Imagining a new field of discourse is at the heart of Rural Black Studies, a new series from the University of Arkansas Press edited by Cherisse Jones-Branch and Yulonda Eadie Sano. Scholars have long written about African Americans who left the rural South for more urban locales. However, little has been published outside the context of enslavement about those who, by choice or circumstance, lived their entire lives in the rural South. An understanding of how race, history, culture, gender, and economy informed and shaped rural lives is critical to a deeper analysis of how Black people saw and imagined themselves in rural spaces and is additionally lacking in the extant, albeit limited, scholarship.
Rural Black Studies provides space for emerging, junior, or senior scholars engaged in research that foregrounds and studies the intersectionality of Black rural life to publish exciting and groundbreaking work. Situated in African American history, books in this series will contribute to our understanding of how agrarian Black life was informed by historical and contemporary events.
Both Dr. Jones-Branch and Dr. Sano are from the South (South Carolina and Mississippi) and have written about African Americans in the rural South in their research. Dr. Jones-Branch, the Dean of the Graduate School at Arkansas State University, is the author or editor of several University Press books, including Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times(University of Georgia Press), Crossing the Line: Women’s Interracial Activism in South Carolina during and after World War II (University Press of Florida), and Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps:Black Women’s Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914-1965 (University of Arkansas Press). Dr. Sano is assistant professor of history in the Department of Social Sciences at Alcorn State University, where she teaches courses in American, African American, and world history. Her scholarship on physician Edith Mae Irby Jones and the integration of the University of Arkansas School of Medicine appears in Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times (University of Georgia Press, 2018)
“The Rural Black Studies series,” write the editors, “will be both multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary, focusing on how race, gender, culture, economy, and agriculture shape our understanding of African Americans in rural communities.”
Dr. Jones-Branch’s third monograph, To Make the Farm Bureau Stronger and Better for All the People: African Americans and the American Farm Bureau Federation, 1920-1966, will be the first book in the Rural Black Studies series. The editors hope to acquire additional titles in the humanities and social sciences that will expand our understanding of African American lives in the rural South.
With a strong background in both African American Studies and regional history, the University of Arkansas Press is the ideal place for this new series. Rural Black Studies is #NextUP in Publishing.
Looking to the future of university presses and the many ways they are evolving, the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) has chosen “Next UP” as the theme for this year’s annual University Press Week (UP Week). The event runs from Monday, November 14, through Friday, November 18.