front cover of Staging a Comeback
Staging a Comeback
Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance
Peter C. Kunze
Rutgers University Press, 2023
In the early 1980s, Walt Disney Productions was struggling, largely bolstered by the success of its theme parks. Within fifteen years, however, it had become one of the most powerful entertainment conglomerates in the world. Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance argues that far from an executive feat, this impressive turnaround was accomplished in no small part by the storytellers recruited during this period. Drawing from archival research, interviews, and textual analysis, Peter C. Kunze examines how the hiring of theatrically trained talent into managerial and production positions reorganized the lagging animation division and revitalized its output. By Aladdin, it was clear that animation—not live action—was the center of a veritable “renaissance” at Disney, and the animated musicals driving this revival laid the groundwork for the company’s growth into Broadway theatrical production. The Disney Renaissance not only reinvigorated the Walt Disney Company but both reflects and influenced changes in Broadway and Hollywood more broadly.
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Criminal Intimacy
Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality
Regina Kunzel
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Sex is usually assumed to be a closely guarded secret of prison life. But it has long been the subject of intense scrutiny by both prison administrators and reformers—as well as a source of fascination and anxiety for the American public. Historically, sex behind bars has evoked radically different responses from professionals and the public alike. In Criminal Intimacy, Regina Kunzel tracks these varying interpretations and reveals their foundational influence on modern thinking about sexuality and identity.
 
Historians have held the fusion of sexual desire and identity to be the defining marker of sexual modernity, but sex behind bars, often involving otherwise heterosexual prisoners, calls those assumptions into question. By exploring the sexual lives of prisoners and the sexual culture of prisons over the past two centuries—along with the impact of a range of issues, including race, class, and gender; sexual violence; prisoners’ rights activism; and the HIV epidemic—Kunzel discovers a world whose surprising plurality and mutability reveals the fissures and fault lines beneath modern sexuality itself.
 
Drawing on a wide range of sources, including physicians, psychiatrists, sociologists, correctional administrators, journalists, and prisoners themselves—as well as depictions of prison life in popular culture—Kunzel argues for the importance of the prison to the history of sexuality and for the centrality of ideas about sex and sexuality to the modern prison. In the process, she deepens and complicates our understanding of sexuality in America.
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Religion and Nationalism in Chinese Societies
Cheng-tian Kuo
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
This book explores the interaction between religion and nationalism in the Chinese societies of mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Cheng-tian Kuo analyses the dominant religions, including Chinese Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity, Islam, and folk religions, but he also goes beyond that, showing how in recent decades the Chinese state has tightened its control over religion to an unprecedented degree. Indeed, it could almost be said to have constructed a wholly new religion, Chinese Patriotism. The same period, however, has seen the growth of democratic civil religions, which could challenge the state.
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East is West and West is East
Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America
Karen Kuo
Temple University Press, 2012

Between 1919-1938,   contact between Asia and America forced a reassessment of the normative boundaries of race, sex, gender, class, home, and nation. Karen Kuo’s provocative East Is West and West Is East looks closely at these global shifts to modernity.

In her analysis of five forgotten texts—the 1930 film East Is West, Frank Capra’s 1937 version of Lost Horizon and its 1973 remake, Younghill Kang's novel East Goes West, and Baroness Ishimoto’s memoir/manifesto, Facing Both Ways—Kuo elucidates how “Asia” played a role in shaping American gender and racial identities and how Asian authors understood modern America and its social, political, and cultural influence on Asia.

Kuo asserts that while notions of white and Asian racial difference remain salient, sexual and gendered constructions of Asians and whites were at times about similarity and intersections as much as they were about establishing differences. 
 

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The Chosen Primate
Human Nature and Cultural Diversity
Adam Kuper
Harvard University Press, 1994
The great debates about human origins, cultural history, and human nature confront us with two opposing images of human beings. One view emphasizes biology, the other emphasizes culture as the foundation of human behavior. In The Chosen Primate, Adam Kuper reframes these debates and reconsiders the fundamental questions of anthropology. Balancing biological and cultural perspectives, Kuper reviews our beliefs about human origins, the history of human culture, genes and intelligence, the nature of the gender differences, and the foundations of human politics.
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Culture
The Anthropologists’ Account
Adam Kuper
Harvard University Press, 2000

Suddenly culture seems to explain everything, from civil wars to financial crises and divorce rates. But when we speak of culture, what, precisely, do we mean?

Adam Kuper pursues the concept of culture from the early twentieth century debates to its adoption by American social science under the tutelage of Talcott Parsons. What follows is the story of how the idea fared within American anthropology, the discipline that took on culture as its special subject. Here we see the influence of such prominent thinkers as Clifford Geertz, David Schneider, Marshall Sahlins, and their successors, who represent the mainstream of American cultural anthropology in the second half of the twentieth century--the leading tradition in world anthropology in our day. These anthropologists put the idea of culture to the ultimate test--in detailed, empirical ethnographic studies--and Kuper's account shows how the results raise more questions than they answer about the possibilities and validity of cultural analysis.

Written with passion and wit, Culture clarifies a crucial chapter in recent intellectual history. Adam Kuper makes the case against cultural determinism and argues that political and economic forces, social institutions, and biological processes must take their place in any complete explanation of why people think and behave as they do.

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Incest and Influence
The Private Life of Bourgeois England
Adam Kuper
Harvard University Press, 2009

Like many gentlemen of his time, Charles Darwin married his first cousin. In fact, marriages between close relatives were commonplace in nineteenth-century England, and Adam Kuper argues that they played a crucial role in the rise of the bourgeoisie.

Incest and Influence shows us just how the political networks of the eighteenth-century aristocracy were succeeded by hundreds of in-married bourgeois clans—in finance and industry, in local and national politics, in the church, and in intellectual life. In a richly detailed narrative, Kuper deploys his expertise as an anthropologist to analyze kin marriages among the Darwins and Wedgwoods, in Quaker and Jewish banking families, and in the Clapham Sect and their descendants over four generations, ending with a revealing account of the Bloomsbury Group, the most eccentric product of English bourgeois endogamy.

These marriage strategies were the staple of novels, and contemporaries were obsessed with them. But there were concerns. Ideas about incest were in flux as theological doctrines were challenged. For forty years Victorian parliaments debated whether a man could marry his deceased wife’s sister. Cousin marriage troubled scientists, including Charles Darwin and his cousin Francis Galton, provoking revolutionary ideas about breeding and heredity.

This groundbreaking study brings out the connection between private lives, public fortunes, and the history of imperial Britain.

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The Essence of Scenarios
Learning from the Shell Experience
Roland Kupers
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
In 1965, Royal Dutch Shell started experimenting with a new approach to preparing for the future. This approach, called scenario planning, eschewed forecasting in favor of plausible alternative stories. By using stories, or Ÿscenarios,Œ Shell aimed to avoid the false assumption that the future would look much like the present“an assumption that marred most corporate planning at the time. The Essence of Scenarios offers unmatched insight into the company’s innovative practice, which still has a huge influence on the way businesses, governments, and other organizations think about and plan for the future.In the course of their research, Angela Wilkinson and Roland Kupers interviewed almost every living veteran of the Shell scenario planning operation, along with many top Shell executives from later periods. Drawing on these interviews, the authors identify several principles that characterize the Shell process and explain how it has survived and thrived for so long. They also enumerate the qualities of successful Shell scenarios, which above all must be plausible stories with logical trajectories. Ultimately, Wilkinson and Kupers demonstrate the value of scenario planning as a sustained practice, rather than as a one-off exercise.
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Feminist Ethics in Film
Reconfiguring Care through Cinema
Joseph H. Kupfer
Intellect Books, 2012

Popular films can do more than merely entertain us; they can contribute to our understanding of human nature and the ethical theory that informs it. Feminist Ethics in Film explores a varied group of cinematic narratives from the perspective of care-based ethics. The interpersonal relationships they portray disclose important dimensions of care that have been overlooked in less contextualized discussions. In particular, the book examines the relationships between care and community, autonomy, family, and self transformation. Interpreting films from the perspective of the feminist ethics of care both expands our knowledge of this burgeoning area of philosophy and adds depth to our appreciation of the films.

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Ethnological Imagination
A Cross-Cultural Critique Of Modernity
Fuyuki Kurasawa
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

A significant intervention in contemporary debates about cross-cultural understanding

Fuyuki Kurasawa unearths what he terms “the ethnological imagination,” a substantial countercurrent of thought that interprets and contests Western modernity’s existing social order through comparison and contrast to a non-Western other. Accordingly, Kurasawa traces and critiques, through this prism of cultural alterity, the writings of some of the key architects of this way of thinking: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Michel Foucault.

In the work of these thinkers, Kurasawa finds little justification for two of the most prevalent claims about social theory: the wholesale “postmodern” dismissal of the social-theoretical enterprise because of its supposedly intractable ethnocentrism and imperialism, or, on the other hand, the traditionalist and historicist revival of a canon stripped of its intercultural foundations. Rather, Kurasawa’s book defends a cultural perspective that eschews both the false universalism of “end of history” scenarios and the radical particularism embodied in the vision of “the clash of civilizations.” It contends that the ethnological imagination can invigorate critical social theory by informing its response to an increasingly multicultural world—a response that calls for a reconsideration of the identity and boundaries of the West as well of modernity itself.
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A Place at the Multicultural Table
The Development of an American Hinduism
Prema Kurien
Rutgers University Press, 2007
Multiculturalism in the United States is commonly lauded as a positive social ideal celebrating the diversity of our nation. But, in reality, immigrants often feel pressured to create a singular formulation of their identity that does not reflect the diversity of cultures that exist in their homeland. Hindu Americans have faced this challenge over the last fifteen years, as the number of Indians that have immigrated to this country has more than doubled.

In A Place at the Multicultural Table, Prema A. Kurien shows how various Hindu American organizations--religious, cultural, and political--are attempting to answer the puzzling questions of identity outside their homeland. Drawing on the experiences of both immigrant and American-born Hindu Americans, Kurien demonstrates how religious ideas and practices are being imported, exported, and reshaped in the process. The result of this transnational movement is an American Hinduism--an organized, politicized, and standardized version of that which is found in India.

This first in-depth look at Hinduism in the United States and the Hindu Indian American community helps readers to understand the private devotions, practices, and beliefs of Hindu Indian Americans as well as their political mobilization and activism. It explains the differences between immigrant and American-born Hindu Americans, how both understand their religion and their identity, and it emphasizes the importance of the social and cultural context of the United States in influencing the development of an American Hinduism.

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Black Eggs
Poems by Kurihara Sadako
Sadako Kurihara
University of Michigan Press, 1994
Kurihara Sadako was born in Hiroshima in 1913, and she was there on August 6, 1945. Already a poet before she experienced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, she used her poetic talents to describe the blast and its aftermath. In 1946, despite the censorship of the American Occupation, she published Kuroi tamago (Black Eggs), poems from before, during, and immediately after the war. This volume includes a translation of Kuroi tamago from the complete edition of 1983.
But August 6, 1945, was not the end point of Kurihara’s journey. In the years after Kuroi tamago she has broadened her focus—to Japan as a victimizer rather than victim, to the threat of nuclear war, to antiwar movements around the world, and to inhumanity in its many guises. She treats events in Japan such as politics in Hiroshima, Tokyo’s long-term complicity in American policies, and the decision in 1992 to send Japanese troops on U.N. peacekeeping operations. But she also deals with the Vietnam War, Three Mile Island, Kwangju, Greenham Common, and Tiananmen Square. This volume includes a large selection of these later poems.
Kurihara sets us all at ground zero, strips us down to our basic humanity, and shows us the world both as it is and as it could be. Her poems are by turns sorrowful and sarcastic, tender and tough. Several of them are famous in Japan today, but even there, few people appreciate the full force and range of her poetry. And few poets in any country—indeed, few artists of any kind—have displayed comparable dedication, consistency, and insight.
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When We Say “Hiroshima”
Selected Poems
Sadako Kurihara
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Kurihara Sadako is one of the poetic giants of the nuclear age. Born in Hiroshima in 1913, she was in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. From then till now she has addressed her poetry primarily to issues of nuclear destruction, nuclear weapons, and nuclear power. Herself a victim of the world’s first nuclear attack, she became the poetic conscience of the Hiroshima that was no more. But Kurihara turned her attention soon to more controversial issues, including Japan’s role as victimizer in World War II. Many of her poems attack the Japanese government and its policies then and now.
When We Say “Hiroshima” contains a selection of the poems Kurihara wrote between 1942 and 1989. They include meditations on death, on survival, on nuclear radiation, on Japanese politics, on American foreign policy, and on women’s issues.
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Queer Budapest, 1873–1961
Anita Kurimay
University of Chicago Press, 2020
By the dawn of the twentieth century, Budapest was a burgeoning cosmopolitan metropolis. Known at the time as the “Pearl of the Danube,” it boasted some of Europe’s most innovative architectural and cultural achievements, and its growing middle class was committed to advancing the city’s liberal politics and making it an intellectual and commercial crossroads between East and West. In addition, as historian Anita Kurimay reveals, fin-de-siècle Budapest was also famous for its boisterous public sexual culture, including a robust gay subculture. Queer Budapest is the riveting story of nonnormative sexualities in Hungary as they were understood, experienced, and policed between the birth of the capital as a unified metropolis in 1873 and the decriminalization of male homosexual acts in 1961.
 
Kurimay explores how and why a series of illiberal Hungarian regimes came to regulate but also tolerate and protect queer life. She also explains how the precarious coexistence between the illiberal state and queer community ended abruptly at the close of World War II. A stunning reappraisal of sexuality’s political implications, Queer Budapest recuperates queer communities as an integral part of Hungary’s—and Europe’s—modern incarnation.
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Political Strategies in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica
Sarah Kurnick
University Press of Colorado, 2020

Political authority contains an inherent contradiction. Rulers must reinforce social inequality and bolster their own unique position at the top of the sociopolitical hierarchy, yet simultaneously emphasize social similarities and the commonalities shared by all. Political Strategies in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica explores the different and complex ways that those who exercised authority in the region confronted this contradiction.

New data from a variety of well-known scholars in Mesoamerican archaeology reveal the creation, perpetuation, and contestation of politically authoritative relationships between rulers and subjects and between nobles and commoners. The contributions span the geographic breadth and temporal extent of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica—from Preclassic Oaxaca to the Classic Petén region of Guatemala to the Postclassic Michoacán—and the contributors weave together archaeological, epigraphic, and ethnohistoric data.

Grappling with the questions of how those exercising authority convince others to follow and why individuals often choose to recognize and comply with authority, Political Strategies in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica discusses why the study of political authority is both timely and significant, reviews how scholars have historically understood the operation of political authority, and proposes a new analytical framework to understand how rulers rule.

Contributors include Sarah B. Barber, Joanne Baron, Christopher S. Beekman, Jeffrey Brzezinski, Bryce Davenport, Charles Golden, Takeshi Inomata, Arthur A. Joyce, Sarah Kurnick, Carlo J. Lucido, Simon Martin, Tatsuya Murakami, Helen Perlstein Pollard, and Víctor Salazar Chávez.

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Beyond the Betrayal
The Memoir of a World War II Japanese American Draft Resister of Conscience
Yoshito Kuromiya
University Press of Colorado, 2022
Beyond the Betrayal is a lyrically written memoir by Yoshito Kuromiya (1923–2018), a Nisei member of the Fair Play Committee (FPC), which was organized at the Heart Mountain concentration camp. The first book-length account by a Nisei World War II draft resister, this work presents an insider’s perspective on the FPC and the infamous trial condemning its members' efforts. It offers not only a beautifully written account of an important moment in US history but also a rare acknowledgment of dissension within the resistance movement, both between the young men who went to prison and their older leaders and also among the young men themselves. Kuromiya’s narrative is enriched by contributions from Frank Chin, Eric L. Muller, and Lawson Fusao Inada.
 
Of the 300 Japanese Americans who resisted the military draft on the grounds that the US government had deprived them of their fundamental rights as US citizens, Kuromiya alone has produced an autobiographical volume that explores the short- and long-term causes and consequences of this fateful wartime decision. In his exquisitely written and powerfully documented testament he speaks truth to power, making evident why he is eminently qualified to convey the plight of the Nisei draft resisters. He perceptively reframes the wartime and postwar experiences of the larger Japanese American community, commonly said to have suffered in the spirit of shikata ga nai—enduring that which cannot be changed—and emerged with dignity.
 
Beyond the Betrayal makes abundantly clear that the unjustly imprisoned Nisei could and did exercise their patriotism even when they refused to serve in the military in the name of civil liberties and social justice. Kuromiya’s account, initially privately circulated only to family and friends, is an invaluable and insightful addition to the Nikkei historical record.
 
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Home Away from Home
Japanese Corporate Wives in the United States
Sawa Kurotani
Duke University Press, 2005
Drawing attention to domestic space as the critical juncture between the global and the local, Home Away from Home is an innovative ethnography of the daily lives of middle-class Japanese housewives who accompany their husbands on temporary corporate job assignments in the United States. These women are charged with the task of creating and maintaining restful Japanese homes in a foreign environment so that their husbands are able to remain productive, loyal workers for Japanese multinationals and their children are properly socialized and educated as Japanese citizens abroad. Arguing that the homemaking components of transnational communities have not received adequate attention, Sawa Kurotani demonstrates how gender dynamics and the politics of the domestic sphere are integral to understanding national identity and transnational mobility.

Kurotani interviewed and spent time with more than 120 women in three U.S. locations with sizable expatriate Japanese communities: Centerville, a pseudonymous Midwestern town; the New York metropolitan area; and North Carolina’s Research Triangle area. She highlights the contradictory situations faced by the transient wives. Their husbands’ assignments in the United States typically last from three to five years, and they frequently emphasize the temporariness of their situation, referring to it as a “long vacation.” Yet they are responsible for creating comfortable homes for their families, which necessitates producing a familiar and permanent environment. Kurotani looks at the dynamic friendships that develop among the wives and describes their feelings about returning to Japan. She conveys how their sense of themselves as Japanese women, of home, and of their relationships with family members are altered by their personal experiences of transnational homemaking.

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The Armenians of Aintab
The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province
Ümit Kurt
Harvard University Press, 2021

A Turk’s discovery that Armenians once thrived in his hometown leads to a groundbreaking investigation into the local dynamics of genocide.

Ümit Kurt, born and raised in Gaziantep, Turkey, was astonished to learn that his hometown once had a large and active Armenian community. The Armenian presence in Aintab, the city’s name during the Ottoman period, had not only been destroyed—it had been replaced. To every appearance, Gaziantep was a typical Turkish city.

Kurt digs into the details of the Armenian dispossession that produced the homogeneously Turkish city in which he grew up. In particular, he examines the population that gained from ethnic cleansing. Records of land confiscation and population transfer demonstrate just how much new wealth became available when the prosperous Armenians—who were active in manufacturing, agricultural production, and trade—were ejected. Although the official rationale for the removal of the Armenians was that the group posed a threat of rebellion, Kurt shows that the prospect of material gain was a key motivator of support for the Armenian genocide among the local Muslim gentry and the Turkish public. Those who benefited most—provincial elites, wealthy landowners, state officials, and merchants who accumulated Armenian capital—in turn financed the nationalist movement that brought the modern Turkish republic into being. The economic elite of Aintab was thus reconstituted along both ethnic and political lines.

The Armenians of Aintab draws on primary sources from Armenian, Ottoman, Turkish, British, and French archives, as well as memoirs, personal papers, oral accounts, and newly discovered property-liquidation records. Together they provide an invaluable account of genocide at ground level.

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Workplace Justice
Organizing Multi-Identity Movements
Sharon Kurtz
University of Minnesota Press, 2002

An unheralded union battle offers new insight into identity politics.

In 1991, Columbia University’s one thousand clerical workers launched a successful campaign for justice in their workplace. This diverse union-two-thirds black and Latina, three-fourths women-was committed to creating an inclusive movement organization and to fighting for all kinds of justice. How could they address the many race and gender injustices members faced, avoid schism, and maintain the unity needed to win? Sharon Kurtz, an experienced union activist and former clerical worker herself, was welcomed into the union and pursued these questions. Using this case study and secondary studies of sister clerical unions at Yale and Harvard, she examines the challenges and potential of identity politics in labor movements.

With the Columbia strike as a point of departure, Kurtz argues that identity politics are valuable for mobilizing groups, but often exclude members and their experiences of oppression. However, Kurtz believes that identity politics should not be abandoned as a component in building movements, but should be reframed-as multi-identity politics. In the end she shows an approach to organizing with great potential impact not only for labor unions but for any social movement.
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Shuva
The Future of the Jewish Past
Yehuda Kurtzer
Brandeis University Press, 2012
Modern Jews tend to relate to the past through “history,” which relies on empirical demonstration and rational thought, rather than through “memory,” which relies on the non-rational architectures of mythology. By now “history” has surpassed “memory” as a means of relating to the past—a development that falls short in building identity and creates disconnection between Jews and their collective history. Kurtzer seeks to mend this breach. Drawing on key classical texts, he shows that “history” and “memory” are not exclusive and that the perceived dissonance between them can be healed by a selective reclamation of the past and a translation of that past into purposefulness.
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Democracy Denied, 1905-1915
Intellectuals and the Fate of Democracy
Charles Kurzman
Harvard University Press, 2008

In the decade before World War I, a wave of democratic revolutions swept the globe, consuming more than a quarter of the world’s population. Revolution transformed Russia, Iran, the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Mexico, and China. In each case, a pro-­democracy movement unseated a long-standing autocracy with startling speed. The nascent democratic regime held elections, convened parliament, and allowed freedom of the press and freedom of association. But the new governments failed in many instances to uphold the rights and freedoms that they proclaimed. Coups d’état soon undermined the democratic experiments.

How do we account for these unexpected democracies, and for their rapid extinction? In Democracy Denied, Charles Kurzman proposes that the collective agent most directly responsible for democratization was the emerging class of modern intellectuals, a group that had gained a global identity and a near-messianic sense of mission following the Dreyfus Affair of 1898.

Each chapter of Democracy Denied focuses on a single angle of this story, covering all six cases by examining newspaper accounts, memoirs, and government reports. This thoroughly interdisciplinary treatment of the early-twentieth-century upheavals promises to reshape debates about the social origins of democracy, the causes of democratic collapse, the political roles of intellectuals, and the international flow of ideas.

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Battleground Chicago
The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention
Frank Kusch
University of Chicago Press, 2008
The 1968 Democratic Convention, best known for police brutality against demonstrators, has been relegated to a dark place in American historical memory. Battleground Chicago ventures beyond the stereotypical image of rioting protestors and violent cops to reevaluate exactly how—and why—the police attacked antiwar activists at the convention.
            Working from interviews with eighty former Chicago police officers who were on the scene, Frank Kusch uncovers the other side of the story of ’68, deepening our understanding of a turbulent decade.
 
“Frank Kusch’s compelling account of the clash between Mayor Richard Daley’s men in blue and anti-war rebels reveals why the 1960s was such a painful era for many Americans. . . . to his great credit, [Kusch] allows ‘the pigs’ to speak up for themselves.”—Michael Kazin
 
“Kusch’s history of white Chicago policemen and the 1968 Democratic National Convention is a solid addition to a growing literature on the cultural sensibility and political perspective of the conservative white working class in the last third of the twentieth century.”—David Farber, Journal of American History
 
 
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Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América
Rodolfo Kusch
Duke University Press, 2010
Originally published in Mexico in 1970, Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América is the first book by the Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch (1922–79) to be translated into English. At its core is a binary created by colonization and the devaluation of indigenous practices and cosmologies: an opposition between the technologies and rationalities of European modernity and the popular mode of thinking, which is deeply tied to Indian ways of knowing and being. Arguing that this binary cuts through América, Kusch seeks to identify and recover the indigenous and popular way of thinking, which he contends is dismissed or misunderstood by many urban Argentines, including leftist intellectuals.

Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América is a record of Kusch's attempt to immerse himself in the indigenous ways of knowing and being. At first glance, his methodology resembles ethnography. He speaks with and observes indigenous people and mestizos in Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. He questions them about their agricultural practices and economic decisions; he observes rituals; he asks women in the market the meaning of indigenous talismans; he interviews shamans; he describes the spatial arrangement and the contents of shrines, altars, and temples; and he reproduces diagrams of archaeological sites, which he then interprets at length. Yet he does not present a "them" to a putative "us." Instead, he offers an inroad to a way of thinking and being that does not follow the logic or fit into the categories of Western social science and philosophy. In his introduction, Walter D. Mignolo discusses Kusch's work and its relation to that of other twentieth-century intellectuals, Argentine history, and contemporary scholarship on the subaltern and decoloniality.

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American Suicide
Howard Kushner
Rutgers University Press, 1991
The predecessors of Durkheim, Freud, and Kraepelin, distrusting explanations based on specific causation, had assumed that suicide like other diseases was a consequence of the interaction of emotional, constitutional, and habitual imbalances. The way a person lived, ate, and felt was viewed as inseparable from the course and outcome of any disorder. For the nineteenth-century physician, the moral issues that suicide raised could not be isolated from its constitutional components. Thus, those who exhibited suicidal tendencies were subjected to an amalgamation of pharmacological, social, and psychological interventions, which practioners labeled the "moral treatment."

By the 1890s, however, the consensus about the causes of suicide became unglued as a bacteriological medicine and the rise of the social sciences jointly served to call into question eclectic diagnoses. The renewed doctrine of specific causation of disease quickly spilled over into a constellation of explanataions for social behavior. The rise of specialization, which followed the bacteriological revolution of the 1880s, made the moral treatment appear scientifically suspect.

The goal of American Suicide is to demonstrate how the apparent contradictions among sociological, psychoanalytic, and neurobiological explanations of the etiology of suicide may be resolved. Only througha reintegration of culture, psychology, and biology can we begin to construct a satisfactory answer to the questions first raised by Durkheim, Freud, and Kraepelin.
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A Ghetto Takes Shape
Black Cleveland, 1870-1930
Kenneth L. Kusmer
University of Illinois Press, 1976

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African American Urban History since World War II
Kenneth L. Kusmer
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Historians have devoted surprisingly little attention to African American urban history ofthe postwar period, especially compared with earlier decades. Correcting this imbalance, African American Urban History since World War II features an exciting mix of seasoned scholars and fresh new voices whose combined efforts provide the first comprehensive assessment of this important subject.

The first of this volume’s five groundbreaking sections focuses on black migration and Latino immigration, examining tensions and alliances that emerged between African Americans and other groups. Exploring the challenges of residential segregation and deindustrialization, later sections tackle such topics as the real estate industry’s discriminatory practices, the movement of middle-class blacks to the suburbs, and the influence of black urban activists on national employment and social welfare policies. Another group of contributors examines these themes through the lens of gender, chronicling deindustrialization’s disproportionate impact on women and women’s leading roles in movements for social change. Concluding with a set of essays on black culture and consumption, this volume fully realizes its goal of linking local transformations with the national and global processes that affect urban class and race relations.

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Jakarta
City of a Thousand Dimensions
Abidin Kusno
National University of Singapore Press, 2023
A study of the forces that shaped Jakarta into the city it is today.

Indonesian writer Seno Gumira Ajidarma has called Jakarta a city of a thousand dimensions. A megacity of 30 million under threat from rising sea levels and temperatures, Jakarta and its resilient residents improvise and thrive. This book teases out some of the dimensions that have given shape to contemporary Jakarta, including the city’s expanded flexibility in accommodating capital and labor, and the consistent lack of planning that can be understood as a result of both politics and the poetics of governing in the region. Jakarta is essential reading for those seeking to understand one of Asia's most dynamic cities.
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The Trauma Mantras
A Memoir in Prose Poems
Adrie Kusserow
Duke University Press, 2024
The Trauma Mantras is a memoir by medical anthropologist, teacher, and writer Adrie Kusserow, who has worked with refugees and humanitarian projects in Bhutan, Nepal, India, Uganda, South Sudan, and the United States. It is a memoir of witness and humility and, ultimately, a way to critique and gain a fresh perspective on Western approaches to the self, suffering, and healing. Kusserow interrogates the way American culture prizes a psychologized individualism, the supposed fragility of the self. In relentlessly questioning the Western tribe of individualism with a hunger to bust out of such narrow confines, she hints at the importance of widening the American self. As she delves into humanity’s numerous social and political ills, she does not let herself off the hook, reflecting rigorously on her own position and commitments. Kusserow travels the world in these poetic meditations, exploring the desperate fictions that “East” and “West” still cling to about each other, the stories we tell about ourselves and obsessively weave from the dominant cultural meanings that surround us.
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Deaf Space in Adamorobe
An Ethnographic Study in a Village in Ghana
Annelies Kusters
Gallaudet University Press, 2015
Shared signing communities consist of a relatively high number of hereditarily deaf people living together with hearing people in relative isolation. In the United States, Martha’s Vineyard gained mythical fame as a paradise for deaf people where everyone signed up until the 19th century. That community disappeared when deaf people left the island, newcomers moved in, married locals, and changed the gene pool. These unique communities still exist, however, one being the Akan village in Ghana called Adamorobe. Annelies Kusters, a deaf anthropologist, traveled to Adamorobe to conduct an ethnographic study of how deaf and hearing people live together in the village. In her new book, Kusters reveals how deaf people in Adamorobe did not live in a social paradise and how they created “deaf spaces” by seeking each other out.

      Deaf Space in Adamorobe reveals one example of the considerable variation in shared signing communities regarding rates of sign language proficiency and use, deaf people’s marriage rates, deaf people’s participation in village economies and politics, and the role of deaf education. Kusters describes spaces produced by both deaf and hearing people as a cohesive community where living together is an integral fact of their sociocultural environments. At the same time, Kusters identifies tension points between deaf and hearing perspectives and also between outside perspectives and discourses that originated within the community. Because of these differences and the relatively high number of deaf people in the community, Kusters concludes it is natural that they form deaf spaces within the shared space of the village community.
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Deaf Mobility Studies
Exploring International Networks, Tourism, and Migration
Annelies Kusters
Gallaudet University Press, 2024
Deaf Mobility Studies revolutionizes how we think about deaf people’s international experiences. Equipped with a common theoretical framework, a team of five deaf ethnographers journeyed alongside their participants to delve into a rich array of experiences—ranging from career advancements and marriages to tourism and the challenges faced by deaf refugees. The authors present their findings within the framework of Deaf Mobility Studies, which brings together the transdisciplinary fields of Deaf Studies and Mobility Studies. Far from taking 'deaf cosmopolitanism' as a given, this work scrutinizes it as a multifaceted phenomenon to be both affirmed and questioned. Themes that emerge include how deaf people seek spaces of belonging, engage in languaging, expand their networks, and experience immobility.

The text is augmented by direct links to clips in nine ethnographic films, analysis of selected film excerpts and screenshots, and compelling data visualizations. Deaf Mobility Studies is an expansive odyssey through the complexities and opportunities inherent in deaf international mobility.
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Saints, Infirmity, and Community in the Late Middle Ages
Jenni Kuuliala
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Bodily suffering and patient, Christlike attitudes towards that suffering were among the key characteristics of sainthood throughout the medieval period. Drawing on new work in medieval dis/ability studies, this book analyses the meanings given to putative saints' bodily infirmities in late medieval canonization hearings. How was an individual saint's bodily ailment investigated in the inquests, and how did the witnesses (re)construct the saintly candidates' ailments? What meanings were given to infirmity when providing proofs for holiness? This study depicts holy infirmity as an aspect of sanctity that is largely defined within the community, in continual dialogue with devotees, people suffering from doubt, the holy person, and the cultural patterns ascribed to saintly life. Furthermore, it analyses how the meanings given to saints' infirmities influenced and reflected society's attitudes towards bodily ailments in general.
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Footprints of Hopi History
Hopihiniwtiput Kukveni'at
Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma
University of Arizona Press, 2018
Kukveni—footprints—are a powerful historical metaphor that the Hopi people use to comprehend their tangible heritage. Hopis say that the deity Máasaw instructed their ancestors to leave footprints during their migrations from their origin place to their home today as evidence that they had fulfilled a spiritual pact to serve as stewards of his land. Today’s Hopis understand these footprints to be the archaeological remains of former settlements—pottery sherds, stone tools, petroglyphs, and other physical evidence of past use and occupation of the land.

The fourteen chapters in Footprints of Hopi History: Hopihiniwtiput Kukveni’at focus on these Hopi footprints as they are understood through a variety of research techniques, including archaeology, ethnography, documentary history, plant genetics, and educational outreach. The editors and contributors offer fresh and innovative perspectives on Hopi archaeology and history, and demonstrate how one tribe has significantly advanced knowledge about its past through collaboration with archaeologists and cultural anthropologists.

The book features managerial uses of research, cultural landscape theory, use of GIS in research, archaeological interpretations of social identity and immigration, analysis of corn genetics, heritage education of youth, and research of oral traditions and documentary history. Footprints of Hopi History highlights the Hopi tribe’s leadership in sustained efforts to create bridges between tribal goals and anthropology, forging a path for others to follow.


Contributors

E. Charles Adams
Wesley Bernardini
Joëlle Clark
Chip Colwell
T. J. Ferguson
Dennis Gilpin
Kelley Hays-Gilpin
George Gumerman IV
Saul L. Hedquist
Maren P. Hopkins
Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa
Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma
Lee Wayne Lomayestewa
Patrick D. Lyons
Shirley Powell
Gregson Schachner
Thomas E. Sheridan
Mark D. Varien
Laurie D. Webster
Peter M. Whiteley
Michael Yeatts
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From the Womb to the Body Politic
Raising the Nation in Enlightenment Russia
Anna Kuxhausen
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012
In Russia during the second half of the eighteenth century, a public conversation emerged that altered perceptions of pregnancy, birth, and early childhood. Children began to be viewed as a national resource, and childbirth heralded new members of the body politic. The exclusively female world of mothers, midwives, and nannies came under the scrutiny of male physicians, state institutions, a host of zealous reformers, and even Empress Catherine the Great.
    Making innovative use of obstetrical manuals, belles lettres, children’s primers, and other primary documents from the era, Anna Kuxhausen draws together many discourses—medical, pedagogical, and political—to show the scope and audacity of new notions about childrearing. Reformers aimed to teach women to care for the bodies of pregnant mothers, infants, and children according to medical standards of the Enlightenment. Kuxhausen reveals both their optimism and their sometimes fatal blind spots in matters of implementation. In examining the implication of women in public, even political, roles as agents of state-building and the civilizing process, From the Womb to the Body Politic offers a nuanced, expanded view of the Enlightenment in Russia and the ways in which Russians imagined their nation while constructing notions of childhood.
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The Myth of the Addicted Army
Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs
Jeremy Kuzmarov
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
The image of the drug-addicted American soldier—disheveled, glassy-eyed, his uniform adorned with slogans of antiwar dissent—has long been associated with the Vietnam War. More specifically, it has persisted as an explanation for the U.S. defeat, the symbol of a demoralized army incapable of carrying out its military mission.

Yet as Jeremy Kuzmarov documents in this deeply researched book, popular assumptions about drug use in Vietnam are based more on myth than fact. Not only was alcohol the intoxicant of choice for most GIs, but the prevalence of other drugs varied enormously. Although marijuana use among troops increased over the course of the war, for the most part it remained confined to rear areas, and the use of highly addictive drugs like heroin was never as widespread as many imagined.

Like other cultural myths that emerged from the war, the concept of an addicted army was first advanced by war hawks seeking a scapegoat for the failure of U.S. policies in Vietnam, in this case one that could be linked to "permissive" liberal social policies and the excesses of the counterculture. But conservatives were not alone. Ironically, Kuzmarov shows, elements of the antiwar movement also promoted the myth, largely because of a presumed alliance between Asian drug traffickers and the Central Intelligence Agency. While this claim was not without foundation, as new archival evidence confirms, the left exaggerated the scope of addiction for its own political purposes.

Exploiting bipartisan concern over the perceived "drug crisis," the Nixon administration in the early 1970s launched a bold new program of federal antidrug measures, especially in the international realm. Initially, the "War on Drugs" helped divert attention away from the failed quest for "peace with honor" in Southeast Asia. But once institutionalized, it continued to influence political discourse as well as U.S. drug policy in the decades that followed.
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Perfect Copies
Reproduction and the Contemporary Comic
Shiamin Kwa
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Analyzing the way that recent works of graphic narrative use the comics form to engage with the “problem” of reproduction, Shiamin Kwa’s Perfect Copies reminds us that the mode of production and the manner in which we perceive comics are often quite similar to the stories they tell. Perfect Copies considers the dual notions of reproduction, mechanical as well as biological, and explores how comics are works of reproduction that embed questions about the nature of reproduction itself. Through close readings of the comics My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris, The Black Project by Gareth Brookes, The Generous Bosom series by Conor Stechschulte, Sabrina by Nick Drnaso, and Panther by Brecht Evens, Perfect Copies shows how these comics makers push the limits of different ideas of “reproduction” in strikingly different ways. Kwa suggests that reading and thinking about books like these, that push us to engage with these complicated questions, teaches us how to become better readers.
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Manuscripts of the Latin Classics 800-1200
Erik Kwakkel
Amsterdam University Press
This volume explores the production and use of medieval manuscripts that contain classical Latin texts. Six experts in the field address a range of topics related to these manuscripts, including how classical texts were disseminated throughout medieval society, how readers used and interacted with specific texts, and what these books look like from a material standpoint. This collection of essays also considers the value of studying classical manuscripts as a distinct group, and demonstrates how such a collective approach can add to our understanding of how classical works functioned in medieval society. Focusing on the period 800-1200, when classical works played a crucial role in the teaching of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics, this volume investigates how classical Latin texts were copied, used, and circulated in both discrete and shared contexts.
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Framing Fat
Competing Constructions in Contemporary Culture
Samantha Kwan
Rutgers University Press, 2013
According to public health officials, obesity poses significant health risks and has become a modern-day epidemic. A closer look at this so-called epidemic, however, suggests that there are multiple perspectives on the fat body, not all of which view obesity as a health hazard.

Alongside public health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are advertisers of the fashion-beauty complex, food industry advocates at the Center for Consumer Freedom, and activists at the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance.

Framing Fat
takes a bird’s-eye view of how these multiple actors construct the fat body by identifying the messages these groups put forth, particularly where issues of beauty, health, choice and responsibility, and social justice are concerned. Samantha Kwan and Jennifer Graves examine how laypersons respond to these conflicting messages and illustrate the gendered, raced, and classed implications within them. In doing so, they shed light on how dominant ideas about body fat have led to the moral indictment of body nonconformists, essentially “framing” them for their fat bodies.
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Under the Knife
Cosmetic Surgery, Boundary Work, and the Pursuit of the Natural Fake
Samantha Kwan
Temple University Press, 2020
Most women who elect to have cosmetic surgery want a “natural” outcome—a discrete alteration of the body that appears unaltered. Under the Knife examines this theme in light of a cultural paradox. Whereas women are encouraged to improve their appearance, there is also a stigma associated with those who do so via surgery.  

Samantha Kwan and Jennifer Graves reveal how women negotiate their “unnatural”—but hopefully (in their view) natural-looking—surgically-altered bodies. Based on in-depth interviews with forty-six women who underwent cosmetic surgery to enhance their appearance, the authors investigate motivations for surgery as well as women’s thoughts about looking natural after the procedures. Under the Knife dissects the psychological and physical strategies these women use to manage the expectations, challenges, and disappointments of cosmetic surgery while also addressing issues of agency and empowerment. It shows how different cultural intersections can produce varied goals and values around body improvement. 

Under the Knife highlights the role of deep-seated yet contradictory gendered meanings about women’s bodies, passing, and boundary work. The authors also consider traditional notions of femininity and normalcy that trouble women’s struggle to preserve an authentic moral self.
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Mixing It Up
Multiracial Subjects
SanSan Kwan
University of Texas Press, 2004

The United States Census 2000 presents a twenty-first century America in which mixed-race marriages, cross-race adoption, and multiracial families in general are challenging the ethnic definitions by which the nation has historically categorized its population. Addressing a wide spectrum of questions raised by this rich new cultural landscape, Mixing It Up brings together the observations of ten noted voices who have experienced multiracialism first-hand.

From Naomi Zack's "American Mixed Race: The United States 2000 Census and Related Issues" to Cathy Irwin and Sean Metzger's "Keeping Up Appearances: Ethnic Alien-Nation in Female Solo Performance," this diverse collection spans the realities of multiculturalism in compelling new analysis. Arguing that society's discomfort with multiracialism has been institutionalized throughout history, whether through the "one drop" rule or media depictions, SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Speirs reflect on the means by which the monoracial lens is slowly being replaced.

Itself a hybrid of memoir, history, and sociological theory, Mixing It Up makes it clear why the identity politics of previous decades have little relevance to the fluid new face of contemporary humanity.

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Digging for History at Old Washington
Mary L. Kwas
University of Arkansas Press, 2009
Positioned along the legendary Southwest Trail, the town of Washington in Hempstead County in southwest Arkansas was a thriving center of commerce, business, and county government in the nineteenth century. Historical figures such as Davy Crockett and Sam Houston passed through, and during the Civil War, when the Federal troops occupied Little Rock, the Hempstead County Courthouse in Washington served as the seat of state government. A prosperous town fully involved in the events and society of the territorial, antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras, Washington became in a way frozen in time by a series of events including two fires, a tornado, and being bypassed by the railroad in 1874. Now an Arkansas State Park and National Historic Landmark, Washington has been studied by the Arkansas Archeological Survey over the past twenty-five years. Digging for History at Old Washington joins the historical record with archaeological findings such as uncovered construction details, evidence of lost buildings, and remnants of everyday objects. Of particular interest are the homes of Abraham Block, a Jewish merchant originally from New Orleans, and Simon Sanders from North Carolina, who became the town’s county clerk. The public and private lives of the Block and Sanders families provide a fascinating look at an antebellum town at the height of its prosperity.
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Burgers in Blackface
Anti-Black Restaurants Then and Now
Naa Oyo A. Kwate
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Exposes and explores the prevalence of racist restaurant branding in the United States 

Aunt Jemima is the face of pancake mix. Uncle Ben sells rice. Chef Rastus shills for Cream of Wheat. Stereotyped Black faces and bodies have long promoted retail food products that are household names. Much less visible to the public are the numerous restaurants that deploy unapologetically racist logos, themes, and architecture. These marketing concepts, which center nostalgia for a racist past and commemoration of our racist present, reveal the deeply entrenched American investment in anti-blackness. Drawing on wide-ranging sources from the late 1800s to the present, Burgers in Blackface gives a powerful account, and rebuke, of historical and contemporary racism in restaurant branding.

Forerunners: Ideas First
Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

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White Burgers, Black Cash
Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation
Naa Oyo A. Kwate
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

The long and pernicious relationship between fast food restaurants and the African American community

Today, fast food is disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods and marketed to Black Americans through targeted advertising. But throughout much of the twentieth century, fast food was developed specifically for White urban and suburban customers, purposefully avoiding Black spaces. In White Burgers, Black Cash, Naa Oyo A. Kwate traces the evolution in fast food from the early 1900s to the present, from its long history of racist exclusion to its current damaging embrace of urban Black communities.

Fast food has historically been tied to the country’s self-image as the land of opportunity and is marketed as one of life’s simple pleasures, but a more insidious history lies at the industry’s core. White Burgers, Black Cash investigates the complex trajectory of restaurant locations from a decided commitment to Whiteness to the disproportionate densities that characterize Black communities today. Kwate expansively charts fast food’s racial and spatial transformation and centers the cities of Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C., in a national examination of the biggest brands of today, including White Castle, KFC, Burger King, McDonald’s, and more.

Deeply researched, grippingly told, and brimming with surprising details, White Burgers, Black Cash reveals the inequalities embedded in the closest thing Americans have to a national meal.

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The Street
A Photographic Field Guide to American Inequality
Naa Oyo A. Kwate
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Vacant lots. Historic buildings overgrown with weeds. Walls and alleyways covered with graffiti. These are sights associated with countless inner-city neighborhoods in America, and yet many viewers have trouble getting beyond the surface of such images, whether they are denigrating them as signs of a dangerous ghetto or romanticizing them as traits of a beautiful ruined landscape. The Street: A Field Guide to Inequality provides readers with the critical tools they need to go beyond such superficial interpretations of urban decay. 
 
Using MacArthur fellow Camilo José Vergara’s intimate street photographs of Camden, New Jersey as reference points, the essays in this collection analyze these images within the context of troubled histories and misguided policies that have exacerbated racial and economic inequalities. Rather than blaming Camden’s residents for the blighted urban landscape, the multidisciplinary array of scholars contributing to this guide reveal the oppressive structures and institutional failures that have led the city to this condition. Tackling topics such as race and law enforcement, gentrification, food deserts, urban aesthetics, credit markets, health care, childcare, and schooling, the contributors challenge conventional thinking about what we should observe when looking at neighborhoods.
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Borderland Dreams
The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers
June Hee Kwon
Duke University Press, 2023
In Borderland Dreams June Hee Kwon explores the trajectory of the “Korean dream” that has fueled the massive migration of Korean Chinese workers from the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in northeast China to South Korea since the early 1990s. Charting the interplay of bodies, money, and time, the ethnography reveals how these migrant workers, in the course of pursuing their borderland dreams, are transformed into a transnational ethnicized class. Kwon analyzes the persistent desire of Korean Chinese to “leave to live better” at the intersection between the neoliberalizing regimes of post-socialist China and post–Cold War South Korea. Scrutinizing the tensions and affinities among the Korean Chinese, North and South Koreans, and Han Chinese whose lives intertwine in the borderland, Kwon captures the diverse and multifaceted aspirations of Korean Chinese workers caught between the ascendant Chinese dream and the waning Korean dream.
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Straight Korean Female Fans and Their Gay Fantasies
Jungmin Kwon
University of Iowa Press, 2019
This book is about ardent Korean female fans of gay representation in the media, their status in contemporary Korean society, their relationship with other groups such as the gay population, and, above all, their contribution to reshaping the Korean media’s portrayal of gay people. Jungmin Kwon names the Korean female fandom for gay portrayals as “FANtasy” subculture, and argues that it adds to the present visibility of the gay body in Korean mainstream media, thus helping to change the public’s perspective toward sexually marginalized groups.

The FANtasy subculture started forming around text-based media, such as yaoi, fan fiction, and U.S. gay-themed dramas (like Will & Grace), and has been influenced by diverse social, political, and economic conditions, such as the democratization of Korea, an open policy toward foreign media products, the diffusion of consumerism, government investment in the culture, the Hollywoodization of the film industry, and the popularity of Korean culture abroad. While much scholarly attention has been paid to female fandom for homoerotic cultural texts in many countries, this book seeks to explore a relatively neglected aspect of the subculture: its location in and influence on Korean society at large.
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Uncivil Youth
Race, Activism, and Affirmative Governmentality
Soo Ah Kwon
Duke University Press, 2013
In Uncivil Youth, Soo Ah Kwon explores youth of color activism as linked to the making of democratic citizen-subjects. Focusing attention on the relations of power that inform the social and political practices of youth of color, Kwon examines how after-school and community-based programs are often mobilized to prevent potentially "at-risk" youth from turning to "juvenile delinquency" and crime. These sorts of strategic interventions seek to mold young people to become self-empowered and responsible citizens. Theorizing this mode of youth governance as "affirmative governmentality," Kwon investigates the political conditions that both enable youth of color to achieve meaningful change and limit their ability to do so given the entrenchment of nonprofits in the logic of a neoliberal state. She draws on several years of ethnographic research with an Oakland-based, panethnic youth organization that promotes grassroots activism among its second-generation Asian and Pacific Islander members (ages fourteen to eighteen). While analyzing the contradictions of the youth organizing movement, Kwon documents the genuine contributions to social change made by the young people with whom she worked in an era of increased youth criminalization and anti-immigrant legislation.
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Chinese Cinema
Identity, Power, and Globalization
Jeff Kyong-McClain
Hong Kong University Press, 2022
A pioneer investigation of Chinese cinema and the Chinese film industry.

In Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization, a variety of scholars explore the history, aesthetics, and politics of Chinese cinema as the Chinese film industry grapples with its place as the second-largest film industry in the world. Exploring the various ways that Chinese cinema engages with global politics, market forces, and film cultures, this edited volume places Chinese cinema against an array of contexts informing the contours of Chinese cinema today. The book also demonstrates that Chinese cinema in the global context is informed by the intersections and tensions found in Chinese and world politics, national and international co-productions, the local and global in representing Chineseness, and the lived experiences of social and political movements versus screened politics in Chinese film culture.
 
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The Trouble with Ancient DNA
Telling Stories of the Past with Genomic Science
Anna Källén
University of Chicago Press
A thoughtful consideration of the storytelling and science behind ancient DNA discoveries.
 
In recent years, discoveries brought to light through analysis of ancient DNA have made headlines around the world. While ancient DNA studies may appear to be a field that is focused on objective results and laboratory science, it has also relied heavily on storytelling and is surprisingly influenced by political interests.
 
In The Trouble with Ancient DNA, Anna Källén explores how the parameters of genetic science influence the stories we tell about our ancient ancestors, questioning what narratives we can and should take at face value. Through accounts of migrations, warriors, and figures like Cheddar Man, we see enticing and potent narratives that reach far beyond what can be gathered from the scientific study of molecules alone. Rather, by privileging certain narratives and questions—like those about sex or eye and skin color—our stories of ancient DNA are spun around the structure of today’s methodologies, technologies, and popular and political interests. Källén considers how DNA is used to sensationalize stories, how its use poses questions of ethics and care, and who is responsible if stories of ancient DNA are adopted for dangerous political projects.
 
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Max Weber
An Introduction to His Life and Work
Dirk Käsler
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Max Weber: An Introduction to His Life and Work has established itself as the standard short introduction in German to the work of Max Weber, and appears here for the first time in English translation. Sociologist Dirk Käsler has a profound sense of Weber's writings, yet manages to make Weber's ideas accessible to the beginner.

Käsler offers a comprehensive account of Weber's views, giving attention both to the context in which Weber produced his most significant contributions to social science, and to the changes involved in his work over the course of his career. This volume also serves as an introduction to the controversies that Weber's writings have stimulated, from the time of their first appearance to the present day.

This book will be of vital interest to anyone concerned with Max Weber and will undoubtedly become the leading student text on Weber in the English-speaking world.
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Serial Selves
Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics
Frederik Byrn Køhlert
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Autobiography is one of the most dynamic and quickly-growing genres in contemporary comics and graphic narratives. In Serial Selves, Frederik Byrn Køhlert examines the genre’s potential for representing lives and perspectives that have been socially marginalized or excluded. With a focus on the comics form’s ability to produce alternative and challenging autobiographical narratives, thematic chapters investigate the work of artists writing from perspectives of marginality including gender, sexuality, disability, and race, as well as trauma. Interdisciplinary in scope and attuned to theories and methods from both literary and visual studies, the book provides detailed formal analysis to show that the highly personal and hand-drawn aesthetics of comics can help artists push against established narrative and visual conventions, and in the process invent new ways of seeing and being seen.

As the first comparative study of how comics artists from a wide range of backgrounds use the form to write and draw themselves into cultural visibility, Serial Selves will be of interest to anyone interested in the current boom in autobiographical comics, as well as issues of representation in comics and visual culture more broadly.
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