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Exchanging the Past: A Rainforest World of Before and After
Bruce M. Knauft
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Library of Congress DU740.42.K52 2002 | Dewey Decimal 305.89912

Twenty years ago, the Gebusi of the lowland Papua New Guinea rainforest had one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Bruce M. Knauft found then that the killings stemmed from violent scapegoating of suspected sorcerers. But by the time he returned in 1998, homicide rates had plummeted, and Gebusi had largely disavowed vengeance against sorcerers in favor of modern schools, discos, markets, and Christianity.

In this book, Knauft explores the Gebusi's encounter with modern institutions and highlights what their experience tells us more generally about the interaction between local peoples and global forces. As desire for material goods grew among Gebusi, Knauft shows that they became more accepting of and subordinated by Christian churches, community schools,and government officials in their attempt to benefit from them—a process Knauft terms "recessive agency." But the Gebusi also respond actively to modernity, creating new forms of feasting, performance, and music that meld traditional practices with Western ones, all of which Knauft documents in this fascinating study.

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Encompassing Others: The Magic of Modernity in Melanesia
Edward LiPuma
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Library of Congress DU740.42.L566 2000 | Dewey Decimal 305.89912

An engaging, beautifully written account by an ethnographer who lived in the mountains of Papua New Guinea, Encompassing Others is at once a history of the encounter of two cultures and an attempt to challenge theoretically the main concepts that have informed the study of modernity. Going beyond accounts that grasp modernity solely in terms of domination, imperialism, and local resistance, it explores how capitalism, Christianity, and mass commercial culture enchant the senses, create a carnival of new goods, and open up new possibilities for thought and action.
Focusing on the Maring people of Highland New Guinea and on the Westerners who interacted with them, Edward LiPuma presents issues from the perspectives of both sides. We hear the voice of the Anglican priest from San Francisco as well as the most powerful Maring shamans. Further, the book seeks to develop a theory of generations that helps explain how change accelerates and societies take on new directions across generations.
Theoretical, descriptive, but almost entirely free of jargon, this book is intended for all those who are interested in how the West's encompassment of other peoples influences how these others conceive of their past, imagine their future, and experience the present. It will have wide appeal for anthropologists and others concerned with colonialism, globalization, and the formation of the nation-state.
Edward LiPuma is Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, University of Miami.

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Conceiving Cultures: Reproducing People and Places on Nuakata, Papua New Guinea
Shelley Mallett
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Library of Congress DU740.42.M353 2003 | Dewey Decimal 306.089992

Conceiving Cultures critically reflects on the ways anthropologists come to understand and represent the people and cultures that they study. These ideas are developed through an ethnographic study that explores notions of the gendered person through knowledge and practices relating to reproductive health on the Massim island of Nuakata in Papua New Guinea. Conceiving Cultures makes explicit anthropology's implicit project to understand the self by way of the other.
Shelley Mallett is Research Fellow at the Key Centre for Women's Health in Society at Melbourne University.

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The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society
Nancy D. Munn
Duke University Press, 1992
Library of Congress DU740.42.M86 1992 | Dewey Decimal 306.089995

This new edition of the critically acclaimed The Fame of Gawa—originally published in 1986—makes available for the first time this important work in paperback. The Fame of Gawa is concerned with fundamental practices of value creation on Gawa, a small island off the southeast coast of mainland Papua New Guinea, the inhabitants of which participate in the long-distance kula shell exchange ring. Integrating various aspects of the study of society and culture--including the sociocultural construction of space and time, self-other relations and the body, and moral and political problems of hierarchy and equality—Nancy D. Munn shows that it is through achieving fame in the wider inter-island world that the Gawan community asserts its own internal viablity.

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Masculinity, Motherhood, and Mockery: Psychoanalyzing Culture and the Iatmul Naven Rite in New Guinea
Eric Kline Silverman
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Library of Congress DU740.42.S57 2001 | Dewey Decimal 306.0899912

Masculinity, Motherhood, and Mockery analyzes the relationship between masculinity and motherhood in an Eastern Iatmul village along the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. It focuses on a metaphorical dialogue between two countervailing images of the body, dubbed by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin as the "moral" and the "grotesque." Eastern Iatmul men in Tambunum village idealize an image of motherhood that is nurturing, sheltering, cleansing, fertile, and chaste--in a word, moral. But men also fear an equally compelling image of motherhood that is defiling, dangerous, orificial, aggressive, and carnal--hence, grotesque. Masculinity in Tambunum is a rejoinder both subtle and strident, both muted and impassioned, to these contrary, embodied images of motherhood.

Throughout this work, Eric Silverman details the dialogics of mothering and manhood throughout Eastern Iatmul culture, including in his analysis cosmology and myth; food- and childraising; architecture and canoes; ethnophysiology and sexuality; shame and hygiene; marriage and kinship; and perhaps most significantly, a ceremonial locus classicus in anthropology: the famous Iatmul naven rite. This book provides the first sustained examination of naven since Bateson, presenting new data and interpretations that are based entirely on original, first-hand ethnographic research.

The sustained engagement with anthropological and psychoanalytic theory coupled with a refreshing examination of a famous and still-enigmatic ritual is sure to make multiple contributions to pressing debates in contemporary anthropology and social theory.

Eric Silverman is Associate Professor of Anthropology, DePauw University.

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The Cassowary's Revenge: The Life and Death of Masculinity in a New Guinea Society
Donald Tuzin
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Library of Congress DU740.42.T84 1997 | Dewey Decimal 306.0899912

Donald Tuzin first studied the New Guinea village of Ilahita in 1972. When he returned many years later, he arrived in the aftermath of a startling event: the village’s men voluntarily destroyed their secret cult that had allowed them to dominate women for generations. The cult’s collapse indicated nothing less than the death of masculinity, and Tuzin examines the labyrinth of motives behind this improbable, self-devastating act. The villagers' mythic tradition provided a basis for this revenge of Woman upon the dominion of Man, and, remarkably, Tuzin himself became a principal figure in its narratives. The return of the magic-bearing "youngest brother" from America had been prophesied, and the villagers believed that Tuzin’s return "from the dead" signified a further need to destroy masculine traditions.

The Cassowary's Revenge is an intimate account of how Ilahita’s men and women think, emote, dream, and explain themselves. Tuzin also explores how the death of masculinity in a remote society raises disturbing implications for gender relations in our own society. In this light Tuzin's book is about men and women in search of how to value one another, and in today's world there is no theme more universal or timely.

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Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea
Paige West
Duke University Press, 2006
Library of Congress DU740.42.W464 2006 | Dewey Decimal 333.720899912

A significant contribution to political ecology, Conservation Is Our Government Now is an ethnographic examination of the history and social effects of conservation and development efforts in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted over a period of seven years, Paige West focuses on the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, the site of a biodiversity conservation project implemented between 1994 and 1999. She describes the interactions between those who ran the program—mostly ngo workers—and the Gimi people who live in the forests surrounding Crater Mountain. West shows that throughout the project there was a profound disconnect between the goals of the two groups. The ngo workers thought that they would encourage conservation and cultivate development by teaching Gimi to value biodiversity as an economic resource. The villagers expected that in exchange for the land, labor, food, and friendship they offered the conservation workers, they would receive benefits, such as medicine and technology. In the end, the divergent nature of each group’s expectations led to disappointment for both.

West reveals how every aspect of the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area—including ideas of space, place, environment, and society—was socially produced, created by changing configurations of ideas, actions, and material relations not only in Papua New Guinea but also in other locations around the world. Complicating many of the assumptions about nature, culture, and development underlying contemporary conservation efforts, Conservation Is Our Government Now demonstrates the unique capacity of ethnography to illuminate the relationship between the global and the local, between transnational processes and individual lives.

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Leviathans at the Gold Mine: Creating Indigenous and Corporate Actors in Papua New Guinea
Alex Golub
Duke University Press, 2014
Library of Congress DU740.9.P66G655 2014 | Dewey Decimal 333.8541099563

Leviathans at the Gold Mine is an ethnographic account of the relationship between the Ipili, an indigenous group in Papua New Guinea, and the large international gold mine operating on their land. It was not until 1939 that Australian territorial patrols reached the Ipili. By 1990, the third largest gold mine on the planet was operating in their valley. Alex Golub examines how "the mine" and "the Ipili" were brought into being in relation to one another, and how certain individuals were authorized to speak for the mine and others to speak for the Ipili. Considering the relative success of the Ipili in their negotiations with a multinational corporation, Golub argues that a unique conjuncture of personal relationships and political circumstances created a propitious moment during which the dynamic and fluid nature of Ipili culture could be used to full advantage. As that moment faded away, social problems in the valley increased. The Ipili now struggle with the extreme social dislocation brought about by the massive influx of migrants and money into their valley.

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Alchemy in the Rain Forest: Politics, Ecology, and Resilience in a New Guinea Mining Area
Jerry K. Jacka
Duke University Press, 2015
Library of Congress DU740.9.P66J33 2015

In Alchemy in the Rain Forest Jerry K. Jacka explores how the indigenous population of Papua New Guinea's highlands struggle to create meaningful lives in the midst of extreme social conflict and environmental degradation. Drawing on theories of political ecology, place, and ontology and using ethnographic, environmental, and historical data, Jacka presents a multilayered examination of the impacts large-scale commercial gold mining in the region has had on ecology and social relations. Despite the deadly interclan violence and widespread pollution brought on by mining, the uneven distribution of its financial benefits has led many Porgerans to call for further development. This desire for increased mining, Jacka points out, counters popular portrayals of indigenous people as innate conservationists who defend the environment from international neoliberal development. Jacka's examination of the ways Porgerans search for common ground between capitalist and indigenous ways of knowing and being points to the complexity and interconnectedness of land, indigenous knowledge, and the global economy in Porgera and beyond.

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Living in the Stone Age: Reflections on the Origins of a Colonial Fantasy
Danilyn Rutherford
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Library of Congress DU744.35.P33L59 2018 | Dewey Decimal 995.1

In 1961, John F. Kennedy referred to the Papuans as “living, as it were, in the Stone Age.” For the most part, politicians and scholars have since learned not to call people “primitive,” but when it comes to the Papuans, the Stone-Age stain persists and for decades has been used to justify denying their basic rights. Why has this fantasy held such a tight grip on the imagination of journalists, policy-makers, and the public at large?

Living in the Stone Age answers this question by following the adventures of officials sent to the New Guinea highlands in the 1930s to establish a foothold for Dutch colonialism. These officials became deeply dependent on the good graces of their would-be Papuan subjects, who were their hosts, guides, and, in some cases, friends. Danilyn Rutherford shows how, to preserve their sense of racial superiority, these officials imagined that they were traveling in the Stone Age—a parallel reality where their own impotence was a reasonable response to otherworldly conditions rather than a sign of ignorance or weakness. Thus, Rutherford shows, was born a colonialist ideology.

Living in the Stone Age is a call to write the history of colonialism differently, as a tale of weakness not strength. It will change the way readers think about cultural contact, colonial fantasies of domination, and the role of anthropology in the postcolonial world.

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Freedom in Entangled Worlds: West Papua and the Architecture of Global Power
Eben Kirksey
Duke University Press, 2012
Library of Congress DU744.5.K565 2012 | Dewey Decimal 995.104

Eben Kirksey first went to West Papua, the Indonesian-controlled half of New Guinea, as an exchange student in 1998. His later study of West Papua's resistance to the Indonesian occupiers and the forces of globalization morphed as he discovered that collaboration, rather than resistance, was the primary strategy of this dynamic social movement. Accompanying indigenous activists to Washington, London, and the offices of the oil giant BP, Kirksey saw the revolutionaries' knack for getting inside institutions of power and building coalitions with unlikely allies, including many Indonesians. He discovered that the West Papuans' pragmatic activism was based on visions of dramatic transformations on coming horizons, of a future in which they would give away their natural resources in grand humanitarian gestures, rather than watch their homeland be drained of timber, gold, copper, and natural gas. During a lengthy, brutal occupation, West Papuans have harbored a messianic spirit and channeled it in surprising directions. Kirksey studied West Papua's movement for freedom while a broad-based popular uprising gained traction from 1998 until 2008. Blending ethnographic research with indigenous parables, historical accounts, and narratives of his own experiences, he argues that seeking freedom in entangled worlds requires negotiating complex interdependencies.

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See No Evil: New Zealand’s Betrayal of the People of West Papua
Maire Leadbeater
University of Cincinnati Press, 2018
Library of Congress DU744.5.L43 2018 | Dewey Decimal 995.103

See No Evil issues a challenge to New Zealanders. The book begins by relating the little-known history of West Papua, but its focus is on the impact of New Zealand’s foreign policy on the indigenous Melanesian inhabitants. In the 1950s New Zealand supported self-determination for the former Dutch colony, but in 1962 opted to back Indonesia as it took over the territory. Delving deep into historical government archives, many of them obtained under the Official Information Act, this meticulously researched book uncovers the untold story of New Zealand’s unprincipled and often hypocritical diplomacy. The consequences of repressive Indonesian rule have been tragic for the West Papuan people, who are experiencing ‘slow genocide’. West Papua remains largely closed to foreign journalists, but its story is now beginning to be heard. A growing number of Pacific Island nations are calling for change, but so far New Zealand has opted for caution and collusion to preserve a ‘business as usual’ relationship with Indonesia.

See No Evil is a shocking account by one of New Zealand’s most respected authors on peace and Pacific issues, issuing a powerful call for a just and permanent solution – self-determination – for the people of West Papua.

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Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua
Danilyn Rutherford
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Library of Congress DU744.5.R88 2012 | Dewey Decimal 995.1

For West Papua and its people, the promise of sovereignty has never been realized, despite a long and fraught struggle for independence from Indonesia. In Laughing at Leviathan, Danilyn Rutherford examines this struggle through a series of interlocking essays that drive at the core meaning of sovereignty itself—how it is fueled, formed, and even thwarted by pivotal but often overlooked players: those that make up an audience. Whether these players are citizens, missionaries, competing governmental powers, nongovernmental organizations, or the international community at large, Rutherford shows how a complex interplay of various observers is key to the establishment and understanding of the sovereign nation-state.

Drawing on a wide array of sources, from YouTube videos to Dutch propaganda to her own fieldwork observations, Rutherford draws the history of Indonesia, empire, and postcolonial nation-building into a powerful examination of performance and power. Ultimately she revises Thomas Hobbes, painting a picture of the Leviathan not as a coherent body but a fragmented one distributed across a wide range of both real and imagined spectators. In doing so, she offers an important new approach to the understanding of political struggle.

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Treasured Possessions: Indigenous Interventions into Cultural and Intellectual Property
Haidy Geismar
Duke University Press, 2013
Library of Congress DU760.G455 2013 | Dewey Decimal 993.00499442

What happens when ritual practitioners from a small Pacific nation make an intellectual property claim to bungee jumping? When a German company successfully sues to defend its trademark of a Māori name? Or when UNESCO deems ephemeral sand drawings to be "intangible cultural heritage"? In Treasured Possessions, Haidy Geismar examines how global forms of cultural and intellectual property are being redefined by everyday people and policymakers in two markedly different Pacific nations. The New Hebrides, a small archipelago in Melanesia managed jointly by Britain and France until 1980, is now the independent nation-state of Vanuatu, with a population that is more than 95 percent indigenous. New Zealand, by contrast, is a settler state and former British colony that engages with its entangled Polynesian and British heritage through an ethos of "biculturalism" that is meant to involve an indigenous population of just 15 percent. Alternative notions of property, resources, and heritage—informed by distinct national histories—are emerging in both countries. These property claims are advanced in national and international settings, but they emanate from specific communities and cultural landscapes, and they are grounded in an awareness of ancestral power and inheritance. They reveal intellectual and cultural property to be not only legal constructs but also powerful ways of asserting indigenous identities and sovereignties.

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Custom and Confrontation: The Kwaio Struggle for Cultural Autonomy
Roger M. Keesing
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Library of Congress DU850.K42 1992 | Dewey Decimal 306.089995

"Anthropologists and students of anthropology may read this book because it is a superior ethnography, detailed and enriched by theoretical insights. But at the heart of this book is a moral take, a simple but powerful story about an indigenous people who were wronged, who resisted for more than 100 years, and who may yet prevail. This message, ultimately, lends the book its true meaning and value."—William Rodman, Anthropologica

"A major contribution to the ethnography and history of Malaita and Melanesia, and to the growing literature on cultural resistance. But above all, his humane and painful analysis of the meeting of peoples living in different worlds and constructing their agendas and moralities on incommensurate—and apparently equally arbitrary—principles, represents a major contribution and challenge to anthropological thought, addressing the basic issue of what it is to be human."—Fredrik Barth

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The Romani Gypsies
Yaron Matras
Harvard University Press, 2015
Library of Congress DX115.M1948 2015 | Dewey Decimal 909.0491497

Roms (Gypsies) have lived among Europeans since the Middle Ages and yet still seem exotic to Westerners. Yaron Matras challenges stereotypes that have long been the unwelcome travel companions of this community, and offers a perspective-changing account of who the Roms are, how they live today, and how they have survived in Europe and America.

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Romanies in Michigan
Martha Aladjem Bloomfield
Michigan State University Press, 2019
Library of Congress DX201.B55 2019 | Dewey Decimal 305.8914970774

This groundbreaking book relates the oral histories of Romanies in the United States. It focuses on the Hungarian-Slovak Romani musical community originally from Delray, Michigan, as well as others from outlying areas in and near Michigan. Originally Romanies came from India and hundreds of years ago traveled to Europe, Latin America, the United States, and, eventually, Michigan. Their stories provide a different voice from the stereotypical, bigoted newspaper articles from Michigan newspapers in the late nineteenth century through today that reflect law enforcement agencies’ prejudices or “racial profiling.” Romanies in Michigan introduces their diverse, rich, resilient history in Michigan, based on oral histories, photographs, newspaper articles, legal documents, and other research. The book explores traditional modes of travel; Romanies’ identity, history, perspective, and challenges with non-Romanies; their feelings as a minority group; and their self-efficacy, respect, and pride in their culture and work.

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Gypsy World: The Silence of the Living and the Voices of the Dead
Patrick Williams
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Library of Congress DX227.W5613 2003 | Dewey Decimal 393.908991497044

For many of us, one of the most important ways of coping with the death of a close relative is talking about them, telling all who will listen what they meant to us. Yet the Gypsies of central France, the Manuš, not only do not speak of their dead, they burn or discard the deceased's belongings, refrain from eating the dead person's favorite foods, and avoid camping in the place where they died.

In Gypsy World, Patrick Williams argues that these customs are at the center of how Manuš see the world and their place in it. The Manuš inhabit a world created by the "Gadzos" (non-Gypsies), who frequently limit or even prohibit Manuš movements within it. To claim this world for themselves, the Manuš employ a principle of cosmological subtraction: just as the dead seem to be absent from Manuš society, argues Williams, so too do the Manuš absent themselves from Gadzo society—and in so doing they assert and preserve their own separate culture and identity.

Anyone interested in Gypsies, death rituals, or the formation of culture will enjoy this fascinating and sensitive ethnography.

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Germany and Its Gypsies: A Post-Auschwitz Ordeal
Gilad Margalit
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002
Library of Congress DX229.M3713 2002 | Dewey Decimal 943.00491497

    Historian Gilad Margalit eloquently fills a tragic gap in the historical record with this sweeping examination of the plight of Gypsies in Germany before, during, and since the era of the Third Reich.
    Germany and Its Gypsies reveals the painful record of the official treatment of the German Gypsies, a people whose future, in the shadow of Auschwitz, remains uncertain. Margalit follows the story from the heightened racism of the nineteenth century to the National Socialist genocidal policies that resulted in the murder of most German Gypsies, from the shifting attitudes in the two Germanys in 1945 through reunification and up to the present day.
    Drawing upon a rich variety of sources, Margalit considers the pivotal historic events, legal arguments, debates, and changing attitudes toward the status of the German Gypsies and shines a vitally important light upon the issue of ethnic groups and their victimization in society. The result is a powerful and unforgettable testament.

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Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Post-Socialism
Alaina Lemon
Duke University Press, 2000
Library of Congress DX241.K46 2000 | Dewey Decimal 947.00491497

Since tsarist times, Roma in Russia have been portrayed as both rebellious outlaws and free-spirited songbirds—in each case, as if isolated from society. In Soviet times, Russians continued to harbor these two, only seemingly opposed, views of “Gypsies,” exalting their songs on stage but scorning them on the streets as liars and cheats. Alaina Lemon’s Between Two Fires examines how Roma themselves have negotiated these dual images in everyday interactions and in stage performances.
Lemon’s ethnographic study is based on extensive fieldwork in 1990s Russia and focuses on Moscow Romani Theater actors as well as Romani traders and metalworkers. Drawing from interviews with Roma and Russians, observations of performances, and conversations, as well as archives, literary texts, and media, Lemon analyzes the role of theatricality and theatrical tropes in Romani life and the everyday linguistics of social relations and of memory. Historically, the way Romani stage performance has been culturally framed and positioned in Russia has served to typecast Gypsies as “natural” performers, she explains. Thus, while theatrical and musical performance may at times empower Roma, more often it has reinforced and rationalized racial and social stereotypes, excluding them from many Soviet and Russian economic and political arenas. Performance, therefore, defines what it means to be Romani in Russia differently than it does elsewhere, Lemon shows. Considering formal details of language as well as broader cultural and social structures, she also discusses how racial categories relate to post-Soviet economic changes, how gender categories and Euro-Soviet notions of civility are connected, and how ontological distinctions between “stage art” and “real life” contribute to the making of social types. This complex study thus serves as a corrective to romantic views of Roma as detached from political forces.

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The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900
Antonello Gerbi
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973
Library of Congress E19.G3713 1973 | Dewey Decimal 917.300722

When Hegel described the Americas as an inferior continent, he was repeating a contention that inspired one of the most passionate debates of modern times. Originally formulated by the eminent natural scientist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon and expanded by the Prussian encyclopedist Cornelius de Pauw, this provocative thesis drew heated responses from politicians, philosophers, publicists, and patriots on both sides of the Atlantic. The ensuing polemic reached its apex in the latter decades of the eighteenth century and is far from extinct today.

Translated in 1973, The Dispute of the New World is the definitive study of this debate. Antonello Gerbi scrutinizes each contribution to the debate, unravels the complex arguments, and reveals their inner motivations. As the story of the polemic unfolds, moving through many disciplines that include biology, economics, anthropology, theology, geophysics, and poetry, it becomes clear that the subject at issue is nothing less than the totality of the Old World versus the New, and how each viewed the other at a vital turning point in history.

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Hemispheric American Studies
Levander, Caroline F
Rutgers University Press, 2007
Library of Congress E20.H46 2008 | Dewey Decimal 970

This landmark collection brings together a range of exciting new comparative work in the burgeoning field of hemispheric studies. Scholars working in the fields of Latin American studies, Asian American studies, American studies, American literature, African Diaspora studies, and comparative literature address the urgent question of how scholars might reframe disciplinary boundaries within the broad area of what is generally called American studies. The essays take as their starting points such questions as: What happens to American literary, political, historical, and cultural studies if we recognize the interdependency of nation-state developments throughout all the Americas? What happens if we recognize the nation as historically evolving and contingent rather than already formed? Finally, what happens if the "fixed" borders of a nation are recognized not only as historically produced political constructs but also as component parts of a deeper, more multilayered series of national and indigenous histories?

With essays that examine stamps, cartoons, novels, film, art, music, travel documents, and governmental publications, Hemispheric American Studies seeks to excavate the complex cultural history of texts and discourses across the ever-changing and stratified geopolitical and cultural fields that collectively comprise the American hemisphere. This collection promises to chart new directions in American literary and cultural studies.

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Imagining Our Americas: Toward a Transnational Frame
Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman, eds.
Duke University Press, 2007
Library of Congress E20.I43 2007 | Dewey Decimal 305.800970904

This rich interdisciplinary collection of essays advocates and models a hemispheric approach to the study of the Americas. Taken together, the essays examine North and South America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific as a broad region transcending both national boundaries and the dichotomy between North and South. In the volume’s substantial introduction, the editors, an anthropologist and a historian, explain the need to move beyond the paradigm of U.S. American Studies and Latin American Studies as two distinct fields. They point out the Cold War origins of area studies, and they note how many of the Americas’ most significant social formations have spanned borders if not continents: diverse and complex indigenous societies, European conquest and colonization, African slavery, Enlightenment-based independence movements, mass immigrations, and neoliberal economies.

Scholars of literature, ethnic studies, and regional studies as well as of anthropology and history, the contributors focus on the Americas as a broadly conceived geographic, political, and cultural formation. Among the essays are explorations of the varied histories of African Americans’ presence in Mexican and Chicano communities, the different racial and class meanings that the Colombian musical genre cumbia assumes as it is absorbed across national borders, and the contrasting visions of anticolonial struggle embodied in the writings of two literary giants and national heroes: José Martí of Cuba and José Rizal of the Philippines. One contributor shows how a pidgin-language mixture of Japanese, Hawaiian, and English allowed second-generation Japanese immigrants to critique Hawaii’s plantation labor system as well as Japanese hierarchies of gender, generation, and race. Another examines the troubled history of U.S. gay and lesbian solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. Building on and moving beyond previous scholarship, this collection illuminates the productive intellectual and political lines of inquiry opened by a focus on the Americas.

Contributors. Rachel Adams, Victor Bascara, John D. Blanco, Alyosha Goldstein, Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste, Ian Lekus, Caroline F. Levander, Susan Y. Najita, Rebecca Schreiber, Sandhya Shukla, Harilaos Stecopoulos, Michelle Stephens, Heidi Tinsman, Nick Turse, Rob Wilson

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The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas
Diana Taylor
Duke University Press, 2003
Library of Congress E20.T39 2003 | Dewey Decimal 306.484

In The Archive and the Repertoire preeminent performance studies scholar Diana Taylor provides a new understanding of the vital role of performance in the Americas. From plays to official events to grassroots protests, performance, she argues, must be taken seriously as a means of storing and transmitting knowledge. Taylor reveals how the repertoire of embodied memory—conveyed in gestures, the spoken word, movement, dance, song, and other performances—offers alternative perspectives to those derived from the written archive and is particularly useful to a reconsideration of historical processes of transnational contact. The Archive and the Repertoire invites a remapping of the Americas based on traditions of embodied practice.

Examining various genres of performance including demonstrations by the children of the disappeared in Argentina, the Peruvian theatre group Yuyachkani, and televised astrological readings by Univision personality Walter Mercado, Taylor explores how the archive and the repertoire work together to make political claims, transmit traumatic memory, and forge a new sense of cultural identity. Through her consideration of performances such as Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s show Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit . . . , Taylor illuminates how scenarios of discovery and conquest haunt the Americas, trapping even those who attempt to dismantle them. Meditating on events like those of September 11, 2001 and media representations of them, she examines both the crucial role of performance in contemporary culture and her own role as witness to and participant in hemispheric dramas. The Archive and the Repertoire is a compelling demonstration of the many ways that the study of performance enables a deeper understanding of the past and present, of ourselves and others.

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History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492-1992
Jonathan D. Hill
University of Iowa Press, 1996
Library of Congress E29.A1H57 1996 | Dewey Decimal 305.80097

For the past five centuries, indigenous and African American communities throughout the Americas have sought to maintain and recreate enduring identities under conditions of radical change and discontinuity. The essays in this groundbreaking volume document this cultural activity—this ethnogenesis—within and against the broader contexts of domination; the authors simultaneously encompass the entanglements of local communities in the webs of national and global power relations as well as people's unique abilities to gain control over their history and identity.

By defining ethnogenesis as the synthesis of people's cultural and political struggles, History, Power, and Identity breaks out of the implicit contrast between isolated local cultures and dynamic global history. From the northeastern plains of North America to Amazonia, colonial and independent states in the Americas interacted with vast multilingual and multicultural networks, resulting in the historical emergence of new ethnic identities and the disappearance of many earlier ones. The importance of African, indigenous American, and European religions, myths, and symbols, as historical cornerstones in the building of new ethnic identities, emerges as one of the central themes of this convincing collection.

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Displacements and Diasporas: Asians in the Americas
Anderson, Wanni W.
Rutgers University Press, 2005
Library of Congress E29.A75D57 2005 | Dewey Decimal 305.89507

Asians have settled in every country in the Western Hemisphere; some are recent arrivals, other descendents of immigrants who arrived centuries ago. Bringing together essays by thirteen scholars from the humanities and social sciences, Displacements and Diasporas explores this genuinely transnational Asian American experience-one that crosses the Pacific and traverses the Americas from Canada to Brazil, from New York to the Caribbean.

With an emphasis on anthropological and historical contexts, the essays show how the experiences of Asians across the Americas have been shaped by the social dynamics and politics of settlement locations as much as by transnational connections and the economic forces of globalization. Contributors bring new insights to the unique situations of Asian communities previously overlooked by scholars, such as Vietnamese Canadians and the Lao living in Rhode Island. Other topics include Chinese laborers and merchants in Latin America and the Caribbean, Japanese immigrants and their descendants in Brazil, Afro-Amerasians in America, and the politics of second-generation Indian American youth culture.

Together the essays provide a valuable comparative portrait of Asians across the Americas. Engaging issues of diaspora, transnational social practice and community building, gender, identity, institutionalized racism, and deterritoriality, this volume presents fresh perspectives on displacement, opening the topic up to a wider, more interdisciplinary terrain of inquiry and teaching.

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Possible Paradises: Basque Emigration to Latin America
Azcona Pastor
University of Nevada Press, 2003
Library of Congress E29.B35A98 2004 | Dewey Decimal 980.0049992

From Columbus's first voyage to "the Indies" in 1492, Basques participated in Spain's American enterprise. Supported by centuries of experience as mariners, shipbuilders, traders, miners, and ironworkers; encouraged toward emigration by restrictive inheritance laws and a land-poor territory; and conditioned by a culture that prized hard work and social solidarity, the Basques were poised to play a significant role in the exploration and development of the New World. The first Basques arrived with Columbus, and well into the twentieth century they continued to arrive seeking livelihood and refuge.

Possible Paradises, José Manuel Azcona Pastor's engaging and meticulously researched study of Basque emigration to the Americas, is a path breaking work of monumental importance. Ranging over the entire former Spanish American empire from Tierra del Fuego to the U.S. Southwest and covering over five centuries of history, Azcona examines the roles and fates of the Basques who came to the New World. He also studies the impact of the New World on the Basque Country, from the importance in the modern Basque diet of such American foodstuffs as corn and beans to the encouragement given to traditional Basque industries by the colonizers' demand for ships and iron tools. He considers the role of Basques in the Spanish imperial expeditions of exploration and conquest; their participation in transatlantic commerce and communication.

The Basque diaspora, although worldwide in dimension, has had its greatest presence and importance in the Americas. Azcona's pioneering study views the Basque presence in the New World through the broadest possible lens, linking Basque communities and activities from Argentina to the North American West.

Foreword by William A. Douglass. Translation by Roland Vazquez.

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Amerikanuak: Basques In The New World
William A. Douglass
University of Nevada Press, 2005
Library of Congress E29.B35D68 | Dewey Decimal 970.0049992

This work, by William Douglass (who helped initiate the Basque Studies Program at the University of Nevada, Reno) and Jon Bilbao (author of several Basque reference works), is the most accessible overview of the Basque diaspora in the Western Hemisphere. Amerikanuak is a pioneering study of one of the American West’s most important ethnic minorities, an engaging, comprehensive survey of Basque migration and settlement in the Americas, and an essential introduction to the history of the Basque people and their five centuries of involvement in the New World.

Research for the book took the authors through ten states of the American West, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela as they traced the exploits of Basque whalers in the medieval Atlantic, the Basque conquistadors, missionaries, colonists, and sheepherders who formed a dramatic part of the history of Spanish America. They also follow the story of the Basques back to their mysterious origins in prehistory to provide background for understanding the Basques’ character and their homeland in the Pyrenean mountains and seacoasts between France and Spain. This is a revised and updated edition of the original 1975 publication. New preface by William A. Douglass.

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Freedom Papers
Rebecca J. Scott
Harvard University Press, 2012
Library of Congress E29.C73S36 2012 | Dewey Decimal 305.8960163

This saga opens with the enslavement of a woman from Senegambia, and then traces her family’s quest, across five generations, for lives of dignity and equality. The story of Rosalie and her descendants unfolds against the background of three great antiracist struggles: the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1848, and the U.S. Civil War.

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Sephardim in the Americas: Studies in Culture and History
Martin Cohen
University of Alabama Press, 1993
Library of Congress E29.J5S46 1993 | Dewey Decimal 970.004924046

Multidisciplinary essays examinig the historical and cultural history of the Sephardic experience in the Americas, from pre-expulsion Spain to the modern era, as recounted by some of the most outstanding interpreters of the field.

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Afrodescendants, Identity, and the Struggle for Development in the Americas
Bernd Reiter
Michigan State University Press, 2012
Library of Congress E29.N3A56 2012 | Dewey Decimal 305.80098

Indigenous people and African descendants in Latin America and the Caribbean have long been affected by a social hierarchy established by elites, through which some groups were racialized and others were normalized. Far from being “racial paradises” populated by an amalgamated “cosmic race” of mulattos and mestizos, Latin America and the Caribbean have long been sites of shifting exploitative strategies and ideologies, ranging from scientific racism and eugenics to the more sophisticated official denial of racism and ethnic difference. This book, among the first to focus on African descendants in the region, brings together diverse reflections from scholars, activists, and funding agency representatives working to end racism and promote human rights in the Americas. By focusing on the ways racism inhibits agency among African descendants and the ways African-descendant groups position themselves in order to overcome obstacles, this interdisciplinary book provides a multi-faceted analysis of one of the gravest contemporary problems in the Americas.

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Beyond Bondage: FREE WOMEN OF COLOR IN THE AMERICAS
Edited by David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine
University of Illinois Press, 2004
Library of Congress E29.N3B49 2004 | Dewey Decimal 305.4889607309

David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine's Beyond Bondage outlines the restricted spheres within which free women of color, by virtue of gender and racial restrictions, were forced to carve out their existences. Although their freedom, represented by the acquisition of property, respectability, and opportunity, always remained precarious, the collection supports the surprising conclusion that women of color often sought and obtained these advantages more successfully than their male counterparts.

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Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle
Katherine McKittrick
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Library of Congress E29.N3M38 2006 | Dewey Decimal 305.4889607009

IIn a long overdue contribution to geography and social theory, Katherine McKittrick offers a new and powerful interpretation of black women’s geographic thought. In Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, black women inhabit diasporic locations marked by the legacy of violence and slavery. Analyzing diverse literatures and material geographies, McKittrick reveals how human geographies are a result of racialized connections, and how spaces that are fraught with limitation are underacknowledged but meaningful sites of political opposition.

Demonic Grounds moves between past and present, archives and fiction, theory and everyday, to focus on places negotiated by black women during and after the transatlantic slave trade. Specifically, the author addresses the geographic implications of slave auction blocks, Harriet Jacobs’s attic, black Canada and New France, as well as the conceptual spaces of feminism and Sylvia Wynter’s philosophies.

Central to McKittrick’s argument are the ways in which black women are not passive recipients of their surroundings and how a sense of place relates to the struggle against domination. Ultimately, McKittrick argues, these complex black geographies are alterable and may provide the opportunity for social and cultural change.

Katherine McKittrick is assistant professor of women’s studies at Queen’s University.

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Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America
Rachel Adams
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Library of Congress E40.A33 2009 | Dewey Decimal 970

North America is more a political and an economic invention than a place people call home. Nonetheless, the region shared by the United States and its closest neighbors, North America, is an intriguing frame for comparative American studies. Continental Divides is the first book to study the patterns of contact, exchange, conflict, and disavowal among cultures that span the borders of Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

Rachel Adams considers a broad range of literary, filmic, and visual texts that exemplify cultural traffic across North American borders. She investigates how our understanding of key themes, genres, and periods within U.S. cultural study is deepened, and in some cases transformed, when Canada and Mexico enter the picture. How, for example, does the work of the iconic American writer Jack Kerouac read differently when his Franco-American origins and Mexican travels are taken into account? Or how would our conception of American modernism be altered if Mexico were positioned as a center of artistic and political activity? In this engaging analysis, Adams charts the lengthy and often unrecognized traditions of neighborly exchange, both hostile and amicable, that have left an imprint on North America’s varied cultures.

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British Atlantic, American Frontier: Spaces of Power in Early Modern British America
Stephen J. Hornsby
University Press of New England, 2004
Library of Congress E40.5.H67 2005 | Dewey Decimal 970.0971241

Reflecting the growing scholarly interest in transnational and comparative approaches to studying the past, British Atlantic, American Frontier offers a geographical perspective on the development of British America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It covers in detail not only the American eastern seaboard, but also eastern Canada and the West Indies, as well as the trans-Atlantic links to Western Europe and West Africa. At one level, the book synthesizes much of the current historical and geographical scholarship on these regions; at another level, it offers a provocative interpretation of British America, arguing that profound and long-standing differences existed between the American eastern seaboard and the Atlantic regions of eastern Canada and the West Indies. These differences ultimately led to the break-up of British America, the creation of the United States, and the reconfiguration of the British Empire. British Atlantic, American Frontier is illustrated with more than one hundred photographs, maps, and historical illustrations.

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Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories
Benjamin H. Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill, eds.
Duke University Press, 2010
Library of Congress E46.B75 2010 | Dewey Decimal 972.1

Despite a shared interest in using borders to explore the paradoxes of state-making and national histories, historians of the U.S.-Canada border region and those focused on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands have generally worked in isolation from one another. A timely and important addition to borderlands history, Bridging National Borders in North America initiates a conversation between scholars of the continent’s northern and southern borderlands. The historians in this collection examine borderlands events and phenomena from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth. Some consider the U.S.-Canada border, others concentrate on the U.S.-Mexico border, and still others take both regions into account.

The contributors engage topics such as how mixed-race groups living on the peripheries of national societies dealt with the creation of borders in the nineteenth century, how medical inspections and public-health knowledge came to be used to differentiate among bodies, and how practices designed to channel livestock and prevent cattle smuggling became the model for regulating the movement of narcotics and undocumented people. They explore the ways that U.S. immigration authorities mediated between the desires for unimpeded boundary-crossings for day laborers, tourists, casual visitors, and businessmen, and the restrictions imposed by measures such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the 1924 Immigration Act. Turning to the realm of culture, they analyze the history of tourist travel to Mexico from the United States and depictions of the borderlands in early-twentieth-century Hollywood movies. The concluding essay suggests that historians have obscured non-national forms of territoriality and community that preceded the creation of national borders and sometimes persisted afterwards. This collection signals new directions for continental dialogue about issues such as state-building, national expansion, territoriality, and migration.

Contributors: Dominique Brégent-Heald, Catherine Cocks, Andrea Geiger, Miguel Ángel González Quiroga, Andrew R. Graybill, Michel Hogue, Benjamin H. Johnson, S. Deborah Kang, Carolyn Podruchny, Bethel Saler, Jennifer Seltz, Rachel St. John, Lissa Wadewitz

Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.

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Subject Matter
Joyce E. CHAPLIN
Harvard University Press, 2001
Library of Congress E46.C48 2001 | Dewey Decimal 973.17

With this sweeping reinterpretation of early cultural encounters between the English and American natives, Joyce E. Chaplin thoroughly alters our historical view of the origins of English presumptions of racial superiority, and of the role science and technology played in shaping these notions. By placing the history of science and medicine at the very center of the story of early English colonization, Chaplin shows how contemporary European theories of nature and science dramatically influenced relations between the English and Indians within the formation of the British Empire. In Chaplin's account of the earliest contacts, we find the English--impressed by the Indians' way with food, tools, and iron--inclined to consider Indians as partners in the conquest and control of nature. Only when it came to the Indians' bodies, so susceptible to disease, were the English confident in their superiority. Chaplin traces the way in which this tentative notion of racial inferiority hardened and expanded to include the Indians' once admirable mental and technical capacities. Here we see how the English, beginning from a sense of bodily superiority, moved little by little toward the idea of their mastery over nature, America, and the Indians--and how this progression is inextricably linked to the impetus and rationale for empire.

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The Backcountry and the City: Colonization and Conflict in Early America
Ed White
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
Library of Congress E46.W47 2005 | Dewey Decimal 320.97309033

What would an account of early America look like if it were based on examining rural insurrections or Native American politics instead of urban republican literature? Offering a new interpretation of eighteenth-century America, The Backcountry and the City focuses on the agrarian majority as distinct from the elite urban minority.

Ed White explores the backcountry-city divide as well as the dynamics of indigenous peoples, bringing together two distinct bodies of scholarship: one stressing the political culture of the Revolutionary era, the other taking an ethnohistorical view of white–Native American contact. White concentrates his study in Pennsylvania, a state in which the majority of the population was rural, and in Philadelphia, a city that was a center of publishing and politics and the national capital for a decade. Against this backdrop, White reads classic political texts such as Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, Franklin’s Autobiography, and Paine’s “Agrarian Justice,” alongside missionary and captivity narratives, farmers’ petitions, and Native American treaties. Using historical and ethnographic sources to enrich familiar texts, White demonstrates the importance of rural areas in the study of U.S. nation formation and finds unexpected continuities between the early colonial period and the federal ascendancy of the 1790s.

Ed White is associate professor of English at the University of Florida.

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A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America
Sam White
Harvard University Press, 2020
Library of Congress E46.W48 2017 | Dewey Decimal 970.01

Cundill History Prize Finalist Longman–History Today Prize Finalist “Meticulous environmental-historical detective work.” —Times Literary Supplement When Europeans first arrived in North America, they faced a cold new world. The average global temperature had dropped to lows unseen in millennia. The effects of this climactic upheaval were stark and unpredictable: blizzards and deep freezes, droughts and famines, winters in which everything froze, even the Rio Grande. A Cold Welcome tells the story of this crucial period, taking us from Europe’s earliest expeditions in unfamiliar landscapes to the perilous first winters in Quebec and Jamestown. As we confront our own uncertain future, it offers a powerful reminder of the unexpected risks of an unpredictable climate. “A remarkable journey through the complex impacts of the Little Ice Age on Colonial North America…This beautifully written, important book leaves us in no doubt that we ignore the chronicle of past climate change at our peril. I found it hard to put down.” —Brian Fagan, author of The Little Ice Age “Deeply researched and exciting…His fresh account of the climatic forces shaping the colonization of North America differs significantly from long-standing interpretations of those early calamities.” —New York Review of Books

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The Minor Intimacies of Race: Asian Publics in North America
Christine Kim
University of Illinois Press, 2016
Library of Congress E49.2.A75K56 2016 | Dewey Decimal 973.0495

An attempt to put an Asian woman on Canada's $100 bill in 2012 unleashed enormous controversy. The racism and xenophobia that answered this symbolic move toward inclusiveness revealed the nation's trumpeted commitment to multiculturalism as a lie. It also showed how multiple minor publics as well as the dominant public responded to the ongoing issue of race in Canada. In this new study, Christine Kim delves into the ways cultural conversations minimize race's relevance even as violent expressions and structural forms of racism continue to occur. Kim turns to literary texts, artistic works, and media debates to highlight the struggles of minor publics with social intimacy. Her insightful engagement with everyday conversations as well as artistic expressions that invoke the figure of the Asian allows Kim to reveal the affective dimensions of racialized publics. It also extends ongoing critical conversations within Asian Canadian and Asian American studies about Orientalism, diasporic memory, racialized citizenship, and migration and human rights.

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