front cover of Colonial Fantasies
Colonial Fantasies
Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870
Susanne Zantop
Duke University Press, 1997
Since Germany became a colonial power relatively late, postcolonial theorists and histories of colonialism have thus far paid little attention to it. Uncovering Germany’s colonial legacy and imagination, Susanne Zantop reveals the significance of colonial fantasies—a kind of colonialism without colonies—in the formation of German national identity. Through readings of historical, anthropological, literary, and popular texts, Zantop explores imaginary colonial encounters of "Germans" with "natives" in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century literature, and shows how these colonial fantasies acted as a rehearsal for actual colonial ventures in Africa, South America, and the Pacific.
From as early as the sixteenth century, Germans preoccupied themselves with an imaginary drive for colonial conquest and possession that eventually grew into a collective obsession. Zantop illustrates the gendered character of Germany’s colonial imagination through critical readings of popular novels, plays, and travel literature that imagine sexual conquest and surrender in colonial territory—or love and blissful domestic relations between colonizer and colonized. She looks at scientific articles, philosophical essays, and political pamphlets that helped create a racist colonial discourse and demonstrates that from its earliest manifestations, the German colonial imagination contained ideas about a specifically German national identity, different from, if not superior to, most others.
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Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities
Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920
Lenny A. Ureña Valerio
Ohio University Press, 2019

In Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities, Lenny Ureña Valerio offers a transnational approach to Polish-German relations and nineteenth-century colonial subjectivities. She investigates key cultural dynamics in the history of medicine, colonialism, and migration that bring Germany and Prussian Poland closer to the colonial and postcolonial worlds in Africa and Latin America. She also analyzes how Poles in the German Empire positioned themselves in relation to Germans and native populations in overseas colonies. She thus recasts Polish perspectives and experiences, allowing new insights into identity formation and nationalist movements within the German Empire.

Crucially, Ureña Valerio also studies the medical projects and scientific ideas that traveled from colonies to the German metropole, and vice versa, which were influential not only in the racialization of Slavic populations, but also in bringing scientific conceptions of race to the everydayness of the German Empire. As a whole, Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources that range from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. By studying these scientific and political debates, Ureña Valerio uncovers novel ways to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism and provides an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.

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Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America
Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto and Alexander Laban Hinton, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
This important collection of essays expands the geographic, demographic, and analytic scope of the term genocide to encompass the effects of colonialism and settler colonialism in North America. Colonists made multiple and interconnected attempts to destroy Indigenous peoples as groups. The contributors examine these efforts through the lens of genocide. Considering some of the most destructive aspects of the colonization and subsequent settlement of North America, several essays address Indigenous boarding school systems imposed by both the Canadian and U.S. governments in attempts to "civilize" or "assimilate" Indigenous children. Contributors examine some of the most egregious assaults on Indigenous peoples and the natural environment, including massacres, land appropriation, the spread of disease, the near-extinction of the buffalo, and forced political restructuring of Indigenous communities. Assessing the record of these appalling events, the contributors maintain that North Americans must reckon with colonial and settler colonial attempts to annihilate Indigenous peoples.

Contributors. Jeff Benvenuto, Robbie Ethridge, Theodore Fontaine, Joseph P. Gone, Alexander Laban Hinton, Tasha Hubbard, Margaret D. Jabobs, Kiera L. Ladner, Tricia E. Logan, David B. MacDonald, Benjamin Madley, Jeremy Patzer, Julia Peristerakis, Christopher Powell, Colin Samson, Gray H. Whaley, Andrew Woolford
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Colonial Habits
Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru
Kathryn Burns
Duke University Press, 1999
In Colonial Habits Kathryn Burns transforms our view of nuns as marginal recluses, making them central actors on the colonial stage. Beginning with the 1558 founding of South America’s first convent, Burns shows that nuns in Cuzco played a vital part in subjugating Incas, creating a creole elite, and reproducing an Andean colonial order in which economic and spiritual interests were inextricably fused.
Based on unprecedented archival research, Colonial Habits demonstrates how nuns became leading guarantors of their city’s social order by making loans, managing property, containing “unruly” women, and raising girls. Coining the phrase “spiritual economy” to analyze the intricate investments and relationships that enabled Cuzco’s convents and their backers to thrive, Burns explains how, by the late 1700s, this economy had faltered badly, making convents an emblem of decay and a focal point for intense criticism of a failing colonial regime. By the nineteenth century, the nuns had retreated from their previous roles, marginalized in the construction of a new republican order.
Providing insight that can be extended well outside the Andes to the relationships articulated by convents across much of Europe, the Americas, and beyond, Colonial Habits will engage those interested in early modern economics, Latin American studies, women in religion, and the history of gender, class, and race.
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Colonial Harem
Malek Alloula
University of Minnesota Press, 1986
A collection of picture postcards of Algerian women exploited by the French, this "album" illustrates a powerful analysis of the distorting, denigrating effects of their presence on Algerian Society. "Imprisoned by the photographers eye these women reclaim their historicity through the pages of this powerful book. The Colonial Harem deserves a central place in the growing literature of decolonization." --Village Voice "Alloula gathers up the impedimenta of empire in the form of (mainly) lewd French postcards of Algerian women which circulated between 1900 and 1930. By displaying and dissecting colonial pornography as an insider he brings into stark relief the violation of the patriarchal gaze at its harshest." --Women's Review of Books "A shocking photographic excursion into the European fascination with the harem." --Whole Earth Review
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Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea
The Onoda Cement Factory
Soon-Won Park
Harvard University Press, 1999
This book is a study of labor relations and the first generation of skilled workers in colonial Korea, a subject crucial to the understanding of modernization in twentieth-century Korea. Born in rural Korea, these workers confronted both the colonial experience and the modern workplace as they interacted with Japanese managers and workers. Based on the archives of the Onoda Cement Factory and interviews with surviving workers, this work analyzes the complex relationship between colonialism and modernization.
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Colonial Inscriptions
Race, Sex, and Class in Kenya
Carolyn Martin Shaw
University of Minnesota Press, 1995

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Colonial Itineraries of Contemporary Mexico
Literary and Cultural Inquiries
Edited by Oswaldo Estrada and Anna M. Nogar
University of Arizona Press, 2014
The rewritings of the Mexican colonia discussed in this book question a present reality of marginalities and inequality, of imposed political domination, and of hybrid subjectivities. In their examination of the novels, films, poetry, and chronicles produced in and outside of Mexico since 2000, the critics included in Colonial Itineraries of Contemporary Mexico produce new interpretations, alternative readings, and different angles of analysis that extend far beyond the theories of the new historical novel of the eighties and nineties, and well beyond the limits of the novel as re-creative genre.

Through a transformative interdisciplinary lens, this book studies the ultra-contemporary chronicles of Carlos Monsiváis, the poetry of Carmen Boullosa and Luis Felipe Fabre, and the novels of Enrique Serna, Héctor de Mauleón, Mónica Lavín, and Pablo Soler Frost, among others. The book also pays close attention to a good sample of recent children’s literature that revisit Mexico’s colonia. It includes the transatlantic perspective of Spanish novelist Inma Chacón, and a detailed analysis of the strategies employed by Laura Esquivel in the creation of a best seller. Other chapters are devoted to the study of transnational film productions, a play by Flavio González Mello, and a set of novels set in the nineteenth-century colonia that problematize static notions of both personal and national identity within specific cultural palimpsests. Taken together, these incisive readings open broader conversations about Mexican coloniality as it continues well into the twenty-first century.
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Colonial Justice in Western Massachusetts, 1639-1702
The Pynchon Court Record—An Original Judges' Diary of the Administration of Justice in the Springfield Courts in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
Joseph H. Smith
Harvard University Press

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Colonial Law Making
Cambodia under the French
Sally Frances Low
National University of Singapore Press, 2023
An important case study in the history of law under colonialism. 

Covering a previously neglected area of Cambodian history, Colonial Law Making explores the structural forces and contingent exchanges that shaped colonial law in Cambodia and examines its post-independence colonial legacy.

The court of King Norodom and the temples of Angkor Wat became orientalist icons in the French colonial imagination, perpetuating an image of the Protectorate (1863–1953) as special and worthy of preservation. This contributed to exceptionalism in the way the Kingdom was colonized, including through law. Drawing on previously unexamined archival material, Sally Low presents a comparative case study of French approaches to colonial law, jurisdiction, and protection. Although the voices of non-elite Cambodians are largely absent from the archives, their influence on colonial law is evident as they resisted efforts to regulate their lives and their land. Low argues that the result was a set of state legal institutions and an indigenous jurisdiction that blended Cambodian and French notions of patronage and royal power as the source and authority for law.

This work is a case study of colonial law as an instrument of control and administration in an indirectly ruled colony. It adds depth to our understanding of the impact of European colonial law and the significance of different forms of colonial rule—direct, indirect, and unofficial. It is easily accessible for non-lawyers and is a must-read for those interested in the recent past of Southeast Asia and the countries that were previously colonized as French Indochina.
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Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture
Looking Through the Kaleidoscope
Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez
University of Arizona Press, 2020
Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture exposes the ways in which colonialism is expressed in the literary and cultural production of the U.S. Southwest, a region that has experienced at least two distinct colonial periods since the sixteenth century.

Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez traces how Spanish colonial texts reflect the motivation for colonial domination. She argues that layers of U.S. colonialism complicate how Chicana/o literary scholars think about Chicana/o literary and cultural production. She brings into view the experiences of Chicana/o communities that have long-standing ties to the U.S. Southwest but whose cultural heritage is tied through colonialism to multiple nations, including Spain, Mexico, and the United States.

While the legacies of Chicana/o literature simultaneously uphold and challenge colonial constructs, the metaphor of the kaleidoscope makes visible the rupturing of these colonial fragments via political and social urgencies. This book challenges readers to consider the possibilities of shifting our perspectives to reflect on stories told and untold and to advocate for the inclusion of fragmented and peripheral pieces within the kaleidoscope for more complex understandings of individual and collective subjectivities.

This book is intended for readers interested in how colonial legacies are performed in the U.S. Southwest, particularly in the context of New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. Readers will relate to the book’s personal narrative thread that provides a path to understanding fragmented identities.
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A Colonial Lexicon
Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo
Nancy Rose Hunt
Duke University Press, 1999
A Colonial Lexicon is the first historical investigation of how childbirth became medicalized in Africa. Rejecting the “colonial encounter” paradigm pervasive in current studies, Nancy Rose Hunt elegantly weaves together stories about autopsies and bicycles, obstetric surgery and male initiation, to reveal how concerns about strange new objects and procedures fashioned the hybrid social world of colonialism and its aftermath in Mobutu’s Zaire.
Relying on archival research in England and Belgium, as well as fieldwork in the Congo, Hunt reconstructs an ethnographic history of a remote British Baptist mission struggling to survive under the successive regimes of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, the hyper-hygienic, pronatalist Belgian Congo, and Mobutu’s Zaire. After exploring the roots of social reproduction in rituals of manhood, she shows how the arrival of the fast and modern ushered in novel productions of gender, seen equally in the forced labor of road construction and the medicalization of childbirth. Hunt focuses on a specifically interwar modernity, where the speed of airplanes and bicycles correlated with a new, mobile medicine aimed at curbing epidemics and enumerating colonial subjects. Fascinating stories about imperial masculinities, Christmas rituals, evangelical humor, colonial terror, and European cannibalism demonstrate that everyday life in the mission, on plantations, and under a strongly Catholic colonial state was never quite what it seemed. In a world where everyone was living in translation, privileged access to new objects and technologies allowed a class of “colonial middle figures”—particularly teachers, nurses, and midwives—to mediate the evolving hybridity of Congolese society. Successfully blurring conventional distinctions between precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial situations, Hunt moves on to discuss the unexpected presence of colonial fragments in the vibrant world of today’s postcolonial Africa.
With its close attention to semiotics as well as sociology, A Colonial Lexiconwill interest specialists in anthropology, African history, obstetrics and gynecology, medical history, religion, and women’s and cultural studies.


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Colonial Lives of Property
Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership
Brenna Bhandar
Duke University Press, 2018
In Colonial Lives of Property Brenna Bhandar examines how modern property law contributes to the formation of racial subjects in settler colonies and to the development of racial capitalism. Examining both historical cases and ongoing processes of settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and Israel and Palestine, Bhandar shows how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as upon legal narratives that equate civilized life with English concepts of property. In this way, property law legitimates and rationalizes settler colonial practices while it racializes those deemed unfit to own property. The solution to these enduring racial and economic inequities, Bhandar demonstrates, requires developing a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession.
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Colonial Madness
Psychiatry in French North Africa
Richard C. Keller
University of Chicago Press, 2007

Nineteenth-century French writers and travelers imagined Muslim colonies in North Africa to be realms of savage violence, lurid sexuality, and primitive madness. Colonial Madness traces the genealogy and development of this idea from the beginnings of colonial expansion to the present, revealing the ways in which psychiatry has been at once a weapon in the arsenal of colonial racism, an innovative branch of medical science, and a mechanism for negotiating the meaning of difference for republican citizenship.

Drawing from extensive archival research and fieldwork in France and North Africa, Richard Keller offers much more than a history of colonial psychology. Colonial Madness explores the notion of what French thinkers saw as an inherent mental, intellectual, and behavioral rift marked by the Mediterranean, as well as the idea of the colonies as an experimental space freed from the limitations of metropolitan society and reason. These ideas have modern relevance, Keller argues, reflected in French thought about race and debates over immigration and France’s postcolonial legacy.

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Colonial Meltdown
Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression
Moses E. Ochonu
Ohio University Press, 2009

Historians of colonial Africa have largely regarded the decade of the Great Depression as a period of intense exploitation and colonial inactivity. In Colonial Meltdown, Moses E. Ochonu challenges this conventional interpretation by mapping the determined, at times violent, yet instructive responses of Northern Nigeria’s chiefs, farmers, laborers, artisans, women, traders, and embryonic elites to the British colonial mismanagement of the Great Depression. Colonial Meltdown explores the unraveling of British colonial power at a moment of global economic crisis.

Ochonu shows that the economic downturn made colonial exploitation all but impossible and that this dearth of profits and surpluses frustrated the colonial administration which then authorized a brutal regime of grassroots exactions and invasive intrusions. The outcomes were as harsh for Northern Nigerians as those of colonial exploitation in boom years.

Northern Nigerians confronted colonial economic recovery measures and their agents with a variety of strategies. Colonial Meltdown analyzes how farmers, women, laborers, laid-off tin miners, and NorthernNigeria’s emergent elite challenged and rebelled against colonial economic recovery schemes with evasive trickery, defiance, strategic acts of revenge, and criminal self-help and, in the process, exposed the weak underbelly of the colonial system.

Combined with the economic and political paralysis of colonial bureaucrats in the face of crisis, these African responses underlined the fundamental weakness of the colonial state, the brittleness of its economicmission, and the limits of colonial coercion and violence. This atmosphere of colonial collapse emboldened critics of colonial policies who went on to craft the rhetorical terms on which the anticolonial struggle of the post–World War II period was fought out.

In the current climate of global economic anxieties, Ochonu’s analysis will enrich discussions on the transnational ramifications of economic downturns. It will also challenge the pervasive narrative of imperial economic success.

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Colonial Memory
Contemporary Women’s Travel Writing in Britain and The Netherlands
Sarah De Mul
Amsterdam University Press, 2011

Exploring the intersections of memory, gender, and the postcolonial, Colonial Memory explores the phenomenon of colonial memory through the specific genre of women’s travel writing. Building on criticism of memory and travel writing, Sarah De Mul seeks to open Dutch literature to postcolonial themes and concepts and to insert the history of the Dutch colonies and its critical recollection into the traditionally Anglophone-dominated field of postcolonial studies.

“A vividly conceived and theoretically astute reading of the complicated weavings between the past and present involved in memory work and the process of nostalgic return.”—Elleke Boehmer, University of Oxford
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Colonial Modernity in Korea
Gi-Wook Shin
Harvard University Press, 1999
The twelve chapters in this volume seek to overcome the nationalist paradigm of Japanese repression and exploitation versus Korean resistance that has dominated the study of Korea’s colonial period (1910–1945) by adopting a more inclusive, pluralistic approach that stresses the complex relations among colonialism, modernity, and nationalism. By addressing such diverse subjects as the colonial legal system, radio, telecommunications, the rural economy, and industrialization and the formation of industrial labor, one group of essays analyzes how various aspects of modernity emerged in the colonial context and how they were mobilized by the Japanese for colonial domination, with often unexpected results. A second group examines the development of various forms of identity from nation to gender to class, particularly how aspects of colonial modernity facilitated their formation through negotiation, contestation, and redefinition.
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Colonial New Hampshire
A History
Jere R. Daniell
University Press of New England, 2015
In his full-scale history of New Hampshire from the Algonkin people to the coming of the American Revolution, the historian Jere R. Daniell discusses the Indian population, the development of community life, the founding of New Hampshire as a royal colony, the political adjustments that existence as a separate colony necessitated, the nature of New Hampshire’s social institutions, and many other subjects. His epilogue links colonial New Hampshire to subsequent developments in the state. This volume will interest historians of colonial New England and New Hampshire.
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Colonial Objects in Early Modern Sweden and Beyond
From the Kunstkammer to the Current Museum Crisis
Mårten Snickare
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
An elaborately crafted and decorated tomahawk from somewhere along the north American east coast: how did it end up in the royal collections in Stockholm in the late seventeenth century? What does it say about the Swedish kingdom’s colonial ambitions and desires? What questions does it raise from its present place in a display cabinet in the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm? This book is about the tomahawk and other objects like it, acquired in colonial contact zones and displayed by Swedish elites in the seventeenth century. Its first part situates the objects in two distinct but related spaces: the expanding space of the colonial world, and the exclusive space of the Kunstkammer. The second part traces the objects’ physical and epistemological transfer from the Kunstkammer to the modern museum system. In the final part, colonial objects are considered at the centre of a heated debate over the present state of museums, and their possible futures.
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Colonial Pathologies
American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines
Warwick Anderson
Duke University Press, 2006
Colonial Pathologies is a groundbreaking history of the role of science and medicine in the American colonization of the Philippines from 1898 through the 1930s. Warwick Anderson describes how American colonizers sought to maintain their own health and stamina in a foreign environment while exerting control over and “civilizing” a population of seven million people spread out over seven thousand islands. In the process, he traces a significant transformation in the thinking of colonial doctors and scientists about what was most threatening to the health of white colonists. During the late nineteenth century, they understood the tropical environment as the greatest danger, and they sought to help their fellow colonizers to acclimate. Later, as their attention shifted to the role of microbial pathogens, colonial scientists came to view the Filipino people as a contaminated race, and they launched public health initiatives to reform Filipinos’ personal hygiene practices and social conduct.

A vivid sense of a colonial culture characterized by an anxious and assertive white masculinity emerges from Anderson’s description of American efforts to treat and discipline allegedly errant Filipinos. His narrative encompasses a colonial obsession with native excrement, a leper colony intended to transform those considered most unclean and least socialized, and the hookworm and malaria programs implemented by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout, Anderson is attentive to the circulation of intertwined ideas about race, science, and medicine. He points to colonial public health in the Philippines as a key influence on the subsequent development of military medicine and industrial hygiene, U.S. urban health services, and racialized development regimes in other parts of the world.

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The Colonial Politics of Global Health
France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa
Jessica Lynne Pearson
Harvard University Press, 2018

In The Colonial Politics of Global Health, Jessica Lynne Pearson explores the collision between imperial and international visions of health and development in French Africa as decolonization movements gained strength.

After World War II, French officials viewed health improvements as a way to forge a more equitable union between France and its overseas territories. Through new hospitals, better medicines, and improved public health, French subjects could reimagine themselves as French citizens. The politics of health also proved vital to the United Nations, however, and conflicts arose when French officials perceived international development programs sponsored by the UN as a threat to their colonial authority. French diplomats also feared that anticolonial delegations to the United Nations would use shortcomings in health, education, and social development to expose the broader structures of colonial inequality. In the face of mounting criticism, they did what they could to keep UN agencies and international health personnel out of Africa, limiting the access Africans had to global health programs. French personnel marginalized their African colleagues as they mapped out the continent’s sanitary future and negotiated the new rights and responsibilities of French citizenship. The health disparities that resulted offered compelling evidence that the imperial system of governance should come to an end.

Pearson’s work links health and medicine to postwar debates over sovereignty, empire, and human rights in the developing world. The consequences of putting politics above public health continue to play out in constraints placed on international health organizations half a century later.

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Colonial Racial Capitalism
Susan Koshy, Lisa Marie Cacho, Jodi A. Byrd, and Brian Jordan Jefferson, editors
Duke University Press, 2022
The contributors to Colonial Racial Capitalism consider anti-Blackness, human commodification, and slave labor alongside the history of Indigenous dispossession and the uneven development of colonized lands across the globe. They demonstrate the co-constitution and entanglement of slavery and colonialism from the conquest of the New World through industrial capitalism to contemporary financial capitalism. Among other topics, the essays explore the historical suturing of Blackness and Black people to debt, the violence of uranium mining on Indigenous lands in Canada and the Belgian Congo, how municipal property assessment and waste management software encodes and produces racial difference, how Puerto Rican police crackdowns on protestors in 2010 and 2011 drew on decades of policing racially and economically marginalized people, and how historic sites in Los Angeles County narrate the Mexican-American War in ways that occlude the war’s imperialist groundings. The volume’s analytic of colonial racial capitalism opens new frameworks for understanding the persistence of violence, precarity, and inequality in modern society.

Contributors. Joanne Barker, Jodi A. Byrd, Lisa Marie Cacho, Michael Dawson, Iyko Day, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Alyosha Goldstein, Cheryl I. Harris, Kimberly Kay Hoang, Brian Jordan Jefferson, Susan Koshy, Marisol LeBrón, Jodi Melamed, Laura Pulido
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Colonial Reckoning
Race and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Cuba
Louis A. Pérez Jr.
Duke University Press, 2023
In Colonial Reckoning Louis A. Pérez Jr. examines Cuba’s wars for independence in the second half of the nineteenth century, focusing specifically on those Cubans who remained loyal to Spain. Drawing on newspaper articles, personal letters, military battle reports, government commissions, consular reports, literature, and other materials, Pérez shows how everyday black, white, and creole Cubans defended the Spanish empire as paramilitary guerrillas alongside white elites. These loyalist Cubans helped the Spanish fight a separatist insurgency composed of a similarly diverse population of Cubans. Pérez demonstrates that these wars were so deadly and drawn out precisely because Cubans fought on both sides, each holding myriad competing visions of sovereignty and contested meanings of nation. Complicating mythical and historiographical narratives that Cuban national liberation was a struggle waged between Cubans of color and white elites beholden to Spain, Pérez shows that the fight consisted of a great number of factions with unique and evolving motivations. In so doing, he interrogates anew the multifaceted social dimensions and multiple political aspects of the complex drama of Cuban national formation.
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Colonial Rosary
The Spanish and Indian Missions of California
Alison Lake
Ohio University Press, 2006

California would be a different place today without the imprint of Spanish culture and the legacy of Indian civilization. The colonial Spanish missions that dot the coast and foothills between Sonoma and San Diego are relics of a past that transformed California’s landscape and its people.

In a spare and accessible style, Colonial Rosary looks at the complexity of California’s Indian civilization and the social effects of missionary control. While oppressive institutions lasted in California for almost eighty years under the tight reins of royal Spain, the Catholic Church, and the government of Mexico, letters and government documents reveal the missionaries’ genuine concern for the Indian communities they oversaw for their health, spiritual upbringing, and material needs.

With its balanced attention to the variety of sources on the mission period, Colonial Rosary illuminates ongoing debates over the role of the Franciscan missions in the settlement of California.

By sharing the missions’ stories of tragedy and triumph, author Alison Lake underlines the importance of preserving these vestiges of California’s prestatehood period. An illustrated tour of the missions as well as a sensitive record of their impact on California history and culture, Colonial Rosary brings the story of the Spanish missions of California alive.

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Colonial Search For A Southern Eden
Louis B. Wright
University of Alabama Press, 2008

European imperialists began to dream of other kinds of wealth besides gold in the New World

Louis Booker Wright was a graduate of Wofford College, and was at various times a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and a Benjamin Franklin Medalist, and he held honorary degrees from, among others, Princeton, Tulane, and California State University-Fulerton. He was the author of a number of books, including The Atlantic Frontier: Colonial American Civilization 1607-1763, Gold, Glory, and the Gospel: the Adventurous Lives of the Renaissance Explorers, Culture on the Moving Frontier, and The Dream of Prosperity in Colonial America. At the time of the preparation of this work he was Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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Colonial Situations
Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge
Edited by George W. Stocking, Jr.
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993

As European colonies in Asia and Africa became independent nations, as the United States engaged in war in Southeast Asia and in covert operations in South America, anthropologists questioned their interactions with their subjects and worried about the political consequences of government-supported research.  By 1970, some spoke of anthropology as “the child of Western imperialism” and as “scientific colonialism.”  Ironically, as the link between anthropology and colonialism became more widely accepted within the discipline, serious interest in examining the history of anthropology in colonial contexts diminished.


    This volume is an effort to initiate a critical historical consideration of the varying “colonial situations” in which (and out of which) ethnographic knowledge essential to anthropology has been produced.  The essays comment on ethnographic work from the middle of the nineteenth century to nearly the end of the twentieth, in regions from Oceania through southeast Asia, the Andaman Islands, and southern Africa to North and South America. 


    The “colonial situations” also cover a broad range, from first contact through the establishment of colonial power, from District Officer administrations through white settler regimes, from internal colonialism to international mandates, from early “pacification” to wars of colonial liberation, from the expropriation of land to the defense of ecology.  The motivations and responses of the anthropologists discussed are equally varied:  the romantic resistance of Maclay and the complicity of Kubary in early colonialism; Malinowski’s salesmanship of academic anthropology; Speck’s advocacy of Indian land rights; Schneider’s grappling with the ambiguities of rapport; and Turner’s facilitation of Kaiapo cinematic activism.



“Provides fresh insights for those who care about the history of science in general and that of anthropology in particular, and a valuable reference for professionals and graduate students.”—Choice



“Among the most distinguished publications in anthropology, as well as in the history of social sciences.”—George Marcus, Anthropologica

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The Colonial Spanish-American City
Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism
By Jay Kinsbruner
University of Texas Press, 2005

The colonial Spanish-American city, like its counterpart across the Atlantic, was an outgrowth of commercial enterprise. A center of entrepreneurial activity and wealth, it drew people seeking a better life, with more educational, occupational, commercial, bureaucratic, and marital possibilities than were available in the rural regions of the Spanish colonies. Indeed, the Spanish-American city represented hope and opportunity, although not for everyone.

In this authoritative work, Jay Kinsbruner draws on many sources to offer the first history and interpretation in English of the colonial Spanish-American city. After an overview of pre-Columbian cities, he devotes chapters to many important aspects of the colonial city, including its governance and administrative structure, physical form, economy, and social and family life. Kinsbruner's overarching thesis is that the Spanish-American city evolved as a circumstance of trans-Atlantic capitalism. Underpinning this thesis is his view that there were no plebeians in the colonial city. He calls for a class interpretation, with an emphasis on the lower-middle class. His study also explores the active roles of women, many of them heads of households, in the colonial Spanish-American city.

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Colonial Ste. Genevieve
An Adventure on the Mississippi Frontier
Carl J. Ekberg
Southern Illinois University Press, 1996
Colonial Ste. Genevieve: An Adventure on the Mississippi Frontier is a comprehensive, award-winning history of the French colonial town of Ste. Genevieve, from its founding in about 1750 to the Louisiana Purchase. Ekberg covers all aspects of the town during this period, including politics, agriculture, family life, and religion, and places Ste. Genevieve within the context of the history of the colonial Illinois Country. 
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Colonial Strangers
Women Writing the End of the British Empire
Lassner, Phyllis
Rutgers University Press, 2004
Colonial Strangers revolutionizes modern British literary studies by showing how our interpretations of the postcolonial must confront World War II and the Holocaust. Phyllis Lassner’s analysis reveals how writers such as Muriel Spark, Olivia Manning, Rumer Godden, Phyllis Bottome, Elspeth Huxley, and Zadie Smith insist that World War II is critical to understanding how and why the British Empire had to end.

Drawing on memoirs, fiction, reportage, and film adaptations, Colonial Strangers explores the critical perspectives of writers who correct prevailing stereotypes of British women as agents of imperialism. They also question their own participation in British claims of moral righteousness and British politics of cultural exploitation. These authors take center stage in debates about connections between the racist ideologies of the Third Reich and the British Empire.

Colonial Strangers reveals how the literary responses of key artists represent not only compelling reading, but also a necessary intervention in colonial and postcolonial debates and the canons of modern British fiction.


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Colonial Subjects
Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology
Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2000
It is often forgotten that anthropology--the scientific study of cultural difference--arose from situations that required a practical management of cultural differences. Out of the practical contexts of colonial contact--administration, mission, nationalism, policing, settler cultivation, tourism, warfare--emerged methods, and images of otherness, that inform anthropological notions of cultural difference to this day.
The essays in this volume share the assumption that "ethnography," far from being the unique purview of anthropology, is a broader field of practice out of which and alongside which anthropology attempted to distinguish itself as a scientific discipline. They explore a variety of situations in colonial South and Southeast Asia and Africa and in the treatment of the indigenous inhabitants of North America and Australia to provide genealogies of present-day anthropological practices, tracing them back to the subjects of colonial ethnography.
This book introduces into the history of anthropology many of the insights developed in recent studies in history, cultural studies, and the anthropology of colonialism. It can serve as a course book in the history of anthropology and the anthropology of colonialism, while at the same time addressing a much larger audience of students of colonial history, of the history of science and modernity, and of globalization.
Peter Pels is Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. Oscar Salemink is Program Officer for Social Sciences and Humanities, The Ford Foundation-Vietnam.
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Colonial Tactics and Everyday Life
Workers of the Manchuria Film Association
Yuxin Ma
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
Following the Japanese invasion of northeast China in 1931, the occupying authorities established the Manchuria Film Association to promote film production efficiency and serve Japan’s propaganda needs. Manchuria Film Association had two tasks: to make “national policy films” as part of a cultural mission of educating Chinese in Manchukuo (the puppet state created in 1932) on the special relationship between Japan and the region, and to block the exhibition of Chinese films from Shanghai that contained anti-Japanese messages. The corporation relied on Japanese capital, technology, and film expertise, but it also employed many Chinese filmmakers. After the withdrawal of Japanese forces in 1945, many of these individuals were portrayed as either exploited victims or traitorous collaborators. Yuxin Ma seeks to move the conversation beyond such simplistic and inaccurate depictions.

By focusing on the daily challenges and experiences of the Chinese workers at the corporation, Ma examines how life was actually lived by people navigating between practical and ideological concerns. She illustrates how the inhabitants of Manchukuo navigated social opportunities, economic depression, educational reforms, fascist rule, commercial interests, practical daily needs, and more—and reveals ways in which these conflicting preoccupations sometimes manifested as tension and ambiguity on screen. In the battle between repression and expression, these Chinese actors, directors, writers, and technicians adopted defensive and opportunistic tactics. They did so in colonial spaces, often rejecting modernist representations of Manchukuo in favor of venerating traditional Chinese culture and values. The expertise, skills, and professional networks they developed extended well beyond the occupation into the postwar period, and may individuals reestablished themselves as cinema professionals in the socialist era.
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Colonial Transactions
Imaginaries, Bodies, and Histories in Gabon
Florence Bernault
Duke University Press, 2019
In Colonial Transactions Florence Bernault moves beyond the racial divide that dominates colonial studies of Africa. Instead, she illuminates the strange and frightening imaginaries that colonizers and colonized shared on the ground. Bernault looks at Gabon from the late nineteenth century to the present, historicizing the most vivid imaginations and modes of power in Africa today: French obsessions with cannibals, the emergence of vampires and witches in the Gabonese imaginary, and the use of human organs for fetishes. Struggling over objects, bodies, agency, and values, colonizers and colonized entered relations that are better conceptualized as "transactions." Together they also shared an awareness of how the colonial situation broke down moral orders and forced people to use the evil side of power. This foreshadowed the ways in which people exercise agency in contemporary Africa, as well as the proliferation of magical fears and witchcraft anxieties in present-day Gabon. Overturning theories of colonial and postcolonial nativism, this book is essential reading for historians and anthropologists of witchcraft, power, value, and the body.
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Colonial Transformations in Venezuela
Anthropology, Archaeology, and History, Volume 47
Berta E. Pérez, ed.
Duke University Press
This special issue employs the tools of history, anthropology and ethnology to address the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in Venezuela. It examines various aspects of the Venezuelan oral-based cultures—including religion, gender, and trade—and argue that the indigenous and black populations were never "cultural islands"—neither before nor after European penetration.
"Colonial Transformations in Venezuela" also provides a much-needed ethnohistorical approach to tropical Amazonia in general. In light of current debates over the nature of the colonial occupation and the ecological potential of the tropical forest as a site for human complexity and development, the papers gathered in this special issue bring new kinds of arguments and important new data to these issues. The articles also indicate important new lines of research for the understanding of native histories in a modern age of global connections.

Contributors include Rodrigo Navarrete, H. Dieter Heinen. Alvaro Garcia-Castro, Rafael A. Gassón, Silvia M. Vidal, Lilliam Arvelo, Franz Scaramelli, Kay Tarble, and Nelly Arvelo-Jiménez

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Colonial Wars, 1689-1762
Howard H. Peckham
University of Chicago Press, 1965
Although the colonial wars consisted of almost continuous raids and skirmishes between the English and French colonists and their Indian allies and enemies, they can be separated into four major conflicts, corresponding to four European wars of which they were, in varying degrees, a part: King William's War (1689-97) (War of the League of Augsburg); Queen Anne's War (1702-13) (War of the Spanish Succession); King George's War (1744-48) (War of the Austrian Succession); and The French and Indian War (1755-62) (Seven Years' War).

Mr. Peckham chronicles the events of these wars, summarizing the struggle for empire in America among France, England, and Spain. He indicates how the colonists applied the experience they gained from fighting Indians to their engagements with European powers. And what they learned from the colonial wars they translated into a political philosophy that led to independence and self-government.

The ready involvement of the colonies in European ambitions, the success and failure of co-operation between colony and mother country, the efforts of the English colonies together, and the growing differences between them and Britain give the narrative continuity and rising excitement.
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Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine
By Laura Robson
University of Texas Press, 2011

Drawing on a rich base of British archival materials, Arabic periodicals, and secondary sources, Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine brings to light the ways in which the British colonial state in Palestine exacerbated sectarianism. By transforming Muslim, Christian, and Jewish religious identities into legal categories, Laura Robson argues, the British ultimately marginalized Christian communities in Palestine. Robson explores the turning points that developed as a result of such policies, many of which led to permanent changes in the region's political landscapes. Cases include the British refusal to support Arab Christian leadership within Greek-controlled Orthodox churches, attempts to avert involvement from French or Vatican-related groups by sidelining Latin and Eastern Rite Catholics, and interfering with Arab Christians' efforts to cooperate with Muslims in objecting to Zionist expansion. Challenging the widespread but mistaken notion that violent sectarianism was endemic to Palestine, Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine shows that it was intentionally stoked in the wake of British rule beginning in 1917, with catastrophic effects well into the twenty-first century.

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Colonialism and Culture
Nicholas B. Dirks, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1992
Colonialism has had cultural effects that have too often been ignored or displaced onto the inexorable logics of modernization and world capitalism. The articles in this important volume explore the multifaced nature of colonialism and its cultural manifestations and treat the unspoken values, hidden assumptions, and buried connections out of which states are made and power is simultaneously exercised and thwarted. The contributors consider explorers’ accounts, missions and conversion, peasant resistance, torture, law, labor, and agriculture, among other issues, using examples that range from South America to Sumatra, from Africa to the Philippines, from India to the metropolitan centers of colonial rule.
 
Colonialism and Culture provides new and important perspectives not only on colonialism, but also on the complex character of colonial history.
 
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Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany
Itohan Osayimwese
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
Over the course of the nineteenth century, drastic social and political changes, technological innovations, and exposure to non-Western cultures affected Germany’s built environment in profound ways. The economic challenges of Germany’s colonial project forced architects designing for the colonies to abandon a centuries-long, highly ornamental architectural style in favor of structural technologies and building materials that catered to the local contexts of its remote colonies, such as prefabricated systems. As German architects gathered information about the regions under their influence in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific—during expeditions, at international exhibitions, and from colonial entrepreneurs and officials—they published their findings in books and articles and organized lectures and exhibits that stimulated progressive architectural thinking and shaped the emerging modern language of architecture within Germany itself.

Offering in-depth interpretations across the fields of architectural history and postcolonial studies, Itohan Osayimwese considers the effects of colonialism, travel, and globalization on the development of modern architecture in Germany from the 1850s until the 1930s. Since architectural developments in nineteenth-century Germany are typically understood as crucial to the evolution of architecture worldwide in the twentieth century, this book globalizes the history of modern architecture at its founding moment.
 
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Colonialism and Race in Luso-Hispanic Literature
Jerome C. Branche
University of Missouri Press, 2006
    In Colonialism and Race in Luso-Hispanic Literature, Jerome C. Branche examines race naming and race making in the modern period (1415–1948). During this time, racism, a partner to both slavery and colonial exploitation, took myriad discursive forms, ranging from the reflections and treatises of philosophers and scientists to travel writing, novels, poetry, drama, and the grammar of everyday life. Branche’s main premise is that modern race making went hand in hand with European expansion, the colonial enterprise, and the international development of capitalism.
            Branche looks at the racially partisan works of the Luso-Hispanic canon to document just how long lasting, widespread, and deep the feelings they expressed were. He also illustrates how important race as narrative has been and continues to be. Branche pays particular attention to the Portuguese travel writing of the mid-fifteenth century, Spanish drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Cuban and Brazilian antislavery texts of the nineteenth century, and the Afro-Antillean negrismo movement of the twentieth century.
            While Colonialism and Race in Luso-Hispanic Literature complements important studies of the 1970s and 1990s that treat black identity in the Spanish literary tradition, at the same time its range is wider than many other works because of the inclusion of the Luso-Brazilian dimension, its examination of extraliterary texts, and its coverage of a broader time frame. Branche’s marriage of postcolonial and cultural theory with his own close readings of related texts leads to a provocative reconsideration of how the Negro was portrayed in Latin American cultural discourse.
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Colonialism and Science
Saint Domingue and the Old Regime
James E. McClellan III
University of Chicago Press, 2010

How was the character of science shaped by the colonial experience? In turn, how might we make sense of how science contributed to colonialism? Saint Domingue (now Haiti) was the world’s richest colony in the eighteenth century and home to an active society of science—one of only three in the world, at that time. In this deeply researched and pathbreaking study of the colony, James E. McClellan III first raised his incisive questions about the relationship between science and society that historians of the colonial experience are still grappling with today. Long considered rare, the book is now back in print in an English-language edition, accompanied by a new foreword by Vertus Saint-Louis, a native of Haiti and a widely-acknowledged expert on colonialism. Frequently cited as the crucial starting point in understanding the Haitian revolution, Colonialism and Science will be welcomed by students and scholars alike.

“By deftly weaving together imperialism and science in the story of French colonialism, [McClellan] . . . brings to light the history of an almost forgotten colony.”—Journal of Modern History

“McClellan has produced an impressive case study offering excellent surveys of Saint Domingue’s colonial history and its history of science.”—Isis

 

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Colonialism and Slavery
An Alternative History of the Port City of Rotterdam
Gert Oostindie
Leiden University Press, 2021
Unlike most city histories, this book focuses exclusively on the city’s connections with colonialism and slavery. Rotterdam, the second-largest Dutch city, is one of Europe’s leading ports. Its maritime expansion was intrinsically linked to Dutch colonialism, including slave trading and colonial slavery in the Americas, Africa and Asia. This painful history sits uneasily with the city’s modern cosmopolitan image and its large population of ‘new Rotterdammers’ with colonial roots. The present volume provides a summary of the research that has documented this history, with chapters on the contribution of colonial trade to economic development; the city’s involvement in slavery; the role of the urban political elites; the impact on urban development and architecture; the ‘ethical impulse’; colonial art and ethnographic collections; colonial and postcolonial migration; and finally the resonance of this history in postcolonial Rotterdam.
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Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany
Christian S. Davis
University of Michigan Press, 2012

Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany examines the relationship between the colonial and antisemitic movements of modern Germany from 1871 to 1918, examining the complicated ways in which German antisemitism and colonialism fed off of and into each other in the decades before the First World War. Author Christian S. Davis studies the significant involvement with and investment in German colonialism by the major antisemitic political parties and extra-parliamentary organizations of the day, while also investigating the prominent participation in the colonial movement of Jews and Germans of Jewish descent and their tense relationship with procolonial antisemites.

Working from the premise that the rise and propagation of racial antisemitism in late-nineteenth-century Germany cannot be separated from the context of colonial empire, Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany is the first work to study the dynamic and evolving interrelationship of the colonial and antisemitic movements of the Kaiserreich era. It shows how individuals and organizations who originated what would later become the ideological core of National Socialism---racial antisemitism---both influenced and perceived the development of a German colonial empire predicated on racial subjugation. It also examines how colonialism affected the contemporaneous German antisemitic movement, dividing it over whether participation in the nationalist project of empire building could furnish patriotic credentials to even Germans of Jewish descent. The book builds upon the recent upsurge of interest among historians of modern Germany in the domestic impact and character of German colonialism, and on the continuing fascination with the racialization of the German sense of self that became so important to German history in the twentieth century.

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Colonialism, Capitalism and Racism
A Postcolonial Chronicle of Dutch and Belgian Practice
Jan Breman
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
For a long time, Europe’s colonizing powers justified their urge for expansion with the conviction that they were ‘bringing civilization to territories where civilization was lacking.’ This doctrine of white superiority and indigenous inferiority was accompanied by a boundless exploitation of local labor. Under colonial rule, the ideology that later became known as neoliberalism was free to subject labor to a capitalism tainted by racialized policies. This political economy has now become dominant in the Western world, too, and has reversed the trend towards equality. In Colonialism, Capitalism and Racism, Jan Breman shows how racial favoritism is no longer contained to ‘faraway, indigenous peoples,’ but has become a source of polarization within Western societies as well.
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Colonialism Experienced
Vietnamese Writings on Colonialism, 1900-1931
Truong Buu Lam
University of Michigan Press, 2000
The first three decades of the twentieth century in late-colonial Vietnam--the period that also marked the transition between the dominant Confucian and nascent Western worldviews--generated an abundance of political literature in that country. The documents from this transitional era belong to a variety of genres: propaganda pamphlets, open letters to government officials, texts for private or clandestine classrooms, manifestos of political or cultural organizations, columns from newspapers, public proclamations, petitions to international agencies, and poems. Whether from the old or the new era, however, they all expressed an opinion on the colonial status of their country.
Scholar Truong Buu Lam has collected twenty of these documents, all written between 1900 and 1931, into an anthology which captures the spirit of the conflicting ideologies and the political struggles of this time. Written originally in Vietnamese, French, or classical Chinese, the documents have been translated into English by Lam and given individual introductions in an effort to clarify their historical contexts most accurately. Lam also provides a lengthy overview of the contemporary scene at the time of the writings to further illuminate the grander themes tying the writings together.
In Vietnam, all of these writings are well-known texts, quoted in every publication that examines the period under consideration; yet, to the best of our knowledge, few have been reproduced in their entirety and none has ever been translated into English. This translation marks an important addition to the fields of Southeast Asian and colonial studies and will be welcomed by historians, political scientists, and anthropologists alike.
Truong Buu Lam is Associate Professor of History, University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is editor of the collections Patterns of Vietnamese Response to Foreign Intervention, 1858-1900 and Borrowings and Adaptations in Vietnamese Culture, and the author of Resistance, Rebellion, Revolution: Popular Movements in Vietnamese History and New Lamps for Old: The Transformation of the Vietnamese Administrative Elite.
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Colonialism in the Congo Basin, 1880–1940
Samuel H. Nelson
Ohio University Press, 1993
This exceptional study of the Mongo people of the upper Congo River basin focuses on the evolution of Mongo work patterns from the period of the late nineteenth century to 1940, the high-water mark of the colonial period. It brings new evidence from oral histories, anthropological research, and archival records to build on or to correct colonial ethnographic accounts. From this fresh vantage point, Nelson reassesses colonial labor policies and relates them to today’s rural poverty and underdevelopment.
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Colonialism, Institutional Change, and Shifts in Global Labour Relations
Edited by Karin Hofmeester and Pim de Zwart
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
This book offers a view of shifts in labour relations in various parts of the world over a breathtaking span, from 1500 to 2000, with a particular emphasis on colonial institutions. How did growing demand for colonial commodities affect labour in the Global South? How did colonial interference with land and labour markets affect developments in labour relations? And what were the effects of the introduction of colonial currencies? The contributors to this volume answer those questions and more, combining global perspectives with impressively detailed case studies.
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Colonialism Is Crime
Marianne Nielsen
Rutgers University Press, 2019
There is powerful evidence that the colonization of Indigenous people was and is a crime, and that that crime is on-going. Achieving historical colonial goals often meant committing acts that were criminal even at the time. The consequences of this oppression and criminal victimization is perhaps the critical factor explaining why Indigenous people today are overrepresented as victims and offenders in the settler colonist criminal justice systems. This book presents an analysis of the relationship between these colonial crimes and their continuing criminal and social consequences that exist today. The authors focus primarily on countries colonized by Britain, especially the United States. Social harm theory, human rights covenants, and law are used to explain the criminal aspects of the historical laws and their continued effects. The final chapter looks at the responsibilities of settler-colonists in ameliorating these harms and the actions currently being taken by Indigenous people themselves.
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Coloniality and the Rise of Liberation Thinking during the Sixteenth Century
Thomas Ward
Arc Humanities Press, 2021
This book delves into the inadequately explored, liberative side of Humanism during the late Renaissance. While some long-sixteenth-century thinking anticipates twentieth-century Liberation Theology, a more appropriate description is simply “liberation thinking,” which embraces its diverse, timeless, and sometimes nontheological aspects. Two moments frame the treatment of American colonialism’s physical and mental pathways and the liberative response to them, known as liberation thinking. These are St. Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516, and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s thousand-page Nueva crónica y buen gobierno, completed one hundred years later. These works and others by Erasmus and Bartolomé de las Casas trace the development of the idea of human liberation in the face of degrading chattel and encomienda slavery as well as the peonage that gave rise to the hacienda system in the Americas. Catholic humanists such as More, Erasmus, Las Casas, and Guaman Poma developed arguments, theories, and even theology that attempted to deconstruct those subordinating structures.
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Coloniality at Large
Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate
Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui, eds.
Duke University Press, 2008
Postcolonial theory has developed mainly in the U.S. academy, and it has focused chiefly on nineteenth-century and twentieth-century colonization and decolonization processes in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. Colonialism in Latin America originated centuries earlier, in the transoceanic adventures from which European modernity itself was born. Coloniality at Large brings together classic and new reflections on the theoretical implications of colonialism in Latin America. By pointing out its particular characteristics, the contributors highlight some of the philosophical and ideological blind spots of contemporary postcolonial theory as they offer a thorough analysis of that theory’s applicability to Latin America’s past and present.

Written by internationally renowned scholars based in Latin America, the United States, and Europe, the essays reflect multiple disciplinary and ideological perspectives. Some are translated into English for the first time. The collection includes theoretical reflections, literary criticism, and historical and ethnographic case studies focused on Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Brazil, the Andes, and the Caribbean. Contributors examine the relation of Marxist thought, dependency theory, and liberation theology to Latin Americans’ experience of and resistance to coloniality, and they emphasize the critique of Occidentalism and modernity as central to any understanding of the colonial project. Analyzing the many ways that Latin Americans have resisted imperialism and sought emancipation and sovereignty over several centuries, they delve into topics including violence, identity, otherness, memory, heterogeneity, and language. Contributors also explore Latin American intellectuals’ ambivalence about, or objections to, the “post” in postcolonial; to many, globalization and neoliberalism are the contemporary guises of colonialism in Latin America.

Contributors: Arturo Arias, Gordon Brotherston, Santiago Castro-Gómez, Sara Castro-Klaren, Amaryll Chanady, Fernando Coronil, Román de la Campa, Enrique Dussel, Ramón Grosfoguel, Russell G. Hamilton, Peter Hulme, Carlos A. Jáuregui, Michael Löwy, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, José Antonio Mazzotti, Eduardo Mendieta, Walter D. Mignolo, Mario Roberto Morales, Mabel Moraña, Mary Louise Pratt, Aníbal Quijano, José Rabasa, Elzbieta Sklodowska, Catherine E. Walsh

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Coloniality in the Cliff Swallow
The Effect of Group Size on Social Behavior
Charles R. Brown and Mary Bomberger Brown
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Many animal species live and breed in colonies. Although biologists have documented numerous costs and benefits of group living, such as increased competition for limited resources and more pairs of eyes to watch for predators, they often still do not agree on why coloniality evolved in the first place.

Drawing on their twelve-year study of a population of cliff swallows in Nebraska, the Browns investigate twenty-six social and ecological costs and benefits of coloniality, many never before addressed in a systematic way for any species. They explore how these costs and benefits are reflected in reproductive success and survivorship, and speculate on the evolution of cliff swallow coloniality.

This work, the most comprehensive and detailed study of vertebrate coloniality to date, will be of interest to all who study social animals, including behavioral ecologists, population biologists, ornithologists, and parasitologists. Its focus on the evolution of coloniality will also appeal to evolutionary biologists and to psychologists studying decision making in animals.
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Coloniality in the Maya Lowlands
Archaeological Perspectives
edited by Kasey Diserens Morgan &Tiffany C. Fryer
University Press of Colorado, 2022
Coloniality in the Maya Lowlands explores what has been required of the Maya to survive both internal and external threats and other destabilizing forces. These include shifting power dynamics and sociocultural transformations, tumultuous political regimes, the precarity of newly formed nation states, migration in search of refuge, and newly globalizing economies in the Yucatecan lowlands in the Late Colonial to Early National periods—the times when formal Spanish colonial rule was giving way to Yucatecan and Mexican neocolonial settler systems.
 
The work takes a hemispheric approach to the historical and material analysis of colonialism, bridging the often disparate literatures on coloniality and settler colonialism. Archaeologists and anthropologists working in what are today southeastern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras grapple with the material realities of coloniality at a regional level. They provide sustained discussions of Maya experiences with wide-ranging colonial endurances: violence, resource insecurity, land rights, refugees, the control of borders, the movement of contraband, surveillance, individual and collective agency, consumption, and use of historic resources.
 
Considering a future for historical archaeologies of the Maya region that bridges anthropology, ethnohistory, Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and Latin American studies, Coloniality in the Maya Lowlands presents a new understanding of how ways of being in the Maya world have formed and changed over time, as well as the shared investments of historical archaeologists and sociocultural anthropologists working in the Maya region.
 
 
Contributors: Fernando Armstrong-Fumero, Alejandra Badillo Sánchez, Adolfo Iván Batún Alpuche, A. Brooke Bonorden, Maia C. Dedrick, Scott L. Fedick, Fior García Lara, John Gust, Brett A. Houk, Rosemary A. Joyce, Gertrude B. Kilgore, Jennifer P. Mathews, Patricia A. McAnany, James W. Meierhoff, Fabián A. Olán de la Cruz, Julie K. Wesp
 
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The Coloniality of the Secular
Race, Religion, and Poetics of World-Making
An Yountae
Duke University Press, 2024
In The Coloniality of the Secular, An Yountae investigates the collusive ties between the modern concepts of the secular, religion, race, and coloniality in the Americas. Drawing on the work of Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Sylvia Wynter, and Enrique Dussel, An maps the intersections of revolutionary non-Western thought with religious ideas to show how decoloniality redefines the sacred as an integral part of its liberation vision. He examines these thinkers’ rejection of colonial religions and interrogates the narrow conception of religion that confines it within colonial power structures. An explores decoloniality’s conception of the sacred in relation to revolutionary violence, gender, creolization, and racial phenomenology, demonstrating its potential for reshaping religious paradigms. Pointing out that the secular has been pivotal to regulating racial hierarchies under colonialism, he advocates for a broader understanding of religion that captures the fundamental ideas that drive decolonial thinking. By examining how decolonial theory incorporates the sacred into its vision of liberation, An invites readers to rethink the transformative power of decoloniality and religion to build a hopeful future.
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Coloniality of the US/Mexico Border
Power, Violence, and the Decolonial Imperative
Roberto D. Hernández
University of Arizona Press, 2018
National borders are often taken for granted as normal and necessary for a peaceful and orderly global civil society. Roberto D. Hernández here advances a provocative argument that borders—and border violence—are geospatial manifestations of long histories of racialized and gendered colonial violence.

In Coloniality of the U-S///Mexico Border, Hernández offers an exemplary case and lens for understanding what he terms the “epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality.” He adopts “coloniality of power” as a central analytical category and framework to consider multiple forms of real and symbolic violence (territorial, corporeal, cultural, and epistemic) and analyzes the varied responses by diverse actors, including local residents, government officials, and cultural producers.

Based on more than twenty years of border activism in San Diego–Tijuana and El Paso–Ciudad Juárez, this book is an interdisciplinary examination that considers the 1984 McDonald’s massacre, Minutemen vigilantism, border urbanism, the ongoing murder of women in Ciudad Juárez, and anti-border music.

Hernández’s approach is at once historical, ethnographic, and theoretically driven, yet it is grounded in analyses and debates that cut across political theory, border studies, and cultural studies. The volume concludes with a theoretical discussion of the future of violence at—and because of—­national territorial borders, offering a call for epistemic and cartographic disobedience.

 
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Colonias and Public Policy in Texas and Mexico
Urbanization by Stealth
By Peter M. Ward
University of Texas Press, 1999

Today in Texas, over 1500 colonias in the counties along the Mexican border are home to some 400,000 people. Often lacking basic services, such as electricity, water and sewerage, fire protection, policing, schools, and health care, these "irregular" subdivisions offer the only low-cost housing available to the mostly Hispanic working poor.

This book presents the results of a major study of colonias in three transborder metropolitan areas and uncovers the reasons why colonias are spreading so rapidly. Peter Ward compares Texas colonias with their Mexican counterparts, many of which have developed into fully integrated working-class urban communities. He describes how Mexican governments have worked with colonia residents to make physical improvements and upgrade services-a model that Texas policymakers can learn from, Ward asserts. Finally, he concludes with a hard-hitting checklist of public policy initiatives that need to be considered as colonia housing policy enters its second decade in Texas.

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Colonias in Arizona and New Mexico
Border Poverty and Community Development Solutions
Adrian X. Esparza and Angela J. Donelson
University of Arizona Press, 2008
There are approximately half a million people living in 227 officially designated colonias in southern Arizona and New Mexico. These border communities are characterized by poor-quality housing, a lack of infrastructure (paved roads, water and sewer systems, and electricity), high levels of poverty and unemployment, and a disproportionate concentration of Hispanics. These colonias comprise one of the country’s largest pockets of poverty. Even so, little is known about these towns or the people who live in them. This book provides the first comprehensive treatment of Arizona and New Mexico colonias, with the aim of increasing their visibility and promoting community development.

Beginning with an examination of the origins of border region settlement and the emergence of colonias in southern Arizona and New Mexico in the late 1800s, the book then turns to an assessment of current social, economic, and housing conditions. The authors also examine how Mexico’s recent economic crises and U.S. immigration and border security policies have shaped the quality of life in colonias, and they evaluate recent community development initiatives. By examining the challenges and successes of these recent efforts, the authors are able to provide a generalized plan for community development. Balancing analyses of these communities with a review of the positive steps taken to improve the quality of life of their inhabitants, Colonias in Arizona and New Mexico is an indispensable tool for anyone interested in public policy or immigration issues.
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The Colonias Reader
Economy, Housing and Public Health in U.S.-Mexico Border Colonias
Edited by Angela J. Donelson and Adrian X. Esparza
University of Arizona Press, 2010
The colonias of the U.S.–Mexico border form a loose network of more than 2,500 settlements, ranging in size from villages to cities, that are home to over a million people. While varying in size, all share common features: wrenching poverty, substandard housing, and public health issues approaching crisis levels. This book brings together scholars, professionals, and activists from a wide range of disciplines to examine the pressing issues of economic development, housing and community development, and public and environmental health in colonias of the four U.S.–Mexico border states.

The Colonias Reader is the first book to present such a broad overview of these communities, offering a glimpse into life in the colonias and the circumstances that allow them to continue to exist—and even grow—in persistent poverty. The contributors document the depth of existing problems in each state and describe how government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and community activists have mobilized resources to overcome obstacles to progress.

More than reporting problems and documenting programs, the book provides conceptual frameworks that tie poverty to institutional and class-based conflicts, and even challenges the very basis of colonia designations. Most of these contributions move beyond portraying border residents as hapless victims of discrimination and racism, showing instead their devotion to improving their own living conditions through grassroots organizing and community leadership.

These contributions show that, despite varying degrees of success, all colonia residents aspire to a livable wage, safe and decent housing, and basic health care. The Colonias Reader showcases many situations in which these people have organized to fulfill these ambitions and provides new insight into life along the border.
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Colonies of Paradise
Poems
Matthias Göritz, translated from the German by Mary Jo Bang
Northwestern University Press, 2023

The first book of poetry by Matthias Göritz to be available in English, in a translation by a renowned writer

Very few books of poetry by contemporary German writers are available to English-speaking readers. In Colonies of Paradise, acclaimed poet and translator Mary Jo Bang introduces the poems of novelist, poet, and translator Matthias Göritz, one of the most exciting German writers publishing today. The poems in this book, which originally appeared in German under the title Loops, take the reader on a tour of Paris, Chicago, Hamburg, and Moscow as they explore childhood, travel, and the human experience. Unsettling our expectations about adulthood, the book permeates the quotidian with a disquieting strangeness that leads us deeper into our own lives and histories. Göritz’s sly humor, keen insight, and artistry are brought to the fore in Bang’s careful and innovative translation, allowing an English-language audience to enter fully the intricate interiority of Göritz’s work.

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Colonization After Emancipation
Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement
Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page
University of Missouri Press, 2011
History has long acknowledged that President Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, had considered other approaches to rectifying the problem of slavery during his administration. Prior to Emancipation, Lincoln was a proponent of colonization: the idea of sending African American slaves to another land to live as free people. Lincoln supported resettlement schemes in Panama and Haiti early in his presidency and openly advocated the idea through the fall of 1862. But the bigoted, flawed concept of colonization never became a permanent fixture of U.S. policy, and by the time Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, the word “colonization” had disappeared from his public lexicon. As such, history remembers Lincoln as having abandoned his support of colonization when he signed the proclamation. Documents exist, however, that tell another story.

Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement explores the previously unknown truth about Lincoln’s attitude toward colonization. Scholars Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page combed through extensive archival materials, finding evidence, particularly within British Colonial and Foreign Office documents, which exposes what history has neglected to reveal—that Lincoln continued to pursue colonization for close to a year after emancipation. Their research even shows that Lincoln may have been attempting to revive this policy at the time of his assassination.

Using long-forgotten records scattered across three continents—many of them untouched since the Civil War—the authors show that Lincoln continued his search for a freedmen’s colony much longer than previously thought. Colonization after Emancipation reveals Lincoln’s highly secretive negotiations with the British government to find suitable lands for colonization in the West Indies and depicts how the U.S. government worked with British agents and leaders in the free black community to recruit emigrants for the proposed colonies. The book shows that the scheme was never very popular within Lincoln’s administration and even became a subject of subversion when the president’s subordinates began battling for control over a lucrative “colonization fund” established by Congress.

Colonization after Emancipation reveals an unexplored chapter of the emancipation story. A valuable contribution to Lincoln studies and Civil War history, this book unearths the facts about an ill-fated project and illuminates just how complex, and even convoluted, Abraham Lincoln’s ideas about the end of slavery really were.
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The Colonization of Freed African Americans in Suriname
Archival Sources relating to the U.S.-Dutch Negotiations, 1860-1866
Michael J. Douma
Leiden University Press, 2019
During the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln’s administration engaged in protracted negotiations with representatives of the Netherlands to aid in the voluntarily colonization of free African Americans to Suriname. Scores of diplomatic letters in Dutch, English, and French, dating to the period 1862 to 1866 attest to the very real possibility that such migration stream could have become a reality. They also indicate reasons why this scheme failed: it was bogged down by differences of opinion, mail delays, and ultimately a reluctance of any African Americans to migrate. Previously unpublished and unknown, these letters have been transcribed and translated here for the first time. The sources provide a rare look inside the minds of liberal government officials during the age of emancipation in the Atlantic World. They demonstrate the officials’ humanitarian concerns, their racial prejudices, respect for legal order and process, and faith in governments to solve international problems. 
 
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Colonization Of Psychic Space
A Psychoanalytic Social Theory Of Oppression
Kelly Oliver
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

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The Colonization of the Amazon
By Anna Luiza Ozorio de Almeida
University of Texas Press, 1992

Deforestation in the Amazon, one of today's top environmental concerns, began during a period of rapid colonization in the 1970s. Throughout that decade, Anna Luiza Ozorio de Almeida, a Stanford-trained economist, conducted a complex and massive economic study of what was going on in the Amazon, who was investing what, what was gained, and what it cost in all its aspects. The Colonization of the Amazon, the resulting work, brings together information on the physical, demographic, institutional, and economic dimensions of directed settlement in the Amazon Basin and raises significant questions about the gains and losses of the settlers, the reasons for these outcomes, and the economic rationale behind the devastation of the rainforest.

Particularly illuminating is Almeida's exploration of the role of the frontier in Brazil and her distinction between types of migrants and migrations. She concludes that the political costs avoided by not undertaking agrarian reform are being paid by devastating the Amazon, with the conflict between distribution and conservation steadily worsening. Today, it can no longer be circumvented.

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Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing
André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee
Rosemary Jane Jolly
Ohio University Press, 1995

The representation of pain and suffering in narrative form is an ongoing ethical issue in contemporary South African literature. Can violence be represented without sensationalistic effects, or, alternatively, without effects that tend to be conservative because they place the reader in a position of superiority over the victim or the perpetrator?

Jolly looks at three primary South African authors—André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee—to consider violence in the context of apartheid and colonialism and their inherent patriarchies.

Jolly also discusses the violence attendant upon the act of narration in the broader context of critiques of Kafka, Freud, Hegel, the postcolonial critics Jan Mohamed and Bhabha, and feminists such as Susan Suleiman.

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Colonizing, Decolonizing, and Globalizing Kolkata
From a Colonial to a Post-Marxist City
Siddhartha Sen
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Colonizing, Decolonizing, and Globalizing Kolkata offers an extended analysis of the architecture and urban planning of Kolkata from the earliest days of colonialism through independence and on into the twenty-first century, all set in the larger context of Indian cities’ architecture and urban planning. What Siddhartha Sen shows is the transformation of a colonial city into a Marxist one — and ongoing attempts to further transform Kolkata into a global city. Richly illustrated, the book carefully situates architecture, design, and urban planning within Kolkata’s political economy and social milieu.
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Colonizing Paradise
Landscape and Empire in the British West Indies
Jefferson Dillman
University of Alabama Press, 2015
Explores how perceptions and depictions of the physical landscape both reflected and influenced the history of the British colonial Caribbean

In Colonizing Paradise, historian Jefferson Dillman charts the broad spectrum of sentiments that British citizens and travelers held regarding their colonial possessions in the West Indies. Myriad fine degrees of ambivalence separated extreme views of the region as an idyllic archipelago or a nest of Satanic entrapments. Dillman shows the manner in which these authentic or spontaneous depictions of the environment were shaped to form a narrative that undergirded Britain’s economic and political aims in the region.
 
Because British sentiments in the Caribbean located danger and evil not just in indigenous populations but in Spanish Catholics as well, Dillman’s work begins with the arrival of Spanish explorers and conquistadors. Colonizing Paradise spans the arrival of English ships and continues through the early nineteenth century and the colonial era. Dillman shows how colonial entrepreneurs, travelers, and settlers engaged in a disquieted dialogue with the landscape itself, a dialogue the examination of which sheds fresh light on the culture of the Anglophone colonial Caribbean.
 
Of particular note are the numerous mythical, metaphorical, and biblical lenses through which Caribbean landscapes were viewed, from early views of the Caribbean landscape as a New World paradise to later depictions of the landscape as a battleground between the forces of Christ and Satan. The ideal of an Edenic landscape persisted, but largely, Dillman argues, as one that needed to be wrested from the forces of darkness, principally through the work of colonization, planting, cataloguing, and a rational ordering of the environment.
 
Ultimately, although planters and their allies continued to promote pastoral and picturesque views of the Caribbean landscape, the goal of such narratives was to rationalize British rule as well as to mask and obscure emerging West Indian problems such as diseases, slavery, and rebellions. Colonizing Paradise offers much to readers interested in Caribbean, British, and colonial history.
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The Colonizing Self
Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine
Hagar Kotef
Duke University Press, 2020
Colonizers continuously transform spaces of violence into spaces of home. Israeli Jews settle in the West Bank and in depopulated Palestinian houses in Haifa or Jaffa. White missionaries build their lives in Africa. The descendants of European settlers in the Americas and Australia dwell and thrive on expropriated indigenous lands. In The Colonizing Self Hagar Kotef traces the cultural, political, and spatial apparatuses that enable people and nations to settle on the ruins of other people's homes. Kotef demonstrates how the mass and structural modes of violence that are necessary for the establishment and sustainment of the colony dwell within settler-colonial homemaking, and through it shape collective and individual identities. She thus powerfully shows how the possibility to live amid the destruction one generates is not merely the possibility to turn one's gaze away from violence but also the possibility to develop an attachment to violence itself. Kotef thereby offers a theoretical framework for understanding how settler-colonial violence becomes inseparable from one's sense of self.
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Colonizing Trick
National Culture And Imperial Citizenship In Early America
David Kazanjian
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
An illuminating look at the concepts of race, nation, and equality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. The idea that "all men are created equal" is as close to a universal tenet as exists in American history. In this hard-hitting book, David Kazanjian interrogates this tenet, exploring transformative flash points in early America when the belief in equality came into contact with seemingly contrary ideas about race and nation. The Colonizing Trick depicts early America as a white settler colony in the process of becoming an empire--one deeply integrated with Euro-American political economy, imperial ventures in North America and Africa, and pan-American racial formations. Kazanjian traces tensions between universal equality and racial or national particularity through theoretically informed critical readings of a wide range of texts: the political writings of David Walker and Maria Stewart, the narratives of black mariners, economic treatises, the personal letters of Thomas Jefferson and Phillis Wheatley, Charles Brockden Brown's fiction, congressional tariff debates, international treaties, and popular novelettes about the U.S.-Mexico War and the Yucatán's Caste War. Kazanjian shows how emergent racial and national formations do not contradict universalist egalitarianism; rather, they rearticulate it, making equality at once restricted, formal, abstract, and materially embodied. David Kazanjian is associate professor of English, Queens College, and visiting associate professor of English, The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
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Colophons of Armenian Manuscripts, 1301-1480
A Source for Middle Eastern History
Avedis K. Sanjian
Harvard University Press, 1969

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Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica
Constructing Categories as Vantages
By Robert E. MacLaury
University of Texas Press, 1996

More than 100 indigenous languages are spoken in Mexico and Central America. Each language partitions the color spectrum according to a pattern that is unique in some way. But every local system of color categories also shares characteristics with the systems of other Mesoamerican languages and of languages elsewhere in the world.

This book presents the results of the Mesoamerican Color Survey, which Robert E. MacLaury conducted in 1978-1981. Drawn from interviews with 900 speakers of some 116 Mesoamerican languages, the book provides a sweeping overview of the organization and semantics of color categorization in modern Mesoamerica.

Extensive analysis and MacLaury's use of vantage theory reveal complex and often surprising interrelationships among the ways languages categorize colors. His findings offer valuable cross-cultural data for all students of Mesoamerica. They will also be of interest to all linguists and cognitive scientists working on theories of categorization more generally.

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Color and Color Perception
A Study in Anthropocentric Realism
David R. Hilbert
CSLI, 1987
Color has often been supposed to be a subjective property, a property to be analyzed correctly in terms of the phenomenological aspects of human experience. In contrast with subjectivism, an objectivist analysis of color takes color to be a property objects possess in themselves, independently of the character of human perceptual experience. David Hilbert defends a form of objectivism that identifies color with a physical property of surfaces---their spectral reflectance. This analysis of color is shown to provide a more adequate account of the features of human color vision than its subjectivist rivals. The author's account of color also recognizeds that the human perceptual system provides a limited and idiosyncratic picture of the world. These limitations are shown to be consistent with a realist account of color and to provide the necessary tools for giving an analysis of common sense knowledge of color phenomena.
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Color and Culture
Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual
Ross Posnock
Harvard University Press, 1998

The coining of the term “intellectuals” in 1898 coincided with W. E. B. Du Bois’s effort to disseminate values and ideals unbounded by the color line. Du Bois’s ideal of a “higher and broader and more varied human culture” is at the heart of a cosmopolitan tradition that Color and Culture identifies as a missing chapter in American literary and cultural history. The book offers a much needed and startlingly new historical perspective on “black intellectuals” as a social category, ranging over a century—from Frederick Douglass to Patricia Williams, from Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles Chesnutt to Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alain Locke, from Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin to Samuel Delany and Adrienne Kennedy. These writers challenge two durable assumptions: that high culture is “white culture” and that racial uplift is the sole concern of the black intellectual.

The remarkable tradition that this book recaptures, culminating in a cosmopolitan disregard for demands for racial “authenticity” and group solidarity, is strikingly at odds with the identity politics and multicultural movements of our day. In the Du Boisian tradition Ross Posnock identifies a universalism inseparable from the particular and open to ethnicity—an approach with the power to take us beyond the provincialism of postmodern tribalism.

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Color and Empathy
Essays on Two Aspects of Film
Christine N. Brinckmann
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
The collection of essays brings together texts from two decades, documenting two of the author's ongoing areas of interest: the poetics of colour in film as well as affective viewer responses. Employing a bottom-up approach as a basis for theoretical exploration, each of the essays concentrates on a particular film or a number of related films to come to terms with a set of issues. These include the differences between black-and-white and color works, the emergence of bold chromatic schemes in the 1950s, experimental aesthetics of color negative stock, idiosyncratic uses of colour, idiosyncratic uses of motor mimicry, genre-specific reactions to the documentary, and empathetic reactions to animals and to architecture in film.
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Color Atlas of the Surface Forms of the Earth
Helmut Blume and R. Gardner
Harvard University Press, 1992
This color atlas describes the manifold landforms of the earth's surface and explains how they evolved. The author has selected photos from all over the world in order to achieve a rather complete and systematic survey. In general as well as in explaining photos, the text is both concise and easily readable even for the general reader looking for information on landforms, morphodynamic processes, and also for explanation of geomorphic terms. Text, figures, and photos are arranged in a most didactic way so that the color atlas may serve as an introduction to the subject of geomorphology.
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The Color Bind
Talking (and Not Talking) About Race at Work
Erica Gabrielle Foldy
Russell Sage Foundation, 2014
Since the 1960s, the dominant model for fostering diversity and inclusion in the United States has been the “color blind” approach, which emphasizes similarity and assimilation and insists that people should be understood as individuals, not as members of racial or cultural groups. This approach is especially prevalent in the workplace, where discussions about race and ethnicity are considered taboo. Yet, as widespread as “color blindness” has become, many studies show that the practice has damaging repercussions, including reinforcing the existing racial hierarchy by ignoring the significance of racism and discrimination. In The Color Bind, workplace experts Erica Foldy and Tamara Buckley investigate race relations in office settings, looking at how both color blindness and what they call “color cognizance” have profound effects on the ways coworkers think and interact with each other. Based on an intensive two-and-a-half-year study of employees at a child welfare agency, The Color Bind shows how color cognizance—the practice of recognizing the profound impact of race and ethnicity on life experiences while affirming the importance of racial diversity—can help workers move beyond silence on the issue of race toward more inclusive workplace practices. Drawing from existing psychological and sociological research that demonstrates the success of color-cognizant approaches in dyads, workgroups and organizations, Foldy and Buckley analyzed the behavior of work teams within a child protection agency. The behaviors of three teams in particular reveal the factors that enable color cognizance to flourish. While two of the teams largely avoided explicitly discussing race, one group, “Team North,” openly talked about race and ethnicity in team meetings. By acknowledging these differences when discussing how to work with their clients and with each other, the members of Team North were able to dig into challenges related to race and culture instead of avoiding them. The key to achieving color cognizance within the group was twofold: It required both the presence of at least a few members who were already color cognizant, as well as an environment in which all team members felt relatively safe and behaved in ways that strengthened learning, including productively resolving conflict and reflecting on their practice. The Color Bind provides a useful lens for policy makers, researchers and practitioners pursuing in a wide variety of goals, from addressing racial disparities in health and education to creating diverse and inclusive organizations to providing culturally competent services to clients and customers. By foregrounding open conversations about race and ethnicity, Foldy and Buckley show that institutions can transcend the color bind in order to better acknowledge and reflect the diverse populations they serve.
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The Color Black
Enslavement and Erasure in Iran
Beeta Baghoolizadeh
Duke University Press, 2024
In The Color Black, Beeta Baghoolizadeh traces the twin processes of enslavement and erasure of Black people in Iran during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She illustrates how geopolitical changes and technological advancements in the nineteenth century made enslaved East Africans uniquely visible in their servitude in wealthy and elite Iranian households. During this time, Blackness, Africanness, and enslavement became intertwined—and interchangeable—in Iranian imaginations. After the end of slavery in 1929, the implementation of abolition involved an active process of erasure on a national scale, such that a collective amnesia regarding slavery and racism persists today. The erasure of enslavement resulted in the erasure of Black Iranians as well. Baghoolizadeh draws on photographs, architecture, theater, circus acts, newspapers, films, and more to document how the politics of visibility framed discussions around enslavement and abolition during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this way, Baghoolizadeh makes visible the people and histories that were erased from Iran and its diaspora.
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Color Harmonies
Augusto Garau
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Because theories of visual perception have traditionally concentrated on form, artists have generally dealt with the problem of color through their own observation and intuition. In Color Harmonies, Augusto Garau systematically investigates the role of both color and form in visual perception and presents an original theory of the aesthetic relations among colors.

Garau, a painter who teaches the psychology of form, pays particular attention to the way colors behave when organized in patterns. His theory of color combination addresses two principal compositional elements: the relations between figure and ground and the phenomenon of transparency.

Garau meticulously analyzes the use of color in paintings by masters such as Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse to show how his theory applies to actual works of art. Containing many full-color examples, his introduction to the workings of color relations is of great practical use to art historians and critics, artists, interior decorators, fashion and set designers, and anyone who works with color to display information or convey emotions.

"In an area of the psychology of art where reliable guidance is still so hard to come by, [Garau's] well-supported contributions to the theory of color composition ought to be welcomed by practitioners and scholars alike."—from the Foreword by Rudolf Arnheim
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Color in the Ancestral Pueblo Southwest
Edited by Marit K. Munson and Kelley Hays-Gilpin
University of Utah Press, 2019
Color attracts attention, evokes emotions, conveys information, carries complex meanings, and makes things beautiful. Color is so meaningful, in fact, that research on the color choices of Ancestral Pueblo people has the potential to deepen our understanding of religious, social, and economic change in the ancient Southwest. This volume explores museum collections and more than a century of archaeological research to create the first systematic understanding of the many ways Ancestral Pueblo people chose specific colors through time and space to add meaning and visual appeal to their lives.
 
Beginning with the technical and practical concerns of acquiring pigments and using them to create paints, the authors explore how connections to landscapes and sacred places are embodied by many colorful materials. Contributors examine the development of polychromes and their juxtaposition with black-on-white vessels; document how color was used in rock paintings and architecture; and consider the inherent properties of materials, arguing that shell, minerals, and stone were valued not only for color but for other visual properties as well. The book concludes by considering the technological, economic, social, and ideological factors at play and demonstrates the significant role color played in aesthetic choices.
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The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America
Reynolds Farley
Russell Sage Foundation, 1987
Is the United States a nation divided by the "color line," as W.E.B. Dubois declared? What is the impact of race on the lives of Americans today? In this powerful new assessment of the social reality of race, Reynolds Farley and Walter Allen compare demographic, social, and economic characteristics of blacks and whites to discover how and to what extent racial identity influences opportunities and outcomes in our society. They conclude that despite areas of considerable gain, black Americans continue to be substantially disadvantaged relative to whites. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Census Series
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The Color Line
Legacy for the Twenty-First Century
John Hope Franklin
University of Missouri Press, 1993
Nearly twenty years after his book Racial Equality in America, Franklin addressed the issue of racial inequality. In the Paul Anthony Brick Lectures given at the University of Missouri-Columbia, just one day after the "not guilty" verdict was returned in the trial of Los Angeles police officers for the beating of Rodney King, Franklin delivered a piercing depiction of the color line that persists in America. A scathing portrait of how discrimination has been allowed to flourish and a poignantly despairing prognosis for its end, The Color Line: Legacy for the Twenty-First Century is a perfect companion to the earlier volume. Together these books powerfully define and describe the long-held, but still unrealized, goal of equal rights for all Americans.
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The Color Line
Legacy for the Twenty-First Century
John Hope Franklin
University of Missouri Press, 1993

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Color Lines
Affirmative Action, Immigration, and Civil Rights Options for America
John David Skrentny
University of Chicago Press, 2001
A new ethnic order has emerged in the United States. The growing number of Latinos and Asians has rendered the old black-and-white binary obsolete. And yet, political pundits and commentators on both the left and the right continue to overlook the changing face of discrimination and opportunity in today's new multiethnic, multiracial America. With Color Lines, John David Skrentny brings us a collection of essays that reexamines the role of affirmative action and civil rights in light of this important shift in American demographics. The book explores issues of public policy, equal opportunity, diversity, multiculturalism, pathways to better work and higher learning, and attempts in countries outside the United States to protect minority civil rights. Combining perspectives from specialists in fields as diverse as sociology, history, political science, and law, Color Lines is a balanced and broad-ranging guide for anyone interested in civil rights policy and the future of ethnic relations in America.

Contributors:
Erik Bleich
Lawrence D. Bobo
Frank Dobbin
John Aubrey Douglass
Hugh Davis Graham
Kyra R. Greene
Erin Kelly
George R. La Noue
Jennifer Lee
Michael Lichter
Deborah C. Malamud
Sunita Parikh
John C. Sullivan
Thomas J. Sugrue
Carol M. Swain
Steven M. Teles
Roger Waldinger
Christine Min Wotipka

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Color Lines, Country Lines
Race, Immigration, and Wealth Stratification in America
Lingxin Hao
Russell Sage Foundation, 2007
The growing number of immigrants living and working in America has become a controversial topic from classrooms to corporations and from kitchen tables to Capitol Hill. Many native-born Americans fear that competition from new arrivals will undermine the economic standing of low-skilled American workers, and that immigrants may not successfully integrate into the U.S. economy. In Color Lines, Country Lines, sociologist Lingxin Hao argues that the current influx of immigrants is changing America's class structure, but not in the ways commonly believed. Drawing on twenty years of national survey data, Color Lines, Country Lines investigates how immigrants are faring as they try to accumulate enough wealth to join the American middle class, and how, in the process, they are transforming historic links between race and socioeconomic status. Hao finds that disparities in wealth among immigrants are large and growing, including disparities among immigrants of the same race or ethnicity. Cuban immigrants have made substantially more progress than arrivals from the Dominican Republic, Chinese immigrants have had more success than Vietnamese or Korean immigrants, and Jamaicans have fared better than Haitians and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, many of these immigrant groups have acquired more wealth than native-born Americans of the same race or ethnicity. Hao traces these diverging paths to differences in the political and educational systems of the immigrants' home countries, as well as to preferential treatment of some groups by U.S. immigration authorities and the U.S. labor market. As a result, individuals' country of origin increasingly matters more than their race in determining their prospects for acquiring wealth. In a novel analysis, Hao predicts that as large numbers of immigrants arrive in the United States every year, the variation in wealth within racial groups will continue to grow, reducing wealth inequalities between racial groups. If upward mobility remains restricted to only some groups, then the old divisions of wealth by race will gradually become secondary to new disparities based on country of origin. However, if the labor market and the government are receptive to all immigrant groups, then the assimilation of immigrants into the middle class will help diminish wealth inequality in society as a whole. Immigrants' assimilation into the American mainstream and the impact of immigration on the American economy are inextricably linked, and each issue can only be understood in light of the other. Color Lines, Country Lines shows why some immigrant groups are struggling to get by while others have managed to achieve the American dream and reveals the surprising ways in which immigration is reshaping American society.
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Color Me Michigan
A University of Michigan Coloring Book
Melissa Mueller
Michigan Publishing Services, 2017
If you ever thought that the University of Michigan was only Maize and Blue, think again. The only limit to the palette in this new adult coloring book is your imagination . . . and whatever pens or pencils you have on hand. Celebrate well-known Ann Arbor and U-M landmarks and unearth hidden treasures in the pages of Color Me Michigan, while celebrating the University’s 200-year history.
 
Whether you are an alum, current student, “Michigan parent,” or simply an admirer of this unique institution, we invite you to relax and reinvigorate your mind, while transforming the variety of black and white images into a colorful keepsake.
 
This coloring book has been published by Michigan Publishing Services, part of the University of Michigan Library. We exist to help faculty members, staff, and students to effectively disseminate their research, record the history of the institution, and develop affordable resources for teaching and learning.





 
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Color me...Cherry & White
A Temple University Coloring Book
Temple University Press
Temple University Press, 2018

The first ever Temple University adult coloring book, Color Me...Cherry & White contains more than twenty iconic Temple University landmarks. From the magnificent Baptist Temple with its ornate stained glass windows, to Hooter the Owl, the campus food trucks, and the SEPTA rail station, students, parents, and alumni—even future Owls—now have a personal campus canvas to color with markers, pencils or crayons.

The images in Color Me...Cherry & White were created from photographs from the University Photography Department and crafted into pages for amateur artists to beautify. The designs will stoke memories as well as provide stress relief as artists create their own impressions of the campus. Moreover, this keepsake will make the perfect gift and provide memories for the worldwide Temple community.

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The Color of Asylum
The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil
Katherine Jensen
University of Chicago Press, 2023
An ethnography of the difficult experiences of refugees in Brazil.
 
In 2013, as Syrians desperate to escape a brutal war fled the country, Brazil took the remarkable step of instituting an open-door policy for all Syrian refugees. Why did Brazil—in contrast to much of the international community—offer asylum to any Syrian who would come? And how do Syrians differ from other refugee populations seeking status in Brazil?
 
In The Color of Asylum, Katherine Jensen offers an ethnographic look at the process of asylum seeking in Brazil, uncovering the different ways asylum seekers are treated and the racial logic behind their treatment. She focuses on two of the largest and most successful groups of asylum seekers: Syrian and Congolese refugees. While the groups obtain asylum status in Brazil at roughly equivalent rates, their journey to that status could not be more different, with Congolese refugees enduring significantly greater difficulties at each stage, from arrival through to their treatment by Brazilian officials. As Jensen shows, Syrians, meanwhile, receive better treatment because the Brazilian state recognizes them as white, in a nation that has historically privileged white immigration. Ultimately, however, Jensen reaches an unexpected conclusion: Regardless of their country of origin, even migrants who do secure asylum status find their lives remain extremely difficult, marked by struggle and discrimination.

 
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The Color of Democracy in Women's Regional Writing
Jean Carol Griffith
University of Alabama Press, 2009
An exciting addition to the ongoing debate about the place of regionalism in American literary history.

American regionalism has become a contested subject in literary studies alongside the ubiquitous triad of race, class, and gender. The Color of Democracy in Women's Regional Writing enters into the heart of an ongoing debate in the field about the significance of regional fiction at the end of the 19th century. Jean Griffith presents the innovative view that regional writing provided Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather with the means to explore social transformation in a form of fiction already closely associated with women readers and writers.

Griffith provides new readings of texts by these authors; she places them alongside the works of their contemporaries, including William Faulkner and Langston Hughes, to show regionalism's responses to the debate over who was capable of democratic participation and reading regionalism's changing mediations between natives and strangers as reflections of the changing face of democracy.

This insightful work enriches the current debate about whether regionalism critiques hierarchies or participates in nationalist and racist agendas and will be of great interest to those invested in regional writing or the works of these significant authors.
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The Color of Dusk
Robin Caton
Omnidawn, 2001
In The Color of Dusk, Robin Caton bridges traditions of secular, religious, modernist, and post modernist writing to encounter word at its most unsettling, provocative, and urgent. At times conversational, elliptic, meditative, minimalist, expansive, Caton's poems are unified by an insistence to reach, with language, through language, to turn words toward what is ever outside their ability to name.
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The Color of Family
History, Race, and the Politics of Ancestry
Michael O'Malley
University of Chicago Press
A uniquely blended personal family history and history of the changing definitions of race in America.
 
A zealous eugenicist, who regarded himself as white, ran Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics in the first half of the twentieth century, misusing his position to reclassify people he suspected of hiding their “true” race. But in addition to being blinded by his prejudices, he and his predecessors were operating more by instinct than by science. Their whole dubious enterprise was subject not just to changing concepts of race but outright error, propagated across generations.
 
This is how Michael O’Malley, a descendant of a Philadelphia Irish-American family, came to have “colored” ancestors in Virginia. In The Color of Family, O’Malley teases out the various changes made to citizens’ names and relationships over the years, and how they affected families as they navigated what it meant to be “white,” “colored,” “mixed race,” and more. In the process, he delves into the interplay of genealogy and history, exploring how the documents that establish identity came about, and how private companies like Ancestry.com increasingly supplant state and federal authorities—and not for the better.
 
Combining the personal history of O’Malley’s own family with the broader history of racial classification, The Color of Family is an accessible and lively look at the ever-shifting and often poisoned racial dynamics of the United States.
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Color Of Law
David Milofsky
University Press of Colorado, 2000
This is a rich, absorbing novel about good, evil, and the inability of the legal system to mediate between the two. Two white Milwaukee motorcycle cops pursue and kill a young black man on a bitterly cold winter night in 1959 and with the help of their su
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The Color of Liberty
Histories of Race in France
Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall, eds.
Duke University Press, 2003
France has long defined itself as a color-blind nation where racial bias has no place. Even today, the French universal curriculum for secondary students makes no mention of race or slavery, and many French scholars still resist addressing racial questions. Yet, as this groundbreaking volume shows, color and other racial markers have been major factors in French national life for more than three hundred years. The sixteen essays in The Color of Liberty offer a wealth of innovative research on the neglected history of race in France, ranging from the early modern period to the present.

The Color of Liberty addresses four major themes: the evolution of race as an idea in France; representations of "the other" in French literature, art, government, and trade; the international dimensions of French racial thinking, particularly in relation to colonialism; and the impact of racial differences on the shaping of the modern French city. The many permutations of race in French history—as assigned identity, consumer product icon, scientific discourse, philosophical problem, by-product of migration, or tool in empire building—here receive nuanced treatments confronting the malleability of ideas about race and the uses to which they have been put.

Contributors. Leora Auslander, Claude Blanckaert, Alice Conklin, Fred Constant, Laurent Dubois, Yaël Simpson Fletcher, Richard Fogarty, John Garrigus, Dana Hale, Thomas C. Holt, Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Dennis McEnnerney, Michael A. Osborne, Lynn Palermo, Sue Peabody, Pierre H. Boulle, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, Tyler Stovall, Michael G. Vann, Gary Wilder

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The Color of Loss
An Intimate Portrait of New Orleans after Katrina
Photographs and introduction by Dan Burkholder
University of Texas Press, 2008

The devastation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina has been imprinted in our collective visual memory by thousands of images in the media and books of dramatic photographs by Robert Polidori, Larry Towell, Chris Jordan, Debbie Fleming Caffrey, and others. New Orleanians want the world to see and respond to the destruction of their city and the suffering of its people—and yet so many images of so much destruction threaten a visual and emotional overload that would tempt us to avert our eyes and become numb.

In The Color of Loss, Dan Burkholder presents a powerful new way of seeing the ravaged homes, churches, schools, and businesses of New Orleans. Using an innovative digital photographic technology called high dynamic range (HDR) imaging, in which multiple exposures are artistically blended to bring out details in the shadows and highlights that would be hidden in conventional photographs, he creates images that are almost like paintings in their richness of color and profusion of detail. Far more intense and poetic than purely documentary photographs, Burkholder's images lure viewers to linger over the artifacts of people's lives—a child's red wagon abandoned in a mud-caked room, a molding picture of Jesus—to fully understand the havoc thrust upon the people of New Orleans.

In the deserted, sinisterly beautiful rooms of The Color of Loss, we see how much of the splendor and texture of New Orleans washed away in the flood. This is the hidden truth of Katrina that Dan Burkholder has revealed.

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The Color of Love
Racial Features, Stigma, and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families
By Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman
University of Texas Press, 2015

Winner, Section on the Sociology of Emotions Outstanding Recent Contribution (Book) Award, American Sociological Association, 2016
Charles Horton Cooley Award for Recent Book, Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, 2017
Best Publication Award, Section on Body and Embodiment, American Sociological Association (ASA), 2018

The Color Of Love reveals the power of racial hierarchies to infiltrate our most intimate relationships. Delving far deeper than previous sociologists have into the black Brazilian experience, Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman examines the relationship between racialization and the emotional life of a family. Based on interviews and a sixteen-month ethnography of ten working-class Brazilian families, this provocative work sheds light on how families simultaneously resist and reproduce racial hierarchies. Examining race and gender, Hordge-Freeman illustrates the privileges of whiteness by revealing how those with “blacker” features often experience material and emotional hardships. From parental ties, to sibling interactions, to extended family and romantic relationships, the chapters chart new territory by revealing the connection between proximity to whiteness and the distribution of affection within families.

Hordge-Freeman also explores how black Brazilian families, particularly mothers, rely on diverse strategies that reproduce, negotiate, and resist racism. She frames efforts to modify racial features as sometimes reflecting internalized racism, and at other times as responding to material and emotional considerations. Contextualizing their strategies within broader narratives of the African diaspora, she examines how Salvador’s inhabitants perceive the history of the slave trade itself in a city that is referred to as the “blackest” in Brazil. She argues that racial hierarchies may orchestrate family relationships in ways that reflect and reproduce racial inequality, but black Brazilian families actively negotiate these hierarchies to assert their citizenship and humanity.

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The Color of Mind
Why the Origins of the Achievement Gap Matter for Justice
Derrick Darby and John L. Rury
University of Chicago Press, 2018
American students vary in educational achievement, but white students in general typically have better test scores and grades than black students. Why is this the case, and what can school leaders do about it? In The Color of Mind, Derrick Darby and John L. Rury answer these pressing questions and show that we cannot make further progress in closing the achievement gap until we understand its racist origins.

Telling the story of what they call the Color of Mind—the idea that there are racial differences in intelligence, character, and behavior—they show how philosophers, such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and American statesman Thomas Jefferson, contributed to the construction of this pernicious idea, how it influenced the nature of schooling and student achievement, and how voices of dissent such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and W. E. B. Du Bois debunked the Color of Mind and worked to undo its adverse impacts.

Rejecting the view that racial differences in educational achievement are a product of innate or cultural differences, Darby and Rury uncover the historical interplay between ideas about race and American schooling, to show clearly that the racial achievement gap has been socially and institutionally constructed. School leaders striving to bring justice and dignity to American schools today must work to root out the systemic manifestations of these ideas within schools, while still doing what they can to mitigate the negative effects of poverty, segregation, inequality, and other external factors that adversely affect student achievement. While we cannot expect schools alone to solve these vexing social problems, we must demand that they address the dignitary injustices associated with how we track, discipline, and deal with special education that reinforce long-standing racist ideas. That is the only way to expel the Color of Mind from schools, close the racial achievement gap, and afford all children the dignity they deserve.
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The Color of Modernity
São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil
Barbara Weinstein
Duke University Press, 2015
In The Color of Modernity, Barbara Weinstein focuses on race, gender, and regionalism in the formation of national identities in Brazil; this focus allows her to explore how uneven patterns of economic development are consolidated and understood. Organized around two principal episodes—the 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution and 1954’s IV Centenário, the quadricentennial of São Paulo’s founding—this book shows how both elites and popular sectors in São Paulo embraced a regional identity that emphasized their European origins and aptitude for modernity and progress, attributes that became—and remain—associated with “whiteness.” This racialized regionalism naturalized and reproduced regional inequalities, as São Paulo became synonymous with prosperity while Brazil’s Northeast, a region plagued by drought and poverty, came to represent backwardness and São Paulo’s racial “Other.”  This view of regional difference, Weinstein argues, led to development policies that exacerbated these inequalities and impeded democratization.
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The Color of Money
Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap
Mehrsa Baradaran
Harvard University Press, 2017

“Read this book. It explains so much about the moment…Beautiful, heartbreaking work.”
—Ta-Nehisi Coates


“A deep accounting of how America got to a point where a median white family has 13 times more wealth than the median black family.”
The Atlantic


“Extraordinary…Baradaran focuses on a part of the American story that’s often ignored: the way African Americans were locked out of the financial engines that create wealth in America.”
—Ezra Klein


When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than 1 percent of the total wealth in America. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. The Color of Money seeks to explain the stubborn persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks.

With the civil rights movement in full swing, President Nixon promoted “black capitalism,” a plan to support black banks and minority-owned businesses. But the catch-22 of black banking is that the very institutions needed to help communities escape the deep poverty caused by discrimination and segregation inevitably became victims of that same poverty. In this timely and eye-opening account, Baradaran challenges the long-standing belief that black communities could ever really hope to accumulate wealth in a segregated economy.

“Black capitalism has not improved the economic lives of black people, and Baradaran deftly explains the reasons why.”
Los Angeles Review of Books

“A must read for anyone interested in closing America’s racial wealth gap.”
Black Perspectives

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The Color of Night
Race, Railroaders, and Murder in the Wartime West
Max Geier
Oregon State University Press, 2015
On an unusually cold January night in 1943, Martha James was murdered on a train in rural Oregon, near the Willamette Valley town of Albany. She was White, Southern, and newly-married to a Navy pilot. Despite inconsistent and contradictory eyewitness accounts, a young Black cook by the name of Robert Folkes, a trainman from South Central Los Angeles, was charged with the crime. The ensuing investigation and sensational murder trial captured national attention during a period of intense wartime fervor and extensive Black domestic migration. Folkes’ trial and controversial conviction—resulting in his execution by the state of Oregon—reshaped how Oregonians and others in the West thought about race, class, and privilege.

In this deeply researched and detailed account, Geier explores how race, gender, and class affected the attitudes of local town-folk, law officers, and courtroom jurors toward Black trainmen on the West Coast, at a time when militarization skewed perceptions of virtue, status, and authority.  He delves into the working conditions and experiences of unionized Black trainmen in their “home and away” lives in Los Angeles and Portland, while illuminating the different ways that they, and other residents of Oregon and southern California, responded to news of “Oregon’s murdered war bride.” Reporters, civil rights activists, and curiosity seekers transformed the trial and appeals process into a public melodrama.

The investigation, trial, and conviction of Robert Folkes galvanized civil rights activists, labor organizers, and community leaders into challenging the flawed judicial process and ultimately the death penalty in Oregon, serving as a catalyst for civil rights activism that bridged rural and urban divides. The Color of Night will appeal to “true crime” aficionados, and to anyone interested in the history of race and labor relations, working conditions, community priorities, and attitudes toward the death penalty in the first half of the 20th century.
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The Color of Opportunity
Pathways to Family, Welfare, and Work
Haya Stier and Marta Tienda
University of Chicago Press, 2000
In The Color of Opportunity, Haya Stier and Marta Tienda ask: How do race and ethnicity limit opportunity in post-civil rights Chicago? In the 1960s, Chicago was a focal point of civil rights activities. But in the 1980s it served as the laboratory for ideas about the emergence and social consequences of concentrated urban poverty; many experts such as William J. Wilson downplayed the significance of race as a cause of concentrated poverty, emphasizing instead structural causes that called for change in employment policy. But in this new study, Stier and Tienda ask about the pervasive poverty, unemployment, and reliance on welfare among blacks and Hispanics in Chicago, wondering if and how the inner city poor differ from the poor in general.

The culmination of a six-year collaboration analyzing the Urban Poverty and Family Life Survey of Chicago, The Color of Opportunity is the first major work to compare Chicago's inner city minorities with national populations of like race and ethnicity from a life course perspective. The authors find that blacks, whites, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans living in poor neighborhoods differ in their experiences with early material deprivation and the lifetime disadvantages that accumulate—but they do not differ much from the urban poor in their family formation, welfare participation, or labor force attachment. Stier and Tienda find little evidence for ghetto-specific behavior, but they document the myriad ways color still restricts economic opportunity.

The Color of Opportunity stands as a much-needed corrective to increasingly negative views of poor people of color, especially the poor who live in deprived neighborhoods. It makes a key and lasting contribution to ongoing debates about the origins and nature of urban poverty.
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The Color of Privilege
Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism
Aida Hurtado
University of Michigan Press, 1996
This groundbreaking and important book explores how women of different ethnic/racial groups conceive of feminism. Aída Hurtado advances the theory of relational privilege to explain those differing conceptions. Previous theories about feminism have predominantly emphasized the lives and experiences of middle-class white women. Aída Hurtado argues that the different responses to feminism by women of color are not so much the result of personality or cultural differences between white women and women of color, but of their differing relationship to white men.
For Hurtado, subordination and privilege must be conceived as relational in nature, and gender subordination and political solidarity must be examined in the framework of culture and socioeconomic context. Hurtado's analysis of gender oppression is written from an interdisciplinary, multicultural standpoint and is enriched by selections from poems by Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Elba Sanchez, and from plays by El Teatro Campesino, the United Farm Workers theater group.
A final chapter proposes that progressive scholarship, and especially feminist scholarship, must have at its core a reflexive theory of gender oppression that allows writers to simultaneously document oppression while taking into account the writer's own privilege, to analyze the observed as well as the observer.
Aída Hurtado is Associate Professor of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz.
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The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940
Matthew Pratt Guterl
Harvard University Press, 2002

With the social change brought on by the Great Migration of African Americans into the urban northeast after the Great War came the surge of a biracial sensibility that made America different from other Western nations. How white and black people thought about race and how both groups understood and attempted to define and control the demographic transformation are the subjects of this new book by a rising star in American history.

An elegant account of the roiling environment that witnessed the shift from the multiplicity of white races to the arrival of biracialism, this book focuses on four representative spokesmen for the transforming age: Daniel Cohalan, the Irish-American nationalist, Tammany Hall man, and ruthless politician; Madison Grant, the patrician eugenicist and noisy white supremacist; W. E. B. Du Bois, the African-American social scientist and advocate of social justice; and Jean Toomer, the American pluralist and novelist of the interior life. Race, politics, and classification were their intense and troubling preoccupations in a world they did not create, would not accept, and tried to change.

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The Color of Representation
Congressional Behavior and Black Interests
Kenny J. Whitby
University of Michigan Press, 2000
The central domestic issue in the United States over the long history of this nation has been the place of the people of color in American society. One aspect of this debate is how African-Americans are represented in Congress. Kenny J. Whitby examines congressional responsiveness to black interests by focusing on the representational link between African-American constituents and the policymaking behavior of members of the United States House of Representatives. The book uses the topics of voting rights, civil rights, and race- based redistricting to examine how members of Congress respond to the interests of black voters. Whitby's analysis weighs the relative effect of district characteristics such as partisanship, regional location, degree of urbanization and the size of the black constituency on the voting behavior of House members over time. Whitby explores how black interests are represented in formal, descriptive, symbolic, and substantive terms. He shows the political tradeoffs involved in redistricting to increase the number of African-Americans in Congress.
The book is the most comprehensive analysis of black politics in the congressional context ever published. It will appeal to political scientists, sociologists, historians, and psychologists concerned with minority politics, legislative politics, and the psychological, political, and sociological effects of increasing minority membership in Congress on the perception of government held by African Americans.
Kenny J. Whitby is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of South Carolina.
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The Color of Rock
A Novel
Sandra Cavallo Miller
University of Nevada Press, 2019

A young physician, Dr. Abby Wilmore, attempts to escape her past by starting over at the Grand Canyon Clinic. Silently battling her own health issues, Abby struggles with adjusting to the demands of this unique rural location. She encounters everything from squirrel bites to suicides to an office plagued by strong personalities. While tending to unprepared tourists, underserved locals, and her own mental trials, Abby finds herself entangled in an unexpected romance and trapped amidst a danger even more treacherous than the foreboding desert landscape.

Sandra Cavallo Miller’s debut novel transports readers to the beautiful depths of Arizona and weaves an adventurous and heartwarming tale of the courage and strength it takes to overcome personal demons and to find love.

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The Color of Sex
Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and the Fictions of White Supremacy
Mason Stokes
Duke University Press, 2001
In The Color of Sex Mason Stokes offers new ways of thinking about whiteness by exploring its surprisingly ambivalent partnership with heterosexuality. Stokes examines a wide range of white-supremacist American texts written and produced between 1852 and 1915—literary romances, dime novels, religious and scientific tracts, film—and exposes whiteness as a tangled network of racial and sexual desire. Stokes locates these white-supremacist texts amid the anti-racist efforts of African American writers and activists, deepening our understanding of both American and African American literary and cultural history.
The Color of Sex reveals what happens when race and sexuality meet, when white desire encounters its own ambivalence. As Stokes argues, whiteness and heterosexuality exist in anxious relation to one another. Mutually invested in “the normal,” they support each other in their desperate insistence on the cultural logic of exclusion. At the same time, however, they threaten one another in their attempt to create and sustain a white future, since reproducing whiteness necessarily involves the risk of contamination
Charting the curious movements of this “white heterosexuality,” The Color of Sex inaugurates a new moment in our ongoing attempt to understand the frenzied interplay of race and sexuality in America. As such, it will appeal to scholars interested in race theory, sexuality studies, and American history, culture, and literature.
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