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Taifa
Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania
James R. Brennan
Ohio University Press, 2012

Taifa is a story of African intellectual agency, but it is also an account of how nation and race emerged out of the legal, social, and economic histories in one major city, Dar es Salaam. Nation and race—both translatable as taifa in Swahili—were not simply universal ideas brought to Africa by European colonizers, as previous studies assume. They were instead categories crafted by local African thinkers to make sense of deep inequalities, particularly those between local Africans and Indian immigrants. Taifa shows how nation and race became the key political categories to guide colonial and postcolonial life in this African city.

Using deeply researched archival and oral evidence, Taifa transforms our understanding of urban history and shows how concerns about access to credit and housing became intertwined with changing conceptions of nation and nationhood. Taifa gives equal attention to both Indians and Africans; in doing so, it demonstrates the significance of political and economic connections between coastal East Africa and India during the era of British colonialism, and illustrates how the project of racial nationalism largely severed these connections by the 1970s.

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Talking Back to the West
How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order
Bilge Yesil
University of Illinois Press, 2024
In the 2010s, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) began to mobilize an international media system to project Turkey as a rising player and counter foreign criticism of its authoritarian practices. Bilge Yesil examines the AKP’s English-language communication apparatus, focusing on its objectives and outcomes, the idea-generating framework that undergirds it, and the implications of its activities. She also analyzes the decolonial and pan-Islamist messages AKP-sponsored outlets deploy to position Turkey as a burgeoning great power opposed to imperialism and claiming to be the voice of oppressed Muslims around the world. As the AKP wields this rhetoric to further its geopolitical and economic goals, media outlets pursue their own objectives by obfuscating facts with identity politics, demonizing the West to aggrandize the East and rallying Muslims under Turkey’s purportedly benevolent leadership.

Insightfully exploring the crossroads of communications and authoritarianism, Talking Back to the West illuminates how the Erdogan government and its media allies use history, religion, and identity to pursue complementary agendas and tighten the AKP’s grip on power.

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Taste of Control
Food and the Filipino Colonial Mentality under American Rule
R. Alexander D. Orquiza, Jr.
Rutgers University Press, 2020

Winner of the 2021 Gourmand Awards, Asian Section & Culinary History Section

Filipino cuisine is a delicious fusion of foreign influences, adopted and transformed into its own unique flavor. But to the Americans who came to colonize the islands in the 1890s, it was considered inferior and lacking in nutrition. Changing the food of the Philippines was part of a war on culture led by Americans as they attempted to shape the islands into a reflection of their home country.

Taste of Control tells what happened when American colonizers began to influence what Filipinos ate, how they cooked, and how they perceived their national cuisine. Food historian René Alexander D. Orquiza, Jr. turns to a variety of rare archival sources to track these changing attitudes, including the letters written by American soldiers, the cosmopolitan menus prepared by Manila restaurants, and the textbooks used in local home economics classes. He also uncovers pockets of resistance to the colonial project, as Filipino cookbooks provided a defense of the nation’s traditional cuisine and culture.

Through the topic of food, Taste of Control explores how, despite lasting less than fifty years, the American colonial occupation of the Philippines left psychological scars that have not yet completely healed, leading many Filipinos to believe that their traditional cooking practices, crops, and tastes were inferior. We are what we eat, and this book reveals how food culture served as a battleground over Filipino identity.

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Teller Tales
Histories
Jo Carson
Ohio University Press, 2007

“All my work fits in my mouth,” Jo Carson says. “I write performance material no matter what else the pieces get called, and whether they are for my voice or other characters’ voices … they are first to be spoken aloud.” Following an oral tradition that has strong roots in her native Tennessee, the author of Teller Tales invites the reader to participate in events in a way that no conventional history book can.

Both stories in this book are set in East Tennessee in the mid-eighteenth century and share certain characters. The first narrative, “What Sweet Lips Can Do,” recounts the story of the Overmountain Men and the battle of King’s Mountain, a tide-turning battle in the American Revolution. “Men of Their Time” is an exploration of white-Cherokee relationships from early contact through the time of the Revolution.

Although not well known to the outside world, the stories recounted in Teller Tales are cornerstones in the heritage of the Appalachian region and of American history. In ways that will appeal to young and old alike, Jo Carson’s irreverent telling will broaden the audience and the understanding for the stories of native Americans, settlers, explorers, and revolutionaries of early America.

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Tensions Of Empire
Japan and Southeast Asia in the Colonial and Postcolonial World
Ken’ichi Goto
Ohio University Press, 2003

Beginning with the closing decade of European colonial rule in Southeast Asia and covering the wartime Japanese empire and its postwar disintegration, Tensions of Empire focuses on the Japanese in Southeast Asia, Indonesians in Japan, and the legacy of the war in Southeast Asia. It also examines Japanese perceptions of Southeast Asia and the lingering ambivalence toward Japanese involvement in Asia and toward the war in particular.

Drawing on extensive multilingual archival research and interviews, Ken‘ichi Goto has produced a factually rich and balanced view of this region’s historical events of the last century.

Tensions of Empire features detailed discussions of Portuguese Timor in the 1930s and 1940s, the decolonization of Malaya, and twentieth-century Indonesia. This extended inquiry yields a unique view of the complicated network within and beyond the colonial and imperial relationships between a one-time nonwestern colonial power and an entire region.

Of great interest to students of Japan-Southeast Asia relations and to specialists in the modern history of both Southeast Asia and Japan, Professor Goto’s Tensions of Empire is a fascinating account of Japan’s recent past from the inside.

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The Terms of Our Surrender
Colonialism, Dispossession and the Resistance of the Innu
Elizabeth Cassell
University of London Press, 2021
An analysis of the laws determining indigenous land ownership in eastern Canada.
 
Based on extensive fieldwork and oral history, The Terms of Our Surrender is a powerful critical appraisal of unceded indigenous land ownership in eastern Canada. Set against an ethnographic, historical, and legal framework, this book traces the myriad ways the Canadian state has evaded the 1763 Royal Proclamation that guaranteed First Nations people a right to their land and way of life.

Focusing on the Innu of Quebec and Labrador, whose land has been taken for resource extraction and development, this book strips back the law of fiduciary duty to its origins. The Terms of Our Surrender argues for the preservation of land ownership and positions First Nations people as natural land defenders amidst a devastating climate crisis. This volume offers a voice to the Innu people, detailing the spirituality practices, culture, and values that make it impossible for them to willingly cede their land.

This book is intended to bridge the gap in knowledge between legal practitioners and those working at the intersections of human rights, social work, and public policy. It offers a potent template for using the law to fight back against the indignities suffered by indigenous communities.
 
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Thabo Mbeki
Adekeye Adebajo
Ohio University Press, 2017

Former South African president Thabo Mbeki is a complex figure. He was a committed young Marxist who, while in power, embraced conservative economic policies and protected white corporate interests; a rational and dispassionate thinker who was particularly sensitive to criticism and dissent; and a champion of African self-reliance who relied excessively on foreign capital.

As a key liberation leader in exile, he was instrumental in the ANC’s antiapartheid struggle. Later, he helped build one of the world’s most respected constitutional democracies. As president, though, he was unable to overcome inherited socioeconomic challenges, and his disastrous AIDS policies will remain a major blotch on his legacy.

Mbeki is the most important African political figure of his generation. He will be remembered as a foreign policy president for his peacemaking efforts and his role in building continental institutions, not least of which was the African Union. In this concise biography, ideally suited for the classroom, Adekeye Adebajo seeks to illuminate Mbeki’s contradictions and situate him in a pan-African pantheon.

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Theft Is Property!
Dispossession and Critical Theory
Robert Nichols
Duke University Press, 2020
Drawing on Indigenous peoples' struggles against settler colonialism, Theft Is Property! reconstructs the concept of dispossession as a means of explaining how shifting configurations of law, property, race, and rights have functioned as modes of governance, both historically and in the present. Through close analysis of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists from the nineteenth century to the present, Robert Nichols argues that dispossession has come to name a unique recursive process whereby systematic theft is the mechanism by which property relations are generated. In so doing, Nichols also brings long-standing debates in anarchist, Black radical, feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial thought into direct conversation with the frequently overlooked intellectual contributions of Indigenous peoples.
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Thieving Three-Fingered Jack
Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780-2015
Botkin, Frances R.
Rutgers University Press, 2018

The fugitive slave known as “Three-Fingered Jack” terrorized colonial Jamaica from 1780 until vanquished by Maroons, self-emancipated Afro-Jamaicans bound by treaty to police the island for runaways and rebels.  A thief and a killer, Jack was also a freedom fighter who sabotaged the colonial machine until his grisly death at its behest. Narratives about his exploits shed light on the problems of black rebellion and solutions administered by the colonial state, creating an occasion to consider counter-narratives about its methods of divide and conquer. For more than two centuries, writers, performers, and storytellers in England, Jamaica, and the United States have “thieved" Three Fingered Jack's riveting tale, defining black agency through and against representations of his resistance.

Frances R. Botkin offers a literary and cultural history that explores the persistence of stories about this black rebel, his contributions to constructions of black masculinity in the Atlantic world, and his legacies in Jamaican and United States popular culture.

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A Third University Is Possible
la la paperson
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

A Third University is Possible unravels the intimate relationship between the more than 200 US land grant institutions, American settler colonialism, and contemporary university expansion. Author la paperson cracks open uncanny connections between Indian boarding schools, Black education, and missionary schools in Kenya; and between the Department of Homeland Security and the University of California. Central to la paperson’s discussion is the “scyborg,” a decolonizing agent of technological subversion.

Drawing parallels to Third Cinema and Black filmmaking assemblages, A Third University is Possible ultimately presents new ways of using language to develop a framework for hotwiring university “machines” to the practical work of decolonization. 

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

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Third World Studies
Theorizing Liberation
Gary Y. Okihiro
Duke University Press, 2024
In this revised and expanded second edition of Third World Studies, Gary Y. Okihiro considers the methods and theories that might constitute the formation of Third World studies. Proposed in 1968 at San Francisco State College by the Third World Liberation Front but replaced by faculty and administrators with ethnic studies, Third World studies was over before it began. As opposed to ethnic studies, which Okihiro critiques for its liberalism and US-centrism, Third World studies begins with the colonized world and the anti-imperial, anticolonial, and antiracist projects located therein as was described by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1900. Third World studies analyzes the locations and articulations of power around the axes of race, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, class, and nation. In this new edition, Okihiro emphasizes the work of Third World intellectuals such as M. N. Roy, José Carlos Mariátegui, and Oliver Cromwell Cox, foregrounds the importance of Bandung and the Tricontinental, and adds discussions of eugenics, feminist epistemologies, and religion. With this work, Okihiro establishes Third World studies as a theoretical formation and a liberatory practice.
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Thou Shalt Forget
Indigenous sovereignty, resistance and the production of cultural oblivion in Canada
Pierrot Ross-Tremblay
University of London Press, 2019
What is ‘cultural oblivion’ and ‘psychological colonialism’, and how are they affecting the capacity of Indigenous Peoples in Canada to actively resist systematic and territorial oppression by the state? Following a decade-long research project, this new book by Pierrot Ross-Tremblay examines the production of oblivion among his own community, the Essipiunnuat [or, ‘People of the Brook Shells River’] and the relationship between a colonial imperative to forget. The book illustrates how the ‘cultural oblivion’ of vulnerable minority communities is a critical human rights issue but also asks us to reflect upon both the role of the state and the local elite in creating and warping our perception and understanding of history.
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Timor-Leste’s Long Road to Independence
Transnational Perspectives
Zelia Pereira
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
From a much neglected Portuguese colony to independence, Timor-Leste travelled a belated, long and troubled journey that included a 24-year Indonesian occupation. A classic process of European decolonization (1974–1975) was followed by a nationalist struggle against “Third World Colonialism” (1975–1999), and a final phase under the direct aegis of the United Nations (1999–2002). More than a direct relation between coloniser and colonised, this turbulent process involved the participation of many different actors scattered around the world. The “Timor Issue” brought to the scene a martyred people’s determination, the diplomacy of several nations (friends or foes), the involvement of the United Nations, and the activism of solidarity networks. This collection adopts a transnational approach that highlights the complexity of Timor-Leste’s road to independence.
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To Speak and Be Heard
Seeking Good Government in Uganda, ca. 1500–2015
Holly Elisabeth Hanson
Ohio University Press, 2021
A history of a political practice through which East Africans have sought to create calm, harmonious polities for five hundred years. “To speak and be heard” is a uniquely Ugandan approach to government that aligns power with groups of people that actively demonstrate their assent both through their physical presence and through essential gifts of goods and labor. In contrast to a parliamentary democracy, the Ugandan system requires a level of active engagement much higher than simply casting a vote in periodic elections. These political strategies—assembly, assent, and powerful gifts—can be traced from before the emergence of kingship in East Africa (ca. 1500) through enslavement, colonial intervention, and anticolonial protest. They appear in the violence of the Idi Amin years and are present, sometimes in dysfunctional ways, in postcolonial politics. Ugandans insisted on the necessity of multiple voices contributing to and affirming authority, and citizens continued to believe in those principles even when colonial interference made good governance through building relationships almost impossible. Through meticulous research, Holly Hanson tells a history of the region that differs from commonly accepted views. In contrast to the well-established perception that colonial manipulation of Uganda’s tribes made state failure inevitable, Hanson argues that postcolonial Ugandans had the capacity to launch a united, functional nation-state and could have done so if leaders in Buganda, Britain, and Uganda’s first governments had made different choices.
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Torture in the National Security Imagination
Stephanie Athey
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Reassessing the role of torture in the context of police violence, mass incarceration, and racial capitalism
 

At the midpoint of a century of imperial expansion, marked on one end by the Philippine–American War of 1899–1902 and on the other by post–9/11 debates over waterboarding, the United States embraced a vision of “national security torture,” one contrived to cut ties with domestic torture and mass racial terror and to promote torture instead as a minimalist interrogation tool. Torture in the National Security Imagination argues that dispelling this vision requires a new set of questions about the everyday work that torture does for U.S. society.

 

Stephanie Athey describes the role of torture in the proliferation of a U.S. national security stance and imagination: as U.S. domestic tortures were refined in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, then in mid-century counterinsurgency theory and the networks that brought it home in the form of law-and-order policing and mass incarceration.

 

Drawing on examples from news to military reports, legal writing, and activist media, Athey shows that torture must be seen as a colonial legacy with a corporate future, highlighting the centrality of torture to the American empire—including its role in colonial settlement, American Indian boarding schools, and police violence. She brings to the fore the spectators and commentators, the communal energy of violence, and the teams and target groups necessary to a mass undertaking (equipment suppliers, contractors, bureaucrats, university researchers, and profiteers) to demonstrate that, at base, torture is propelled by local social functions, conducted by networked professional collaborations, and publicly supported by a durable social imaginary.

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Torture in the National Security Imagination
Stephanie Athey
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Reassessing the role of torture in the context of police violence, mass incarceration, and racial capitalism
 

At the midpoint of a century of imperial expansion, marked on one end by the Philippine–American War of 1899–1902 and on the other by post–9/11 debates over waterboarding, the United States embraced a vision of “national security torture,” one contrived to cut ties with domestic torture and mass racial terror and to promote torture instead as a minimalist interrogation tool. Torture in the National Security Imagination argues that dispelling this vision requires a new set of questions about the everyday work that torture does for U.S. society.

 

Stephanie Athey describes the role of torture in the proliferation of a U.S. national security stance and imagination: as U.S. domestic tortures were refined in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, then in mid-century counterinsurgency theory and the networks that brought it home in the form of law-and-order policing and mass incarceration.

 

Drawing on examples from news to military reports, legal writing, and activist media, Athey shows that torture must be seen as a colonial legacy with a corporate future, highlighting the centrality of torture to the American empire—including its role in colonial settlement, American Indian boarding schools, and police violence. She brings to the fore the spectators and commentators, the communal energy of violence, and the teams and target groups necessary to a mass undertaking (equipment suppliers, contractors, bureaucrats, university researchers, and profiteers) to demonstrate that, at base, torture is propelled by local social functions, conducted by networked professional collaborations, and publicly supported by a durable social imaginary.

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Tourism and the Emergence of Nation-States in the Arab Eastern Mediterranean, 1920s-1930s
Jasmin Daam
Leiden University Press
In the aftermath of World War I, the beaten paths of tourism guided an increasing number of international tourists to the hinterlands of the Arab Eastern Mediterranean, where they would admire pyramids and Roman ruins. Yet they were not the only visitors: Arab nationalists gathered in summer resorts, and Yishuvi skiing clubs practised on Lebanese mountain slopes. By catering to these travellers, local tour guides and advocates of tourism development pursued their agendas. The book unearths unexpected connections between tourism and the emergence of nation-states in Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. Arab middle-class actors striving for independence, Zionist settlers and mandate officials presented their visions of the post-Ottoman spatial order to an international audience of tourists. At the same time, mobilities and infrastructures of tourism shaped the material conditions of this order. Tourism thus helps us to understand the transformations of Arab societies in their global context, and its history is a colourful story of the emergence of the modern Middle East.
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The Transit of Empire
Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism
Jodi A. Byrd
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

In 1761 and again in 1768, European scientists raced around the world to observe the transit of Venus, a rare astronomical event in which the planet Venus passes in front of the sun. In The Transit of Empire, Jodi A. Byrd explores how indigeneity functions as transit, a trajectory of movement that serves as precedent within U.S. imperial history. Byrd argues that contemporary U.S. empire expands itself through a transferable “Indianness” that facilitates acquisitions of lands, territories, and resources.

Examining an array of literary texts, historical moments, and pending legislations—from the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma’s vote in 2007 to expel Cherokee Freedmen to the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization bill—Byrd demonstrates that inclusion into the multicultural cosmopole does not end colonialism as it is purported to do. Rather, that inclusion is the very site of the colonization that feeds U.S. empire.

Byrd contends that the colonization of American Indian and indigenous nations is the necessary ground from which to reimagine a future where the losses of indigenous peoples are not only visible and, in turn, grieveable, but where indigenous peoples have agency to transform life on their own lands and on their own terms.

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Transmedia Geographies
Decoloniality, Democratization, Cultural Citizenship, and Media Convergence
Kevin Glynn
Rutgers University Press, 2025
Looking at the US, New Zealand, and Central America, this book considers how cultural politics has been deeply reworked in our contemporary media environment. The authors analyze how rampant technological convergence has allowed stories to spill across media platforms as well as geographical borders, and how those stories re-emerge as transmediated events.    

The authors explore the cultural politics that have developed within this new media environment by moving across the mediated landscapes of the first, third and fourth (Indigenous people’s) worlds, which are deeply intertwined and interconnected under contemporary conditions of neoliberal globalization and emergent regimes of authoritarian post-democracy. The book attends both to the platforms and digital networks of the new media environment and to the cultural forms and practices that have constituted television as the dominant medium of communication throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In the new media environment, transmediation works on behalf not only of those corporate mega-conglomerates that have become all too familiar to media consumers around the world, but also for many communities that have previously been excluded from access to the means of electronic textual production and circulation. For the latter, grassroots transmediation has become an important technique for the production of cultural citizenship.
 
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The Two Faces of American Freedom
Aziz Rana
Harvard University Press, 2014

The Two Faces of American Freedom boldly reinterprets the American political tradition from the colonial period to modern times, placing issues of race relations, immigration, and presidentialism in the context of shifting notions of empire and citizenship. Today, while the U.S. enjoys tremendous military and economic power, citizens are increasingly insulated from everyday decision-making. This was not always the case. America, Aziz Rana argues, began as a settler society grounded in an ideal of freedom as the exercise of continuous self-rule—one that joined direct political participation with economic independence. However, this vision of freedom was politically bound to the subordination of marginalized groups, especially slaves, Native Americans, and women. These practices of liberty and exclusion were not separate currents, but rather two sides of the same coin.

However, at crucial moments, social movements sought to imagine freedom without either subordination or empire. By the mid-twentieth century, these efforts failed, resulting in the rise of hierarchical state and corporate institutions. This new framework presented national and economic security as society’s guiding commitments and nurtured a continual extension of America’s global reach. Rana envisions a democratic society that revives settler ideals, but combines them with meaningful inclusion for those currently at the margins of American life.

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The Two Hendricks
Unraveling a Mohawk Mystery
Eric Hinderaker
Harvard University Press, 2011

In September 1755, the most famous Indian in the world—a Mohawk leader known in English as King Hendrick—died in the Battle of Lake George. He was fighting the French in defense of British claims to North America, and his death marked the end of an era in Anglo-Iroquois relations. He was not the first Mohawk of that name to attract international attention. Half a century earlier, another Hendrick worked with powerful leaders in the frontier town of Albany. He cemented his transatlantic fame when he traveled to London as one of the “four Indian kings.”

Until recently the two Hendricks were thought to be the same person. Eric Hinderaker sets the record straight, reconstructing the lives of these two men in a compelling narrative that reveals the complexities of the Anglo-Iroquois alliance, a cornerstone of Britain’s imperial vision. The two Hendricks became famous because, as Mohawks, they were members of the Iroquois confederacy and colonial leaders believed the Iroquois held the balance of power in the Northeast. As warriors, the two Hendricks aided Britain against the French; as Christians, they adopted the trappings of civility; as sachems, they stressed cooperation rather than bloody confrontation with New York and Great Britain.

Yet the alliance was never more than a mixed blessing for the two Hendricks and the Iroquois. Hinderaker offers a poignant personal story that restores the lost individuality of the two Hendricks while illuminating the tumultuous imperial struggle for North America.

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