In The New Noir: Race, Identity, and Diaspora in Black Suburbia (University of California Press, October 2019), Orly Clerge, assistant professor of sociology, explores the complex worlds of a generation of Black middle-class adults who have migrated from different corners of the African diaspora to suburban New York. The New Noir is the co-winner of the 2020 Mary Douglas Prize from the American Sociological Society's Section on the Sociology of Culture and was a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award given by the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

Orly is an author and sociologist whose research focuses on race, migration, cities, inequality, and identity. Orly's first book The New Noir: Race, Identity & Diaspora in Black Suburbia (University of California Press, 2019; winner of the Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book in the ASA Culture Section, and SSSP C. Wright Mills Book Award finalist) is a comprehensive exploration of the making of Black diasporic suburbs. The New Noir examines how nationality and citizenship are negotiated by the Black middle class and is the first book in a series on the politics of Black identity in the 21st century. Orly is currently crafting a book on the political identities of Black millennials during the Obama and Trump era. Tentatively titled Young World, this book is an intersectional analysis of how Black youth growing up in middle-class neighborhoods construct and challenge ideas about opportunity, political solidarity, and racial progress.

View the book at the University of California Press