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College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Department of African American Studies
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Publication Spotlight

  • Black Panther Woman Publications
    Phillips. M. F. (2025). Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins. NYU Press
    The first biography of Ericka Huggins, a queer Black woman who brought spiritual self-care practices to the Black Panther Party. In this groundbreaking biography, Mary Frances Phillips immerses readers in the life and legacy of Ericka Huggins, a revered Black Panther Party member, as well as a mother, widow, educator, poet, and former political prisoner. In 1969, the police arrested Ericka...
  • The Second Battle for Africa
    McDuffie. E. S. (2024). The Second Battle for Africa: Garveyism, the US Heartland, and Global Black Freedom. Duke University
    In The Second Battle for Africa, Erik S. McDuffie establishes the importance of the US Midwest to twentieth-century global Black history, internationalism, and radicalism. McDuffie shows how cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, as well as rural areas in the heartland, became central and enduring incubators of Marcus Garvey’s Black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA...
  • Same Old Song
    Meyers. J. P. (2024). Same Old Song: The Enduring Past in Popular Music. University Press of Mississippi
    In Same Old Song: The Enduring Past in Popular Music, John Paul Meyers argues that these phenomena are part of what he calls “historical consciousness in popular music.” These deep relationships with the past are an important but underexamined aspect of how musicians and listeners engage with this key cultural form.
  • The Black Coptic Church
    McKinnis, L. C. (2023). The Black Coptic Church: Race and Imagination in a New Religion. NYU Press
    McKinnis asks, ‘What does it mean to imagine Blackness?’ Drawing on ten years of archival research and interviews with current members of the church, The Black Coptic Church offers a look at a group that insisted on its own understanding of its divine Blackness. In the process, it provides a more complex look at the diverse world of Black religious life in North America, particularly within non-...
  • Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement
    Smith II, B. J. (2023). Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. The University of North Carolina Press
    This book unearths a food story buried deep within the soil of American civil rights history. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and oral histories, Bobby J. Smith II re-examines the Mississippi civil rights movement as a period when activists expanded the meaning of civil rights to address food as integral to sociopolitical and economic conditions.
  • for land and liberty book cover. loarge yellow title letters and a man smiling and reaching up surrounded by forest
    Bowen. M. L. (2021). For Land and Liberty: Black Struggles in Rural Brazil. Cambridge University Press
    For Land and Liberty is a comparative study of the history and contemporary circumstances concerning Brazil's quilombos (African-descent rural communities) and their inhabitants, the quilombolas.
  • book cover
    Jenkins. C. M. (2019). Black Bourgeois: Class and Sex in the Flesh. University of Minnesota Press
    Dr. Jenkins' book "explores the forces that keep black people vulnerable even amid economically privileged lives. With today’s repeated reminders of the vulnerability of African Americans to state and extralegal violence, Black Bourgeois considers the contradiction of privileged, presumably protected black bodies that remain racially vulnerable. Examining disruptions around race and...
  • Cover
    Jenkins. C. M. (2007). Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy. University of Minnesota Press.
    In Private Lives, Proper Relations, Candice M. Jenkins addresses the question of why contemporary African American literature—particularly that produced by black women—is continually concerned with issues of respectability and propriety.
College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Department of African American Studies
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Email: afro-public@illinois.edu

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