Bookshelf

(Duke University Press, 2021)
Part of the Refiguring American Music series, this book builds on archival research and oral history interviews, conducted in France, Senegal, and the United States, that examine the popularization of African American music in postwar France and the Francophone world where it signaled new forms of power and protest. By showing how the popularity of African American music was intertwined with contemporary structures of racism and imperialism, the author demonstrates this music's centrality to postwar France and the convergence of decolonization, the expanding globalized economy, the Cold War, and worldwide liberation movements.

One reviewer notes, “Celeste Day Moore takes us on a dazzling and deeply researched tour through the soundscapes and multisensory experiences of the Francophone Black world.”

(Oakland, Calif.: University of California Press, 2020)
According to the publisher, this book offers “a new history of what it meant to shoot, edit, and sell news images after World War II” and unravels the mythology surrounding Magnum Photos, a photographers’ cooperative founded in the middle of the 20th century.

“Bair shows that between the 1940s and 1960s, Magnum expanded the human-interest story to global dimensions while bringing the aesthetic of news pictures into new markets” and “made photojournalism integral to postwar visual culture,” the publisher adds. “By unpacking the collaborative nature of photojournalism, [the] book shows how picture editors, sales agents, spouses, and publishers helped Magnum photographers succeed in their assignments and achieve fame.”

The book, the author’s first, was named winner of the Association of American Publishers’ 2021 PROSE Award.

(University of California Press, 2021)
Best known for his experimental film about its own making, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, William Greaves was an influential independent documentary filmmaker who produced, directed, shot, and edited more than 100 films on a variety of social issues and on key African American figures ranging from Muhammad Ali to Ralph Bunche to Ida B. Wells.

MacDonald’s book offers the first comprehensive overview of Greaves’ career, bringing together a mix of essays from critics and scholars, Greaves’ own writings, an extensive meta-interview with Greaves, conversations with his wife and collaborator and his son. Together, they illuminate Greaves’ mission to use filmmaking as a tool for transforming the ways African Americans were perceived by others and the ways they saw themselves.

(New York and London: Routledge, 2021).
This volume focuses on teaching classics in a prison setting and features articles that examine how incarcerated adults read and discuss classical texts and the best pedagogical practices for teaching within a prison.

(New York and London: Routledge, 2021).
The publisher describes the book as, “An interdisciplinary, themed anthology that focuses on how comics have played a crucial role in representing, constructing, and reifying the immigrant subject and the immigrant experience in popular global culture of the 20th and 21st centuries.” Serrano, who contributed a chapter and the introduction, said her goal was to be global in scope, from the Jewish American experience to Algerian immigration to X-Men to the Latino experience.

(Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2020)
Part of the series “After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France,” this book argues that the identity politics surrounding the immigration discourse of early 21st century France were reflected in the marketing and editing practices of the Metropole’s key publishers, specifically regarding non-white French women’s literature. “Mouflard’s research highlights the discrepancies between France’s official discourse on immigration, and the actual identity formation processes created by the institutions and exploited by influential publishers, in the years leading to the historic 2005 banlieue civil unrest,” the publisher noted.(Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2020)

(Long Grove, Ill.: Waveland Press, 2020)
The second edition of this book, originally published in 1996, recounts Raybeck’s adventures (and misadventures) while doing fieldwork in Southeast Asia. According to the publisher, the book includes “rich descriptions of Kelantanese society and culture” and “insight into the human dimension of the fieldwork undertaking.” Raybeck also addresses important considerations such as building rapport with research subjects and how to obtain reliable information. New to the second edition is an extensive epilogue. Prominent anthropologist Rosemary Firth calls it “a gem,” saying it is “beautifully written, dryly comic, and wryly self-mocking; at root it is a thoughtful and critical contribution to the aims and field techniques of our profession.”

(Hong Kong, China: Hong Kong University Press, 2019)
This book, awarded Choice’s Outstanding Academic Title of 2020, features 10 essays that demonstrate that the connection between laughter and political culture during the Mao years was far more complex than conventional conceptions of communist indoctrination can explain. By examining a variety of genres — including dance, cartoon, children’s literature, comedy, regional oral performance, film, and fiction — the editors uncover many nuanced innovations and experiments with laughter during what has been too often misinterpreted as an unrelentingly bleak period.

(Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2020)
Dolly Parton’s success as a performer and pop culture icon often overshadows her achievements as a songwriter. According to the publisher, “Hamessley’s expert analysis and Parton’s characteristically straightforward input inform this comprehensive look at the process, influences, and themes that have shaped the superstar’s songwriting. Hamessley reveals how Parton’s loving, hardscrabble childhood in the Smoky Mountains provided the musical language, rhythms, and memories of old-time music that resonate in so many of her songs. Hamessley further provides an understanding of how Parton combines her cultural and musical heritage with an artisan’s sense of craft and design to compose eloquent, painfully honest, and gripping songs about women’s lives, poverty, heartbreak, inspiration, and love.”

(New York: Routledge, 2018)
The author examines how, despite the intertwined histories of Africa and Europe, space and place remain racialized, impacting everyday experiences among African Italians, immigrants, and refugees. One reviewer praised Merrill for taking aim at “Italian common sense concerning race, while passionately foregrounding the lives of African migrants and ­Afro-Italians who daily navigate the deadly politics of exclusion.”