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In Black Feelings, Corrigan traces the surging optimism of the Kennedy administration through the Black Power era’s dynamic and powerful circulation of black pessimism to understand how black feelings were a terrain of political struggle for black meaning, representation, and agency as black activists navigated the physical violence and psychological strain of movement disappointment, particularly with liberals (both black and white). Black Feelings demonstrates how racial feelings emerged, ebbed, flowed, disappeared, and re-emerged as the Long Sixties unfolded and finally ended. Black Feelings investigates how politicians, activists, and artists articulated the relationship between feeling black and black feelings to chart the affective energies that animated and troubled liberalism’s tropes of progress, equality, exceptionalism, perfection, and colorblindness. Black Feelings pays special attention to hope, hopelessness, impatience, brotherhood, rage, shame, resentment, disgust, contempt, betrayal, and melancholy and metaphors like the “powederkeg” that helped propel the affective racial landscape in the Long Sixties. Consequently, Black Feelings maps how black intellectuals described, animated, located, solicited, and projected feelings that shaped their political affiliations and their rhetorical strategies in opposition to dominant constructions of white feelings.

Cooperatives in New Orleans: Collective Action and Urban Development intervenes in southern labor, civil rights, and social movement histories to counter the misconception that cooperatives are merely proto-political entities serving as training grounds for or as ancillary to institutionalized social justice movements critiquing capitalism and its fraught connections to gender, race, and class. To historically and theoretically anchor the book, the book examines seven neighborhood cooperatives, spanning from the 1890s to the present, whose alliances with union, consumer, and social justice activists animated successive generations of locally-informed, regional cooperative networks stimulating urban growth in New Orleans. Debating alternative forms of social organization within the city’s plethora of integrated spaces, women, people of color, and laborers blended neighborhood-based African, Caribbean, and European communal traditions with transnational cooperative principles to democratize exploitative systems of consumption, production, and exchange. From utopian socialist workers unions and Rochdale grocery stores to black liberationist theater collectives and community gardens, their cooperative businesses integrated marginalized residents into democratic governance while equally distributing profits among members.

This book questions the tendency among most Americans to separate their dead along lines of race, faith, ethnicity, or social standing. It asks what a deeper exploration of that phenomenon, so often taken for granted, can tell us about American history broadly. Comparative in scope, and regionally diverse, it looks to immigrants, communities of color, the colonized, the enslaved, rich and poor, and religious minorities as they laid their dead to rest in locales spanning the northeast to the Spanish American southwest. Whether African Americans, Muslim or Christian Arabs, Indians, mestizos, Chinese, Jews, Poles, Catholics, Protestants, or various whites of European descent, one thing that united these Americans was a drive to keep their dead apart. While burial spaces have reflected and preserved cultural and communal identity, particularly in a society as diverse as the United States, this collection argues that the invisible and institutional borders built around them (and into them) also tell a powerful story of the ways in which Americans have negotiated race, culture, class, national origin, and religious difference in the United States during its formative century.