Zora Neale Hurston, an anthropologist and writer best known for her classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, led a complicated life often marked by tragedy and contradictions. When both she and her writing fell out of favor after the Harlem Renaissance, she struggled not only to regain an audience for her novels but also to simply make ends meet. In The C ... Show More
Nov 24
Yolanda Aixelà-Cabré, "African Women’s Histories in European Narratives: The Afropolitan Krio Fernandino Diaspora (1850-1996)" (Leuven UP, 2025)
Little is known about the African women who came to Europe from the 1870s onwards, nor do we dare to imagine them as wealthy, elegantly dressed individuals with refined tastes and fluent in several languages. The Krio Fernandino represented a multisited, multilocal, transnational ... Show More
44m 1s
Nov 23
Sarah Hoiland, "Righteous Sisterhood: The Politics and Power of an All-Women's Motorcycle Club" (Temple UP, 2025)
A righteous sister identifies herself as a biker. She might wrench, or maintain, her own bike, and she prefers to ride with other righteous sisters. Righteous Sisterhood: The Politics and Power of an All-Women's Motorcycle Club (Temple UP, 2025) is Dr. Sarah Hoiland’s insightful ... Show More
44m 53s
Nov 22
Shatema Threadcraft, "Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Western democracies are haunted. Michael Hanchard suggests that the specter of race is what haunts our democracies, but it may be more accurate to suggest that they are haunted by their own racialized death machines—by racialized premature death. If this haunting is not adequatel ... Show More
58m 24s
Aug 2023
Tamara J. Walker, "Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad" (Crown, 2023)
Part historical exploration, part travel memoir, Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad (Crown, 2023) reveals poignant histories of a diverse group of African Americans who have left the United States over the course of the past century. Together, the interwoven ... Show More
1h 18m
Jan 2025
Jennie Lightweis-Goff, "Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
Cities are fraught sites in the national imagination, turned into identity markers when “urban” and “rural” indicate tastes rather than places. Cities bring chaos, draining the lifeblood of the nation like a tick draws blood from its host, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson’s anti-ur ... Show More
56m 51s
Feb 2025
Tao Leigh Goffe, "Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis" (Doubleday Books, 2025)
In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laborator ... Show More
1h 1m
Jan 2023
Paulina Laura Alberto et al., "Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870-1960" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) offers English translations of more than one hundred articles published in Black newspapers in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Uruguay from 1870 to 1960. Those publications were as im ... Show More
49m 20s
Nov 2024
Sharonah Esther Fredrick, "An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods: Political Ideology and Insurrection in the Mayan Popul Vuh and the Andean Huarochiri Manuscript" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)
An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods: Political Ideology and Insurrection in the Mayan Popul Vuh and the Andean Huarochiri Manuscript (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) is the first comprehensive comparison of two of the greatest epics of the Indigenous peoples of Latin Americ ... Show More
56m 58s
Jun 2024
Mónica M. Salas Landa, "Visible Ruins: The Politics of Perception and the Legacies of Mexico's Revolution" (U Texas Press, 2024)
The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) introduced a series of state-led initiatives promising modernity, progress, national grandeur, and stability; state surveyors assessed land for agrarian reform, engineers used nationalized oil for industrialization, archaeologists reconstructed ... Show More
52m 7s
Jul 2021
Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, "Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote that “the silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in wa ... Show More
1h 10m
Sep 2024
Sarah Lewis, "The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America" (Harvard UP, 2024)
In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of th ... Show More
43m 23s
Jul 2024
Oneka LaBennett, "Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond" (NYU Press, 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 moder ... Show More
53m 52s
Feb 2024
Bryce Henson, "Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil" (U Texas Press, 2024)
Known as Black Rome, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, is a predominantly Black city. The local art, food, and dance are closely linked to the population's African roots. Yet many Black Brazilian residents are politically and economically disenfranchised. Bryce Henson details a culture ... Show More
1h 11m