Mazama and Asante explore the Obama era—the confluence of the political, technological, social, economic, and religious dimensions of Obama’s campaign, election, and presidency.

Culled from hundreds of articles in journals across the social sciences—in political science, sociology, African American studies, and communication--this illuminating collection deals with the complexities of the Obama phenomenon from critical research perspective, marking the era as a transformation brought about by a transitional leader. Part introductions offer needed framing and context to facilitate debate and discussion.

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The Barack Obama Phenomenon: Politics, Symbol, and Reality, Ama Mazama and Molefi Kete Asante

Part I. See How Barack Obama Ran: The Campaign for the Presidency
1: Deracializing Obama: White Voters and the 2004 Illinois U.S. Senate Race, David. J. Andersen and Jane Junn
2. Southern Strategy 2.0: Conservatives, White Voters, and the Election of Barack Obama, Thomas Edge
3. Turning Out the Center: Racial Politics and African Agency in the Obama Era, Phillip S. Howard
4. An Immigrant's Dream and the Audacity of Hope: The 2004 Convention Addresses of Barack Obama and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Babak Elahi and Grant Cos Part

Part II. The Iconic Obama: Controlling the Identity of a President
5. Obama’s Political Philosophy: Pragmatism, Politics, and the University of Chicago, Bart Schultz
6: Barack Obama and the Politics of Blackness, Ron Walters
7. Barack Obama’s Faustian Bargain and the Fight for America’s Racial Soul, Christopher J. Metzler

Part III. The Lessons of the Obama Presidential Election
8. Facing Barack Hussein Obama: Race, Globalization, and Transnational America, Radhika Parameswaran
9. The Audacity of Hope, Dewey Clayton
10. Obama and the White Vote, Todd Donovan Part

Part IV. The Limits of Governance in Obama’s Administration
11. Obama: The New Contours of Power, Jerry Harris and Carl Davidson
12. Barack Obama and the Dilemma of Power: An Africological Observation, Molefi Kete Asante
13. Obama’s Whiteness, Shawn Michelle Smith
14. Perceptions of Leadership and the Challenge of Obama’s Blackness, Charlton D. McIlwain
15. Barack Obama and the Politics of Race: The Myth of Postracism in America, Martell Teasley and David Ikard
16. The Reality of American Life Has Strayed From its Myths: Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope and the Discourse of the American Reclamation Jeremiad, Willie J. Harrell, Jr.

Ama Mazama is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Temple University. She holds a Ph.D. from La Sorbonne and has published eleven books including co-editing the Encyclopedia of African Religion; The Afrocentric Paradigm; Africa in the 21st Century; L’ Imperatif Afrocentricité as well as more than forty articles in research journals. In addition she has translated the political and social works of African American intellectuals into French. During the past twenty years Dr. Mazama has directed a dozen doctoral degree programs and educated thousands of students in the Americas, Europe and the Caribbean. Her work is regularly cited by others scholars in Canada, Jamaica, England, France, and the United States. She is also the associate editor of the Journal of Black Studies, the premier journal in its field. Dr. Mazama edited the first scholarly special issue on the candidacy of Barack Obama.

Molefi Kete Asante holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published more than 70 books and is the creator of the first doctoral program in African American Studies. Asante is author of As I Run Toward Africa, The African American People, The Afrocentric Idea; An Afrocentric Manifesto; and Afrocentricity. He is also the co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Black Studies and the Handbook of Black Studies. Asante has been called the most published African American scholar with more than 400 articles to his credit. Dr. Asante in an intellectual activist believing that one must seek to use scholarship to humanize the world.