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Dark Victorians
Vanessa D. Dickerson
University of Illinois Press, 2007

Dark Victorians illuminates the cross-cultural influences between white Britons and black Americans during the Victorian age. In carefully analyzing literature and travel narratives by Ida B. Wells, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Carlyle, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others, Vanessa D. Dickerson reveals the profound political, racial, and rhetorical exchanges between the groups. From the nineteenth-century black nationalist David Walker, who urged emigrating African Americans to turn to England, to the twentieth-century writer Maya Angelou, who recalls how those she knew in her childhood aspired to Victorian ideas of conduct, black Americans have consistently embraced Victorian England. At a time when scholars of black studies are exploring the relations between diasporic blacks, and postcolonialists are taking imperialism to task, Dickerson considers how Britons negotiated their support of African Americans with the controlling policies they used to govern a growing empire of often dark-skinned peoples, and how philanthropic and abolitionist Victorian discourses influenced black identity, prejudice, and racism in America.

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The Decline of Comity in Congress
Eric M. Uslaner
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Why do members of Congress resort to name-calling? In this provocative book, Eric M. Uslaner proposes that Congress is mirroring the increased incivility of American society. He points to five core values—American exceptionalism, enlightened individualism, egalitarianism, science as social engineering, and religion—that have been eroded since the 1960s. The author argues that a lack of trust permeates members of Congress to the point that they would rather seek control than compromise. This, Uslaner contends, is the real cause of gridlock in Washington. The Decline in Comity in Congress demonstrates why institutional reform will not correct this problem and why Americans need to change before their government can.
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Defending Their Own in the Cold
The Cultural Turns of U.S. Puerto Ricans
Marc Zimmerman
University of Illinois Press, 2011
Marc Zimmerman works from a theoretical frame of cultural, postcolonial, and diasporic studies to compare the artistic experiences and cultural production of Puerto Ricans with that of Chicanos and Cuban Americans. As he shows, even supposedly mainstream U.S. Puerto Ricans participate in a performative culture that embodies elements of possible cultural "Ricanstruction." Zimmerman examines a spectrum of U.S. Puerto Rican artistic life, including relations with other ethnic groups and resistance to colonialism and cultural assimilation. To illustrate how Puerto Ricans have survived and created new identities and relations out of their colonized and diasporic circumstances, Zimmerman looks at the cultural examples of Latino entertainment stars like Jennifer Lopez and Benicio del Toro; visual artists Juan Sánchez, Ramón Flores, and Elizam Escobar; and a group of Chicago Puerto Rican writers.
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Deflective Whiteness
Co-Opting Black and Latinx Identity Politics
Hannah Noel
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
In Deflective Whiteness, Hannah Noel repositions Whiteness studies in relation to current discussions around racialized animus and White victimhood, demonstrating how White supremacy adapts its discursive strategies by cannibalizing the language and rhetoric of Black and Latinx social justice movements. Analyzing a wide-ranging collection of cultural objects—memes, oration, music, advertisements, and news coverage—Noel shows how White deflection sustains and reproduces structures of inequality and injustice.

White deflection offers a script for how social justice rhetoric and the emotions of victimization are appropriated to conjure a hegemonic White identity. Using derivative language, deflection claims Whiteness as the aggrieved social status. Through case studies of cultural moments and archives including Twitter, country music, the Black Lives Matter movement, and more, Deflective Whiteness exposes the various forms of tacit White supremacy that operate under the alibi of injury and that ultimately serve to deepen racial inequities. By understanding how, where, and why White deflection is used, Noel argues, scholars and social justice advocates can trace, tag, and deconstruct covert White supremacy at its rhetorical foundations.
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Democracy in Mexico
Attitudes and Perceptions of Citizens at National and Local Level
Edited by Salvador Marti i Puig, Reynaldo Yunuen Ortega Ortiz, M. Fernanda Somuano Ventura, and Claire Wright
University of London Press, 2014

Democracy in Mexico offers an important contribution to one of the more complex and multifaceted political processes of recent decades in Latin America: Mexico's democratization at the national and subnational levels. Topics include the quality of democracy, political participation, and insecurity.

The book is based on two surveys carried out throughout Mexico in 2009 and 2011. The result of this collaboration is one of the few existing studies on democratic processes in the Mexican states.

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Destructive Desires
Rhythm and Blues Culture and the Politics of Racial Equality
Robert J. Patterson
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Despite rhythm and blues culture’s undeniable role in molding, reflecting, and reshaping black cultural production, consciousness, and politics, it has yet to receive the serious scholarly examination it deserves. Destructive Desires corrects this omission by analyzing how post-Civil Rights era rhythm and blues culture articulates competing and conflicting political, social, familial, and economic desires within and for African American communities. As an important form of black cultural production, rhythm and blues music helps us to understand black political and cultural desires and longings in light of neo-liberalism’s increased codification in America’s racial politics and policies since the 1970s. Robert J. Patterson provides a thorough analysis of four artists—Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, Adina Howard, Whitney Houston, and Toni Braxton—to examine black cultural longings by demonstrating how our reading of specific moments in their lives, careers, and performances serve as metacommentaries for broader issues in black culture and politics.
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The Difference That Disability Makes
Rod Michalko
Temple University Press, 2002
Rod Michalko launches into this book asking why disabled people are still feared, still regarded as useless or unfit to live, not yet welcome in society? Michalko challenges us to come to grips with the social meanings attached to disability and the body that is not "normal."Michalko's analysis draws from his own understanding of blindness and narratives by other disabled people. Connecting lived experience with social theory, he shows the consistent exclusion of disabled people from the common understandings of humanity and what constitutes the good life. He offers new insight into what suffering a disability means to individuals as well as to the polity as a whole. He shows how disability can teach society about itself, about its determination of what is normal and who belongs. Guiding us to a new understanding of how disability, difference, and suffering are related, this book enables us to choose disability as a social identity and a collective political issue. The difference that disability makes can be valuable and worthwhile, but only if we choose to make it so.
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Different Drummers
Military Culture and Its Discontents
Tad Tuleja
Utah State University Press, 2020
Different Drummers explores the disjunction between organizational solidarity and individual pushback in military organizations, examining how members of the armed forces express ambivalent attitudes about their service. The volume focuses not on antimilitary sentiment but on psychological complexity within a loyal opposition, considering examples of creative insubordination and analyzing the “oppositional positioning” of individuals whose military identity is conflicted.
 
This multidisciplinary collection brings in the perspectives of scholars from folklore, literary studies, psychology, and media studies, as well as the first-person perspectives of veterans. It includes chapters on the vernacular genres of bodylore, folksong, personal narrative, and legend; literary items like soldiers’ memoirs and poetry; the artwork of soldier cartoonists; and accounts of defying the chain of command in the field. Ideally, the goal of military basic training is to replace recruits’ focus on their own individuality with an unquestioned devotion to group solidarity. In reality, unit cohesion is constantly challenged by humans clinging obstinately to their non-collective personalities. Different Drummers focuses on those in uniform who feel themselves to be both of the military culture and at odds with it. It shows how these loyal “discontents” find ways of communicating and interacting with others that sometimes defy institutional expectations.
 
Contributors:
Ron Ben-Tovim, Carol Burke, Richard Allen Burns, Catherine Calloway, James I. Deutsch, Ronald Fry, Angus Kress Gillespie, Christina M. Knopf, Jay Mechling, Matthew David Perry, Mark C. Russell, John Paul Wallis
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Dilemmas of Desire
Teenage Girls Talk about Sexuality
Deborah L. Tolman
Harvard University Press, 2005

Be sexy but not sexual. Don't be a prude but don't be a slut. These are the cultural messages that barrage teenage girls. In movies and magazines, in music and advice columns, girls are portrayed as the object or the victim of someone else's desire--but virtually never as someone with acceptable sexual feelings of her own. What teenage girls make of these contradictory messages, and what they make of their awakening sexuality--so distant from and yet so susceptible to cultural stereotypes--emerges for the first time in frank and complex fashion in Deborah Tolman's Dilemmas of Desire.

A unique look into the world of adolescent sexuality, this book offers an intimate and often disturbing, sometimes inspiring, picture of how teenage girls experience, understand, and respond to their sexual feelings, and of how society mediates, shapes, and distorts this experience. In extensive interviews, we listen as actual adolescent girls--both urban and suburban--speak candidly of their curiosity and confusion, their pleasure and disappointment, their fears, defiance, or capitulation in the face of a seemingly imperishable double standard that smiles upon burgeoning sexuality in boys yet frowns, even panics, at its equivalent in girls.

As a vivid evocation of girls negotiating some of the most vexing issues of adolescence, and as a thoughtful, richly informed examination of the dilemmas these girls face, this readable and revealing book begins the critical work of understanding the sexuality of young women in all its personal, social, and emotional significance.

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The Discovery of the Greek Bronze Age
J. Lesley Fitton
Harvard University Press, 1996

J. Lesley Fitton traces this exciting tale of scholarly discovery and weaves it into an engaging, in-depth portrait of Greek Bronze Age civilizations, from their dawning on the Cycladic Isles in the third millennium B.C. to their later flowering in Minoan Crete and then in the Mycenaean centers and finally to their mysterious disappearance in the twelfth century B.C. The result is an elegant assimilation of vast historical detail and a well-illustrated tour of the art and artifacts, the grand palaces and tombs, the mythical heroes and Trojan treasures that form at least one cradle of our own civilization.

Fitton begins with the early finds of travelers, advances in geology, and research into Homer's identity. She vividly recreates the heroic age of the first archaeological excavations, particularly Heinrich Schliemann's fascinating work at Troy and Mycenae, and Arthur Evans's pioneering excavation and restoration of the Palace of Minos on Crete. The persistent search for signs of writing among Bronze Age Greeks culminates in Fitton's description of the 1952 deciphering of the earliest script used to write Greek. And as her account extends into the present, it encompasses the important contributions of the archaeologists Alan Wace and Carl Blegen, the War's impact on research, and a concise summation of current scholarly trends.

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Displacing Territory
Syrian and Palestinian Refugees in Jordan
Karen Culcasi
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Displacing Territory explores the core concepts of territory and belonging—and humanizes refugees in the process.
 
Based on fieldwork with Palestinian and Syrian refugees in Jordan, Displacing Territory explores how the lived realities of refugees are deeply affected by their imaginings of what constitutes territory and their sense of belonging to different places and territories. Karen Culcasi shows how these individual conceptualizations about territory don’t always fit the Western-centric division of the world into states and territories, thus revealing alternative or subordinated forms and scales of territory. She also argues that disproportionate attention to “refugee crises” in the Global North has diverted focus from other parts of the world that bear the responsibility of protecting the majority of the world’s refugees. By focusing on Jordan, a Global South state that hosts the world’s second-largest number of refugees per capita, this book provides insights to consider alternate ways to handle the situation of refugees elsewhere. In the process, Culcasi brings the reader into refugees’ diverse realities through their own words, inherently arguing against the tendency of many people in the Global North to see refugees as aberrant, burdensome, or threatening.
 
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Displacing Whiteness
Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism
Ruth Frankenberg, ed.
Duke University Press, 1997
Displacing Whiteness makes a unique contribution to the study of race dominance. Its theoretical innovations in the analysis of whiteness are integrated with careful, substantive explorations of whiteness on an international, multiracial, cross-class, and gendered terrain. Contributors localize whiteness, as well as explore its sociological, anthropological, literary, and political dimensions.
Approaching whiteness as a plural rather than singular concept, the essays describe, for instance, African American, Chicana/o, European American, and British experiences of whiteness. The contributors offer critical readings of theory, literature, film and popular culture; ethnographic analyses; explorations of identity formation; and examinations of racism and political process. Essays examine the alarming epidemic of angry white men on both sides of the Atlantic; far-right electoral politics in the UK; underclass white people in Detroit; whiteness in "brownface" in the film Gandhi; the engendering of whiteness in Chicana/o movement discourses; "whiteface" literature; Roland Barthes as a critic of white consciousness; whiteness in the black imagination; the inclusion and exclusion of suburban "brown-skinned white girls"; and the slippery relationships between culture, race, and nation in the history of whiteness. Displacing Whiteness breaks new ground by specifying how whiteness is lived, engaged, appropriated, and theorized in a range of geographical locations and historical moments, representing a necessary advance in analytical thinking surrounding the burgeoning study of race and culture.

Contributors. Rebecca Aanerud, Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, Phil Cohen, Ruth Frankenberg, John Hartigan Jr., bell hooks, T. Muraleedharan, Chéla Sandoval, France Winddance Twine, Vron Ware, David Wellman

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The Diversity Bargain
And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions, and Meritocracy at Elite Universities
Natasha Warikoo
University of Chicago Press, 2016
We’ve heard plenty from politicians and experts on affirmative action and higher education, about how universities should intervene—if at all—to ensure a diverse but deserving student population. But what about those for whom these issues matter the most? In this book, Natasha K. Warikoo deeply explores how students themselves think about merit and race at a uniquely pivotal moment: after they have just won the most competitive game of their lives and gained admittance to one of the world’s top universities.
           
What Warikoo uncovers—talking with both white students and students of color at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford—is absolutely illuminating; and some of it is positively shocking. As she shows, many elite white students understand the value of diversity abstractly, but they ignore the real problems that racial inequality causes and that diversity programs are meant to solve. They stand in fear of being labeled a racist, but they are quick to call foul should a diversity program appear at all to hamper their own chances for advancement. The most troubling result of this ambivalence is what she calls the “diversity bargain,” in which white students reluctantly agree with affirmative action as long as it benefits them by providing a diverse learning environment—racial diversity, in this way, is a commodity, a selling point on a brochure. And as Warikoo shows, universities play a big part in creating these situations. The way they talk about race on campus and the kinds of diversity programs they offer have a huge impact on student attitudes, shaping them either toward ambivalence or, in better cases, toward more productive and considerate understandings of racial difference.
           
Ultimately, this book demonstrates just how slippery the notions of race, merit, and privilege can be. In doing so, it asks important questions not just about college admissions but what the elite students who have succeeded at it—who will be the world’s future leaders—will do with the social inequalities of the wider world.  
 
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Diversity's Child
People of Color and the Politics of Identity
Efrén O. Pérez
University of Chicago Press, 2021
An incisive look at how America’s continued demographic explosion has spurred the development of a new identity as people of color.

For decades now, pundits and political scientists have been pointing to a major demographic change that’s underway in the United States. Demographers project that whites will become a minority of the US population and that minority groups will jointly comprise a majority before 2050.
 
Diversity’s Child appraises the political ramifications of this change. Efrén O. Pérez deftly argues that America’s changing demographics are forging a new identity for many as people of color—that unifies the political outlook of assorted minority groups. Drawing on opinion surveys of multiple minority groups, social science experiments with minority adults, content analyses of newspapers and congressional archives, and in-depth interviews with minority individuals, Pérez makes two key points. First, a person of color's identity does exist, and we can reliably measure it, as well as distinguish it from other identities that minorities hold. Second, across a wide swath of circumstances, identifying as a person of color profoundly shapes how minorities view themselves and their political system. Diversity’s Child is a vital and engaging look at America’s identity politics as well as at how people of color think about racial disparities and how politics can best solve them.
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Doing Difference Differently
Chinese International Students’ Literacy Practices and Affordances
Zhaozhe Wang
Utah State University Press, 2024
Doing Difference Differently ethnographically recounts the stories of four Chinese international students navigating the complex socio-academic environment of a North American institution for higher education. Author Zhaozhe Wang traces the ecologically situated and distributed literacy practices of these individuals across rhetorical contexts, both on and off campus, and reconstructs the digitally networked, spatiotemporally emerging, rhetorically potent, and ecologically afforded literacy worlds of Chinese international students.
 
Doing Difference Differently provides an in-depth, nuanced understanding of the multifaceted literate lives of this often-marginalized cultural group, highlighting their diverse aspirations, personas, communities, challenges, and strategies. The book reconceptualizes the linguistic and cultural differences of Chinese international students as active processes of embracing, performing, resisting, negotiating, and redefining the identities that institutions impose on them through everyday literacy practices. Wang offers an analytical heuristic for researchers and educators to better understand these students’ backgrounds and to more effectively and ethically support and advocate for them. This case study critically engages broad and interconnected concepts that are essential to educators’ collective understanding of Generation Z students brought up in cultural and educational contexts outside of the European-American sphere.
 
This book appeals to scholars, researchers, teachers, and administrators working in North American higher education and English-speaking countries, particularly those in the fields of writing studies, second language studies, applied linguistics, multilingual education, literacy studies, and international education. Educators across disciplines seeking to better understand the growing population of Chinese international students in North America will likewise benefit.
 
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Dreaming Equality
Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil
Sheriff, Robin E.
Rutgers University Press, 2001
In the 1933 publication The Masters and the Slaves, Brazilian scholar and novelist Gilberto Freyre challenged the racist ideas of his day by defending the “African contribution” to Brazil’s culture. In so doing, he proposed that Brazil was relatively free of most forms of racial prejudice and could best be understood as a “racial democracy.” Over time this view has grown into the popular myth that racism in Brazil is very mild or nonexistent.

This myth contrasts starkly with the realities of a pernicious racial inequality that permeates every aspect of Brazilian life. To study the grip of this myth on African Brazilians’ views of themselves and their nation, Robin E. Sheriff spent twenty months in a primarily black shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, studying the inhabitants’s views of race and racism. How, she asks, do poor African Brazilians experience and interpret racism in a country where its very existence tends to be publicly denied? How is racism talked about privately in the family and publicly in the community—or is it talked about at all?

Sheriff’s analysis is particularly important because most Brazilians live in urban settings, and her examination of their views of race and racism sheds light on common but underarticulated racial attitudes. This book is the first to demonstrate that urban African Brazilians do not subscribe to the racial democracy myth and recognize racism as a central factor shaping their lives.
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Driver Adaptation to Information and Assistance Systems
Alan Stevens
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2013
Driver information and assistance systems have emerged as an integral part of modern road vehicles in order to support the driver while driving. They make use of the newest information technologies in order to enhance driver awareness, safety and comfort, and thereby avoiding driver errors and accidents. Driver Adaptation to Information and Assistance Systems brings together recent work by the Marie-Curie Initial Training Network ADAPTATION. The project has studied drivers' behavioural adaptation to these new technologies from an integrative perspective working under a joint conceptual theoretical framework of behavioural adaptation that can be used to generate research hypotheses about how drivers will adapt to information and assistance systems and to derive guidelines for the design and deployment of such systems.
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