Kenja McCray, "Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership" (NYU Press, 2025)

Kenja McCray, "Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership" (NYU Press, 2025)

Academics and popular commentors have expressed common sentiments about the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s—that it was male dominated and overrun with autocratic leaders. Yet women’s strategizing, management, and sustained work were integral to movement organizations’ functioning, and female advocates of cultural nationalism often exhibited a unique service-oriented, collaborative leadership style.Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership (New York University Press, 2025) documents a variety of women Pan-African nationalists’ experiences, considering the ways they produced a distinctive kind of leadership through their devotion and service to the struggle for freedom and equality. Relying on oral histories, textual archival material, and scholarly literature, this book delves into women’s organizing and resistance efforts, investigating how they challenged the one-dimensional notions of gender roles within cultural nationalist organizations. Revealing a form of Black Power leadership that has never been highlighted, author Kenja McCray explores how women articulated and used their power to transform themselves and their environments. Through her examination, McCray argues that women’s Pan-Africanist cultural nationalist activism embodied a work-centered, people-centered, and African-centered form of service leadership. A dynamic and fascinating narrative of African American women activists, Essential Soldiers provides a new vantage point for considering Black Power leadership legacies. This episode includes a reference to the book Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores by Katie Mitchell (Random House, 2025). Listen to Mitchell discuss her book at New Books in African American Studies, hosted by N’Kosi Oates. Dr. Kenja McCray is Assistant Professor of History in the Department of Humanities at Clayton State University and coauthor of Atlanta Metropolitan State College: A Campus History (Arcadia Publishing, 2023). You can find Dr. McCray at her website, on Facebook, and on Instagram. Find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Dr. McCray continued their conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

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David Beer, “Popular Culture and New Media: The Politics of Circulation” (Palgrave, 2013)

David Beer, “Popular Culture and New Media: The Politics of Circulation” (Palgrave, 2013)

Popular Culture and New Media: The Politics of Circulation (Palgrave, 2013) is written by David Beer, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at York University in the UK. He blogs here and tweets here. The bo...

21 Sep 201338min

Sarah Banet-Weiser, “Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture” (NYU Press, 2013)

Sarah Banet-Weiser, “Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture” (NYU Press, 2013)

In Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (NYU Press, 2013), Sarah Banet-Weiser scrutinizes the spread of brand culture into other spheres of social life that the market–at least i...

27 Aug 201357min

Brian Michael Goss, “Rebooting the Herman and Chomsky Propaganda Model in the Twenty-First Century” (Peter Lang, 2013)

Brian Michael Goss, “Rebooting the Herman and Chomsky Propaganda Model in the Twenty-First Century” (Peter Lang, 2013)

Brian Michael Goss, professor of communication at St. Louis University in Madrid, has taken one of media’s most studied theories and given it a facelift. In Rebooting the Herman and Chomsky Propagand...

22 Juli 201344min

Stacy Alaimo, “Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self” (Indiana UP, 2010)

Stacy Alaimo, “Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self” (Indiana UP, 2010)

In her book, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Indiana University Press, 2010), Stacy Alaimo approaches the concepts of “science, environment, and self” in an extremely nove...

8 Juli 201351min

Michael Serazio, “Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing” (NYU Press, 2013)

Michael Serazio, “Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing” (NYU Press, 2013)

“Power through freedom.” Michael Serazio‘s Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing (NYU Press, 2013) traces the mushrooming world of guerrilla marketing–defined to include word-of-mouth, vi...

3 Juli 201358min

Dominic Pettman, “Human Error” (UMinnesota, 2011)/”Look at the Bunny” (Zero Books, 2013)

Dominic Pettman, “Human Error” (UMinnesota, 2011)/”Look at the Bunny” (Zero Books, 2013)

“The humans are dead.” Whether or not you recognize the epigram from Flight of the Conchords (and if not, there are worse ways to spend a few minutes than by looking here, and I recommend sticking ar...

31 Maj 20131h 15min

Amir Eshel, “Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Amir Eshel, “Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

In his very recent work, Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past(University of Chicago Press, 2013), Amir Eshel presents us with a very interesting examination of what he refers t...

22 Jan 201356min

Nicholas De Villiers, “Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol” (University of Minnesota Press, 2012)

Nicholas De Villiers, “Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol” (University of Minnesota Press, 2012)

In his book, Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), Nicholas de Villiers takes up an examination of the work of the three titular...

11 Jan 201357min

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