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Explores forgotten solidarity with African liberation struggles through the life of Black Chicagoan Prexy Nesbitt.

For many civil rights activists, the Vietnam War brought the dangers of US imperialism and the global nature of antiracist struggle into sharp relief. Martha Biondi tells the story of one such group of activists who built an internationalist movement in Chicago committed to liberation everywhere but especially to ending colonialism and apartheid in Africa.

Among their leaders was Prexy Nesbitt. Steeped from an early age in stories of Garveyism and labor militancy, Nesbitt was powerfully influenced by his encounters with the exiled African radicals he met in Dar es Salaam, London, and across the United States. Operating domestically and abroad, Nesbitt's cohort worked closely with opponents of Portuguese and white minority rule in Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. Rather than promoting a US conception of Black self-determination, they took ideas from African anticolonial leaders and injected them into US foreign policy debates.

The biography of a man but even more so of a movement, We Are Internationalists: Prexy Nesbitt and the Fight for African Liberation (U California Press, 2025) reveals the underappreciated influence of a transformative Black solidarity project.

How do we know through atmospheres? How can being affected by an atmosphere give rise to knowledge? What role does somatic, nonverbal knowledge play in how we belong to places? Atmospheric Knowledge takes up these questions through detailed analyses of practices that generate atmospheres and in which knowledge emerges through visceral intermingling with atmospheres. From combined musicological and anthropological perspectives, Birgit Abels and Patrick Eisenlohr investigate atmospheres as a compelling alternative to better-known analytics of affect by way of performative and sonic practices across a range of ethnographic settings. With particular focus on oceanic relations and sonic affectedness, Atmospheric Knowledge centers the rich affordances of sonic connections for knowing our environments.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination (University of California Press, 2025) by Dr. Jennifer Barry confronts the violent ideological frameworks underpinning the early Christian imagination, arguing that gender-based violence is not peripheral but is fundamental to understanding early Christian history.

By analyzing hagiographical and doctrinal writings, Dr. Barry reveals how male authors used portrayals of feminized suffering to shape ideals of sanctity and power, exploiting themes of domestic abuse, martyrdom, and sexualized violence to reinforce their visions of piety. The study first traces the roots of gendered violence within the Greco-Roman and early Christian imagination, and then explores the disturbing role of male fantasies and dreams in hagiographical traditions. Dr. Barry draws on womanist scholarship and engages with trauma studies and feminist horror theory in order to challenge traditional readings of Christian texts, offering new perspectives for understanding how narratives of violence continue to shape contemporary interpretations of gender and power.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

The history of film calls to mind unforgettable photographs, famous directors, and the glitz and hustle of the media business. But there is another tale to tell that connects film as a material to the twentieth century's history of war, destruction, and cruelty.

This story comes into focus during World War II at the factories of Tennessee Eastman, where photographic giant Kodak produced the rudiments of movie magic. Not far away, at Oak Ridge, Kodak was also enriching uranium for the Manhattan Project--uranium mined in the Belgian Congo and destined for the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. While the world's largest film manufacturer transformed into a formidable military contractor, across the ocean its competitor Agfa grew entangled with Nazi Germany's machinery of war. After 1945, Kodak's film factories stood at the front lines of a new, colder war, as their photosensitive products became harbingers of the dangers of nuclear fallout.

Following scientists, soldiers, prisoners, and spies through Kodak's and Agfa's global empires, Alice Lovejoy links the golden age of cinema and photography to colonialism, the military-industrial complex, radioactive dust, and toxic waste. Revelatory and chilling, Tales of Militant Chemistry shows how film became a weapon whose chemistry irrevocably shaped the world we live in today.

Alice Lovejoy is author of the award-winning Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military. A former editor at Film Comment, she is Professor of film and media studies at the University of Minnesota.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.