2009 Ralph Bunche Award

The Ralph J. Bunche Award is given for the best scholarly work in political science published in the previous calendar year that explores the phenomenon of ethnic and cultural pluralism.

Award Committee: Linda Bosniak, Chair, Rutgers University; Kerry L. Haynie, Duke University; and Taeku Lee, University of California, Berkeley

Co-Recipient: Richard Iton, Northwestern University

Title: In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Citation: Throughout their history in the U.S. black Americans often have been denied full and equal access to the formal levers of political power. In this context, black political culture emerged as an important tool for expression and change. Iton interrogates the spaces of African American popular culture to show how culture – captured by Iton's concept of the "fantastic" – acts as a vanguard and a space (literal and imaginary) for seeding and mobilizing reform and change. Iton is both imaginative and dogged in his pursuit to reclaim culture as a potentially emancipatory site during moments of quiescence. This book is an important reminder that defining the boundaries of "black politics" so narrowly as to limit it to electoral politics places blinders on what we are able to discover and imagine about the possibilities of blacks as political actors.

Co-Recipient: Julie Novkov, SUNY, Albany

Title: Racial Union: Law, Intimacy, and the White State in Alabama (University of Michigan Press, 2008)

Citation: Novkov employs a masterful and in-depth analysis of case law to give a rich and detailed portrayal of the vital role white supremacy played in the development of the state and its political, economic, and social institutions in the American South. By focusing on and filling in the context in just one state (Alabama), Novkov makes a compelling case for the role of the state in regulating interracial boundaries and safeguarding white citizenship and privilege through the force of law. Racial Union is an important contribution to the emerging and growing fields of race and American political development, and race and gender intersectionality.