NYU Press

NYU Press celebrates the life of the legendary author, activist and historian whose words and brilliance still inspires and scholarship today, and lives through, and in, some of the titles below: 

“Brilliant in its dramatic sweep and analytic nuance, Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific is a bold examination of the intersections between African American and Asian American cultural production as they emerge from competing imperialist discourses. Schleitwiler’s approach is groundbreaking, synthesizing a remarkable range of texts to provide unexpected and evocative conclusions.”

—Helen Jun, author of Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoli

“The Sonic Color Line will open up new vistas for thinking about sound, race, and identity, and for understanding how racism is enforced through both sounding and listening. Painstakingly researched and written with verve, Stoever’s book will shape the way scholars of American and African American culture and history think about sound, even when our primary texts, like photographs and literary works, are seemingly silent.”

—Gayle Wald, author of It's Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television

Articulates the role black theatricality played in the radical energy of the sixties by looking broadly at performances found in music, theater, film, and everyday life—from American singer and pianist Nina Simone, Ghanaian playwrights Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, Afro-German actor Günther Kaufmann, to California-based performer Sylvester. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left eloquently explores how shared signs of racial legacy and resistance politics are articulated with regional distinction.

Available August 2017 

"Forging A Laboring Race is an important and imaginative contribution to the history of race and labor in the Progressive Era. It is also a brisk, powerful, and re-orienting critique of the very notion of 'the black worker' as a discrete category of experience. This notion was produced by myriad think tanks, self-professed social scientists, and busy-bodied state agencies, and it had real consequences for the men and women who arrived in the urban North in the first Great Migration. It persists to this day."

—Matthew Pratt Guterl, Brown University

“By centering radical black women, Want to Start a Revolution? shatters the artificial boundaries separating civil rights, black power, and feminist ideologies and movements, generating an expanded history of black radicalism and conveying the centrality of African-American women to the black freedom struggle and social justice movements more broadly. This collection will undoubtedly inspire an outpouring of much-needed new scholarship, adding to our collective knowledge and offering new frameworks for grappling with this history.”

—Emilye Crosby, author of A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi

Drawing on psychoanalysis, memory studies, and feminist and queer theory, Levy-Hussen examines how works by Toni Morrison, David Bradley, Octavia Butler, Charles Johnson, and others represent and mediate social injury and collective grief. Moving beyond the question of whether literature must heal or abandon historical wounds, Levy-Hussen proposes new ways on how to read African American literature now.

Did you know #NationalVideoGamesDay is a thing? Us either. But we did know Gaming Studies was a thing, and we have some top reads for all you digital media players out there.

Based upon fieldwork at an ordinary London school, The Class examines young people's experiences of growing up and learning in a digital world. It provides insights into how young people’s social, digital, and learning networks enable or disempower them. Youth (and you) can read it free online here. 

In the aftermath of 9/11, games like Call of Duty transformed a national crisis into fantastic and profitable adventures, where seemingly powerless spectators became solutions to these virtual Wars on Terror. Playing War provides a cultural framework for understanding the popularity of games like these.  

People  spend countless hours in virtual universes creating new identities, fall in love, build cities, make rules, and break them. As digital worlds become increasingly powerful and lifelike, people employ them for countless real-world purposes, including commerce and law enforcement. Who will regulate them?Real-world law? The State of Play shows how we can use virtual worlds to study real-world social interactions and test real-world laws.

This unparalleled selection of original essays examines instances across the spectrum of modern cultural consumption from Karl Marx to Paris Hilton and from nineteenth-century concert halls to computer gaming. Fandom is key to understanding modern life in our increasingly mediated and globalized world.

Celebrate youth today, and every day, with our Connected Youth and Digital Futures Series, featuring two open-access titles by experts in the field of digital technologies, specifically as they relate to the social, cultural and the political life of today’s young people. NYU Press is proud to bring you free reading online in partnership with the DML Hub at @ucirvine, The Connected Learning Alliance the MacArthur Foundation.

By Any Media Necessary The New Youth Activism by Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Arely Zimmerman

Young men and women are tapping into the potential of new forms of communication such as social media platforms, spreadable videos and memes, remixing the language of popular culture, and seeking to bring about political change—by any media necessary.

The Class Living and Learning in the Digital Age by Sonia Livingstone, Julian Sefton-Green

Based upon fieldwork at an ordinary London school, The Class examines young people's experiences of growing up and learning in a digital world. In this original and engaging study, Livingstone and Sefton-Green explore youth values, teenagers’ perspectives on their futures, and their tactics for facing the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

Make that 6, with Spirituality and the State by Kerry Mitchell. 

"You will never look at National Parks or spirituality the same way again!...With careful attention to the revelations and concealments of power in the productions of the National Park Service, Mitchell demonstrates how the conceptions and practices of a loosely-defined nature-based spirituality are tied to a pervasive secular ethos that underlies modern American subjectivity and state power."

—Richard J. Callahan, Jr., University of Missouri

It’s summer, and election season, so we are currently reading Tea Party Women by Melissa Deckman. Whether they terrify or fascinate you, Tea Party women have started a new movement and gained significant traffic in America’s ever changing political landscape. They are furthering women’s involvement in political leadership and the shaping the future of females in the American Right. This book provides a behind-the-scenes look at the women behind an enduring and influential faction in American politics.

From reproductive rights to Hillary, women’s progress in today’s political climate has largely been credited to the American left. But is it too simple to pin gender advancement on the Democratic party?

As Melissa Deckman discusses in her new book, Tea Party Women: Mama Grizzlies, Grassroots Leaders, and the Changing Face of the American Right, the Tea Party has been practicing its own kind of progressivism.  In the process, many right-wing women are reframing what is means for an issue to be a “women's issue.”

On Thursday, Melissa Deckman and journalist Amy Sullivan will join the Better Life Lab and the Political Reform Program for the latest in the Women’s Decision series to discuss the ways that women are making conservatism progressive.