Research

Psyche A. Williams-Forson is one of our leading thinkers about food in America. In Eating While Black, she offers her knowledge and experience to illuminate how anti-Black racism operates in the practice and culture of eating. She shows how mass media, nutrition science, economics, and public policy drive entrenched opinions among both Black and non-Black Americans about what is healthful and right to eat. Distorted views of how and what Black people eat are pervasive, bolstering the belief that they must be corrected and regulated. What is at stake is nothing less than whether Americans can learn to embrace nonracist understandings and practices in relation to food.

Sustainable culture—what keeps a community alive and thriving—is essential to Black peoples' fight for access and equity, and food is central to this fight. Starkly exposing the rampant shaming and policing around how Black people eat, Williams-Forson contemplates food's role in cultural transmission, belonging, homemaking, and survival. Black people's relationships to food have historically been connected to extreme forms of control and scarcity—as well as to stunning creativity and ingenuity. In advancing dialogue about eating and race, this book urges us to think and talk about food in new ways in order to improve American society on both personal and structural levels.

Survey data collected in the wake of the March 2021 mass shooting in Atlanta Georgia

Christina Hanhardt and co-editor Jasbir Puar conduct a roundtable with scholars exploring campus safety, from the history of alert systems to insurance calculations for international study programs to struggles over academic freedom and student organizing. Hanhardt also contributes an essay on the word "safe" to the third edition of Keywords in American Cultural Studies, exploring the use of the word and associated concepts from the Declaration of Independence to the expansion of order maintenance policing to recent liability laws, among much more.

Project Director: Mary Corbin Sies, Associate Professor of American Studies 

Project Title: Change and Resilience in Lakeland: African Americans in College Park, Md., 1950–1980

Project Description: A daylong digitization event, by-appointment collecting visits to neighbors’ homes, and a public interpretation event to document and explore the history of Lakeland, an African-American community in Prince George’s County, Maryland. 

This article explores Roots: The Next Generations' treatment of twentieth-century issues of assimilation, exclusion, and disaffection through the theme of black Americans serving in the U.S. military. It contends that the show creates a landmark departure from prevailing (and succeeding) narrative conventions of U.S. films and television series, in which black service was either overlooked or written into a simplistic, celebratory narrative of progress toward equality. Rather than emphasizing seamless multiracial unity or presenting war as a cure for prejudice and division (what we might call racial triumphalism), RTNG taps into African Americans' post-civil rights, post-Vietnam War reconsideration of integrationism and military service as viable responses to exclusion. The experiences of Simon Haley (author Alex Haley's father) in World War I and Alex Haley himself in World War II situate black service and the challenges confronting black veterans not in a teleology of uplift and equalization, but as part of ongoing and shifting patterns of bigotry and betrayal. This constitutes a significant expression of a dissenting vision of war and its repercussions for U.S. racial formations, all the more so for its appearance on ABC, a major network reaching millions of the nation's homes.

"Suspect Freedoms" chronicles more than a hundred years of Cuban diasporic history in New York. One of the few studies to examine the early history of Afro-Cuban migration and politics, it employs a rich cache of primary sources, archival documents, literary texts, club records, newspapers, photographs, and oral histories to produce what Michel Rolph Trouillot calls an "unthinkable history."

Brings together 63 essays from a wide-range of scholars from diverse fields who respond to multiple keywords and in doing so, articulate the shape and direction of Latina/o Studies as an academic and scholarly field of study. The different authors trace the history, genealogy and future of the field.

This chapter outlines the changing meanings given to World War II in US popular culture across the postwar period. The first section, “Early Postwar” (1945-1948), covers anxieties arising at war’s end over returning soldiers, potential fascist violence at home, racial inequality, and the dawning of the atomic age; the second, “Cold War” (1948-1962), explores shifting postwar international alliances, analyzes the role of World War II popular culture in supporting the US’s Cold War agenda, and further examines postwar paranoia concerning atomic weaponry; the third, “The Vietnam Era” (1962-1978), considers popular images of World War II as they were filtered through the lens of an unpopular war in Indochina, exploring the decline of militarism in US culture and the ways in which Americans drew on memory of World War II to critique the nation’s postwar global role; the fourth, “Post-Vietnam” (1978-2001) briefly recounts the resuscitation of World War II triumphalism in the Reagan revival of the 1980s and charts the development in the 1990s of patriotic mythologies of “the greatest generation”; finally, “Post-9/11” (2001-) documents how representations of World War II after the September 2001 attacks helped both rejuvenate and challenge American militarism during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and beyond.

Article analyzes African American director Antoine Fuqua’s Tears of the Sun, a 2003 war film made with US Navy cooperation. The film imagines the intervention of Navy SEALs in an ethnic cleansing being conducted against Christians by Nigerian Muslims. It is at once an exercise in black diasporic consciousness and an expression of American exceptionalism. The director aimed to raise awareness of contemporary African crises, but the picture is also the closest Hollywood combat cinema came in the immediate post-9/11 years to addressing and endorsing the polarizing discourse and militarism of the Bush administration. Its use of reductive religious imagery, weak box office return, and generally hostile reception overseas expose its failure as a tool of diplomacy and reveal the waning ability of triumphalist Hollywood cinema to define or explain the ‘War on Terror’.

Chester's article traces the postwar connotations attached to remembering (and forgetting) black sailor and Pearl Harbor hero Doris Miller both in African American culture and in US navy-sponsored commemorations from 1941 to 2013. Drawing on governmental and military archives, the records of the NAACP, and a selection of poems, songs, films, news reportage, and television series, the piece argues that while Miller's post-Pearl Harbor narrative began as a marker of racial inequality and black disaffection with such, the navy and other scribes of official memory eventually created around Miller a modality of remembrance identifying the armed forces with ideological color blindness and attributing to World War II and nonwhite service therein the death of racism in military culture.