Over the last five centuries, the story of the Americas has been a story of the mixing of races and cultures. Not surprisingly, the issue of miscegenation, with its attendant fears and hopes, has been a pervasive theme in New World literature, as writers from Canada to Argentina confront the legacy of cultural hybridization and fusion.

This book takes up the challenge of transforming American literary and cultural studies into a comparative discipline by examining the dynamics of racial and cultural mixture and its opposite tendency, racial and cultural disjunction, in the literatures of the Americas. Editors Kaup and Rosenthal have brought together a distinguished set of scholars who compare the treatment of racial and cultural mixtures in literature from North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America. From various angles, they remap the Americas as a multicultural and multiracial hemisphere, with a common history of colonialism, slavery, racism, and racial and cultural hybridity.

Widespread human alteration of the planet has led many scholars to claim that we have entered a new epoch in geological time: the Anthropocene, an age dominated by humanity. This ethnography is the first to directly engage the Anthropocene, tackling its problems and paradoxes from the vantage point of the world’s largest tropical rainforest.

Drawing from extensive ethnographic research, Nicholas Kawa examines how pre-Columbian Amerindians and contemporary rural Amazonians have shaped their environment, describing in vivid detail their use and management of the region’s soils, plants, and forests. At the same time, he highlights the ways in which the Amazonian environment resists human manipulation and control—a vital reminder in this time of perceived human dominance. Written in engaging, accessible prose, Amazonia in the Anthropocene offers an innovative contribution to debates about humanity’s place on the planet, encouraging deeper ecocentric thinking and a more inclusive vision of ecology for the future.

Uncertain Powers is an original and much-needed analysis of female leadership in medieval Japan. In challenging current scholarship by exploring the important political and economic roles of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Japanese royal women, Sachiko Kawai questions the traditional view of the era as one dominated by male retired monarchs and a warrior government. Instead the author populates it with royal wives and daughters who held the title of premier royal lady (nyoin) and owned extensive estates across the Japanese archipelago. Nyoin, whose power varied according to marital status, networks, and age, used their wealth and human networks to build temples and organize their entourages as salons to assert religious, cultural, and political influence. Confronted with social factors and gender disparities, they were motivated to develop coping strategies, the workings of which Kawai masterfully teases out from the abundant primary sources.

Uncertain Powers presents a nuanced and groundbreaking study of the relationship between a nyoin’s authority (her acknowledged rights) and her actual power (the ability to enforce those rights), demonstrating how, as members of political factions, as landlords, and as religious and cultural patrons, nyoin struggled to transform authority into power by means of cooperation, persuasion, compromise, and coercion.

Forced Out: A Nikkei Woman’s Search for a Home in America offers insight into “voluntary evacuation,” a little-known Japanese American experience during World War II, and the lasting effects of cultural trauma. Of the roughly 120,000 people forced from their homes by Executive Order 9066, around 5,000 were able to escape incarceration beforehand by fleeing inland. In a series of beautifully written essays, Judy Kawamoto recounts her family’s flight from their home in Washington to Wyoming, their later moves to Montana and Colorado, and the influence of those experiences on the rest of her life. Hers is a story shared by the many families who lost everything and had to start over in often suspicious and hostile environments.
 
Kawamoto vividly illustrates the details of her family’s daily life, the discrimination and financial hardship they experienced, and the isolation that came from experiencing the horrors of the 1940s very differently than many other Japanese Americans. Chapters address her personal and often unconscious reactions to her parents’ trauma, as well as her own subsequent travels around much of the world, exploring, learning, enjoying, but also unconsciously acting out a continual search for a home.
 
Showing how the impacts of traumatic events are collective and generational, Kawamoto draws
interconnections between her family’s displacement and later aspects of her life and juxtaposes the impact of her early experiences and questions of identity, culture, and assimilation. Forced Out will be of great interest to the general reader as well as students and scholars of ethnic studies, Asian American studies, history, education, and mental health.

2022 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, Honor Title, Adult Non-Fiction Literature
2022 Evans Handcart Award Winner

In texts from the mid-Heian to the early Kamakura periods, certain figures appear to be “marginal” or removed from “centers” of power. But why do we see these figures in this way?

This study first seeks to answer this question by examining the details of the marginalizing discourse found in these texts. Who is portraying whom as marginal? For what reason? Is the discourse consistent? The author next considers these texts in terms of the predilection of modern scholarship, both Japanese and Western, to label certain figures “marginal.” She then poses the question: Is this predilection a helpful tool or does it inscribe modern biases and misconceptions onto these texts?

The inspirational writings of cultural theorist and social justice activist Gloria Anzaldúa have empowered generations of women and men throughout the world. Charting the multiplicity of Anzaldúa's impact within and beyond academic disciplines, community trenches, and international borders, Bridging presents more than thirty reflections on her work and her life, examining vibrant facets in surprising new ways and inviting readers to engage with these intimate, heartfelt contributions.

Bridging is divided into five sections: The New Mestizas: "transitions and transformations"; Exposing the Wounds: "You gave me permission to fly in the dark"; Border Crossings: Inner Struggles, Outer Change; Bridging Theories: Intellectual Activism with/in Borders; and "Todas somos nos/otras": Toward a "politics of openness." Contributors, who include Norma Elia Cantú, Elisa Facio, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Aída Hurtado, Andrea Lunsford, Denise Segura, Gloria Steinem, and Mohammad Tamdgidi, represent a broad range of generations, professions, academic disciplines, and national backgrounds. Critically engaging with Anzaldúa's theories and building on her work, they use virtual diaries, transformational theory, poetry, empirical research, autobiographical narrative, and other genres to creatively explore and boldly enact future directions for Anzaldúan studies.

A book whose form and content reflect Anzaldúa's diverse audience, Bridging perpetuates Anzaldúa's spirit through groundbreaking praxis and visionary insights into culture, gender, sexuality, religion, aesthetics, and politics. This is a collection whose span is as broad and dazzling as Anzaldúa herself.

A leading scholar of twentieth-century American history looks again at the beginning of the century, this time giving us a remarkable portrait of the emergence of modern society and its distinctive transformations and social problems. As in Regulating a New Economy, his earlier book on the changing American economy, Morton Keller integrates political, legal, and governmental history, now providing the first comprehensive study of the ideas and interests that shaped early twentieth-century American social policy.

Keller looks at the major social institutions: the family, voluntary associations, religion, and education. He examines important social issues: the rights of the individual, the regulation of public mores (gambling, drugs, prostitution, alcohol abuse), the definition and punishment of crime, and social welfare policy (poverty, public health, conditions of labor). His final area of concern is one that assumed new importance after 1900: social policy directed at major groups, such as immigrants, blacks, Native Americans, and women.

The interpretive theme is fresh and controversial. Keller sees early twentieth-century American government not as an artifact of class, race, and gender conflict but as the playing out of tension between the Progressive thrust to restore social cohesion through the principle of order and organization and two other, mutually antipodal, social interests: the weight of the American past and the growing pluralism of modern America. The interplay among these elements—progressivism, persistence, pluralism—shaped early twentieth-century social policy. The result was no clear victory for any one of these public attitudes, but rather the emergence and delineation of most of the social issues that have dominated American public life for the rest of the century.

In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, pianist Randy Weston and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik celebrated with song the revolutions spreading across Africa. In Ghana and South Africa, drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin fused local musical forms with the dizzying innovations of modern jazz. These four were among hundreds of musicians in the 1950s and ’60s who forged connections between jazz and Africa that definitively reshaped both their music and the world.

Each artist identified in particular ways with Africa’s struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, demands for independence and self-determination. That music was the wild, boundary-breaking exultation of modern jazz. The result was an abundance of conversation, collaboration, and tension between African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization. This collective biography demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered politics and culture on both continents.

In a crucial moment when freedom electrified the African diaspora, these black artists sought one another out to create new modes of expression. Documenting individuals and places, from Lagos to Chicago, from New York to Cape Town, Robin Kelley gives us a meditation on modernity: we see innovation not as an imposition from the West but rather as indigenous, multilingual, and messy, the result of innumerable exchanges across a breadth of cultures.

In 2003, in the face of errors and accidents caused by medical and surgical trainees, the American Council of Graduate Medical Education mandated a reduction in resident work hours to eighty per week. Over the course of two and a half years spent observing residents and staff surgeons trying to implement this new regulation, Katherine C. Kellogg discovered that resistance to it was both strong and successful—in fact, two of the three hospitals she studied failed to make the change. Challenging Operations takes up the apparent paradox of medical professionals resisting reforms designed to help them and their patients. Through vivid anecdotes, interviews, and incisive observation and analysis, Kellogg shows the complex ways that institutional reforms spark resistance when they challenge long-standing beliefs, roles, and systems of authority.

At a time when numerous policies have been enacted to address the nation’s soaring medical costs, uneven access to care, and shortage of primary-care physicians, Challenging Operations sheds new light on the difficulty of implementing reforms and offers concrete recommendations for effectively meeting that challenge.

Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Erin Kelly challenges the moralism behind harsh treatment of criminal offenders and calls into question our society’s commitment to mass incarceration.

The Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. Kelly underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indicates, particularly when it is tied to the illusion that we know how long and in what ways criminals should suffer. Our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly. It represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment.

Appreciating the limits of moral blame critically undermines a commonplace rationale for long and brutal punishment practices. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution. Were we to refocus our perspective to fit the relevant moral circumstances and legal criteria, we could endorse a humane, appropriately limited, and more productive approach to criminal justice.

The Mexican folkways described in this monograph, of scientific interest to anthropologists, will fascinate laypeople as well. Isabel Kelly collected these notes in the 1950s, as a diversion when official field work was not feasible, in the vicinity of Torreón and particularly in the nearby village of El Cuije, in northern Mexico. She recounts folk customs and habits, focusing on beliefs and practices related to health and healing and on notions concerning magic. These form, Kelly believes, a core of folk culture which has survived tenaciously in the rural areas and on the outskirts of the cities, among mestizo families of scant education and limited economic resources.

 These people are well acquainted with simple, matter-of-fact illnesses which result from natural causes and which respond to treatment by herbal and other home remedies or by modern medicines. But they also recognize the evil eye and the emotional upset known as “fright.” They are thoroughly familiar with the ever-present danger of ailments which are not “natural” and God-sent, but which are deliberately inflicted by an enemy, through the artifice of a sorcerer or a spiritualist. Such “instigated” illnesses may take any form, from a cold in the head to a false pregnancy. If a person suspects that poor health results from such malevolence, he or she spurns Western medicine and looks instead to the witch or to the spiritualist as the only hope of a cure.

 El Cuije pays an annual quota from community funds to make available modern health services provided by the government. But community funds are similarly drawn upon to provide “medical” attention for those who repair to the sorcerers. Once a week the village truck takes all presumed witchcraft victims to a nearby town, where they receive clinical treatment from professional sorcerers.

 Kelly sees little that is genuinely indigenous in the beliefs and practices described; many of them demonstrably result from infiltration from the Old World in the years following the Spanish Conquest. She considers spiritualistic curing—important in northern Mexico and many other parts of Latin America—in some detail, but the specific outlines of its history in northern Mexico still awaited clarification at the time of her research.

Global events of the early twenty-first century have placed new stress on the relationship among anthropology, governance, and war. Facing prolonged insurgency, segments of the U.S. military have taken a new interest in anthropology, prompting intense ethical and scholarly debate. Inspired by these issues, the essays in Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency consider how anthropologists can, should, and do respond to military overtures, and they articulate anthropological perspectives on global war and power relations.

This book investigates the shifting boundaries between military and civil state violence; perceptions and effects of American power around the globe; the history of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice; and debate over culture, knowledge, and conscience in counterinsurgency. These wide-ranging essays shed new light on the fraught world of Pax Americana and on the ethical and political dilemmas faced by anthropologists and military personnel alike when attempting to understand and intervene in our world.

In the early morning of November 29, 1864, with the fate of the Union still uncertain, part of the First Colorado and nearly all of the Third Colorado volunteer regiments, commanded by Colonel John Chivington, surprised hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho people camped on the banks of Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado Territory. More than 150 Native Americans were slaughtered, the vast majority of them women, children, and the elderly, making it one of the most infamous cases of state-sponsored violence in U.S. history. A Misplaced Massacre examines the ways in which generations of Americans have struggled to come to terms with the meaning of both the attack and its aftermath, most publicly at the 2007 opening of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site.

This site opened after a long and remarkably contentious planning process. Native Americans, Colorado ranchers, scholars, Park Service employees, and politicians alternately argued and allied with one another around the question of whether the nation’s crimes, as well as its achievements, should be memorialized. Ari Kelman unearths the stories of those who lived through the atrocity, as well as those who grappled with its troubling legacy, to reveal how the intertwined histories of the conquest and colonization of the American West and the U.S. Civil War left enduring national scars.

Combining painstaking research with storytelling worthy of a novel, A Misplaced Massacre probes the intersection of history and memory, laying bare the ways differing groups of Americans come to know a shared past.