New This Week: November 4th

It’s New Books Tuesday and publishing today we have two new releases that offer fresh perspectives on race, space, and power in the United States.

The Undesirable Many, part of our acclaimed Justice, Power, and Politics series, examines Black women’s experiences with displacement and housing insecurity in Washington, D.C. Folk Engineering takes a broader view, exploring how race, region, and planning have shaped the built environment across the US South.

Learn more about these new books in this post or browse all of our November releases on the Hot Off the Press page.

The Undesirable Many: Black Women and Their Struggles against Displacement and Housing Insecurity in the Nation’s Capital by Rosemary Ndubuizu

Justice, Power, and Politics Series

The fight against low-wage Black women’s housing precarity

“A bold and novel intervention. Rosemary Ndubuizu historicizes the phenomenon of inbuilt obstacles that low-wage Black women have faced when seeking safe public housing and fills a dearth of scholarship on the political attacks on public housing in the post–civil rights period.”—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

“A deep and consequential story of how DC officials and landlords employed cultural stereotypes to justify a regime that tied poor Black families’ access to good housing to their willingness to endure state surveillance.”—George Derek Musgrove, coauthor of Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital

Folk Engineering: Planning Southern Regionalism by Stephen J. Ramos

The understudied history of race, region, and planning in the US South

“In this book, Stephen J. Ramos holds Howard Odum and his time at UNC as his lodestar of analysis but smartly connects his argument within the broader national and international canon of those theorizing the region at the turn of the century. A much-needed text that treads on new ground.”—Barbara Brown Wilson, University of Virginia

“An original and deeply researched analysis of the movement known as Southern regionalism from the 1920s through the 1950s, centering on its best-known figure, Howard W. Odum. Stephen Ramos’s interpretation is fresh and original, his scholarship impressive, and his prose vigorous.”—Robert Fishman, University of Michigan