Introduces key terms, interdisciplinary research, debates, and histories for African American Studies

As the longest-standing interdisciplinary field, African American Studies has laid the foundation for critically analyzing issues of race, ethnicity, and culture within the academy and beyond. This volume assembles the keywords of this field for the first time, exploring not only the history of those categories but their continued relevance in the contemporary moment. Taking up a vast array of issues such as slavery, colonialism, prison expansion, sexuality, gender, feminism, war, and popular culture, Keywords for African American Studies showcases the startling breadth that characterizes the field.
Featuring an august group of contributors across the social sciences and the humanities, the keywords assembled within the pages of this volume exemplify the depth and range of scholarly inquiry into Black life in the United States. Connecting lineages of Black knowledge production to contemporary considerations of race, gender, class, and sexuality, Keywords for African American Studies provides a model for how the scholarship of the field can meet the challenges of our social world.

Erica R. Edwards (Editor)
Erica R. Edwards is Associate Professor of English and Presidential Term Chair in African American Literature at Rutgers University. She is author of Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (2012), which received the MLA's William Sanders Scarborough Prize, and co-editor of Keywords for African American Literature (2018).
Roderick A. Ferguson (Editor)
Roderick A. Ferguson is Professor of African American Studies and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar (Editor)
Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar is Professor of History and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music at the University of Connecticut.