Featured New Books

Society, Power and Land in Northeastern Zimbabwe, ca 1560-1960

Admire Mseba, Assistant Professor, Van Hunnick Department of History, received the American Historical Association (AHA)’s Martin A Klein Prize in African History for 2025 for his book, Society, Power and Land in Northeastern Zimbabwe, ca 1560-1960 (Ohio University Press, 2024).

Society, Power and Land in Northeastern Zimbabwe, ca 1560-1960 refocuses attention on how regimes of power rooted in kinship, gender, generation, and status have, individually and in combination, informed access to land in precolonial northeastern Zimbabwe. It then examines how these regimes of power interacted with colonial policies to inform the African experience in colonial Zimbabwe. Further, the book places land and the ability to ensure its fecundity at the center of the making and moderation of precolonial political power and how this power was impacted by the imposition of colonial rule.

Society, Power and Land in Northeastern Zimbabwe, ca 1560-1960 book cover

Let’s Talk about DEI: Productive Disagreements about America’s Most Polarizing Topics

Shaun Harper, University Professor of Education, Business, and Public Policy and Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership published a book, Let’s Talk about DEI: Productive Disagreements about America’s Most Polarizing Topics (Teachers College Press, 2025).

Let’s Talk About DEI models for professionals and everyday Americans ways to productively critique, learn from, and respond to other people’s perspectives on topics related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). A variety of contested issues are debated, including consequences for kids who do racist things in schools, the U.S. Supreme Court’s affirmative action reversal, legacy advantages in college admissions, the tumultuous tenure of Harvard’s first Black president, legislative attacks on DEI initiatives, and celebrity coaches at historically Black universities.

Dominican Crossroads: H.C.C. Astwood and the Moral Politics of Race-making in the Age of Emancipation

Please help us congratulate Dr. Christina C. Davidson for her recent publication, Dominican Crossroads: H.C.C. Astwood and the Moral Politics of Race-making in the Age of Emancipation. In Dominican Crossroads, Davidson explores H.C.C. Astwood’s extraordinary and complicated life and career. Davidson tracks the challenges that Astwood faced as a Black politician in an era of rampant racism and ongoing cross-border debates over Black men’s capacity for citizenship. As a US representative and AME missionary, Astwood epitomized Black masculine respectability. But as Davidson shows, Astwood became a duplicitous, scheming figure who used deception and engaged in racist moral politics to command authority. His methods, Davidson demonstrates, show a bleaker side of Black international politics and illustrate the varied contours of transnational moral discourse as people of all colors vied for power during the ongoing debate over Black rights in Santo Domingo and beyond.

Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond

Join us in celebrating the publication of Dr. Oneka LaBennett’s newest book, Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond. Global Guyana exposes the global threat of environmental catastrophe and the forms of erasure that structure Caribbean women’s lives in the often overlooked nation of Guyana. LaBennett draws from archival research and oral history, and examines 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—to reposition 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. 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.

Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons

We look forward to reading Dr. Brittany Friedman’s forthcoming book, Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, set to be published on January 7, 2025. Carceral Apartheid delves into how the California Department of Corrections deployed various official, clandestine, and at times extralegal control techniques, including officer alliances with imprisoned white supremacists, to suppress Black political movements, revealing the broader themes of deception, empire, corruption, and white supremacy in American mass incarceration. Drawing from original interviews with founders of Black political movements such as the Black Guerilla Family, white supremacists, and a swath of little-known archival data, Friedman uncovers how the US domestic war against imprisoned Black people models and perpetuates genocide, imprisonment, and torture abroad.