Another exciting forthcoming book that was recently proofread by Southwest Humanities, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2021), by Autumn M. Womack (Asst. Professor of African American Studies and English at Princeton University) examines turn-of-the-twentieth-century social science’s approach to data in relation to Black life in the post-Emancipation era. Analyzing works by Sutton Griggs, Zora Neale Hurston, and W. E. B. DuBois (among others), the book “excavates the dynamic interplay between racial data and Black aesthetic production that shaped late nineteenth-century social, cultural, and literary atmosphere. Through assembling previously overlooked archives and seemingly familiar texts, Womack shows how these artists and writers recalibrated the relationship between data and Black life.” The Matter of Black Living will be available for purchase in October 2021. Find more information here.