This month’s featured titles include a history Harlem by a government alum and a prof’s memoir about his education under Apartheid.
Cross-Cultural Harlem
Sandhya Shukla ’88
In this nonfiction book, Shukla explores how the influences of various racial and ethnic groups have intersected over the decades to create the Manhattan neighborhood long seen as a center of Black culture.
“Over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, Harlem has been the capital of both Black America and a global African diaspora, an early home for Italian and Jewish immigrant communities, an important Puerto Rican neighborhood, and a representative site of gentrification,” states the publisher, Columbia University Press.
“How do we understand the power of a place with so many claims and identifications?”
A former government major in Arts & Sciences, Shukla is an associate professor of English and American studies at the University of Virginia. She previously penned India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England.
The Perversity of Gratitude
Grant Farred
Farred is a professor of Africana studies in Arts & Sciences. His book, published by Temple University Press, has been described as a “philosophical memoir.” The volume is part reflection on the author’s upbringing in South Africa during the Apartheid era, and part critique of the unjust system that, ironically, allowed him to thrive intellectually thanks to several outstanding teachers in the segregated schools he attended.
“Apartheid made me think,” he writes in the preface, “and, as such, my apartheid education constituted the optimal conditions for thinking.”
Farred’s many previous books include An Essay for Ezra—observations on racial violence and white supremacy, addressed to his biracial son—and In Motion, At Rest, which parses the deeper societal meanings of three infamous events in the world of sports.
