It may be summer but IDA Faculty Director H. Samy Alim hasn't slowed down a bit. He is busy preparing for the release of a new book co-written with the distinguished scholar Geneva Smitherman called Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race In The U.S. Early reviews call the book a "tour de force."

Articulate While Black tracks the controversies surrounding President Barack Obama's use of language. "We're gonna talk about the way Barack Obama talks," they write early on, and then go on to offer fresh incisive analyses of Obama's speeches and public appearances, including his interactions with Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

This week Publisher's Weekly hailed Alim and Smitherman's book as providing "significant insight", and note that the authors themselves model "respect for the vernacular" and "an equal affinity for the professionally academic." Michael Eric Dyson writes, "Articulate While Black brilliantly dissects the politics of language as embedded in the politics of race." Duke scholar Mark Anthony Neal calls it " a groundbreaking and definitive exploration of the cultural meaning of the first Black President." Stanford professor John R. Rickford says it is "a fabulously original work!" Vanderbilt professor T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting says Articulate While Black is nothing less than "a sweeping ethnographic and linguistic tour de force that moves between popular culture and political culture with unprecedented academic verve."

The book will be out on Oxford University Press on October 1, 2012 and Dr. Alim will be touring this fall to support the book.