahiyya, an anxious middle-class Omani artist, and Faneesh, the Ethiopian domestic worker she hires. When Zahiyya’s husband Amer, a novelist, leaves for Zanzibar in search of his biological mother, Zahiyya is left to confront her anxieties and prejudices. Both Zahiyya and Faneesh begin to suffer a recurring nightmare, prompting Zahiyya to read Fanheesh’s diaries in search of answers. Alone and afraid, Zahiyya reads excerpts from Amer’s novel, written from his father’s diaries about living in Zanzibar, where he fell in love with Amer’s mother, a Zanzibari woman whose absence still haunts him. Weaving between multiple perspectives and stories within stories, the novel explores honestly—but without sensationalizing or self-Orientalizing—the anti-Blackness that has endured in the Arab world and elsewhere.

WINNER OF THE JAMES F. SULZBY AWARD

Healing against the odds—Black doctors, bold resistance, and the fight for medical justice in Alabama.

Physicians for the People chronicles the remarkable stories of 241 Black doctors who practiced medicine in Alabama during the Jim Crow era. Historian Jack D. Ellis reveals the ingenuity and resilience of these trailblazing doctors who defied segregation by establishing hospitals and clinics and providing vital healthcare to underserved Black communities.

This meticulously researched work draws on archival sources, oral histories, and an unparalleled database to dismantle the myth of a monolithic medical system in the Jim Crow South. Jack D. Ellis argues that the post–Civil War lives of Black physicians, dentists, pharmacists, nurses, and midwives hold special significance, illuminating both the causes of health care disparities among African Americans and the reasons for their continued underrepresentation in the medical professions.

Offering much of interest to students and scholars of Black history, medical history, and the civil rights movement, Physicians for the People exposes the deliberate exclusion faced by Black doctors within the white medical establishment and their ongoing fight for racial equality in medicine.

Explores the contradictory perceptions of African immigrant students in New York City and reveals how anti-Blackness persists even within predominantly Black and Brown schools.

African immigrant students are often celebrated in the United States as academically successful and culturally disciplined. But what happens when praise itself becomes part of a racial hierarchy? In The Black Model Minority Student, sociologist of education Mercy Agyepong traces the complex experiences of West African immigrant students attending public high schools in New York City. 

Using ethnographic and interview data from predominantly Black and Brown schools in the Bronx, Agyepong shows that African immigrant students are often viewed through two competing yet coexisting narratives: as intellectually capable and hardworking, yet also as uncivilized or socially inferior. These perceptions are not incidental, but central to how anti-Blackness operates and how racial hierarchies are sustained in the United States. While the model minority stereotype shaped their experiences in Black and Brown high schools, West African immigrant students found that this seemingly favorable stereotype mattered less once they graduated and entered the white spaces of higher education and other social settings. At every step, African students—regardless of their national origins—were disadvantaged by racial stereotypes.

Theoretically grounded yet deeply human, The Black Model Minority Student offers an important new perspective on race, immigration, and education in contemporary America.