Summer Book Roundup, Volume One

One of the things I hope to do with NewBlackMan: The Blog, is to give some shine to the scholars, critics, and artists who putting in down in major way. This week I want to shout some folk doing their thang, thang in the literary world

Daphne Brooks is one of my favorite people and also one of the most brilliant people I know. Her long awaited book about Jeff Buckley’s Grace has just been published by Continuum as part of their 33 1/3 Series (book length studies of important pop albums). Anybody who has heard Daphne talk passionately about Buckley and the need for a black feminist perspective in Rock criticism (which this book is), knows that she can bring her own style of crunchy granola funk. Now hopefully we’ll see her “big” book--Bodies in Dissent: Performing Race, Gender, and Nation in the Trans-Atlantic Imaginary-- in the world soon, also.

When Judith Halberstam dropped her brilliant Female Masculinity
back in 1998, it opened up a whole new spaces to theorize about gender and sexuality. I was indeed enraptured listening to Judith talk about Big Mama Thornton within the context of female masculinity during last year’s Experience Music Project (EMP) Pop Conference. Judith has just published a new book, In A Queer Time And Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (NYU Press). According to Popmatters reviewer N.A. Hayes, “This small seductive book pours warmth as Halberstam confesses and connects movements of pop culture and high art to a deeper understanding of the potentials of the body.”

Speaking of a fabulously brilliant women, Maureen Mahon will be at Harlem’s Hue-Man Book Store and Café on Thursday June 23, 2005. I’ve already given Maureen major propers for her book Right to Rock: The Black Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race and was fortunate to have her spend some time with my graduate students in our seminar on Post-Black Culture.

Venus In The Dark: Blackness And Beauty In Popular Culture, Janell Hobson’s new book on black female bodies in popular culture will be published late next month. A brilliant book throughout, the chapter “The "Batty" Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body” is worth the price of admission alone. Janell’s voice is a great addition to the on-going debates about the policing of black female sexuality.

For one year S. Craig Watkins and I, were to the University of Texas at Austin, what Chauncey Billups and Rip Hamilton are to the Detroit Pistons. Watkins been putting it down in the lone star state for a bit and now he’s back with a follow-up to his vital Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (still one of the top five scholarly studies of hip-hop). According to Robin D.G. Kelley, Watkins’ Hip-Hop Matters: Politics, Popular Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement is “A fantastic voyage into a culture that has defined a generation.”