[2] James worked closely with Angela Davis, who was on the faculty, during a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
[4] In 1996, James released her second book, Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture, via University of Minnesota Press.
The book was written over twenty years with essays that describe the tensions confronted by writers, scholars, activists, politicians, and political prisoners fighting racism and sexism.
[9][10][11][12] In 2023, New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the Afterlife of Erica Garner was published by Common Notions.
James introduces the concept of a figure called the "captive maternal," from Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, to the incarcerated at Attica prison in 1971, to Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner, the captive maternal is rarely celebrated in African-American history and United States history.