On Publishing and Racial Justice

June 10, 2020 - This week George Floyd is being celebrated in Houston, where he grew up. In our home state of Texas and throughout the country, protestors have raised their voices against the systematic suppression of Black voices, the excessive use of force against protestors, and the murders of named and unnamed Black people. The University of Texas Press joins these condemnations and supports the essential and urgent work of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Our publishing mission is to serve the people of Texas and knowledge seekers around the world by publishing valuable and relevant information to educate, advance scholarship, and deepen our understanding of history, current events, and contemporary cultures. Our authors reveal the connections between law enforcement along the US-Mexico border and the militarization of the police in this country. They study how cultural trauma is disproportionally inflicted upon and suffered by communities of color, the severity of which is compounded by white systems of power. And they examine the personal histories and the cultural impact of art created, transformed, and advanced by Black creators.

We believe deeply that these kinds of books, and the historical and cultural perspectives they foster, have an important role to play in the broader conversations now taking place. At the same time, we acknowledge that the book publishing industry itself, with a Black workforce of only 5 percent, has a very long way to go. Without the opportunities for meaningful and gainful entry-level jobs, barriers remain for young publishers of color. Unpaid internships; poor oversight of recruitment, promotion, and retainment; and a broad lack of equity training and accountability systems have made publishing an unwelcoming field for Black professionals.

The University of Texas Press is committed to asking difficult questions of ourselves and our institution to purposefully seek solutions. We are committed to the ongoing work of increasing staff diversity while providing professional development opportunities, training all staff to participate in an equitable work environment, and regularly reviewing our acquisitions and peer review practices to ensure broad representation. We are committed to advancing the works and expertise of Black scholars and artists, decentering whiteness when celebrating Black cultural production, and investing deliberately in our outreach to share publishing opportunities and market Black authors.

It is crucial for us to reckon with privilege, gather our peers, and actively protect and advance the rights, lives, and self-determination of Black people. In the coming weeks and months, we will be joining with others in listening, amplifying voices, sharing resources, and centering the work that must be done. In a time of uncertainty, precarity, and division, our ears and our inboxes are open.

As we continue to educate ourselves in efforts to dismantle white supremacy, we also want to do our part to elevate Black voices. We have compiled a list of our staff’s favorite books by Black authors who have made an impact on us, especially at a time when context and deep thinking are necessary.

• Affrilachia, Frank X Walker
• The Age of Phillis, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
• Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• An American Marriage, Tayari Jones
• American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assasin, Terrance Hayes
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley
• The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle
• Becoming, Michelle Obama
• Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
• The Birds of Opulence, Crystal Wilkinson
• Blackberries, Blackberries, Crystal Wilkinson
• Black Bone: 25 Years of Affrilachian Writers, edited by Bianca Spriggs and Jeremy Paden
• Black from the Future: A Collection of Black Speculative Fiction, edited by Stephanie Andrea Allen and Lauren Cherelle
• Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Cedric Robinson
• The Black Poets, Dudley Randall
• Black Skins, White Masks, Franz Fanon
• Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, Hortense Spillers
• Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, bell hooks
• Book of Hours: Poems, Kevin Young
• The Book of Night Women, Marlon James
• A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland, DaMaris B. Hill
• Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, Trevor Noah
• The Bridge of Beyond, Simone Schwarz-Bart
• Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James
• Broken Earth series, N. K. Jemisin
• Brown: Poems, Kevin Young
• Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, Kevin Young
• Cane, Jean Toomer
• Can't Escape Love, Alyssa Cole
• The Century Cycle (plays), August Wilson
• The Changeling, Victor LaValle
• Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, Zadie Smith
• Clotel, or the President's Daughter, William Wells Brown
• The Color Purple, Alice Walker
• Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, Khalil Gibran Muhammad
• Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South, Michael Twitty
• Dawn, Octavia Butler
• Delicious Foods, James Hannaham
• Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, Marisa Fuentes 
• Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems, Danez Smith
• The Edna Lewis Cookbook, Edna Lewis and Evangeline Peterson
• Eight Men: Short Stories, Richard Wright
• Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Brittney Cooper
• For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, Ntozake Shange
• Freedom as Marronage, Neil Roberts
• Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
• Gather Together in My Name, Maya Angelou
• Get a Life, Chloe Brown, Talia Hibbert
• Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin
• Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, Ruth Wilson Gilmore
• The Good Lord Bird, James McBride
• The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas
• Head Off and Split, Nikky Finney
• The Heart of a Woman, Maya Angelou
• Heavy: An American Memoir, Kiese Laymon
• The History of White People, Nell Irvin Painter
• Home, Toni Morrison
• Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
• How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Kiese Laymon
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
• In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era, Richard Iton
• Insurrections, Rion Amilcar Scott
• Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic, Shatema Threadcraft
• Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
• Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride, Frank X Walker
• Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, Bryan Stevenson
• The Known World, Edward P. Jones
• Life’s Work: A Moral Argument for Choice, Dr. Willie Parker
• Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman
• Loving Day, Mat Johnson
• Men We Reaped: A Memoir, Jesmyn Ward
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander
• No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity, Sarah Haley
• On Beauty, Zadie Smith
• On the Come Up, Angie Thomas
• The Poet X, Elizabeth Acevedo
• Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration, January 20, 2009, Elizabeth Alexander
• Prelude to Bruise, Saeed Jones
• The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation, Daina Ramey Berry
• Pride, Ibi Zoboi
• Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields
• Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, Robin D. G. Kelley
• Rafe: A Buff Male Nanny, Rebekah Weatherspoon
• Recyclopedia, Harryette Mullen
• The Sellout, Paul Beatty
• Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, Maya Angelou
• Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward
• A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid
• Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
• The Stars and the Blackness Between Them, Junauda Petrus
• Sula, Toni Morrison
• Summer Lightning, Olive Senior
• Swallow the Fish, Gabrielle Civil
• Tar Baby, Toni Morrison
• Texaco, Patrick Chamoiseau
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
• They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Hanif Abdurraqib
• Thick: And Other Essays, Tressie McMillan Cottom
• The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
• The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
• The Venus Hottentot: Poems, Elizabeth Alexander
• The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson
• We Are Never Meeting in Real Life: Essays, Samantha Irby
• We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, Ta-Nehisi Coates
• The works of Stuart Hall
• The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon
• You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker
• Zone One, Colson Whitehead

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Announcing a New Series—Latinx: The Future is Now

Latinx: The Future Is Now is a new interdisciplinary series devoted to the evolving field of Latina/o/x studies, including Central American, Afro-Latinx, and Asian-Latinx studies. Situated at the nexus of cultural, performance, historical, food, environmental, and textual studies, the series will focus on ways in which the racial, cultural, and social formations of historical Latinx communities can engage and enhance scholarship across geographies and nationalities. The series editors invite projects that consider the multiple queer and gender-fluid possibilities that are embodied in the “x”; projects that have a feminist critique of patriarchy at the center of their intellectual work; projects that deploy a relational approach to ethnic and national groups; and projects that address the overlapping dynamics of gender, race, sexual, and national identities.

Submissions or queries may be directed to the series editors, Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez, nicole.m.guidotti-hernandez@emory.edu and Lorgia Garcia-Peña, garciapena@fas.harvard.edu in addition to Senior Acquisitions Editor, Kerry Webb, kwebb@utpress.utexas.edu.

Forthcoming books in the series will be listed here as they are published: https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/series/latinx-future-now.

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Dr. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández is Professor in the Department of English at Emory University. She is an expert in Borderlands History after 1846, Transnational Feminist Methodologies, Latinx Studies, and Popular Culture and Immigration. As a public intellectual, Dr. Guidotti-Hernández has written numerous articles for the feminist magazine Ms. and the feminist blog The Feminist Wire, covering such topics as immigration, reproductive rights, and the Dream act. She also sits on the national advisory council for the Ms. and is currently on the national advisory council for Freedom University in Athens, Georgia.

Dr. Lorgia Garcia-Peña is the Roy G. Clouse Associate Professor of Latinx Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of  award-winning book The Borders of Dominicanidad and the co-founder of Freedom University Georgia, a modern-day freedom school created to support undocumented students.  

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10 Films Once Controversial Now Classic

This year, the Academy Awards is embroiled in controversy. The hashtag #OscarsSoWhite has been widely used on social media to shed light on the racial makeup of Academy voters. Any changes that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences makes internally will be historic, so we asked Jeremy Geltzer, author of Dirty Words and Filthy Pictures: Film and the First Amendment to reflect on some controversies of years past. Some of the films Geltzer examines in his book on media censorship were quite controversial at the time they were released. (It is hard to imagine A Clockwork Orange not being enormously controversial.) However, despite controversy over surrounding themes like race and violence, two of the films explored below went on to win Best Picture Oscars.

You can catch author Jeremy Geltzer at The Book Stall in Winnetka, IL, on Saturday, March 5th at 1PM. Follow Jeremy on Twitter at @HollywoodBabel.

1

Some Like It Hot (1959)

Director Billy Wilder’s cross-dressing comedy has been regarded by many viewers as one of the funniest films of all time with Marilyn Monroe in her finest form. But this classic was not a laughing matter to the Production Code Administration and the Catholic Legion of Decency; both monitored Hollywood movies to ensure clean, wholesome fun in the theaters. Some Like It Hot riled the regulators who branded the movie as “seriously offensive to Christian and traditional standards of morality and decency.” The censors were way off base, but as Joe E. Brown said in the film’s final line, “Nobody’s perfect.”

2

Psycho (1960) 

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho shocked audiences when it was released—American filmgoers had never before encountered a mainstream slasher film. The low budget black & white film changed the industry by demonstrating that audiences were ready for more daring and provocative pictures. But Psycho was also controversial for two less obvious reasons. The Production Code Administration nearly denied the film a Seal of Approval because of the “incestuous relationship between Norman and his mother.” In addition, the PCA advised caution in showing a toilet in the bathroom—Hitchcock’s edgy film was the first time a flushing toilet was seen in an American motion picture.

Building on 'God Help the Child'

Some scholars may know the satisfaction of having the themes of their work penetrate the mainstream news cycle. Our author Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman has watched acclaimed author Toni Morrison's new book coverage deal with the issues she has studied: colorism, racial hierarchy, and stigma in family and community. Here, Elizabeth writes about how both fiction and scholarship can contribute to a broad conversation about painful issues of race.

Musings on Toni Morrison's God Help the Child
By Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman

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When I read early publicity that Toni Morrison’s newest book, God Help the Child, was a novel written about a dark-skinned black woman who is brutalized by her mother because of her color, it struck a chord. It resonated with me because my first book, The Color of Love: Racial Features, Stigma, and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families, is a sociological book that will be published later this year addressing similar issues. I relished in imagining that Morrison and I may have vibed on the same conceptual wavelength without knowing it, pondering questions of colorism in black families, and leading us to publish a book on similar topics in the same year. I eagerly pre-ordered Toni Morrison’s new book, with excitement and incredulity … and then fear crept in. As a fledgling sociologist, I thought that Morrison’s book could only mean one thing: the kiss of death for my book. But wait, this was no irrational fear. Anyone who has read Morrison’s work knows that when she gives a theme her treatment, she forfeits the necessity of any more words. She articulates with ease in 150 pages, what I can not accomplish with a modicum of the same impact in 350 pages. Visions of us intellectually vibing were now overcome with the sense that her book would render my book redundant and, at worst, mundane. I had the sinking feeling that Toni Morrison had stolen my thunder.

Immediately after this thought passed through my mind, I was overcome with laughter. A laugh that lasted several times longer than the original thought itself. A laugh that was borne out of how completely and utterly preposterous it was to imagine Morrison “stealing my thunder.” What thunder? All I could do was laugh at the absurdity of this idea, as my passion for reading, my desire to write, and my interest in colorism, all find themselves linked to the reverberations of Morrison’s thunder. My childhood memories of her books on my mother’s bookshelf, the same ones that later migrated to my own shelves trace a more accurate truth – my work is the sociological undulation, a mere residual of her oeuvre. Toni Morrison, literary genius and Nobel Laureate, does not and can not steal anyone’s thunder - She IS thunder!