Tressie McMillan Cottom

Learn how Southern planter-capitalists used early forms of scientific management to turn their power over enslaved people into a productivity advantage. Accounting for Slavery challenges the traditional depiction of slavery as a barrier to innovation, revealing how elite planters employed meticulous note-taking and experiments to improve daily profits and productivity. By analyzing old accounting books from Southern and West Indian plantations, the author provides a groundbreaking investigation of business practices in relation to slavery and capitalism.

Travel along the slave route in Ghana and learn about the history of the Atlantic slave trade with Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother. Hartman reflects on the effects of slavery on African and African American history, and explores the idea that to lose your mother is to be severed from kin and forgotten history. With no known surviving relatives in Ghana, Hartman becomes an outsider searching for strangers and engaging with people along the way. Lose Your Mother is a powerful and deeply affecting exploration of the past.

Discover the sweeping and emotionally powerful story of two half-sisters born in 18th-century Ghana, whose destinies diverge as one is married to an Englishman and lives in luxury while the other is sold into slavery and shipped off to America. Homegoing follows the families of both sisters through generations, capturing with stunning immediacy the impact of historical forces on their lives. From the slave trade and British colonization to the Civil War and Great Migration, this exquisite novel by a major new voice in contemporary fiction is not to be missed.

"From Here to Equality" explores the persistence of racism and discrimination in the form of housing discrimination, unequal education, police brutality, mass incarceration, employment discrimination, and massive wealth and opportunity gaps. The authors, William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, make an innovative and comprehensive case for economic reparations for U.S. descendants of slavery. Using monetary values to measure historical wrongs, they offer a detailed roadmap for an effective reparations program that includes substantial payment to each documented U.S. black descendant of slavery. Their assessment of three eras of injustice, slavery, Jim Crow, and modern-day discrimination, creates a powerful case for black reparations.

The Economization of Life is a thought-provoking book that traces the rise of infrastructures of calculation and experiment aimed at governing population for the sake of national economy. Author Michelle Murphy delves into the history of postcolonial neoliberal techniques and how they led to the devaluation of certain lives. Through a powerful archive of data, Murphy challenges readers to rethink how we view the economy and population as a term of reproductive justice.