In the past twenty years, American historiography has produced a burgeoning body of scholarship dealing with the deep social, political, and cultural transformations of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Historical scholarship on American conservatism and U.S. political history established the highly productive line of research centered around the resurgence of conservatism cum neoliberalism and the “rise of the right” in the United States. The associated narratives have earlier been criticized for their simplifying dichotomy.1 Joining in this criticism, a group of historians recently called for a “new political history” to transcend the familiar “red-blue divide” and the long influential narratives of the rise of conservatism and the end of the New Deal order. Instead, historiography should investigate the deeper forms of consensus and longterm structures in the American polity by studying the various relationships between the twentieth century American state and its citizens in the capitalist and (later) globalized economy.2 Bruce Schulman, in this journal, characterized this trend as “Neo-Consensus History.” Rather than emphasizing social and political conflicts, increasing polarization, and ideological divides in U.S. politics and society since the end of the 1960s, this historiography underlines common attitudes and orientations across party lines, like the development of suburban attitudes and policy preferences, the expansion of the carceral state, and the embrace of neoliberal ideas and policies across the political spectrum. Focusing on consensus, it also emphasizes continuities rather than historical breaks and shifts.3 As a German historian who has dealt intensively with post-1968 U.S. history in the past ten years, I am rather ambivalent about the “neo-consensus” approach. It is my contention that if we flatten the concept of neoliberalism to free-market ideology and a capitalist consensus that has permeated the American political tradition regardless of party affiliations throughout the twentieth century, as suggested in Shaped by the State (2018), edited by Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams, we risk losing sight of the deep impact of State of the Field
{"title":"State of the Field: A View from Abroad: Post-1968 U.S. History, the End of the New Deal Order, and Neoliberalism","authors":"Ariane Leendertz","doi":"10.1353/rah.2021.0061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2021.0061","url":null,"abstract":"In the past twenty years, American historiography has produced a burgeoning body of scholarship dealing with the deep social, political, and cultural transformations of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Historical scholarship on American conservatism and U.S. political history established the highly productive line of research centered around the resurgence of conservatism cum neoliberalism and the “rise of the right” in the United States. The associated narratives have earlier been criticized for their simplifying dichotomy.1 Joining in this criticism, a group of historians recently called for a “new political history” to transcend the familiar “red-blue divide” and the long influential narratives of the rise of conservatism and the end of the New Deal order. Instead, historiography should investigate the deeper forms of consensus and longterm structures in the American polity by studying the various relationships between the twentieth century American state and its citizens in the capitalist and (later) globalized economy.2 Bruce Schulman, in this journal, characterized this trend as “Neo-Consensus History.” Rather than emphasizing social and political conflicts, increasing polarization, and ideological divides in U.S. politics and society since the end of the 1960s, this historiography underlines common attitudes and orientations across party lines, like the development of suburban attitudes and policy preferences, the expansion of the carceral state, and the embrace of neoliberal ideas and policies across the political spectrum. Focusing on consensus, it also emphasizes continuities rather than historical breaks and shifts.3 As a German historian who has dealt intensively with post-1968 U.S. history in the past ten years, I am rather ambivalent about the “neo-consensus” approach. It is my contention that if we flatten the concept of neoliberalism to free-market ideology and a capitalist consensus that has permeated the American political tradition regardless of party affiliations throughout the twentieth century, as suggested in Shaped by the State (2018), edited by Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams, we risk losing sight of the deep impact of State of the Field","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"49 1","pages":"633 - 648"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48893586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Religion, Power, and the Life of John Foster Dulles","authors":"Benjamin E. Varat","doi":"10.1353/rah.2021.0055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2021.0055","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"49 1","pages":"576 - 582"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48992247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Michael Fortner’s 2015 Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment put forth a controversial thesis: “black middle-class morality” and “members of the black silent majority” compelled this particular Black socioeconomic group to “prioritize public safety over economic and racial inequality. It drove them to rally and rail against ‘hoodlums’ instead of seeking reform of society.”1 Fortner’s analysis of late 1960s and 1970s drug laws and ethnic-racial identity provided a different interpretation into mass incarceration’s origins that would continue to proliferate under President Ronald Reagan’s “war on drugs.”2 Fortner asked scholars to take “black agency seriously” when considering an African American history that did not reflect Black people simply as victims or as interlocutors in a declension narrative or narrative of dominance.3 Furthermore, he wrote that specialists could acknowledge Black agency while not maintaining that African Americans had complete control over political outcomes.4 Historians such as Donna Murch, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and Heather Ann Thompson have all disputed Fortner’s reconstitution of Black agency for false structural agency, arguing that there are not sufficient sources to reframe one of the origins behind mass incarceration to a Black middle class.5 Yet Fortner’s book leaves its reader with a particular question: if scholars place agency onto racialized communities,
迈克尔·福特纳（Michael Fortner）2015年的《黑人沉默多数：洛克菲勒毒品法与惩罚政治》（Black Silent Majority:The Rockefeller Drug Laws and The Politics of Pension）提出了一个有争议的论点：“黑人中产阶级道德”和“黑人沉默多数成员”迫使这个特定的黑人社会经济群体“将公共安全置于经济和种族不平等之上。这促使他们团结起来，谴责‘流氓’，而不是寻求社会改革。1福特纳对20世纪60年代末和70年代毒品法和种族认同的分析为大规模监禁的起源提供了不同的解释，在罗纳德·里根总统的“禁毒战争”下，大规模监禁将继续激增。“2 Fortner要求学者们在考虑一段非裔美国人的历史时，要认真对待“黑人代理”，因为这段历史并没有将黑人简单地反映为受害者或主导叙事中的对话者。3此外，他写道，专家们可以承认黑人机构，但不能坚持认为非裔美国人对政治结果有完全的控制权。4历史学家，如Donna Murch、Khalil Gibran Muhammad和Heather Ann Thompson，都对Fortner将黑人机构重组为虚假的结构机构提出了质疑，认为没有足够的来源将大规模监禁背后的起源之一重新定义为黑人中产阶级。5然而，福特纳的书给读者留下了一个特殊的问题：如果学者们将代理权放在种族化的社区上，
{"title":"Latinx Agencies: Emerging Histories of Politicians, Religious Leaders, and Undocumented Migrants","authors":"Kristen Hernandez","doi":"10.1353/rah.2021.0058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2021.0058","url":null,"abstract":"Michael Fortner’s 2015 Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment put forth a controversial thesis: “black middle-class morality” and “members of the black silent majority” compelled this particular Black socioeconomic group to “prioritize public safety over economic and racial inequality. It drove them to rally and rail against ‘hoodlums’ instead of seeking reform of society.”1 Fortner’s analysis of late 1960s and 1970s drug laws and ethnic-racial identity provided a different interpretation into mass incarceration’s origins that would continue to proliferate under President Ronald Reagan’s “war on drugs.”2 Fortner asked scholars to take “black agency seriously” when considering an African American history that did not reflect Black people simply as victims or as interlocutors in a declension narrative or narrative of dominance.3 Furthermore, he wrote that specialists could acknowledge Black agency while not maintaining that African Americans had complete control over political outcomes.4 Historians such as Donna Murch, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and Heather Ann Thompson have all disputed Fortner’s reconstitution of Black agency for false structural agency, arguing that there are not sufficient sources to reframe one of the origins behind mass incarceration to a Black middle class.5 Yet Fortner’s book leaves its reader with a particular question: if scholars place agency onto racialized communities,","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"49 1","pages":"599 - 609"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43321768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
It is rare to begin an academic book review by entering a personal plea to disinterested readers, but here a statement of authorial purpose is in order. William J. Bulman’s splendid monograph on the origins of majority rule in the English Parliament is not a book that most readers of this journal would expect to see reviewed here. True, its final chapter does discuss the colonial American assemblies. But this imperial chapter is more an afterthought to Bulman’s dominant concern, which is to provide an extended analysis of rules of deliberation and decision-making in the seventeenth-century House of Commons. The very thought of navigating the dense scholarly terrain of seventeenth-century British history will daunt many readers, even those of us trained as early American historians. After all, what history of any nation over a similar span of years has ever been studied more intensely? Yet at this precarious moment in American history, when our own conventions of majority rule have become both deeply controversial and gravely vulnerable, Bulman’s scrupulously argued book deserves close attention. At one level, The Rise of Majority Rule is a tightly focused monograph that depends on the careful analysis of one main evidentiary source, the legislative journals of the House of Commons, complemented by a few textual sources conveying how its members perceived the changes they were witnessing. Yet the book is also an interpretive work of the first order of significance. It starts with a simple, seemingly naïve question that one would think barely merits an answer: why do we allow majorities to govern? Is this rule of decision not so obvious and self-evident (in the axiomatic sense of the term) that no explanation of its origins is needed? In fact, Bulman demonstrates, this development, like all others, has its own distinctive history. He makes his key claims at the outset: the institutional “turn to majority voting [within Parliament] is more essential to the history of majority rule than the gradual attainment of universal suffrage” or the invention of political parties (p. 1), and this shift in legislative
{"title":"Why Does the Majority Rule? A Detective Story about Its Origins","authors":"Jack N. Rakove","doi":"10.1353/rah.2021.0051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2021.0051","url":null,"abstract":"It is rare to begin an academic book review by entering a personal plea to disinterested readers, but here a statement of authorial purpose is in order. William J. Bulman’s splendid monograph on the origins of majority rule in the English Parliament is not a book that most readers of this journal would expect to see reviewed here. True, its final chapter does discuss the colonial American assemblies. But this imperial chapter is more an afterthought to Bulman’s dominant concern, which is to provide an extended analysis of rules of deliberation and decision-making in the seventeenth-century House of Commons. The very thought of navigating the dense scholarly terrain of seventeenth-century British history will daunt many readers, even those of us trained as early American historians. After all, what history of any nation over a similar span of years has ever been studied more intensely? Yet at this precarious moment in American history, when our own conventions of majority rule have become both deeply controversial and gravely vulnerable, Bulman’s scrupulously argued book deserves close attention. At one level, The Rise of Majority Rule is a tightly focused monograph that depends on the careful analysis of one main evidentiary source, the legislative journals of the House of Commons, complemented by a few textual sources conveying how its members perceived the changes they were witnessing. Yet the book is also an interpretive work of the first order of significance. It starts with a simple, seemingly naïve question that one would think barely merits an answer: why do we allow majorities to govern? Is this rule of decision not so obvious and self-evident (in the axiomatic sense of the term) that no explanation of its origins is needed? In fact, Bulman demonstrates, this development, like all others, has its own distinctive history. He makes his key claims at the outset: the institutional “turn to majority voting [within Parliament] is more essential to the history of majority rule than the gradual attainment of universal suffrage” or the invention of political parties (p. 1), and this shift in legislative","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"49 1","pages":"535 - 545"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46570150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Those of us who have done research on the history of the Communist left in the United States, on the culture of the 1930s, or on the history of southern chain gangs, have almost certainly come across a small 1936 songbook of two dozen “Negro Songs of Protest” compiled by Lawrence Gellert. Graced with a striking cover illustration by Lawrence’s more famous brother, the Communist artist Hugo Gellert, Negro Songs of Protest remains a quintessential example of Popular Front culture and a radical complement to the much-better-known material collected by Alan Lomax across the South during the same period and deposited at the Library of Congress. But, as Steven Garabedian’s book A Sound History proposes, the Gellert story is even far more complicated—and interesting—than it might seem at first glance. Gellert and his fieldwork, Garabedian shows, experienced a “trajectory of celebration to defamation” (p. ix). During the 1930s, the African American protest songs Gellert collected across the South made a signal contribution to what Michael Denning has called “the cultural front,” exposing radicals to a taste of Black vernacular culture aligned with the politics of the moment.1 During the Cold War years, however, Gellert’s association with the Communist Party (CP) and its publications—his brother Hugo was an editor at the New Masses, and some of Gellert’s material initially appeared in its pages—made his work suspect. Now what had been lauded as an amazing feat of recovery of a buried folk expression was derided as “an example of white leftwing propaganda...rather than Black vernacular creativity and resistance” (p. 9). The CP, once the alleged champion of African American rights, most famously in its global campaign to free the “Scottsboro Boys,” came to be regarded during the Cold War as preying on Black discontent for its own nefarious ends. Gellert’s once-laudable efforts to collect and disseminate an authentic protest culture located among the most oppressed group of African Americans living under Jim Crow was now dismissed as manipulative, at best, and outright fakery at worst.
{"title":"A Sound Archive","authors":"A. Lichtenstein","doi":"10.1353/rah.2021.0056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2021.0056","url":null,"abstract":"Those of us who have done research on the history of the Communist left in the United States, on the culture of the 1930s, or on the history of southern chain gangs, have almost certainly come across a small 1936 songbook of two dozen “Negro Songs of Protest” compiled by Lawrence Gellert. Graced with a striking cover illustration by Lawrence’s more famous brother, the Communist artist Hugo Gellert, Negro Songs of Protest remains a quintessential example of Popular Front culture and a radical complement to the much-better-known material collected by Alan Lomax across the South during the same period and deposited at the Library of Congress. But, as Steven Garabedian’s book A Sound History proposes, the Gellert story is even far more complicated—and interesting—than it might seem at first glance. Gellert and his fieldwork, Garabedian shows, experienced a “trajectory of celebration to defamation” (p. ix). During the 1930s, the African American protest songs Gellert collected across the South made a signal contribution to what Michael Denning has called “the cultural front,” exposing radicals to a taste of Black vernacular culture aligned with the politics of the moment.1 During the Cold War years, however, Gellert’s association with the Communist Party (CP) and its publications—his brother Hugo was an editor at the New Masses, and some of Gellert’s material initially appeared in its pages—made his work suspect. Now what had been lauded as an amazing feat of recovery of a buried folk expression was derided as “an example of white leftwing propaganda...rather than Black vernacular creativity and resistance” (p. 9). The CP, once the alleged champion of African American rights, most famously in its global campaign to free the “Scottsboro Boys,” came to be regarded during the Cold War as preying on Black discontent for its own nefarious ends. Gellert’s once-laudable efforts to collect and disseminate an authentic protest culture located among the most oppressed group of African Americans living under Jim Crow was now dismissed as manipulative, at best, and outright fakery at worst.","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"49 1","pages":"583 - 589"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43764433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Laboring on the Land of Empires","authors":"M. S. Heerman","doi":"10.1353/rah.2021.0052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2021.0052","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"49 1","pages":"546 - 560"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44931225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Brooklyn You Might Not Know","authors":"I. Rocksborough-Smith","doi":"10.1353/rah.2021.0060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2021.0060","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"49 1","pages":"625 - 632"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44577105","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Searching for a Soul Mate","authors":"E. Pleck","doi":"10.1353/rah.2021.0054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2021.0054","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"49 1","pages":"569 - 575"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47575616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What Is a Professor?","authors":"J. Neem","doi":"10.1353/rah.2021.0059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2021.0059","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"49 1","pages":"610 - 624"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46627490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Since the publication of Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams (2013), Ed Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told (2014), and Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014), the new history of capitalism has contributed to scholarly and public conversations about enslavement’s relationship to the growth of capitalism in the United States. These histories highlight the complex legal and financial systems that the peculiar institution engendered. Before the Civil War, people could buy, sell, and mortgage property in humans, generating massive profits for enslavers, bankers, and others. In light of this research, a growing group of scholars has reconsidered the process of emancipation in the South. Formal abolition may have ended the legalized trade in Black bodies, but what happened to the legal and financial practices that the value of enslaved people necessitated? Aaron Carico’s Black Market: The Slave’s Value in National Culture after 1865 is one of the first books to answer this question. Carico argues that formal abolition did not end the commodification of Black bodies or their representations as relations of exchange, accumulation, and domination in U.S. culture. “Though no longer chattel,” he says, “blacks in America weren’t relieved of the commodity’s mark. Blackness is realized in a historical matrix of economic exchange and cultural production, a real abstraction” (p. 9). Black Market is a work of cultural criticism that contributes to American Studies and interdisciplinary studies of racial capitalism. Carico explores eclectic texts like court cases, paintings, performances, photographs, novels, poetry, and music. This broad source base puts the book in conversation with U.S. and art historians, legal and literary scholars, and especially historians of capitalism. The book’s theoretical framework relies on analyses of slave racial capitalism, a coin termed by Johnson in River of Dark Dreams to denote how race-based enslavement enabled and required westward expansion in the antebellum era. Carico also pulls from Black radical thinkers and Afro-
{"title":"Measuring Value: The Legacies of Slave Racial Capitalism after Emancipation","authors":"A. Kleintop","doi":"10.1353/rah.2021.0053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2021.0053","url":null,"abstract":"Since the publication of Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams (2013), Ed Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told (2014), and Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014), the new history of capitalism has contributed to scholarly and public conversations about enslavement’s relationship to the growth of capitalism in the United States. These histories highlight the complex legal and financial systems that the peculiar institution engendered. Before the Civil War, people could buy, sell, and mortgage property in humans, generating massive profits for enslavers, bankers, and others. In light of this research, a growing group of scholars has reconsidered the process of emancipation in the South. Formal abolition may have ended the legalized trade in Black bodies, but what happened to the legal and financial practices that the value of enslaved people necessitated? Aaron Carico’s Black Market: The Slave’s Value in National Culture after 1865 is one of the first books to answer this question. Carico argues that formal abolition did not end the commodification of Black bodies or their representations as relations of exchange, accumulation, and domination in U.S. culture. “Though no longer chattel,” he says, “blacks in America weren’t relieved of the commodity’s mark. Blackness is realized in a historical matrix of economic exchange and cultural production, a real abstraction” (p. 9). Black Market is a work of cultural criticism that contributes to American Studies and interdisciplinary studies of racial capitalism. Carico explores eclectic texts like court cases, paintings, performances, photographs, novels, poetry, and music. This broad source base puts the book in conversation with U.S. and art historians, legal and literary scholars, and especially historians of capitalism. The book’s theoretical framework relies on analyses of slave racial capitalism, a coin termed by Johnson in River of Dark Dreams to denote how race-based enslavement enabled and required westward expansion in the antebellum era. Carico also pulls from Black radical thinkers and Afro-","PeriodicalId":43597,"journal":{"name":"REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY","volume":"48 6","pages":"561 - 568"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41243994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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