Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender and Care Work in Portugal examines the everyday lives of an African descendant care service workforce that labors in an ostensibly “anti-racial” Europe and against the backdrop of the Portuguese colonial empire. While much of the literature on global care work has focused on Asian and Latine migrant care workers, there is comparatively less research that explicitly examines African care workers and their migration histories to Europe. Sociologist Celeste V. Curington focuses on Portugal—a European setting with comparatively liberal policies around family settlement and naturalization for migrants. In this setting, rapid urbanization in the late twentieth century, along with a national push to reconcile work and family, have shaped the growth of paid home care and cleaning service industries. Many researchers focus on informal work settings where immigrant rights are restricted, and many workers are undocumented or without permanent residence status. Curington instead examined workers who have accessed citizenship or permanent residence status and also explores African women’s experiences laboring in care and service industries in the formal market, revealing how deeply colonial and intersectional logics of a racialized and international division of reproductive labor in Portugal render these women “hyper-invisible” and “hyper-visible” as “appropriate” workers in Lisbon.
But it was as a columnist for the famous African-American newspaper the Chicago Defender that Hughes chronicled the hopes and despair of his people. For twenty years, he wrote forcefully about international race relations, Jim Crow, the South, white supremacy, imperialism and fascism, segregation in the armed forces, the Soviet Union and communism, and African-American art and culture. None of the racial hypocrisies of American life escaped his searing, ironic prose.
This is the first collection of Hughes's nonfiction journalistic writings. For readers new to Hughes, it is an excellent introduction; for those familiar with him, it gives new insights into his poems and fiction.
A Language and Power Reader organizes reading and writing activities for undergraduate students, guiding them in the exploration of racism and cross-racial rhetorics.
Introducing texts written from and about versions of English often disrespected by mainstream Americans, A Language and Power Reader highlights English dialects and discourses to provoke discussions of racialized relations in contemporary America. Thirty selected readings in a range of genres and from writers who work in ?alternative? voices (e.g., Pidgin, African American Language, discourse of international and transnational English speakers) focus on disparate power relations based on varieties of racism in America and how those relations might be displayed, imposed, or resisted across multiple rhetorics. The book also directs student participation and discourse. Each reading is followed by comments and guides to help focus conversation.
Research has long shown that increasing a student?s metalinguistic awareness improves a student?s writing. No other reader available at this time explores the idea of multiple rhetorics or encourages their use, making A Language and Power Reader a welcome addition to writing classrooms.
Michel Foucault observed that “the birth of philology attracted far less notice in the Western mind than did the birth of biology or political economy.” In this penetrating exploration of the origin of the discipline, Maurice Olender shows that philology left an indelible mark on Western visions of history and contributed directly to some of the most horrifying ideologies of the twentieth century.
The comparative study of languages was inspired by Renaissance debates over what language was spoken in the Garden of Eden. By the eighteenth century scholars were persuaded that European languages shared a common ancestor. With the adoption of positivist, “scientific” methods in the nineteenth century, the hunt for the language of Eden and the search for a European Ursprache diverged. Yet the desire to reconcile historical causality with divine purpose remained.
Because the Indo-European languages clearly had a separate line of descent from the biblical tongues, the practitioners of the new science of philology (many of whom had received their linguistic training from the Church) turned their scholarship to the task of justifying the ascendance of European Christianity to the principal role in Providential history. To accomplish this they invented a pair of concepts—Aryan and Semitic—that by the end of the century had embarked on ideological and political careers far outside philology. Supposed characteristics of the respective languages were assigned to the peoples who spoke them: thus the Semitic peoples (primarily the Jews) were, like their language, passive, static, and immobile, while the Aryans (principally Western Europeans) became the active, dynamic Chosen People of the future.
Olender traces the development of these concepts through the work of J. G. Herder, Ernest Renan, Friedrich Max Müller, Adolphe Pictet, Rudolph Grau, and Ignaz Goldziher. He shows that, despite their different approaches, each of these men struggled more or less purposefully “to join romanticism with positivism in an effort to preserve a common allegiance to the doctrines of Providence.”
With erudition and elegance, Olender restores the complexity and internal contradictions of their ideas and recreates the intellectual climate in which they flourished.
During the past decade, racial/ethnic minority women have made significant strides in U.S. politics, comprising large portions of their respective minority delegations both in Congress and in state legislatures. This trend has been particularly evident in the growing political presence of Latinas, yet scholars have offered no clear explanations for this electoral phenomenon—until now.
In The Latina Advantage, Christina E. Bejarano draws on national public opinion datasets and a close examination of state legislative candidates in Texas and California to demonstrate the new power of the political intersection between race and gender. Underscoring the fact that racial/ethnic minority women form a greater share of minority representatives than do white women among white elected officials, Bejarano provides empirical evidence to substantiate previous theoretical predictions of the strategic advantage in the intersectionality of gender and ethnicity in Latinas. Her evidence indicates that two factors provide the basis for the advantage: increasingly qualified candidates and the softening of perceived racial threat, leading minority female candidates to encounter fewer disadvantages than their male counterparts.
Overturning the findings of classic literature that reinforce stereotypes and describe minority female political candidates as being at a compounded electoral disadvantage, Bejarano brings a crucial new perspective to dialogues about the rapidly shifting face of America’s electorate.
Born on the same day in 1809, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were true contemporaries. Though shaped by vastly different environments, they had remarkably similar values, purposes, and approaches. In this exciting new study, James Lander places these two iconic men side by side and reveals the parallel views they shared of man and God.
While Lincoln is renowned for his oratorical prowess and for the Emancipation Proclamation, as well as many other accomplishments, his scientific and technological interests are not widely recognized; for example, many Americans do not know that Lincoln is the only U.S. president to obtain a patent. Darwin, on the other hand, is celebrated for his scientific achievements but not for his passionate commitment to the abolition of slavery, which in part drove his research in evolution. Both men took great pains to avoid causing unnecessary offense despite having abandoned traditional Christianity. Each had one main adversary who endorsed scientific racism: Lincoln had Stephen A. Douglas, and Darwin had Louis Agassiz.
With graceful and sophisticated writing, Lander expands on these commonalities and uncovers more shared connections to people, politics, and events. He traces how these two intellectual giants came to hold remarkably similar perspectives on the evils of racism, the value of science, and the uncertainties of conventional religion.
Separated by an ocean but joined in their ideas, Lincoln and Darwin acted as trailblazers, leading their societies toward greater freedom of thought and a greater acceptance of human equality. This fascinating biographical examination brings the mid-nineteenth-century discourse about race, science, and humanitarian sensibility to the forefront using the mutual interests and pursuits of these two historic figures.
Named on the 2013 list of University Press Books for Public and Secondary Schools
Abraham Lincoln is known as the Great Emancipator, yet his personal views on race have long been debated. Since his death, his legend has been shadowed by the mystery of his true stance toward non-whites. While Lincoln took many actions to fight slavery throughout his political career, his famously crafted speeches can be interpreted in different ways: at times his words suggest personal bigotry, but at other times he sounds like an enemy of racists. In Lincoln and Race, Richard Striner takes on one of the most sensitive subjects of Abraham Lincoln’s legacy, exploring in depth Lincoln’s mixed record and writings on the issue of race.
Striner gives fair hearing to two prevailing theories about Lincoln’s seemingly contradictory words and actions: Did Lincoln fight a long-term struggle to overcome his personal racism? Or were his racist comments a calculated act of political deception? Beginning with an exploration of the historical context of Lincoln’s attitudes toward race in the years before his presidency, Striner details the ambiguity surrounding the politician’s participation in the Free Soil Movement and his fight to keep slavery from expanding into the West. He explores Lincoln’s espousal of colonization—the controversial idea that freed slaves should be resettled in a foreign land—as a voluntary measure for black people who found the prospect attractive. The author analyzes some of Lincoln’s most racially charged speeches and details Lincoln’s presidential words and policies on race and the hotbed issue of voting rights for African Americans during the last years of the president’s life.\
A brief but comprehensive look into one of the most contentious quandaries about Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln and Race invites readers to delve into the mind, heart, and motives of one of America’s most fascinating and complex leaders.
Univeristy Press Books for Public and Secondary Schools 2013 edition
Look, a White! returns the problem of whiteness to white people. Prompted by Eric Holder's charge, that as Americans, we are cowards when it comes to discussing the issue of race, noted philosopher George Yancy's essays map out a structure of whiteness.
He considers whiteness within the context of racial embodiment, film, pedagogy, colonialism, its "danger," and its position within the work of specific writers. Identifying the embedded and opaque ways white power and privilege operate, Yancy argues that the Black countergaze can function as a "gift" to whites in terms of seeing their own whiteness more effectively.
Throughout Look, a White! Yancy pays special attention to the impact of whiteness on individuals, as well as on how the structures of whiteness limit the capacity of social actors to completely untangle the way whiteness operates, thus preventing the erasure of racism in social life.
Winner, 2022 Ottis Lock Endowment “Best Book” Award from the East Texas Historical Association
In Lynching and Leisure, Terry Anne Scott examines how white Texans transformed lynching from a largely clandestine strategy of extralegal punishment into a form of racialized recreation in which crowd involvement was integral to the mode and methods of the violence. Scott powerfully documents how lynchings came to function not only as tools for debasing the status of Black people but also as highly anticipated occasions for entertainment, making memories with friends and neighbors, and reifying whiteness. In focusing on the sense of pleasure and normality that prevailed among the white spectatorship, this comprehensive study of Texas lynchings sheds new light on the practice understood as one of the chief strategies of racial domination in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South.
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