Episodes

  • Oneka LaBennett, "Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond" (NYU Press, 2024)

    Oneka LaBennett, "Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond" (NYU Press, 2024)
    Jul 3 2024
    Previously ranked among the hemisphere’s poorest countries, Guyana is becoming a global leader in per capita oil production, a shift which promises to profoundly transform the nation. This sea change presents a unique opportunity to dissect both the environmental impacts of modern-world resource extraction and the obscured yet damaging ways in which intersectional race and gender formations circumscribe Caribbean women’s lives. Drawing from archival research and oral history, and examining mass-mediated flashpoints across the African and Indian diasporas―including Rihanna’s sonic routes, ethnic conflict reportage, HBO’s Lovecraft Country, and Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking―Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond (NYU Press, 2024) repositions this marginalized nation as a nexus of social and economic activity which drives popular culture and ideas about sexuality while reshaping the geopolitical and literal topography of the Caribbean region. Oneka LaBennett employs the powerful analytic of the pointer broom to disentangle the symbiotic relationship between Guyanese women’s gendered labor and global racial capitalism. She illuminates how both oil extraction and sand export are implicated in a well-established practice of pillaging the Caribbean’s natural resources while masking the ecological consequences that disproportionately affect women and children. Global Guyana uncovers how ecological erosion and gendered violence are entrenched in extractive industries emanating from this often-effaced but pivotal country. Sounding the alarm on the portentous repercussions that ambitious development spells out for the nation’s people and its geographical terrain, LaBennett issues a warning for all of us about the looming threat of global environmental calamity. Oneka LaBennett is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California. She’s the author of She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn and co-editor of Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies
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    54 mins
  • Faith Smith, "Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean's Non-Sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century" (Duke UP, 2023)

    Faith Smith, "Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean's Non-Sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century" (Duke UP, 2023)
    Jul 2 2024
    In Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean's Non-Sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century (Duke UP, 2023), Faith Smith engages with a period in the history of the Anglophone Caribbean often overlooked as nondescript, quiet, and embarrassingly pro-imperial within the larger narrative of Jamaican and Trinidadian nationalism. Between the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion and World War I, British imperialism was taken for granted among both elites and ordinary people, while nationalist discourses would not begin to shape political imagination in the West Indies for decades. Smith argues that this moment, far from being uneventful, disrupts the inevitability of nationhood in the mid-twentieth century and anticipates the Caribbean’s present-day relationship to global power. Smith assembles and analyzes a diverse set of texts, from Carnival songs, poems, and novels to newspapers, photographs, and gardens, to examine theoretical and literary-historiographic questions concerning time and temporality, empire and diaspora, immigration and indigeneity, gender and the politics of desire, Africa’s place within Caribbeanist discourse, and the idea of the Caribbean itself. Closely examining these cultural expressions of apparent quiescence, Smith locates the quiet violence of colonial rule and the insistence of colonial subjects on making meaningful lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Ben Wright, "Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism" (LSU Press, 2020)

    Ben Wright, "Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism" (LSU Press, 2020)
    Jul 2 2024
    Ben Wright's Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism (LSU Press, 2020) demonstrates how religion structured the possibilities and limitations of American abolitionism during the early years of the republic. From the American Revolution through the eruption of schisms in the three largest Protestant denominations in the 1840s, this comprehensive work lays bare the social and religious divides that culminated in secession and civil war. Historians often emphasize status anxieties, market changes, biracial cooperation, and political maneuvering as primary forces in the evolution of slavery in the United States. Wright instead foregrounds the pivotal role religion played in shaping the ideological contours of the early abolitionist movement. Wright first examines the ideological distinctions between religious conversion and purification in the aftermath of the Revolution, when a small number of white Christians contended that the nation must purify itself from slavery before it could fulfill its religious destiny. Most white Christians disagreed, focusing on visions of spiritual salvation over the practical goal of emancipation. To expand salvation to all, they created new denominations equipped to carry the gospel across the American continent and eventually all over the globe. These denominations established numerous reform organizations, collectively known as the "benevolent empire," to reckon with the problem of slavery. One affiliated group, the American Colonization Society (ACS), worked to end slavery and secure white supremacy by promising salvation for Africa and redemption for the United States. Yet the ACS and its efforts drew strong objections. Proslavery prophets transformed expectations of expanded salvation into a formidable antiabolitionist weapon, framing the ACS's proponents as enemies of national unity. Abolitionist assertions that enslavers could not serve as agents of salvation sapped the most potent force in American nationalism--Christianity--and led to schisms within the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches. These divides exacerbated sectional hostilities and sent the nation farther down the path to secession and war. Wright's provocative analysis reveals that visions of salvation both created and almost destroyed the American nation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies
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    22 mins
  • Kehbuma Langmia, "Black 'Race' and the White Supremacy Saga" (Anthem Press, 2024)

    Kehbuma Langmia, "Black 'Race' and the White Supremacy Saga" (Anthem Press, 2024)
    Jul 1 2024
    Dr. Langmia's book Black 'Race' and the White Supremacy Saga (Anthem Press, 2024) examines the conundrum that has haunted the Black and White ancestry for ages on what supremacy actually means. Is it Black or White supremacy? Granted, the term "White supremacy" has occupied the sociopolitical, cultural and economic discourse for ages, but what does that really imply? All other ancestries on planet earth have been coerced to believe that conformity to Euro-American lifestyle is the way to become 'civilized' on planet earth. But the term civilization owes its genesis to the African cultural and educational achievements in Egypt. Consequently, Black ancestry, the first human specie on planet earth, should lead humankind to cultural and epistemological supremacy--but that has always been met with skepticism. This book examines this debate, especially between the Black and the White ancestry. There appears to be a pejorative connotation associated with the term Black. It has been 'inferiorized' because of the stain of slavery, servitude and brutal murders suffered by those from the continent of Africa that are overwhelmingly Black. Dr. Kehbuma Langmia offers “counter arguments on ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority’ designations” (p. 181) that have been applied to particular groups and have prevented the unity of the entire human "race." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies
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    44 mins
  • Bayley J. Marquez, "Plantation Pedagogy: The Violence of Schooling Across Black and Indigenous Space" (U California Press, 2024)

    Bayley J. Marquez, "Plantation Pedagogy: The Violence of Schooling Across Black and Indigenous Space" (U California Press, 2024)
    Jun 30 2024
    Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, teachers, administrators, and policymakers fashioned a system of industrial education that attempted to transform Black and Indigenous peoples and land. This form of teaching—what Bayley J. Marquez names plantation pedagogy—was built on the claim that slavery and land dispossession are fundamentally educational. Plantation pedagogy and the formal institutions that encompassed it were thus integrally tied to enslavement, settlement, and their inherent violence toward land and people. Marquez investigates how proponents developed industrial education domestically and then spread the model abroad as part of US imperialism. A deeply thoughtful and arresting work, Plantation Pedagogy: The Violence of Schooling Across Black and Indigenous Space (U California Press, 2024) sits where Black and Native studies meet in order to understand our interconnected histories and theorize our collective futures. Bayley J. Marquez is an Indigenous scholar from the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians and Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Max Jacobs is a PhD student in education at Rutgers University. He currently sits on the Graduate Student Council for the History of Education Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies
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    1 hr and 15 mins
  • On Michael Jackson: A Lecture by Margo Jefferson

    On Michael Jackson: A Lecture by Margo Jefferson
    Jun 29 2024
    In September 2006, Margo Jefferson spoke to the Institute about her book, On Michael Jackson (Vintage, 2007). Jefferson received the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for criticism when she was at the New York Times. Her 2015 book, Negroland: A Memoir, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. And in 2022, she published, Constructing a Nervous System, a memoir in fragments. She has taught at NYU, The New School, and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she is a professor of professional practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies
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    49 mins
  • Jeremy Schipper, "Denmark Vesey's Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial" (Princeton UP, 2022)

    Jeremy Schipper, "Denmark Vesey's Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial" (Princeton UP, 2022)
    Jun 27 2024
    In Denmark Vesey's Bible: The Thwarted Revolt that Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial (Princeton UP, 2022), Dr. Jeremy Schipper tells the story of a free Black man accused of plotting an anti-slavery insurrection in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822. Vesey was found guilty and hanged along with dozens of others accused of collaborating with him. At the center of the book is an examination of how former slave Denmark Vesey used interpretations of the Bible to justify the revolt while members of the white establishment in South Carolina use that same Bible to support the slaveholders view of themselves as benevolent biblical patriarchs. The book is a riveting account of a key moment in antebellum American history that underscores deep racial inequities and the assumed supremacy of white Christians during a time of violence, fear, and conflicting understandings of moral superiority and biblical truth. Recommended reading: The Denmark Vesey Affair: A Documentary History edited by Douglas R. Egerton and Robert L. Paquette Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies
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    1 hr and 14 mins
  • Frederick Klaits et al., "Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated US City: Designs for Vitality" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

    Frederick Klaits et al., "Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated US City: Designs for Vitality" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
    Jun 26 2024
    In Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated US City: Designs for Vitality (Bloomsbury, 2022), Frederick Klaits compares how members of one majority white and two African American churches in Buffalo, New York receive knowledge from God about their own and others' life circumstances. In the Pentecostal Christian faith, believers say that they acquire divinely inspired insights by developing a "relationship with God." But what makes these insights appear necessary? This book offers a novel approach to this question, arguing that the inspirations believers receive from God lead them to take critical stances on what they regard as ordinary understandings of space, time, care, and personal value. Using a shared Pentecostal language, believers occupying different positions within racial, class, and gender formations reflect in divergent ways on God's designs. In the process, they engage critically with late liberal imaginaries of eventfulness and vitality to envision possibilities of life in a highly unequal society. This text incorporates commentaries on Klaits' ethnography by LaShekia Chatman and Michael Richbart, junior scholars who have also studied and been part of Pentecostal communities in Buffalo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies
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    59 mins