Category: Book/Video Reviews

  • Book Review: Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. Jennifer L. Ruef Stanford University, Palo Alto, California Urban Education Volume 50, Number 6 (September 2015) pages 776-783 DOI: 10.1177/0042085913519339 H. S. Alim, G. Smitherman (2012). Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. New York, NY: Oxford University…

  • Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story by Walter Hamilton (review) The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth Volume 7, Number 3, Fall 2014 pages 565-567 DOI: 10.1353/hcy.2014.0047 Owen Griffiths Hamilton, Walter, Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story (Sydney: NewSouth Books, 2012) What if you felt like you didn’t belong to the…

  • Review: ‘Oreo,’ a Sandwich-Cookie of a Feminist Comic Novel The New York Times 2015-07-14 Dwight Garner Fran Ross’s first and only novel, “Oreo,” was published in 1974, four years after Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and two years before Alex Haley’s “Roots.” It wasn’t reviewed in The New York Times; it was hardly reviewed anywhere.…

  • SCIENTIFIC RACISM REDUX? The Many Lives of a Troublesome Idea Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race Volume 12, Issue 1, Spring 2015 pages 187-199 DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X1500003X Ann Morning, Associate Professor of Sociology New York University Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. New York: Penguin Press, 2014, 278 pages, ISBN…

  • Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction by Diana Rebekkah Paulin (review) [Black] TDR: The Drama Review Volume 59, Number 2, Summer 2015 (T226) pages 178-180 Alex W. Black Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction. Diana Rebekkah Paulin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,…

  • Before Rachel Dolezal, there was Walter White The Christian Science Monitor 2015-06-15 Randy Dotinga The man known as ‘Mr. NAACP’ was blonde, blue-eyed and 5/32nd black, all of which provoked an outcry similar to that over contemporary NAACP official Rachel Dolezal. Walter White, known as “Mr. NAACP,” didn’t look black. He had blue eyes and…

  • ‘Mislaid,’ by Nell Zink Sunday Book Review The New York Times 2015-06-04 Walter Kirn Agata Nowicka Zink, Nell, Mislaid: A Novel (New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015). 242 pages. Toward the middle of Nell Zink’s “Mislaid,” a screwball comic novel of identity, Karen, a Southern white girl whose lesbian mother has raised her as black for complicated…

  • ‘Loving Day,’ by Mat Johnson Sunday Book Review The New York Times 2015-06-01 Baz Dreisinger, Associate Professor of English John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Abraham Lincoln declared in his 1858 speech presaging the Civil War. Such a house sits at the heart…

  • Review: Mat Johnson’s ‘Loving Day’ Takes a Satirical Slant on Racial Identities The New York Times 2015-05-26 Dwight Garner, Senior writer and book critic Mat Johnson’s new novel, “Loving Day,” takes its title from an unofficial holiday, one his narrator likens to “Mulatto Christmas.” It’s the observance of the Supreme Court ruling in Loving v.…

  • On The Cherokee Rose, Historical Fiction, and Silences in the Archives Process: a blog for american history 2015-05-26 Martha S. Jones, Arthur F Thurnau Professor, Associate Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies University of Michigan Martha S. Jones Martha S. Jones is the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan on…