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Guy Hocquenghem
Beyond Gay Identity
Bill Marshall
Duke University Press, 1997
Although Homosexual Desire, first published in French in 1972 and in English in 1978, has become a classic in gay male theory, no full-length study of its author, Guy Hocquenghem, has been available in English until now. From the rise of the international gay liberation movement of the late 1960s to Hocquenghem’s AIDS-related death in 1988, Bill Marshall discusses the arguments and impact of Hocquenghem’s theoretical and political work while situating this work in its biographical, historical, and intellectual contexts.
Marshall explores all aspects of Hocquenghem’s writing—journalistic, theoretical, and fictional—much of this work still untranslated. His consideration reaches beyond the aftermath of the events of May 1968 and points toward the ways in which Hocquenghem’s work might invigorate contemporary debates on a range of issues in Marxist and queer theory and in gay, lesbian, and cultural studies. These include the construction of homosexuality in social discourse, the status of "identity politics," and the role of the state and civil society in the determination of each. Demonstrating Hocquenghem’s importance within the framework of French leftist thought, Marshall links him to his contemporaries Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari. Tracing his connections to the intellectual traditions of Benjamin, Diderot, Fourier, Lucretius, and Gnosticism, he also illustrates Hocquenghem’s place within the European intellectual tradition.Guy Hocquenghem brings an important, challenging, and overly neglected French theorist back to the main stage.
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Turning Archival
The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies
Daniel Marshall
Duke University Press, 2022
The contributors to Turning Archival trace the rise of “the archive” as an object of historical desire and study within queer studies and examine how it fosters historical imagination and knowledge. Highlighting the growing significance of the archival to LGBTQ scholarship, politics, and everyday life, they draw upon accounts of queer archival encounters in institutional, grassroots, and everyday repositories of historical memory. The contributors examine such topics as the everyday life of marginalized queer immigrants in New York City as an archive; secondhand vinyl record collecting and punk bootlegs; the self-archiving practices of grassroots lesbians; and the decolonial potential of absences and gaps in the colonial archives through the life of a suspected hermaphrodite in colonial Guatemala. Engaging with archives from Africa to the Americas to the Arctic, this volume illuminates the allure of the archive, reflects on that which resists archival capture, and outlines the stakes of queer and trans lives in the archival turn.

Contributors. Anjali Arondekar, Kate Clark, Ann Cvetkovich, Carolyn Dinshaw, Kate Eichhorn, Javier Fernández-Galeano, Emmett Harsin Drager, Elliot James, Marget Long, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Daniel Marshall, María Elena Martínez, Joan Nestle, Iván Ramos, David Serlin, Zeb Tortorici
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The !Kung of Nyae Nyae
Lorna J. Marshall
Harvard University Press, 1976

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Nyae Nyae !Kung Beliefs and Rites
Lorna J. Marshall
Harvard University Press, 1999

With style and depth, Lorna Marshall leads the reader through the intricacies, ambiguities, and silences of !Kung beliefs. Her narrative, based on fieldwork among the Bushmen of the Kalahari in the early 1950s, brings into focus a way of life that appears to have existed for millennia. She presents the culture, beliefs, and spirituality of one of the last true hunting-and-gathering peoples by focusing on members of different bands as they reveal their own views. This account, with photography by John Marshall, presents a system of beliefs, one in which personified deities and unpersonified supernatural forces (n!ow and n/um) interact with man and the natural world. The !Kung believe that this interaction accounts for much of the mystery of life and the vicissitudes of the good and evil that befall mankind. The book also depicts an egalitarian lifestyle based on sharing and group awareness, a lifestyle that has not survived intact the increasing integration of the Bushmen into the modern world.

A companion volume to her 1976 work, The !Kung of Nyae Nyae, this book is published to mark the recent one-hundredth birthday of Lorna Marshall.

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The Archaeology of Slavery
A Comparative Approach to Captivity and Coercion
Lydia Wilson Marshall
Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

Plantation sites, especially those in the southeastern United States, have long dominated the archaeological study of slavery. These antebellum estates, however, are not representative of the range of geographic locations and time periods in which slavery has occurred. As archaeologists have begun to investigate slavery in more diverse settings, the need for a broader interpretive framework is now clear.

The Archaeology of Slavery: A Comparative Approach to Captivity and Coercion, edited by Lydia Wilson Marshall, develops an interregional and cross-temporal framework for the interpretation of slavery. Contributors consider how to define slavery, identify it in the archaeological record, and study it as a diachronic process from enslavement to emancipation and beyond.

Essays cover the potential material representations of slavery, slave owners’ strategies of coercion and enslaved people’s methods of resisting this coercion, and the legacies of slavery as confronted by formerly enslaved people and their descendants. Among the peoples, sites, and periods examined are a late nineteenth-century Chinese laborer population in Carlin, Nevada; a castle slave habitation at San Domingo and a more elite trading center at nearby Juffure in the Gambia; two eighteenth-century plantations in Dominica; Benin’s Hueda Kingdom in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; plantations in Zanzibar; and three fugitive slave sites on Mauritius—an underground lava tunnel, a mountain, and a karst cave.

This essay collection seeks to analyze slavery as a process organized by larger economic and social forces with effects that can be both durable and wide-ranging. It presents a comparative approach that significantly enriches our understanding of slavery.

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Beliefs, Behaviors, and Alcoholic Beverages
A Cross-Cultural Survey
Mac Marshall
University of Michigan Press, 1979
Essays on the use of alcoholic beverages within diverse societies and cultures
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Celebrity And Power
Fame and Contemporary Culture
P. David Marshall
University of Minnesota Press, 1997
The celebrity is an ambiguous figure in contemporary culture. Simultaneously celebrated and denigrated, stars represent not only the embodiment of success, but also the ultimate construction of false value. They are a peculiar form of public subjectivity that negotiates the tension between a democratic culture of access and a consumer capitalist culture of excess. Celebrity and Power examines this dynamic, questioning the cultural forces behind our need to become endlessly embroiled with the construction and collapse of celebrities.Through detailed analysis of figures from Tom Cruise to Oprah Winfrey to the commercial pop music sensation New Kids on the Block, author and cultural critic P. David Marshall investigates the general public’s desire to associate with celebrity. He examines various kinds of stars, questioning the needs each type fulfills in our lives and relating these needs to particular entertainment media. Marshall asks why enigmatic, distant stars populate the silver screen while television constructs approachable “everyman” figures and popular music features audience-identified celebrity personalities. He looks at the significance of stars who amass cultlike followings as well as those who appear to prompt outright rejection.Celebrity and Power identifies the forces that have enveloped the development of democratic culture and their partial resolution through a redefined public sphere populated by celebrities. Marshall argues that the new concern with the masses that characterizes modern capitalism promotes figures who can be seen as part of the crowd but who are articulated as individuals. As such, they provide a model of self-differentiation that furthers an economy in which product consumption is thought to bestow individualism and personality.Bridging the fields of media studies, film studies, communications, and popular culture, Marshall’s volume is a unique resource for students and researchers in all of these disciplines as well as for the general reader.P. David Marshall is director of the Media and Cultural Studies Centre in the Department of English, University of Queensland in Australia.
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The Celebrity Persona Pandemic
P. David Marshall
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

The Celebrity Persona Pandemic explores how the construction of a public persona is fetishized in contemporary culture. As social media has progressively led to a greater focus on the production of the self, so this book looks at the most visible versions of persona through figures such as Stephen Colbert, Cate Blachett, and Justin Bieber, as well as fictional characters like Spock and Harry Potter. Ultimately, P. David Marshall closely studies how persona culture shapes our notions of value and significance, and dramatically shifts cultural politics.

Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. 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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The Great Map of Mankind
Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment
P. J. Marshall
Harvard University Press, 1982

In 1777 Edmund Burke remarked that for his contemporaries “the Great Map of Mankind is unrolled at once.” The period from the late seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century had seen a massive increase in Britain’s knowledge of the non-European peoples of the wider world, and this was reflected in the proliferation of travel accounts of every kind.

This is a history of British perceptions of the exotic peoples and lands of Asia, North America, West Africa, and the Pacific who became well-known during that great age of exploration. It shows how the contours of intellectual and cultural history changed as news poured in. Philosophers contemplated man in a state of nature; the study of religion was broadened as Hinduism, the naturalistic religions of North America, and Chinese rites and ceremonies were revealed. Racial issues like slavery and negritude, questions about advanced versus backward nations, the great Chain of Being argument, and the Unchanging East theory became concerns of educated persons. Along with the impact of explorations on men’s ideas, the use of “sciences” like anthropology, ethnology, archeology, and philology came into vogue. And not incidentally, interest in empire grew, missionary zeal was strengthened, and tolerance and intolerance toward strangers struggled for dominance.

It could be argued that by the end of this age of “enlightenment,” investigation of the inhabitants of these distant lands had reinforced those assumptions of superiority that were an essential feature of British global expansion. To that extent this book is concerned with the intellectual foundations of the second British empire, for it seeks to show how many of the attitudes present in Britain’s dealings with the world in her imperial heyday were formulated during the eighteenth century.

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Collective Decision Making in Rural Japan
Robert Marshall
University of Michigan Press, 1984
This study is a result of three continuous years of fieldwork in a hamlet in rural Japan. The data presented and analyzed here consist of records from participant observation, formal and informal interviews, casual conversation and formal questionnaires, and public and private documents. The subject of this research is group decision making, and the results of this process are, after all, a matter of public record.
The major conclusions of this study are outlined in their simplest and most straightforward form. A hamlet is fundamentally a nexus for the organization of productive exchange among member households, the form of exchange through which two or more parties actively combine their resources to produce something of value not available, or as cheaply available, to any of them separately. Defection from productive exchange agreements by hamlet members is reduced by making access to future valuable transactions and corporate property contingent upon the integrity of each current exchange transaction. This method of combining a common interest in production with contingent access to productive resources is termed mutual investment and is the major source of consensus in hamlet decision making. When only cooperate resources are at issue, decisions regularly result in unanimity. When a course of action can be implemented only if hamlet members relinquish control over individually held resources, a division will emerge among the membership. Whether or not a formal vote is taken, the distribution of differing opinion will be known through more informal means of communication. In all cases of division, by the time the course of action to be implemented is formally announced, the minority in opposition will be extremely small. The question then must be resolved whether those in the minority will participate in the implementation or resign as hamlet members.
This book is written with two rather disparate audiences in mind: readers interested primarily in exchange and decision-making phenomenon, on the one hand, and readers interested primarily in the unity of experience represented by the Japanese sensibility, on the other.
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Political Spiritualities
The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria
Ruth Marshall
University of Chicago Press, 2009

After an explosion of conversions to Pentecostalism over the past three decades, tens of millions of Nigerians now claim that “Jesus is the answer.” But if Jesus is the answer, what is the question? What led to the movement’s dramatic rise and how can we make sense of its social and political significance? In this ambitiously interdisciplinary study, Ruth Marshall draws on years of fieldwork and grapples with a host of important thinkers—including Foucault, Agamben, Arendt, and Benjamin—to answer these questions.

To account for the movement’s success, Marshall explores how Pentecostalism presents the experience of being born again as a chance for Nigerians to realize the promises of political and religious salvation made during the colonial and postcolonial eras. Her astute analysis of this religious trend sheds light on Nigeria’s contemporary politics, postcolonial statecraft, and the everyday struggles of ordinary citizens coping with poverty, corruption, and inequality.

Pentecostalism’s rise is truly global, and Political Spiritualities persuasively argues that Nigeria is a key case in this phenomenon while calling for new ways of thinking about the place of religion in contemporary politics.

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Splintered Sisterhood
Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage
Susan E. Marshall
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997

When Tennessee became the thirty-sixth and final state needed to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment in August 1920, giving women the right to vote, one group of women expressed bitter disappointment and vowed to fight against “this feminist disease.” Why this fierce and extended opposition? In Splintered Sisterhood, Susan Marshall argues that the women of the antisuffrage movement mobilized not as threatened homemakers but as influential political strategists.
    Drawing on surviving records of major antisuffrage organizations, Marshall makes clear that antisuffrage women organized to protect gendered class interests. She shows that many of the most vocal antisuffragists were wealthy, educated women who exercised considerable political influence through their personal ties to men in politics as well as by their own positions as leaders of social service committees. Under the guise of defending an ideal of “true womanhood,” these powerful women sought to keep the vote from lower-class women, fearing it would result in an increase in the “ignorant vote” and in their own displacement from positions of influence. This book reveals the increasingly militant style of antisuffrage protest as the conflict over female voting rights escalated. Splintered Sisterhood adds a missing piece to the history of women’s rights activism in the United States and illuminates current issues of antifeminism.

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Roots and Resilience
California Ranchers in their Own Words
Susan Edinger Marshall
University of Nevada Press, 2024
In Roots and Resilience, the authors invite readers to consider an intimate relationship with the California landscape and its history. Ranching in the region goes back centuries, and many of these essayists have long family lineages in the area, while other contributors are newer to the region. Through their authentic voices, these writers provide a lens through which we can better understand the language of this landscape.

The editors have drawn together these stories, poems, and musings from ranchers across the state, calling upon real people to share their experiences, and beckoning readers to find a shared understanding concerning often divisive land-use topics. Many perspectives are considered, including those of transplanted suburbanites to seventh-generation heirs. Notably, many women’s writings are including in the book, offering unique and valuable perspectives on ranching culture.

Roots and Resilience gives voice to California’s Indigenous, Mexican American, Basque and other European American ranchers, asking the reader to find common ground in the name of land stewardship and conservation.
 
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Nurturing Dads
Fatherhood Initiatives Beyond the Wallet
William Marsiglio
Russell Sage Foundation, 2012
American fathers are a highly diverse group, but the breadwinning, live-in, biological dad prevails as the fatherhood ideal. Consequently, policymakers continue to emphasize marriage and residency over initiatives that might help foster healthy father-child relationships and creative co-parenting regardless of marital or residential status. In Nurturing Dads, William Marsiglio and Kevin Roy explore the ways new initiatives can address the social, cultural, and economic challenges men face in contemporary families and foster more meaningful engagement between many different kinds of fathers and their children. What makes a good father? The firsthand accounts in Nurturing Dads show that the answer to this question varies widely and in ways that counter the mainstream "provide and reside" model of fatherhood. Marsiglio and Roy document the personal experiences of more than 300 men from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds and diverse settings, including fathers-to-be, young adult fathers, middle-class dads, stepfathers, men with multiple children in separate families, and fathers in correctional facilities. They find that most dads express the desire to have strong, close relationships with their children and to develop the nurturing skills to maintain these bonds. But they also find that disadvantaged fathers, including young dads and those in constrained financial and personal circumstances, confront myriad structural obstacles, such as poverty, inadequate education, and poor job opportunities. Nurturing Dads asserts that society should help fathers become more committed and attentive caregivers and that federal and state agencies, work sites, grassroots advocacy groups, and the media all have roles to play. Recent efforts to introduce state-initiated paternity leave should be coupled with social programs that encourage fathers to develop unconditional commitments to children, to co-parent with mothers, to establish partnerships with their children's other caregivers, and to develop parenting skills and resources before becoming fathers via activities like volunteering and mentoring kids. Ultimately, Marsiglio and Roy argue, such combined strategies would not only change the policy landscape to promote engaged fathering but also change the cultural landscape to view nurturance as a fundamental aspect of good fathering. Care is a human experience—not just a woman's responsibility—and this core idea behind Nurturing Dads holds important implications for how society supports its families and defines manhood. The book promotes the progressive notion that fathers should provide more than financial support and, in the process, bring about a better start in life for their children. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology
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Genres of Listening
An Ethnography of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires
Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas
Duke University Press, 2022
In Genres of Listening Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas explores a unique culture of listening and communicating in Buenos Aires. She traces how psychoanalytic listening circulates beyond the clinical setting to become a central element of social interaction and cultural production in the city that has the highest number of practicing psychologists and psychoanalysts in the world. Marsilli-Vargas develops the concept of genres of listening to demonstrate that hearers listen differently, depending on where, how, and to whom they are listening. In particular, she focuses on psychoanalytic listening as a specific genre. Porteños (citizens of Buenos Aires) have developed a “psychoanalytic ear” that emerges during conversational encounters in everyday interactions in which participants offer different interpretations of the hidden meaning the words carry. Marsilli-Vargas does not analyze these interpretations as impositions or interruptions but as productive exchanges. By outlining how psychoanalytic listening operates as a genre, Marsilli-Vargas opens up ways to imagine other modes of listening and forms of social interaction.
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Feminism and the Cinema of Experience
Lori Jo Marso
Duke University Press, 2024

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Politics with Beauvoir
Freedom in the Encounter
Lori Jo Marso
Duke University Press, 2017
In Politics with Beauvoir Lori Jo Marso treats Simone de Beauvoir's feminist theory and practice as part of her political theory, arguing that freedom is Beauvoir's central concern and that this is best apprehended through Marso's notion of the encounter. Starting with Beauvoir's political encounters with several of her key contemporaries including Hannah Arendt, Robert Brasillach, Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, and Violette Leduc, Marso also moves beyond historical context to stage encounters between Beauvoir and others such as Chantal Akerman, Lars von Trier, Rahel Varnhagen, Alison Bechdel, the Marquis de Sade, and Margarethe von Trotta. From intimate to historical, always affective though often fraught and divisive, Beauvoir's encounters, Marso shows, exemplify freedom as a shared, relational, collective practice. Politics with Beauvoir gives us a new Beauvoir and a new way of thinking about politics—as embodied and coalitional.
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Simone de Beauvoir’s Political Thinking
Lori Marso
University of Illinois Press, 2006

By exploring the life and work of the influential feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir, this book shows how each of us lives within political and social structures that we can--and must--play a part in transforming. It argues that Beauvoir’s careful examination of her own existence can also be understood as a dynamic method for political thinking.

As the contributors illustrate, Beauvoir's political thinking proceeds from the bottom up, using examples from individual lives as the basis for understanding and transforming our collective existence. For example, she embraced her responsibility as a French citizen as making her complicit in the French war against Algeria.  Here, she sees her role as an oppressor.  In other contexts, she looks to the lives of individual women, including herself, to understand the dimensions of gender inequality. 

This volume’s six tightly connected essays home in on the individual’s relationship to community, and how one’s freedom interacts with the freedom of other people. Here, Beauvoir is read as neither a liberal nor a communitarian. The authors focus on her call for individuals to realize their freedom while remaining consistent with ethical obligations to the community. Beauvoir's account of her own life and the lives of others is interpreted as a method to understand individuals in relations to others, and as within structures of personal, material, and political oppression. Beauvoir's political thinking makes it clear that we cannot avoid political action. To do nothing in the face of oppression denies freedom to everyone, including oneself.

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Women and Men in Late Eighteenth-Century Egypt
Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot
University of Texas Press, 1995

In the late eighteenth century, decentralized and chaotic government in Egypt allowed women a freedom of action that has not been equaled until recent times. Delving extensively into archival sources, Afaf Marsot presents the first comprehensive picture of women's status and opportunities in this period.

Marsot makes important connections between forms of government, economic possibilities, and gender relations, showing how political instability allowed women to acquire property, independent of males, as a hedge against political uncertainty. She traces the linkages that women formed among themselves and with the ulama (non-Ottoman native elites) who aided and supported them. The book concludes with a comparison of women's status in the nineteenth century, when the introduction of European institutions that did not recognize their legal existence marginalized women, causing them to have to rely on men as major breadwinners. These important findings about the relationship between forms of government and the status of women will be of interest to a wide audience.

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Method and Theory in Paleoethnobotany
John M. Marston
University Press of Colorado, 2014
Paleoethnobotany, the study of archaeological plant remains, is poised at the intersection of the study of the past and concerns of the present, including agricultural decision making, biodiversity, and global environmental change, and has much to offer to archaeology, anthropology, and the interdisciplinary study of human relationships with the natural world. Method and Theory in Paleoethnobotany demonstrates those connections and highlights the increasing relevance of the study of past human-plant interactions for understanding the present and future.

A diverse and highly regarded group of scholars reference a broad array of literature from around the world as they cover their areas of expertise in the practice and theory of paleoethnobotany—starch grain analysis, stable isotope analysis, ancient DNA, digital data management, and ecological and postprocessual theory.

The only comprehensive edited volume focusing on method and theory to appear in the last twenty-five years, Method and Theory in Paleoethnobotany addresses the new areas of inquiry that have become central to contemporary archaeological debates, as well as the current state of theoretical, methodological, and empirical work in paleoethnobotany.

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Unburied Bodies
Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead
James R. Martel
Amherst College Press, 2018
The human body is the locus of meaning, personhood, and our sense of the possibility of sanctity.  The desecration of the human corpse is a matter of universal revulsion, taboo in virtually all human cultures. Not least for this reason, the unburied corpse quickly becomes a focal point of political salience, on the one hand seeming to express the contempt of state power toward the basic claims of human dignity—while on the other hand simultaneously bringing into question the very legitimacy of that power. In Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead, James Martel surveys the power of the body left unburied to motivate resistance, to bring forth a radically new form of agency, and to undercut the authority claims made by state power. Ranging across time and space from the battlefields of ancient Thebes to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, and taking in perspectives from such writers as Sophocles, Machiavelli, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Judith Butler, Thomas Lacqueur, and Bonnie Honig, Martel asks why the presence of the abandoned corpse can be seen by both authorities and protesters as a source of power, and how those who have been abandoned or marginalized by structures of authority can find in a lifeless body fellow accomplices  in their aspirations for dignity and humanity. 
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Farm to Form
Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire
Jessica Martell
University of Nevada Press, 2020
In this groundbreaking book, Jessica Martell investigates the relationship between industrial food and the emergence of literary modernisms in Britain and Ireland. By the early twentieth century, the industrialization of the British Empire’s food system had rendered many traditional farming operations, and attendant agrarian ways of life, obsolete. Weaving insights from modernist studies, food studies, and ecocriticism, Farm to Form contends that industrial food made nature “modernist,” a term used as literary scholars understand it—stylistically disorienting, unfamiliar, and artificial but also exhilarating, excessive, and above all, new. Martell draws in part upon archives in the United Kingdom but also presents imperial foodways as an extended rehearsal for the current era of industrial food supremacy. She analyzes how pastoral mode, anachronism, fragmentation, and polyvocal narration reflect the power of the literary arts to reckon with—and to resist—the new “modernist ecologies” of the twentieth century.

Deeply informed by Martell’s extensive knowledge of modern British, Irish, American, and World Literatures, this progressive work positions modernism as central to the study of narratives of resistance against social and environmental degradation. Analyzed works include those of Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, George Russell, and James Joyce.

In light of climate change, fossil fuel supremacy, nutritional dearth, and other pressing food issues, modernist texts bring to life an era of crisis and anxiety similar to our own. In doing so, Martell summons the past as a way to employ the modernist term of “defamiliarizing” the present so that entrenched perceptions can be challenged. Our current food regime is both new and constantly evolving with the first industrial food trades. Studying earlier cultural responses to them invites us to return to persistent problems with new insights and renewed passion.
 
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In Her Own Voice
Childbirth Stories from Mennonite Women
Katherine Martens
University of Manitoba Press, 1997
Winnipeg writer Katherine Martens interviewed 26 women from the Mennonite community in southern Manitoba, ranging in age from 22 to 88 years old. They had many different backgrounds, but they all had one important characteristic: all were mothers.In the course of these interviews, Martens was searching for answers to questions that affected her both as a Mennonite and as a woman. How did they feel when they learned of the pregnancy? How did they choose home or hospital birth? How did the traditions of the Mennonite culture affect them as wives and mothers? As they talked, many spoke about the joys and trials of giving birth, and they also told Martens stories about other parts of their lives. Some had escaped the Russian Revolution to emigrate to Canada; others spent their entire lives in rural Manitoba, part of the close-knit Mennonite community, running farms and bearing as many as 15 children. Younger women who had formally left the Mennonite church were still conscious of the impact of the beliefs and customs on their lives.Many women were surprised to be approached for an interview, insisting that they had "no stories to tell." One was visited in a dream by her dead husband, who told her to "leave that alone." Yet, in the privacy of their kitchens and parlours, over sociable cups of tea, many did share with Martens their private fears and joys about what was often seen as a rite of passage into responsible adulthood, and they recalled that childbirth could be a difficult and, at times, traumatic event, but it could also be a radiant and spiritual experience.
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As Told By Herself
Women’s Childhood Autobiography, 1845-1969
Lorna Martens
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
As Told by Herself offers the first systematic study of women's autobiographical writing about childhood. More than 175 works—primarily from English-speaking countries and France, as well as other European countries—are presented here in historical sequence, allowing Lorna Martens to discern and reveal patterns as they emerge and change over time. What do the authors divulge, conceal, and emphasize? How do they understand the experience of growing up as girls? How do they understand themselves as parts of family or social groups, and what role do other individuals play in their recollections? To what extent do they concern themselves with issues of memory, truth, and fictionalization?

Stopping just before second-wave feminism brought an explosion in women's childhood autobiographical writing, As Told by Herself explores the genre's roots and development from the mid-nineteenth century, and recovers many works that have been neglected or forgotten. The result illustrates how previous generations of women—in a variety of places and circumstances—understood themselves and their upbringing, and how they thought to present themselves to contemporary and future readers. 
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Women Artists on the Leading Edge
Visual Arts at Douglass College
Joan M. Marter
Rutgers University Press, 2020

How do students develop a personal style from their instruction in a visual arts program? Women Artists on the Leading Edge explores this question as it describes the emergence of an important group of young women artists from an innovative post-war visual arts program at Douglass College.

The women who studied with avant-garde artists at Douglas were among the first students in the nation to be introduced to performance art, conceptual art, Fluxus, and Pop Art. These young artists were among the first to experience new approaches to artmaking that rejected the predominant style of the 1950s: Abstract Expressionism. The New Art espoused by faculty including Robert Watts, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Geoffrey Hendricks, and others advocated that art should be based on everyday life. The phrase “anything can be art” was frequently repeated in the creation of Happenings, multi-media installations, and video art. Experimental approaches to methods of creation using a remarkable range of materials were investigated by these young women. Interdisciplinary aspects of the Douglass curriculum became the basis for performances, videos, photography, and constructions. Sculpture was created using new technologies and industrial materials. The Douglass women artists included in this book were among the first to implement the message and direction of their instructors.

Ultimately, the artistic careers of these young women have reflected the successful interaction of students with a cutting-edge faculty. From this BA and MFA program in the Visual Arts emerged women such as Alice Aycock. Rita Myers, Joan Snyder, Mimi Smith, and Jackie Winsor, who went on to become lifelong innovators. Camaraderie was important among the Douglass art students, and many continue to be instructors within a close circle of associates from their college years. Even before the inception of the women’s art movement of the 1970s, these women students were encouraged to pursue professional careers, and to remain independent in their approach to making art. The message of the New Art was to relate one’s art production to life itself and to personal experiences. From these directions emerged a “proto-feminist” art of great originality identified with women’s issues. The legacy of these artists can be found in radical changes in art instruction since the 1950s, the promotion of non-hierarchical approaches to media, and acceptance of conceptual art as a viable art form.

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Democracy in Mexico
Attitudes and Perceptions of Citizens at National and Local Level
Salvador Marti i Puig
University of London Press, 2014

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

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

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No Coward Soldiers
Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America
Waldo E. Martin Jr.
Harvard University Press, 2005

In a vibrant and passionate exploration of the twentieth-century civil rights and black power eras in American history, Waldo Martin uses cultural politics as a lens through which to understand the African-American freedom struggle.

In black culture, argues Martin, we see the debate over the profound tension at the core of black identity: the duality of being at once both American and African. And in the transformative postwar period, the intersection between culture and politics became increasingly central to the African-American fight for equality. In freedom songs, in the exuberance of an Aretha Franklin concert, in Faith Ringgold’s exploration of race and sexuality, the personal and social became the political.

Martin explores the place of black culture in this vision and examines the multiple ways in which various forms of expressive culture and African-American cultural figures influenced consciousness and helped effect social action. From the music of John Coltrane and James Brown to the visual art of Jacob Lawrence and Betye Saar to the dance movements of Alvin Ailey and Arthur Mitchell, Martin discusses how, why, and with what consequences culture became a critical battle site in the freedom struggle. And in a fascinating epilogue, he draws the thread of black cultural politics into today’s hip-hop culture.

This engaging book brings a new perspective to the civil rights and black power eras, while illuminating the broader history of American and global freedom struggles.

[more]

front cover of The Theater Is in the Street
The Theater Is in the Street
Politics and Public Performance in 1960s America
Bradford D. Martin
University of Massachusetts Press, 2004
During the 1960s, the SNCC Freedom Singers, The Living Theatre, the Diggers, the Art Workers Coalition, and the Guerrilla Art Action Group fused art and politics by staging unexpected and uninvited performances in public spaces. Through their activism and the response it provoked, art, theater, and politics began to converge and assume a new visibility in everyday life. While their specific political visions varied, these groups shared the impulse to stage performances and actions publicly—"in the streets"—eschewing museums, theaters, and other conventional halls of culture. Bradford D. Martin offers detailed portraits of each of these groups and examines why they embraced public performance as a vehicle to express and advance their politics.

At a time when the New Left and the counterculture were on the rise, these artists reflected the decade's political and cultural radicalism and helped to define a new aesthetic. Civil rights activists mobilized singing in the struggle for desegregation, introducing a vibrant musical form into the public space. The Living Theatre culminated an arduous quest to mesh artistic and political goals, leading audiences from theaters into the streets to begin the "beautiful nonviolent anarchist revolution." The Diggers playfully engaged San Francisco's counterculture in politics with their carnivalesque public actions. The Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Action Art Group sought to disrupt the conventional art world, mounting protests in and around New York City museums.

By questioning the values and assumptions that separated art from politics, these groups not only established public performance as a legitimate aesthetic but also provided a new creative vocabulary for future generations of artists. Their continued involvement with the women's liberation movement, rural communes, and political street theater into the 1970s and beyond challenges the popular myth that activists disengaged from politics after the 1960s.
[more]

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Napoleonic Friendship
Military Fraternity, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France
Brian Joseph Martin
University of New Hampshire Press, 2011
Winner of the Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies

One of the first books on “Gays in the Military” published following the historic repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in 2011, Napoleonic Friendship examines the history of male intimacy in the French military, from Napoleon to the First World War. Echoing the historical record of gay soldiers in the United States, Napoleonic Friendship is the first book-length study on the origin of queer soldiers in modern France. Based on extensive archival research in France, the book traces the development of affectionate friendships in the French Army from 1789 to 1916. Following the French Revolution, radical military reforms created conditions for new physical and emotional intimacy between soldiers, establishing a model of fraternal affection during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that would persist amid the ravages of the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. Through readings of Napoleonic military memoirs (and other non-fiction archival material) and French military fiction (from Hugo and Balzac to Zola and Proust), Martin examines a broad range of emotional and erotic relationships, from combat buddies to soldier lovers. He argues that the French Revolution’s emphasis on military fraternity evolved into an unprecedented sense of camaraderie in the armies of Napoleon. For many soldiers, the hardships of combat led to intimate friendships. For some, the homosociality of military life inspired mutual affection, lifelong commitment, and homoerotic desire.
[more]

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Benching Jim Crow
The Rise and Fall of the Color Line in Southern College Sports, 1890-1980
Charles Martin
University of Illinois Press, 2010
Chronicling the uneven rise and slow decline of segregation in American college athletics, Charles H. Martin shows how southern colleges imposed their policies of racial exclusion on surprisingly compliant northern teams and explains the social forces that eventually forced these southern schools to accept integrated competition. Martin emphasizes not just the racism prevalent in football and basketball in the South, but the effects of this discrimination for colleges and universities all over the country. Southern teams such as the University of Alabama, University of Mississippi, and the University of North Carolina were obsessed with national recognition, but their Jim Crow policies prevented them for many years from playing against racially mixed teams from other parts of the country.
 
Devoting special attention to the Southeastern Conference, the Atlantic Coast Conference, and teams in Texas, Martin explores the changing social attitudes and culture of competition that turned the tide and allowed for the recruitment of black players and hiring of black coaches. He takes a close look at the case of Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso), the first major white university in an ex-Confederate state to recruit African American athletes extensively. Martin skillfully weaves existing arguments and documentation on the integration of college sports with wide-ranging, original research, including previously unpublished papers and correspondence of college administrators and athletic directors uncovered in university archives.
[more]

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The Black Extended Family
Elmer P. Martin
University of Chicago Press, 1980
Misunderstood and stereotyped, the black family in America has been viewed by some as pathologically weak while others have acclaimed its resilience and strength. Those who have drawn these conflicting conclusions have gnerally focused on the nuclear family—husband, wife, and dependent children. But as Elmer and Joanne Martin point out in this revealing book, a unit of this kind often is not the center of black family life. What appear to be fatherless, broken homes in our cities may really be vital parts of strong and flexible extended families based hundreds of miles away—usually in a rural area.

Through their eight-year study of some thirty extended families, the Martins find that economic pressures, including federal tax and welfare laws, have begun to make the extended family's flexibility into a liability that threatens its future.
[more]

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Dreams of Flight
The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West
Fran Martin
Duke University Press, 2022
In Dreams of Flight, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad. On one hand, unmarried middle-class women in the single-child generations are encouraged to develop themselves as professional human capital through international education, molding themselves into independent, cosmopolitan, career-oriented individuals. On the other, strong neotraditionalist state, social, and familial pressures of the post-Mao era push them back toward marriage and family by age thirty. Martin examines these women’s motivations for studying in Australia and traces their embodied and emotional experiences of urban life, social media worlds, work in low-skilled and professional jobs, romantic relationships, religion, Chinese patriotism, and changed self-understanding after study abroad. Martin illustrates how emerging forms of gender, class, and mobility fundamentally transform the basis of identity for a whole generation of Chinese women.
[more]

front cover of Backward Glances
Backward Glances
Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary
Fran Martin
Duke University Press, 2010
Backward Glances reveals that the passionate love one woman feels for another occupies a position of unsuspected centrality in contemporary Chinese mass cultures. By examining representations of erotic and romantic love between women in popular films, elite and pulp fiction, and television dramas, Fran Martin shows how youthful same-sex love is often framed as a universal, even ennobling, feminine experience. She argues that a temporal logic dominates depictions of female homoeroticism, and she traces that logic across texts produced and consumed in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan during the twentieth century and the early twenty-first. Attentive to both transnational cultural flows and local particularities, Martin shows how loving relations between women in mass culture are usually represented as past experiences. Adult protagonists revel in the repeated, mournful narration of their memories. Yet these portrayals do not simply or finally consign the same-sex loving woman to the past—they also cause her to reappear ceaselessly in the present.

As Martin explains, memorial schoolgirl love stories are popular throughout contemporary Chinese cultures. The same-sex attracted young woman appears in both openly homophobic and proudly queer-affirmative narratives, as well as in stories whose ideological valence is less immediately clear. Martin demonstrates that the stories, television programs, and films she analyzes are not idiosyncratic depictions of marginal figures, but manifestations of a broader, mainstream cultural preoccupation. Her investigation of representations of same-sex love between women sheds new light on contemporary Chinese understandings of sex, love, gender, marriage, and the cultural ordering of human life.

[more]

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AsiaPacifiQueer
Rethinking Genders and Sexualities
Fran Martin
University of Illinois Press, 2007
This interdisciplinary collection examines the shaping of local sexual cultures in the Asian Pacific region in order to move beyond definitions and understandings of sexuality that rely on Western assumptions. The diverse studies in AsiaPacifiQueer demonstrate convincingly that in the realm of sexualities, globalization results in creative and cultural admixture rather than a unilateral imposition of the western values and forms of sexual culture. These essays range across the Pacific Rim and encompass a variety of forms of social, cultural, and personal expression, examining sexuality through music, cinema, the media, shifts in popular rhetoric, comics and magazines, and historical studies. By investigating complex processes of localization, interregional borrowing, and hybridization, the contributors underscore the mutual transformation of gender and sexuality in both Asian Pacific and Western cultures. Contributors are Ronald Baytan, J. Neil C. Garcia, Kam Yip Lo Lucetta, Song Hwee Lim, J. Darren Mackintosh, Claire Maree, Jin-Hyung Park, Teri Silvio, Megan Sinnott, Yik Koon Teh, Carmen Ka Man Tong, James Welker, Heather Worth, and Audrey Yue.
[more]

front cover of Henry L. Brunk and Brunk's Comedians
Henry L. Brunk and Brunk's Comedians
Tent Repertoire Empire of the Southwest
Jerry L. Martin
University of Wisconsin Press, 1984
Tent repertoire theatre as a form of popular entertainment caught on in the late 19th century, had its heyday in the 1920s, and was finished by the Depression and World War II gasoline rationing. The author examines this rise and fall in context of an increasingly urbanized society.
[more]

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Tepoztlán and the Transformation of the Mexican State
The Politics of Loose Connections
JoAnn Martin
University of Arizona Press, 2005
During the 1980s and ’90s, Mexico weathered an economic crisis, witnessed electoral upheaval, and saw the dismantling of state subsidies to farmers and the privatization of nationally owned industries. This book considers how popular movements found fresh footing in this new political-economic landscape as villagers in Tepoztlán fought to keep communal lands out of the hands of outsiders, the state, and—increasingly—global capitalists. Examining social movement politics from the margins rather than the center, JoAnn Martin revisits the famous Redfield-Lewis debate on Tepoztlán to argue that the gossip seen by Oscar Lewis as undermining community coherence is really a form of political practice. During more than fifteen years of research, she observed the metamorphosis of a movement founded as a revolutionary popular struggle into what she terms a “politics of loose connections,” in which temporary alliances, flexible identities, and shifting rhetoric are adapted to the demands of the moment. Martin examines contemporary land struggles with an emphasis on the Comité para la Defensa de Tierra and its attempts to weave together strands of an invented tradition, contemporary agrarian reform law, and revolutionary ideology. She shows how Tepoztecan politics borrows discourses from the Mexican state; she then tells how this process shaped local politics in the midst of the contested 1988 national presidential election when local actors elaborated a discourse of democracy as a technique for disciplining gossip, and in 1991 when Tepoztecans began to draw on the support of international environmental NGOs. Throughout her analysis, Martin explores how Tepoztecan politics unfolds in the climate of mistrust first nurtured by the role of the state in local politics and later by the demands of working with U.S. and Western European environmentalists. Martin shows that the politics of loose connections is above all else a style of political participation that has proved adaptive in the contemporary political landscape, and that understandings of politics have been dogged by a conception of connections that may well be obsolete in the contemporary world. Her study is a balanced re-evaluation of Tepoztlán that reveals how politics succeeds through loose connections, a strategy that may be instructive for others seeking to survive in either local or global coalitions.
[more]

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Thinking Through Methods
A Social Science Primer
John Levi Martin
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Sociological research is hard enough already—you don’t need to make it even harder by smashing about like a bull in a china shop, not knowing what you’re doing or where you’re heading. Or so says John Levi Martin in this witty, insightful, and desperately needed primer on how to practice rigorous social science. Thinking Through Methods focuses on the practical decisions that you will need to make as a researcher—where the data you are working with comes from and how that data relates to all the possible data you could have gathered.
            This is a user’s guide to sociological research, designed to be used at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Rather than offer mechanical rules and applications, Martin chooses instead to team up with the reader to think through and with methods. He acknowledges that we are human beings—and thus prone to the same cognitive limitations and distortions found in subjects—and proposes ways to compensate for these limitations. Martin also forcefully argues for principled symmetry, contending that bad ethics makes for bad research, and vice versa. Thinking Through Methods is a landmark work—one that students will turn to again and again throughout the course of their sociological research.
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Thinking Through Statistics
John Levi Martin
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Simply put, Thinking Through Statistics is a primer on how to maintain rigorous data standards in social science work, and one that makes a strong case for revising the way that we try to use statistics to support our theories. But don’t let that daunt you. With clever examples and witty takeaways, John Levi Martin proves himself to be a most affable tour guide through these scholarly waters.

Martin argues that the task of social statistics isn't to estimate parameters, but to reject false theory. He illustrates common pitfalls that can keep researchers from doing just that using a combination of visualizations, re-analyses, and simulations. Thinking Through Statistics gives social science practitioners accessible insight into troves of wisdom that would normally have to be earned through arduous trial and error, and it does so with a lighthearted approach that ensures this field guide is anything but stodgy.
 
[more]

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Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries
New Tools to End Hunger
Katie S. Martin
Island Press, 2021
In the US, there is a wide-ranging network of at least 370 food banks, and more than 60,000 hunger-relief organizations such as food pantries and meal programs. These groups provide billions of meals a year to people in need. And yet hunger still affects one in nine Americans. What are we doing wrong?

In Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries, Katie Martin argues that if handing out more and more food was the answer, we would have solved the problem of hunger decades ago. Martin instead presents a new model for charitable food, one where success is measured not by pounds of food distributed but by lives changed. The key is to focus on the root causes of hunger. When we shift our attention to strategies that build empathy, equity, and political will, we can implement real solutions. 

Martin shares those solutions in a warm, engaging style, with simple steps that anyone working or volunteering at a food bank or pantry can take today. Some are short-term strategies to create a more dignified experience for food pantry clients: providing client choice, where individuals select their own food, or redesigning a waiting room with better seating and a designated greeter. Some are longer-term: increasing the supply of healthy food, offering job training programs, or connecting clients to other social services. And some are big picture: joining the fight for living wages and a stronger social safety net.

These strategies are illustrated through inspiring success stories and backed up by scientific research. Throughout, readers will find a wealth of proven ideas to make their charitable food organizations more empathetic and more effective. As Martin writes, it takes more than food to end hunger. Picking up this insightful, lively book is a great first step.
[more]

front cover of Off to a Good Start
Off to a Good Start
Social and Emotional Development of Memphis’ Children
Laurie T. Martin
RAND Corporation, 2015
Drawing on national, state, and local data, the Urban Child Institute partnered with RAND to explore the social and emotional well-being of children in Memphis and Shelby County, Tenn. The book highlights the importance of factors in the home, child care setting, and community that contribute to social and emotional development.
[more]

front cover of Smokestacks in the Hills
Smokestacks in the Hills
Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia
Lou Martin
University of Illinois Press, 2015
Long considered an urban phenomenon, industrialization also transformed the American countryside. Lou Martin weaves the narrative of how the relocation of steel and pottery factories to Hancock County, West Virginia, created a rural and small-town working class--and what that meant for communities and for labor.

As Martin shows, access to land in and around steel and pottery towns allowed residents to preserve rural habits and culture. Workers in these places valued place and local community. Because of their belief in localism, an individualistic ethic of "making do," and company loyalty, they often worked to place limits on union influence. At the same time, this localism allowed workers to adapt to the dictates of industrial capitalism and a continually changing world on their own terms--and retain rural ways to a degree unknown among their urbanized peers. Throughout, Martin ties these themes to illuminating discussions of capital mobility, the ways in which changing work experiences defined gender roles, and the persistent myth that modernizing forces bulldozed docile local cultures.

Revealing and incisive, Smokestacks in the Hills reappraises an overlooked stratum of American labor history and contributes to the ongoing dialogue on shifts in national politics in the postwar era.

[more]

front cover of Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States
Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States
On Reparations for Slavery, Jim Crow, and Their Legacies
Michael T. Martin
Duke University Press, 2007
An exceptional resource, this comprehensive reader brings together primary and secondary documents related to efforts to redress historical wrongs against African Americans. These varied efforts are often grouped together under the rubric “reparations movement,” and they are united in their goal of “repairing” the injustices that have followed from the long history of slavery and Jim Crow. Yet, as this collection reveals, there is a broad range of opinions as to the form that repair might take. Some advocates of redress call for apologies; others for official acknowledgment of wrongdoing; and still others for more tangible reparations: monetary compensation, government investment in disenfranchised communities, the restitution of lost property and rights, and repatriation.

Written by activists and scholars of law, political science, African American studies, philosophy, economics, and history, the twenty-six essays include both previously published articles and pieces written specifically for this volume. Essays theorize the historical and legal bases of claims for redress; examine the history, strengths, and limitations of the reparations movement; and explore its relation to human rights and social justice movements in the United States and abroad. Other essays evaluate the movement’s primary strategies: legislation, litigation, and mobilization. While all of the contributors support the campaign for redress in one way or another, some of them engage with arguments against reparations.

Among the fifty-three primary documents included in the volume are federal, state, and municipal acts and resolutions; declarations and statements from organizations including the Black Panther Party and the NAACP; legal briefs and opinions; and findings and directives related to the provision of redress, from the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 to the mandate for the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States is a thorough assessment of the past, present, and future of the modern reparations movement.

Contributors. Richard F. America, Sam Anderson, Martha Biondi, Boris L. Bittker, James Bolner, Roy L. Brooks, Michael K. Brown, Robert S. Browne, Martin Carnoy, Chiquita Collins, J. Angelo Corlett, Elliott Currie, William A. Darity, Jr., Adrienne Davis, Michael C. Dawson, Troy Duster, Dania Frank, Robert Fullinwider, Charles P. Henry, Gerald C. Horne, Robert Johnson, Jr., Robin D. G. Kelley, Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., David Lyons, Michael T. Martin, Douglas S. Massey , Muntu Matsimela , C. J. Munford, Yusuf Nuruddin, Charles J. Ogletree Jr., Melvin L. Oliver, David B. Oppenheimer, Rovana Popoff, Thomas M. Shapiro, Marjorie M. Shultz, Alan Singer, David Wellman, David R. Williams, Eric K. Yamamoto, Marilyn Yaquinto

[more]

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Songs My Mother Sang to Me
An Oral History of Mexican American Women
Patricia Preciado Martin
University of Arizona Press, 1992
Motivated by a love of her Mexican American heritage, Patricia Preciado Martin set out to document the lives and memories of the women of her mother's and grandmother's eras; for while the role of women in Southwest has begun to be chronicled, that of Hispanic women largely remains obscure. In Songs My Mother Sang to Me, she has preserved the oral histories of many of these women before they have been lost or forgotten.

Martin's quest took her to ranches, mining towns, and cities throughout southern Arizona, for she sought to document as varied an experience of the contributions of Mexican American women as possible. The interviews covered family history and genealogy, childhood memories, secular and religious traditions, education, work and leisure, environment and living conditions, rites of passage, and personal values. Each of the ten oral histories reflects not only the spontaneity of the interview and personality of each individual, but also the friendship that grew between Martin and her subjects.

Songs My Mother Sang to Me collects voices not often heard and brings to print accounts of social change never previously recorded. These women document more than the details of their own lives; in relating the histories of their ancestors and communities, they add to our knowledge of the culture and contributions of Mexican American people in the Southwest.
[more]

front cover of Beloved Land
Beloved Land
An Oral History of Mexican Americans in Southern Arizona
Patricia Preciado Martin
University of Arizona Press, 2004
Doña Ramona Benítez Franco was born in 1902 on her parents' Arizona ranch and celebrated her hundredth birthday with family and friends in 2002, still living in her family's century-old adobe house. Doña Ramona witnessed many changes in the intervening years, but her memories of the land and customs she knew as a child are indelible.

For Doña Ramona as well as for countless generations of Mexican Americans, memories of rural life recall la querida tierra, the beloved land. Through good times and bad, the land provided sustenance. Today, many of those homesteads and ranches have succumbed to bulldozers that have brought housing projects and strip malls in their wake.

Now a writer and a photographer who have long been intimately involved with Arizona's Hispanic community have preserved the voices and images of men and women who are descendants of pioneer ranching and farming families in southern Arizona. Ranging from Tucson to the San Rafael Valley and points in between, this book documents the contributions of Mexican American families whose history and culture are intertwined with the lifestyle of the contemporary Southwest. These were hardy, self-reliant pioneers who settled in what were then remote areas. Their stories tell of love affairs with the land and a way of life that is rapidly disappearing.

Through oral histories and a captivating array of historic and contemporary photos, Beloved Land records a vibrant and resourceful way of life that has contributed so much to the region. Individuals like Doña Ramona tell stories about rural life, farming, ranching, and vaquero culture that enrich our knowledge of settlement, culinary practices, religious traditions, arts, and education of Hispanic settlers of Arizona. They talk frankly about how the land changed hands—not always by legal means—and tell how they feel about modern society and the disappearance of the rural lifestyle.

"Our ranch homes and fields, our chapels and corrals may have been bulldozed by progress or renovated into spas and guest ranches that never whisper our ancestors' names," writes Patricia Preciado Martin. "The story of our beautiful and resilient heritage will never be silenced . . . as long as we always remember to run our fingers through the nourishing and nurturing soil of our history." Beloved Land works that soil as it revitalizes that history for the generations to come.
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Language Use and Language Change in Brunei Darussalam
Mis Sea#100
Peter W. Martin
Ohio University Press, 1996

The oil-rich sultanate of Brunei Darussalam is located on the northern coast of Borneo between the two Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah. Though the country is small in size and in population, the variety of language use there provides a veritable laboratory for linguists in the fields of Austronesian linguistics, bilingual studies, and sociolinguistic studies, particularly those dealing with language shift.

This useful reference is divided into three sections: one on varieties of the Malay language used in the country, one on other indigenous languages, and one on the role and form of the English used there. Contributors to the collection include Bruneian scholars as well as established experts in the fields of Austronesian linguistics, sociolinguistics studies, and the description of new varieties of English.

[more]

front cover of Financialization Of Daily Life
Financialization Of Daily Life
Randy Martin
Temple University Press, 2002
While trillions of dollars came and went in the stock market boom of the 1990s, the image of "every man and woman a CEO" may turn out to be the era's lasting legacy. Business news, once reserved to specialized papers or sections of the larger news of the day, came to the forefront in cable television and in cultural images of how ordinary people, through the internet and other avenues could not only master their financial life, but move money and equity around with the ease of a financial titan. Financialization of Daily Life looks at how this transformation occurred, and how it is just now becoming a significant, and troubling, aspect of our political and cultural life.Randy Martin takes us through all of the aspects of our "financialization." He examines how the shift in economic life arose not only from changes in culture, but also from new policy priorities that emphasize controlling inflation over promoting growth. He offers a close reading of self-help literature that teaches parents how to rear financially literate children and to instruct adults in the fundamentals of fiscal management. He examines just what a society that treats financial investment as a national past time really looks like, and how that society is transforming the world.In a country rocked by scandals in accounting and banking, the identification ordinary citizens make with, and the risk with which they engage in, the stock market calls into question the very basis of our economic system. Randy Martin spells out in clear terms the implications our financial doings—and undoing—have for the way we organize our lives, and, especially, our money.
[more]

front cover of Knowledge LTD
Knowledge LTD
Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative
Randy Martin
Temple University Press, 2015
Catastrophes ranging from the travesties of financial markets and the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil well to the tsunami that struck northern Japan and the levees breaking in New Orleans are examples of the limits of knowledge. Author Randy Martin insists that the expertise erected to prevent these natural and social disasters failed in each case.
 
In Knowledge LTD, Martin explores how both the limits of knowledge and the social constructions of culture reflect the way we organize social life in the face of disasters and their aftermath. He examines this crisis of knowledge as well as the social movements that rose up in its wake. Martin not only treats derivatives as financial contracts for pricing risk, but also shows how the derivative works in economic terms, where the very unity of the economy is undone.
 
Knowledge LTD ultimately points to a more comprehensive reordering of the once separate spheres of economy, polity, and culture. Martin provides a new way of understanding the social significance of the all-pervasive derivative logic. 
[more]

front cover of Corruption in Corporate Culture, Volume 21
Corruption in Corporate Culture, Volume 21
Randy Martin
Duke University Press
Corruption in Corporate Culture argues that there has been a serious breakdown in the systems designed to ensure fair dealing in the self-governing and self-policing worlds of U.S. business and finance. Contending that a war of containment has been launched to conceal both the repercussions of corporate corruption and government complicity in it, this special issue of Social Text evaluates these problems on a systemic level, as well as focusing on immediate cases.

Addressing several recent high-profile scandals, contributors examine both the short- and the long-term ramifications of corporate corruption: the means by which Martha Stewart has been used as an icon and a scapegoat in the ImClone case while broader critical issues have failed to receive the attention they demand; the divisive ways in which the antifeminist Independent Women’s Forum—along with other neocon organizations and pundits—has moved the debate regarding the deregulation of the financial services sector far to the right of the far right; the collapse of Enron and what it means for corporate governance; the global implications of U.S. corporate corruption; the confusion over public and private business transactions in Argentina; the moral panic ensuing from the random violence caused by the Washington, D.C. area snipers precisely as the U.S. was launching a war on Iraq because of its supposed weapons of mass destruction; and the emergence of a new business model and icon, the hiphop mogul.

Contributors. Peter Bratsis, David M. Brennan, Jane Marcus-Delgado, Randy Martin, Nancy Shaw, Ella Shohat, Christopher Holmes Smith, Barbara Spindel, Susan Willis

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Mediators
Aesthetics, Politics, and the City
Reinhold Martin
University of Minnesota Press, 2014
Reinhold Martin’s Mediators is a series of linked meditations on the globalized city. Focusing on infrastructural, technical, and social systems, Martin explores how the aesthetics and the political economy of cities overlap and interact. He discusses a range of subjects, including the architecture of finance written into urban policy, regimes of enumeration that remix city and country, fictional ecologies that rewrite biopolitics, the ruins of socialism strewn amid the transnational commons, and memories of revolution stored in everyday urban hardware. For Martin, these mediators—the objects, processes, and imaginaries from which these phenomena emerge—serve to explain disparate fragments of a global urbanity.

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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American Gothic
New Interventions in a National Narrative
Robert K. Martin
University of Iowa Press, 1998

In America as in Britain, the rise of the Gothic represented the other—the fearful shadows cast upon Enlightenment philosophies of common sense, democratic positivism, and optimistic futurity. Many critics have recognized the centrality of these shadows to American culture and self-identification. American Gothic, however, remaps the field by offering a series of revisionist essays associated with a common theme: the range and variety of Gothic manifestations in high and popular art from the roots of American culture to the present.

The thirteen essayists approach the persistence of the Gothic in American culture by providing a composite of interventions that focus on specific issues—the histories of gender and race, the cultures of cities and scandals and sensations—in order to advance distinct theoretical paradigms. Each essay sustains a connection between a particular theoretical field and a central problem in the Gothic tradition.

Drawing widely on contemporary theory—particularly revisionist views of Freud such as those offered by Lacan and Kristeva—this volume ranges from the well-known Gothic horrors of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne to the popular fantasies of Stephen King and the postmodern visions of Kathy Acker. Special attention is paid to the issues of slavery and race in both black and white texts, including those by Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner. In the view of the editors and contributors, the Gothic is not so much a historical category as a mode of thought haunted by history, a part of suburban life and the lifeblood of films such as The Exorcist and Fatal Attraction.

[more]

front cover of The City Moves West
The City Moves West
Economic and Industrial Growth in Central West Texas
Robert L. Martin
University of Texas Press, 1969

Where water supply, railway transportation, and oil reserves have been abundant, towns in central West Texas have prospered; where these resources are few, settlements have maintained only slight growth or disappeared entirely. Supporting his conclusions with profuse statistical evidence, Robert L. Martin traces the economic development of six major towns in the area, all with over 10,000 residents in 1960: Lamesa, Snyder, Sweetwater, Big Spring, Midland, and Odessa.

Ranching brought the first settlers to West Texas in the 1870s and dominated the economy until 1900. In the 1880s farmers began to arrive, and between 1900 and 1930 agricultural production replaced ranching as the most important industry.

With the influx of population came the railroad, and small settlements were established along its route. Those with sufficient water supply prospered and, as counties were organized, became county seats and supply centers for the surrounding agricultural regions.

The land could not support a large agricultural population, and agriculture-related manufactures soon drew population to the towns. However, it was not until the oil discoveries of the 1920's that the modern city emerged. After World War II, oil production and oil-related industries generated great wealth and caused a boom in population growth and urban development. Despite the growth in prosperity, the economy is precariously balanced. Urban centers dependent on oil—an industry of limited life—have matured in an area without sufficient water or agricultural resources to support them. Martin concludes that, without careful planning and a solution to the water problem, these cities could some day become ghost towns on the plains.

[more]

front cover of Cleveland Jews and the Making of a Midwestern Community
Cleveland Jews and the Making of a Midwestern Community
Sean Martin
Rutgers University Press, 2020
This volume gathers an array of voices to tell the stories of Cleveland’s twentieth century Jewish community. Strong and stable after an often turbulent century, the Jews of Cleveland had both deep ties in the region and an evolving and dynamic commitment to Jewish life. The authors present the views and actions of community leaders and everyday Jews who embodied that commitment in their religious participation, educational efforts, philanthropic endeavors, and in their simple desire to live next to each other in the city’s eastern suburbs. The twentieth century saw the move of Cleveland’s Jews out of the center of the city, a move that only served to increase the density of Jewish life. The essays collected here draw heavily on local archival materials and present the area’s Jewish past within the context of American and American Jewish studies.
[more]

front cover of Power Struggles
Power Struggles
Hydro Development and First Nations in Manitoba and Quebec
Thibault Martin
University of Manitoba Press, 2008
Power Struggles: Hydro Development and First Nations in Manitoba and Quebec examines the evolution of new agreements between First Nations and Inuit and the hydro corporations in Quebec and Manitoba, including the Wuskwatim Dam Project, Paix des Braves, and the Great Whale Project. In the 1970s, both provinces signed so-called “modern treaties” with First Nations for the development of large hydro projects in Aboriginal territories. In recent times, however, the two provinces have diverged in their implementation, and public opinion of these agreements has ranged from celebratory to outrage.Power Struggles brings together perspectives on these issues from both scholars and activists. In debating the relative merits and limits of these agreements, they raise a crucial question: Is Canada on the eve of a new relationship with First Nations, or do the same colonial attitudes that have long characterized Canadian-Aboriginal relations still prevail?
[more]

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Who Defines Indigenous?
Identities, Development, Intellectuals, and the State in Northern Mexico
Carmen Martinez Novo
Rutgers University Press, 2006

For years, conventional scholarship has argued that minority groups are better served when the majority groups that absorb them are willing to recognize and allow for the preservation of indigenous identities. But is the reinforcement of ethnic identity among migrant groups always a process of self-liberation? In this surprising study, Carmen Martínez Novo draws on her ethnographic research of the Mixtec Indians’ migration from the southwest of Mexico to Baja California to show that sometimes the push for indigenous labels is more a process of external oppression than it is of minority empowerment.

            In Baja California, many Mixtec Indians have not made efforts to align themselves as a coherent demographic. Instead, Martínez Novo finds that the push for indigenous identity in this region has come from local government agencies, economic elites, intellectuals, and other external agents. Their concern has not only been over the loss of rich culture. Rather, the pressure to maintain an indigenous identity has stemmed from the desire to secure a reproducible abundance of cheap “Indian” labor. Meanwhile, many Mixtecs reject their ethnic label precisely because being “Indian” means being a commercial agriculture low-wage worker or an urban informal street vendor—an identity that interferes with their goals of social mobility and economic integration.

            Bringing a critical new perspective to the complex intersection among government and scholarly agendas, economic development, global identity politics, and the aspirations of local migrants, this provocative book is essential reading for scholars working in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and ethnic studies.

[more]

front cover of Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba
Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba
A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society
Verena Martinez-Alier
University of Michigan Press, 1989
Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba challenges conventional ideas about the roots of Cuban race relations. Verena Martinez-Alier proposes a relational model for the study of sexual values and social inequality. She deals with Cuban notions of honor and virtue while describing complex interconnections between class and perceived racial status that determined the choice of sexual and marriage partners. First published in 1974, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba is now a classic, a pathbreaking encounter of anthropology with history that points the way for future investigations. With this edition, the work of this pioneering scholar is made available again, with a new introduction by the author.
[more]

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Food Fight!
Millennial Mestizaje Meets the Culinary Marketplace
Paloma Martinez-Cruz
University of Arizona Press, 2019
From the racial defamation and mocking tone of “Mexican” restaurants geared toward the Anglo customer to the high-end Latin-inspired eateries with Anglo chefs who give the impression that the food was something unattended or poorly handled that they “discovered” or “rescued” from actual Latinos, the dilemma of how to make ethical choices in food production and consumption is always as close as the kitchen recipe, coffee pot, or table grape.

In Food Fight! author Paloma Martinez-Cruz takes us on a Chicanx gastronomic journey that is powerful and humorous. Martinez-Cruz tackles head on the real-world politics of food production from the exploitation of farmworkers to the appropriation of Latinx bodies and culture, and takes us right into transformative eateries that offer a homegrown, mestiza consciousness.

The hard-hitting essays in Food Fight! bring a mestiza critique to today’s pressing discussions of labeling, identity, and imaging in marketing and dining. Not just about food, restaurants, and coffee, this volume employs a decolonial approach and engaging voice to interrogate ways that mestizo, Indigenous, and Latinx peoples are objectified in mainstream ideology and imaginary.
[more]

front cover of Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica
Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica
From East L.A. to Anahuac
Paloma Martinez-Cruz
University of Arizona Press, 2011
Paloma Martinez-Cruz argues that the medicine traditions of Mesoamerican women constitute a hemispheric intellectual lineage that continues to thrive despite the legacy of colonization. Martinez-Cruz asserts that indigenous and mestiza women healers are custodians of a knowledge base that remains virtually uncharted.

The few works looking at the knowledge of women in Mesoamerica generally examine only the written—even academic—world, accessible only to the most elite segments of (customarily male) society. These works have consistently excluded the essential repertoire and performed knowledge of women who think and work in ways other than the textual. And while two of the book’s chapters critique contemporary novels, Martinez-Cruz also calls for the exploration of non-textual knowledge transmission. In this regard, the book's goals and methods are close to those of performance scholarship and anthropology, and these methods reveal Mesoamerican women to be public intellectuals. In Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica, fieldwork and ethnography combine to reveal women healers as models of agency.

Her multidisciplinary approach allows Martinez-Cruz to disrupt Euro-based intellectual hegemony and to make a case for the epistemic authority of Native women. Written from a Chicana perspective, this study is learned, personal, and engaging for anyone who is interested in the wisdom that prevailing analytical cultures have deemed “unintelligible.” As it turns out, those who are unacquainted with the sometimes surprising extent and depth of wisdom of indigenous women healers simply haven’t been looking in the right places—outside the texts from which they have been consistently excluded.
[more]

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Organic Coffee
Sustainable Development by Mayan Farmers
Maria Elena Martinez-Torres
Ohio University Press, 2006
Despite deepening poverty and environmental degradation throughout rural Latin America, Mayan peasant farmers in Chiapas, Mexico, are finding environmental and economic success by growing organic coffee. Organic Coffee: Sustainable Development by Mayan Farmers provides a unique and vivid insight into how this coffee is grown, harvested, processed, and marketed to consumers in Mexico and in the north.

Maria Elena Martinez-Torres explains how Mayan farmers have built upon their ethnic networks to make a crucial change in their approach to agriculture. Taking us inside Chiapas, Mexico's poorest state and scene of the 1994 Zapatista uprising, she examines the anatomy of the ongoing organic coffee boom and the fair-trade movement. The organic coffee boom arose as very poor farmers formed cooperatives, revalued their ethnic identity, and improved their land through organic farming. The result has been significant economic benefits for their families and ecological benefits for the future sustainability of agriculture in the region.

Organic Coffee refutes the myth that organic farming is less productive than chemical-based agriculture and gives us reasons to be hopeful for indigenous peoples and peasant farmers
[more]

front cover of Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia
Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia
An Anthropology of Forgetting, Repair and Urban Traces
Francisco Martinez
University College London, 2018
What happens to legacies that do not find any continuation? In Estonia, a new generation that does not remember the socialist era and is open to global influences has grown up. As a result, the impact of the Soviet memory in people's conventional values is losing its effective power, allowing for new opportunities for recuperation.

Francisco Martinez brings together a number of sites of interest to explore the vanquishing of the Soviet legacy in Estonia: a street market in Tallinn where concepts such as "market" and "employment" take on distinctly different meanings from their Western use; Linnahall, a multi-purpose venue, whose Soviet heritage now poses difficult questions of how to present the building’s history; Tallinn’s cityscape, where the social, spatial, and temporal coevolution of the city can be viewed and debated; Narva, a city that marks the border between the Russian Federation, NATO, and the European Union and represents a place of continual negotiation; and the new Estonian National Museum in Raadi, an area on the outskirts of Tartu that has avoided promoting a single narrative of the past.

By exploring these places of cultural and historical significance, which all contribute to our understanding of how the new generation in Estonia is not following the expectations and values of its predecessor, the book also demonstrates how we can understand generational change in a material sense.
[more]

front cover of Becoming Transnational Youth Workers
Becoming Transnational Youth Workers
Independent Mexican Teenage Migrants and Pathways of Survival and Social Mobility
Isabel Martinez
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Becoming Transnational Youth Workers contests mainstream notions of adolescence with its study of a previously under-documented cross-section of Mexican immigrant youth. Preceding the latest wave of Central American children and teenagers now fleeing violence in their homelands, Isabel Martinez examines a group of unaccompanied Mexican teenage minors who emigrated to New York City in the early 2000s. As one of the consequences of intractable poverty in their homeland, these emigrant youth exhibit levels of agency and competence not usually assigned to children and teenage minors, and disrupt mainstream notions of what practices are appropriate at their ages. Leaving school and family in Mexico and financially supporting not only themselves through their work in New York City, but also their families back home, these youths are independent teenage migrants who, upon migration, wish to assume or resume autonomy and agency rather than dependence. This book also explores community and family understandings about survival and social mobility in an era of extreme global economic inequality.
[more]

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The Molino
A Memoir
Melani Martinez
University of Arizona Press, 2024
Set in one of Tucson’s first tamal and tortilla factories, The Molino is a hybrid memoir that reckons with one family’s loss of home, food, and faith.

Weaving together history, culture, and Mexican food traditions, Melani Martinez shares the story of her family’s life and work in the heart of their downtown eatery, El Rapido. Opened by Martinez’s great-grandfather, Aurelio Perez, in 1933, El Rapido served tamales and burritos to residents and visitors to Tucson’s historic Barrio Presidio for nearly seventy years. For the family, the factory that bound them together was known for the giant corn grinder churning behind the scenes—the molino. With clear eyes and warm humor, Martinez documents the work required to prepare food for others, and explores the heartbreaking aftermath of gentrification that forces the multigenerational family business to close its doors.

The Molino is also Martinez’s personal story—that of a young Tucsonense coming of age in the 1980s and ’90s. As a young woman she rejects the work in her father’s popular kitchen, but when the business closes, her world shifts and the family disbands. When she finds her way back home, the tortillería’s iconic mural provides a gateway into history and ruin, ancestry and sacrifice, industrial myth and artistic incarnation—revealing a sacred presence still alive in Tucson.

A must-read for foodies, history lovers, and anyone searching for spiritual truth in the desert, this is a story of belonging and transformation in the borderlands. 
 
[more]

front cover of The Injustice Never Leaves You
The Injustice Never Leaves You
Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas
Monica Muñoz Martinez
Harvard University Press, 2020

Winner of the Caughey Western History Prize
Winner of the Robert G. Athearn Award
Winner of the Lawrence W. Levine Award
Winner of the TCU Texas Book Award
Winner of the NACCS Tejas Foco Nonfiction Book Award
Winner of the María Elena Martínez Prize
Frederick Jackson Turner Award Finalist


“A page-turner…Haunting…Bravely and convincingly urges us to think differently about Texas’s past.”
Texas Monthly

Between 1910 and 1920, self-appointed protectors of the Texas–Mexico border—including members of the famed Texas Rangers—murdered hundreds of ethnic Mexicans living in Texas, many of whom were American citizens. Operating in remote rural areas, officers and vigilantes knew they could hang, shoot, burn, and beat victims to death without scrutiny. A culture of impunity prevailed. The abuses were so pervasive that in 1919 the Texas legislature investigated the charges and uncovered a clear pattern of state crime. Records of the proceedings were soon filed away as the Ranger myth flourished.

A groundbreaking work of historical reconstruction, The Injustice Never Leaves You has upended Texas’s sense of its own history. A timely reminder of the dark side of American justice, it is a riveting story of race, power, and prejudice on the border.

“It’s an apt moment for this book’s hard lessons…to go mainstream.”
Texas Observer

“A reminder that government brutality on the border is nothing new.”
Los Angeles Review of Books

[more]

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Latinos in the Midwest
Rubén O. Martinez
Michigan State University Press, 2011
Over the past twenty years, the Latino population in the Midwest has grown rapidly, both in urban and rural areas. As elsewhere in the country, shifting demographics in the region have given rise to controversy and mixed reception. Where some communities have greeted Latinos openly, others have been more guarded. In spite of their increasing presence, Latinos remain the most marginalized major population group in the country. In coming years, the projected growth of this population will require greater attention from policymakers concerned with helping to incorporate them into the nation’s core institutions. This eye-opening collection of essays examines the many ways in which an increase in the Latino population has impacted the Midwest—culturally, economically, educationally, and politically. Drawing on studies, personal histories, legal rulings, and other sources, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach to an increasingly important topic in American society and offers a glimpse into the nation’s demographic future.
[more]

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Agent Orange
History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty
Edwin A. Martini
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
Taking on what one former U.S. ambassador called "the last ghost of the Vietnam War," this book examines the far-reaching impact of Agent Orange, the most infamous of the dioxin-contaminated herbicides used by American forces in Southeast Asia. Edwin A. Martini's aim is not simply to reconstruct the history of the "chemical war" but to investigate the ongoing controversy over the short- and long-term effects of weaponized defoliants on the environment of Vietnam, on the civilian population, and on the troops who fought on both sides.

Beginning in the early 1960s, when Agent Orange was first deployed in Vietnam, Martini follows the story across geographical and disciplinary boundaries, looking for answers to a host of still unresolved questions. What did chemical manufacturers and American policymakers know about the effects of dioxin on human beings, and when did they know it? How much do scientists and doctors know even today? Should the use of Agent Orange be considered a form of chemical warfare? What can, and should, be done for U.S. veterans, Vietnamese victims, and others around the world who believe they have medical problems caused by Agent Orange?

Martini draws on military records, government reports, scientific research, visits to contaminated sites, and interviews to disentangle conflicting claims and evaluate often ambiguous evidence. He shows that the impact of Agent Orange has been global in its reach affecting individuals and communities in New Zealand, Australia, Korea, and Canada as well as Vietnam and the United States. Yet for all the answers it provides, this book also reveals how much uncertainty—scientific, medical, legal, and political—continues to surround the legacy of Agent Orange.
[more]

front cover of Invisible Enemies
Invisible Enemies
The American War on Vietnam, 1975-2000
Edwin A. Martini
University of Massachusetts Press, 2007
Beginning where most histories of the Vietnam War end, Invisible Enemies examines the relationship between the United States and Vietnam following the American pullout in 1975. Drawing on a broad range of sources, from White House documents and congressional hearings to comic books and feature films, Edwin Martini shows how the United States continued to wage war on Vietnam "by other means" for another twenty-five years. In addition to imposing an extensive program of economic sanctions, the United States opposed Vietnam's membership in the United Nations, supported the Cambodians, including the Khmer Rouge, in their decade-long war with the Vietnamese, and insisted that Vietnam provide a "full accounting" of American MIAs before diplomatic relations could be established. According to Martini, such policies not only worked against some of the stated goals of U.S. foreign policy, they were also in opposition to the corporate economic interests that ultimately played a key role in normalizing relations between the two nations in the late 1990s.

Martini reinforces his assessment of American diplomacy with an analysis of the "cultural front"—the movies, myths, memorials, and other phenomena that supported continuing hostility toward Vietnam while silencing opposing views of the war and its legacies. He thus demonstrates that the "American War on Vietnam" was as much a battle for the cultural memory of the war within the United States as it was a lengthy economic, political, and diplomatic campaign to punish a former adversary.
[more]

front cover of An Introduction to International Migration Studies
An Introduction to International Migration Studies
European Perspectives
Marco Martiniello
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
Focusing mainly on the European experience including Eastern Europe, this important volume offers an advanced introduction to immigrant incorporation studies from a historical, empirical and theoretical perspective. Beyond incorporation theories, renowned scholars in the field explore incorporation in action in different fields, policy issues and normative dimensions.
[more]

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Curating As Ethics
Jean-Paul Martinon
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

A new ethics for the global practice of curating
 

Today, everyone is a curator. What was once considered a hallowed expertise is now a commonplace and global activity. Can this new worldwide activity be ethical and, if yes, how? This book argues that curating can be more than just selecting, organizing, and presenting information in galleries or online. Curating can also constitute an ethics, one of acquiring, arranging, and distributing an always conjectural knowledge about the world. 

Curating as Ethics is primarily philosophical in scope, evading normative approaches to ethics in favor of an intuitive ethics that operates at the threshold of thought and action. It explores the work of authors as diverse as Heidegger, Spinoza, Meillassoux, Mudimbe, Chalier, and Kofman. Jean-Paul Martinon begins with the fabric of these ethics: how it stems from matter, how it addresses death, how it apprehends interhuman relationships. In the second part he establishes the ground on which the ethics is based, the things that make up the curatorial—for example, the textual and visual evidence or the digital medium. The final part focuses on the activity of curating as such—sharing, caring, preparing, dispensing, and so on. 

With its invigorating new approach to curatorial studies, Curating as Ethics moves beyond the field of museum and exhibition studies to provide an ethics for anyone engaged in this highly visible activity, including those using social media as a curatorial endeavor, and shows how philosophy and curating can work together to articulate the world today.

[more]

front cover of The Machinery of Whiteness
The Machinery of Whiteness
Studies in the Structure of Racialization
Steve Martinot
Temple University Press, 2010

In this follow up to his book, The Rule of Racialization—which considered the way class structure is formed in the U.S.—Steve Martinot now examines how the structures of racialization reside at the core of all social, cultural, and political institutions in the U.S. In The Machinery of Whiteness, Martinot examines how race and racism are produced in the United States, analyzing the politics of racialization, and the preponderance of racial segregation and racial deprivation that have kept the U.S. a white dominated society throughout its history. Martinot dedicates this work to expunging white supremacy from the earth.

The Machinery of Whiteness investigates how “whiteness” came to be as foundational to the process that then produced the modern concept of race. Martinot addresses the instrumentalization of women as a necessary step in its formation, furthering the debates regarding the relationships of race and gender. And he addresses U.S. international interventionism, the anti-immigrant movements, and white racist populism to describe the political forms that white supremacy takes.

Martinot puts these together to analyze the underlying cultural structures of racialization that have driven and conditioned the resurgence of white supremacy and white entitlement in the wake of the Civil Rights movements. This book is a call to transform the cultural structures of the U.S. to make justice and democracy, which depend on inclusion and not segregation, possible.

[more]

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Everyday Streets
Inclusive Approaches to Understanding and Designing Streets
Agustina Martire
University College London, 2023
A comparative look at everyday streets in contemporary cities and how they could be more inclusively used.

Everyday streets are both the most used and most undervalued of cities’ public spaces. They are places of social aggregation, bringing together people of different classes, genders, ages, ethnicities, and nationalities. They comprise not just the familiar outdoor spaces that we move through and interact in but also urban blocks, interiors, depths, and hinterlands, which are integral to streets’ nature and contribute to their vitality. Everyday Streets offers an inclusive approach to understanding and designing these streets through an analysis of them as found in cities around the globe. From the regular rectilinear urban blocks of Montreal to the carefully regulated narrow alleyways of Naples, and from the resilient market streets of London to the crammed commercial streets of Chennai, the streets in this book were all conceived with a certain level of control. Everyday Streets is a palimpsest of methods, perspectives, and recommendations that together provide a solid understanding of everyday streets, their degree of inclusiveness, and to what extent they could be more inclusive.
 
 
[more]

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Bullying
The Social Destruction of Self
Laura Martocci
Temple University Press, 2015
In her forceful social history, Bullying, Laura Martocci explores the “bully culture” that has claimed national attention since the late 1990s. 
 
Moving beyond the identification of aggressive behaviors to an analysis of how and why we have arrived at a culture that thrives on humiliation, she critiques the social forces that gave rise to, and help maintain, bullying. Martocci’s analysis of gossip, laughter, stereotyping, and competition—dynamics that foment bullying and prompt responses of shame, violence, and depression—is positioned within a larger social narrative: the means by which we negotiate damaged social bonds and the role that bystanders play in the possibility of atonement, forgiveness, and redemption.  
 
Martocci’s fresh perspective on bullying positions shame as pivotal. She urges us to acknowledge the pain and confusion caused by social disgrace; to understand its social, psychological, and neurological nature; and to address it through narratives of loss, grief, and redemption—cultural supports that are already in place. 
[more]

front cover of Back to the Breast
Back to the Breast
Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America
Jessica Martucci
University of Chicago Press, 2015
After decades of decline during the twentieth century, breastfeeding rates began to rise again in the 1970s, a rebound that has continued to the present. While it would be easy to see this reemergence as simply part of the naturalism movement of the ’70s, Jessica Martucci reveals here that the true story is more complicated. Despite the widespread acceptance and even advocacy of formula feeding by many in the medical establishment throughout the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, a small but vocal minority of mothers, drawing upon emerging scientific and cultural ideas about maternal instinct, infant development, and connections between the body and mind, pushed back against both hospital policies and cultural norms by breastfeeding their children. As Martucci shows, their choices helped ideologically root a “back to the breast” movement within segments of the middle-class, college-educated population as early as the 1950s.
           
That movement—in which the personal and political were inextricably linked—effectively challenged midcentury norms of sexuality, gender, and consumption, and articulated early environmental concerns about chemical and nuclear contamination of foods, bodies, and breast milk. In its groundbreaking chronicle of the breastfeeding movement, Back to the Breast provides a welcome and vital account of what it has meant, and what it means today, to breastfeed in modern America.
[more]

front cover of Hollywood Faith
Hollywood Faith
Holiness, Prosperity, and Ambition in a Los Angeles Church
Gerardo Martí
Rutgers University Press, 2008
In Christianity, as with most religions, attaining holiness and a higher spirituality while simultaneously pursuing worldly ideals such as fame and fortune is nearly impossible. So how do people pursuing careers in Hollywood's entertainment industry maintain their religious devotion without sacrificing their career goals? For some, the answer lies just two miles south of the historic center of Hollywood, California, at the Oasis Christian Center.

In Hollywood Faith, Gerardo Marti shows how a multiracial evangelical congregation of 2,000 people accommodates itself to the entertainment industry and draws in many striving to succeed in this harsh and irreverent business. Oasis strategically sanctifies ambition and negotiates social change by promoting a new religious identity as "champion of life"-an identity that provides people who face difficult career choices and failed opportunities a sense of empowerment and endurance.

The first book to provide an in-depth look at religion among the "creative class," Hollywood Faith will fascinate those interested in the modern evangelical movement and anyone who wants to understand how religion adapts to social change.

[more]

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Borderlands Saints
Secular Sanctity in Chicano/a and Mexican Culture
Desirée A. Martín
Rutgers University Press, 2013

Winner of the 2014 Latina/o Studies Section - LASA Outstanding Book Award

In Borderlands Saints, Desirée A. Martín examines the rise and fall of popular saints and saint-like figures in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. Focusing specifically on Teresa Urrea (La Santa de Cabora), Pancho Villa, César Chávez, Subcomandante Marcos, and Santa Muerte, she traces the intersections of these figures, their devotees, artistic representations, and dominant institutions with an eye for the ways in which such unofficial saints mirror traditional spiritual practices and serve specific cultural needs.

Popular spirituality of this kind engages the use and exchange of relics, faith healing, pilgrimages, and spirit possession, exemplifying the contradictions between high and popular culture, human and divine, and secular and sacred. Martín focuses upon a wide range of Mexican and Chicano/a cultural works drawn from the nineteenth century to the present, covering such diverse genres as the novel, the communiqué, drama, the essay or crónica, film, and contemporary digital media. She argues that spiritual practice is often represented as narrative, while narrative—whether literary, historical, visual, or oral—may modify or even function as devotional practice.

[more]

front cover of The Iberian Peninsula between 300 and 850
The Iberian Peninsula between 300 and 850
An Archaeological Perspective
Carlos Martínez Jiménez
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
The vast transformation of the Roman world at the end of antiquity has been a subject of broad scholarly interest for decades, but until now no book has focused specifically on the Iberian Peninsula in the period as seen through an archaeological lens. Given the sparse documentary evidence available, archaeology holds the key to a richer understanding of the developments of the period, and this book addresses a number of issues that arise from analysis of the available material culture, including questions of the process of Christianisation and Islamisation, continuity and abandonment of Roman urban patterns and forms, the end of villas and the growth of villages, and the adaptation of the population and the elites to the changing political circumstances.
[more]

front cover of Protestantism and Political Conflict in the Ninteenth-Century Hispanic Caribbean
Protestantism and Political Conflict in the Ninteenth-Century Hispanic Caribbean
Luis Martínez-Fernández
Rutgers University Press, 2001

Catholicism has long been recognized as one of the major forces shaping the Hispanic Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic) during the nineteenth century, but the role of Protestantism has not been fully explored. Protestantism and Political Conflict in the Nineteenth-Century Hispanic Caribbean traces the emergence of Protestantism in Cuba and Puerto Rico during a crucial period of national consolidation involving both social and political struggle. Using a comparative framework, Martínez-Fernández looks at the ways in which Protestantism, though officially “illegal” for most of the century, established itself, competed with Catholicism, and took differing paths in Cuba and Puerto Rico.

One of the book’s main goals is to trace the links between religion and politics, particularly with regard to early Protestant activities. Protestants encountered a complex social, economic, and political landscape both in Cuba and in Puerto Rico and soon found that their very presence, coupled with their demands for freedom of worship and burial rights, involved them in a series of interrelated struggles in which the Catholic Church was embroiled along with the other main forces of the period—the peasantry, the agrarian bourgeoisie, the mercantile bourgeoisie, and the colonial state. While the established Catholic Church increasingly identified with the conservative, pro-slavery, and colonialist causes, newly arrived Protestants tended to be nationalistic and to pursue particular economic activities—such as cigar exportation in Cuba and the sugar industry in Puerto Rico. The author argues that the early Protestant communities reflected the socio-cultural milieus from which they emerged and were profoundly shaped by the economic activities of their congregants. This influence, in turn, shaped not only the congregations’ composition, but also their political and social orientations.

[more]

front cover of Moral Ecology of a Forest
Moral Ecology of a Forest
The Nature Industry and Maya Post-Conservation
José E. Martínez-Reyes
University of Arizona Press, 2016
Forests are alive, filled with rich, biologically complex life forms and the interrelationships of multiple species and materials. Vulnerable to a host of changing conditions in this global era, forests are in peril as never before. New markets in carbon and environmental services attract speculators. In the name of conservation, such speculators attempt to undermine local land control in these desirable areas.

Moral Ecology of a Forest provides an ethnographic account of conservation politics, particularly the conflict between Western conservation and Mayan ontological ecology. The difficult interactions of the Maya of central Quintana Roo, Mexico, for example, or the Mayan communities of the Sain Ka’an Biosphere, demonstrate the clashing interests with Western biodiversity conservation initiatives. The conflicts within the forest of Quintana Roo represent the outcome of nature in this global era, where the forces of land grabbing, conservation promotion and organizations, and capitalism vie for control of forests and land.

Forests pose living questions. In addition to the ever-thrilling biology of interdependent species, forests raise questions in the sphere of political economy, and thus raise cultural and moral questions. The economic aspects focus on the power dynamics and ideological perspectives over who controls, uses, exploits, or preserves those life forms and landscapes. The cultural and moral issues focus on the symbolic meanings, forms of knowledge, and obligations that people of different backgrounds, ethnicities, and classes have constructed in relation to their lands. The Maya Forest of Quintana Roo is a historically disputed place in which these three questions come together.
[more]

front cover of Trans Studies
Trans Studies
The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Winner of the 2017 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

From Caitlyn Jenner to Laverne Cox, transgender people have rapidly gained public visibility, contesting many basic assumptions about what gender and embodiment mean. The vibrant discipline of Trans Studies explores such challenges in depth, building on the insights of queer and feminist theory to raise provocative questions about the relationships among gender, sexuality, and accepted social norms.   
 
Trans Studies is an interdisciplinary essay collection, bringing together leading experts in this burgeoning field and offering insights about how transgender activism and scholarship might transform scholarship and public policy. Taking an intersectional approach, this theoretically sophisticated book deeply grounded in real-world concerns bridges the gaps between activism and academia by offering examples of cutting-edge activism, research, and pedagogy.
 
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front cover of Trans Studies
Trans Studies
The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Winner of the 2017 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

From Caitlyn Jenner to Laverne Cox, transgender people have rapidly gained public visibility, contesting many basic assumptions about what gender and embodiment mean. The vibrant discipline of Trans Studies explores such challenges in depth, building on the insights of queer and feminist theory to raise provocative questions about the relationships among gender, sexuality, and accepted social norms.   
 
Trans Studies is an interdisciplinary essay collection, bringing together leading experts in this burgeoning field and offering insights about how transgender activism and scholarship might transform scholarship and public policy. Taking an intersectional approach, this theoretically sophisticated book deeply grounded in real-world concerns bridges the gaps between activism and academia by offering examples of cutting-edge activism, research, and pedagogy.
 
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Shaping the Discourse on Space
Charity and Its Wards in Nineteenth-Century San Juan, Puerto Rico
Teresita Martínez-Vergne
University of Texas Press, 1999

As an inchoate middle class emerged in Puerto Rico in the early nineteenth century, its members sought to control not only public space, but also the people, activities, and even attitudes that filled it. Their instruments were the San Juan town council and the Casa de Beneficencia, a state-run charitable establishment charged with responsibility for the poor.

In this book, Teresita Martínez-Vergne explores how municipal officials and the Casa de Beneficencia shaped the discourse on public and private space and thereby marginalized the worthy poor and vagrants, "liberated" Africans, indigent and unruly women, and destitute children. Drawing on extensive and innovative archival research, she shows that the men who comprised the San Juan ayuntamiento and the board of charity regulated the public discourse on topics such as education, religious orthodoxy, hygiene, and family life, thereby establishing norms for "correct" social behavior and chastising the "deviant" lifestyles of the working poor.

This research clarifies the ways in which San Juan's middle class defined itself in the midst of rapid social and economic change. It also offers new insights into notions of citizenship and the process of nation-building in the Caribbean.

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Performance in the Zócalo
Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present
Ana Martínez
University of Michigan Press, 2020
For more than five centuries, the Plaza Mayor (or Zócalo) in Mexico City has been the site of performances for a public spectatorship. During the period of colonial rule, performances designed to ensure loyalty to the Spanish monarchy were staged there, but over time, these displays gave way to staged demonstrations of resistance. Today, the Zócalo is a site for both official government-sponsored celebrations and performances that challenge the state. Performance in the Zócalo examines the ways that this city square has achieved symbolic significance over the centuries, and how national, ethnic, and racial identity has been performed there.
 
A saying in Mexico City is “quien domina el centro, domina el país” (whoever dominates the center, dominates the country) as the Zócalo continues to act as the performative embodiment of Mexican society. This book highlights how particular performances build upon each other by recycling past architectures and performative practices for new purposes. Ana Martínez discusses the singular role of collective memory in creating meaning through space and landmarks, providing a new perspective and further insight into the problem of Mexico’s relationship with its own past. Rather than merely describe the commemorations, she traces the relationship between space and the invention of a Mexican imaginary. She also explores how indigenous communities, Mexico’s alienated subalterns, performed as exploited objects, exotic characters, and subjects with agency. The book’s dual purposes are to examine the Zócalo as Mexico’s central site of performance and to unmask, without homogenizing, the official discourse regarding Mexico’s natives. This book will be of interest for students and scholars in theater studies, Mexican Studies, Cultural Geography, Latinx and Latin American Studies.
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My Heart Is Bound Up with Them
How Carlos Montezuma Became the Voice of a Generation
David Martínez
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Carlos Montezuma is well known as an influential Indigenous figure of the turn of the twentieth century. While some believe he was largely interested only in enabling Indians to assimilate into mainstream white society, Montezuma’s image as a staunch assimilationist changes dramatically when viewed through the lens of his Yavapai relatives at Fort McDowell in Arizona.

Through his diligent research and transcription of the letters archived in the Carlos Montezuma Collection at Arizona State University Libraries, David Martínez offers a critical new perspective on Montezuma’s biography and legacy. During an attempt to force the Fort McDowell Yavapai community off of their traditional homelands north of Phoenix, the Yavapai community members and leaders wrote to Montezuma pleading for help. It was these letters and personal correspondence from his Yavapai cousins George and Charles Dickens, as well as Mike Burns that sparked Montezuma’s desperate but principled desire to liberate his Yavapai family and community—and all Indigenous people—from the clutches of an oppressive Indian Bureau.

Centering historically neglected Indigenous voices as his primary source material, Martínez elevates Montezuma’s correspondence and interactions with his family and their community and shows how it influenced his advocacy. Martínez argues that Montezuma’s work in Arizona directly contributed to his national projects. For his Yavapai community, Montezuma set an example as a resistance fighter and advocate on behalf of his people and other Indigenous groups. Martínez offers a critical exploration of history, memory, the formation of archival collections, and the art of writing biography.
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500 Years of Chicana Women's History / 500 Años de la Mujer Chicana
Bilingual Edition
Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez
Rutgers University Press, 2008
Named the 2009 AAUP Best of the Best - Outstanding Book Distinction

The history of Mexican Americans spans more than five centuries and varies from region to region across the United States. Yet most of our history books devote at most a chapter to Chicano history, with even less attention to the story of Chicanas.

500 Years of Chicana Women’s History offers a powerful antidote to this omission with a vivid, pictorial account of struggle and survival, resilience and achievement, discrimination and identity. The bilingual text, along with hundreds of photos and other images, ranges from female-centered stories of pre-Columbian Mexico to profiles of contemporary social justice activists, labor leaders, youth organizers, artists, and environmentalists, among others.  With a distinguished, seventeen-member advisory board, the book presents a remarkable combination of scholarship and youthful appeal.

In the section on jobs held by Mexicanas under U.S. rule in the 1800s, for example, readers learn about flamboyant Doña Tules, who owned a popular gambling saloon in Santa Fe, and Eulalia Arrilla de Pérez, a respected curandera (healer) in the San Diego area. Also covered are the “repatriation” campaigns” of the Midwest during the Depression that deported both adults and children, 75 percent of whom were U.S.–born and knew nothing of Mexico. Other stories include those of the garment, laundry, and cannery worker strikes, told from the perspective of Chicanas on the ground.

From the women who fought and died in the Mexican Revolution to those marching with their young children today for immigrant rights, every story draws inspiration. Like the editor’s previous book, 500 Years of Chicano History (still in print after 30 years), this thoroughly enriching view of Chicana women’s history promises to become a classic.
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Ethnographic Experiments with Artists, Designers and Boundary Objects
Exhibiting the Field
Francisco Martínez
University College London, 2021
A lively investigation into ethnographic practice.
 
Richly illustrated, Ethnographic Experiments with Artists, Designers and Boundary Objects reflects on the experimental skills and practices shared by ethnographers and curators. Francisco Martínez highlights relationships between contemporary art, design, and anthropology and imagines creative ways to develop new infrastructure that supports vital interdisciplinary work. Attentive to the experimental nature of exhibitions, Martínez models a new approach to both ethnography and objecthood across disciplinary boundaries.
 
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Mexican Americans and Language
Del dicho al hecho
Glenn A. Martínez
University of Arizona Press, 2006
When political activists rallied for the abolition of bilingual education and even called for the declaration of English as an official language, Mexican Americans and other immigrant groups saw this as an assault on their heritage and civil rights. Because language is such a defining characteristic of Mexican American ethnicity, nearly every policy issue that touches their lives involves language in one way or another.

This book offers an overview of some of the central issues in the Mexican American language experience, describing it in terms of both bilingualism and minority status. It is the first book to focus on the historical, social, political, and structural aspects of multiple languages in the Mexican American experience and to address the principles and methods of applied sociolinguistic research in the Mexican American community. Spanish and non-Spanish speakers in the Mexican American community share a common set of social and ethnic bonds. They also share a common experience of bilingualism.

As Martínez observes, the ideas that have been constructed around bilingualism are as important to understanding the Mexican American language experience as bilingualism itself. Mexican Americans and Language gives students the background they need to respond to the multiple social problems that can result from the language differences that exist in the Mexican American community. By showing students how to go from word to deed (del dicho al hecho), it reinforces the importance of language for their community, and for their own lives and futures.
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Haunting Without Ghosts
Spectral Realism in Colombian Literature, Film, and Art
Juliana Martínez
University of Texas Press, 2020

Winner, William M. LeoGrande Prize, Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University, 2022

For half a century, cultural production in Colombia has labored under the weight of magical realism—above all, the works of Gabriel García Márquez—where ghosts told stories about the country’s violent past and warned against a similarly gruesome future.

Decades later, the story of violence in Colombia is no less horrific, but the critical resources of magical realism are depleted. In their wake comes "spectral realism." Juliana Martínez argues that recent Colombian novelists, filmmakers, and artists—from Evelio Rosero and William Vega to Beatriz González and Erika Diettes—share a formal and thematic concern with the spectral but shift the focus from what the ghost is toward what the specter does. These works do not speak of ghosts. Instead, they use the specter to destabilize reality by challenging the authority of human vision and historical chronology.

By introducing the spectral into their work, these artists decommodify well-worn modes of representing violence and create a critical space from which to seek justice for the dead and disappeared. A Colombia-based study, Haunting without Ghosts brings powerful insight to the politics and ethics of spectral aesthetics, relevant for a variety of sociohistorical contexts.

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Border People
Life and Society in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
Oscar J. Martínez
University of Arizona Press, 1994
While the U.S.-Mexico borderlands resemble border regions in other parts of the world, nowhere else do so many millions of people from two dissimilar nations live in such close proximity and interact with each other so intensely. Borderlanders are singular in their history, outlook, and behavior, and their lifestyle deviates from the norms of central Mexico and the interior United States; yet these Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and Anglo-Americans also differ among themselves, and within each group may be found cross-border consumers, commuters, and people who are inclined or disinclined to embrace both cultures. Based on firsthand interviews with individuals from all walks of life, Border People presents case histories of transnational interaction and transculturation, and addresses the themes of cross-border migration, interdependence, labor, border management, ethnic confrontation, cultural fusion, and social activism. Here migrants and workers, functionaries and activists, and "mixers" who have crossed cultural boundaries recall events in their lives related to life on the border. Their stories show how their lives have been shaped by the borderlands milieu and how they have responded to the situations they have faced. Border People shows that these borderlanders live in a unique human environment shaped by physical distance from central areas and constant exposure to transnational processes. The oral histories contained here reveal, to a degree that no scholarly analysis can, that borderlanders are indeed people, each with his or her own individual perspective, hopes, and dreams.
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Mexican-Origin People in the United States
A Topical History
Oscar J. Martínez
University of Arizona Press, 2001
The history of the United States in the twentieth century is inextricably entwined with that of people of Mexican origin. The twenty million Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in the U.S. today are predominantly a product of post-1900 growth, and their numbers give them an increasingly meaningful voice in the political process. Oscar J. Martínez here recounts the struggle of a people who have scraped and grappled to make a place for themselves in the American mainstream.
 
Focusing on social, economic, and political change during the twentieth century—particularly in the American West—Martínez provides a survey of long-term trends among Mexican Americans and shows that many of the difficult conditions they have experienced have changed decidedly for the better. Organized thematically, the book addresses population dynamics, immigration, interaction with the mainstream, assimilation into the labor force, and growth of the Mexican American middle class. Martínez then examines the various forms by which people of Mexican descent have expressed themselves politically: becoming involved in community organizations, participating as voters, and standing for elective office. Finally he summarizes salient historical points and offers reflections on issues of future significance. Where appropriate, he considers the unique circumstances that distinguish the experiences of Mexican Americans from those of other ethnic groups.
 
By the year 2000, significant numbers of people of Mexican origin had penetrated the middle class and had achieved unprecedented levels of power and influence in American society; at the same time, many problems remain unsolved, and the masses face new challenges created by the increasingly globalized U.S. economy. This concise overview of Mexican-origin people puts these successes and challenges in perspective and defines their contribution to the shaping of modern America.
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Troublesome Border, Revised Edition
Oscar J. Martínez
University of Arizona Press, 2006
“U.S. residents are largely unaware that Mexicans also view their northern border with concern, and at times even alarm. Border communities, such as Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana, have long been subjected to heavy criticism from Mexico City and other interior areas for their close ties to the United States, a country viewed with apprehension and suspicion by the Mexican citizenry.”

Oscar Martínez’s words may come as a surprise to those who associate the U.S. southern border with banditry, racial strife, illegal migration, drug smuggling, and official corruption—all attributed to Mexico. In Troublesome Border, now revised to reflect the dramatic changes over the last two decades, a distinguished scholar and long-time resident of the border area addresses these and other problems that have caused increasing concern to federal governments on both sides of the border.

This second edition of Troublesome Border has been updated and revised to cover dramatic developments since the book’s first publication in 1988 that have once again transformed the region in fundamental ways. Martinez includes new information on migration and drugs, including the extraordinary rise of violence traced largely to the rampant illegal drug trade; the devastating effects of U.S. Border Patrol “blockades” that have resulted in thousands of deaths; and the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
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Illegalized
Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States
Rafael A Martínez
University of Arizona Press, 2024
Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States takes readers on a journey through the history of the rise of undocumented youth social movements in the United States in the twenty-first century. The book follows the documentation trail of undocumented youth activists spanning over two decades of organizing. Each chapter carefully analyzes key organizing strategies used by undocumented youth to produce direct forms of activism that expose and critique repressive forms of state control and violence. This inquiry is particularly generative in relation to how immigrant bodies are erased, contained, and imagined as “aliens” or “illegal.”

Rafael A. Martínez, an undocu-scholar, intricately weaves his lived experience into this deeply insightful exploration. Martínez’s interdisciplinary approach will engage scholars and readers alike, resonating with disciplines such as history, American studies, Chicana and Chicano studies, and borderlands studies.
Illegalized shows that undocumented youth and their activism represent a disruption to the social imaginary of the U.S. nation-state and its figurative and physical borders. It invites readers to explore how undocumented youth activists changed the way immigrant rights are discussed in the United States today.
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PADRES
The National Chicano Priest Movement
Richard Edward Martínez
University of Texas Press, 2005

From the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the 1960s, Mexican American Catholics experienced racism and discrimination within the U.S. Catholic church, as white priests and bishops maintained a racial divide in all areas of the church's ministry. To oppose this religious apartheid and challenge the church to minister fairly to all of its faithful, a group of Chicano priests formed PADRES (Padres Asociados para Derechos Religiosos, Educativos y Sociales, or Priests Associated for Religious, Educational, and Social Rights) in 1969. Over the next twenty years of its existence, PADRES became a powerful force for change within the Catholic church and for social justice within American society.

This book offers the first history of the founding, activism, victories, and defeats of PADRES. At the heart of the book are oral history interviews with the founders of PADRES, who describe how their ministries in poor Mexican American parishes, as well as their own experiences of racism and discrimination within and outside the church, galvanized them into starting and sustaining the movement. Richard Martínez traces the ways in which PADRES was inspired by the Chicano movement and other civil rights struggles of the 1960s and also probes its linkages with liberation theology in Latin America. He uses a combination of social movement theory and organizational theory to explain why the group emerged, flourished, and eventually disbanded in 1989.

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Petersburg
The Physiology of a City
Thomas Gaiton Marullo
Northwestern University Press, 2009
This landmark collection of short works forms a vivid documentary of life in midnineteenth-century St. Petersburg. Editor Nikolai Nekrasov was the most influential literary entrepreneur of the day, and he assembled works ranging from ethnography to fiction to literary criticism, all written by leading authors and thinkers of the time. The book he edited represents many important strands in Russian culture and history, including the development of Russian prose and the rise of the intelligentsia. A vital political document as well, Petersburg is a record of—and served as a spur to—the changes in Russian society that culminated in the 1917 revolution. This first-ever English edition brings its storied and studied illumination to a new audience, providing a key to understanding the place that St. Petersburg holds in Russia’s identity.
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A New War on Cancer
The Unlikely Heroes Revolutionizing Prevention
Kristina Marusic
Island Press, 2023
For more than fifty years, we have been waging, but not winning, the war on cancer. We’re better than ever at treating the disease, yet cancer still claims the lives of one in five men and one in six women in the US. The astonishing news is that up to two-thirds of all cancer cases are linked to preventable environmental causes. If we can stop cancer before it begins, why don’t we?

That was the question that motivated Kristina Marusic’s revelatory inquiry into cancer prevention. In searching for answers, she met remarkable doctors, scientists, and advocates who are upending our understanding of cancer and how to fight it. They recognize that we will never reduce cancer rates without ridding our lives of the chemicals that increasingly trigger this deadly disease.

Most never imagined this role for themselves. One scientist grew up without seeing examples of Indian-American women in the field, yet went on to make shocking discoveries about racial disparities in cancer risk. Another leader knew her calling was children’s health, but realized only later in her career that kids can be harmed by invisible pollutants at their daycares. Others uncovered surprising links between cancer and the everyday items that fill our homes and offices.

For these individuals, the fight has become personal. And it certainly is personal for Berry, a young woman whose battle with breast cancer is woven throughout these pages. Might Berry have dodged cancer had she not grown up in Oil City, Pennsylvania, in the shadow of refineries? There is no way to know for sure. But she is certain that, even with the best treatment available, her life was changed irrevocably by her diagnosis. Marusic shows that, collectively, we have the power to prevent many cases like Berry’s. The war on cancer is winnable—if we revolutionize the way we fight.
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Bargaining for Brooklyn
Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City
Nicole P. Marwell
University of Chicago Press, 2007
When middle-class residents fled American cities in the 1960s and 1970s, government services and investment capital left too. Countless urban neighborhoods thus entered phases of precipitous decline, prompting the creation of community-based organizations that sought to bring direly needed resources back to the inner city. Today there are tens of thousands of these CBOs—private nonprofit groups that work diligently within tight budgets to give assistance and opportunity to our most vulnerable citizens by providing services such as housing, child care, and legal aid.

Through ethnographic fieldwork at eight CBOs in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Bushwick, Nicole P. Marwell discovered that the complex and contentious relationships these groups form with larger economic and political institutions outside the neighborhood have a huge and unexamined impact on the lives of the poor. Most studies of urban poverty focus on individuals or families, but Bargaining for Brooklyn widens the lens, examining the organizations whose actions and decisions collectively drive urban life.
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A New Social Question?
On Minimum Income Protection in the Postindustrial Era
Ive Marx
Amsterdam University Press, 2007
Social scientists, politicians, and economists have recently been taken with the idea that the advanced welfare states of Europe face a “New Social Question.” The core idea is that the transition from an industrial to a postindustrial environment has brought with it a whole new set of social risks, constraints, and trade-offs, which necessitate radical recalibration of social security systems. A New Social Question? analyzes that question in depth, with particular attention to the problem of income protection and the difficulties facing Bismarckian welfare states. It will be necessary reading for anyone interested in understanding the future of European social policy.
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Smoothing the Jew
"Abie the Agent" and Ethnic Caricature in the Progressive Era
Jeffrey A. Marx
Rutgers University Press, 2024
The turn of the nineteenth century in the United States saw the substantial influx of immigrants and a corresponding increase in anti-immigration and nativist tendencies among longer-settled Americans. Jewish immigrants were often the object of such animosity, being at once the object of admiration and anxiety for their perceived economic and social successes. One result was their frequent depiction in derogatory caricatures on the stage and in print.
 
Smoothing the Jew investigates how Jewish artists of the time attempted to “smooth over” these demeaning portrayals by focusing on the first Jewish comic strip published in English, Harry Hershfield’s Abie the Agent. Jeffrey Marx demonstrates how Hershfield created a Jewish protagonist who in part reassured nativists of the Jews’ ability to assimilate into American society while also encouraging immigrants and their children that, over time, they would be able to adopt American customs without losing their distinctly Jewish identity.
 
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Karl Marx on Society and Social Change
With Selections by Friedrich Engels
Karl Marx
University of Chicago Press, 1975
This volume presents those writings of Marx that best reveal his contribution to sociology, particularly to the theory of society and social change. The editor, Neil J. Smelser, has divided these selections into three topical sections and has also included works by Friedrich Engels.

The first section, "The Structure of Society," contains Marx's writings on the material basis of classes, the basis of the state, and the basis of the family. Among the writings included in this section are Marx's well-known summary from the Preface of A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy and his equally famous observations on the functional significance of religion in relation to politics.

The second section is titled "The Sweep of Historical Change." The first selection here contains Marx's first statement of the main precapitalist forms of production. The second selection focuses on capitalism, its contradictions, and its impending destruction. Two brief final selections treat the nature of communism, particularly its freedom from the kinds of contradictions that have plagued all earlier forms of societies.

The last section, "The Mechanisms of Change," reproduces several parts of Marx's analysis of the mechanisms by which contradictions develop in capitalism and generate group conflicts. Included is an analysis of competition and its effects on the various classes, a discussion of economic crises and their effects on workers, and Marx's presentation of the historical specifics of the class struggle.

In his comprehensive Introduction to the selections, Professor Smelser provides a biography of Marx, indentifies the various intellectual traditions which formed the background for Marx's writings, and discusses the selections which follow. The editor describes Marx's conception of society as a social system, the differences between functionalism and Marx's theories, and the dynamics of economic and political change as analyzed by Marx.
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Is There a Measure on Earth?
Foundations for a Nonmetaphysical Ethics
Werner Marx
University of Chicago Press, 1987
The search for an ethics rooted in human experience is the crux of this deeply compassionate work, here translated from the 1983 German edition. Distinguished philosopher Werner Marx provides a close reading, critique, and Weiterdenken, or "further thinking," of Martin Heidegger's later work on death, language, and poetry, which has often been dismissed as both obscure and obscurantist. In it Marx seeks, and perhaps finds, both a measure for distinguishing between good and evil and a motive for preferring the former.

The poet Hölderlin posed the question, "Is there a measure on earth?" His own answer was emphatic, "There is none," for he was convinced that the measure for man was to be found only in the domain of the heavenly beings. Such metaphysical assumptions, as well as the attempt to found ethical conduct in the nature of man as a rational being, have been rejected by many contemporary thinkers, particularly Heidegger. Yet these thinkers have not been able to provide a satisfactory alternative to metaphysical foundations of the standards for responsible human conduct.

Marx, therefore, goes beyond Heidegger in demonstrating how several of his most basic notions could be relevant to a secular morality in our age. It is death, Marx claims, that unsettles man and transforms his conduct toward his fellow man. the common experience of mortality nourishes ethical life—and leads to the measures of compassion, love, and recognition of one's fellow human beings.

"It is only on the basis of these 'traditional virtues,'" Marx writes, "that we can find a motive for averting the impending dangers which have often enough been described so vividly and convincingly."
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The Hatred of Literature
William Marx
Harvard University Press, 2018

For the last 2,500 years literature has been attacked, booed, and condemned, often for the wrong reasons and occasionally for very good ones. The Hatred of Literature examines the evolving idea of literature as seen through the eyes of its adversaries: philosophers, theologians, scientists, pedagogues, and even leaders of modern liberal democracies. From Plato to C. P. Snow to Nicolas Sarkozy, literature’s haters have questioned the value of literature—its truthfulness, virtue, and usefulness—and have attempted to demonstrate its harmfulness.

Literature does not start with Homer or Gilgamesh, William Marx says, but with Plato driving the poets out of the city, like God casting Adam and Eve out of Paradise. That is its genesis. From Plato the poets learned for the first time that they served not truth but merely the Muses. It is no mere coincidence that the love of wisdom (philosophia) coincided with the hatred of poetry. Literature was born of scandal, and scandal has defined it ever since.

In the long rhetorical war against literature, Marx identifies four indictments—in the name of authority, truth, morality, and society. This typology allows him to move in an associative way through the centuries. In describing the misplaced ambitions, corruptible powers, and abysmal failures of literature, anti-literary discourses make explicit what a given society came to expect from literature. In this way, anti-literature paradoxically asserts the validity of what it wishes to deny. The only threat to literature’s continued existence, Marx writes, is not hatred but indifference.

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Decoding Andean Mythology
Margarita Marín-Dale
University of Utah Press, 2016

Decoding Andean Mythology is a comprehensive analysis of Native Andean oral tradition spanning five centuries. Based on twenty years of research and a wide range of scholarship, this book departs from the Cuzco-centered focus of many published Andean narratives and includes myths, stories, and folktales from diverse regions and ethnic groups. Among them are full translations of thirty-two ancient and modern Native Andean stories. Colorful illustrations and a comprehensive glossary of Quechua, Aymara, and Spanish loan words supplement the text.
     In an accessible and engaging discussion suitable for students, the author explores a number of recurring themes and characters in Andean stories. These include shape-shifting animals, the inversion of time-space (pachacuti), anthropomorphic and supernatural beings, and conflicting attitudes toward sexuality. The text also presents a fresh perspective on traditional, non-Western concepts such as huacas (sacred objects and places), suggesting some act as portals or mediating spaces between the natural and supernatural worlds. Of particular significance for current events is a lengthy chapter on social protest, explaining the rise of indigenous movements in the Andes and highlighting the contemporary use of Native Andean folktales as an avenue for social and political dissent. 

Winner of the 2018 Wayland D. Hand Prize by the American Folklore Society.

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