Celebrating Black History Month

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase some of our recent and deep backlist titles for Black History Month.

Recently Published

BLAM! Black Lives Always Mattered!: Hidden African American Philadelphia of the Twentieth Century, by the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection. Foreword by Lonnie G. Bunch III.

African American history has produced countless exceptional heroes, leaders, and role models. The graphic novel, BLAM! Black Lives Always Mattered!, tells the inspiring stories of 14 important Black Philadelphians, such as opera singer Marian Anderson, civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois, and “Father of the Harlem Renaissance,” Alain Locke. Every profile is vibrantly illustrated with facts and images that emphasize each individual’s life and accomplishments.

It Was Always a Choice: Picking Up the Baton of Athlete Activism, by David Steele

Using their celebrity to demand change, athlete activists like Colin Kaepernick inspired fans but faced great personal and professional risks in doing so. It Was Always a Choice shows how the new era of activism Kaepernick inaugurated builds on these decisive moments toward a bold and effective new frontier of possibilities.

If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress: Black Politics in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia, edited by James Wolfinger, with a Foreword by Heather Ann Thompson.

Philadelphia has long been a crucial site for the development of Black politics across the nation. If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress provides an in-depth historical analysis—from the days of the Great Migration to the present—of the people and movements that made the city a center of political activism. The editor and contributors show how Black activists have long protested against police abuse, pushed for education reform, challenged job and housing discrimination, and put presidents in the White House.

Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures, edited by Grant Farred

As Africana Studies celebrates its fiftieth anniversary throughout the United States, this invigorating collection presents possibilities for the future of the discipline’s theoretical paths. The essays in Africana Studies focus on philosophy, science, and technology; poetry, literature, and music; the crisis of the state; issues of colonialism, globalization, and neoliberalism; and the ever-expanding diaspora. The editor and contributors to this volume open exciting avenues for new narratives, philosophies, vision, and scale in this critical field of study—formed during the 1960s around issues of racial injustice in America—to show what Africana Studies is already in the process of becoming.

From Our Backlist

The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction, by Shamira Gelbman

As the lobbying arm of the civil rights movement, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR)—which has operated since the early 1950s—was instrumental in the historic legislative breakthroughs of the Second Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Lobby skillfully recounts the LCCR’s professional and grassroots lobbying that contributed to these signature civil rights policy achievements in the 1950s and ’60s.

Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania, by Beverley C. Tomek

Beverly Tomek corrects the long-held notion that slavery in the North was “not so bad” as, or somehow “more humane” than, in the South due to the presence of abolitionists. While the Quaker presence focused on moral and practical opposition to bondage, slavery was ubiquitous. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania was the first state to pass an abolition law in the United States.

Black Identity Viewed from a Barber’s Chair: Nigrescence and Eudamonia, by William E. Cross, Jr.

Cross connects W. E. B. DuBois’s concept of double consciousness to an analysis of how Black identity is performed in everyday life, and traces the origins of the deficit perspective on Black culture to scholarship dating back to the 1930s.

God Is Change: Religious Practices and Ideologies in the Works of Octavia Butler, edited by Aparajita Nanda and Shelby L. Crosby

Exploring Octavia Butler’s religious imagination and its potential for healing and liberation, God Is Change meditates on alternate religious possibilities that open different political and cultural futures to illustrate humanity’s ability to endure change and thrive.

The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, by Deborah Willis and Carla Williams

Searching for photographic images of black women, Deborah Willis and Carla Williams were startled to find them by the hundreds. In long-forgotten books, in art museums, in European and U.S. archives and private collections, a hidden history of representation awaited discovery. The Black Female Body offers a stunning array of familiar and many virtually unknown photographs, showing how photographs reflected and reinforced Western culture’s fascination with black women’s bodies.

The Afrocentric Idea: Revised and Expanded Edition, by Molefi Kete Asante

Asante’s spirited engagement with culture warriors, neocons, and postmodernists updates this classic text. Expanding on his core ideas, Asante has cast The Afrocentric Idea in the tradition of provocative critiques of the established social order. This is a fresh and dynamic location of culture within the context of social change.

Mediating America: Black and Irish Press and the Struggle for Citizenship, 1870-1914, by Brian Shott

How black and Irish journalists in the Gilded Age used newspapers to recover and reinvigorate racial identities. As Shott proves, minority print culture was a powerful force in defining American nationhood and belonging.

Upon the Ruins of Liberty: Slavery, the President’s House at Independence National Historical Park, and Public Memory, by Roger C. Aden

A behind-the-scenes look at the development of the memorial to slavery in Independence Mall, Upon the Ruins of Liberty offers a compelling account that explores the intersection of contemporary racial politics with history, space, and public memory.

A City within A City: The Black Freedom Struggle in Grand Rapids, Michigan, by Todd E Robinson

Examining the civil rights movement in the North, historian Todd Robinson studies the issues surrounding school integration and bureaucratic reforms in Grand Rapids as well as the role of black youth activism to detail the diversity of black resistance. He focuses on respectability within the African American community as a way of understanding how the movement was formed and held together. And he elucidates the oppositional role of northern conservatives regarding racial progress.

From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism, by Patricia Hill Collins

In this incisive and stimulating book, renowned social theorist Patricia Hill Collins investigates how nationalism has operated and re-emerged in the wake of contemporary globalization and offers an interpretation of how black nationalism works today in the wake of changing black youth identity. 

Men’s College Athletics and the Politics of Racial EqualityFive Pioneer Stories of Black Manliness, White Citizenship, and American Democracy, by Gregory Kaliss

Gregory Kaliss offers stunning insights into Americans’ contested visions of equality, fairness, black manhood, citizenship, and an equal opportunity society. He looks at Paul Robeson, Kenny Washington, Woody Strode, Jackie Robinson, Wilt Chamberlain, Charlie Scott, Bear Bryant, John Mitchell, and Wilbur Jackson to show how Americans responded to racial integration over time. 

Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin, by Celeste-Marie Bernier

A majestic biography of the pioneering African American artist, Suffering and Sunset illustrates Horace Pippin’s status as a groundbreaking African American painter who not only suffered from but also staged many artful resistances to racism in a white-dominated art world.

Frankie Manning: Ambassador of Lindy Hop, by Cynthia R Millman

The autobiography of a legendary swing dancer, Frankie Manning traces the evolution of swing dancing from its early days in Harlem through the post-World War II period, until it was eclipsed by rock ‘n’ roll and then disco. When swing made a comeback, Manning’s 30-year hiatus ended. 

Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara, Edited by Linda Janet Holmes and Cheryl A. Wall

The extraordinary spirit of Toni Cade Bambara lives on in Savoring the Salt, a vibrant and appreciative recollection of the work and legacy of the multi-talented, African American writer, teacher, filmmaker, and activist. Among the contributors who remember Bambara, reflect on her work, and examine its meaning today are Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Pearl Cleage, Ruby Dee, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Nikki Giovanni, Avery Gordon, Audre Lorde, and Sonia Sanchez.

Philadelphia Freedoms: Black American Trauma, Memory, and Culture after King, by Michael Awkward

Philadelphia Freedoms captures the disputes over the meanings of racial politics and black identity during the post-King era in the City of Brotherly Love. Looking closely at four cultural moments, he shows how racial trauma and his native city’s history have been entwined.

Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing, by Justin Gifford

Gifford provides a hard-boiled investigation of hundreds of pulpy paperbacks written by Chester Himes, Donald Goines, and Iceberg Slim (aka Robert Beck), among many others. Gifford draws from an impressive array of archival materials to provide a first-of-its-kind literary and cultural history of this distinctive genre.

Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Live, by Tiffany Ruby Patterson

A historian hoping to reconstruct the social world of all-black towns or the segregated black sections of other towns in the South finds only scant traces of their existence. In Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life, Tiffany Ruby Patterson uses the ethnographic and literary work of Zora Neale Hurston to augment the few official documents, newspaper accounts, and family records that pertain to these places hidden from history.

Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture, by Katrina Hazzard-Gordon

Katrina Hazzard-Gordon offers the first analysis of the development of the jook—an underground cultural institution created by the black working class—together with other dance arenas in African-American culture.

Why I revisited painful memories to write A Refugee’s American Dream

This week in North Philly Notes, Leth Oun, author of A Refugee’s American Dream, explains the reasons for penning his memoir about surviving the Cambodian Killing Fields to realize his dream of becoming an American citizen working for the U.S. Secret Service.

When I first met my coauthor, Joe Samuel “Sam” Starnes, almost a dozen years ago, I told him I hoped to write a book about my life. I said during my interview with him for Widener University’s alumni magazine that I wanted to do it while I was still young enough to remember the details of what I survived in the Killing Fields. I was forty-five at the time. Although it took me, with Sam’s help, more than eleven years to take the book from a dream to a reality, I am thrilled that my story is finally on the page for others to read.

Writing my book involved returning again and again to many painful memories I had kept inside. It is filled with details of incidents and images I had not talked about and tried not to think about for years as I was striving to build a career in America. Why would I want to go back and relive that pain? There are, I believe, three good reasons.

Education. I hope to educate others about what happened in Cambodia under Pol Pot in the late 1970s. I survived a holocaust. Approximately two million people, about a quarter of Cambodia’s population at the time, were killed or died of starvation and disease under the Khmer Rouge’s reign. My father, a lieutenant in the Cambodian army, was executed. Even though it is one of the world’s worst genocides, many in America and around the world do not know the story of what happened in Cambodia less than 50 years ago. It is important we don’t forget our history. It is important to remember and understand and do all we can to prevent something like this from happening again. And I want to make sure that my father and all of the two million people who did not survive are remembered.

Inspiration: I hope I can inspire others who are facing hardships. After being starved, tortured, and almost worked to death, I recovered and made a life for myself in America that makes those miserable years seem like they were thousands of years ago, almost like they never happened. Despite all the success and happiness I have found here in America, I will never forget that suffering, but I also know that if I can survive that period, I can survive anything. If I can live through the Killing Fields of Cambodia to become a protector of the president of the United States, nothing in this world is impossible. I hope that others going through hardships can read my story and be motivated to overcome their challenges as well.

Relief Efforts. For a number of years now I have sent money to help Cambodians who don’t have enough food to eat or fresh water to drink. Whatever money my coauthor and I earn from this book, we have pledged to support projects to make life better for Cambodians living in poverty. I also want to support schools in my native country. My goal is to return the many favors and generosity that I have received by paying it forward to help those who are very poor. I would not be where I am without the support that helped me when I needed it. I hope that some of the children we help can go on to live their own dreams as I have been able to do.

Considering these three goals, I am happy I took the time to go back into my painful history to tell my story of survival and finding success. Writing my book has been a hard journey, but it is well worth it.

Searching for missing Temple University Press books

This week in North Philly Notes, Will Forrest, the Press’s Editorial Assistant and Rights and Contracts Coordinator, blogs about finding the titles missing from the Press library.

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When I first interviewed for the rights and contracts intern position at the Press during my senior year at Temple, I was struck by the shelves of books that lined the conference room walls. Ashley Petrucci, my then supervisor, explained it was a library of the Press’s titles. I asked if it contained every book the Press had published and was told that we were missing a few from our early years of existence. This surprised me, and occasionally I would think of those gaps, wondering just what might be missing.

One year later, I found myself in the same role that Ashley held then, and the library gaps were still there. I asked our director, Mary Rose Muccie, if I could try to track down and obtain copies of the  missing backlist titles, and she gave me the thumbs up.  I was then faced with determining how many, and what, books were missing. Since these books were primarily published in the 1970s, there are fewer digital records and means of searching for lost books. So, I got creative.

I searched the Library of Congress’s website for a listing of all the Temple books they had a record of. I searched WorldCat, a resource for finding books hosted in libraries worldwide, and I also looked through our author contract files to see which projects were signed during the period. I ran all of this against the actual books that we had in our library, and over time began to develop a master list.

Until I did the research, no one knew how many books were missing. My initial estimate was approximately fifteen. Most of us didn’t think it would be higher than twenty. It turned out, not counting the few titles that we had digitized and made available  open access through an NEH grant, we were missing thirty-eight titles! This was significantly higher than any of us expected. I began to search for them on used-book sites and was able to find reasonably priced copies in good condition to add to our shelves.

There are still one or two books that I have yet to track down, but I now know what they are. It felt great to finally complete the Temple University Press library.   Together the physical books covey our history, who we are, and what we do as a university press.

Here is a small selection of titles that we added to our library.

From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and Urban Transportation, 1900-1940, by Mark S. Foster (1981): This is a forty-year-old book that we could put out this year and it wouldn’t look out of place on our current urban studies list. From Streetcar to Superhighway looks at urban planning at the dawn of the 20th century, when passenger rail and trolley systems were booming and the automobile had just been invented, and the challenges that planners faced along with growing car ownership. A recent Temple book that comes to mind is Amy Finstein’s Modern Mobility Aloft, exploring how the building of early highways in cities changed their architectural as well as social and material landscapes.

Broadcasting and Democracy in West Germany, by Arthur Williams (1976): This is one of the titles I was most excited to find. It is part of our International and Comparative Broadcasting series of the 1970s, a series unlike any other at the time, which examined radio and television all across the globe, as well as its intersections with politics and society. The book is a fascinating look at Cold War-era broadcasting and an early work of the then-new field of media studies.

Every Need Supplied: Mutual Aid and Christian Community in the Free Churches, 1525-1675, edited by Donald F. Durnbaugh (1974): This is one of the most striking early books we received (with a great dustjacket). Collecting primary documents from the communities of Free Churches that were part of the Radical Reformation during the Renaissance era, this was part of an early Temple series devoted entirely to study of the Free Church of this period. Temple has always had strong religious studies titles, but this book’s focus on community and mutual aid has more currency than one might expect from one of its age.

Genocide in Paraguay, edited by Richard Arens (1976): This pioneering look at the then ongoing genocide of the Aché people in Paraguay was one of Temple’s first books in Latin American studies as well as genocide studies. It collects essays by anthropologists and scholars about both Paraguay and the topic of genocide at large. It also includes one of the most widely recognizable contributors to a Temple book: Elie Wiesel, who compares the events in Paraguay to his own experiences with the Nazi Holocaust.

Black Testimony: Voices of Britain’s West Indians, by Thomas J. Cottle (1978): This book is one of Temple’s first ethnographies as well as an early book in Latin American and postcolonial studies. Drawing on interviews from more than twenty Black Britons, the book describes the hardships and obstacles that immigrants from Jamacia and other West Indian colonies faced after emigrating to Britain.

Street Names of Philadelphia, by Robert I. Alotta (1975): This might be my favorite of the missing books, and the title I was the most surprised to find was missing. Street Names of Philadelphia is an alphabetical reference guide to nearly every named street in Philadelphia and a description of why the street is named as such. It’s to the best of my knowledge the only book of its kind and a classic example of a Press Philadelphia regional title. Also, it may have inspired Bruce Springsteen’s famous song (as of yet unconfirmed).

Better City Government: Innovation in American Urban Politics, 1850-1937, by Kenneth Fox (1977): This is another title that we could put out next season and nobody would bat an eye. Better City Government looks at urban political development from the 1850s to the New Deal era and draws lessons about the limitations of reform-minded individuals and the most effective ways to enact change. This book would be right at home alongside our Political Lessons from American Cities series edited by Richardson Dilworth.

Gritty Cities, edited by Mary Procter and Bill Matuszeski (1978): I had to talk about this one. Aside from the fact that it  has the word “gritty” in the title decades before the Philadelphia Flyers debuted their beloved mascot, this is a fascinating look at twelve mid-sized industrial Rust Belt towns and their architecture right as manufacturing was beginning to fade away in the Northeast. It combines history with walking-tour commentary and great photographs. It is very much a time capsule of its era, and a great book for those interested in the last gasp of manufacturing in the United States.

Announcing the new issue of Kalfou

This week in North Philly Notes, we present the new issue of our journal, Kalfou.

Vol. 9 No. 2 (2022): Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies

Published: 2023-01-05

Symposium on The Race of Sound, by Nina Sun Eidsheim

• The Race of Sound, by Nina Sun Eidsheim: What Good Work Does and Why It Matters by George Lipsitz
  
• Making a Space for Epistemology and Aesthetics in Voice Studies by Marit J. MacArthur
  
• Listening to Listening: A Response to Nina Sun Eidsheim’s The Race of Sound by Ellie M. Hisama
  
• The Acousmatic Question and the Will to Datafy: Otter.ai, Low-Resource Languages, and the Politics of Machine Listening by Jonathan Sterne , Mehak Sawhney
  
• Listening Practice and History: Sound, Erasure by Nancy Yunhwa Rao
  
• Do Vibrations Make Decisions? by Brian Kane
  
• Hearing Timbre at the Crossroads by Landon Morrison
  
• Who Is Speaking? An Empirical Perspective on the Acousmatic Question by Jody Kreiman
  
• Exceeding the Visual, Eluding the Textual by Dorinne Kondo
  
• No Conclusions: Response to Symposium, August 16, 2021by Nina Sun Eidsheim, Daniel Walden

Feature Articles

• Mapping Complicities in Brahmin Supremacy to White Supremacy: An Unsettling of South Asia and South Asian America by sahiba
  
• Boxing Ring Entrances as Insubordinate Spaces: A Disruptive Oral Herstory by Rudy Mondragón
  
• “Did He Ever Hear of Egypt or Carthage?” Moses Roper’s Literary and Oratorical Activism in the British Isles by Hannah-Rose Murra
  
• A Different Way of Working: The Insurgent Sociology of Shana M. griffin by Nia Flowers, George Lipsitz

La Mesa Popular

• Unsettling Complicities: An Autoethnographic Mapping by sahiba

Mobilized 4 Movement

• The Grace of Black Folk: Notes on Ubuntu Democracy by Johari Jabir

Review

• Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence, by Yarden Katz by Ethan Chang