Keywords for African American Studies

Introduces key terms, interdisciplinary research, debates, and histories for African American Studies

As the longest-standing interdisciplinary field, African American Studies has laid the foundation for critically analyzing issues of race, ethnicity, and culture within the academy and beyond. This volume assembles the keywords of this field for the first time, exploring not only the history of those categories but their continued relevance in the contemporary moment. Taking up a vast array of issues such as slavery, colonialism, prison expansion, sexuality, gender, feminism, war, and popular culture, Keywords for African American Studies showcases the startling breadth that characterizes the field.
Featuring an august group of contributors across the social sciences and the humanities, the keywords assembled within the pages of this volume exemplify the depth and range of scholarly inquiry into Black life in the United States. Connecting lineages of Black knowledge production to contemporary considerations of race, gender, class, and sexuality, Keywords for African American Studies provides a model for how the scholarship of the field can meet the challenges of our social world.

“"This comprehensive butincisive collection is both born of this moment and the culmination of thedecades-long project of African American studies: a collective, intellectualendeavor forged in the world and beyond it. The volume is an index of the powerof Black thought, for the now and for the next."-Mark Anthony Neal,James B. Duke Professor of African & African American Studies at Duke University”

"This comprehensive but incisive collection is both born of this moment and the culmination of the decades-long project of African American studies: a collective, intellectual endeavor forged in the world and beyond it. The volume is an index of the power of Black thought, for the now and for the next." -- Mark Anthony Neal, James B. Duke Professor of African & African American Studies at Duke University
"Keywords is an exciting contribution to the discipline, providing the genealogy of fifty words as living testaments to the past and present, and potential future directions for these words and phrases, now ubiquitous in the academy, the blogosphere, and quotidian conversations." Journal of African American History

Erica R. Edwards (Editor)
Erica R. Edwards is Associate Professor of English and Presidential Term Chair in African American Literature at Rutgers University. She is author of Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (2012), which received the MLA's William Sanders Scarborough Prize, and co-editor of Keywords for African American Literature (2018).
Roderick A. Ferguson (Editor)
Roderick A. Ferguson is Professor of African American Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar (Editor)
Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar is Professor of History and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music at the University of Connecticut.

A new vocabulary for African American Studies As the longest-standing interdisciplinary field, African American Studies has laid the foundation for critically analyzing issues of race, ethnicity, and culture within the academy and beyond. This volume assembles the keywords of this field for the first time, exploring not only the history of those categories but their continued relevance in the contemporary moment. Taking up a vast array of issues such as slavery, colonialism, prison expansion, sexuality, gender, feminism, war, and popular culture, Keywords for African American Studies showcases the startling breadth that characterizes the field. Featuring an august group of contributors across the social sciences and the humanities, the keywords assembled within the pages of this volume exemplify the depth and range of scholarly inquiry into Black life in the United States. Connecting lineages of Black knowledge production to contemporary considerations of race, gender, class, and sexuality, Keywords for African American Studies provides a model for how the scholarship of the field can meet the challenges of our social world.

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