What kind of content can you find an American Studies professor reading? We asked Lenora Warren, Assistant Professor of Literatures in English and Director of Undergraduate Studies for AMST, to share a few comments about her favorite books at the moment. Here's what she had to say!
1. Vincent Brown, Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War
I wish this book had been out when I was writing my first book because it highlights the way in which the history of slave resistance needs to be understood as a period of total warfare culminating in the Haitian Revolution.
2. Elizabeth McHenry, To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship
I am very excited for this book, which comes out [this] month. McHenry’s archival work has always been compelling and with this new book, she restores a sense of the particular to a moment in literary history that is all too often treated as a monolith.
3. Nicholas Brown, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art Under Capitalism
A dense but punchy and sharp analysis of how art remains art under capitalism, Brown’s book both explores how capitalism leaves fewer spaces in which art can exist free of commodification and how it nevertheless resists total commodification by demanding the work of interpretation.
4. Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture
This is one of those books that, even though I don’t agree completely with the conclusions, has been massively enlightening to my own thinking about the landscape of resistance. In focusing on the necessity of quiet in contributing to a rich inner life, Quashie forces us to consider the narrow lens through which we understand terms like “political."
5. Warren Eugene Milteer Jr., Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South
This another book due out [this] month that I’m extremely excited to read. In the wake of the 2020 election more than ever we need to understand the South as a place where Black people lived and live.
