Reclaiming narratives: Cambridge publishing highlights this Black History Month
October marks Black History Month in the UK, providing the opportunity to highlight, celebrate, and better understand the impact of Black heritage and culture. This year’s theme is ‘reclaiming narratives’, which speaks to centring a wider and more diverse range of voices, stories, perspectives, and ideas. It challenges individuals and organisations to question culturally dominant narratives, and to seek to revise, nuance, or expand these.
As an academic publisher, Cambridge seeks to publish books and journals that reflect a broad spectrum of ideas and knowledge, and which build on – or challenge – existing conversations.
Cecelia A. Cancellaro, Publisher in Cambridge’s New York office commented on the value of publishing academic and trade writing that explores the underrepresented lives and experiences of Black women and men. She stressed that “while it is wonderful to honour and celebrate these voices during Black History Month, it is important to note that Black history is an integral part of Cambridge’s publishing program, and one that I and others commission, publish, and promote not just this month, but every month.”
This year, we celebrate Black History Month with highlights from the Cambridge University Press book list, as well as free-to-read book chapters and a curated collection of journal articles, which can be found via our Black History hub.
Brooding Over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women’s Lethal Resistance by Nikki M. Taylor
From the colonial through to the antebellum era, enslaved women in the United States used lethal force as the ultimate form of resistance. By amplifying their voices and experiences, Brooding Over Bloody Revenge strongly challenges assumptions that enslaved women only participated in covert, nonviolent forms of resistance, when in fact they consistently seized justice for themselves and organised toward revolt.
Nikki M. Taylor expertly reveals how enslaved women killed for deeply personal instances of injustice committed by their owners. The stories presented, which span centuries and legal contexts, demonstrate that these acts of lethal force were carefully premeditated. Enslaved women planned how and when their enslavers would die, what weapons and accomplices were necessary, and how to evade capture in the aftermath. Original and compelling, Brooding Over Bloody Revenge opens a window into the lives and philosophies of enslaved women who had their own ideas about justice and how to achieve it.
Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly’s Truths from Jim Crow’s Lies by Sheila Curran Bernard
Known worldwide as Lead Belly, American icon Huddie Ledbetter (1889-1949) had a tremendous influence on modern music. According to legend, he had a temper that landed him in two of the South’s most brutal prisons, while his immense talent won him pardons. This deeply researched book shows that these stories were shaped by the white folklorists who ‘discovered’ Lead Belly and, along with reporters, recording executives, and radio and film producers, introduced him to audiences beyond the South.
Through a revelatory examination of arrest, trial, and prison records, sharecropping reports, oral histories, newspaper articles and more, author Sheila Curran Bernard replaces myth with fact. Bring Judgment Day offers a stunning indictment of systemic racism in the Jim Crow era of the United States and the power of narrative to erase and distort the past.
Old Age and American Slavery by David Stefan Doddington
Old Age and American Slavery explores how antebellum southerners, Black and white, adapted to, resisted, or failed to overcome changes associated with old age, both real and imagined. In examining how individuals, families, and communities felt about the ageing process and dealt with elders, David Stefan Doddington emphasizes the complex social relations that developed in a slave society. In connecting old age to the arguments of Black activists, abolitionists, enslavers, and their propagandists, the book reveals how representations of old age, and experiences of ageing, spoke to wider struggles relating to mastery, paternalism, resistance, and survival in slavery.
Cambridge Studies on Black Women in US History edited by Karen Cook Bell, Nikki M. Taylor, Kelly Houston Jones and Hettie V. Williams
Cambridge University Press recently signed a brand-new book series: Cambridge Studies on Black Women in US History. The series will focus on African descended women from colonial settlement to the twenty-first century. The books in the series will analyse Black women’s experiences in the US with a focus on the lives, labours, war-time experiences and legal battles of Black women in the United States and their self-making practices which enabled them to navigate slavery, freedom, Jim Crow segregation, and the turmoil of the Civil Rights and post-Civil Rights era.
The Cambridge History of Black Women in the US
Signed this year, this five-volume set, which is part of our prestigious Cambridge Histories series, will be a foundational work in the field of US history. Under the general editorship of Karen Cook Bell, author of Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America (Cambridge University Press, 2021), these volumes will be the most comprehensive exploration of Black women’s history in the US from the colonial period to the present. Organised thematically and chronologically, the volumes will take an intersectional approach to Black women’s history, providing an analytical framework for a multi-layered discussion of race, gender, and class. They will highlight the individuals, organisations, social, political and economic forces, and political movements that have shaped Black women’s lives in the US.
The Press has also created a 7-episode New Book Network podcast playlist on Black History – listen to it for free on Spotify.