Front Table 4/21/2023

On This Week's Front Table, find dark histories and shady presents illuminated, from an in-depth examination of weaponized surveillance operations shrouded in secrecy to a close look at slavery’s end to better understand why its shadow still haunts us today. Find the following and more at semcoop.com

Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America
(Princeton University Press)
Margot Canaday
 
Workplaces have traditionally been viewed as "straight spaces" in which queer people passed. As a result, historians have directed limited attention to the experiences of queer people on the job. Queer Career rectifies this, offering an expansive historical look at sexual minorities in the modern American workforce. Arguing that queer workers were more visible than hidden, Margot Canaday positions employment and fear of job loss as central to gay life in postwar America. Rather than finding that employers tried to root out gay employees, Canaday sees an early version of "don't ask / don't tell" in all kinds of work, as long as queer workers were discreet, they were valued for the lower wages they could be paid, their perceived lack of familial ties, and the ease with which they could be pulled in and pushed out of the labor market. While progress was not linear, by century's end some gay workers rejected their former discretion, and some employers eventually offered them protection unattained through law. Queer Career shows how LGBT history helps us understand the recent history of capitalism and labor and rewrites our understanding of the queer past.

The American Surveillance State
(Pluto Press) 
David Hotchkiss Price

Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation
(Scribner)
Kris Manjapra

To understand why the shadow of slavery still haunts us today, we must look closely at the way it ended. Between the 1770s and 1880s, emancipation processes took off across the Atlantic world. But far from ushering in a new age of universal freedoms, these emancipations further codified the racial caste systems they claimed to disrupt. In this paradigm-altering book, acclaimed historian and professor Kris Manjapra identifies five types of emancipations across the globe and reveals that their perceived failures were the predictable outcomes of policies designed to preserve racial oppression. In the process, Manjapra shows how, amidst this unfinished history, grassroots Black organizers and activists have become custodians of collective recovery and remedy; not only for our present, but also for our relationship with the past. Black Ghost of Empire shines a light into the gap between the idea of slavery's end and the reality of its continuation--exposing to whom a debt was paid and to whom a debt is owed.

Becoming Kin
(Broadleaf Books)
Patty Krawec

The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home." Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to ""unforget"" our history.

Rock & Roll in Kennedy's America: A Cultural History of the Early 1960s
(Johns Hopkins University Press)
Richard Aquila 

In the early 1960s, the nation was on track to fulfill its destiny in what was being called "the American Century." Baby boomers and rock & roll shared the country's optimism for "one brief, shining moment," both President John F. Kennedy and young people across the country riding high. The dream of a New Frontier would soon give way, however, to a new reality involving assassinations, the Vietnam War, Cold War crises, the civil rights movement, a new feminist movement, and various culture wars. From the former host of NPR's Rock & Roll America, Richard Aquila's Rock & Roll in Kennedy's America offers an in-depth look at early 1960s rock & roll, as well as an unconventional history of Kennedy's America through the lens of popular music. Based on extensive research and exclusive interviews with Bo Diddley, Martha Reeves, Dick Clark, and other legendary figures, this book proves that the rock & roll of the 60s was vibrant and in tune with the history and events of the colorful era. 

Scatterlings: A Novel
(HarperVia) 
Resoketswe Martha Manenzhe

In 1927, South Africa passes the Immorality Act, prohibiting sexual intercourse between "Europeans" (white people) and "natives" (Black people). Alisa, who is Jamaican and the descendant of slaves, was raised by a wealthy white British couple, but journeyed to South Africa where she met and married Abram. Abram and Alisa have their share of marital problems, but they also have a comfortable life in South Africa with their two young girls. But then the Act is passed, and their two children are now evidence of their involvement in a union that has now been criminalized. When officials start asking questions at the girls' school, and their estate is catalogued for potential disbursement, Abram is at a loss as to how he can protect his family from the the law, whose worst discriminations have until now been kept at bay by the family's economic privilege. In the aftermath of the Act, the couple's bond is tattered, and Alisa comes to a conclusion to commit her own devastating act, one that will reverberate through their entire family's lives. The debut of gifted South African storyteller Resoketswe Martha Manenzhe, Scatterlings intertwines ritual, myth, and the heart-wrenching question of who stays and who leaves.
 

Black and Female: Essays
(Graywolf Press)
Tsitsi Dangarembga 

In Black and Female, Tsitsi Dangarembga examines the legacy of imperialism on her own life and on every aspect of black embodied African life. This paradigm-shifting essay collection weaves the personal and political in an illuminating exploration of race and gender. Dangarembga recounts a painful separation from her parents as a toddler, connecting this experience to the ruptures caused in Africa by human trafficking and enslavement. She argues that, after independence, the ruling party in Zimbabwe only performed inclusion for women while silencing the work of self-actualized feminists. She describes her struggles to realize her ambitions in theater, film, and literature, laying out the long path to the publication of her novels. At once philosophical, intimate, and urgent, Black and Female is a powerful testimony of the pervasive and long-lasting effects of racism and patriarchy that provides an ultimately hopeful vision for change. Black feminists are "the status quo's worst nightmare." Dangarembga writes, "our conviction is deep, bolstered by a vivid imagination that reminds us that other realities are possible beyond the one that obtains."