Internationally recognized photographer Stacie Huckeba and Madison, Tennessee, community volunteer Laura Amaral have partnered to create a photographic art book and living historical document, Madison: Portraits of Our Neighbors. This is a “time capsule” of art as well as a historical document that captures the heart of the people who contribute to the Madison community as it is today, home to a world-class bass player, a nonagenarian cattle farmer, a TikTok celebrity, a singer/songwriter, a mariachi band, the personal photographer for Johnny Cash, a beloved gymnastics coach, model airplane enthusiasts, educators, a fashion designer, a puppet enthusiast, a pastor and outreach worker, an array of artists, small business owners, farmers, and local legends. Beyond a collection of portraits, it's a testament to an enduring urban community, a celebration of the shared human experience, and an opportunity to see our neighbors in their best light. Madison: Portraits of Our Neighbors invites readers to celebrate the tapestry of humanity that weaves through our unique neighborhood.

Women come to Magdalene House in Nashville when they are ready to leave the streets. They live togetherunsupervised and free of chargefor two years. During that time, the women are given time, space, and the resources they need to heal from what have often been lifelong experiences with suffering. (Of the twentytwo women now in residence, 80 percent have a diagnosed mental illness other than addiction, 40 percent are receiving treatment for hepatitis C, and onethird are HIV positive.)

However, the story of the Magdalene community is not about these statistics, but about the stories the women tell. They say they thrive in the community because it is a place where they are free to be themselves, safe to give and receive love, and free to speak their trutheven to complain sometimes about how their storytelling is exploited "for the good of the community." A Place about Mercy is a participantobservation account of the history of this remarkable community founded in 1997, its structure, its Thistle Farms beauty products operation, and Reverend Becca Stevens's communal and spiritual vision. The book is finally about what it means to walk the path of healing with a group of unlikely women as guide.

Magdalene House was the subject of a multiplepart documentary on National Public Radio.

The history of Mexican rock is one of censorship. A number of cultural histories recount how rock was repressed, censored, and marginalized by Mexico’s single-party regime in the twentieth century, often focusing on the authoritarian crackdown that followed a mediatized moral panic after the Avándaro Festival of 1971. The popular 2020 Netflix documentary Break It All, for example, positions Mexican rock as a potent expression of resistance in the late twentieth century, forging a strong association with Mexico’s transition away from authoritarian rule and toward neoliberal democracy.

Yet in light of the failures of successive democratically elected governments in Mexico, these histories are worth critically revisiting and updating. What stories about music censorship can be told after Mexico’s transition to multi-party democracy? Placing history and ethnography into dialogue, Making Mexican Rock explores historical and recent experiences of censorship and repression against popular music, focusing on the independent rock scene (or “escena independiente”) in Mexico City.

Informed by the so-called new censorship theory, ethnomusicologist Andrew J. Green challenges historical accounts that equate acts of censorship with state activity. The open-ended account of censorship assumed here helps us to understand, instead, how conceptions of censorship and expressive freedom transformed toward the end of single-party rule; how practices of policing live rock adapted to neoliberal securitization; and how histories of rock censorship have been invoked by those seeking to construct and protect emergent music scenes. Making Mexican Rock thus both decenters histories of music censorship from the state, and extends them into the country’s recent history.

In this new contribution to moral theory, Todd Lekan argues for a pragmatist conception of morality as an evolving, educational, and fallible practice of everyday life. Drawing on the work of John Dewey, Lekan asserts that moral norms are neither timeless truths nor subjective whims, but habits transmitted through practices. Like the habits that make up medicine or engineering, moral habits are subject to rational evaluation and change according to new challenges and circumstances. This pragmatic interpretation of morality provides a way out of the conundrum of relativism and absolutism.

Building on classical American philosophy to address current philosophical concerns, Lekan's theory revises our basic understanding of moral life and the place of theorizing within that life. Making Morality will prove of great interest to ethical theorists, as it enjoins them to measure theoretical inquiries by how well they produce intellectual tools for problem-solving in dynamic, complex communities.

Sandra Gaffney entered her first nursing home for long-term care at the unusually young age of fifty. Fourteen years earlier she had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Over the next sixteen years, Gaffney lived in nursing homes in Florida, Virginia, and Minnesota, as the ways she could be close to family changed.


She describes her situation in these words: "As a nursing home resident, I require total or maximum care. I have limited use of my hands and arms. With special splints, I am able to turn the pages of my books, use the telephone and TV/VCR/FM radio remote control. When my cup is positioned properly, I can drink independently. I am able to walk with a platform walker and the help of two nursing assistants. My walking is not functional; it is only for exercise. After I moved into my third nursing home, I learned to operate a power wheelchair by using an adaptive switch between my knees. ... All other areas of physical care have to be done for me. My speech is impaired. If people listen carefully, they can understand what I am saying. ... I am able to eat regular food and breathe on my own."


Gaffney became an acute observer and strategist about how to live in a nursing home. Her first-person account, dictated to family members and assistants, covers making the decision to enter a nursing home, choosing the right one, and understanding its culture. She talks about how to furnish your room and about all the issues that arise in a resident's typical day. She has much to say about communication with staff and family about "how to help others help me." Gaffney's daughters, Amy and Bridget, and her friend Ellen Potter provide additional perspectives on the caregiving experience.

Using the one-act comedy El parto de Juan Rana (John Frog Gives Birth) as a point of departure, Velasco argues that the figure of the pregnant man in early modern Spanish culture was not merely comic entertainment, but also served an important role as a physical representation of the anxieties about the changing roles of men and women at the time.

Men were increasingly taking over medical duties--especially surrounding childbirth--usually left to women and, as their medical knowledge increased, they became aware of bodies and behaviors--both male and female--that transgressed gender norms. The anxieties about men who acted in ways seen as increasingly womanly (from acting effeminately to participating in homosexual activity) played out in the character of pregnant Juan Rana.

Then, Velasco turns to Hollywood and asks if we might not use the lessons of Juan Rana to help explain why contemporary America is also fascinated by the idea of male pregnancy--think Arnold Schwarzenegger in Junior--and our increasing anxiety over the changing face of masculinity in our own culture.

“Do we want to perpetuate a Jim Crow health system?” A brilliant, idealistic physician named Jean Cowsert asked that question in Alabama in 1966. Her answer was no—and soon after, she died under suspicious circumstances. Unearthing the truth of Cowsert’s life and death is a central concern of David Barton Smith’s Malicious Intent. Unearthing the grim history of our health care system is another.

Race-related disparities in American death rates, exacerbated once again by the COVID-19 pandemic, have persisted since the birth of the modern US medical system a century ago. A unique but perpetually unequal history has prevented the United States from providing the kind of health care assurances that are taken for granted in other industrialized nations. The underlying story is one of political, medical, and bureaucratic machinations, all motivated by a deliberate Jim Crow systemic design. In Malicious Intent, David Barton Smith traces the Jean Cowsert story and the cold case of her death as a through line to explain the construction and fulfillment of an unequal health care system that would rather sacrifice many than provide for Black Americans.

Cowsert’s suspicious death came at a key moment in the struggle for universal health care in the wealthiest country on earth. Malicious Intent is a history of those failed efforts and a story of selective amnesia about one doctor’s death and the movement she fought for.

Martin Luis Guzman was many things throughout his career in twentieth-century Mexico: a soldier in Pancho Villa's revolutionary army, a journalist-in-exile, one of the most esteemed novelists and scholars of the revolutionary era, and an elder statesman and politician. In The Man Who Wrote Pancho Villa, we see the famous author as he really was: a careful craftsman of his own image and legacy. His five-volume biography of Villa propelled him to the heights of Mexican cultural life, and thus began his true life's work. Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody shapes this study of Guzman through the lens of "life writing" and uncovers a tireless effort by Guzman to shape his public image.

The Man Who Wrote Pancho Villa places Guzman's work in a biographical context, shedding light on the immediate motivations behind his writing in a given moment and the subsequent ways in which he rewrote or repackaged the material. Despite his efforts to establish a definitive reading of his life and literature, Guzman was unable to control that interpretation as audiences became less tolerant of the glaring omissions in his self-portrait.

Electronic open-access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

At the border where Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina meet under the scrutiny of the US and Mercosur (the large South American trade bloc), Arabs have long fulfilled what author John Tofik Karam calls a "manifold destiny." Karam casts Lebanese, Palestinians, and Syrians at this American border as circumstantial protagonists of a hemispheric saga.

For the more than six decades since they started settling at the trinational border between Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina, Arabs have animated the hemisphere. Their transnational economic and social projects reveal a heretofore unacknowledged venue of exceptional rule in which the community accommodates and abides multiple states' varied suspensions of norms and laws. Arabs set up businesses and community centers at the border under authoritarian military governments between the 1950s and 1980s; thereafter, when denied full democratic enfranchisement, they instead underwent increasing surveillance from the 1990s to today. Karam reveals an unfinished history of exceptional rule that Arabs accommodate from an authoritarian past to a counterterrorist present.

Karam's riveting account draws on anthropological and historical research from each side of this trinational South American border, as well as from the US—where government bureaucrats still suspect Arabs at the border of would-be-terrorist subversion. Offering a fresh understanding of the hemisphere, Manifold Destiny brings the transnational turn of Middle Eastern studies to bear upon the fields of American studies, Brazilian studies, and Latin American studies.

Mapping Diversity in Latin America offers ample critical coverage of recent approaches to the historical study of race and ethnicity in Latin America since the arrival of Spanish and Portuguese colonizers to the present. Bringing together the work of leading scholars, this volume presents readers with a thorough and updated examination of the formation and evolution of ideas surrounding race and ethnicity, social movements, and political processes in Latin America that provides multiple routes for future research on the topic. The book’s nineteen chapters establish the basis for a productive comparative analysis of racial developments in the whole continent to allow for a combination of diachronic and synchronic study of regional processes. Both the scope of the book and the historical and geocultural coverage on these topics are unique in the field of Latin American Studies.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach to understanding issues of collective identity, otherness, alterity, and the like, Mapping Diversity in Latin America sheds light on histories that have been traditionally overlooked in texts on race in Latin America, such as the rich history of diasporic Asian, Syrian Lebanese, and Jewish communities, and the more recent emergence of Latinx populations in the United States. The book includes a critical examination of fundamental concepts such as mestizaje, mulataje, creolization, negritud, and blanquitud, as well as critical and theoretical approaches to the study of these issues in postcolonial societies.

Based on years of archival research in Madrid and Barcelona, this interdisciplinary study offers a fresh approach to understanding how men visualized themselves and their place in a nation that struggled to modernize after nearly a century of civil war, colonial entanglement, and imperial loss. Masculine Figures is the first study to provide a comprehensive overview of competing models of masculinity in nineteenth-century Spain, and it is particularly novel in its treatment of Catalan texts and previously unstudied evidence (e.g., department store catalogs, commercial advertisements, fashion plates, and men’s tailoring journals).

Fictional masculinity performs a symbolic role in representing and negotiating the contradictions male novelists often encountered in their attempts to professionalize not only as writers, but also as businessmen, professors, lawyers, and politicians. Through specific and recurring figures like the student, the priest, the businessman, and the heir, male novelists portray and represent an increasingly middle-class world at odds with the values and virtues it inherited from an imperial Spanish past, and those it imported from more industrialized nations like England and France. The visual culture of the time and place marks the material turn in middle-class masculinity and sets the stage for discussions of race and sexuality.

Winner of the Tennessee History Book Award (Tennessee Historical Society and Tennessee Historical Commission), 2021

Was Nashville once home to a giant race of humans?

No, but in 1845, you could have paid a quarter to see the remains of one who allegedly lived here before The Flood. That summer, Middle Tennessee well diggers had unearthed the skeleton of an American mastodon. Before it went on display, it was modified and augmented with wooden “bones” to make it look more like a human being and passed off as an antediluvian giant. Then, like so many Nashvillians, after a little success here, it went on tour and disappeared from history.

But this fake history of a race of Pre-Nashville Giants isn’t the only bad history of what, and who, was here before Nashville. Sources written for schoolchildren and the public lead us to believe that the first Euro-Americans arrived in Nashville to find a pristine landscape inhabited only by the buffalo and boundless nature, entirely untouched by human hands. Instead, the roots of our city extend some 14,000 years before Illinois lieutenant-governor-turned-fur-trader Timothy Demonbreun set foot at Sulphur Dell.

During the period between about AD 1000 and 1425, a thriving Native American culture known to archaeologists as the Middle Cumberland Mississippian lived along the Cumberland River and its tributaries in today’s Davidson County. Earthen mounds built to hold the houses or burials of the upper class overlooked both banks of the Cumberland near what is now downtown Nashville. Surrounding densely packed village areas including family homes, cemeteries, and public spaces stretched for several miles through Shelby Bottoms, and the McFerrin Park, Bicentennial Mall, and Germantown neighborhoods. Other villages were scattered across the Nashville landscape, including in the modern neighborhoods of Richland, Sylvan Park, Lipscomb, Duncan Wood, Centennial Park, Belle Meade, White Bridge, and Cherokee Park.

This book is the first public-facing effort by legitimate archaeologists to articulate the history of what happened here before Nashville happened.

Winner of the Tennessee History Book Award (Tennessee Historical Society and Tennessee Historical Commission), 2021

Was Nashville once home to a giant race of humans?

No, but in 1845, you could have paid a quarter to see the remains of one who allegedly lived here before The Flood. That summer, Middle Tennessee well diggers had unearthed the skeleton of an American mastodon. Before it went on display, it was modified and augmented with wooden “bones” to make it look more like a human being and passed off as an antediluvian giant. Then, like so many Nashvillians, after a little success here, it went on tour and disappeared from history.

But this fake history of a race of Pre-Nashville Giants isn’t the only bad history of what, and who, was here before Nashville. Sources written for schoolchildren and the public lead us to believe that the first Euro-Americans arrived in Nashville to find a pristine landscape inhabited only by the buffalo and boundless nature, entirely untouched by human hands. Instead, the roots of our city extend some 14,000 years before Illinois lieutenant-governor-turned-fur-trader Timothy Demonbreun set foot at Sulphur Dell.

During the period between about AD 1000 and 1425, a thriving Native American culture known to archaeologists as the Middle Cumberland Mississippian lived along the Cumberland River and its tributaries in today’s Davidson County. Earthen mounds built to hold the houses or burials of the upper class overlooked both banks of the Cumberland near what is now downtown Nashville. Surrounding densely packed village areas including family homes, cemeteries, and public spaces stretched for several miles through Shelby Bottoms, and the McFerrin Park, Bicentennial Mall, and Germantown neighborhoods. Other villages were scattered across the Nashville landscape, including in the modern neighborhoods of Richland, Sylvan Park, Lipscomb, Duncan Wood, Centennial Park, Belle Meade, White Bridge, and Cherokee Park.

This book is the first public-facing effort by legitimate archaeologists to articulate the history of what happened here before Nashville happened.

As medical science progressed through the nineteenth century, the United States was at the forefront of public health initiatives across the Americas. Dreadful sanitary conditions were relieved, lives were saved, and health care developed into a formidable institution throughout Latin America as doctors and bureaucrats from the United States flexed their scientific muscle. This wasn't a purely altruistic enterprise, however, as Jose Amador reveals in Medicine and Nation Building in the Americas, 1890-1940. Rather, these efforts almost served as a precursor to modern American interventionism. For places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Brazil, these initiatives were especially invasive.

Drawing on sources in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and the United States, Amador shows that initiatives launched in colonial settings laid the foundation for the rise of public health programs in the hemisphere and transformed debates about the formation of national culture. Writers rethought theories of environmental and racial danger, while Cuban reformers invoked the yellow fever campaign to exclude nonwhite immigrants. Puerto Rican peasants flooded hookworm treatment stations, and Brazilian sanitarians embraced regionalist and imperialist ideologies. Together, these groups illustrated that public health campaigns developed in the shadow of empire propelled new conflicts and conversations about achieving modernity and progress in the tropics.

This book is a recipient of the annual Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize for the best project in the area of medicine.

SAGE Memory Studies Journal & Memory Studies Association Outstanding First Book Award, Honorable Mention, 2019

Set in Israel in the first decade of the twenty-first century and based on long-term fieldwork, this rich ethnographic study offers an innovative analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It explores practices of "memory activism" by three groups of Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian citizens--Zochrot, Autobiography of a City, and Baladna--showing how they appropriated the global model of truth and reconciliation while utilizing local cultural practices such as tours and testimonies.

These activist efforts gave visibility to a silenced Palestinian history in order to come to terms with the conflict's origins and envision a new resolution for the future. This unique focus on memory as a weapon of the weak reveals a surprising shift in awareness of Palestinian suffering among the Jewish majority of Israeli society in a decade of escalating violence and polarization--albeit not without a backlash.

Contested memories saturate this society. The 1948 war is remembered as both Independence Day by Israelis and al-Nakba ("the catastrophe") by Palestinians. The walking tour and survivor testimonies originally deployed by the state for national Zionist education that marginalized Palestinian citizens are now being appropriated by activists for tours of pre-state Palestinian villages and testimonies by refugees.

The ability to forget the violent twentieth-century past was long seen as a virtue in Spain, even a duty. But the common wisdom has shifted as increasing numbers of Spaniards want to know what happened, who suffered, and who is to blame. Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War shows how historiography, fiction, and photography have shaped our views of the 1936-39 war and its long, painful aftermath.

Faber traces the curious trajectories of iconic Spanish Civil War photographs by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour; critically reads a dozen recent Spanish novels and essays; interrogates basic scholarly assumptions about history, memory, and literature; and interviews nine scholars, activists, and documentarians who in the past decade and a half have helped redefine Spain's relationship to its past. In this book Faber argues that recent political developments in Spain--from the grassroots call for the recovery of historical memory to the indignados movement and the foundation of Podemos--provide an opportunity for scholars in the humanities to engage in a more activist, public, and democratic practice.

Stieg Larsson was an unabashed feminist in his personal and professional life and in the fictional world he created, but The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest are full of graphic depictions of violence against women, including stalking, sexual harassment, child abuse, rape, incest, serial murder, sexual slavery, and sex trafficking, committed by vile individual men and by corrupt, secretive institutions. How do readers and moviegoers react to these depictions, and what do they make of the women who fight back, the complex masculinities in the trilogy, and the ambiguous gender of the elusive Lisbeth Salander?

These lively and accessible essays expand the conversation in the blogosphere about the novels and films by connecting the controversies about gender roles to social trends in the real world.

LAJSA Book Award Winner, 2017, Latin American Jewish Studies Association

As Cuba industrialized in the nineteenth century, an epochal realignment of the social order occurred. In this period of change, two seemingly disparate, yet nevertheless intertwined, ideological forces appeared: anti-Semitism and abolitionism. As the antislavery movement became organized in Cuba, the argument grew that Jews participated in the African slave trade and in New World slavery, and that this participation gave Jews extraordinary influence in the new Cuban economy and culture. What was remarkable about this anti-Semitism was the decidedly small Jewish population on the island in this era. This form of anti-Semitism, Silverstein reveals, sprang almost exclusively from mythological beliefs.

The Mexican Transpacific considers the influence of a Japanese ethnic background or lack thereof in the cultural production of several twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexican authors, performers, and visual artists. Despite Japanese Mexicans’ unquestionable influence on Mexico’s history and culture and the historical studies recently published on this Nikkei community, the study of its cultural production and therefore its self-definition has been, for the most part, overlooked.

This book, a continuation of author Ignacio López-Calvo’s previous research on cultural production by Latin American authors of Asian ancestry, focuses mostly on literature, theater, and visual arts produced by Japanese immigrants in Mexico and their descendants, rather than on the Japanese community as a mere object of study. With this interdisciplinary project, López-Calvo aims to bring to the fore this silenced community’s voice and agency to historicize its own experience.

In Mexico, the confluence of the 1992 Quincentennial commemoration of Columbus's voyages and the neo-liberal sexenio, or presidency, of Carlos Salinas de Gortari spurred artistic creations that capture the decade like no other source does. In the 1990s, Mexican artists produced an inordinate number of works that revise and rewrite the events of the sixteenth-century conquest and colonization. These works and their relationship to, indeed their mirroring of, the intellectual and cultural atmosphere in Mexico during the Salinas presidency are of paramount importance if we are to understand the subtle but deep shifts within Mexico's national identity that took place at the end of the last century.

Throughout the twentieth century, the post-revolutionary Mexican State had used mestizaje as a symbol of national unity and social integration. By the end of the millennium, however, Mexico had gone from a PRI-dominated, economically protectionist nation to a more democratic, economically globalizing one. More importantly, the homogenizing, mestizophile national identity that pervaded Mexico throughout the past century had given way to official admission of Mexico's ethnic and linguistic diversity--or 'pluriculture' according to President Salinas's 1992 constitutional revision.

This book is the first interdisciplinary study of literary, cinematic, and graphic images of Mexican national identity in the 1980s and '90s. Discussing, in depth, writings, films, and cartoons from a vast array of contemporary sources, Carrie C. Chorba creates a social history of this important shift.

Honorable Mention, Premio al Mejor Libro en Humanidades, Latin American Studies Association–Mexico Section, 2024

Mexican independence was, in a sense, an economic event. Through economic concerns, elites created a common ground with non-elites in their demands against foreign domination, and independence was imagined by the lettered men of Mexico as a feat that would nationalize a rich and productive economic apparatus.
 
Mexico, Interrupted investigates these economic hopes during the difficult decades between 1821, the year of the country’s definite separation from Spain, and 1852, a period of political polarization after the US-Mexico War that led the country to the brink of another armed conflict. Drawing on political and popular media, this book studies the Mexican intelligentsia’s obsession with labor and idleness in their attempts to create a wealthy, independent nation.
 
Focusing on figures of work and its opposites, Mexico, Interrupted reconstructs these decades’ “economic imaginaries of independence”: the political and cultural discourses that structured understandings, beliefs, and fantasies of the relationship between “the economy” and the life of an independent polity. By bringing together intellectual history, critical theory, and cultural studies, Gutiérrez Negrón offers a new account of the Mexican nineteenth century and complicates the history of the “spirit of capitalism” in the Americas.

The thirteen original essays in this collection explore the Mexican point of view from the 1920s to the present in order to register often unheard voices in the complex cross-border, cross-cultural reality shared by the two nations. The contributors, all of whom have personal experience with the challenges of bi-cultural and bi-national living, discuss travel writing, novels, film, essays, political cartoons, and Mexican sociocultural movements.

In a time of ever-increasing migration of capital and human beings, this book turns on its head the usual perspective of U.S. economic and cultural dominance in order to deepen understanding of the bi-national relationship.

Carlos Pereda’s Mexico Unveiled is a fresh, idiosyncratic synthesis of twentieth-century Mexican philosophy that puts contemporary debates about Mexican identity politics into a critical perspective. This edition—translated, edited, and introduced by Noell Birondo—brings the Mexican thinker’s ideas to a new English-language audience.

In three engaging essays written in a peerless prose style, Pereda considers the persistent influence of European colonialism on Mexican intellectual life, the politics of inclusion, and the changing ideas of what it means to be Mexican. He identifies three “vices”—social habits, customs, and beliefs inherited from European colonialism—that have influenced the development of Mexican national identity: subaltern fervor, craving for novelty, and nationalist zeal. Pereda demonstrates that these three tendencies have led Mexican intellectuals, and Mexican society more generally, to uncritically adopt a politics of exclusion and destructive nationalist attitudes.

Using a strategy he calls “nomadic” thinking—the act of moving beyond our cultural preconceptions and habits of thinking—Pereda guides readers through a number of examples drawn from Mexican philosophy and culture that illustrate these tendencies. At its core, Mexico Unveiled is an accessible and entertaining introduction to the philosophical themes that have long occupied Pereda’s life and work and Mexican philosophy more generally.

The result of a ten-year collaboration between Australian and Samoan researchers and midwives, this book compiles the first-person stories of several generations of Samoan midwives, both those who use traditional techniques for home birth and those who use Western techniques in a hospital. The voices are vivid and varied, often displaying the Samoan gift for storytelling.

The overall picture of changing birthing practices is complex and sometimes tinged with ironies. As the introduction says, "These Samoan nurses and midwives did not immediately attempt to mediate new and old ways of birthing after the colonial leadership of their profession left. They themselves became cultural agents for change as they continued the role of 'colonizing' their own birth tradition and taught the fa'atosaga [Samoan for midwife] Western techniques, at the same time trying to provide a professional midwife for all women. Paradoxically they often chose a social midwife for their own births and supported or at least condoned the social midwives close to them. . . . Kaisarina, while working as the leading professional midwife in the country, and working almost totally in hospital practice herself, simultaneously assisted her mother-in-law with her social practice of midwifery. Vipulo's story shows how a professional midwife preferred to have her mother, a social midwife, deliver her at home."

A particular objective of the authors is to encourage a reconception of maternity care in countries where professional services are rare and not available to all women. The book challenges common assumptions, still held in many postcolonial countries, that a simple migration of Western-style, hospital-focused care is necessarily always an achievable or desirable goal. It also demonstrates the considerable progress that one group has made in rethinking and developing a model of maternity care that works within their society and culture. As these midwives' stories suggest, solutions to some of the problems caused by gaps in the kinds of resources that Westerners take for granted can be found in partnerships and cultural wisdom that already exist in Samoa and, by extension, other developing countries.

The essays collected in this volume and written between 1959-1980 clearly belong to professional philosophy in both tone and context. Yet their ultimate aim is to explore larger problems and to set the groundwork for dealing with them. For the focus of attention throughout is human nature, not so much in the details of its structure or its social and moral manifestations as in its most general features and constituents. What sort of beings we are and how mind and body are related is the question at the very core of all inquiries into human nature.

Missionary Scientists explores the scientific activities of Jesuit missionaries in colonial Spanish America, revealing a little-known aspect of religions role in the scholarship of the early Spanish Empire. Grounded in an examination of the writings and individuals authors who were active in South American naturalist studies, this study outlines new paths of research often neglected by current scholarship.

What becomes clear throughout Missionary Scientists is that early missionaries were adept in adapting to local practices, in order to both understand the scientific foundations of these techniques and ingratiate themselves to the native communities.

Spanning the disciplines of history, religion, and Latin American studies, Missionary Scientists reshapes our understanding of the importance of the Jesuit missions in establishing early scientific traditions in the New World.

As global health institutions and aid donors expanded HIV treatment throughout Africa, they rapidly "scaled up" programs, projects, and organizations meant to address HIV and AIDS. Yet these efforts did not simply have biological effects: in addition to extending lives and preventing further infections, treatment scale-up initiated remarkable political and social shifts.

In Lesotho, which has the world's second highest HIV prevalence, HIV treatment has had unintentional but pervasive political costs, distancing citizens from the government, fostering distrust of health programs, and disrupting the social contract. Based on ethnographic observation between 2008 and 2014, this book chillingly anticipates the political violence and instability that swept through Lesotho in 2014.

This book is a recipient of the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of medicine.

As subSaharan Africa continues to confront the runaway epidemic of HIV/AIDS, traditional healers have been tapped as collaborators in prevention and education efforts. The terms of this collaboration, however, are far from settled and continually contested. As Modernizing Medicine in Zimbabwe demonstrates, serious questions continue to linger in the medical community since the explosion of the disease nearly thirty years ago. Are healers obstacles to health development? Do their explanations for the disease disregard biomedical science? Can the worlds of traditional healing and modern medicine coexist and cooperate?

Combining anthropological, historical, and public health perspectives, Modernizing Medicine in Zimbabwe explores the intersection of African healing traditions and Western health development, emphasizing the role of this historical relationship in current debates about HIV/AIDS. Drawing on diverse sources including colonial records, missionary correspondence, international health policy reports, and interviews with traditional healers, anthropologist David S. Simmons demonstrates the remarkable adaptive qualities of these disparate communities as they try to meet the urgent needs of the people.

The birth of the world’s great megacities is the surest and starkest harbinger of the “urban age” inaugurated in the twentieth century. As the world’s urban population achieves majority for the first time in recorded history, theories proliferate on the nature of urban politics, including the shape and quality of urban democracy, the role of urban social and political movements, and the prospects for progressive and emancipatory change from the corridors of powerful states to the routinized rhythms of everyday life. At stake are both the ways in which the rapidly changing urban world is understood and the urban futures being negotiated by the governments and populations struggling to contend with these changes and forge a place in contemporary cities.

Transdisciplinary by design, Monstrous Politics first moves historically through Mexico City’s turbulent twentieth century, driven centrally by the contentious imbrication of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its capital city. Participant observation, expert interviews, and archival materials demonstrate the shifting strategies and alliances of recent decades, provide the reader with a sense of the texture of contemporary political life in the city during a time of unprecedented change, and locate these dynamics within the history and geography of twentieth-century urbanization and political revolution. Substantive ethnographic chapters trace the emergence and decline of the political language of “the right to the city,” the establishment and contestation of a “postpolitical” governance regime, and the culmination of a century of urban politics in the processes of “political reform” by which Mexico City finally wrested back significant political autonomy and local democracy from the federal state.

A four-fold transection of the revolutionary structure of feeling that pervades the city in this historic moment illustrates the complex and contradictory sentiments, appraisals, and motivations through which contemporary politics are understood and enacted. Drawing on theories of social revolution that embrace complexity, and espousing a methodology that foregrounds the everyday nature of politics, Monstrous Politics develops an understanding of revolutionary urban politics at once contextually nuanced and conceptually expansive, and thus better able to address the realities of politics in the “urban age” even beyond Mexico City.

Named a Best Book of 2008 by Library Journal

In a series of moving vignettes, the author begins by describing a particular representation of Water-Moon Kuan Yin, a Buddhist teacher and goddess associated with compassion, who often sits on a precarious overhang or floats on a flimsy petal. Then Kuan Yin steps out of the frame to join the author in the mundane challenges of caring for her father-transferring his health insurance, struggling with a wheelchair van, managing adult diapers, or playing in the fictions of dementia. From perplexed to poignant to funny, the vignettes record the working-class English of a fading but still wise dad, and they find other human versions of Kuan Yin in a doctor who will still make house calls or kind strangers in the street.

The book includes ten illustrations: both classical representations of Kuan Yin and also the author's own drawings, which adapt Kuan Yin in an act of practical spirituality, reading art through life and life through art. Each vignette invites the harried caregiver to take a deep breath and meditate on the trials and joys of caring for an aging parent.

Some plays of Corneille that were formerly considered masterpieces are no longer admired; others that were little liked are now much acclaimed by critics. Amid such changes—and such divergences—of evaluation, the student of drama who is lacking in knowledge of French, but who has a critical sense perhaps equal or even superior to that of many people who are better linguists, may wish that he could judge for himself. This he can do with reasonable assurance by means of translations, just as is commonly done with the dramas of Ibsen. Except as regards poetry, a play can be appraised in a good translation almost as well as in its own language.

In an earlier book, The Chief Plays of Corneille, Dr. Lockert translated the six most famous (but not necessarily the best) tragedies of that dramatist. The present volume makes available to English readers all his other plays, comedies aside, for which high claims have been or could be made. Some recent critics have pronounced some of them superior to everything else of Corneille but the Cid and Polyeucte.

A brief introduction is prefixed to each play, giving examples of the diverse opinions held by representative critics in the last eighty-five years.
 

Best Nineteenth-Century Book Award Winner, 2018, Latin American Studies Association Nineteenth-Century Section

Moral electricity—a term coined by American transcendentalists in the 1850s to describe the force of nature that was literacy and education in shaping a greater society. This concept wasn't strictly an American idea, of course, and Ronald Briggs introduces us to one of the greatest examples of this power: the literary scene in Lima, Peru, in the nineteenth century.

As Briggs notes in the introduction to The Moral Electricity of Print, "the ideological glue that holds the American hemisphere together is a hope for the New World as a grand educational project combined with an anxiety about the baleful influence of a politically and morally decadent Old World that dominated literary output through its powerful publishing interests." The very nature of living as a writer and participating in the literary salons of Lima was, by definition, a revolutionary act that gave voice to the formerly colonized and now liberated people. In the actions of this literary community, as men and women worked toward the same educational goals, we see the birth of a truly independent Latin American literature.

A follow-up to Lacy Lockert’s classic The Chief Rivals of Corneille and Racine (Vanderbilt University Press 1956), More Plays by Rivals of Corneille and Racine consists of more French tragedies of the period—eleven plays from the great age of French drama in the seventeenth century, one play from the prolific pen of Alexandre Hardy, who preceded the great age, and one from the eighteenth century, the aftermath of that age. The volume contains plays Lockert typified as “excellent,” such as Tiridate and Mariamne, Géta, and Ariane, “smash hits” of the time like Timocrate and Astrate, and several other plays Lockert called “minor,” but that he felt would be of interest to scholars.
 

Mothering for Capital offers a bold new interpretation about the crisis of motherhood in neoliberalism. It documents how the drive of capital stealthily subsumes mothering, tethering women’s work, care, and socialization of children, as well as their wishes, fears, and understandings of themselves as mothers, to the imperatives of value accumulation. Under the guise of prioritizing being a “good” parent who maximizes the odds of a child’s “success” in a precarious future, capital orients mothers to cultivate a set of specific cognitive, social, emotional, and psychological traits that shape children as future labor power, what in neoliberalism is ideally the compliant self-managed subject. The child is the site of capital’s most audacious aspirations—to flatten and empty human life of all that is superfluous or dangerous to capital. What is ultimately at stake, Kromidas argues, is the subordination or emancipation of the human subject, and Mothering for Capital tracks this hidden terrain of struggle.

Rebecca Biron breaks new ground in this study of masculinity, violence, and the strategic construction of collective political identities in twentieth-century Latin American fiction. By engaging current sociological, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories, Murder and Masculinity analyzes the cliche of proving virility through violence against women. Biron develops her argument through close readings of five works: Jorge Luis Borges's "La intrusa," Armonia Somer's "El despojo," Clarice Lispector's A Maca no Escuro, Manuel Puig's The Buenos Aires Affair, and Reinaldo Arenas's El Asalto. Although men murdering women is often interpreted as nothing more than machista misogyny, Biron argues that the five narratives addressed in this book show that healed masculinities are essential to the achievement of cultural identity and political autonomy in Latin America.

The introduction to this study deftly situates Biron's work in relation to previous theoretical arguments on the social and political dimensions of Latin American writing. The five subsequent chapters offer superb analyses of the individual texts. Like their male protagonists who experiment with the psychological and legal extremes of gender division, these narratives risk nonconformity to the laws of genre in their quest for liberation from violent social and literary conventions. In combining elements of detective stories, crime narratives, psychological case studies, and magical or grotesque realism, they offer metafictional commentary on a network of discourses that confuses images of masculinity, national identity, and political autonomy in postcolonial Latin America.

These fourteen original essays examine the fascinating world of music scenes, those largely inconspicuous sites where clusters of musicians, producers, and fans explore their common musical tastes and distinctive lifestyle choices. Although most music scenes come and go with hardly a trace, they nevertheless give immense satisfaction to their participants, and a few--New York bop jazz, Merseybeat, Memphis rockabilly, London punk, Bronx hip-hop--achieve fame and spur musical innovations. To date, serious study of the scenes phenomenon has focused mainly on specific music scenes while paying less attention to recurrent dynamics of scene life, such as how individuals construct and negotiate scenes to the various activities. This volume remedies that neglect.

On September 4, 1957, the group of African American high school students who became known as the Little Rock Nine walked up to the front of Central High to enroll in school. They were turned away by the National Guard, who had been called out by Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus. "Blood will run in the streets," said Faubus, "if Negro pupils should attempt to enter Central High School." A mob seethed out front. The man who led the Nine up to the lines of the National Guard on that fateful morning was the author's father, a white Presbyterian pastor.

My Father Said Yes is the untold story of the Reverend Dunbar Ogden, who became the pro-integration leader in Little Rock's white community. He responded to a call for support from Daisy Bates, co-owner of the town's black newspaper. Both faced fierce opposition from within as well as from outside. Reverend Ogden lost his church and Daisy Bates lost her newspaper.

This memoir is also a moving father-son story. In this frank account, the author discusses the depression his father battled for most of his life, as well as the family tragedy of his brother's suicide.

Situated in contemporary Martinique, My Heart Beats Fast centers Kim, a young man accused of murdering his father, his sister’s partner, and her young son. The narration braids three temporalities: the present of the trial; the recent past of Kim’s youth shaped by Martinique’s entanglement with late‑stage capitalism and/as neocolonialism; and a longer duration that stretches back to slavery and the plantation, where Kim’s Antillean matrilineal origins have their roots. This nonlinear narrative makes generous use of analepses, as the spirits of the ancestors whisper visions and memories to Kim’s sister Edith, who attempts to understand what led her brother to commit such a horrific act. In addition to blending elements of realism and the marvelous, My Heart Beats Fast is written in a particularly poetic, urgent yet precise prose that has earned Nadia Chonville many accolades.

Chonville’s novel is at the vanguard of a new Antillean literature that moves beyond créolité (the last identifiable literary movement in the Antillean canon) in several important ways: First, although it does reflect on the past (as indeed prescribed by the créolistes), it is firmly anchored in the present, which Chonville, a trained social scientist, captures unflinchingly. Second, it complexifies the Antilles gender landscape with characters whose intersectional realities are explored with depth and care.

Over a two-year period, author Sana Loue and her research team followed the lives of fifty-three Puerto Rican women living with severe mental illness as they coped with daily challenges in the areas of family, romantic relationships, employment, social services, substance use, and health care. The team interviewed the women and shadowed them at their homes, churches, schools, physicians' offices, family events, and other occasions in order to understand how their mental illness, their gender, their language, and their culture affected their relationships with others, their understandings of their own situations, and their hopes for themselves and their families.

Sana Loue lets us see the remarkable strength of many of the women and hear in their own words about their efforts to survive, despite long histories of childhood physical and sexual abuse, partner violence, substance use, poverty, and severe mental illness. We also witness the violence that surrounds them and the HIV risk that becomes a part of their lives in their efforts to survive economically and emotionally.