31 Books Published by Cambridge University Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Drawing from stratification economics, intersectionality, and respectability politics, The Love Jones Cohort focuses on the experiences of Black middle-class individuals who are single and living alone (SALA). This groundbreaking book explores the intersections of race, gender, and class, and how these factors, along with social structures, shape the lives of SALA individuals. It delves into their definitions of family and friends, decisions regarding romantic relationships, experiences of being Black and middle class, choices of residence, wealth accumulation, and overall well-being and coping mechanisms. Through this lens, The Love Jones Cohort offers a nuanced understanding of the Black middle-class experience.

Birthright Citizens tells how African American activists radically transformed the terms of citizenship for all Americans. Before the Civil War, colonization schemes and black laws threatened to deport former slaves born in the United States. Birthright Citizens recovers the story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses. They faced formidable opposition, most notoriously from the US Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Still, Martha S. Jones explains, no single case defined their status. Former slaves studied law, secured allies, and conducted themselves like citizens, establishing their status through local, everyday claims. All along they argued that birth guaranteed their rights. With fresh archival sources and an ambitious reframing of constitutional law-making before the Civil War, Jones shows how when the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the birthright principle, the aspirations of black Americans’ aspirations were realized.

African American novels have moved from being a literature of necessity to being a literature. Perhaps it is time for them once again to return to their origins, however, and have their themes applied to broader contexts. Perhaps they should once again become a literature of necessity because their arguments for the humanity of black Americans are needed to advocate for the respect of all human life; their arguments for equal treatment under the law are needed as reminders of the social justice work that still must be done. The visions of community within so many of them as well as their cautions of dangers to community, offer models for reordering social structures to benefit larger humanity. By making coherence out of the chaotic experiences of enslavement, racism, and the many resulting disjuncture’s African American novels provide multiple examples for navigating the complex arrays of human experience.

A History of the African American Novel offers an in-depth overview of the development of the novel and its major genres. In the first part of this book, Valerie Babb examines the evolution of the novel from the 1850s to the present, showing how the concept of black identity has transformed along with the art form. The second part of this History explores the prominent genres of African American novels, such as neoslave narratives, detective fiction, and speculative fiction, and considers how each one reflects changing understandings of blackness. This book builds on other literary histories by including early black print culture, African American graphic novels, pulp fiction, and the history of adaptation of black novels to film. By placing novels in conversation with other documents - early black newspapers and magazines, film, and authorial correspondence — A History of the African American Novel brings many voices to the table to broaden interpretations of the novel’s development.

Beyond the Rope is an interdisciplinary study that draws on narrative theory and cultural studies methodologies to trace African Americans’ changing attitudes and relationships to lynching over the twentieth century. Whereas African Americans are typically framed as victims of white lynch mob violence in both scholarly and public discourses, Karlos K. Hill reveals that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries African Americans lynched other African Americans in response to alleged criminality, and that twentieth-century black writers envisaged African American lynch victims as exemplars of heroic manhood. By illuminating the submerged histories of black vigilantism and consolidating narratives of lynching in African American literature that framed black victims of white lynch mob violence as heroic, Hill argues that rather than being static and one dimensional, African American attitudes towards lynching and the lynched black evolved in response to changing social and political contexts.

The first major twenty-first century history of four hundred years of black writing, The Cambridge History of African American Literature presents a comprehensive overview of the literary traditions, oral and print, of African-descended peoples in the United States. Expert contributors, drawn from the United States and beyond, emphasize the dual nature of each text discussed as a work of art created by an individual and as a response to unfolding events in American cultural, political, and social history. Unprecedented in scope, sophistication and accessibility, the volume draws together current scholarship in the field. It also looks ahead to suggest new approaches, new areas of study, and as yet undervalued writers and works. The Cambridge History of African American Literature is a major achievement both as a work of reference and as a compelling narrative and will remain essential reading for scholars and students in years to come.

1919, The Year of Racial Violence recounts African Americans’ brave stand against a cascade of mob attacks in the United States after World War I. The emerging New Negro identity, which prized unflinching resistance to second-class citizenship, further inspired veterans and their fellow black citizens. In city after city – Washington, DC; Chicago; Charleston; and elsewhere – black men and women took up arms to repel mobs that used lynching, assaults, and other forms of violence to protect white supremacy; yet, authorities blamed blacks for the violence, leading to mass arrests and misleading news coverage. Refusing to yield, African Americans sought accuracy and fairness in the courts of public opinion and the law. This is the first account of this three-front fight – in the streets, in the press, and in the courts – against mob violence during one of the worst years of racial conflict in U.S. history.

Bourgeois Radicals explores the NAACP’s key role in the liberation of Africans and Asians across the globe even as it fought Jim Crow on the home front during the long civil rights movement. In the eyes of the NAACP’s leaders, the way to create a stable international system, stave off communism in Africa and Asia, and prevent capitalist exploitation was to embed human rights, with its economic and cultural protections, in the transformation of colonies into nations. Indeed, the NAACP aided in the liberation struggles of multiple African and Asian countries within the limited ideological space of the Second Red Scare. However, its vision of a "third way" to democracy and nationhood for the hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa was only partially realized due to a toxic combination of the Cold War, Jim Crow, and die-hard imperialism. Bourgeois Radicals examines the toll that internationalism took on the organization and illuminates the linkages between the struggle for human rights and the fight for colonial independence.

Union occupation of parts of the Confederacy during the Civil War forced federal officials to confront questions about the social order that would replace slavery. This volume of Freedom presents a documentary history of the emergence of free-labor relations in the large plantation areas of the Union-occupied Lower South. The documents illustrate the experiences of former slaves as military laborers, as residents of federally sponsored "contraband camps," as wage laborers on plantations and in towns, and in some instances, as independent farmers and self-employed workers. Together with the editors’ interpretative essays, these documents portray the different understandings of freedom advanced by the many participants in the wartime evolution of free labor—former slaves and free blacks; former slaveholders; Union military officers and officials in Washington; and Northern planters, ministers and teachers. The war sealed the fate of slavery only to open a contest over the meaning of freedom. This volume documents an important chapter of that contest. Ira Berlin is the Director of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, University of Maryland.

As slavery collapsed during the American Civil War, former slaves struggled to secure their liberty, reconstitute their families, and create the institutions befitting a free people. This volume of Freedom presents a documentary history of the emergence of free-labor relations in different settings in the Upper South. At first, most federal officials hoped to mobilize former slaves without either transforming the conflict into a war of liberation or assuming responsibility for the young, the old, or others not suitable for military employment. But as the Union army came to depend on black workers and as the number of destitute freedpeople mounted, authorities at all levels grappled with intertwined questions of freedom, labor and welfare. Meanwhile, the former slaves pursued their own objectives, working within the constraints imposed by the war and Union occupation to fashion new lives as free people. The Civil War sealed the fate of slavery only to open a contest over the meaning of freedom. This volume of Freedom documents an important chapter in that contest.

A must read for anyone interested in race, family, marriage, and their legal struggles! In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional in Loving vs. Virginia. This book takes a critical approach to that case and asks how Loving has influenced the marital freedom and racial equality in America. How far have we come since then, and what effect did the case have on individual lives?

"The studies making up the collection are motivated by a shared concern to question the unilinear understanding of secularization which forms the weighty heritage of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber to social theory. In pursuit of this revisionist approach the studies that make up the collection put forward many well informed readings of the understanding and the experience of religion in the collective life of societies. Some contributions fall squarely within the field of the history of political thought … Other studies in the collection focus on classic historical cases of secularization and the interplay of politics and religion in the life of great imperial polities."
Paschalis M. Kitromilides, History of Political Thought

Since the first donations of Egyptian artefacts to the Fitzwilliam Museum, including the sarcophagus lid of Rameses III donated in 1823, its ancient Egyptian holdings have grown steadily. This collection, now one of the most important in Britain, was catalogued for the first time by Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge (1857-1934) of the British Museum’s department of antiquities. Budge was a leading authority on ancient Egypt and had himself acquired several pieces for the museum in Egypt in 1886-7. The collection as listed in this 1893 publication included 577 objects: sarcophagi, coffins, canopic jars, mummies, scarabs, sculptures, and other decorative objects. Budge provided transcriptions and translations of the hieroglyphs that appear on the objects with his descriptions of each item. Although the collection has been augmented by many further gifts and purchases, Budge’s catalogue remains a valuable record of the collection in the late Victorian period.

"The book offers an exceptionally stimulating contribution to the present state of theoretical questions in several fields and to current disputes in the historiography of political thought, as well a subtle contribution to some current political issues. Republicanism is about rhetoric as a resource for knowledge, among other things; and the book by Kalyvas and Katznelson stands out for what it does as well as what it says. It should be heard and answered.
-David Kettler, Bard College

In this undergraduate textbook Lewis R. Gordon offers the first comprehensive treatment of Africana philosophy, beginning with the emergence of an Africana (i.e. African diasporic) consciousness in the Afro-Arabic world of the Middle Ages. He argues that much of modern thought emerged out of early conflicts between Islam and Christianity that culminated in the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula, and from the subsequent expansion of racism, enslavement, and colonialism which in their turn stimulated reflections on reason, liberation, and the meaning of being human. His book takes the student reader on a journey from Africa through Europe, North and South America, the Caribbean, and back to Africa, as he explores the challenges posed to our understanding of knowledge and freedom today, and the response to them which can be found within Africana philosophy.

Salman Rushdie is a major contemporary writer, who engages with some of the vital issues of our times: migrancy, postcolonialism, religious authoritarianism. This Companion offers a comprehensive introduction to his entire oeuvre. Part I provides thematic readings of Rushdie and his work, with chapters on how Bollywood films are intertextual with the fiction, the place of family and gender in the work, the influence of English writing and reflections on the fatwa. Part II discusses Rushdie’s importance for postcolonial writing and provides detailed interpretations of his fiction. In one volume, this book provides a stimulating introduction to the author and his work in a range of expert essays and readings. With its detailed chronology of Rushdie’s life and a comprehensive bibliography of further reading, this volume will be invaluable to undergraduates studying Rushdie and to the general reader interested in his work.

The Harlem Renaissance (1918-1937) was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. Its key figures include W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes. The movement laid the groundwork for all later African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. With chapters by a wide range of well-known scholars, this 2007 Companion is an authoritative and engaging guide to the movement. It first discusses the historical contexts of the Harlem Renaissance, both national and international; then presents original discussions of a wide array of authors and texts; and finally treats the reputation of the movement in later years. Giving full play to the disagreements and differences that energized the renaissance, this Companion presents a set of new readings encouraging further exploration of this dynamic field.

Highly acclaimed when it first appeared in 1990, this general history of Barbados traces the events and ideas that have shaped the collaborative experience of all the islands inhabitants. In this second edition, Hilary Beckles updates the text to reflect the considerable number of writings recently published on Barbados. He presents new insights and analyses key events in a lucid and provocative style which will appeal to all those who have an interest in the island’s past and present. Using a vigorous approach, Hilary Beckles examines how the influences of the Amerindians, European colonisation, the sugar industry, the African slave trade, emancipation, the civil rights movement, independence in 1966 and nationalism have shaped contemporary Barbados.

Written by two of the Caribbean’s leading historians, Freedoms Won is an essential book for students engaged in following courses on the history of the Caribbean. It will also be of interest to general readers seeking information on the history of the region. Starting with the aftermath of emancipation, Freedoms Won covers the African-Caribbean peasantry, Asian arrival in the Caribbean, social and political experiences of the working classes in the immediate post-slavery period, the Caribbean economy, US intervention and imperialst tendencies from the 18th century, the Labour Movement in the Caribbean in the 20th centurym the social life and culture of the Caribbean people, and social protest, decolonisation and nationhood.

This is the first history of the development of American Jewish political conservatism and the rise of a group of Jewish intellectuals and activists who are known as neoconservatives. It describes the growth of perhaps a dozen such figures in the 1940s and 50s, including Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Norman Podhoretz, to several hundred younger people such as Paul Wolfowitz, David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer who have had a powerful impact on American public policy, including the run up to and aftermath of the war in Iraq.

Beginning with Latin America in the fifteenth century, this book comprises a social history of the experiences of African Muslims and their descendants throughout the Americas, including the Caribbean. The years under slavery are examined, as well as the post-slavery period. The study also analyzes Muslim revolts in Brazil—especially in 1835. The second part of the book traces the emergence of Islam among U.S. African descendants in the twentieth century, featuring chapters on Noble Drew Ali, Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X to explain how orthodoxy arose from varied unorthodox roots. Currently Professor of History and Middle Eastern Studies at NYU, Michael Gomez has research interests that include Islam in West Africa, the African diaspora and African culture in North America. He has been involved with the launching of a new academic organization, the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), and has published widely in the field.

An in-depth look at how The New York Times failed in its coverage of the fate of European Jews from 1939-45. It examines how the decisions that were made at The Times ultimately resulted in the minimizing and misunderstanding of modern history’s worst genocide. Laurel Leff, a veteran journalist and professor of journalism, recounts how personal relationships at the newspaper, the assimilationist tendencies of The Times’ Jewish owner, and the ethos of mid-century America, all led The Times to consistently downplay news of the Holocaust. It recalls how news of Hitler’s ’final solution’ was hidden from readers and - because of the newspaper’s influence on other media - from America at large. Buried by The Times is required reading for anyone interested in America’s response to the Holocaust and for anyone curious about how journalists determine what is newsworthy.

Written by two of the Caribbean’s leading historians, Liberties Lost is an essential book for students engaged in following courses on the history of the Caribbean. It will also be of interest to general readers seeking information on the history of the region. Starting with indigenous societies, Liberties Lost covers Europe’s Caribbean project, European settlement and rivalry, the Transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans; sugar and slavery; African culture and community life; revolt and resistance and, finally, Caribbean emancipation.

Combining scholarship covering one hundred fifty years of novel writing in the U.S., newly commissioned essays examine eighty African American novels. They include well-known works as well as writings recently recovered or acknowledged. The collection features essays on the slave narrative, coming of age, vernacular modernism, and the post-colonial novel to help readers gain a better appreciation of the African American novel’s diversity and complexity.

As World War II drew to a close and the world awakened to the horrors wrought by white supremacists in Nazi Germany, the NAACP and African-American leaders sensed an opportunity to launch an offensive against the conditions of segregation and inequality in the United States. The "prize" they sought was not civil rights, but human rights. Only the human rights lexicon, shaped by the Holocaust and articulated by the United Nations, contained the language and the moral power to address not only the political and legal inequality but also the education, health care, housing, and employment needs that haunted the black community. The NAACP understood this and wielded its influence and resources to take its human rights agenda before the United Nations. But the onset of the Cold War and rising anti-communism allowed powerful southerners to cast those rights as Soviet-inspired and a threat to the American "ways of life." Enemies and friends excoriated the movement, and the NAACP retreated to a narrow civil rights agenda that was easier to maintain politically. Thus the Civil Rights Movement was launched with neither the language nor the mission it needed to truly achieve black equality. Carol Anderson is the recipient of major grants from the Ford Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, and numerous awards for excellence in teaching. Her scholarly interests are 20th century American, African-American, and diplomatic history, and the impact of the Cold War and U.S. foreign policy on the struggle for black equality in particular. Her publications include "From Hope to Disillusion published in Diplomatic History and reprinted in The African-American Voice in U.S. Foreign Policy.

Claudio Saunt vividly depicts a dramatic transformation in the eighteenth century that overturned the world of the powerful and numerous Creek Indians and forever changed the Deep South. As the Creeks amassed a fortune in cattle and slaves, new property fostered a new possessiveness, and government by coercion bred confrontation. A New Order of Things is the first book to chronicle this decisive transformation in America’s early history, a transformation that left deep divisions between the wealthy and poor, powerful and powerless.

In this first full-length study of Glissant’s creative and theoretical work J. Michael Dash examines his poems, novels, plays and essays in the context of modern French literary movements and the post-negritude Caribbean situation, providing both a useful introduction to, and a challenging assessment of, Glissant’s work to date. Dash shows how Glissant has focused in an unprecedented way on the Caribbean in terms of the diverse and hybrid culture that has been created in the region, and how his ideas on a cross-cultural poetics are the shaping force in the francophone Caribbean ’Creolite’ movement.

Discrepant Engagement addresses work by a number of authors not normally grouped under a common rubric—black writers from the United States and the Caribbean and the so-called Black Mountain poets. Nathaniel Mackey examines the ways in which the experimental aspects of their work advance a critique of the assumptions underlying conventional perceptions and practice. Arguing that the work of these writers engages the discrepancy between presumed norms and qualities of experience such norms fail to accommodate, Mackey highlights their valorization of dissonance, divergence and formal disruption. He advances a cross-cultural mix that is uncommon in studies of experimental writing, frequently bringing the works and ideas of the authors it addresses into dialogue and juxtaposition with one another, insisting that parallels, counterpoint and relevance to one another exist among writers otherwise separated by ethnic and regional boundaries.

The three essays in this volume present an introduction to history of the emancipation of the slaves during the Civil War. The first essay traces the destruction of slavery by discussing the shift from a war for the Union to a war against slavery. The slaves are shown to have shaped the destiny of the nation through their determination to place their liberty on the wartime agenda. The second essay examines the evolution of freedom in occupied areas of the lower and upper South. The struggle of those freed to obtain economic independence in difficult wartime circumstances indicates conflicting conceptions of freedom among former slaves and slaveholders, Northern soldiers and civilians. The third essay demonstrates how the enlistment and military service of nearly 200,000 slaves hastened the transformation of the war into a struggle for universal liberty, and how this experience shaped the lives of former slaves long after the war had ended.

Bundu is an anomaly among the precolonial Muslim states of West Africa. Founded during the jihads which swept the savannah in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it developed a pragmatic policy, unique in the midst of fundamentalist, theocratic Muslim states. Located in the Upper Senegal and with access to the Upper Gambia, Bundu played a critical role in regional commerce and production and reacted quickly to the stimulus of European trade. Drawing on a wide range of sources both oral and documentary, Arabic, English and French, Dr. Gomez provides the first full account of Bundu’s history. He analyzes the foundation and growth of an Islamic state at a crossroads between the Saharan and trans-Atlantic trade, paying particular attention to the relationship between Islamic thought and court policy, and to the state’s response to militant Islam in the early nineteenth century.

Published less than fifty years ago, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man shares with older classic works the odd quality of seeming to have been in place much longer. It is a novel that encompasses much of the American scene and character: though told by a single Afro-American voice and set in the contemporary South and then in modern New York City, its references are to the First World War, to Reconstruction, to the Civil War and slavery, to the founding of the American republic, to Columbus, and to the country’s frontier past.

In his introduction to this volume Robert O’Meally discusses Ellison’s fictional strategies for reaching a wide audience while remaining true to his own artistic vision and voice. Then each of five critical essays explores a different aspect of this capacious novel. One looks at the novel’s protagonist as an embattled artist-in-training: another focuses on the novel’s political and philosophical backgrounds; a third discusses the style and meaning of the nameless narrator’s speeches; a fourth examines the novel’s modernism in light of its references to jazz and anthropology: and the final essay considers Invisible Man as a kind of war novel.

Written in an accessible style, these essays represent the best of recent scholarship and provide students with a useful introduction to this major novel.

This book develops in detail the simple idea that assertion is the expression of belief. In it the author puts forward a version of ’probabilistic semantics’ which acknowledges that we are not perfectly rational, and which offers a significant advance in generality on theories of meaning couched in terms of truth conditions. It promises to challenge a number of entrenched and widespread views about the relations of language and mind. Part I presents a functionalist account of belief, worked through a modified form of decision theory. In Part II the author generates a theory of meaning in terms of ’assertibility conditions’, whereby to know the meaning of an assertion is to know the belief it expresses.