New Book Published

Jeffrey Herf's most recent book, lsrael's Moment; International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945-1949 (Cambridge University Press, 2022)  has received the Bernard Lewis Prize awarded annually by the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) .

According to the Award letter, the Bernard Lewis Prize recognizes the work of scholars engaged in the study of issues on antisemitism that were of great importance to ASMEA's founding chairman, Bernard Lewis. "While Christian antisemitism is well-studied, a stigma remains around addressing antisemitism in the Muslim world. Beyond this, relatively few scholars focus on the Middle Eastern dimensions of Christian antisemitism in religious and cultural terms, much less the political impact in the West. ASMEA was founded 15 years ago by the  historians Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, both of whom made major contributions to the scholarship on the modern Middle East."

Jeffrey Herf adds: "Israel's Moment is a history of how the governments of the United States, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and Soviet bloc reacted to the Zionist project in the crucial years of 1945 to 1949. It also addresses debates, especially in the United States, and at the United Nations, about Zionist aspirations, antisemitism, and the aftereffects of Nazism and the Holocaust. I am pleased that as a historian whose past work is on modern European history, my study of its aftereffects around the world and in the Middle East has received this acclaim among scholars of the Middle East as well." 

In 2020, the United States faced a cultural reckoning as the world stared down the start of a global pandemic. During a time of strife and death, a time that disproportionately affected people of color, the world watched along as continued police brutality reached a point that that triggered protests around the world. At the Journal of Modern Slavery we mourned and felt anger with those around us, and then we wondered what we could do, how we could actively support the movement for racial justice. The answer came in the form of a special issue of the Journal of Modern Slavery, designed to look deeper into the individual, social, and systemic injustices woven into the fabric of the United States, beginning with slavery. The issue of the journal grew into this book.

In Slavery and its Consequences: Racism, Inequity and Exclusion in the USA, the contributors tell rich narratives about how slavery and racial injustice, as well as the resistance to it, has shaped the country over centuries to become what modern America is today. Through various lenses, the book explores and celebrates Black American history as it is woven into the cultural and social structures of the country. Across centuries of change, this book weaves together the invaluable influence this history has had on music, sport, philosophy, literature, publishing, scholarship, politics, faiths, poetry, the church, photography, civil rights, peacebuilding, jazz and more as part of the struggle and the resistance.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface
Dr. Tina Davis & Jodi L. Henderson

Introduction
Lawrence E. Carter

“We Knew”
Stephane Dunn

Black Lives Have Always Mattered in Black Music
Stephanie Shonekan

A New Look at Slavery – The “Peculiar Institution”
Charles Finch

American Slavery Historiography
Orville Vernon Burton

Racializing Cain, Demonizing Blackness & Legalizing Discrimination: Proposal for Reception of Cain and America’s Racial Caste System
Joel B. Kemp

Dealing with the Devil and Paradigms of Life in African American Music
Anthony B. Pinn

‘A Home in Dat Rock’: Afro-American Folk Sources and Slave Visions of Heaven and Hell
Lewis V Baldwin

Modern Slavery By Another Name: A Black Church Response to Gender Based Violence and the Human Trafficking of Black Women, Girls, and Queer Folx for the Purpose of Sexual Exploitation
Brandon Thomas Crowley

The Birth – and Rebirth – of Black Activist Athletes: They Refused To Lay Their Burdens Down
Ron Thomas

Occupying the Center: Black Publishing: an interview with Paul Coates & Barry Beckham
Jodi L. Henderson

Literary Review of the Woke 2019-2021
Leah Creque

Blueprints Towards Improved Communities
Dr. Tina Davis

To Hope, Fourteen Years Later
Naje Lataillade

The Sounds of Freedom: A dialogue on the poison of racism, the medicine of jazz, and a Buddhist view of life
Taro Gold withWayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock & esperanza spalding

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Fresh out of undergrad and working in advertising in Chicago in the late 2000s, Catherine Knight Steele found an online escape from her cubicle—in the blogosphere. Each day, she soaked up musings on topics ranging from gossip and entertainment to beauty and motherhood, written mainly by Black women. Not only did the content fascinate and enliven her, but it began to feel essential to her sense of personhood—like home. 

Steele became so interested in these online spaces that she began to wonder whether she could pursue research on them. There weren’t many examples at the time of scholars of color working at the intersection of race and digital media, so Steele paved her own way, returning to graduate school for a Ph.D. in communication. Her dissertation, “Digital Barbershops,” focused on the politics of African American oral culture in online blog communities, tracing the ways that Black people have long found spaces outside the purview of the dominant group. 

Now an associate professor of communication at UMD, Steele is committed to building community and expanding opportunities for a new generation of scholars in the burgeoning humanistic field of Black digital studies—the ways that technology impacts and intersects with Blackness and the lives, histories and cultures of Black Americans. Through her research and publications, collaborative projects and teaching, Steele wants people—and especially Black women—to know that if they’re interested in Black communication and technology, there’s a space at UMD for them.   

“I’ve been very fortunate and privileged to get to this place, and now I have a sense of responsibility and a debt to pay to those on a similar path,” she said. “I want to help people find their people, find their passions and drive themselves forward in spaces they’ve been boxed out of.” 

A native Chicagoan, Steele has long been interested in technology—but is the first to admit she’s not “techie” in a traditional sense. She remembers learning to type as a young girl using “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing” on the family’s computer and was among the first batch of students to get Facebook in college, “back when you had to have a .edu address.” Mostly though, technology has been a tool to express herself and find belonging. 

After she received her doctorate from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2014, she served as an assistant professor at Colorado State University before coming to UMD in 2016 as the founding director of the Mellon-funded African American Digital Humanities Initiative (AADHum). The multi-year initiative encompasses research, education and training at the intersections of African American history, culture and the digital humanities—what’s often called Black digital humanities, or “BlackDH.” For three years, Steele and her team worked especially to create a community among those at the graduate and faculty levels in a range of disciplines and with varied interests. They organized workshops, panels and reading groups, hosted a conference, launched the first cohort of AADHum scholars and more.

“Catherine brought to life what was then a collection of plans and hopes,” said Trevor Muñoz, the director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and AADHum co-principal investigator. “She nurtured a scholarly community that encompassed and was genuinely interested in many different approaches to the study of Black life through and with technology.” 

Steele dove back into her dissertation research, but with a renewed focus on Black women and Black feminists and how they’ve transformed technology over centuries. Using both historical and archival analysis and empirical Internet studies methods, Steele’s first book, “Digital Black Feminism,” was published in 2021 and offers a throughline from the writing of 19th-century Black women all the way to modern-day bloggers and social media creators. The book won the 2022 Nancy Baym Book Award from the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). In its announcement, AoIR said the book “reclaims feminism for Black women and directly intervenes in Internet scholarship.”

For Steele, the best part of publishing “Digital Black Feminism” has been the resultant conversations. From high school book clubs and a community college Black feminism course, to graduate programs in digital studies and feminist studies, it’s been used in “a variety of different generative spaces of conversation,” she said. 

At UMD, Steele teaches courses on digital studies, media theory, methods in media and digital research, Black discourse and digital media and more. She recently became the director of Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities, or DSAH, an interdisciplinary graduate certificate jointly administered by the College of Arts and Humanities and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. She’s part of the inaugural cohort of the “Breaking the M.O.L.D.” initiative, which seeks to prepare underrepresented arts and humanities faculty from UMD, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Morgan State University for institutional leadership. And she’s working on three simultaneous collaborative book projects.

She was also recently named a Higher Ed IT “Influencer to Follow” by EdTech Magazine. 

These days, Steele is focused on launching a new space on the third floor of the Skinner Building for anyone with an interest in Black digital studies. The Black Communication and Technology—or BCat—Lab will feature tables for workshops and writing sessions, a sofa and comfy chairs for reading from a Black digital studies library and a big screen for virtual workshops, lectures and events. 

It’s part of the Mellon Foundation-funded Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, & Optimism (DISCO) network, a collective of six scholars at institutions across the country that are “envisioning an alternative and inclusive digital future.” Each is leveraging their own areas of expertise to establish new research hubs, courses and more at their institutions. All the while, they are working together to share knowledge and experiences. 

At UMD, the BCaT Lab will develop a program model to introduce undergraduates to digital research through workshops and coursework, help students carry out graduate research and find jobs and create a mentoring network for students and faculty to navigate Black digital studies, focusing on collaboration across generations of researchers. 

Doctoral student Alisa Hardy, a graduate assistant at the lab and Steele’s advisee, has been working to spread the word about BCaT on campus and beyond. She said students—and Black students especially—are eager for a space to talk about technology, “and write together and learn together.” 

“Working on the BCaT project has really fostered my own Black identity as a digital scholar,” Hardy said. “When I came to UMD, I wanted to study digital communication but I didn’t know if I had the tools, understanding or perspective. Working with Catherine has opened my mind up to so many other possibilities. Seeing this lab and how it's come to be—it’s inspiring. It makes me think I could do something similar one day.”

Among the lab’s upcoming events: BCaT will host a panel discussion this semester for early career scholars on writing a first book manuscript, which will feature published authors and an acquisition editor from a major academic press. Participants will then be invited to a weeklong workshop on writing the book proposal. It will also begin the “BCaT Writes Open Lab,” where undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty gather to write their own projects.

Eventually, Steele hopes to introduce students in Prince George’s County high schools to the field of Black digital studies and encourage future scholarship.

Her message for interested students: “There’s a place in the humanities where you can do what you want to do—where you can be of service to this community, and that’s in Black digital studies,” she said. “There is a wide range of possibilities with a graduate and undergrad degree with this background and skillset.”

“We need to show what that path looks like and provide branches along the way,” she added. 

Steele will be in conversation with ARHU Dean Stephanie Shonekan on September 28, 2022, (on Zoom) to discuss “Digital Black Feminism” and how to marry digital research with historical and archival work as we consider a path for the humanities in the digital age. Learn more and sign up.

Hallie Liberto's book is about permissive consent—the moral tool we use to give another person permission to do what would otherwise be forbidden. For instance, consent to enter my home gives you permission to do what would otherwise be trespass. This transformation is the very thing that philosophers identify as consent—which is why we call it a normative power. It is something individuals can do, by choice, to change the moral or legal world. But what human acts or attitudes render consent? When do coercive threats, offers, or lies undermine the transformative power of consent? What intentions or conventions are necessary to render consent meaningful?

This book develops a novel theory that explains the moral features of consent in some of the most central domains of human life—but that also serves as a study in how to theorize normative power. It argues that consent is a moral mechanism with exactly the set of features that, when triggered, prevents another person's behavior from constituting a certain kind of wrongdoing. What kind of wrongdoing? It depends on what sort of permission is being granted. Sometimes consent permits others to enter, occupy, or act within some bounded domain wherein the consent-giver holds moral authority. In these cases, consent operates to prevent what the book calls: Invasive Wrongdoing. By identifying the moral features that underlie this special wrongdoing, we can learn what it takes to render consent.

Mircea Raianu's new book, "Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism," tells the story of a small business that, over 150 years, had both struggles and success as it grew to become one of the most powerful companies in India.

Nearly a century old, the grand façade of Bombay House is hard to miss in the historic business district of Mumbai. This is the iconic global headquarters of the Tata Group, a multinational corporation that produces everything from salt to software. After getting their start in the cotton and opium trades, the Tatas, a Parsi family from Navsari, Gujarat, ascended to commanding heights in the Indian economy by the time of independence in 1947. Over the course of its 150-year history Tata spun textiles, forged steel, generated hydroelectric power, and took to the skies. It also faced challenges from restive workers fighting for their rights and political leaders who sought to curb its power.

In this sweeping history, Mircea Raianu tracks the fortunes of a family-run business that was born during the high noon of the British Empire and went on to capture the world’s attention with the headline-making acquisition of luxury car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover. The growth of Tata was a complex process shaped by world historical forces: the eclipse of imperial free trade, the intertwined rise of nationalism and the developmental state, and finally the return of globalization and market liberalization. Today Tata is the leading light of one of the world’s major economies, selling steel, chemicals, food, financial services, and nearly everything else, while operating philanthropic institutions that channel expert knowledge in fields such as engineering and medicine.

Based on painstaking research in the company’s archive, Tata elucidates how a titan of industry was created and what lessons its story may hold for the future of global capitalism.

The book is available on Amazon here or on the publisher's website here.