It is easy to dismiss beauty pageants as sexist or inconsequential. After all, many pageants continue to make judgments and enforce rules based on women’s body measurements, age, and marital status. Oluwakemi M. Balogun’s Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation, however, examines beauty pageants in their full complexity by recognizing aspects of pageantry that some scholars deem troublesome while simultaneously…

This book provides an empirical study of media and law enforcement bias in reporting and investigating homicides of African American women compared with their white counterparts. The author discusses the symbiotic relationship between media coverage and the response from law enforcement to victims of color, particularly when these victims are reported missing and presumed to be in danger by their…

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organizing, and thinking. She makes clear that the goal of Indigenous resistance can no longer be cultural resurgence as a mechanism for inclusion in a multicultural mosaic, calling for unapologetic, place-based Indigenous alternatives to the destructive logics of the settler colonial state.

Evidence of Being is an important book that should impact the contours of Black and Queer Studies. Bost’s recuperation of the history of black gay cultural expression opens new lines of inquiry for scholars concerned with black sexuality, loss, history, and memory. Readers will find Evidence of Being moving, theoretically rich, and original.