UMass Press continues its proud tradition of offering strong and various titles in African American studies, literature, and history. Here are some of our newest books:
Black Bostonians and the Politics of Culture, 1920-1940 by Lorraine Elena Roses
In the 1920s and 1930s Boston became a rich and distinctive site of African American artistic production, unfolding at the same time as the Harlem Renaissance. Lorraine Elena Roses employs archival sources and personal interviews to recover this artistic output.
An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe by Sirpa Salenius
Sarah Parker Remond (1826–1894) left the free black community of Salem, Massachusetts, where she was born, to become one of the first women to travel on extensive lecture tours across the United Kingdom.
Measuring the Harlem Renaissance: The U.S. Census, African American Identity, and Literary Form by Michael Soto
Michael Soto examines how the U.S. Census placed persons of African descent within a rigid taxo
nomy of racial difference and thus defined a uniform African American identity in Harlem. Soto explores how black writers and intellectuals during the same period described a far more complex community of interracial social contact and intra-racial diversity.
The Harlem Renaissance and the Idea of a New Negro Reader by Shawn Anthony Christian
Many scholars have written about the white readers of the Harlem Renaissance, but during the period many black writers, publishers, and editors worked to foster a cadre of African American readers. Shawn Anthony Christian illustrates that the drive to develop and support black readers was central in the poetry, fiction, and drama of the era.
Forthcoming:
Remember Little Rock by Erin Krutko Devlin
In Remember Little Rock Erin Krutko Devlin explores public memories surrounding the iconic Arkansas school desegregation crisis of 1957 and shows how these memories were vigorously contested and sometimes deployed against the cause.
Ragged Revolutionaries: The Lumpenproletariat and African American Marxism in Depression-Era Literature by Nathaniel Mills
In Ragged Revolutionaries, Nathaniel Mills argues that the lumpenproletariat was central to an overlooked yet vibrant mode of African American Marxism formulated during the Great Depression by black writers on the Communist left, including Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Margaret Walker.
All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn by Jason Sokol
All Eyes Are Upon Us explores the history of racial struggles in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York from World War II to the present—struggles that involve warring traditions of welcoming inclusion and violent segregation.
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