New & Featured Books for Feb. 2024
The Library is excited to feature a selection of books that have been recently added to the collection. All items are available to be checked out. February is Black History Month, and the books in this month’s showcase touch upon the Black experience, both contemporary and historical, across different disciplines.
Each month we will feature a different selection of new books. In March, we will be celebrating Women’s History Month and will spotlight books that examine and celebrate women. Check back then!
Featured New Books for February 2024
Brew-Hammond, Nana Ekua, editor. Relations : An Anthology of African and Diaspora Voices. Harpervia, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2023.
Available , Main Stacks ; PR9348 .R45 2023
“Relations is a meeting place of perspectives, a profound meditation on the diversity of the Black experience in a post-Black Panther world. The essays, poetry, and stories included span format and genre; they address questions of culture and experience among communities across the globe, who we are, who we want to be, and what it means to navigate life in a Black body. Relations is a vibrant, essential examination of being that elevates voices from different corners of the world.” - Worldcat
Byrd, Brandon R., Leslie M. Alexander, and Russell Rickford, editors. Ideas in Unexpected Places : Reimagining Black Intellectual History. Northwestern University Press, 2022.
Available , Display Bookshelf ; E185.89.I56 I34 2022
“This transformative collection advances new approaches to Black intellectual history by foregrounding the experiences and ideas of people who lacked access to more privileged mechanisms of public discourse and power. While the anthology highlights renowned intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, it also spotlights thinkers such as enslaved people in the antebellum United States, US Black expatriates in Guyana, and Black internationals in Liberia. … Timely and incisive, Ideas in Unexpected Places encourages scholars to ask new questions through innovative interpretive lenses—and invites students, scholars, and other practitioners to push the boundaries of Black intellectual history even further.” - Northwestern University Press
Darby, Derrick. A Realistic Blacktopia : Why We Must Unite to Fight. Oxford University Press, 2023.
Available , Main Stacks ; E185.61 .D266 2023
Darby, a Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, “draws on Martin Luther King, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the black radical tradition to explore how to make progress in the antiracist struggle. [A Realistic Blacktopia] discusses alliances, voting rights, affirmative action and the limits of racial remedies. - Rutgers Philosopher Argues for a “Realistic Blacktopia”
Piper, Brian, Russell Lord, and John Edwin Mason. Called to the Camera : Black American Studio Photographers. New Orleans Museum of Art, 2023.
Available , Main Stacks ; TR681.B52 C35 2023
“Spanning the first 120 years of photography, [Called to the Camera] … features many photographs published for the first time. This unique collection reveals the inner workings (the toil, the techniques, and the students) of these studios, as well as the intimate portraits of Black life produced inside of them.” - Review by Salamishah Tillet in Aperture
Roberts, Rosemarie A. Baring Unbearable Sensualities : Hip Hop Dance, Bodies, Race, and Power. Wesleyan University Press, 2021.
Available , Display Bookshelf ; GV1796.H57 R63 2021
“Baring Unbearable Sensualities … offers a profoundly insightful and necessary contribution to the growing scholarship of Hip Hop dance and performance. … Through an interdisciplinary approach of social psychology, anthropology, and dance studies, Roberts analyzes dance and movement to problematize the ways in which the body is seen and written. In particular, her work challenges how the fields ranging from dance to anthropology have set limitations on the power of the body, in particular on collective bodies, and more specifically on Black and Brown bodies.” - Review by Grace Shinhae Jun in Dance Chronicle
Sarath, Ed. Black Music Matters : Jazz and the Transformation of Music Studies. Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.
Available , Main Stacks ; MT1 .S268 2018
“Black Music Matters: Jazz and the Transformation of Music Studies is among the first books to examine music studies reform through the lens of African American music, as well as the emergent field of consciousness studies. It is inspired by conversations on race and a rich body of literature on the place of black music in American culture” - Worldcat
Smith, Danyel. Shine Bright : A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop. Roc Lit 101, 2022.
Available , Popular Collection-Novel ; ML82 .S615 2022
“American pop music is arguably this country’s greatest cultural contribution to the world, and its singular voice and virtuosity were created by a shining thread of Black women geniuses stretching back to the country’s founding. This is their surprising, heartbreaking, soaring story—from “one of the generation’s greatest, most insightful, most nuanced writers in pop culture.” - Shea Serrano, author of Hip-Hop (And Other Things)
Tuana, Nancy. Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference : An Ecointersectional Analysis. Oxford University Press, 2023.
Available , Main Stacks ; GE220 .T83 2023
“Developing an ecointersectional analysis, Tuana has produced an elegant, meticulously crafted, deep, and yet accessible text on how racism is entangled in the environmental justice movement.” - Choice Reviews