front cover of Measurement of Nontariff Barriers
Measurement of Nontariff Barriers
Alan Verne Deardorff
University of Michigan Press, 1998
As tariffs on imports of manufactures have been reduced as a result of multi-lateral trade negotiations, interest in the extent to which existing nontariff barriers may distort and restrict international trade is growing. Accurate and reliable measures are needed in order to address the issues involving the use and impacts of nontariff barriers. This study assesses currently available methods for quantifying such barriers and makes recommendations as to those methods that can be most effectively employed. The authors focus both on the conceptual issues arising in the measurement of the different types of nontariff barriers and on the applied research that has been carried out in studies prepared by country members of the OECD Pilot Group and others seeking to quantify the barriers.
Nontariff barriers include quotas, variable levies, voluntary export restraints, government procurement regulations, domestic subsidies, and antidumping and countervailing duty measures. The authors discuss the many different methods available for measuring the effects of these and other nontariff barriers. Illustrative results are presented for industrial OECD countries, including Australia, Canada, Germany, Norway, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Finally, the authors offer guideline principles and recommend procedures for measuring different types of nontariff barriers.
Economists, political scientists, government officials, and lawyers involved in international trade will find this an invaluable resource for understanding and measuring NTBs.
Alan V. Deardorff and Robert M. Stern are Professors of Economics and Public Policy, University of Michigan.
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Social Dimensions of U.S. Trade Policies
Alan Verne Deardorff
University of Michigan Press, 2000
The contributors to this volume include numerous members of the trade policy community who analyze and discuss the salient social dimensions of U.S. trade policies. These issues include the effects of trade on wage inequality; trade and immigration policy; U.S. trade adjustment assistance policies; the effects of NAFTA on environmental quality; the role of labor standards in U.S. trade policies; the economics of labor standards and the GATT; issues of child labor; and the role of interest groups in the design and implementation of U.S. trade policies.
Chapter authors are Kyle Bagwell, Claude Barfield, George J. Borjas, Drusilla K. Brown, Alan V. Deardorff, Nancy Dunne, Gary S. Fields, John Kirton, Mike Jendrzejczyk, Phyllis Shearer Jones, Edward E. Leamer, Robert Naiman, Gregory K. Schoepfle, Robert W. Staiger, and Robert M. Stern.
Commenters are Steve Beckman, Jagdish Bhagwati, Alan V. Deardorff, Avinash Dixit, Pharis Harvey, David van Hoogstraten, John H. Jackson, Lawrence Mishel, Jack Otero, J. David Richardson, Dani Rodrik, Mark Silbergeld, and T. N. Srinivasan.
Alan V. Deardorff and Robert M. Stern are Professors of Economics and Public Policy, University of Michigan.
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The Stolper-Samuelson Theorem
A Golden Jubilee
Alan Verne Deardorff
University of Michigan Press, 1994
In celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Stolper-Samuelson Theorem, this volume collects in one place the original Stolper-Samuelson articles as well as the most significant later contributions that interpret, extend, and test the basic result. It also includes reflective papers by both Wolfgang F. Stolper and Paul A. Samuelson, an overview of the literature, and an annotated bibliography. Contributors to the volume, either in reprints of their original articles or in new commentary, are Robert E. Baldwin, Sundari R. Baru, Jagdish N. Bhagwati, John S. Chipman, Alan V. Deardorff, Wilfred Ethier, Ronald W. Jones, Murray C. Kemp, Ulrich Kohli, Paul R. Krugman, Edward E. Leamer, Stephen P. Magee, Lloyd A. Metzler, Ronald Rogowski, Paul A. Samuelson, Jose A. Scheinkman, Robert M. Stern, Wolfgang F. Stolper, and Leon Wegge.
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Leading and Managing Archives and Records Programs
Bruce W. Dearstyne
American Library Association, 2008

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The Great Texas Stamp Collection
How Some Stubborn Texas Confederate Postmasters, a Handful of Determined Texas Stamp Collectors, and a Few of the World's Greatest Philatelists Created, Discovered, and Preserved Some of the World's Most Valuable Postage Stamps
Charles W. Deaton
University of Texas Press, 2012

Among the many difficulties the newly formed Confederate States of America endured in the summer of 1861 was the failure of its post office department to provide sufficient numbers of that item most crucial to its service: the postage stamp. Faced with the resulting din of customer complaints, a handful of industrious Texas postmasters solved the problem by simply making their own homemade stamps.

In this thoroughly researched history of these rare and highly coveted stamps, The Great Texas Stamp Collection traces their journey from creation through their rediscovery years later by local, and then international, stamp collectors—a journey that culminated in the sale of a few pieces at a recent auction in New York that fetched more than $250,000. Weaving the larger contexts of Texas and U.S. postal history together with individual tales of greed, intrigue, forgery, and discovery, Deaton’s book is rich with characters from European royalty to early stamp dealers to common criminals, while also providing detailed examinations of the stamps themselves, including a complete census of the stamps now known as the Texas Confederate Postmasters’ Provisionals.

Appealing at once to devoted philatelists, Texas and U.S. history buffs, and amateur collectors of all kinds, The Great Texas Stamp Collection offers a unique vantage point from which to view our history as well as the very nature of collecting.

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To Be an Immigrant
Kay Deaux
Russell Sage Foundation, 2006
Immigration is often discussed in broad, statistical terms, with a focus on how it affects labor markets, schools, and social services. But at its most basic level, immigration is a process that affects people and their identities in deeply personal ways. In To Be an Immigrant, social psychologist Kay Deaux explores the role of both social conditions and individual capacities in determining how well immigrants adapt to life in their new homelands, and makes a strong case for the relevance of social psychology in immigration studies. To Be an Immigrant looks at how immigrants are defined, shaped, and challenged by the cultural environment they encounter in their new country and offers an integrated psychological framework for studying the immigrant experience. Deaux argues that in addition to looking at macro-level factors like public policies and social conditions and micro-level issues like individual choices, immigration scholars should also study influences that occur on an intermediate level, such as interpersonal encounters. Each of these three levels of analysis is essential to understanding how immigrants adapt to a new homeland and form distinct identities. As a case study for her framework, Deaux examines West Indians, exploring their perceptions of the stereotypes they face in the United States and their feelings of connection to their new home. Though race plays a limited role in the West Indies, it becomes more relevant to migrants once they arrive in the United States, where they are primarily identified by others as black, rather than Guyanese or Jamaican. Deaux's research adds to a growing literature in social psychology on stereotype threat, which suggests that negative stereotypes about one's group can hinder an individual's performance. She finds that immigrants who have been in the United States longer and identify themselves as African American suffer from the negative effects of stereotype threat more than recent immigrants. More than a discrete event, immigration can be understood as a life-long process that continues to affect people well after they have migrated. To Be an Immigrant takes a novel approach to the study of immigration, looking at how societal influences help shape immigrants and their understanding of who they are.
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RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Immigration and Changing Identities
Kay Deaux
Russell Sage Foundation, 2018
Since the 1960s, the United States has undergone a profound demographic transformation due to increased immigration from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Today immigrants and their U.S.-born children represent approximately 25 percent of the population, or more than 85 million people. How has immigration changed the way that both newcomers and the native-born understand what it means to be American? This issue of RSF, edited by immigration scholars Kay Deaux, Katharine Donato, and Nancy Foner investigates how  immigration has shaped the way longer-established Americans, as well as immigrants and their children, see themelves and others in terms of race, ethnicity, and national identity --- and also considers the implications for intergroup relations. 
 
Several articles explore how immigrants negotiate their positions in the racial hierarchy and how they perceive themselves in relation to native-born groups. Michael Jones-Correa and coauthors find that while Mexican immigrants are more likely to identify as Americans the more they report positive interactions with both native-born whites and blacks, Indian immigrants’ identification with being American is largely shaped by positive interactions just with whites. Prema Kurien shows that in response to the wave of hate crimes after 9/11, Sikh Americans sought to be recognized as an American religious minority, as well as an ethnic group distinct from Indian Americans. In their study of the children of immigrants in middle adulthood, Cynthia Feliciano and Rubén G. Rumbaut find that some second-generation immigrants retain a strong attachment to an ethnic identity into their late thirties, but that ethnic identification for others wanes as their social identities as parents, workers, or spouses become more important.
 
Other contributors investigate the extent to which longer-established Americans  respond to increased immigration. Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson show that whites living in areas with large or increasing racial minority populations are more likely to believe that anti-white discrimination is on the rise. Deborah Schildkraut and Satia Morotta similarly find that when millennials—particularly those who identify as white and Republican—are exposed to information on the changing racial makeup of the U.S., they express more conservative political views.
 
At a time when questions of immigration and national identity are at the forefront of our political and public discourse, understanding how immigrants and their offspring influence—and are influenced by—conceptions of race and identity is critical for social scientists. This issue provides key insights into the challenges of a rapidly changing population.
 
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Hiking Big South Fork 3 E
Brend G. Deaver
University of Tennessee Press, 1998
Now in its third edition, Hiking the Big South Fork  is packed with up-to-date information on the trails of the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area in Tennessee and Kentucky. The book combines numerous details about the natural history of the area with fascinating tidbits of folklore and legend to provide an interpretive guide to the trails. The authors have walked, measured, and rated every hiking trail, and, for this edition, they include information about trails in the adjoining Pickett State Park and Forest.

The book features detailed maps; checklists of mammals, birds, and wildflowers; and valuable advice on safety, park rules and regulations, and accommodations. The trail descriptions include difficulty ratings, distance and time information, notes on accommodations and special considerations, and detailed mileage indicators to keep hikers informed of their progress and to clarify points of confusion. Also included is a handy chart designed for backpackers who wish to combine trails for longer excursions.

Strollers, hikers, and backpackers looking for a less-crowded alternative to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park will enjoy discovering this beautiful, rugged National Park service area. Only a ninety-minute drive northwest of Knoxville, the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area is easily reached in half a day or less from Louisville, Nashville, Chattanooga, and Atlanta.

The Authors: Brenda G. Deaver is a park ranger at the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area. Jo Anna Smith, a former ranger-historian with the National Park Service, now lives in Idaho with her husband, Steve. Howard Ray Duncan, a native of the Big South Fork area, has spent many years exploring the region. A former school teacher and principal, he has been a ranger at Big South Fork since 1985.


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Far Afield
French Anthropology between Science and Literature
Vincent Debaene
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Anthropology has long had a vexed relationship with literature, and nowhere has this been more acutely felt than in France, where most ethnographers, upon returning from the field, write not one book, but two: a scientific monograph and a literary account. In Far Afield—brought to English-language readers here for the first time—Vincent Debaene puzzles out this phenomenon, tracing the contours of anthropology and literature’s mutual fascination and the ground upon which they meet in the works of thinkers from Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille to Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes.
           
The relationship between anthropology and literature in France is one of careful curiosity. Literary writers are wary about anthropologists’ scientific austerity but intrigued by the objects they collect and the issues they raise, while anthropologists claim to be scientists but at the same time are deeply concerned with writing and representational practices. Debaene elucidates the richness that this curiosity fosters and the diverse range of writings it has produced, from Proustian memoirs to proto-surrealist diaries. In the end he offers a fascinating intellectual history, one that is itself located precisely where science and literature meet.
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Nature as Event
The Lure of the Possible
Didier Debaise
Duke University Press, 2017
We have entered a new era of nature. What remains of the frontiers of modern thought that divided the living from the inert, subjectivity from objectivity, the apparent from the real, value from fact, and the human from the nonhuman? Can the great oppositions that presided over the modern invention of nature still claim any cogency? In Nature as Event, Didier Debaise shows how new narratives and cosmologies are necessary to rearticulate that which until now had been separated. Following William James and Alfred North Whitehead, Debaise presents a pluralistic approach to nature. What would happen if we attributed subjectivity and potential to all beings, human and nonhuman? Why should we not consider aesthetics and affect as the fabric that binds all existence? And what if the senses of importance and value were no longer understood to be exclusively limited to the human?
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The Mountain
A Political History from the Enlightenment to the Present
Bernard Debarbieux
University of Chicago Press, 2015

In The Mountain, geographers Bernard Debarbieux and Gilles Rudaz trace the origins of the very concept of a mountain, showing how it is not a mere geographic feature but ultimately an idea, one that has evolved over time, influenced by changes in political climates and cultural attitudes. To truly understand mountains, they argue, we must view them not only as material realities but as social constructs, ones that can mean radically different things to different people in different settings.
 
From the Enlightenment to the present day, and using a variety of case studies from all the continents, the authors show us how our ideas of and about mountains have changed with the times and how a wide range of policies, from border delineation to forestry as well as nature protection and social programs, have been shaped according to them. A rich hybrid analysis of geography, history, culture, and politics, the book promises to forever change the way we look at mountains.


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Reel Patriotism
The Movies and World War I
Leslie Midkiff DeBauche
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997
     Mixing film history with social history, Reel Patriotism examines the role played by the American film industry during World War I and the effects of the industry’s pragmatic patriotism in the decade following the war. Looking at such films as Joan the Woman and Wings and at the war-time activities of Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, film distributors, including George Kleine, and the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry, this book shows how heavily publicized gestures of patriotism benefited the reputation and profits of the movie business.
     Leslie Midkiff DeBauche shows how the United States government’s need to garner public support for the war, conserve food, raise money, and enlist soldiers was met by the film industry. Throughout the nineteen months of American involvement in World War I, film studios supported the war effort through the production of short instructional films, public speaking activities of movie stars, the civic forum provided by movie theaters, and the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry’s provision of administrative personnel to work directly with government agencies. While feature films about the war itself never dominated the release schedules of film distributors, they did become a staple film industry offering throughout the late 1910s and 1920s.
     The film industry had much to gain, DeBauche demonstrates, from working closely with the U.S. government. Though the war posed a direct challenge to the conduct of business as usual, the industry successfully weathered the war years. After the war, film producers, distributors, and exhibitors were able to capitalize on the good will of the movie-goer and the government that the industry’s war work created. It provided a buffer against national censorship when movie stars became embroiled in scandal, and it served as a selling point in the 1920s when major film companies began to trade their stock on Wall Street.
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Botticelli
Artist and Designer
Ana Debenedetti
Reaktion Books, 2024
A revealing look at the commercial strategy and diverse output of this canonical Renaissance artist.
 
In this vivid account, Ana Debenedetti reexamines the life and work of Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli through a novel lens: his business acumen. Focusing on the organization of Botticelli’s workshop and the commercial strategies he devised to make his way in Florence’s very competitive art market, Debenedetti looks with fresh eyes at the remarkable career and output of this pivotal artist within the wider context of Florentine society and culture. Uniquely, Debenedetti evaluates Botticelli’s celebrated works, like The Birth of Venus, alongside less familiar forms such as tapestry and embroidery, showing the breadth of the artist’s oeuvre and his talent as a designer across media.
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Botticelli Past and Present
Ana Debenedetti
University College London, 2019
Botticelli gave us some of the most stunning Renaissance masterpieces. Paintings like Primavera and The Birth of Venus are as beloved today as at the time of their creation, as evidenced by recent exhibitions around the world. Botticelli’s influence and innovations also continue to inspire interest and passionate debate among art historians and lovers of art.

In four chapters, spanning centuries of Botticelli’s artistic fame and reception, Botticelli Past and Present engages with the significant debates about Botticelli. Each chapter collects several essays and includes a short introduction that positions them within the wider scholarly literature on Botticelli. The chapters are organized chronologically, beginning with discussion of the artist and his work in his own time, moving on to the progressive rediscovery of his work from the late eighteenth to the turn of the twentieth century, through to his enduring impact on contemporary art and design.
 
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The Book of Right and Wrong
Matt Debenham
The Ohio State University Press, 2010

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Parthian Pottery from Seleucia on the Tigris
Neilson Debevoise
University of Michigan Press, 1934
The author examines ceramic material from the Parthian site of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris; more than 1500 extant examples are arranged into type groups, and selections published. Parthian Pottery from Seleucia on the Tigris offers a satisfactory presentation of Parthian ware in the Mesopotamian valley.
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With Fire and Sword
Arkansas, 1861-1874
Thomas A. Deblack
University of Arkansas Press, 2003

When Arkansas seceded from the Union in 1861, it was a thriving state. But the Civil War and Reconstruction left it reeling, impoverished, and so deeply divided that it never regained the level of prosperity it had previously enjoyed. Although most of the major battles of the war occurred elsewhere, Arkansas was critical to the Confederate war effort in the vast Trans-Mississippi region, and Arkansas soldiers served—some for the Union and more for the Confederacy—in every major theater of the war. And the war within the state was devastating. Union troops occupied various areas, citizens suffered greatly from the war’s economic disruption, and guerilla conflict and factional tensions left a bitter legacy. Reconstruction was in many ways a continuation of the war as the prewar elite fought to regain economic and political power.

In this, the fourth volume in the Histories of Arkansas series, Thomas DeBlack not only describes the major players and events in this dramatic and painful story, but also explores the experiences of ordinary people. Although the historical evidence is complex—and much of the secondary literature is extraordinarily partisan—DeBlack offers a balanced, vivid overview of the state’s most tumultuous period.

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Pro-dvizhenie
Advanced Russian through Film and Media
Alyssa DeBlasio
Georgetown University Press, 2023

An advanced, student-centered textbook that uses popular media to explore diverse perspectives from across Russian-speaking cultures

Pro-dvizhenie is a student-centered, inquiry-based textbook designed to build Advanced-level Russian proficiency through engagement with timely topics that encourage reflection and examination. Whether exploring the role of technology in relationships, learning about indigenous communities of Russia, or reflecting on what it means to live well, Pro-dvizhenie uses popular Russian film, TV, and media as a springboard for various types of activities, including skill-building exercises, essay writing, and group projects. Students are encouraged to challenge assumptions and make intercultural connections throughout while developing ACTFL Advanced-level skills such as argumentation, narration, and collaboration.

Students benefit from extensive activities and resources, including audio and video of diverse voices and viewpoints from across Russia, available to stream on the Press website. A full-service textbook for instructors, Pro-dvizhenie includes extensive online instructors’ resources, such as additional grammar and vocabulary assignments, writing and group project prompts, grading rubrics, and answer keys. A modular structure and activities at various levels of difficulty give instructors the flexibility to select material in the book based on their class’s needs, making Pro-dvizhenie perfectly suited for mixed-level classrooms. The textbook can be used over one semester or over the course of a full year.

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Catching Stories
A Practical Guide to Oral History
Donna M. DeBlasio
Ohio University Press, 2009

In neighborhoods, schools, community centers, and workplaces, people are using oral history to capture and collect the kinds of stories that the history books and the media tend to overlook: stories of personal struggle and hope, of war and peace, of family and friends, of beliefs, traditions, and values—the stories of our lives.

Catching Stories: A Practical Guide to Oral History is a clear and comprehensive introduction for those with little or no experience in planning or undertaking oral history projects. Opening with the key question, “Why do oral history?” the guide outlines the stages of a project from idea to final product—planning and research, the interviewing process, basic technical principles, and audio and video recording techniques. The guide covers interview transcribing, ethical and legal issues, archiving, funding sources, and sharing oral history with audiences.

Intended for teachers, students, librarians, local historians, and volunteers as well as individuals, Catching Stories is the place to start for anyone who wants to document the memories and collect the stories of community or family.

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Speaking the Same Language
Speech and Audience in Thucydides' Spartan Debates
Paula Debnar
University of Michigan Press, 2002
The Peloponnesian War, which destroyed imperial Athens and ultimately Sparta as well, continues to fascinate students of history, politics, and human nature. Thucydides' account of the twenty-seven-year conflict charts the opposition between the two great powers of the classical Greek world and the ways of life they represented. Paula Debnar explores the collapse of these powers from a new perspective, examining the ways discourse changed under the strain of a long and costly war.
Speaking the Same Language seeks to recover the role played by the audiences within the History. By restoring the internal audiences to a more prominent place, Debnar emphasizes the perspective of the participants in the war and heightens the dramatic immediacy of the debates. She thoroughly analyzes twelve speeches delivered by or to the Spartans, demonstrating how the earlier speeches illustrate the role of discourse in the construction of Sparta's identity and the unification of her Dorian allies in the face of their primarily Ionian adversaries.
Combining close textual analysis with an examination of narrative and historical context, Debnar bridges the gap between literary and historical studies of Thucydides. Accessible to specialists and nonspecialists alike, her work will interest those working in the fields of Greek literature, ancient historiography, rhetoric, political science, and ethnic studies.
Paula Debnar is Associate Professor of Classics, Mount Holyoke College.
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The American H.D.
Annette Debo
University of Iowa Press, 2012

In The American H.D., Annette Debo considers the significance of nation in the artistic vision and life of the modernist writer Hilda Doolittle. Her versatile career stretching from 1906 to 1961, H.D. was a major American writer who spent her adult life abroad; a poet and translator who also wrote experimental novels, short stories, essays, reviews, and a children’s book; a white writer with ties to the Harlem Renaissance; an intellectual who collaborated on avant-garde films and film criticism; and an upper-middle-class woman who refused to follow gender conventions. Her wide-ranging career thus embodies an expansive narrative about the relationship of modernism to the United States and the nuances of the American nation from the Gilded Age to the Cold War.

Making extensive use of material in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale—including correspondences, unpublished autobiographical writings, family papers, photographs, and Professor Norman Holmes Pearson’s notes for a planned biography of H.D.—Debo’s American H.D. reveals details about its subject never before published. Adroitly weaving together literary criticism, biography, and cultural history, The American H.D. tells a new story about the significance of this important writer.
Written with clarity and sincere affection for its subject, The American H.D. brings together a sophisticated understanding of modernism, the poetry and prose of H.D., the personalities of her era, and the historical and cultural context in which they developed: America’s emergence as a dominant economic and political power that was riven by racial and social inequities at home.
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The Necessary Past
Revising History in Contemporary African American Poetry
Annette Debo
Northwestern University Press, 2024
Uncovering how poetry refigures Black history to imagine a more just present and future
 
“Poets are lyric historians,” proclaimed Langston Hughes. Today, historical poetry offers a lyric history necessary to our current moment—poetry with the power to correct the past, realign the present, and create a more hopeful, or even hoped-for, future. The Necessary Past: Revising History in Contemporary African American Poetry focuses on six of today’s most celebrated poets: Elizabeth Alexander, Natasha Trethewey, A. Van Jordan, Kevin Young, Frank X Walker, and Camille T. Dungy. Their works reimagine the interiority of Black historical figures like the so-called Venus Hottentot Sara Baartman and the would-be spelling champion MacNolia Cox, the African American Native Guard who fought in the Civil War and the unknown victims of domestic violence, Jack Johnson and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Medgar Evers and those freed and enslaved in the early nineteenth century. These poets shift the power dynamic in revising our shared history, reconfiguring who speaks and whose stories are told, and writing a past that frees readers to change the present and envision a more just future.
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Traces Behind the Esmeraldas Shore
Warren DeBoer
University of Alabama Press, 1996

Although long famous for its antiquities—notably intricate goldwork, elaborate pottery, and earthen mounds—the Santiago-Cayapas region of coastal Ecuador has been relatively neglected from the standpoint of scientific archaeology. Until recently, no sound chronology was available, and even the approximate age of the region's most impressive monument, the large and much-looted site of La Tolita, remained in doubt.

Building on evidence obtained during the last decade, this book documents an eventful prehistory for Santiago-Cayapas that spans three millennia. A highlight of this prehistory was the reign of La Tolita as a regional center from 200 B.C. to A.D. 350. Archaeological data from
La Tolita's hinterland indicate a complex and changing social landscape in which La Tolita's hegemony was never absolute nor uncontested.

Abundantly illustrated and written in a crisp, witty, and occasionally irreverent style, Traces Behind the Esmeraldas Shore will stimulate debate and rankle interpretive conventions about those social formations that archaeologists gloss as 'chiefdoms.'

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Reinventing Public Service Television for the Digital Future
Mary Debrett
Intellect Books, 2010

Since the 1980s there has been much speculation about the demise of public service television, initially because of the advent of cable and satellite television and the variety of entertainment channels they offer. While the proliferation of global niche media might seem to accelerate the demise of public television, in reality, public broadcasters are undergoing a reinvention. Reinventing Public Service Television for the Digital Future draws on fifty interviews with media industry and academic specialists from four countries to discuss on how public service broadcasting institutions are responding to the changes in digital media. This seminal work offers superior insights into the constraints and possibilities of the public service system and its prospects for survival in the age of on-demand media.

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The Scorpion's Question Mark
J.D. Debris
Autumn House Press, 2023
A formally inventive debut collection of poetry driven by narrative and character.
 
In this poetry collection, JD Debris focuses on characters who live on society’s outskirts and demand greater visibility in the face of marginalization. At the book’s heart are extended narrative elegies for two musicians. First, the poet follows Mexican singer and songwriter Chalino Sánchez as he avenges his sister’s sexual assault, and then he turns to Gato Barbieri, an influential Argentine tenor saxophonist who is haunted by a shadowy “man in dusk-colored glasses.” As these musicians question their purpose, we as readers are invited to reflect on our lives, our legacies, and ourselves.
 
The Scorpion’s Question Mark is personal and mythological, representational and abstract. These formally inventive and metrically attuned poems compose a range of contrasts—boxers Manny Pacquiao and Marvelous Marvin Hagler appear alongside Tupac and Herman Melville, and apparitions of the Virgin Mary manifest in both human and mirage-like forms on public beachfronts. Looking to the scorpion’s tail that forms the shape of a question mark, Debris seeks to occupy uncertain space within the poems, bending forms to find both expansiveness and tension.
 
The Scorpion’s Question Mark was the winner of the 2022 Donald Justice Poetry Prize.
 
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Rituals Of Mediation
International Politics And Social Meaning
Francois Debrix
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

A timely consideration of the meaning of transnational cultural interactions today

In an era of increasing globalization, the cultural and the international have borders as permeable as most nations’s—and an understanding of one requires making sense of the other. Foregrounding the role of mediation—understood here as a site of representation, transformation, and pluralization—the authors engage two specific questions: How might we make theoretical and practical sense of transnational cultural interactions? And how are we to understand the ways in which the sites of mediation represent, transform, and remediate internationals? Accordingly, the authors consider international issues like security, development, political activism, and the war against terrorism through the lens of cultural practices such as traveling through airports, exhibiting art and photography, logging on to the Internet, and spinning news stories.

Contributors: Robin Brown, U of Leeds; David Campbell, U of Newcastle upon Tyne; Michael Dillon, U of Lancaster; Debbie Lisle, Queen’s U, Belfast; Moya Lloyd, Queen’s U, Belfast; Timothy W. Luke, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State U; Patricia L. Price, Florida International U; Jayne Rodgers, U of Leeds; Marysia Zalewski, Queen’s U, Belfast.
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Roman Propertius and the Reinvention of Elegy
Jeri Blair DeBrohun
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Roman Propertius and the Reinvention of Elegy presents an arresting new interpretation of the intricate and complex poetry of Propertius' final collection. Jeri Blair DeBrohun illuminates the manner in which the poet reinvents and revitalizes his elegy in Book 4 by broadening its lyrical promise and ideological horizons.
DeBrohun finds the most striking element of Book 4 to be the apparent polarity of the poems, whose themes are split between new, aetiological subjects of Roman national significance and amatory affairs that evoke the themes of Propertius' first three books. In her compelling reassessment of Propertius' aspirations in Book 4, DeBrohun identifies the conflict between his new ambitions to produce Roman aetiological elegy and his traditional, exclusive devotion to erotic concerns as the central dynamic of his collection. Roman Propertius and the Reinvention of Elegy reveals how the poet came to find in the subcodes of the elegiac genre a medium of interaction between the opposing values of the two themes.
Roman Propertius will interest not only scholars and students of Greek and Roman Poetry but also students of later traditions who are interested in the questions of genre and the relationship between poetry and wider cultural discourses.
Jeri Blair DeBrohun is Associate Professor of Classics, Brown University.
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Objectivity, Invariance, and Convention
Symmetry in Physical Science
Talal A. Debs
Harvard University Press, 2007

Most observers agree that modern physical theory attempts to provide objective representations of reality. However, the claim that these representations are based on conventional choices is viewed by many as a denial of their objectivity. As a result, objectivity and conventionality in representation are often framed as polar opposites.

Offering a new appraisal of symmetry in modern physics, employing detailed case studies from relativity theory and quantum mechanics, Objectivity, Invariance, and Convention contends that the physical sciences, though dependent on convention, may produce objective representations of reality. Talal Debs and Michael Redhead show that both realists and constructivists have recognized important elements of an understanding of science that may not be contradictory.

The position—“perspectival invariantism”—introduced in this book highlights the shortcomings of existing approaches to symmetry in physics, and, for the constructivist, demonstrates that a dependence on conventions in representation reaches into the domain of the most technical sciences. For the realist, it stands as evidence against the claim that conventionality must undermine objectivity. We can be committed to the existence of a single real ontology while maintaining a cultural view of science.

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Seeing Things Whole
The Essential John Wesley Powell
William deBuys
Island Press, 2001

John Wesley Powell was an American original. He was the last of the nation's great continental explorers and the first of a new breed of public servant: part scientist, part social reformer, part institution builder. His work and life reveal an enduringly valuable way of thinking about land, water, and society as parts of an interconnected whole; he was America's first great bioregional thinker.

Seeing Things Whole presents John Wesley Powell in the full diversity of his achievements and interests, bringing together in a single volume writings ranging from his gripping account of exploring the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon to his views on the evolution of civilization, along with the seminal writings in which he sets forth his ideas on western settlement and the allocation and management of western resources.

The centerpiece of Seeing Things Whole is a series of selections from the famous 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region and related magazine articles in which Powell further develops the themes of the report. In those, he recommends organizing the Arid Lands into watershed commonwealths governed by resident citizens whose interlocking interests create the checks and balances essential to wise stewardship of the land. This was the central focus of John Wesley Powell's bioregional vision, and it remains a model for governance that many westerners see as a viable solution to the resource management conflicts that continue to bedevil the region.

Throughout the collection, award-winning writer and historian William deBuys brilliantly sets the historical context for Powell's work. Section introductions and extensive descriptive notes take the reader through the evolution of John Wesley Powell's interests and ideas from his role as an officer in the Civil War through his critique of Social Darwinism and landmark categorization of Indian languages, to the climatic yet ultimately futile battles he fought to win adoption of his land-use proposals.

Seeing Things Whole presents the essence of the extraordinary legacy that John Wesley Powell has left to the American people, and to people everywhere who strive to reconcile the demands of society with the imperatives of the land.


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Pidgins and Creoles
Current Trends and Prospects
David DeCamp
Georgetown University Press

A collection of work on pidgins and creoles that includes discussions of the English-derived creole of San Andres Island and the French-derived creole of Cayenne, the theoretical contributions of creolistics to general linguistic theory, decreolization, generative phonological treatment of a hypothesized English-derived proto-creole, and the little-known Shelta language.

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Culture Myths
Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching
Andrea DeCapua
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Culture Myths is intended for all educators who work with culturally and linguistically diverse students. The book is designed to help readers observe, evaluate, and appreciate cultural differences in values, beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, and worldviews by focusing on the underlying and mostly invisible reasons for these differences. Developing an awareness of one's own cultural assumptions deepens understanding and empathy and contributes to the breaking down of the cultural barriers that can affect communication. 

A goal of this book is to help readers strike a balance between minimizing cultural differences and assuming similarities across cultures on one hand, and exoticizing other cultures or accentuating surface differences on the other.
 
The myths about culture as it relates to the classroom that are explored in this book are:
  • We are all human beings, so how different can we really be?
  • The goal of education is to develop each individual’s potential.
  • Focusing on conversational skills in the classroom is overrated.
  • Not looking at the teacher shows disrespect.
  • How something is said is not as important as what is said.
  • Everyone knows what a good instructional environment is.
  • By the time students get to middle or high school, they know how to be a student.
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SLIFE
What Every Teacher Needs to Know
Andrea DeCapua
University of Michigan Press, 2019
SLIFE: What Every Teacher Needs to Know helps readers deepen their understanding of Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education (SLIFE). Because of their limited, greatly interrupted, or sometimes nonexistent participation in formal education, SLIFE face challenges in the classroom that go beyond language and content. Often SLIFE need to develop basic literacy skills and foundational subject-area knowledge, as well as to learn how to engage in the discourse and practices of formal educational settings. So what can teachers do to help these students succeed and to recognize and honor their knowledge, skills, and cultural capital? SLIFE: What Every Teacher Needs to Know centers around four guidelines for teaching SLIFE: question assumptions, foster two-way communication, explicitly teach school tasks and academic ways of thinking, and promote project-based learning. Discussion of the Mutually Adaptive Learning Paradigm (MALP), is also included.
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Breaking New Ground for SLIFE
The Mutually Adaptive Learning Paradigm
Andrea DeCapua
University of Michigan Press, 2023

In its second edition, Breaking New Ground for SLIFE builds on its model for supporting students who are new to English and may have experienced a disruption in their schooling. The practices presented in this book emerge from the belief that education for students with limited or interrupted formal education, also known as SLIFE, should not be remedial but should build on the students’ prior learning experiences and existing areas of knowledge. This second edition has been significantly updated, informed by recent research in the field, feedback from teachers, and new scholarly treatments of the topic. Breaking New Ground for SLIFE, second edition, explores the MALP approach, highlights how technology can be incorporated into classroom activities, and includes actual MALP projects implemented by MALP-trained teachers of both young and adolescent learners. In addition, the authors provide a newly revised MALP Teacher Planning Checklist.

By reading Breaking New Ground for SLIFE, educators will:

- Further develop their understanding of the needs of students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE)
- ​Learn about the Mutually Adaptive Learning Paradigm (MALP) and how to integrate it into their classrooms
- Discover and learn about the MALP instructional approach and how to use it to develop a project-based curriculum using examples from teachers in the field
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Making the Transition to Classroom Success
Culturally Responsive Teaching for Struggling Language Learners
Andrea DeCapua
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Features a chapter on flipped classrooms!
 
 Learners with no, minimal, or limited exposure to formal education generally do not share the expectations and assumptions of their new setting; as a result, they are likely to find themselves confounded by the ways in which the language and content are presented, practiced, and assessed in Western-style educational settings. Institutions and teachers must tailor therefore their instruction to this population. Making the Transition to Classroom Success: Culturally Responsive Teaching for Struggling Language Learners examines how understanding secondary and adult L2 learners’ educational paradigm, rooted deeply in their past experiences and cultural orientations, provides a key to the solution to a lack of progress.

Making the Transition to Classroom Success builds on and expands on two earlier books, Meeting the Needs of Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Schooling and Breaking New Ground: Teaching Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education in U.S. Secondary Schools.  These previous books focused specifically on a subset of struggling L2 learners--those with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE) in U.S. secondary schools—and detailed the instructional model (MALP). Making the Transition broadens the applications of the MALP model to include academic thinking tasks, flipped classrooms, project design, and rubrics.

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Meeting the Needs of SLIFE, Second Ed.
A Guide for Educators
Andrea DeCapua
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Today's public schools are brimming with students who are not only new to English but who also have limited or interrupted schooling. These students, referred to as SLIFE (or SIFE), create unique challenges for teachers and administrators.
 
Like its predecessor, this book is grounded in research and is designed to be an accessible and practical resource for teachers, staff, and administrators who work with students with limited or interrupted formal education. Chapters 3-5 focus on classroom instruction, but others address issues of concern to administrators and staff too. For example, Chapter 6 explores different program models for SLIFE instruction, but the planning and commitment to creating a successful program require the involvement of many across the school community, not just teachers. 
 
This edition features case studies, model programs, and teaching techniques and tips; also included is a new chapter focused on the Mutually Adaptive Learning Paradigm (MALP (R)). A major theme of this new edition is moving school personnel away from a deficit perspective, when it comes to teaching SLIFE, and toward one of difference. The goal is to help all stakeholders in the school community create and foster inclusion of, and equity for, a population that is all too often marginalized, ignored, and underserved.
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Crossing Cultures in the Language Classroom, Second Edition
Andrea DeCapua
University of Michigan Press, 2016
A MICHIGAN TEACHER TRAINING title

Teachers are often in the forefront of today’s cross-cultural contact, whether in the language classroom or in the K–12 or university/college classroom, but they are not always prepared to handle the various issues that can arise in terms of cross-cultural communication. The intent of this book is to make education in cross-cultural awareness accessible to a broad range of teachers working in a variety of educational settings.
 
Crossing Cultures in the Language Classroom attempts to balance theory and practice for pre-service and in-service teachers in general education programs or in ESL/EFL, bilingual, and foreign language teacher training programs, as well as cross-cultural awareness workshops. This book is unique in that it combines theory with a wide range of experiential activities and projects designed to actively engage users in the process of understanding different aspects of cross-cultural awareness. The goals of the book are to help readers:
  • expand cultural awareness of one’s own culture and that of others
  • achieve a deeper understanding of what culture is and the relationship between culture and language
  • acquire the ability to observe behaviors in order to draw conclusions based on observation rather than preconceptions
  • understand and implement observations of cultural similarities and differences
  • develop an attitude of tolerance toward cultural differences and move away from the “single story.”
The new edition has been thoroughly updated and includes a Suggested Projects section in each chapter. This section provides opportunities for users of the text to explore in greater depth an area and topic of interest. It also includes even more Critical Incidents--brief descriptions of events that depict some element or elements of cultural differences, miscommunication, or culture clash. Critical Incidents develop users’ ability to analyze and understand how multiple perspectives of the same situation are rooted in differing culturally influenced beliefs, behaviors, norms of interaction, and worldviews.
 
 

 
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The Structure of English
Studies in Form and Function for Language Teaching
Jeanette Speer DeCarrico
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Covering the spectrum of grammatical structures, The Structure of English teaches why grammatical structures are important and how to use them through literary illustrations and clear explanations of grammar's effective use and communicative function. It is directed at future English teachers, as well as the new ESL/EFL teacher.

With an emphasis on discourse function throughout, students are never expected to rely on lists of unrelated, constructed example sentences. Rather, when major points of grammar are presented, the structures are illustrated with rich, "real world" contexts excerpted from literature (mostly American), including novels, short stories, poems, essays, and drama. Exercises in the companion workbook are likewise based on naturally occurring stretches of discourse.
Though informed by modern linguistic theory, explanations are framed in more traditional terminology and are designed to help build students' confidence in using English grammar by deepening their understanding of its forms and functions..
For advanced ESL students and graduate TESOL and certificate programs.
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Lives of the Milanese Tyrants
Pier Candido Decembrio
Harvard University Press, 2019
Lives of the Milanese Tyrants brings together two biographies by the most important Milanese humanist of the early fifteenth century. Pier Candido Decembrio (1399–1477) served as secretary and envoy to the bizarre and powerful Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan. As a member of the duke’s inner circle, Decembrio was in a privileged position to write what historians agree is a unique masterpiece of Renaissance biography, based on his decades of direct experience. Also included in this volume is a work of homage to Visconti’s successor, Decembrio’s flattering account of the deeds of the most successful mercenary captain of the Renaissance, Francesco Sforza, who secured for himself and his heirs the disputed position of Duke of Milan through guile, force, and willpower. Both works are translated into English here for the first time from new Latin texts prepared specially for this edition.
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Circuits of the Sacred
A Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean
Carlos Ulises Decena
Duke University Press, 2023
In Circuits of the Sacred Carlos Ulises Decena examines transnational black Latinx Caribbean immigrant queer life and spirit. Decena models what he calls a faggotology—the erotic in the divine as found in the disreputable and the excessive—as foundational to queer black critical and expressive praxis of the future. Drawing on theoretical analysis, memoir, creative writing, and ethnography of Santería/Lucumí in Santo Domingo, Havana, and New Jersey, Decena moves between languages, locations, pronouns, and genres to map the itineraries of blackness as a “circuit,” a multipronged and multisensorial field. A feminist pilgrimage and extended conversation with the dead, Decena’s study is a provocative work that transforms the academic monograph into a gathering of stories, theoretical innovation, and expressive praxis to channel voices, ancestors, deities, theorists, artists, and spirits from the vantage point of radical feminism and queer-of-color thinking.
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Tacit Subjects
Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men
Carlos Ulises Decena
Duke University Press, 2011
Tacit Subjects is a pioneering analysis of how gay immigrant men of color negotiate race, sexuality, and power in their daily lives. Drawing on ethnographic research with Dominicans in New York City, Carlos Ulises Decena explains that while the men who shared their life stories with him may self-identify as gay, they are not the liberated figures of traditional gay migration narratives. Decena contends that in migrating to Washington Heights, a Dominican enclave in New York, these men moved from one site to another within an increasingly transnational Dominican society. Many of them migrated and survived through the resources of their families and broader communities. Explicit acknowledgment or discussion of their homosexuality might rupture these crucial social and familial bonds. Yet some of Decena’s informants were sure that their sexuality was tacitly understood by their family members or others close to them. Analyzing their recollections about migration, settlement, masculinity, sex, and return trips to the Dominican Republic, Decena describes how the men at the center of Tacit Subjects contest, reproduce, and reformulate Dominican identity in New York. Their stories reveal how differences in class, race, and education shape their relations with fellow Dominicans. They also offer a view of “gay New York” that foregrounds the struggles for respect, belonging, and survival within a particular immigrant community.
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The Border Next Door
New York Migraciones, Volume 24
Carlos Ulises Decena
Duke University Press
Addressing how national immigration concerns play out at urban, rural, and suburban levels in the state of New York, this special issue of Social Text offers new insight into an area of study that has long been focused primarily on cities. As new Latino/a immigrants change the culture and social fabric of small communities and reshape policy concerns, suburban and rural regions are becoming key locations for anti-immigrant acts and immigrant social justice organizing. This special issue presents immigrant stories and community and advocacy responses that underscore the need to recognize the diversity of Latino/a immigrant experiences, and it explores the widely varying responses of towns, counties, and both new and established immigrant groups to the race, ethnic, and class tensions usually associated with cities.

While focusing on Central American and Mexican immigrants in New York state, the contributors to this issue—scholars, activists, artists, and filmmakers—situate their work within a national context and consider the paradox of the experience of Latino/a immigrants, who face increasing repression on the one hand and emerging opportunities on the other. Essays address the experience of transnational mothers who leave their children in the care of extended family to pursue low-wage U.S. jobs; the politics of gender and sexuality in immigrant communities; the social practices of day laborers as they wait for work on street corners; and the unlikely pairing of the Virgen de Guadalupe and New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer as figures to whom Mexican immigrants appeal in their demands for rights and dignity. Other articles address the upsurge of immigrant mobility, anti-immigrant activities, and immigrant advocacy in non-urban locations.

Contributors. James E. Claffey, Carlos Ulises Decena, Alyshia Gálvez, Margaret Gray, Angela Martínez, Melanie Nicholson, Pilar A. Parra, Max J. Pfeffer, Michele G. Shedlin, Carolyn Pinedo Turnovsky

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Border Rhetorics
Citizenship and Identity on the US-Mexico Frontier
D. Robert DeChaine
University of Alabama Press, 2012

Undertakes a wide-ranging examination of the US-Mexico border as it functions in the rhetorical production of civic unity in the United States

A “border” is a powerful and versatile concept, variously invoked as the delineation of geographical territories, as a judicial marker of citizenship, and as an ideological trope for defining inclusion and exclusion. It has implications for both the empowerment and subjugation of any given populace. Both real and imagined, the border separates a zone of physical and symbolic exchange whose geographical, political, economic, and cultural interactions bear profoundly on popular understandings and experiences of citizenship and identity.

The border’s rhetorical significance is nowhere more apparent, nor its effects more concentrated, than on the frontier between the United States and Mexico. Often understood as an unruly boundary in dire need of containment from the ravages of criminals, illegal aliens, and other undesirable threats to the national body, this geopolitical locus exemplifies how normative constructions of “proper”; border relations reinforce definitions of US citizenship, which in turn can lead to anxiety, unrest, and violence centered around the struggle to define what it means to be a member of a national political community.

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In Idi Amin’s Shadow
Women, Gender, and Militarism in Uganda
Alicia C. Decker
Ohio University Press, 2014

Finalist for the 2015 Aidoo-Snyder Prize

In Idi Amin’s Shadow is a rich social history examining Ugandan women’s complex and sometimes paradoxical relationship to Amin’s military state. Based on more than one hundred interviews with women who survived the regime, as well as a wide range of primary sources, this book reveals how the violence of Amin’s militarism resulted in both opportunities and challenges for women. Some assumed positions of political power or became successful entrepreneurs, while others endured sexual assault or experienced the trauma of watching their brothers, husbands, or sons “disappeared” by the state’s security forces. In Idi Amin’s Shadow considers the crucial ways that gender informed and was informed by the ideology and practice of militarism in this period. By exploring this relationship, Alicia C. Decker offers a nuanced interpretation of Amin’s Uganda and the lives of the women who experienced and survived its violence.

Each chapter begins with the story of one woman whose experience illuminates some larger theme of the book. In this way, it becomes clear that the politics of military rule were highly relevant to women and gender relations, just as the politics of gender were central to militarism. By drawing upon critical security studies, feminist studies, and violence studies, Decker demonstrates that Amin’s dictatorship was far more complex and his rule much more strategic than most observers have ever imagined.

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African Feminisms
Cartographies for the Twenty-First Century
Alicia C. Decker
Duke University Press
This special issue, edited by the co-directors of the African Feminist Initiative (AFI) at Pennsylvania State University, is a partnership between Meridians and the AFI. The issue builds on the AFI's work to promote the study of African feminist thought and activism within the U.S. academy and to create equitable partnerships between scholars and practitioners of African feminism. Through the multiplicity of feminisms theorized in this issue, contributors challenge patriarchal ideologies and structures on myriad fronts, both on the African continent and beyond. The issue includes poetry, memoirs, essays, interviews, reflections, and testimonials on African feminisms, addressing such topics as hip hop, ethnography, secessionist movements, “saving” Nigerian girls, and women's writing.

Contributors. Gabeba Baderoon, Abena P. A. Busia, Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Msia Kibona Clark, Alicia C. Decker, Chipo Dendere, Abosede George, Tsitsi Jaji, Selina Makana, Patricia McFadden, Anne Moraa, Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué, Neo Sinoxolo Musangi, Wambui Mwangi, Aziza Ouguir, Charmaine Pereira, Fatima Sadiqi, Toni Stuart, Makhosazana Xaba, Ntokozo Yingwana
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Hesse
The Wanderer and His Shadow
Gunnar Decker
Harvard University Press, 2018

A deftly crafted biography of the author of Siddhartha, whose critique of consumer culture continues to inspire millions of readers.

Against the horrors of Nazi dictatorship and widespread disillusionment with the forces of mass culture and consumerism, Hermann Hesse’s stories inspired nonconformity and a yearning for universal values. Few today would doubt Hesse’s artistry or his importance to millions of devoted readers. But just who was the author of Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Demian?

Gunnar Decker weaves together previously unavailable sources to offer a unique interpretation of the life and work of Hermann Hesse. Drawing on recently discovered correspondence between Hesse and his psychoanalyst Josef Lang, Decker shows how Hesse reversed the traditional roles of therapist and client, and rethinks the relationship between Hesse’s novels and Jungian psychoanalysis. He also explores Hesse’s correspondence with Stefan Zweig—recently unearthed—to find the source of Hesse’s profound sense of alienation from his contemporaries.

Decker’s biography brings to life this icon of spiritual searching and disenchantment who galvanized the counterculture in the 1960s and feels newly relevant today.

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Made In America
Self-Styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey
Jeffrey Louis Decker
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

The first look at self-made men and women from a multicultural perspective.

Brings gender, race, and ethnicity to bear on the myth of the “self-made man.”

Made in America presents the first look at self-made men and women from a multicultural perspective. Jeffrey Louis Decker discusses the emergence of self-starters like Andrew Carnegie, Booker T. Washington, Madam C. J. Walker, Younghill Kang, and Lee Iacocca in relation to the changing consumer markets of the twentieth century.Decker locates the new breed of entrepreneurs within the changing rhetoric of personal success, which shifted its emphasis over the past century from religious “character” to psychological “personality” to celebrity “image.” The book concludes by surveying the life stories of enterprising celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Arnold Schwarzenegger.Decker analyzes the autobiographical expressions of famous entrepreneurs, from Carnegie to Ross Perot, alongside more marginal ones in order to examine how mainstream society shapes and is shaped by the cultures of subordinate groups. In addition, he looks at the link between self-making and nation-building, and in doing so discovers the origins of another pervasive myth: the “American dream.”Underlying Decker’s study are these questions: What happened to the myth of self-making in America? If it is dead, what caused its demise? If it lives on, what form has it taken? Written in a lucid and engaging style, Made in America uncovers the richness, complexity, and diversity of self-styled success in our time. By bringing gender, race, and ethnicity to bear on the myth of the “self-made man,” this book provides a timely and fascinating reexamination of a traditional area of inquiry in American cultural studies.200 pages Translation rights: University of Minnesota Press
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Peculiar Portrayals
Mormons on the Page, Stage and Screen
Mark T. Decker
Utah State University Press, 2010

In a time when Mormons appear to have larger roles in everything from political conflict to television shows and when Mormon-related topics seem to show up more frequently in the news, eight scholars take a close look at Mormonism in popular media: film, television, theater, and books.

Some contributors examine specific works, including the Tony-winning play Angels in America, the hit TV series Big Love, and the bestselling books Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith and The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint. Others consider the phenomena of Mormon cinema and Mormon fiction; the use of the Mormon missionary as a stock character in films; and the noticeably prominent presence of Mormons in reality television shows.

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The Byzantine Art of War
Michael J. Decker
Westholme Publishing, 2013
A Complete Overview of One of the Most Important Military Forces in the History of the World
The Byzantine Art of War explores the military history of the thousand-year empire of the eastern Mediterranean, Byzantium. Throughout its history the empire faced a multitude of challenges from foreign invaders seeking to plunder its wealth and to occupy its lands, from the deadly Hunnic hordes of Attila, to the Arab armies of Islam, to the western Crusaders bent on carving out a place in the empire or its former lands. In order to survive the Byzantines relied on their army that was for centuries the only standing, professional force in Europe. Leadership provided another key to survival; Byzantine society produced a number of capable strategic thinkers and tacticians—and several brilliant ones. These officers maintained a level of professionalism and organization inherited and adapted from Roman models. The innovations of the Byzantine military reforms of the sixth century included the use of steppe nomad equipment and tactics, the most important of which was the refinement of the Roman mounted archer. Strategy and tactics evolved in the face of victory and defeat; the shock of the Arab conquests led to a sharp decline in the number and quality of imperial forces. By the eighth and ninth centuries Byzantine commanders mastered the art of the small war, waging guerrilla campaigns, raids, and flying column attacks that injured the enemy but avoided the decisive confrontation the empire was no longer capable of winning. A century later they began the most sustained, glorious military expansion of their history. This work further sketches the key campaigns, battles, and sieges that illustrate Byzantine military doctrine, vital changes from one era to another, the composition of forces and the major victories and defeats that defined the territory and material well-being of its citizens. Through a summary of their strategies, tactics, and innovations in the tools of war, the book closes with an analysis of the contributions of this remarkable empire to world military history.
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The Sasanian Empire at War
Persia, Rome, and the Rise of Islam, 224–651
Michael J. Decker
Westholme Publishing, 2021

A comprehensive military history of one of the most important empires of Late Antiquity

The Sasanian Empire at War: Persia, Rome, and the Rise of Islam, 224–651 is the first comprehensive study in English examining war and society in one of the most important empires in world history: the Persian Empire of 224-651 AD, ruled by the Sasanian clan. At its height the Sasanians governed lands from the Indus River in the east to Egypt and the Mediterranean in the west. Adversaries of Rome, they also faced grave challenges from nomadic powers from Central Asia, notably the Huns and Turks. The Sasanians were able to maintain their empire for hundreds of years through nearly constant warfare, but when their expansion was checked in the north by the Byzantines at Constantinople in 626, and with the Muslim invasions to their south and west beginning in the 630s, the empire could no longer be sustained, and it finally collapsed.

In this book, Michael J. Decker examines Sasanian warfare, including military capabilities, major confrontations, organization and weapons of the Persian army. In addition to providing a comprehensive overview of the conflicts that marked this vital period in the history of Eurasia, The Sasanian Empire at War challenges long cherished notions of the inferiority of Sasanian military capabilities and renders a new image of a sophisticated, confident culture astride the heart of Eurasia at the end of the ancient world and birth of the Silk Road. Persian arms were among the many features of their culture that drew widespread admiration and was one of the keys to the survival of Iranian culture beyond the Arab Conquest and into the present day.

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Utah Politics
The Elephant in the Room
Rod Decker
Signature Books, 2019
From the tempestuous fight for statehood to the evolution of Utah voters from Democrats to Republicans, Rod Decker analyzes the intersection of politics and faith in the complex political culture of modern Utah. Beginning with the state’s roots as a communal theocracy, Utah Politics deftly examines how Mormon morality influenced and continues to shape conflicts on both the local and federal levels. Whether determining the role nuclear fallout played in causing cancer epidemics throughout the state or the influence of Mormon lobbyists, Decker demonstrates how the rose that blossomed in the desert was sometimes fertilized by conspiracy, debate, and political machination.

Some themes reoccur: governors become popular by fighting federal oversight— signaling a lingering distrust that Washington could alter the Mormon way of life—and liberals use the court system to circumvent conservative legislatures who see public morality as a defining feature of government. Through this lens, issues both deceptively innocuous and deeply complex underscore Utah’s dance with religious freedom and civil liberty.
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Drug Smugglers on Drug Smuggling
Lessons from the Inside
Scott H. Decker
Temple University Press, 2008
Drug Smugglers on Drug Smuggling features interviews with 34 convicted drug smugglers -- most of them once major operators -- detailing exactly how drugs are smuggled into the U.S. from Latin America.  These sources provide tangible evidence of the risks, rewards, and organization of international drug smuggling.

Quoting frequently from their interviews, Decker and Chapman explain how individuals are recruited into smuggling, why they stay in it, and how their roles change over time.  They describe the specific strategies their interviewees employed to bring drugs into the country and how they previously escaped apprehension.  Over-all, the authors find that drug smuggling is organized in a series of networks which are usually unconnected.

This extraordinarily informative book will be of particular interest to law enforcement officials and policymakers, but it will appeal to anyone who wants to know how the drug business actually works.
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On Gangs
Scott H. Decker
Temple University Press, 2022

Gangs are multifaceted and varied, so any attempt to understand them cannot be restricted to a singular approach. On Gangs provides a diverse and comprehensive survey of the available theories for understanding this social issue as well as the broad range of responses to it. The authors look at the many influences on gangs’ operation, growth, prevention, and enforcement.

The authors provide different criminological, psychological, and sociological approaches to gang studies, including interviews with past and current gang members. On Gangs presents the core issues for understanding gangs, including emerging topics like prison gangs, gender and gangs, and international gangs. There is also a focus on policing, legislation, and punishment. Weaving together research and policy findings to address the causes, contexts, and consequences of gangs, the authors address topics including joining, resisting, and leaving gangs, and how gangs operate in communities and institutions.  

An authoritative and sweeping tour of gang scholarship, On Gangs showcases the critical evidence-based solutions in prevention, enforcement, legislation, and intervention. The authors seek to answer the question: How do we effectively deal with gangs and gang membership?

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Criminology and Public Policy
Putting Theory to Work
Scott H. Decker
Temple University Press, 2018

In the field of criminal justice, public policy is designed to address the problems brought on by criminal behavior and the response to that behavior. However, too often, the theories carefully developed in the academy fail to make their way into programs and policy. The editors and contributors to this second edition of Criminology and Public Policy highlight the recent development of “translational criminology” to address the growing movement in criminology to use the results of criminological research and theory to better inform policy and practice.  

The essays in Criminology and Public Policy propose an in-depth look at both theory and practice and how they are integrated across a number of key criminal justice problems—from racial and environmental concerns to gun control and recidivism rates as well as police use of force and mass incarceration. The end result is an essential volume that blends both theory and practice in an effort to address the critical problems in explaining, preventing, responding to, and correcting criminal behavior.    

Contributors include: Robert K. Ax, Michelle N. Block, Anthony A. Braga, Rod K. Brunson, Jennifer Carlson, Ronald V. Clarke, Shea Cronin, Megan Denver, Kevin M. Drakulich, Grant Duwe, Amy Farrell, Cheryl Jonson, Charis E. Kubrin, Justin Kurland, Megan Kurlychek, Shannon Magnuson, Daniel P. Mears, Robert D. Morgan, Kathleen Powell, Danielle Rudes, Cassia Spohn, Cody Telep, Natalie Todak, Glenn Trager, Jillian J. Turanovic, Sara Wakefield, Patricia Warren, David Weisburd, Michael D. White, Rob White, Lauren Wilson and the editors

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Geographies of Flight
Phillis Wheatley to Octavia Butler
William Merrill Decker
Northwestern University Press, 2020

African American writing commonly represents New World topography as a set of entrapments, contesting the open horizons, westward expansion, and individual freedom characteristic of the white, Eurocentric literary tradition. Geographies of Flight: Phillis Wheatley to Octavia Butler provides the first comprehensive treatment of the ways in which African American authors across three centuries have confronted the predicament of inhabiting space under conditions of bondage and structural oppression. William Merrill Decker examines how, in testifying to those conditions, fourteen black authors have sought to transform a national cartography that, well into the twenty-first century, reflects white supremacist assumptions. These writers question the spatial dimensions of a mythic American liberty and develop countergeographies in which descendants of the African diaspora lay claim to the America they have materially and culturally created.

Tracking the testimonial voice in a range of literary genres, Geographies of Flight explores themes of placement and mobility in the work of Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Octavia Butler.

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School Board Battles
The Christian Right in Local Politics
Melissa M. Deckman
Georgetown University Press, 2004

If there is a "culture war" taking place in the United States, one of the most interesting, if under-the-radar, battlegrounds is in local school board elections. Rarely does the pitch of this battle reach national attention, as it did in Kansas when the state school board—led by several outspoken conservative Christians—voted to delete evolution from the state's science curriculum and its standardized tests in August 1999. That action rattled not only the educational and scientific communities, but concerned citizens around the nation as well.

While the movement of the Christian Right into national and state politics has been well documented, this is the first book to examine their impact on local school board politics. While the Kansas decision was short-lived, during the past decade in school districts around the country, conservative Christian majorities have voted to place limits on sex education, to restrict library books, to remove references to gays and lesbians in the classroom, and to promote American culture as superior to other cultures.

School Board Battles studies the motivation, strategies, and electoral success of Christian Right school board candidates. Based on interviews, and using an extensive national survey of candidates as well as case studies of two school districts in which conservative Christians ran and served on local boards, Melissa M. Deckman gives us a surprisingly complex picture of these candidates. She reveals weaker ties to national Christian Right organizations—and more similarities between these conservative candidates and their more secular counterparts than might be expected.

Deckman examines important questions: Why do conservative Christians run for school boards? How much influence has the Christian Right actually had on school boards? How do conservative Christians govern? School Board Battles is an in-depth and in-the-trenches look at an important encounter in the "culture war"—one that may well determine the future of our nation's youth.

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Black Space
Negotiating Race, Diversity, and Belonging in the Ivory Tower
Sherry L. Deckman
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Protests against racial injustice and anti-Blackness have swept across elite colleges and universities in recent years, exposing systemic racism and raising questions about what it means for Black students to belong at these institutions. In Black Space, Sherry L. Deckman takes us into the lives of the members of the Kuumba Singers, a Black student organization at Harvard with racially diverse members, and a self-proclaimed safe space for anyone but particularly Black students. Uniquely focusing on Black students in an elite space where they are the majority, Deckman provides a case study in how colleges and universities might reimagine safe spaces. Through rich description and sharing moments in students’ everyday lives, Deckman demonstrates the possibilities and challenges Black students face as they navigate campus culture and the refuge they find in this organization. This work illuminates ways administrators, faculty, student affairs staff, and indeed, students themselves, might productively address issues of difference and anti-Blackness for the purpose of fostering critically inclusive campus environments.
 
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Politics on the Fringe
The People, Policies, and Organization of the French National Front
Edward G. DeClair
Duke University Press, 1999
Once a marginal political coalition, the French National Front has become the most high-profile far-right organization in Europe. In Politics on the Fringe Edward G. DeClair provides the first extensive analysis of the Front’s history, from its creation in 1972 and outcast status in the early 1980s to its achievement of broad-based support and show of political strength in the 1997 elections.

Using rare, in-depth interviews with twenty-nine members of the Front elite, as well as public opinion survey data and electoral results, DeClair examines the internal structure of the Front, its political agenda, and its growing influence in France. DeClair shows how the party has dramatically expanded its traditionally narrow core constituency by capitalizing upon anxieties about national identity, immigration, European unification, and rising unemployment. In illustrating how the rhetoric surrounding such topics is key to the Front’s success, DeClair examines the Front’s legacy by detailing the links between the French far-right and similar movements in such countries as Germany, Belgium, Austria, Italy, and the United States. Finally, Politics on the Fringe offers not only a complete picture of the Front’s increasingly influential role in French partisan politics but also further insight into the resurgence of right-wing extremism throughout western societies in the late twentieth century.

This volume will be of primary importance to political scientists and those engaged with European politics, culture, and history. It will also appeal to those concerned with right-wing populism and political movements.

[more]

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The Shape and Shaping of the Book of Psalms
The Current State of Scholarship
Nancy L. deClaissé-Walford
SBL Press, 2014

A new and innovative way to approach the Psalter that moves beyond form and cult-functional criticism

Drawing inspiration from Gerald H. Wilson’s The Editing of the Hebrew Psalter, this volume explores questions of the formation of the Psalter from the perspective of canonical criticism. Though called “canonical criticism,” the study actually employs a number of historically traditional and nontraditional approaches to reading the text including form criticism, historical criticism of individual psalms as well as of the whole Psalter, and redaction criticism.

Features:

  • Exploration of collections of psalms, theological viewpoints, sovereignty, and the shape and shaping of Psalms
  • Examination of the impact of canonical criticism on the study of the Psalter
  • Sixteen essays from the Book of Psalms Consultation group and invited scholars
[more]

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Visitation
The Conjure Work of Black Feminist Avant-Garde Cinema
Jennifer DeClue
Duke University Press, 2022
In Visitation, Jennifer DeClue shows how Black feminist avant-garde filmmakers draw from historical archives in order to visualize and reckon with violence suffered by Black women in the United States. DeClue argues that these filmmakers—including Kara Walker, Kara Lynch, Tourmaline, and Ja’Tovia Gary—create spaces of mourning and reckoning rather than voyeurism and pornotropy. Through their use of editing, performance, and cinematic experimentation, these filmmakers intervene in the production of Blackness and activate new ways of seeing Black women and telling their stories. Theorizing these films as a form of conjure work, DeClue shows how these filmmakers raise the specters of Black women from the past and invite them to reveal history from their point of view. In so doing, Black feminist avant-garde filmmakers channel spirits that haunt archives and create cinematic arenas for witnessing Black women battling for survival during pivotal and exceedingly violent moments in US history.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
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Interpreting the Gospel of John in Antioch and Alexandria
Miriam DeCock
SBL Press, 2020

A nuanced study of early Christian exegesis

Miriam DeCock analyzes four important early Christian treatments of the Gospel of John, including commentaries by Origen and Cyril from the Alexandrian tradition and the homilies of John Chrysostom and the commentary of Theodore of Mopsuestia, which represent Antiochian traditions. DeCock maintains that the traditional distinction between nonliteral and literal interpretations in these two early Christian centers remains helpful despite recent challenges to the paradigm. She argues that a major and abiding distinction between the two schools lies in the manner in which Alexandrian and Antiochian authors apply the gospel text to their respective communities. DeCock demonstrates that the Antiochenes find primarily literal moral examples and doctrinal teachings in John's Gospel, whereas the Alexandrians find both these and nonliteral teachings concerning the immediate situation of the church and of its individual members.

Features

  • An examination of each author's interpretations of a selection of texts
  • Focused explorations of John 2; 4; and 9-11 in early Christian exegesis
  • A study of early literal non-literal interpretations of John's Gospel
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Senator Dennis DeConcini
From the Center of the Aisle
Dennis DeConcini
University of Arizona Press, 2006
Dennis DeConcini, a contemporary of Arizona greats like Sandra Day O’Connor, Barry Goldwater, and Rose Mofford, is an Arizona icon in his own right. Starting his public career as the Pima County Attorney, DeConcini orchestrated an unprecedented rise to a seat in the U.S. Senate, which he held for eighteen years. His political memoir, co-authored with historian Jack L. August Jr., reaches beyond typical reflections to provide the reader with penetrating and revealing insights into the inner workings and colorful characters of Arizona politics and the United States Senate.

A vigilant centrist, who got results by building coalitions on both sides of the aisle, Senator DeConcini’s approach was not bound to strict party alliances but was deeply rooted in the independent political environment of Arizona. During his career, he sponsored legislation limiting the sale of assault weapons, which provoked the National Rifle Association. He confounded Democratic Party regulars by supporting Clarence Thomas during the controversial confirmation hearings and again split with his party in his support for William Rehnquist’s nomination to Chief Justice. In 1980 he voted for Ronald Reagan, but in 1993 he cast the swing vote for President Bill Clinton’s tax bill, which was strongly opposed by Republicans in Arizona.

This political memoir will be of interest to anyone concerned with the inner workings of the U.S. Senate or Arizona politics and offers relevant insights into today’s political climate.
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Picture Personalities
The Emergence of the Star System in America
Richard Decordova
University of Illinois Press, 1990
Moving pictures existed for over a decade before anything resembling a star system appeared. Then, within the space of a very few years, American cinema went from being completely devoid of stars to being completely dependent on them. Picture Personalities is an invaluable account of this crucial development in cinema and modern culture.
 
Conventional wisdom attributes the rise of the star system to the charisma of individual performers or to the public's desire to idolize an appealing star. In Picture Personalities, Richard deCordova argues that the fledgling movie industry and the press conspired to develop the star system, along with a system of discourse to support it.
 
How actors became stars and how they began to assume public identities distinct from their fictional roles was closely tied to the journalistic discourse of the period, produced by the trade press, newspapers, general periodicals, fan magazines, publicity stills, posters, and other material. DeCordova shows how the studios worked to fabricate moral images of the stars' marriages and personal lives and how a series of star scandals in the 1920s challenged those images and brought about changes in the conventions of representing stars. A new foreword by Corey K. Creekmur enhances this first paperback edition.
 
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Ancestors and Antiretrovirals
The Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Claire Laurier Decoteau
University of Chicago Press, 2013
In the years since the end of apartheid, South Africans have enjoyed a progressive constitution, considerable access to social services for the poor and sick, and a booming economy that has made their nation into one of the wealthiest on the continent. At the same time, South Africa experiences extremely unequal income distribution, and its citizens suffer the highest prevalence of HIV in the world. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has noted, “AIDS is South Africa’s new apartheid.”

In Ancestors and Antiretrovirals, Claire Laurier Decoteau backs up Tutu’s assertion with powerful arguments about how this came to pass. Decoteau traces the historical shifts in health policy after apartheid and describes their effects, detailing, in particular, the changing relationship between biomedical and indigenous health care, both at the national and the local level. Decoteau tells this story from the perspective of those living with and dying from AIDS in Johannesburg’s squatter camps. At the same time, she exposes the complex and often contradictory ways that the South African government has failed to balance the demands of neoliberal capital with the considerable health needs of its population.
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Emergency
COVID-19 and the Uneven Valuation of Life
Claire Laurier Decoteau
University of Chicago Press, 2024
A forceful critique of how and why states failed to protect marginalized communities in their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the implications of ignoring the existing emergencies that exacerbated the pandemic’s devastating effects.
 
The COVID-19 pandemic inaugurated a state of emergency unprecedented for most Americans. Some could observe this emergency from the relative safety of their homes by working remotely, conducting routine medical appointments over video calls, and getting groceries by delivery. At the same time, those in marginalized communities got sick and died without access to the same privileges, sometimes even at the expense of others. After all, someone had to ship goods from warehouses, someone had to clean the hospital, and someone had to shelve and deliver groceries.
 
In this book, sociologist Claire Laurier Decoteau attempts to document and theorize the emergencies of COVID-19 by looking at the experiences of Chicagoans and the policies that shaped those experiences. She describes the uneven racial impact of COVID-19 on Black and Latinx Chicagoans as a crisis within a crisis, caused by a convergence of emergencies: a state of emergency that protected white supremacy and wealth, the slow emergencies racially marginalized populations have faced due to the long-term gutting of care infrastructure and deindustrialization, and the sacrifice “essential workers” were asked to make to protect the United States economy. As Decoteau shows, the city’s “racial equity” project attempted to manage these converging emergencies by building up epistemic infrastructure and manipulating epidemiological data. City officials used data to determine which communities would be given scarce resources, but once positivity or death rates declined, resources were retracted and redistributed elsewhere. The city focused on the urgent and spectacular while ignoring the long-term disinvestment in marginalized communities, including healthcare resources. Decoteau makes clear that the emergencies precipitated by COVID-19 long predated the pandemic, and that we will continue to live with their compounding crises if we do not tackle their structural underpinnings.
 
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The Western Disease
Contesting Autism in the Somali Diaspora
Claire Laurier Decoteau
University of Chicago Press, 2021

Because autism is an increasingly common diagnosis, North Americans are familiar with its symptoms and treatments. But what we know and think about autism is shaped by our social relationship to health, disease, and the medical system. In The Western Disease Claire Laurier Decoteau explores the ways that recent immigrants from Somalia to Canada and the US make sense of their children’s diagnosis of autism. Having never heard of autism before migrating to North America, they often determine that it must be a Western disease. Given its apparent absence in Somalia, they view it as Western in nature, caused by environmental and health conditions unique to life in North America. 

Following Somali parents as they struggle to make sense of their children's illness and advocate for alternative care, Decoteau unfolds how complex interacting factors of immigration, race, and class affect Somalis’ relationship to the disease. Somalis’ engagement with autism challenges the prevailing presumption among Western doctors that their approach to healing is universal.   Decoteau argues that centering an analysis on autism within the Somali diaspora exposes how autism has been defined and institutionalized as a white, middle-class disorder, leading to health disparities based on race, class, age, and ability. The Western Disease asks us to consider the social causes of disease and the role environmental changes and structural inequalities play in health vulnerability.

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The Broken Land
Adventures in Great Basin Geology
Frank DeCourten
University of Utah Press, 2003

"The desert may seem timeless from within the Yellow Circle tonight, but the permanence of the surrounding landscape is only an illusion. Even the land is alive here, constantly changing and evolving as do all living things. Nothing here is 'finished.' Everything around us—the plants, the animals, the rocks, and the terrain itself—is in the process of becoming something else. And, of course, so are we. None of us around the campfire tonight are the same people we were yesterday, or will be tomorrow."—from the book

The Broken Land surveys the geological phenomena of the magnificent Great Basin landscape of western Utah, Nevada, eastern California, and adjacent regions. Each chapter focuses on a locality or area that provides insight into the deep history of one of North America's most remote regions—one of its continental margins. It is the only book available covering the geology of the entire Great Basin. Written for anyone with a casual to serious interest in natural history, The Broken Land conveys Frank DeCourten's awe at the story written in the rock of the basin.

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Dinosaurs Of Utah
Second Edition
Frank DeCourten
University of Utah Press, 2013
Since the late 1800s, when professional fossil hunters vied with each other to bring the largest and most complete specimens to the museum market, Utah has been one of the most fertile grounds for dinosaur discovery. Because rock from the Mesozoic era covers more than 25,000 square miles in Utah, the state is a natural museum of the great age of dinosaurs. The presence of sites such as Dinosaur National Park and the Cleveland- Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry underline Utah’s ongoing paleontological significance. There are probably more paleontologists residing and working in Utah now than at any time in the past, and the state even has an official dinosaur, the Allosaurus.

Dinosaurs of Utah is an ambitious book bridging the gap between the voluminous technical literature on Utah’s Mesozoic era and the numerous publications that describe dinosaurs at the elementary level. “Utah” dinosaurs are presented here as part of the Mesozoic terrestrial ecosystems that evolved in the Colorado Plateau region and are discussed in the context of the changing landscapes, environments, and biota recorded in the geological record.

More than one hundred of author Frank DeCourten’s meticulous line drawings illustrate fossil remains and various features of dinosaur anatomy, as do five stunning paintings by Carel Brest van Kempen. More than forty color landscape photographs by John Telford and Frank DeCourten show modern geologic contexts in most parts of the state and emphasize the dynamic nature of the region’s geologic history. There is also a series of detailed maps, including several new to this edition, that show the tremendous topographical shifts that occurred within the Mesozoic era from the early Triassic to the late Cretaceous periods, a span of over 175 million years.

This second edition of Dinosaurs of Utah enlivens our understanding of these amazing vanished creatures by explaining them and their world to us. It moves beyond the often superficial representations that have been so prevalent and more accurately portrays the variety of dinosaurs that once roamed the region now known as Utah.

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The Great Basin Seafloor
Exploring the Ancient Oceans of the Desert West
Frank DeCourten
University of Utah Press, 2022
Many people appreciate the stunning vistas of the Great Basin desert; understanding the region’s geological past can provide a deeper way to know and admire this landscape. In The Great Basin Seafloor, Frank DeCourten immerses readers in a time when the Basin was covered by a vast ocean in which volcanoes exploded and sea life flourished.

Written for a nontechnical audience, this book interprets the rock record left by more than 500 million years of oceanic activity, when mud and sand accumulated and solidified to produce today’s Great Basin across parts of modern Utah, Nevada, and California. DeCourten deciphers clues within exposed slopes and canyons to reconstruct the vanished seafloor and its volcanic events and examines fossils to reveal once-thriving ancient marine communities. Supplemental material is available online to serve as a field guide for readers wishing to explore this ancient ocean themselves as they travel through the region.
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Aquinas, Feminism, and the Common Good
Susanne M. DeCrane
Georgetown University Press, 2004

To dismiss the work of philosophers and theologians of the past because of their limited perceptions of the whole of humankind is tantamount to tossing the tot out with the tub water. Such is the case when feminist scholars of religion and ethics confront Thomas Aquinas, whose views of women can only be described as misogynistic. Rather than dispense with him, Susanne DeCrane seeks to engage Aquinas and reflect his otherwise compelling thought through the prism of feminist theology, hermeneutics, and ethics.

Focusing on one of Aquinas's great intellectual contributions, the fundamental notion of "the common good"—in short, the human will toward peace and justice—DeCrane demonstrates the currency of that notion through a contemporary social issue: women's health care in the United States and, specifically, black women and breast cancer. In her skillful re-engagement with Aquinas, DeCrane shows that certain aspects of religious traditions heretofore understood as oppressive to women and minority groups can actually be parsed, "retrieved," and used to rectify social ills.

Aquinas, Feminism, and the Common Good is a bold and intellectually rigorous feminist retrieval of an important text by a Catholic scholar seeking to remain in the tradition, while demanding that the tradition live up to its emphasis on human equity and justice.

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Rocking My Life Away
Writing about Music and Other Matters
Anthony DeCurtis
Duke University Press, 1998
Rocking My Life Away represents nearly twenty years of writing by one of the premier critics of popular music in America today. In these pieces from Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and other publications, Anthony DeCurtis reveals his ongoing engagement with rock & roll as artistic forum, source of personal inspiration, and compelling site of cultural struggle. Including significant new work—liner notes commissioned for the Phil Spector box set and a spirited discussion with Peter Buck of R.E.M. about rock criticism, for example—DeCurtis also ventures with insight and power beyond the world of rock & roll. A joint profile of the political writers Neil Sheehan and Taylor Branch and provocative looks at the work of novelists Don DeLillo and T. Coraghessan Boyle round out this eclectic collection.
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Present Tense
Rock & Roll and Culture
Anthony DeCurtis
Duke University Press, 1992
The most compelling art form to emerge from the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, rock & roll stands in an edgy relationship with its own mythology, its own musicological history and the broader culture in which it plays a part. In Present Tense, Anthony DeCurtis brings together writers from a wide variety of fields to explore how rock & roll is made, consumed, and experienced in our time.
In this collection, Greil Marcus creates a collage of words and pictures that evokes and explores Elvis Presley's grisly fate as an American cultural image, while Robert Palmer tells the gripping tale of the origins and meanings of the electric guitar. Rap music, MTV, and the issue of gender identity in the work of Bruce Springsteen all undergo thorough examination; rock & roll's complex relationship with the forces of censorship gets a remarkably fresh reading; and the mainstreaming of rock & roll in the 1980s is detailed and analyzed. And, in an interview with Laurie Anderson and an essay by Atlanta musician Jeff Calder, the artists speak for themselves.

Contributors. Jeff Calder, Anthony DeCurtis, Mark Dery, Paul Evans, Glenn Gass, Trent Hill, Michael Jarrett, Alan Light, Greil Marcus, Robert Palmer, Robert B. Ray, Dan Rubey, David R. Shumway, Martha Nell Smith, Paul Smith
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The War Diaries of Vladimir Dedijer
Volume 1: From April 6, 1941, to November 27, 1942
Vladimir Dedijer
University of Michigan Press, 1990
After fleeing from occupied Beograd to the liberated territory in the Sumadija, Vladimir Dedijer began his life as a Yugoslavian Partisan. Commissioned at the request of then Commander Tito, Vladimir Dedijer began writing his diaries in April of 1941 to record the daily lives, battles, and casualties of the Yugoslavian Partisan Army. The War Diaries of Vladimir Dedijer represents a wealth of primary information about the lives and struggles of the Partisan brigades. There can be no complete understanding of Tito's Yugoslavia without knowing the Diaries' account of the extent of the Second World War's impact on Yugoslavia's people. Tito, who was a frequent reader of the Diaries as the Partisan Army fought across Yugoslavia, called this work "Our Great Obituary." To maintain a diary under the hardships of war was difficult. Among the hazards were river crossings, rain, self-censorship should the Germans find the diaries, and in many instances a shortage of ink. In fact, ink was in such demand that German supplies were targeted by Partisans during raids. Despite these difficulties, Dedijer continually recorded day-to-day life throughout the war. These three volumes contain his writings up to the liberation of Prague in November of 1944. The Diaries were originally published in Yugoslavia more than forty years ago, and have since gone through four editions. The original publication in 1945 caused great debate because of Dedijer's fierce commitment to speaking his views and his uncompromising dedication to recording what he lived. Many felt that Dedijer should not make public the names of Partisan heroes who supported Stalin during the bitter Stalin-Tito split, but in keeping with his values, Dedijer refused, with Tito supporting his decision.
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The War Diaries of Vladimir Dedijer
Volume 2: From November 28, 1942, to September 10, 1943
Vladimir Dedijer
University of Michigan Press, 1990
After fleeing from occupied Beograd to the liberated territory in the Sumadija, Vladimir Dedijer began his life as a Yugoslavian Partisan. Commissioned at the request of then Commander Tito, Vladimir Dedijer began writing his diaries in April of 1941 to record the daily lives, battles, and casualties of the Yugoslavian Partisan Army. The War Diaries of Vladimir Dedijer represents a wealth of primary information about the lives and struggles of the Partisan brigades. There can be no complete understanding of Tito's Yugoslavia without knowing the Diaries' account of the extent of the Second World War's impact on Yugoslavia's people. Tito, who was a frequent reader of the Diaries as the Partisan Army fought across Yugoslavia, called this work "Our Great Obituary." To maintain a diary under the hardships of war was difficult. Among the hazards were river crossings, rain, self-censorship should the Germans find the diaries, and in many instances a shortage of ink. In fact, ink was in such demand that German supplies were targeted by Partisans during raids. Despite these difficulties, Dedijer continually recorded day-to-day life throughout the war. These three volumes contain his writings up to the liberation of Prague in November of 1944. The Diaries were originally published in Yugoslavia more than forty years ago, and have since gone through four editions. The original publication in 1945 caused great debate because of Dedijer's fierce commitment to speaking his views and his uncompromising dedication to recording what he lived. Many felt that Dedijer should not make public the names of Partisan heroes who supported Stalin during the bitter Stalin-Tito split, but in keeping with his values, Dedijer refused, with Tito supporting his decision.
[more]

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The War Diaries of Vladimir Dedijer
Volume 3: From September 11, 1943, to November 7, 1944
Vladimir Dedijer
University of Michigan Press, 1990
After fleeing from occupied Beograd to the liberated territory in the Sumadija, Vladimir Dedijer began his life as a Yugoslavian Partisan. Commissioned at the request of then Commander Tito, Vladimir Dedijer began writing his diaries in April of 1941 to record the daily lives, battles, and casualties of the Yugoslavian Partisan Army. The War Diaries of Vladimir Dedijer represents a wealth of primary information about the lives and struggles of the Partisan brigades. There can be no complete understanding of Tito's Yugoslavia without knowing the Diaries' account of the extent of the Second World War's impact on Yugoslavia's people. Tito, who was a frequent reader of the Diaries as the Partisan Army fought across Yugoslavia, called this work "Our Great Obituary." To maintain a diary under the hardships of war was difficult. Among the hazards were river crossings, rain, self-censorship should the Germans find the diaries, and in many instances a shortage of ink. In fact, ink was in such demand that German supplies were targeted by Partisans during raids. Despite these difficulties, Dedijer continually recorded day-to-day life throughout the war. These three volumes contain his writings up to the liberation of Prague in November of 1944. The Diaries were originally published in Yugoslavia more than forty years ago, and have since gone through four editions. The original publication in 1945 caused great debate because of Dedijer's fierce commitment to speaking his views and his uncompromising dedication to recording what he lived. Many felt that Dedijer should not make public the names of Partisan heroes who supported Stalin during the bitter Stalin-Tito split, but in keeping with his values, Dedijer refused, with Tito supporting his decision.
[more]

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Saving the Gray Whale
People, Politics, and Conservation in Baja California
Serge Dedina
University of Arizona Press, 2000
Once hunted by whalers and now the darling of ecotourists, the gray whale has become part of the culture, history, politics, and geography of Mexico's most isolated region. After the harvesting of gray whales was banned by international law in 1946, their populations rebounded; but while they are no longer hunted for their oil, these creatures are now chased up and down the lagoons of southern Baja California by whalewatchers. This book uses the biology and politics associated with gray whales in Mexican waters to present an unusual case study in conservation and politics. It provides an inside look at how gray whale conservation decisions are made in Mexico City and examines how those policies and programs are carried out in the calving grounds of San Ignacio Lagoon and Magdalena Bay, where catering to ecotourists is now an integral part of the local economy.

More than a study of conservation politics, Dedina's book puts a human face on wildlife conservation. The author lived for two years with residents of Baja communities to understand their attitudes about wildlife conservation and Mexican politics, and he accompanied many in daily activities to show the extent to which the local economy depends on whalewatching. "It is ironic," observes Dedina, "that residents of some of the most isolated fishing villages in North America are helping to redefine our relationship with wild animals. Americans and Europeans brought the gray whale population to the brink of extinction. The inhabitants of San Ignacio Lagoon and Magdalena Bay are helping us to celebrate the whales' survival." By showing us how these animals have helped shape the lifeways of the people with whom they share the lagoons, Saving the Gray Whale demonstrates that gray whales represent both a destructive past and a future with hope.
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Wild Sea
Eco-Wars and Surf Stories from the Coast of the Californias
Serge Dedina
University of Arizona Press, 2011
Many people have lamented the pollution and outright loss of beaches along the coasts of California and Mexico, but very few people have fought on behalf of beaches as hard—or as successfully—as Serge Dedina. Whether taking on an international conglomerate or tackling a state transportation agency, Dedina is truly an eco-warrior. In this sparkling collection of articles, many written for popular magazines, Dedina tells the stories as only an insider could. He writes with a firm grasp of facts along with an advocate’s passion and outrage. Sprinkled with just the right mix of humor and surf lingo, Dedina’s writing is “weapons grade”—surfer speak for totally awesome.

Dedina grew up in Imperial Beach, California, just north of the Mexican border, and he feels equally at home in Mexico and the States. An expert on gray whales, he eloquently describes the fight he helped to lead against the Mitsubishi Corporation, whose plan to build a salt-processing plant in the San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja California would have destroyed the world’s last undeveloped gray whale lagoon. With similar fervor, Dedina describes helping to construct the unlikely coalition that succeeded in defeating a proposed toll road that would have decimated a legendary California surf spot.

In between, he writes about the first surfers in Baja, the Great Baja Land Rush of the 1990s, Tijuana’s punk music scene, the pop-culture wrestling phenomenon lucha libre, the reasons why ocean pollution must be stopped, and the way HBO took over his hometown. Anyone interested in what’s happening to our natural places or just yearning to read about someone really making a difference in the world will find this a book worth sinking their teeth into.
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Sonora Yaqui Language Structures
John M. Dedrick
University of Arizona Press, 1999
Yaqui is a Southern Uto-Aztecan language spoken by a people living predominantly in Sonora, with some communities in Arizona. This comprehensive reference on the Sonoran Yaqui language is a descriptive grammar that covers topics on phonology, word classes, verb structure, and complex sentences. John M. Dedrick, who lived and worked among the Yaquis for more than thirty years, shares his extensive knowledge of the language, while Uto-Aztecan specialist Eugene H. Casad helps put the material in a comparative perspective.

The book includes useful sections on quantifiers and adverbial and deictic particles, often inadequately treated in reference grammars. A section on auxiliary verbs and well-documented information on voice, aspect, and other features of verbal inflection provide readers with useful data for particular lines of linguistic inquiry. Each grammatical point is illustrated by example sentences distinguished by their naturalness and cultural relevance. At the end of the book, a Yaqui text provides a sample of connected sentences in a natural context.

Sonora Yaqui Language Structures is a valuable source not only for research on this language family but also for anthropological studies of the Arizona-Sonora cultural region. In addition, it documents an indigenous language for future generations of Yaqui speakers.
[more]

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Ohio’s War
The Civil War in Documents
Christine Dee
Ohio University Press, 2006

In 1860, Ohio was among the most influential states in the nation. As the third-most-populous state and the largest in the middle west, it embraced those elements that were in concert-but also at odds-in American society during the Civil War era. Ohio’s War uses documents from that vibrant and tumultuous time to reveal how Ohio’s soldiers and civilians experienced the Civil War. It examines Ohio’s role in the sectional crises of the 1850s, its contribution to the Union war effort, and the war’s impact on the state itself. In doing so, it provides insights into the war’s meaning for northern society.

Ohio’s War introduces some of those soldiers who left their farms, shops, and forges to fight for the Union. It documents the stories of Ohio’s women, who sustained households, organized relief efforts, and supported political candidates. It conveys the struggles and successes of free blacks and former slaves who claimed freedom in Ohio and the distinct wartime experiences of its immigrants. It also includes the voices of Ohioans who differed over emancipation, freedom of speech, the writ of habeas corpus, the draft, and the war’s legacy for American society.

From Ohio’s large cities to its farms and hamlets, as the documents in this volume show, the war changed minds and altered lives but left some beliefs and values untouched. Ohio’s War is a documentary history not only of the people of one state, but also of a region and a nation during the pivotal epoch of American history.

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Doing Good
Racial Tensions and Workplace Inequalities at a Community Clinic in El Nuevo South
Natalia Deeb-Sossa
University of Arizona Press, 2013
Throughout the “New South,” relationships based on race, class, social status, gender, and citizenship are being upended by the recent influx of Latina/o residents. Doing Good examines these issues as they play out in the microcosm of a community health center in North Carolina that previously had served mostly African American clients but now serves predominantly Latina/o clients. Drawing on eighteen months of experience as a participant- observer in the clinic and in-depth interviews with clinic staff at all levels, Natalia Deeb-Sossa provides an informative and fascinating view of how changing demographics are profoundly affecting the new social order.

Deeb-Sossa argues persuasively that “moral identities” have been constructed by clinic staff. The high-status staff—nearly all of whom are white—see themselves as heroic workers. Mid- and lower-status Latina staff feel like they are guardians of people who are especially needy and deserving of protection. In contrast, the moral identity of African American staffers had previously been established in response to serving “their people.” Their response to the evolving clientele has been to create a self-image of superiority by characterizing Latina/o clients as “immoral,” “lazy,” “working the system,” having no regard for rules or discipline, and being irresponsible parents.

All of the health-care workers want to be seen as “doing good.” But they fail to see how, in constructing and maintaining their own moral identity in response to their personal views and stereotypes, they have come to treat each other and their clients in ways that contradict their ideals.
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Latinx Belonging
Community Building and Resilience in the United States
Natalia Deeb-Sossa
University of Arizona Press, 2022

What does it mean to be Latinx? This pressing question forms the core of Latinx Belonging, which brings together cutting-edge research to discuss the multilayered ways this might be answered.

Latinx Belonging is anchored in the claim that Latinx people are not defined by their marginalization but should instead be understood as active participants in their communities and contributors to U.S. society. The volume’s overarching analytical approach recognizes the differences, identities, and divisions among people of Latin American origin in the United States, while also attending to the power of mainstream institutions to shape their lives and identities. Contributors to this volume view “belonging” as actively produced through struggle, survival, agency, resilience, and engagement.

This work positions Latinxs’ struggles for recognition and inclusion as squarely located within intersecting power structures of gender, race, sexuality, and class and as shaped by state-level and transnational forces such as U.S. immigration policies and histories of colonialism. From the case of Latinxs’ struggles for recognition in the arts, to queer Latinx community resilience during COVID-19 and in the wake of mass shootings, to Indigenous youth’s endurance and survival as unaccompanied minors in Los Angeles, the case studies featured in this collection present a rich and textured picture of the diversity of the U.S. Latinx experience in the twenty-first century.

Contributors
Andrés Acosta
Jack “Trey” Allen
Jennifer Bickham Mendez
Stephanie L. Canizales
Christopher Cuevas
Natalia Deeb-Sossa
Yvette G. Flores
Melanie Jones Gast
Monika Gosin
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo
Nolan Kline
Verónica Montes
Yvonne Montoya
Michael De Anda Muñiz
Suzanne Oboler
Gilda L. Ochoa
Dina G. Okamoto
Marco Antonio Quiroga
Michelle Téllez

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Testimonios of Care
Feminist Latina/x and Chicana/x Perspectives on Caregiving Praxis
Natalia Deeb-Sossa
University of Arizona Press, 2024
The first English-language collection of Latina/x caregiving testimonios, this volume gives voice to diverse Chicana/x and Latina/x caregiving experiences. Bringing together thirteen first-person accounts, these testimonios speak to the tragic flaws in our health-care system and the woefully undervalued labor of providing care to family and community.

The book opens with an introductory chapter by the three co-editors, and then is divided into three sections exploring the caregiver voice, community caregiving, and reflections that outline a Caregiver Bill of Rights and present a call to action. Throughout, contributors discuss kinship care, including formal and informal adoptions, community care, caregiving in professional health contexts, and the implicit caregiving inherent in teaching BIPOC students, which largely falls upon faculty of color.

Testimonios of Care gives voice to those who often are voiceless in histories of caregiving and is guided by Chicana and Latina feminist principles, which include solidarity between women of color, empathy, willingness to challenge the patriarchal medical health-care systems, questioning traditional gender roles and idealization of familia, and caring for self while caring for loved ones and community.

Contributors
yvonne hurtado allen
Angie Chabram
Natalia Deeb-Sossa
Yvette G. Flores
Inés Hernández-Ávila
ire’ne lara silva
Josie Méndez-Negrete
Maria R. Palacios
Hector Rivera-Lopez
Maria Angelina Soldatenko
Anita Tijerina Revilla
Mónica Torreiro-Casal
Enriqueta Valdez-Curiel
[more]

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Community-Based Participatory Research
Testimonios from Chicana/o Studies
Natalia Deeb-Sossa
University of Arizona Press, 2019
Members of communities of color in the United States often struggle for equity, autonomy, survival, and justice. Community-Based Participatory Research is an edited volume from activist-scholars who present personal testimonies showcasing how community-based participatory research (CBPR) can lead to sustainable change and empowerment. Editor Natalia Deeb-Sossa has chosen contributors whose diverse interdisciplinary projects are grounded in politically engaged research in Chicanx and Latinx communities. The scholars’ advocacy work is a core component of the research design of their studies, challenging the idea that research needs to be neutral or unbiased.

The testimonies tell of projects that stem from community demands for truly collaborative research addressing locally identified issues and promoting community social change. Contributors share their personal experiences in conducting CBPR, focusing on the complexities of implementing this method and how it may create sustainable change and community empowerment. Along with a retrospective analysis of how CBPR has been at the center of the Chicana/o Movement and Chicana/o studies, the book includes a discussion of consejos y advertencias (advice and warnings).

The most knowledgeable people on community issues are the very members of the communities themselves. Recognizing a need to identify the experiences and voices (testimonios) of communities of color, activist-­scholars showcase how to incorporate the perspectives of the true experts: the poor, women, farmworkers, students, activists, elders, and immigrants.
 
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Defiance and Deference in Mexico's Colonial North
Indians under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya
Susan M. Deeds
University of Texas Press, 2003

Thomas F. McGann Memorial Prize, Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies, 2004
Southwest Book Award, Border Regional Library Association, 2003

In their efforts to impose colonial rule on Nueva Vizcaya from the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, Spaniards established missions among the principal Indian groups of present-day eastern Sinaloa, northern Durango, and southern Chihuahua, Mexico—the Xiximes, Acaxees, Conchos, Tepehuanes, and Tarahumaras. Yet, when the colonial era ended two centuries later, only the Tepehuanes and Tarahumaras remained as distinct peoples, the other groups having disappeared or blended into the emerging mestizo culture of the northern frontier. Why were these two indigenous peoples able to maintain their group identity under conditions of conquest, while the others could not?

In this book, Susan Deeds constructs authoritative ethnohistories of the Xiximes, Acaxees, Conchos, Tepehuanes, and Tarahumaras to explain why only two of the five groups successfully resisted Spanish conquest and colonization. Drawing on extensive research in colonial-era archives, Deeds provides a multifaceted analysis of each group's past from the time the Spaniards first attempted to settle them in missions up to the middle of the eighteenth century, when secular pressures had wrought momentous changes. Her masterful explanations of how ethnic identities, subsistence patterns, cultural beliefs, and gender relations were forged and changed over time on Mexico's northern frontier offer important new ways of understanding the struggle between resistance and adaptation in which Mexico's indigenous peoples are still engaged, five centuries after the "Spanish Conquest."

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Finance Capitalism Unveiled
Banks and the German Political Economy
Richard Edward Deeg
University of Michigan Press, 1999
If we are moving toward one global financial market, will all national financial systems that determine how businesses raise money look the same? Richard Deeg argues that, despite financial market integration and considerable harmonization in the regulation of financial markets, the traditional structure and economic functions of national financial systems are not inevitably undermined. Using the case of Germany--a country with a strong and distinctive financial sector that is at the center of the pressures of economic integration--the author shows how the unique aspects of the German financial sector and its relationship to the German economy have persisted notwithstanding powerful pressures to change. Posing the German model of coordinated capitalism in which banks play an important role in shaping both firm behavior and the possibilities for state intervention in the economy against the liberal model of the United States and Britain in which the securities markets play a much greater role than banks, Deeg shows how the German model has survived competitive pressures in the international economic system that have pushed Germany--and other countries--toward the liberal model.
This book will appeal to political scientists and economists interested in international financial markets, globalization, and the comparative study of domestic financial markets, as well as in German politics and the German economy.
Richard Deeg is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Temple University.
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Pope John Paul II Speaks on Women
Brooke Williams Deely
Catholic University of America Press, 2014
In Pope John Paul II Speaks on Women, Brooke Williams Deely presents a comprehensive record of John Paul II's reflections. This collection brings to the forefront the full context and content of his original contributions. Since John Paul II encouraged women and men to expand what he has adumbrated, this book facilitates ongoing dialogue. The principle of the organization of the volume is chronological, compiling John Paul II's teachings on the subject of women arranged by date over the entire term of his Papacy. Since this influential Pope addressed the situation of women from the beginning of his pontificate, this overview of his writings and his spoken addresses best showcases the development and historical context of his thought.
[more]

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Basics Of Semiotics
John Deely
St. Augustine's Press, 2004

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Medieval Philosophy Redefined as the Latin Age
John Deely
St. Augustine's Press, 2016
In a statement published for Paul Cobley’s edition of Realism for the 21st Century. A John Deely Reader, Umberto Eco wrote that “John Deely has not only paid attention to the Second Scholasticism but also to the first one”. In the present book, Deely goes one step further, by establishing the continuity of the Latin Age as a whole. He shows how the Latin thinkers demonstrated the presuppositions and created the framework of critical thought that made possible and inevitable the turn to science in the modern sense. The book thus shows how and why criticalachievements of the Latins remain requisite, even today, for the proper understanding of science and technology as offshot of the “Way of Signs” upon which all of thought, as also evikytuib as a whole, perforce travels.

“With the sophistic modern and Enlightenment misconceptions about philosophy’s nature and history daily crashing and burning around us, Deely’s unconventional way of understanding medieval philosophy is like a breath of fresh air amid intellectual smog. This is a great book, the single most important study of medieval thought in half a century or more. It deserves an unbiased hearing by anyone today claiming to be a serious philosopher.” — Peter A. Redpath

Founding Chairman, Universities of Western Civilization Chairman of the Board, The International Etienne Gilson Society

“Drawing upon the thought of John Poinsot and Charles Pierce, John Deely has opened a distinctively postmodern path to the metaphysics of being, at once illuminating much of this ancient tradition while casting new light upon it in the context of contemporary thought. His treatment notably of St. Thomas is not merely a return to an earlier thinker, but an opening to a different path, at once in profound agreement with St. Thomas and yet heretofore unexplored. This book, thus, not only constitutes a return to a past era, but shows this era in a new light that illuminates as well the contemporary scene.” — Kenneth L. Schmitz

Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto, Canada Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, Washington, D.C.
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Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy
Phillip Deen
Southern Illinois University Press, 2012

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In 1947 America’s premier philosopher, educator, and public intellectual John Dewey purportedly lost his last manuscript on modern philosophy in the back of a taxicab. Now, sixty-five years later, Dewey’s fresh and unpretentious take on the history and theory of knowledge is finally available. Editor Phillip Deen has taken on the task of editing Dewey’s unfinished work, carefully compiling the fragments and multiple drafts of each chapter that he discovered in the folders of the Dewey Papers at the Special Collections Research Center at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has used Dewey’s last known outline for the manuscript, aiming to create a finished product that faithfully represents Dewey’s original intent. An introduction and editor’s notes by Deen and a foreword by Larry A. Hickman, director of the Center for Dewey Studies, frame this previously lost work.

In Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy, Dewey argues that modern philosophy is anything but; instead, it retains the baggage of outdated and misguided philosophical traditions and dualisms carried forward from Greek and medieval traditions. Drawing on cultural anthropology, Dewey moves past the philosophical themes of the past, instead proposing a functional model of humanity as emotional, inquiring, purposive organisms embedded in a natural and cultural environment.

Dewey begins by tracing the problematic history of philosophy, demonstrating how, from the time of the Greeks to the Empiricists and Rationalists, the subject has been mired in the search for immutable absolutes outside human experience and has relied on dualisms between mind and body, theory and practice, and the material and the ideal, ultimately dividing humanity from nature. The result, he posits, is the epistemological problem of how it is possible to have knowledge at all. In the second half of the volume, Dewey roots philosophy in the conflicting beliefs and cultural tensions of the human condition, maintaining that these issues are much more pertinent to philosophy and knowledge than the sharp dichotomies of the past and abstract questions of the body and mind. Ultimately, Dewey argues that the mind is not separate from the world, criticizes the denigration of practice in the name of theory, addresses the dualism between matter and ideals, and questions why the human and the natural were ever separated in philosophy. The result is a deeper understanding of the relationship among the scientific, the moral, and the aesthetic.

More than just historically significant in its rediscovery, Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy provides an intriguing critique of the history of modern thought and a positive account of John Dewey’s naturalized theory of knowing. This volume marks a significant contribution to the history of American thought and finally resolves one of the mysteries of pragmatic philosophy.

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The Problem with Feeding Cities
The Social Transformation of Infrastructure, Abundance, and Inequality in America
Andrew Deener
University of Chicago Press, 2020
For most people, grocery shopping is a mundane activity. Few stop to think about the massive, global infrastructure that makes it possible to buy Chilean grapes in a Philadelphia supermarket in the middle of winter. Yet every piece of food represents an interlocking system of agriculture, manufacturing, shipping, logistics, retailing, and nonprofits that controls what we eat—or don’t.

The Problem with Feeding Cities is a sociological and historical examination of how this remarkable network of abundance and convenience came into being over the last century. It looks at how the US food system transformed from feeding communities to feeding the entire nation, and it reveals how a process that was once about fulfilling basic needs became focused on satisfying profit margins. It is also a story of how this system fails to feed people, especially in the creation of food deserts. Andrew Deener shows that problems with food access are the result of infrastructural failings stemming from how markets and cities were developed, how distribution systems were built, and how organizations coordinate the quality and movement of food. He profiles hundreds of people connected through the food chain, from farmers, wholesalers, and supermarket executives, to global shippers, logistics experts, and cold-storage operators, to food bank employees and public health advocates. It is a book that will change the way we see our grocery store trips and will encourage us all to rethink the way we eat in this country.
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Venice
A Contested Bohemia in Los Angeles
Andrew Deener
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Nestled between Santa Monica and Marina del Rey, Venice is a Los Angeles community filled with apparent contradictions. There, people of various races and classes live side by side, a population of astounding diversity bound together by geographic proximity. From street to street, and from block to block, million dollar homes stand near housing projects and homeless encampments; and upscale boutiques are just a short walk from the (in)famous Venice Beach where artists and carnival performers practice their crafts opposite cafés and ragtag tourist shops. In Venice: A Contested Bohemia in Los Angeles, Andrew Deener invites the reader on an ethnographic tour of this legendary California beach community and the people who live there.
 
In writing this book, the ethnographer became an insider; Deener lived as a resident of Venice for close to six years. Here, he brings a scholarly eye to bear on the effects of gentrification, homelessness, segregation, and immigration on this community. Through stories from five different parts of Venice—Oakwood, Rose Avenue, the Boardwalk, the Canals, and Abbot Kinney Boulevard— Deener identifies why Venice maintained its diversity for so long and the social and political factors that threaten it. Drenched in the details of Venice’s transformation, the themes and explanations will resonate far beyond this one city. 
 
Deener reveals that Venice is not a single locale, but a collection of neighborhoods, each with its own identity and conflicts—and he provides a cultural map infinitely more useful than one that merely shows streets and intersections. Deener's Venice appears on these pages fully fleshed out and populated with a stunning array of people. Though the character of any neighborhood is transient, Deener's work is indelible and this book will be studied for years to come by scholars across the social sciences.
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Edward Said
A Memorial Issue, Volume 24
Patrick Deer
Duke University Press
Through his work as a scholar, as a critic, and as a political commentator, Edward Said asked insistently: Who speaks? For what and whom? How does an intellectual articulate his or her place in the West? Or in the developing world? What is the specific contribution and intervention to be made by the intellectual? This Social Text special issue in memory of Said examines how he challenged established authority and identity with these questions and shaped a culture of criticism.
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The Ends of War, Volume 25
Patrick Deer
Duke University Press
This special issue of Social Text examines the self-perpetuating nature of postmodern war and war culture. It looks at the instrumental nature of war discourse as a political force and challenges its vision of endless warfare as the means to control both domestic and foreign populations in an era of globalization. Essays analyze the historical and material interests that war serves and challenge the seductive mythology of high-tech precision warfare, which allows the traumatic effects of war to be considered at a great distance. The issue also argues that the increasing tendency to discuss war metaphorically—as in the phrases “War on Drugs” and “War on Terror”—blurs the boundaries between civilian and soldier and between combatant and noncombatant and defers the human cost of permanent warfare.

The contributors to this special issue—drawing on cultural studies, anthropology, economics, psychoanalysis, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and war literature—target the blind spots in current debates about war. One essay examines the financing of war, challenging the myth that our military-industrial complex generates economic bounty. Another contributor addresses strategies of high-tech urban warfare now being developed by the U.S. military and warns of the historical limits of colonial policing techniques that build on practices of surveillance. Other essays discuss the eroticization of “consent” embodied in the practice of torture at Abu Ghraib; the paradoxes of paramilitary policing and popular resistance along the militarized Mexico-U.S. border; and the continuities between the permanent war economy that emerged in the United States during World War II and the current disastrous confluence of militarism, global outsourcing, and economic depletion.

Contributors. Ashley Dawson, Patrick Deer, Jonathan Michael Feldman, Kennan Ferguson, Jean Franco, Randy Martin, Leerom Medovoi, Rosalind C. Morris, Gilberto Rosas

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Punk and Its Afterlives, Volume 31
Patrick Deer
Duke University Press
This issue follows the punk movement’s lingering aftereffects, investigating its unruly profligacy of meanings within music and popular culture and outside and beyond genre. The contributors track punk’s affect and aesthetics across media and geography from the 1970s to the present, seeking to disrupt conventional linear narratives of punk’s development. This collection participates in a growing body of literature focusing on the stories and creative articulations of punk by women, people of color, and queer individuals. The contributors reconsider the presence of masculinity in emo; posit a queer minstrelsy underlying the homophobia in 1980s hardcore punk; analyze the “shadow feminism” within the screams of Rhoda Dakar, Yoko Ono, Grace Jones, and Janelle Monáe; and confront the relationship of faith, feminism, and aesthetics in Pussy Riot’s work. Other essays offer a realignment of punk’s Los Angeles–New York–London axis by investigating South Tejas punk bands and disentangling punk’s thorny connections to ska, dub, dubstep, and pop.

Jayna Brown is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Patrick Deer is Associate Professor of English at New York University. Tavia Nyong’o is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

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Empowering Women
Land And Property Rights In Latin America
Carmen Diana Deere
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001
The expansion of married women’s property rights was a main achievement of the first wave of feminism in Latin America. As Carmen Diana Deeere and Magdalena Leon reveal, however, the disjuncture between rights and actual ownership remains vast. This is particularly true in rural areas, where the distribution of land between men and women is highly unequal. In their pioneering, twelve-country comparative study, the authors argue that property ownership is directly related to women’s bargaining power within the household and community, point out changes resulting from recent gender-progressive legislation, and identify additional areas for future reform, including inheritance rights of wives.
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A Country of Defiance
Mapping the Casamance in Senegal
Mark W. Deets
Ohio University Press, 2023
A historiographical analysis of human geography and a social history of nationalist separatism and cultural identity in southern Senegal. This book is a spatial history of the conflict in Casamance, the portion of Senegal located south of The Gambia. Mark W. Deets traces the origins of the conflict back to the start of the colonial period in a select group of contested spaces and places where the seeds of nationalism and separatism took root. Each chapter examines the development of a different piece of the still unrealized Casamançais nation: river, rice field, forest, school, and stadium. Each of these locations forms a spatial discourse of grievance that transformed space into place, rendering a separatist nation from the pieces where a particular Casamançais identity emerged. However, not every Casamançais identified with these spaces and places in the same way. Many refused to tie their beloved culture and landscape to the project of separatism, revealing a layer of counter-mapping below that of the separatist leaders like Father Augustin Diamacoune Senghor and Mamadou “Nkrumah” Sané. The Casamance conflict began on December 26, 1982. After an oath-taking ceremony in a sacred forest on the edge of Ziguinchor, hundreds of separatists from the Movement of Democratic Forces of the Casamance (MFDC) marched into the town to remove the Senegalese flag in front of the regional governor’s office and replace it with a white flag. The marchers were met by gendarmes who quickly found themselves outnumbered. Government surveillance, arrests, and interrogations followed into the next year, when gendarmes went to the sacred forest to stop another MFDC meeting. This time, the separatists greeted the gendarmes with a burst of violence that left four dead, their bodies mutilated. Senegalese security responded with force, driving the separatists—armed only with improvised rifles, bows and arrows, and machetes—into the forest. The Casamance conflict continues to the present day, so far having left more than five thousand dead, four hundred killed or maimed by land mines, and another eight hundred thousand living in a state of insecurity, with limited possibility for economic development. Ordinary Casamançais—on the Casamance River, in the rice fields, in the forests, in the schools, and in the sports stadiums—have demonstrated a diversity of opinions about the separatist project. Whether by the Senegalese state or by the separatists, these ordinary Casamançais have refused to be mapped. They have made the Casamance “a country of defiance.”
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Uncanny Subjects
Aging in Contemporary Narrative
Amelia DeFalco
The Ohio State University Press, 2009
In the United States anti-aging is a multibillion-dollar industry, and efforts to combat signs of aging have never been stronger, or more lucrative. Although there are many sociological studies of aging and culture, there are few studies that examine the ways cultural texts construct multiple narratives of aging that intersect and sometimes conflict with existing social theories of aging. In Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative, Amelia DeFalco contributes to the ongoing discourse of aging studies by incorporating methodologies and theories derived from the humanities in her investigation into contemporary representations of aging.
 
The movement of aging is the movement of our lives, and this dynamism aligns aging with narrative: both are a function of time, of change, of one event happening after another. Subjects understand their lives through narrative trajectories—through stories—not necessarily as they are living moment to moment, but in reflection, reflection that becomes, many argue, more and more prevalent as one ages. As a result, narrative fiction provides compelling representations of the strange—indeed uncanny—familiarity of the aging self.
 
In Uncanny Subjects, DeFalco explores a thematic similitude in a range of contemporary fiction and film by authors and directors such as John Banville, John Cassavetes, and Alice Munro. As their texts suggest, proceeding into old age involves a growing awareness of the otherness within, an awareness that reveals identity as multiple, shifting, and contradictory—in short, uncanny. Drawing together theories of the uncanny with research on aging and temporality, DeFalco argues that aging is a category of difference integral to a contemporary understanding of identity and alterity.
 
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Sixteenth Street NW
Washington, DC's Avenue of Ambitions
John DeFerrari
Georgetown University Press, 2023

A richly illustrated architectural “biography” of one of DC’s most important boulevards

Sixteenth Street NW in Washington, DC, has been called the Avenue of the Presidents, Executive Avenue, and the Avenue of Churches. From the front door of the White House, this north-south artery runs through the middle of the District and extends just past its border with Maryland. The street is as central to the cityscape as it is to DC’s history and culture.

In Sixteenth Street NW: Washington, DC’s Avenue of Ambitions, John DeFerrari and Douglas Peter Sefton depict the social and architectural history of the street and immediate neighborhoods, inviting readers to explore how the push and pull between ordinary Washingtonians and powerful elites has shaped the corridor—and the city. This highly illustrated book features notable buildings along Sixteenth Street and recounts colorful stories of those who lived, worked, and worshipped there. Maps offer readers an opportunity to create self-guided tours of the places and people that have defined this main thoroughfare over time.

What readers will find is that both then and now, Sixteenth Street NW has been shaped by a diverse array of people and communities. The street, and the book, feature a range of sites—from Black Lives Matter Plaza to the White House, from mansions and rowhomes to apartment buildings, from Meridian Hill (Malcolm X) Park with its drum circles to Rock Creek Park with its tennis tournaments, and from hotels to houses of worship. Sixteenth Street, NW reveals a cross section of Washington, DC, that shows the vibrant makeup of our nation’s capital.

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René Magritte
The Artist’s Materials
Catherine Defeyt
J. Paul Getty Trust, The
The first book-length material study of the works of Belgian Surrealist René Magritte.
 
René Magritte (1898–1967) is the most famous Belgian artist of the twentieth century and a celebrated representative of the Surrealist movement. Much has been written about his practices, artistic community, and significance within the history of modernism, but little has been documented regarding his process.
 
This volume examines fifty oil paintings made by Magritte between 1921 and 1967, now held at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. This technical study of his works using noninvasive scientific imaging and chemical analysis reveals the artist’s painting materials, his habit of overpainting previous compositions, and the origins and mechanisms of surface and pigment degradation. Of interest to conservators, scientists, curators, and enthusiasts of twentieth-century art, this book expands our understanding of Magritte the artist and provides new and useful findings that will inform strategies for the future care of his works.
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front cover of Voices of the Jazz Age
Voices of the Jazz Age
Profiles of Eight Vintage Jazzmen
Chip Deffaa
University of Illinois Press, 1990
In Voices of the Jazz Age, Chip Deffaa interviews eight musicians who rose to popularity during the 1920s. Sam Wooding, Benny Waters, Bix Beiderbecke, Joe Tarto, Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland, Freddie Moore, Jabbo Smith bring the Jazz Age back to life with vivid memories, amazing stories, and their own larger-than-life personalities. Deffaa draws out their glory days in the Twenties but also invites them to share the stories of their long lives in music, often in obscurity, but in many cases still working and gigging well into their eighties.
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front cover of María Izquierdo and Frida Kahlo
María Izquierdo and Frida Kahlo
Challenging Visions in Modern Mexican Art
Nancy Deffebach
University of Texas Press, 2015

María Izquierdo (1902–1955) and Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) were the first two Mexican women artists to achieve international recognition. During the height of the Mexican muralist movement, they established successful careers as easel painters and created work that has become an integral part of Mexican modernism. Although the iconic Kahlo is now more famous, the two artists had comparable reputations during their lives. Both were regularly included in major exhibitions of Mexican art, and they were invariably the only women chosen for the most important professional activities and honors.

In a deeply informed study that prioritizes critical analysis over biographical interpretation, Nancy Deffebach places Kahlo’s and Izquierdo’s oeuvres in their cultural context, examining the ways in which the artists participated in the national and artistic discourses of postrevolutionary Mexico. Through iconographic analysis of paintings and themes within each artist’s oeuvre, Deffebach discusses how the artists engaged intellectually with the issues and ideas of their era, especially Mexican national identity and the role of women in society. In a time when Mexican artistic and national discourses associated the nation with masculinity, Izquierdo and Kahlo created images of women that deconstructed gender roles, critiqued the status quo, and presented more empowering alternatives for women. Deffebach demonstrates that, paradoxically, Kahlo and Izquierdo became the most successful Mexican women artists of the modernist period while most directly challenging the prevailing ideas about gender and what constitutes important art.

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