ALEX LUBIN
Associate Professor, American Studies Department

Lubin's research fields include critical race studies, 20th century social and cultural history, and the African Diaspora. He is the author of Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954 (UP Mississippi, 2005). Romance and Rights is a study of the private and public realms of interracial romance, marriage, and sex during the period between the end of WWII and the Brown decision. Mining postwar court cases, American film and comics, African American magazines and literature, and academic debates, Romance and Rights interrogates the relationship of intimate matters to civil rights strategies. In so doing, the book examines the gender, sexual and racial politics of civil rights politics.

Lubin is also the editor of an anthology of critical essays on the African American writer Ann Lane Petry. Revising the Blueprint: Ann Petry and the Literary Left (Mississippi, 2007), locates Petry in the African American literary left while offering a new framework for understanding radical politics during the early Cold War.

His current research explores the importance of the Middle East in the African American global imaginary. His book project, “Promised Land: The Orient in the African American Global Imaginary” (University of North Carolina Press) will explore African American writing about, travel to, and internationalist politics involving the Middle East. By examining blacks' relationships to Ottoman Palestine, to Zionism, and to Israel, Lubin will expand current understandings of Black internationalism and contribute to ongoing scholarship on the cultural politics of U.S./Middle East relations.

Lubin, along with Alyosha Goldstein, is the editor of a forthcoming issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly that includes essay on settler colonialism in the United States, South Africa, Latin America, Israel/Palestine, the Sudan, and Ethiopia.

Publications

"We are all Israelis': The Politics of Comparitive Colonialism," in Goldstein and Lubin (eds.) South Atlantic Quarterly, special issue on settler colonialism, Fall 2008.

"The Black Holy Land" in Evelyn Alsutaney and Ella Shoat, The Cultural Politics of the Middle East in the Americas (forthcoming from University of Michigan Press).

"Locating Palestine in pre-1948 Black Internationalism," Souls special issue on Islam in African America. Spring 2007.

(ed.) Revising the Blueprint: Ann Lane Petry and the Literary Left , Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, August, 2007.

Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954, Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

“What’s Love Got To Do With It?” The Politics of Race and Marriage in the 1948 Perez v. Sharp Decision,” OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 18, No. 4 (July 2004): 31-7.

Courses

AMST 185, Introduction to Race, Class, Ethnicity
AMST 200, Introduction to American Studies
AMST 285, American Life and Thought: Work in America.
AMST 310, America in the Middle East/ The Middle East in America.
AMST 500, American Culture Studies Proseminar
AMST 555, Black Internationalism.
AMST 559, The History and Politics of Interracial Intimacy

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