IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS:

Backtalker: An American Memoir
by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw 
Simon & Schuster, 2026

[Publication date: May 5, 2026]

 

 

One of the most influential public intellectuals in the world and the architect of the two biggest ideas to reshape the American conversation about fairness offers the intimate story of how her life gave birth to these ideas.

It is not very often that someone comes along and permanently reshapes the way Americans think about two of the most important issues of the day. In this case: race and gender. But that is what Kimberlé Crenshaw did when she articulated two concepts that would forever change national and global debates about equality: intersectionality and critical race theory.

Backtalker is the powerful and intimate story of how a little girl from Canton, Ohio, came up with a new way to look at the world. Crenshaw’s memoir traces the way her lived experience made her see things others didn’t as the daughter of a strong-minded teacher and a pathbreaking public servant, and as the sister of a protective, yet bullying older brother. She starts to talk back, and that backtalking has continued throughout her life. It happens when she is denied a role in the kindergarten school play. When she is escorted to the back door of a private club. When Anita Hill is exiled for testifying against Clarence Thomas. When OJ Simpson goes on trial. When Obama launches My Brother’s Keeper, a movement focused on boys of color only. When the movement against police violence overlooks Black women. Crenshaw is there for all of it.

In the vein of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Bryan Stevenson, Crenshaw evokes each time and place like a gifted novelist with extreme honesty and specificity, making her book a series of awe-inspiring, deep revelations. As a result of her work, Crenshaw has become a force to be reckoned with across America—at schools, in the workplace, at dinner tables, and, of course, in our public square.

REVIEWS:

"Backtalker charts Crenshaw’s extraordinary journey from precocious child to renowned public intellectual. . . . A rousing call to see the story of the future as one in which ‘the spirit of freedom was nurtured by talking back.’” -- Colin Grant ― The New York Times

"[Crenshaw] frames her life and her remarkably influential career as one long fight against various forms of exclusion and unfairness. . . . The reasonable conclusions of a clear-eyed intellectual who simply refused to shut up about what she witnessed and experienced." -- Kelefa Sanneh ― The New Yorker

“A beautifully written, compelling and insightful memoir from the extraordinary intellectual, activist and scholar who has shaped critical discourse in America. A moving and powerful read.”—Bryan Stevenson

“A searing, defiant and deeply inspiring memoir for our times from one of America's greatest architects of justice.”—V (formerly Eve Ensler)

“It is rare that creators of movements that shake the world use the memoir form to honestly and precisely explore how their will to change was created. Kimberle Crenshaw has made a fleshy piece of theory, a foundational book for this nation, a moving memoir that will continue to build on the monumental work Crenshaw has already done. We will thankfully be feeling the work of this book for generations.”—Kiese Laymon

“Kimberlé Crenshaw is one of America’s most original legal thinkers, a pioneering theorist whose scholarship has transformed the way we think about race, gender, and the law. Now in Backtalker, her powerful new memoir, she reminds us of the greatest teacher of all: experience. Here is a compelling account of the making not only of a visionary mind on the front lines of change, but of the ‘we’ that binds us to one another in families, communities, and in the nation as a whole.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

“Her ideas have shaped generations of thinkers and activists globally. Now, with Backtalker, we come to understand the people and contexts that have given shape to Kimberlé Crenshaw, her values and her sensibilities. This in-depth self-portrait reveals a woman of great depth, courage, and conviction—a truth teller and justice seeker. It is a tale as unique and compelling as its author, a much needed story for our times and beyond.”—Farah Jasmine Griffin


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, Black feminist legal theory, race, racism, and the law. She was a founder and has been a leader in the intellectual movement called Critical Race Theory and is also known for introducing and developing the concept of intersectionality. She is a Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and the cofounder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum. Crenshaw writes regularly for The New Republic, The Nation, and Ms., hosts the podcast Intersectionality Matters!, and has appeared as a commentator on media outlets including MSNBC and NPR.

Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights

 

by Lisa Graves
Bold Type Books, 2025

[Publication date: September 30, 2025]

 

In the last twenty years the US Supreme Court has radically curtailed voting rights, undermined anti-corruption measures, encouraged extreme political gerrymandering, restricted the regulation of guns, and obliterated the constitutional right to control one’s reproductive choices. This transformation was orchestrated by a billionaire-backed reactionary political movement, whose interests Chief Justice John Roberts has been all too willing to serve.

Without Precedent explodes the falsehood that Roberts is a fair-minded institutionalist who works to blunt the worst impulses of other Republican appointees to the court when, in fact, he has led the rightward transformation of the court’s jurisprudence while presiding over the most corrupt and corrupted Supreme Court in American history.

Informed by Lisa Graves’s experience working on judicial issues for all three branches of the federal government, and based on years of intensive research, Without Precedent not only exposes Roberts as the reactionary politician in robes he has always been but delivers a vigorous plan of judicial reform designed to overcome the divisive, discriminatory, destructive, and anti-democratic machinations of the Roberts court.  

REVIEWS:

“A brilliant explanation of how conservative big money and a long-term strategy changed American politics, and a detailed account of the way political conservatives, inside and outside government, have shaped the Supreme Court and other federal courts since 1991.”―Los Angeles Review of Books

“Graves writes clearly and with a clear sense of outrage at what the Supreme Court has become under Roberts’s stewardship.”―Times Literary Supplement

“A well-researched, cogently analyzed, and eye-opening chronicle of Roberts and his seemingly compromised Supreme Court.”―Booklist (starred)

“A captivating cri de coeur from an up-close spectator to U.S. democracy’s downward spiral.”―Publishers Weekly (starred)

“A vigorous takedown of the chief justice of the United States.”―Kirkus

“Lisa Graves is a dazzlingly brilliant sleuth of the dark-money apparatus that has corrupted the Supreme Court. Graves’ Without Precedent reveals how Chief Justice Roberts and the other right-wing justices mangled the Constitution in service to a group of shadowy billionaire extremists.”―Sheldon Whitehouse, U.S. Senator, Rhode Island

“A devastating, passionate takedown of Chief Justice John Roberts's Supreme Court by a Washington insider, progressive activist, and eyewitness to Roberts' rise to power. As a top Democratic lawyer to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lisa Graves was 'in the room where it happened,' for many of the most hard-fought battles over America's highest court. Now she tells the inside story. Anyone concerned about justice in America should read it.”―Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money, Chief Washington Correspondent, The New Yorker Magazine

“No one combines legal expertise and peerless investigative talent like the brilliant and brave Lisa Graves, who proves beyond reasonable doubt that Justice John Roberts has acted as a political animal throughout his career. An eye-popping can’t-put-it-down account, Without Precedent is a must-read for everyone who knows something has gone terribly wrong with the U.S. Supreme Court yet doesn’t understand why. I had to remind myself to breathe while reading this tour de force about the near ruin of our country that Roberts and his Federalist Society supermajority have wrought.”―Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Lisa Graves is one of the nation’s foremost experts on the right-wing influence on the US Supreme Court and other levers of power. She leads True North Research and co-hosts Legal AF. She has served as a senior advisor in all three branches of the federal government, including as chief counsel for nominations for the Senate Judiciary Committee for Senator Patrick Leahy. She resides in Superior, Wisconsin.

The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader
by Melissa Murray
37 Ink, 2026

 
[Publication date: May 5, 2026]

 

From a #1 New York Times bestselling author, podcast host,and legal expertcomes an accessible and modern guide on how to read and understand the U.S. Constitution.

Think of this as the U.S. Constitution explained by America’s favorite law professor, Melissa Murray. On her podcast, Strict Scrutiny, Murray and her cohosts, Kate Shaw and Leah Litman, provide in-depth, accessible, and irreverent analysis of the Supreme Court and its cases, culture, and personalities.

On that podcast, on MSNOW—where she is a frequent contributor—in opinion pieces, and when providing commentary as she did in a recent New York Times piece on Justice Brown Jackson, Murray spends an awful lot of time demystifying laws for everyone else. In this book, she tackles one of the founding American documents: the Constitution. Each amendment will be annotated with some historical context provided, as well as examples of how it is relevant to our present day.

More necessary than ever, as we look to the Supreme Court and their interpretation of the Constitution as the last institution upholding our democracy, this book is an indispensable read for every thinking American.

REVIEWS:

"At long last, we have an annotated and explanatory guide to our Constitution that ordinary people, lawyers, and democracy advocates can understand. Constitutional law scholar Melissa Murray does the hard work of distilling the meaning of our Constitution into a book that should be in every home library, on every desk, and in every school. This is a critical work for our time."—Sherrilyn Ifill, President and Director-Counsel Emeritus, The Legal Defense Fund

"With this timely and readable annotated Constitution, Prof. Melissa Murray has yet again done what she does best: Locating current disputes over constitutional powers, authority and limits within her expansive knowledge of history, caselaw, legal movements and daily headlines. Equal parts legal doctrine and owners manual, this deep dive into the founding documents serves as a vital reminder that it is emphatically the province of the people to know what the law is, so that they can defend it and also build it to serve its highest purposes."—Dahlia Lithwick, author of the New York Times bestseller Lady Justice and host of Amicus

"Murray is without peer in her ability to translate the law to a general audience. With this book, Murray convincingly and succinctly explains how under the Constitution, the people are supreme and empowers us all to claim the Constitution as our own, to hold the government to account, and to continue the Constitution's project of becoming a more perfect Union."—Leah Litman, author of the New York Times bestseller Lawless

"Murray does so much more than annotate the Constitution, she illuminates it, and in the process exposes its dark secrets and hidden myths. She tells us not only what the Constitution says, but what it really means."—Elie Mystal, Justice Correspondent for The Nation Magazine

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Melissa Murray is the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at New York University’s School of Law. She is the coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Trump Indictments: The Historic Charging Documents with Commentary, cohost of a top-ranked podcast, Strict Scrutiny—which is about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it—and a regular commentator on MSNBC. Her writing appears regularly in major national publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and The Nation. She is frequently called upon by national media outlets such as NPR and PBS to offer expert—yet accessible—commentary on the Supreme Court’s decisions and other pressing legal matters of national importance. Her academic publications have appeared (or are forthcoming) in the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Yale Law Journal, among others. Murray is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where she was a Jefferson Scholar and an Echols Scholar, and Yale Law School, where she was notes development editor of the Yale Law Journal. While in law school, she earned special recognition as an NAACP-LDF/Shearman & Sterling Scholar and was a semifinalist of Morris Tyler Moot Court. Following law school, Murray clerked for Sonia Sotomayor, then of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Stefan Underhill of the US District Court for the District of Connecticut. Prior to joining the NYU faculty, Murray was on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she was the recipient of the Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction. From March 2016 to June 2017, she served as interim dean of Berkeley Law. Murray is a member of the New York bar. She lives in New York City with her family.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved

1. Preamble PREAMBLE

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The Preamble in a Nutshell

The Preamble is the introductory statement that precedes the various provisions of the Constitution. In it, the Framers announced their goals for the Constitution as a governing document and the values underlying its provisions. The Preamble makes clear that the Constitution’s power and authority proceed from the American people.

Origin Story

It is not surprising that the Framers chose to introduce the Constitution with a preamble. Preambles were common features of legal documents, including the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, and other documents that informed the Framers’ understanding of constitutionalism. Indeed, the Articles of Confederation, the governing document that preceded the Constitution, contained a preamble that declared the end of the thirteen colonies and the birth of a new “Confederation and perpetual Union.”

Today, the Preamble is arguably the part of the Constitution that most Americans know best. Yet the question of whether to include a preface—and if so, what that prefatory text would say—was not a topic of debate at the Constitutional Convention. Indeed, it was late in the drafting stage when Virginia delegate Edmund Randolph mused that “[a] preamble seems proper.”1 From there, the Preamble underwent various iterations, ultimately settling on a statement articulating the purposes of the new governing charter (and by implication, outlining the failures of the predecessor Articles of Confederation). Ironically, the Preamble’s famous opening line, “We the People,” was something of an afterthought.

Commentary

We the People…

An initial draft of the Preamble, which identified all of the thirteen states by name, was unanimously approved by all the delegates at the Constitutional Convention. However, when this draft was referred to the Committee of Style—a smaller subset of the convention delegates who were charged with editing the document—the committee eliminated the names of the thirteen states, replacing them with “We the People.” The convention records are silent as to the exact rationale for the change, but the records of the various state ratification conventions suggest that the shift was not merely rhetorical. When the Constitution was submitted for ratification, a number of Anti-Federalists raised objections to the use of “We the People.” As they argued, the states, rather than the people, were the “soul of a confederation” and for that reason, the true “agents of this compact.”2 Prominent Federalists, like John Marshall (later a chief justice of the Supreme Court), countered by noting that the powers of the states and the federal government were themselves derived from the consent of the people.3

… in Order to form a more perfect Union,…

The need to form “a more perfect Union” responded directly to the deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation, the United States’ first governing charter. Adopted in 1777 by the Continental Congress, the Articles established a “league of friendship” between the thirteen states, but this loose framework was incapable of constructing a strong national government that could mediate interstate conflicts, wage war, negotiate peace, and manage foreign commerce and diplomacy. When the war ended, the states sent delegates to Philadelphia for the purpose of amending the Articles. But it immediately became clear that modification would not cure what ailed this first charter. So, the delegates pivoted and began to draft a new governing document from scratch.

… establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility,…

In The Federalist Papers, a series of essays arguing for ratification of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, under the pseudonym “Publius,” emphasized the threat of interstate conflicts as evidence of the need for a strong federal government.

… provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare,…

Fresh from the Revolutionary War with Britain, it is unsurprising that national security was a critical concern for the Framers—indeed, John Jay addressed the subject in Federalist 25.4 The Preamble’s references to the “common defence” and “general Welfare” reflect the language of the Articles of Confederation, which made similar stipulations. However, the Articles of Confederation did not make provisions for federal or national authority to provide for either. Instead, the effort was a cooperative endeavor among the thirteen states. The prospect of relying on the states to “crowdsource” the national defense struck Alexander Hamilton as wrongheaded. In Federalist 23, he dismissed as “ill-founded and illusory”5 the hope that the states might secure the nation’s defense and welfare. Responsibility for protecting the “national interests,” Hamilton maintained, must rest with the federal government.

… and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,…

The reference to “Posterity” underscores the Constitution’s status as the oldest written Constitution in continuous use in world history. In memorializing the Constitution as a written document, the Framers struck an immediate contrast with Great Britain and its unwritten constitution. As the Framers intended, the written Constitution has endured as a guiding charter of American government. Its example, too, has inspired other nations to set down their own governing principles in writing.


Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon
by Toni Morrison
Knopf, 2026

[Publication date: ‎February 3, 2026]

Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Beloved Toni Morrison investigates Black characters in the American literary canon and the way they shaped the nation’s collective unconscious.

In a dazzling series of lectures from her tenure as a professor at Princeton University, Toni Morrison interrogates America’s most famous works and authors, drawing a direct line from the Black bodies that built the nation to the Black characters that many of the country’s canonical white writers imagined in their work. Morrison sees these fictions as a form of creation and projection, arguing that they helped manufacture American racial identity—these “Africanist” presences are “the shadow that makes light possible,” as Morrison writes, and the reflections of their authors’ own deepest fears, insecurities, and longings.

With profound erudition and wit, Morrison breaks wide open the American conception of race with energetic, enlivening readings of the nation’s canon, revealing that our liberation from these diminishing notions comes through language. “How,” Morrison wonders, “could one speak of profit, of economy, of labor, or progress, of suffragism, or Christianity, of the frontier, of the formation of new states, the acquisition of new lands . . . of practically anything a new nation concerns itself with—without having as a referent, at the heart of the discourse or defining its edges, the presence of Africans and/or their descendants?”

To read these lectures, collected here for the first time, is to encounter Morrison, not just the writer but also the teacher, in the most penetrating and subversive way yet. With a foreword by her son Ford Morrison and an introduction by her Princeton comparative literature colleague Claudia Brodsky, Language as Liberation is a revelatory collection that promises to redefine the American canon.

REVIEWS:

 
“There is intellectual pleasure to be had in Morrison’s exacting, appreciative readings of Twain, Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein. . . . The effect of . . . Language as Liberation is to bring her from dull, sanctified solitude into the busy fold of canonized American writers, whose difficult books demand to be plumbed and debated and compared, and, most of all, to be reread."—Wall Street Journal

“We’ve long known the late Toni Morrison as a Nobel Prize-winning novelist and an astute cultural critic. Here we engage her as a scholar in a collection of Princeton University lectures enriched by marginalia, a beguiling testament to a prodigious mind in motion. American literature has been shaped by streams of influences from an array of continents and peoples, a ‘chaos’ of imagery and rhythms as vibrant and volatile as the nation itself. Taking stock of works from writers like Herman Melville, William Faulkner, and Gertrude Stein, Morrison probes the ‘powerful presence of Africanist personae, discourse, and narrative’ within our emerging canon.”—TIME Magazine

“Provides unprecedented insight into Morrison’s roles as cultural critic and thought leader. . . . Morrison inverts our understanding of classic American literature. . . . An insightful invitation to revisit the familiar with new eyes.”—Booklist

“Deeply insightful investigations of major works.”—Kirkus
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

 
TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels and three essay collections. From 1989 to 2006, Morrison was the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.

 
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Image of Blacks in Western Art

 
Studies in American Africanism is an investigation into two principal areas of discursive practice: one area involves the ways in which a non-­white, Africanist presence and persona was constructed in the United States; the second area involves the ways in which that fabricated “presence” served the literary imagination in its exploration of American identity.

The course uses the terms “Africanism” and “Africanist” to suggest the mythic construct of a denotative and connotative blackness, and an entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and mis-­readings of African peoples and their descendants in this country. Africanism is also the process of alienizing and exoticizing one’s own experience of Black people in order to know and therefore own that experience. [caveat] The course is not limited to an investigation of what might be called racist or non-­racist literature. Nor does the course take or encourage a position that confines itself to measuring the quality of a work based on the attitudes of the author, or the representations he or she makes of another racial or ethnic group. Such judgments can and are being made in recent literary criticisms. (For example, the critical scholarship of Ezra Pound, [Louis-­Ferdinand] Céline, George Jean Nathan, Paul de Man, etc.; and we know books are constantly being banned from library shelves for these alleged attitudes or representations or sensibilities regardless of past evaluations of the quality of the text. In fact, the argument has been advanced that, in the case of Paul de Man, say, or Mark Twain, the work can have no unmitigated quality precisely because the work—­or in some cases not the work but the author—­has been found to reveal insensitivity to ethnic, religious, sexual, or racial groups.)

However, although those judgments are within the reach of this course, they are not within its purview. One of the reasons the course does not close with analyses leading toward conclusions about a work’s being racist or non-­racist is that such an analysis can be an intellectual cul-­de-­sac—­once the evidence is in, there is nothing more to be said about the work.

What we propose to do is a series of close readings of traditional American fiction in order to discover what impact notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability have had on the literature. We will describe and analyze how this literature has behaved in its encounter with racial ideology and discover in what ways the literature has been shaped by that encounter.

Now in order to do this we will have to identify the instances during which American literature has been complicit in the development of racialism, and when it has intervened in racial discourse to undermine or explode it; but we will want to move beyond stark identification to the further investigation of what Africanism has meant for the work/product of the writer’s imagination. How does literary utterance arrange itself when it tries to imagine an Africanistic “other”? What does the encounter with Africans and/or African-­Americans do to and for the work? How does one describe the rhetorical struggle that follows? Our study averts the gaze from the racialized object to the racialized subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers.

If Africanism is a construct, if “blackness” has “meaning,” then so does “whiteness.” One goal, then, becomes to discover how the concept of “whiteness” was built/invented/produced and what it is for. The insights we come up with may help us to discover not only the nature—­even the cause of “whiteness”—­but also the part that its development played in the evolution of something known, loosely, as an American. Reading and critiquing American literature from this point of view may also release the literature from the incoherence that the studied indifference and historical evasion in criticism has imposed on it. In other words, we will regard the literary engagements with Africanism as self-­reflexive—­as ways to talk about, imagine, and set forth/assert the deep concerns white writers have about themselves and the world they inhabit. Further, we will regard the presence of Africanism in a work as an impinging force in the execution of that work’s structure and figurative language.

The suspicion of the course is that the intrusion or inclusion of Africanistic characters is significant. That the writer’s choice to include or the necessity of inclusion can be shown sometimes to throttle the text, destabilize it, and, far more frequently than one would think, it can be shown to liberate it, to provide and force astonishing kinds of artistic creativity, astonishing leaps into otherwise forbidden territory, and that in the wake of this imaginative encounter, some interesting patterns emerge—­patterns that should be included in the history of American literature as part of its distinguishing features.

Two points require underscoring (one about knowledge and imagination, the other about language):

1) Although we will see that “knowing” the “other”—­the conviction that one “knows” Africans and African-­Americans—­is central to the construction of “whiteness” (knowing is, after all, the demonstration of power), we should not ever assume that the Africans and African-­Americans encountered in this fiction are in fact known—­they are imagined. Sartre’s description of colonialist language captures the point: “These phrases (terminology for the suborned natives) were never the translation of a real, concrete thought; they were not even the object of thought . . . they have not by themselves any meaning, at least in so far as they claim to express knowledge about the colonialized.” So we will not be looking for “real” or realistic representations of blacks within a construct based on stereotypes. (“Representation is how we make our will known.”) In the absence of race-­neutral knowledge, or open-­minded inquiry about Africans and African-­Americans, and in the presence of ideological and imperialistic rationales for oppression, an invented, fictive Africanist persona emerged, and flourished because of its serviceability. Political serviceability, of course, and economic serviceability, etc.; but it is the literary serviceability that we will focus on.

The Matter of Africanism, by which I mean the fabrication of an Africanistic Presence that would support, promulgate, and enhance the institution of slavery and the hierarchy of race, seems to be a dominant figuration within American literature. And it is important to remember that under the constraints of this fabrication, we can be only secondarily concerned here with the way Africans really were—­what their various cultures, laws, languages, and art forms were; nor with what African-­Americans were or are really like—­what kind of cultural, linguistic, artistic, and social forms they either preserved or created in the New World. “Real” Blacks “out of the loop.” In short, we are not concerned here, except indirectly, with all of what was available for these writers to see and interpret, but rather with what they believed they saw, or wished to see, and how in fact they did interpret a black “other” in their midst.

We will try to discover how the variables of racism—­biologic, economic, ideological, metaphoric, metaphysical—­can be understood in each of these formulations to be insistently self-­referential for both the racist and the non-­racist alike.

Because our route takes us repeatedly to and through economical, ideological, iconographical, and figurative racism, the order of the readings is not based on a work’s date of publication or progressive literary periods. I don’t want linear or chronological time to suggest a conventional “progress” in these matters. Or lead us to believe that because the language and iconography of Africanism has altered, that its force is weakened in the literature.

Roughly put, we will treat the content of sample literature like the results of a Rorschach test, the meditation on a black spot that appears in any of an unlimited variety of shapes, and hazard some speculations about what that meditation reveals about the viewer, and how he or she translates these meditations into art. Writers produce meaning in their work—­and we want to note how. In some instances the act of imagining blacks produces language and images reinforced by received, unquestioned, culturally informed perceptions—­perceptions, biases, and evaluations already established as “knowledge” and distributed as such. In other instances the presence of Africans and/or African-­Americans alters the work—­forces it away from its announced and/or hidden course and yields fresh insights that are at odds with racial cliché. In all instances, the act of imagining Africanist personae tells its own story, a story often at variance with the responses it intended to call forth.

2)The second point to be stressed is that although the language used to accommodate this Africanist persona may be overt or encoded, covert and self-­reinforcing, it is also powerfully revealing. The close readings we do will decode this language. I will come back to this point about how language can sabotage or negotiate content. But first I want to put our study into historical context.

When we look at the beginnings of American literature we should remember that nineteenth-­century writers were mindful of the presence of blacks; they had personal and political responses to the “problem” inherent in the contradiction of a free republic resting on and committed to a slave population. The alertness to this slave population did not confine itself to personal encounters with blacks or not. Nor to their familiarity with the publishing boom that slave narratives fed. The press, the political campaigns, the policy platforms of various parties and elected governments are rife with the slave/free discourse. It would have been an isolated individual indeed who was unaware of one of the single, if not the single, most explosive of issues in the nation. How could one speak of profit, of economy, of labor, of progress, of suffragism, of Christianity, of the frontier, of the formation of new states, the acquisition of new lands, of education, of transportation—­freight and passengers—­neighborhoods, quarters, the military—­of practically anything a new nation concerns itself with—­without having as a referent, at the heart of the discourse or defining its edges, the presence of Africans and/or their descendants? It was not possible. What did happen, frequently, was an effort to talk about these things with a vocabulary designed to disguise and displace the subject. It was not always successful, and in the work of many writers disguise was never intended. But the consequence was a master narrative (or a term I like better—­white discourse) that spoke for the African and/or his descendants, and of him. Whatever popularity slave narratives had, a slave’s own narrative did not destroy the master narrative, for the master narrative could accommodate many shifts, several adjustments to keep itself intact. Enforced silence from the object was needed and a kind of tacit-­manipulative silence of the subject as well.

 
Some of the silences were broken, of course, and some maintained by authors who lived with and within the narrative. What we are interested in here are the strategies for maintaining the silence and those for breaking it. The thesis of the course is that our founding writers engaged, imagined, employed, and created an Africanistic presence and persona in several ways, and that more recent literature has followed in their footsteps.
 

In the Hour of Chaos: Art and Activism with Public Enemy's Chuck D
by Chuck D 
University of California Press, 2026

[Publication date: ‎ February 10, 2026]

A profound meditation on hip hop’s transformative power, In the Hour of Chaos takes us deep into the mind of the genre’s most unabashed revolutionary.

This book is not an autobiography. It’s not a manifesto. It’s a razor-sharp investigation into hip hop and rap music by searing lyricist and global music icon Chuck D of Public Enemy.

Engaging with some of the world’s leading thinkers on hip hop, “Professor Chuck” sets out on a journey that celebrates fifty years of hip hop and charts paths forward for its future. Exploring the intersections of hip hop with Black radicalism and feminism, media and technology, and globalization and politics, this curated collection shows the power of culture and the arts not only to bring people together but to bring about political change in this current hour of chaos.

Features conversations with leading thinkers, including Robin D. G. Kelley, H. Samy Alim, Jeff Chang, Davey D, Scot Brown, Cheryl L. Keyes, Gaye Theresa Johnson, Bryonn Bain, Maya Jupiter, Adam Bradley, Joan Morgan, and more.

 

REVIEWS:

"[Chuck D is] neither snootily professorial nor just an OG unspooling war stories. Rather, he’s a thoughtful interlocutor . . . . a valuable chronicle of the genre’s role in troubled times―and how the times have always been troubled. Smart and chatty hip-hop history." ― Kirkus Reviews

“Anyone even slightly familiar with the work of P.E. will know that Chuck D is a gifted lyricist, capable of boiling down very real experiences into lines that have the greatest impact―an attribute he shares with the likes of Dylan, Guthrie, and Marley. So, it’s not at all surprising that his book packs a genuine punch. The man can write.” ― Music Connection

"The book presents a razor-sharp investigation into hip hop and rap music from the searing lyricist and global music icon, engaging with some of the world's leading thinkers on the genre. 'Professor Chuck' sets out on a journey that celebrates fifty years of hip hop and charts paths forward for its future." ― That Eric Alper

"Public Enemy fans and rap aficionados who want to delve into Chuck D’s contention that hip hop was the ‘Black CNN,’ or learn how ‘Fight the Power’ sprang from the Isley Brothers, or examine the Black Panthers' influence on the group’s public persona, will be rewarded." ― California Magazine

"The Public Enemy frontman has always been one of rap music’s most articulate advocates, but in 2022 he shifted career from MC to university lecturer. . . . [In] In The Hour of Chaos, Chuck D talks about the cultural politics of hip hop and what it means for the future." ― The Quietus 

From the Back Cover:

 
"Chuck D is a stone-cold genius in every sense of the word. In the Hour of Chaos is an integration of the significance of the culture by someone who was inside the music in conversation with a range of brilliant thinkers. It is a breakthrough in hip hop studies, in Black studies, in music studies, and across the humanities."—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

"Chuck D doesn’t just talk about the importance of culture but teaches us the importance of making change. This book is a gift to future generations of artists, activists, and academics, and to all those who love hip hop."—Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

"Chuck D is the best person to lead us on this journey because it’s rare to find someone who has literally laid the foundation of the culture and grounded us through its difficult periods—massive capitalist growth, the really terrible bouts of misogyny, and regional and global shifts. We need his voice now more than ever."—Joan Morgan, author of When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost

"To have the kind of longevity Chuck D has is a testament to his artistry and his dedication to the craft, to always evolving, to being in context. This book gives us a rare window into his intellectual brilliance."—Adam Bradley, author of Book of Rhymes


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

 

Chuck D is the Grammy-winning leader of the hip hop group Public Enemy. A rapper, lyricist, producer, visual artist, and author, he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. In 2022, he was the UCLA Hip Hop Initiative’s Inaugural Artist-in-Residence and currently serves on its National Advisory Board.