Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book analyzes Black women's involvement in American political life, focusing on what they did to gain political power between 1961 and 2001, and why, in many cases, they did not succeed. Harris demonstrates that Black women have tried to gain centrality through their participation in Presidential Commissions, Black feminist organizations, theatrical productions, film adaptations of literature, beauty pageants, electoral politics, and Presidential appointments.

Harris contends that 'success' in this area means that the feminist-identified Black women in the Congressional Black Caucus who voted against Clarence Thomas's appointment would have spoken on behalf of Anita Hill; Senator Carol Moseley Braun would have won re-election; Lani Gunier would have had a hearing; Dr. Joycelyn Elders would have maintained her post; and Congresswoman Barbara Lee wouldn't have stood alone in her opposition to the Iraq war resolution. (Palgrave Macmillan - July 2009)

Advance Praise for Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton

“I have been longing for a book that can conceptually interweave the legacy of the Combahee River Collective, the long standing hostility by some in the black community toward the movie The Color Purple, and the political style of Congresswoman Barbara Lee. Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton offers us a little known political history--it is required reading for any serious student and scholar of contemporary African American's women's political participation.

This book provides readers a new and valuable conceptual landscape of how African American feminists have engaged electoral and cultural politics despite consistent and powerful opposition. What a refreshing and much needed addition!”-- Michele Tracy Berger, Author of Workable Sisterhood: The Political Journey of Stigmatized Women with HIV/AIDS

Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity
Bruce Baum and Duchess Harris, editors

Racially Writing the Republic investigates the central role of race in the construction and transformation of American national identity from the Revolutionary War era to the height of the civil rights movement. Drawing on political theory, American studies, critical race theory, and gender studies, the contributors to this collection highlight the assumptions of white (and often male) supremacy underlying the thought and actions of major U.S. political and social leaders. At the same time, they examine how nonwhite writers and activists have struggled against racism and for the full realization of America’s political ideals. The essays are arranged chronologically, and, with one exception, each essay is focused on a single figure, from George Washington to James Baldwin.

The contributors analyze Thomas Jefferson’s legacy in light of his sexual relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings; the way that Samuel Gompers, the first president of the American Federation of Labor, rallied that organization against Chinese immigrant workers; and the eugenicist origins of the early-twentieth-century birth-control movement led by Margaret Sanger. They draw attention to the writing of Sarah Winnemucca, a Northern Piute and one of the first published Native American authors; the anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett; the Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan; and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who linked civil rights struggles in the United States to anticolonial efforts abroad. Other figures considered include Abraham Lincoln, Juan Nepomuceno Cortina (who fought against Anglo American expansion in what is now Texas), Theodore Roosevelt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alexis de Tocqueville and his traveling companion Gustave de Beaumont. In the afterword, George Lipsitz reflects on U.S. racial politics since 1965. (Duke University Press, September 2009)

Advance Praise for Racially Writing the Republic

"In asking how U.S. commitments to liberty and white supremacy have cohabited, this collection brings to bear state-of-the-art scholarship and a long historical view. Moreover, rather than only focusing on the white/African American color line, it shows that critically important variations have mattered where American Indians, Asian Americans, Latina/os, and `white ethnics' are concerned."- David Roediger, author of How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon