front cover of The Williams Collection of Far Eastern Ceramics
The Williams Collection of Far Eastern Ceramics
Chinese, Siamese, and Annamese Ceramic Ware Selected from the Collection of Justice and Mrs. G. Mennen Williams in the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology
Kamer Aga-Oglu
University of Michigan Press, 1972
Kamer Aga-Oglu was curator of the Museum’s Asian collections from 1945 to 1974. An extraordinary scholar, Aga-Oglu singlehandedly transformed the study of Asian ceramics, focusing particularly on understudied Asian trade wares in the Museum’s collections. She described for the first time a whole new range of East Asian ceramics that until then were unknown, even among specialists, and she documented the pre-European movement of these ceramics throughout the Pacific and as far as Turkey and East Africa. Her catalogs of the Williams Collection contain dozens of photographs and detailed descriptions of the pieces.
[more]

front cover of The Williams Collection of Far Eastern Ceramics
The Williams Collection of Far Eastern Ceramics
Tonnancour Section
Kamer Aga-Oglu
University of Michigan Press, 1975
Kamer Aga-Oglu was curator of the Museum’s Asian collections from 1945 to 1974. An extraordinary scholar, Aga-Oglu singlehandedly transformed the study of Asian ceramics, focusing particularly on understudied Asian trade wares in the Museum’s collections. A specialist in Far Eastern art history, she devoted her life’s work to researching the division’s outstanding collection of Asian ceramics. Throughout her entire tenure at the Museum, Kamer Aga-Oglu was the Museum’s only woman curator. Her catalogs of the Williams Collection contain dozens of photographs and detailed descriptions of the pieces.
[more]

front cover of Persian Bookbindings of the Fifteenth Century
Persian Bookbindings of the Fifteenth Century
Mehmet Aga-Oglu
University of Michigan Press, 1935
Because of the lack of systematically treated material from the period preceding the fifteenth century, the publication of an exhaustive study on the historical and artistic development of Persian bookbinding is almost impossible at the present time. It is not the writer's purpose to present here a historical or stylistic study of the subject, but rather to add to already published material additional specimens of artistic value, which may extend the hitherto scanty knowledge concerning the art of Persian bookbinding of the century in question. This book appears as a contribution from the University of Michigan Research Seminary in Islamic Art, which owes its existence to the interest of Dr. Alexander G. Ruthven, President of the University, and Professor John G. Winter, Director of the Division of Fine Arts.
[more]

front cover of Coming Community
Coming Community
Giorgio Agamben
University of Minnesota Press, 1993

front cover of Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency
Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency
The Routes of Terror in an African Context
Daniel E Agbiboa
University of Michigan Press, 2022

In Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency, Daniel Agbiboa takes African insurgencies back to their routes by providing a transdisciplinary perspective on the centrality of mobility to the strategies of insurgents, state security forces, and civilian populations caught in conflict. Drawing on one of the world’s deadliest insurgencies, the Boko Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria and the Lake Chad region, this well-crafted and richly nuanced intervention offers fresh insights into how violent extremist organizations exploit forms of local immobility and border porosity to mobilize new recruits, how the state’s “war on terror” mobilizes against so-called subversive mobilities, and how civilian populations in transit are treated as could-be terrorists and subjected to extortion and state-sanctioned violence en route. The multiple and intersecting flows analyzed here upend Eurocentric representations of movement in Africa as one-sided, anarchic, and dangerous. Instead, this book underscores the contradictions of mobility in conflict zones as simultaneously a resource and a burden. Intellectually rigorous yet clear, engaging, and accessible, Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency is a seminal contribution that lays bare the neglected linkages between conflict and mobility.

[more]

front cover of The Streets of San Francisco
The Streets of San Francisco
Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950-1972
Christopher Lowen Agee
University of Chicago Press, 2014
During the Sixties the nation turned its eyes to San Francisco as the city's police force clashed with movements for free speech, civil rights, and sexual liberation. These conflicts on the street forced Americans to reconsider the role of the police officer in a democracy. In The Streets of San Francisco Christopher Lowen Agee explores the surprising and influential ways in which San Francisco liberals answered that question, ultimately turning to the police as partners, and reshaping understandings of crime, policing, and democracy.

The Streets of San Francisco uncovers the seldom reported, street-level interactions between police officers and San Francisco residents and finds that police discretion was the defining feature of mid-century law enforcement. Postwar police officers enjoyed great autonomy when dealing with North Beach beats, African American gang leaders, gay and lesbian bar owners, Haight-Ashbury hippies, artists who created sexually explicit works, Chinese American entrepreneurs, and a wide range of other San Franciscans. Unexpectedly, this police independence grew into a source of both concern and inspiration for the thousands of young professionals streaming into the city's growing financial district. These young professionals ultimately used the issue of police discretion to forge a new cosmopolitan liberal coalition that incorporated both marginalized San Franciscans and rank-and-file police officers. The success of this model in San Francisco resulted in the rise of cosmopolitan liberal coalitions throughout the country, and today, liberal cities across America ground themselves in similar understandings of democracy, emphasizing both broad diversity and strong policing.
[more]

front cover of A Cry for Justice
A Cry for Justice
Daniel Rudd and His Life in Black Catholicism, Journalism, and Activism, 1854-1933
Gary B. Agee
University of Arkansas Press, 2017
Daniel A. Rudd, born a slave in Bardstown, Kentucky, grew up to achieve much in the years following the Civil War. His Catholic faith, passion for activism, and talent for writing led him to increasingly influential positions in many places. One of his important early accomplishments was the publication of the American Catholic Tribune, which Rudd referred to as "the only Catholic journal owned and published by colored men." At its zenith, the Tribune, run out of Detroit and Cincinnati, where Rudd lived, had ten thousand subscribers, making it one of the most successful black newspapers in the country. Rudd was also active in the leadership of the Afro-American Press Association, and he was a founding member of the Catholic Press Association. By 1889, Rudd was one of the nation's best-known black Catholics. His work was endorsed by a number of high-ranking church officials in Europe as well as in the United States, and he was one of the founders of the Lay Catholic Congress movement. Later, his travels took him to Bolivar County, Mississippi, and eventually on to Forrest City, Arkansas, where he worked for the well-known black farmer and businessperson, Scott Bond, and eventually co-wrote Bond's biography.
[more]

front cover of Unsettling Choice
Unsettling Choice
Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education
Ujju Aggarwal
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

How the Great Recession revealed a system of school choice built on crisis, precarity, and exclusion

 

What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually not about better choices for all but, rather, about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders—guaranteeing a system of winners and losers? Unsettling Choice addresses such questions through a compelling ethnography that illuminates how one path of neoliberal restructuring in the United States emerged in tandem with, and in response to, the Civil Rights movement.

 

Drawing on ethnographic research in one New York City school district, Unsettling Choice traces the contestations that surfaced when, in the wake of the 2007–2009 Great Recession, public schools navigated austerity by expanding choice-based programs. Ujju Aggarwal argues that this strategy, positioned as “saving public schools,” mobilized mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side, thereby solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private—where contingency was anticipated and rights for some were marked by intensified precarity for poor and working-class Black and Latinx families.

 

As Unsettling Choice shows, these struggles over public schools—one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—were entrapped within neoliberal regimes that exceeded privatization and ensured exclusion even as they were couched in language of equity, diversity, care, and rights. And yet this richly detailed and engaging book also tracks an architecture of expansive rights, care, and belonging built among poor and working-class parents at a Head Start center, whose critique of choice helps us understand how we might struggle for—and reimagine—justice, and a public that remains to be won.

 

 

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

[more]

logo for Temple University Press
Men Who Sell Sex
International Perspectives on Male Prostitution and AIDS
Peter Aggleton
Temple University Press, 1999
While much is known about prostitution and sex work from studies of female sex workers and their customers, relatively little is known about men who sell sex, either to women or other men. Particularly poorly understood are their motivations for doing so, the circumstances in which the sale of sex occurs, the meanings attached to the acts by both sex worker and client, and the HIV-related risks involved.

Each chapter, written by a national expert, is based on months and even years of interviews with male sex workers, including young boys and elderly men in some countries. The workers discuss why they do the work, what it is like, and what their behavior means to them. For example, those who have regular sex with men often strenuously affirm their heterosexuality, though there is considerable variety in their attitudes.

Each chapter relates the experiences of the male sex workers to the political economy of their neighborhood and assesses the implications of their work for HIV transmission and the AIDS epidemic. The researchers and the sex workers discuss the value of different kinds of health promotion interventions.
[more]

front cover of The Women of Karbala
The Women of Karbala
Ritual Performance and Symbolic Discourses in Modern Shi'i Islam
Kamran Scot Aghaie
University of Texas Press, 2005

Commemorating the Battle of Karbala, in which the Prophet Mohammad's grandson Hosayn and seventy-two of his family members and supporters were martyred in 680 CE, is the central religious observance of Shi'i Islam. Though much has been written about the rituals that reenact and venerate Karbala, until now no one has studied women's participation in these observances. This collection of original essays by a multidisciplinary team of scholars analyzes the diverse roles that women have played in the Karbala rituals, as well as the varied ways in which gender-coded symbols have been used within religious and political discourses.

The contributors to this volume consider women as participants in and observers of the Karbala rituals in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, India, Pakistan, and the United States. They find that women's experiences in the Shi'i rituals vary considerably from one community to another, based on regional customs, personal preferences, religious interpretations, popular culture, and socioeconomic background. The authors also examine the gender symbolism within the rituals, showing how it reinforces distinctions between the genders while it also highlights the centrality of women to the symbolic repertory of Shi'ism. Overall, the authors conclude that while Shi'i rituals and symbols have in some ways been used to restrict women's social roles, in other ways they have served to provide women with a sense of independence and empowerment.

[more]

front cover of From Charity to Social Work
From Charity to Social Work
Mary E. Richmond and the Creation of an American Profession
Elizabeth N. Agnew
University of Illinois Press, 2003
Mary E. Richmond (1861-1928) was a contemporary of Jane Addams and an influential leader in the American charity organization movement.  In this biography--the first in-depth study of Richmond's life and work--Elizabeth N. Agnew examines the contributions of this important, if hitherto under-valued, woman to the field of charity and to its development into professional social work.
 
Orphaned at a young age and largely self-educated, Richmond initially entered charity work as a means of self-support, but came to play a vital role in transforming philanthropy--previously seen as a voluntary expression of individual altruism--into a valid, organized profession. Her career took her from charity organization leadership in Baltimore and Philadelphia to an executive position with the prestigious Russell Sage Foundation in New York City.
 
Richmond's progressive civic philosophy of social work was largely informed by the social gospel movement. She strove to find practical applications of the teachings of Christianity in response to the social problems that accompanied rapid industrialization, urbanization, and poverty. At the same time, her tireless efforts and personal example as a woman created an appealing, if ambiguous, path for other professional women. A century later her legacy continues to echo in social work and welfare reform.
 
[more]

front cover of A Perfect Pint's Beer Guide to the Heartland
A Perfect Pint's Beer Guide to the Heartland
Michael Agnew
University of Illinois Press, 2014
Once dominated by megabreweries like Miller and G. Heilemann, the Midwest has in recent years become home to a dynamic craft beer industry at the core of America's current brewing renaissance. Beer writer and Certified Cicerone® Michael Agnew crisscrossed Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin sampling the astonishing variety of beers on offer at breweries and brewpubs. The result is a region-wide survey of the Midwestern craft beer scene. Packed with details on more than 200 breweries, A Perfect Pint's Beer Guide to the Heartland offers actual and armchair travelers alike a handbook that includes:
  • Agnew's exclusive choices on which beers to try at each location
  • Entries on every brewery's history and philosophy
  • Information on tours, tasting rooms and attached pubs, and dining options and other amenities
  • A survey of each brewery's brands, including its flagship beer plus seasonal brews and special releases
  • Brewery equipment and capacity
  • Nearby attractions

In addition, Agnew sets the stage with a history of Midwestern beer spanning the origins of the immigrant brewers who arrived in the 1800s to the homebrewers-made-good who have built a new kind of brewing culture founded on creativity, dedication to quality, and attention to customer feedback.

Informed and unique, A Perfect Pint's Beer Guide to the Heartland is the essential companion for beer aficionados and curious others determined to drink the best the Midwest has to offer.

Includes more than 150 full color images, including the region's most distinctive beer labels, trademarks, and company logos.

[more]

front cover of Gabriela Mistral
Gabriela Mistral
The Audacious Traveler
Marjorie Agosin
Ohio University Press, 2003

Gabriela Mistral is the only Latin American woman writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Even so, her extraordinary achievements in poetry, narrative, and political essays remain largely untold. Gabriela Mistral: The Audacious Traveler explores boldly and thoughtfully the complex legacy of Mistral and the way in which her work continues to define Latin America.

Edited by Professor Marjorie Agosín, Gabriela Mistral: The Audacious Traveler addresses for the first time the vision that Mistral conveyed as a representative of Chile during the drafting of the United Nations Human Rights Declaration. It depicts Mistral as a courageous social activist whose art and writings against fascism reveal a passionate voice for freedom and justice.

The book also explores Mistral’s Pan-American vision and her desire to be part of a unified American hemisphere as well as her concern for the Caribbean and Brazil. Readers will learn of her sojourn in Brazil, her turbulent years as consul in Madrid, and, finally, her last days on Long Island.

Students of her poetry, as well as general readers, will find Gabriela Mistral: The Audacious Traveler an insightful collection dedicated to the life and work of an inspiring and original artist.

The contributors are Jonathan Cohen, Joseph R. Slaughter, Verónica Darer, Patricia Varas, Eugenia Muñoz, Darrell B. Lockhart, Ivonne Gordon Vailakis, Santiago Daydí-Tolson, Diana Anhalt, Ana Pizarro, Randall Couch, Patricia Rubio, Elizabeth Horan, Emma Sepúlveda, Luis Vargas Saavedra, and Marie-Lise Gazarian-Gautier.

[more]

front cover of The Alphabet in My Hands
The Alphabet in My Hands
A Writing Life
Marjorie Agosín
Rutgers University Press, 1999

Marjorie Agosín writes of a beloved childhood nanny: "Since I was Jewish she baptized me with holy water brought forth from the fonts of nearby churches. She told me to stay very still so I wouldn't sprout horns. . . . I was somewhere between taciturn and happy gazing into the mirror as if approaching the edge of a cliff . . . and I watched myself in the deep, transparent veil of this night of all nights." Many of the themes expressed in this vignette—cultural dissonance, family, and community—are poetically intertwined throughout The Alphabet in My Hands. Agosín takes us on a personal journey of discovery that is as much internal reflection as it is an exodus across continents and decades.

Agosín's childhood and early adolescence were spent with her Jewish family in Chile. While her family raised her to regard her Jewish heritage with loving awareness, they also participated in the dominant Catholic culture—an aunt organized Easter egg hunts and her mother admired the beauty of Chile's Catholic churches. The young Agosín became keenly aware of her dual identity in her country, both as a participant and an outsider.

The second half of The Alphabet in My Hands recounts the events that forced her family to emigrate to America: the overthrow of Salvador Allende by General Augusto Pinochet. Agosín writes of her new life in Athens, Georgia, of the sudden loss of all that was familiar. Ostracized as an emigrant—a "non-white" with a strange foreign accent—her high school years were made even more painful by the news from Chile: prisoners taken and classmates disappearing or shot.

Years later, Agosín goes back to Chile and she travels there with her own children. As she stares down at her old homeland from the plane, she writes: "Why do I love this place that forced us into exile, that punished my father for being a Jew?" And in the final chapter of The Alphabet in My Hands, this award-winning poet addresses two important topics: her current residence in New England and the central role of writing and literature in her life.

[more]

front cover of A Map of Hope
A Map of Hope
Women's Writing on Human Rights—An International Literary Anthology
Marjorie Agosín
Rutgers University Press, 1999

The first international anthology to explore women’s human rights from a literary perspective.

More than half a century after the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, women throughout the world still struggle for social and political justice. Many fight back with the only tools of resistance they possess—words. A Map of Hope presents a collection of 77 extraordinary literary works documenting the ways women writers have spoken out about human rights issues.

Writers young and old, known and unknown, explore the dimensions of terror, the unspeakable atrocities of war, and the possibilities of resistance and refusal against all odds. Their poems, essays, memoirs, and brief histories examine issues that affect the condition of women in war, prison camps, exile, and as victims of domestic and political violence.

A Map of Hope presents diverse women writers who have created a literature of global consciousness and justice. Their works give a face, an image, and a human dimension to the dehumanization of human rights violations. The collection allows readers to hear voices that have decided to make a difference. It goes beyond geography and ethnic groups; writers from around the globe are united by the universal dimensions of horror and deprivation, as well as the unique common struggle for justice and solidarity.

[more]

front cover of A Map of Hope
A Map of Hope
Women's Writing on Human Rights—An International Literary Anthology
Marjorie Agosín
Rutgers University Press, 1999

The first international anthology to explore women’s human rights from a literary perspective.

More than half a century after the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, women throughout the world still struggle for social and political justice. Many fight back with the only tools of resistance they possess—words. A Map of Hope presents a collection of 77 extraordinary literary works documenting the ways women writers have spoken out about human rights issues.

Writers young and old, known and unknown, explore the dimensions of terror, the unspeakable atrocities of war, and the possibilities of resistance and refusal against all odds. Their poems, essays, memoirs, and brief histories examine issues that affect the condition of women in war, prison camps, exile, and as victims of domestic and political violence.

A Map of Hope presents diverse women writers who have created a literature of global consciousness and justice. Their works give a face, an image, and a human dimension to the dehumanization of human rights violations. The collection allows readers to hear voices that have decided to make a difference. It goes beyond geography and ethnic groups; writers from around the globe are united by the universal dimensions of horror and deprivation, as well as the unique common struggle for justice and solidarity.

[more]

front cover of Women, Gender, and Human Rights
Women, Gender, and Human Rights
A Global Perspective
Marjorie Agosín
Rutgers University Press, 2001

The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights expresses the credo that all human beings are created free and equal. But not until 1995 did the United Nations declare that women’s rights to be human rights, and bring gender issues into the global arena for the first time. The subordination of indigenous and minority women, ethnic cleansing, and the struggle for reproductive rights are some of the most pressing issues facing women worldwide.

Women, Gender, and Human Rights
is the first collection of essays that encompass a global perspective on women and a wide range of issues, including political and domestic violence, education, literacy, and reproductive rights. Most of the articles were written expressly for this volume by internationally known experts in the fields of government, bioethics, medicine, public affairs, literature, history, anthropology, law, and psychology.

[more]

front cover of Amigas
Amigas
Letters of Friendship and Exile
Marjorie Agosín
University of Texas Press, 2001

This collection of letters chronicles a remarkable, long-term friendship between two women who, despite differences of religion and ethnicity, have followed remarkably parallel paths from their first adolescent meeting in their native Chile to their current lives in exile as writers, academics, and political activists in the United States. Spanning more than thirty years (1966-2000), Agosín's and Sepúlveda's letters speak eloquently on themes that are at once personal and political—family life and patriarchy, women's roles, the loneliness of being a religious or cultural outsider, political turmoil in Chile, and the experience of exile.

[more]

logo for Pluto Press
Counter-Colonial Criminology
A Critique of Imperialist Reason
Biko Agozino
Pluto Press, 2003
This book is about how the history of colonialism has shaped the definition of crime and justice systems not only in former colonies but also in colonialist countries. Biko Agozino argues that criminology in the West was originally tested in the colonies and then brought back to mother countries -- in this way, he claims, the colonial experience has been instrumental in shaping modern criminology in colonial powers.

He looks at how radical critiques of mainstream criminology by critical feminist and postmodernist thinkers contribute to an understanding of the relationship between colonial experience and criminology. But he also shows that even critical feminist and postmodernist assessments of conventional criminology do not go far enough as they remain virtually silent on colonial issues.

Biko Agozino considers African and other postcolonial literature and contributions to counter colonial criminology, their originality, relevance and limitations. Finally he advocates a “committed objectivity” approach to race-class-gender criminology investigations in order to come to terms with imperialistic and neo-colonialist criminology.
[more]

front cover of Questioning Secularism
Questioning Secularism
Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt
Hussein Ali Agrama
University of Chicago Press, 2012
The central question of the Arab Spring—what democracies should look like in the deeply religious countries of the Middle East—has developed into a vigorous debate over these nations’ secular identities. But what, exactly, is secularism? What has the West’s long familiarity with it inevitably obscured? In Questioning Secularism, Hussein Ali Agrama tackles these questions. Focusing on the fatwa councils and family law courts of Egypt just prior to the revolution, he delves deeply into the meaning of secularism itself and the ambiguities that lie at its heart.
 
Drawing on a precedent-setting case arising from the family law courts —the last courts in Egypt to use Shari‘a law—Agrama shows that secularism is a historical phenomenon that works through a series of paradoxes that it creates. Digging beneath the perceived differences between the West and Middle East, he highlights secularism’s dependence on the law and the problems that arise from it: the necessary involvement of state sovereign power in managing the private spiritual lives of citizens and the irreducible set of legal ambiguities such a relationship creates. Navigating a complex landscape between private and public domains, Questioning Secularism lays important groundwork for understanding the real meaning of secularism as it affects the real freedoms of a citizenry, an understanding of the utmost importance for so many countries that are now urgently facing new political possibilities.
[more]

front cover of
"Too Good a Town"
William Allen White, Community, and the Emerging Rhetoric of Middle America
Edward G. Agran
University of Arkansas Press, 1999

For fifty years, William Allen White, first as a reporter and later as the long-time editor of the Emporia Gazette, wrote of his small town and its Mid-American values. By tailoring his writing to the emerging urban middle class of the early twentieth century, he won his “gospel of Emporia” a nationwide audience and left a lasting impact on he way America defines itself.

Investigating White’s life and his extensive writings, Edward Gale Agran explores the dynamic thought of one of America’s best-read and most-respected social commentators. Agran shows clearly how White honed his style and transformed the myth of conquering the western frontier into what became the twentieth-century ideal of community building.

Once a confidante of and advisor to Theodore Roosevelt, White addressed, and reflected in his work, all the great social and political oscillations of his time—urbanization and industrialism, populism, and progressivism, isolationism internationalism, Prohibition, and New Deal reform. Again and again, he asked the question “What’s the matter?” about his times and townspeople, then found the middle ground. With great care and discernment, Agran gathers the man strains of White’s messages, demonstrating one writer’s pivotal contribution to our idea of what it means to be an American.

[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Greener Pastures
Politics, Markets, and Community among a Migrant Pastoral People
Arun Agrawal
Duke University Press, 1999
Social scientists theorizing about political economy and the allocation of resources have usually omitted migrant communities from their studies. In Greener Pastures Arun Agrawal uses the story of the Raikas, a little-known group of migrant shepherds in western India, to reexamine current scholarship on markets and exchange, local and state politics, and community and hierarchy. The Raikas are virtually invisible in the regions through which they travel, as well as to the wider Indian society, yet they must operate as part of these larger spheres for their economic survival.

Agrawal analyzes the institutions developed by the shepherds to solve livelihood problems. First, by focusing on the relations of the shepherds with their landholder neighbors, he explains why the shepherds migrate. He shows that struggles between these two groups led to a sociopolitical squeeze on the access of shepherds to the fodder resources they need to feed their sheep. Then, in an examination of why the shepherds migrate in groups, he demonstrates how their migratory lives depend on market exchanges and points to the social and political forces that influence prices and determine profits. Finally, he looks at decision-making processes such as division of labor and the delegation of power. Politics is ubiquitous in the interactions of the shepherds with their neighbors and with state officials, in their exchanges in markets and with farmers, and in their internal relations as a community.

Interspersing the words of the Raikas themselves with a sophisticated deployment of political theory, Agrawal has produced a volume that will interest scholars in a broad range of academic disciplines, including Asian studies, political science, human ecology, anthropology, comparative politics, rural sociology, and environmental studies and policy.

[more]

front cover of Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex
Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex
Henricus Cornelius Agrippa
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Originally published in 1529, the Declamation on the Preeminence and Nobility of the Female Sex argues that women are more than equal to men in all things that really matter, including the public spheres from which they had long been excluded.

Rather than directly refuting prevailing wisdom, Agrippa uses women's superiority as a rhetorical device and overturns the misogynistic interpretations of the female body in Greek medicine, in the Bible, in Roman and canon law, in theology and moral philosophy, and in politics. He raised the question of why women were excluded and provided answers based not on sex but on social conditioning, education, and the prejudices of their more powerful oppressors. His declamation, disseminated through the printing press, illustrated the power of that new medium, soon to be used to generate a larger reformation of religion.
[more]

front cover of Purple Power
Purple Power
The History and Global Impact of SEIU
Luís LM Aguiar
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Chartered in 1921, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is a worldwide organization that represents more than two million workers in occupations from healthcare and government service to custodians and taxi drivers. Women form more than half the membership while people in minority groups make up approximately forty percent.

Luís LM Aguiar and Joseph A. McCartin edit essays on one of contemporary labor’s bedrock organizations. The contributors explore key episodes, themes, and features in the union’s recent history and evaluate SEIU as a union with global aspirations and impact. The first section traces the SEIU’s growth in the last and current centuries. The second section offers in-depth studies of key campaigns in the United States, including the Justice for Janitors and Fight for $15 movements. The third section focuses on the SEIU’s work representing low-wage workers in Canada, Australia, Europe, and Brazil. An interview with Justice for Janitors architect Stephen Lerner rounds out the volume.

Contributors: Luís LM Aguiar, Adrienne E. Eaton, Janice Fine, Euan Gibb, Laurence Hamel-Roy, Tashlin Lakhani, Joseph A. McCartin, Yanick Noiseux, Benjamin L. Peterson, Allison Porter, Alyssa May Kuchinski, Maite Tapia, Veronica Terriquez, and Kyoung-Hee Yu

[more]

front cover of Arranging Marriage
Arranging Marriage
Conjugal Agency in the South Asian Diaspora
Marian Aguiar
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

The first critical analysis of contemporary arranged marriage among South Asians in a global context

Arranged marriage is an institution of global fascination—an object of curiosity, revulsion, outrage, and even envy. Marian Aguiar provides the first sustained analysis of arranged marriage as a transnational cultural phenomenon, revealing how its meaning has been continuously reinvented within the South Asian diaspora of Britain, the United States, and Canada. Aguiar identifies and analyzes representations of arranged marriage in an interdisciplinary set of texts—from literary fiction and Bollywood films, to digital and print media, to contemporary law and policy on forced marriage.

Aguiar interprets depictions of South Asian arranged marriage to show we are in a moment of conjugal globalization, identifying how narratives about arranged marriage bear upon questions of consent, agency, state power, and national belonging. Aguiar argues that these discourses illuminate deep divisions in the processes of globalization constructed on a fault line between individualist and collectivist agency and in the process, critiques neoliberal celebrations of “culture as choice” that attempt to bridge that separation. Aguiar advocates situating arranged marriage discourses within their social and material contexts so as to see past reductive notions of culture and grasp the global forces mediating increasingly polarized visions of agency.

[more]

front cover of Tracking Modernity
Tracking Modernity
India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility
Marian Aguiar
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
From Mohandas Gandhi’s nineteenth-century tour in a third-class compartment to the recent cinematic shenanigans of Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, the railway has been one of India’s most potent emblems of modern life. In the first in-depth analysis of representations of the Indian railway, Marian Aguiar interprets modernity through the legacy of this transformative technology.

Since the colonial period in India, the railway has been idealized as a rational utopia—a moving box in which racial and class differences might be amalgamated under a civic, secular, and public order. Aguiar charts this powerful image into the postcolonial period, showing how the culture of mobility exposes this symbol of reason as surprisingly dynamic and productive. Looking in turn at the partition of India, labor relations, rituals of travel, works of literature and film, visual culture, and the Mumbai train bombings of 2006, Aguiar finds incongruities she terms “counternarratives of modernity” to signify how they work both with and against the dominant rhetoric.  Revealing railways as a microcosm of tensions within Indian culture, Aguiar demonstrates how their representations have challenged prevailing ideas of modernity.
[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
Little Saigons
Staying Vietnamese in America
Karin Aguilar–San Juan
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

Karin Aguilar-San Juan examines the contradictions of Vietnamese American community and identity in two emblematic yet different locales: Little Saigon in suburban Orange County, California (widely described as the capital of Vietnamese America) and the urban "Vietnamese town" of Fields Corner in Boston, Massachusetts. Their distinctive qualities challenge assumptions about identity and space, growth amid globalization, and processes of Americanization.

With a comparative and race-cognizant approach, Aguilar-San Juan shows how places like Little Saigon and Fields Corner are sites for the simultaneous preservation and redefinition of Vietnamese identity. Intervening in debates about race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, and suburbanization as a form of assimilation, this work elaborates on the significance of place as an integral element of community building and its role in defining Vietnamese American-ness.

Staying Vietnamese, according to Aguilar-San Juan, is not about replicating life in Viet Nam. Rather, it involves moving toward a state of equilibrium that, though always in flux, allows refugees, immigrants, and their U.S.-born offspring to recalibrate their sense of self in order to become Vietnamese anew in places far from their presumed geographic home.

[more]

front cover of Health Issues in Latino Males
Health Issues in Latino Males
A Social and Structural Approach
Marilyn Aguirre-Molina
Rutgers University Press, 2010
It is estimated that more than 50 million Latinos live in the United States. This is projected to more than double by 2050. In Health Issues in Latino Males experts from public health, medicine, and sociology examine the issues affecting Latino men's health and recommend policies to overcome inequities and better serve this population. The book addresses sexual and reproductive health; alcohol, tobacco, and drug use; mental and physical health among those in the juvenile justice or prison systems; chronic diseases; HIV/AIDS; Alzheimer's and dementia; and health issues among war veterans. It discusses utilization, insurance coverage, and research programs, and includes an extensive appendix charting epidemiological data on Latino health.
[more]

front cover of The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds
The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds
The Prison Experience, 1850-1935
Carlos Aguirre
Duke University Press, 2005
The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds is the first major historical study of the creation and development of the prison system in Peru. Carlos Aguirre examines the evolution of prisons for male criminals in Lima from the conception—in the early 1850s—of the initial plans to build penitentiaries through the early-twentieth-century prison reforms undertaken as part of President Augusto Leguia’s attempts to modernize and expand the Peruvian state. Aguirre reconstructs the social, cultural, and doctrinal influences that determined how lawbreakers were treated, how programs of prison reform fared, and how inmates experienced incarceration. He argues that the Peruvian prisons were primarily used not to combat crime or to rehabilitate allegedly deviant individuals, but rather to help reproduce and maintain an essentially unjust social order. In this sense, he finds that the prison system embodied the contradictory and exclusionary nature of modernization in Peru.

Drawing on a large collection of prison and administrative records archived at Peru’s Ministry of Justice, Aguirre offers a detailed account of the daily lives of men incarcerated in Lima’s jails. In showing the extent to which the prisoners actively sought to influence prison life, he reveals the dynamic between prisoners and guards as a process of negotiation, accommodation, and resistance. He describes how police and the Peruvian state defined criminality and how their efforts to base a prison system on the latest scientific theories—imported from Europe and the United States—foundered on the shoals of financial constraints, administrative incompetence, corruption, and widespread public indifference. Locating his findings within the political and social mores of Lima society, Aguirre reflects on the connections between punishment, modernization, and authoritarian traditions in Peru.

[more]

front cover of The Surrendered
The Surrendered
Reflections by a Son of Shining Path
José Carlos Agüero
Duke University Press, 2021
When Peruvian public intellectual José Carlos Agüero was a child, the government imprisoned and executed his parents, who were members of Shining Path. In The Surrendered—originally published in Spanish in 2015 and appearing here in English for the first time—Agüero reflects on his parents' militancy and the violence and aftermath of Peru's internal armed conflict. He examines his parents' radicalization, their lives as guerrillas, and his tumultuous childhood, which was spent in fear of being captured or killed, while grappling with the complexities of public memory, ethics and responsibility, human rights, and reconciliation. Much more than a memoir, The Surrendered is a disarming and moving consideration of what forgiveness and justice might mean in the face of hate. This edition includes an editors' introduction, a timeline of the Peruvian conflict, and an extensive interview with the author.
[more]

front cover of Afro-Nostalgia
Afro-Nostalgia
Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture
Badia Ahad-Legardy
University of Illinois Press, 2021
As early as the eighteenth century, white Americans and Europeans believed that people of African descent could not experience nostalgia. As a result, black lives have been predominately narrated through historical scenes of slavery and oppression. This phenomenon created a missing archive of romantic historical memories.

Badia Ahad-Legardy mines literature, visual culture, performance, and culinary arts to form an archive of black historical joy for use by the African-descended. Her analysis reveals how contemporary black artists find more than trauma and subjugation within the historical past. Drawing on contemporary African American culture and recent psychological studies, she reveals nostalgia’s capacity to produce positive emotions. Afro-nostalgia emerges as an expression of black romantic recollection that creates and inspires good feelings even within our darkest moments.

Original and provocative, Afro-Nostalgia offers black historical pleasure as a remedy to contend with the disillusionment of the present and the traumas of the past.

[more]

front cover of Freud Upside Down
Freud Upside Down
African American Literature and Psychoanalytic Culture
Badia Sahar Ahad
University of Illinois Press, 2010
This thought-provoking cultural history explores how psychoanalytic theories shaped the works of important African American literary figures. Badia Sahar Ahad details how Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Ralph Ellison, Adrienne Kennedy, and Danzy Senna employed psychoanalytic terms and conceptual models to challenge notions of race and racism in twentieth-century America.
 
Freud Upside Down explores the relationship between these authors and intellectuals and the psychoanalytic movement emerging in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. Examining how psychoanalysis has functioned as a cultural phenomenon within African American literary intellectual communities since the 1920s, Ahad lays out the historiography of the intersections between African American literature and psychoanalysis and considers the creative approaches of African American writers to psychological thought in their work and their personal lives.
[more]

front cover of Invitations to Love
Invitations to Love
Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal
Laura M. Ahearn
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Invitations to Love provides a close examination of the dramatic shift away from arranged marriage and capture marriage toward elopement in the village of Junigau, Nepal. Laura M. Ahearn shows that young Nepalese people are applying their newly acquired literacy skills to love-letter writing, fostering a transition that involves not only a shift in marriage rituals, but also a change in how villagers conceive of their own ability to act and attribute responsibility for events. These developments have potential ramifications that extend far beyond the realm of marriage and well past the Himalayas.

The love-letter correspondences examined by Ahearn also provide a deeper understanding of the social effects of literacy. While the acquisition of literary skills may open up new opportunities for some individuals, such skills can also impose new constraints, expectations, and disappointments. The increase in female literacy rates in Junigau in the 1990s made possible the emergence of new courtship practices and facilitated self-initiated marriages, but it also reinforced certain gender ideologies and undercut some avenues to social power, especially for women.

Scholars, and students in such fields as anthropology, women's studies, linguistics, development studies, and South Asian studies will find this book ethnographically rich and theoretically insightful.
Laura M. Ahearn is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University.
[more]

front cover of The Counselling Speeches of Jim Ka-Nipitehtew
The Counselling Speeches of Jim Ka-Nipitehtew
Freda Ahenakew
University of Manitoba Press, 1998
A monolingual Cree speaker from Onion Lake, Saskatchewan, Jim Ka-Nipitehtew was a highly respected orator. His discourses have great force and authority, and no speeches of similar scope or depth have ever been published in their original form. He speaks of his concerns for young people, and of the proper performances of rituals, and gives an account of the signing of Treaty Six. These are superb examples of authentic spoken Cree texts. They are presented in syllabics, with Roman orthography and English translation on facing pages, and a glossary.
[more]

front cover of Women and Temporality in Literature and Cinema
Women and Temporality in Literature and Cinema
Negotiating with Timelessness
Ila Ahlawat
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
Women and Temporality in Literature and Cinema delves into the subject of literary and cinematic women characters entrapped in temporal spaces and their peculiar communication with visibility, enclosure, space and time in the setup of a sexual and temporal discord. It explores subjects such as youth, ageing, remembering, forgetting, and repeating within the larger realm of gendered temporalities that are essentially a nuanced and affective experience. In its entirety, this book has sought to locate and spell out both the damaging as well as the healing effects of temporality upon women's consciousness.
[more]

front cover of Transplanting the Great Society
Transplanting the Great Society
Lyndon Johnson and Food for Peace
Kristin L. Ahlberg
University of Missouri Press, 2008
Enacted in 1954, the Food for Peace program allowed the United States to make agricultural surpluses available to needy nations but served varying political agendas. President Eisenhower saw it primarily as a temporary means for improving domestic agriculture prices, while his two Democratic successors turned it into the cornerstone of an expanded foreign assistance program.
Kristin Ahlberg traces the transformation of Public Law 480 from a means of liquidating domestic surplus into a vital component of U.S. foreign policy. She focuses on how Lyndon Johnson sought to re-create his Great Society reforms on a global scale by exporting programs designed to improve the lives of world citizens through combating food shortages—and how he also wielded Food for Peace as a diplomatic tool to gain support for U.S. policies and to reward or punish allies for their behavior.
LBJ sought to demonstrate America’s commitment to the less fortunate while providing a deterrent to those impoverished nations most vulnerable to communist influence, and the White House maintained control of the program’s objectives on a country-by-country basis while leaving its implementation to the bureaucracy. Ahlberg describes these foreign policy maneuvers as well as the domestic battles that found farm nationalists like Senator Allen Ellender opposing Johnson and Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman—and also found the Department of Agriculture, Department of State, and Agency for International Development vying for control of the program.
Ahlberg draws on recently declassified sources to show how the Johnson administration used Food for Peace to win diplomatic support for American policy in Vietnam, prevent nuclear proliferation on the Indian subcontinent, and uphold Israeli security. When India diverted resources from agriculture to arms, Washington suspended wheat shipments until New Delhi reordered its priorities. But in the case of Israel and South Vietnam, LBJ used food aid to help client governments build up their militaries—as well as to win the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people.
Transplanting the Great Society is an insightful study that shows the successes and limitations of using food aid as a diplomatic tool during the middle period of the cold war. It paints a broader picture of Johnson’s foreign policies, opening a new window on both his administration and postwar diplomatic history.
[more]

front cover of Plains Village Archaeology
Plains Village Archaeology
Bison Hunting Farmers in the Central and Northern Plains
Stanley A Ahler
University of Utah Press, 2007
Plains villagers had a well-developed life way of intensive horticulture, bison hunting, and residence in substantial timber houses. This volume documents how Plains village culture emerged as a widespread and cohesive cultural adaptation from its roots in late Plains woodland cultures, as well as how it was repeatedly altered by internal and external forces. It addresses the historical emergence of these peoples, greatly transformed and decimated as the Wichitas, Omaha, Pawnees, Arikaras, Mandans, and Hidatsas.

This volume presents a cross section of current research about the origins and internal developments of prehistoric Plains village people in the Central and Northern Plains.
[more]

front cover of Calling Family
Calling Family
Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives
Tanja Ahlin
Rutgers University Press, 2023
How do digital technologies shape both how people care for each other and, through that, who they are? With technological innovation is on the rise and increasing migration introducing vast distances between family members--a situation additionally complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the requirements of physical distancing, especially for the most vulnerable – older adults--this is a pertinent question. Through ethnographic fieldwork among families of migrating nurses from Kerala, India, Tanja Ahlin explores how digital technologies shape elder care when adult children and their aging parents live far apart. Coming from a country in which appropriate elder care is closely associated with co-residence, these families tinker with smartphones and social media to establish how care at a distance can and should be done to be considered good. Through the notion of transnational care collectives, Calling Family uncovers the subtle workings of digital technologies on care across countries and continents when being physically together is not feasible. Calling Family provides a better understanding of technological relationality that can only be expected to further intensify in the future.
[more]

front cover of Historical Archaeologies of the Caribbean
Historical Archaeologies of the Caribbean
Contextualizing Sites through Colonialism, Capitalism, and Globalism
Todd M. Ahlman
University of Alabama Press, 2019
New perspectives on Caribbean historical archaeology that go beyond the colonial plantation
 
Historical Archaeologies of the Caribbean: Contextualizing Sites through Colonialism, Capitalism, and Globalism addresses issues in Caribbean history and historical archaeology such as freedom, frontiers, urbanism, postemancipation life, trade, plantation life, and new heritage. This collection moves beyond plantation archaeology by expanding the knowledge of the diverse Caribbean experiences from the late seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries.
 
The essays in this volume are grounded in strong research programs and data analysis that incorporate humanistic narratives in their discussions of Amerindian, freedmen, plantation, institutional, military, and urban sites. Sites include a sample of the many different types found across the Caribbean from a variety of colonial contexts that are seldom reported in archaeological research, yet constitute components essential to understanding the full range and depth of Caribbean history.
 
Contributors examine urban contexts in Nevis and St. John and explore the economic connections between Europeans and enslaved Africans in urban and plantation settings in St. Eustatius. The volume contains a pioneering study of frontier exchange with Amerindians in Dominica and a synthesis of ceramic exchange networks among enslaved Africans in the Leeward Islands. Chapters on military forts in Nevis and St. Kitts call attention to this often-neglected aspect of the Caribbean colonial landscape. Contributors also directly address culture heritage issues relating to community participation and interpretation. On St. Kitts, the legacy of forced confinement of lepers ties into debates of current public health policy. Plantation site studies from Antigua and Martinique are especially relevant because they detail comparisons of French and British patterns of African enslavement and provide insights into how each addressed the social and economic changes that occurred with emancipation.


Contributors
Todd M. Ahlman / Douglas V. Armstrong / Samantha Rebovich Bardoe / Paul Farnsworth / Jeffrey R. Ferguson / R. Grant Gilmore III / Diana González-Tennant / Edward González-Tennant / Barbara J. Heath / Carter L. Hudgins Kenneth G. Kelly / Eric Klingelhofer / Roger H. Leech / Stephan Lenik / Gerald F. Schroedl / Diane Wallman / Christian Williamson

 
[more]

front cover of Reproductive Restraints
Reproductive Restraints
Birth Control in India, 1877-1947
Sanjam Ahluwalia
University of Illinois Press, 2007

Reproductive Restraints traces the history of contraception use and population management in colonial India, while illuminating its connection to contemporary debates in India and birth control movements in Great Britain and the United States. Sanjam Ahluwalia draws attention to the interactive and relational history of Indian birth control by including western activists such as Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes alongside important Indian campaigners. In revealing the elitist politics of middle-class feminists, Indian nationalists, western activists, colonial authorities and the medical establishment, Ahluwalia finds that they all sought to rationalize procreation and regulate women while invoking competing notions of freedom, femininity, and family.

Ahluwalia’s remarkable interviews with practicing midwives in rural northern India fills a gaping void in the documentary history of birth control and shows that the movement has had little appeal to non-elite groups in India. Finding that Jaunpuri women’s reproductive decisions are bound to their emotional, cultural, and economic reliance on family and community, Ahluwalia presents the limitations of universal liberal feminist categories, which often do not consider differences among localized subjects. She argues that elitist birth control efforts failed to account for Indian women’s values and needs and have worked to restrict reproductive rights rather than liberate subaltern Indian women since colonial times.

[more]

front cover of Everyday Conversions
Everyday Conversions
Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait
Attiya Ahmad
Duke University Press, 2017
Why are domestic workers converting to Islam in the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf region? In Everyday Conversions Attiya Ahmad presents us with an original analysis of this phenomenon. Using extensive fieldwork conducted among South Asian migrant women in Kuwait, Ahmad argues domestic workers’ Muslim belonging emerges from their work in Kuwaiti households as they develop Islamic piety in relation—but not opposition—to their existing religious practices, family ties, and ethnic and national belonging. Their conversion is less a clean break from their preexisting lives than it is a refashioning in response to their everyday experiences. In examining the connections between migration, labor, gender, and Islam, Ahmad complicates conventional understandings of the dynamics of religious conversion and the feminization of transnational labor migration while proposing the concept of everyday conversion as a way to think more broadly about emergent forms of subjectivity, affinity, and belonging.
[more]

front cover of Futures after Progress
Futures after Progress
Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore
Chloe Ahmann
University of Chicago Press, 2024
A powerful ethnographic study of South Baltimore, a place haunted by toxic pasts in its pursuit of better futures.

Factory fires, chemical explosions, and aerial pollutants have inexorably shaped South Baltimore into one of the most polluted places in the country. In Futures after Progress, anthropologist Chloe Ahmann explores the rise and fall of industrial lifeways on this edge of the city and the uncertainties that linger in their wake. Writing from the community of Curtis Bay, where two hundred years of technocratic hubris have carried lethal costs, Ahmann also follows local efforts to realize a good future after industry and the rifts competing visions opened between neighbors.
 
Examining tensions between White and Black residents, environmental activists and industrial enthusiasts, local elders and younger generations, Ahmann shows how this community has become a battleground for competing political futures whose stakes reverberate beyond its six square miles in a present after progress has lost steam. And yet—as one young resident explains—“that’s not how the story ends.” Rigorous and moving, Futures after Progress probes the deep roots of our ecological predicament, offering insight into what lies ahead for a country beset by dreams deferred and a planet on the precipice of change.
[more]

front cover of Complaint!
Complaint!
Sara Ahmed
Duke University Press, 2021
In Complaint! Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens. To make complaints within institutions is to learn how they work and for whom they work: complaint as feminist pedagogy. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. To open these doors---to get complaints through, keep them going, or keep them alive---Ahmed emphasizes, requires forming new kinds of collectives. This book offers a systematic analysis of the methods used to stop complaints and a powerful and poetic meditation on what complaints can be used to do. Following a long lineage of Black feminist and feminist of color critiques of the university, Ahmed delivers a timely consideration of how institutional change becomes possible and why it is necessary.
[more]

front cover of Living a Feminist Life
Living a Feminist Life
Sara Ahmed
Duke University Press, 2017
In Living a Feminist Life Sara Ahmed shows how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist at home and at work. Building on legacies of feminist of color scholarship in particular, Ahmed offers a poetic and personal meditation on how feminists become estranged from worlds they critique—often by naming and calling attention to problems—and how feminists learn about worlds from their efforts to transform them. Ahmed also provides her most sustained commentary on the figure of the feminist killjoy introduced in her earlier work while showing how feminists create inventive solutions—such as forming support systems—to survive the shattering experiences of facing the walls of racism and sexism. The killjoy survival kit and killjoy manifesto, with which the book concludes, supply practical tools for how to live a feminist life, thereby strengthening the ties between the inventive creation of feminist theory and living a life that sustains it.
[more]

front cover of On Being Included
On Being Included
Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life
Sara Ahmed
Duke University Press, 2012
What does diversity do? What are we doing when we use the language of diversity? Sara Ahmed offers an account of the diversity world based on interviews with diversity practitioners in higher education, as well as her own experience of doing diversity work. Diversity is an ordinary, even unremarkable, feature of institutional life. Yet diversity practitioners often experience institutions as resistant to their work, as captured through their use of the metaphor of the "brick wall." On Being Included offers an explanation of this apparent paradox. It explores the gap between symbolic commitments to diversity and the experience of those who embody diversity. Commitments to diversity are understood as "non-performatives" that do not bring about what they name. The book provides an account of institutional whiteness and shows how racism can be obscured by the institutionalization of diversity. Diversity is used as evidence that institutions do not have a problem with racism. On Being Included offers a critique of what happens when diversity is offered as a solution. It also shows how diversity workers generate knowledge of institutions in attempting to transform them.
[more]

front cover of The Promise of Happiness
The Promise of Happiness
Sara Ahmed
Duke University Press, 2010
The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way.

Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including Mrs. Dalloway, The Well of Loneliness, Bend It Like Beckham, and Children of Men, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.

[more]

front cover of Queer Phenomenology
Queer Phenomenology
Orientations, Objects, Others
Sara Ahmed
Duke University Press, 2006
In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.

Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear—and those that do not—as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts—by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon—with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.

[more]

front cover of What's the Use?
What's the Use?
On the Uses of Use
Sara Ahmed
Duke University Press, 2019
In What’s the Use? Sara Ahmed continues the work she began in The Promise of Happiness and Willful Subjects by taking up a single word—in this case, use—and following it around. She shows how use became associated with life and strength in nineteenth-century biological and social thought and considers how utilitarianism offered a set of educational techniques for shaping individuals by directing them toward useful ends. Ahmed also explores how spaces become restricted to some uses and users, with specific reference to universities. She notes, however, the potential for queer use: how things can be used in ways that were not intended or by those for whom they were not intended. Ahmed posits queer use as a way of reanimating the project of diversity work as the ordinary and painstaking task of opening up institutions to those who have historically been excluded.
[more]

front cover of Willful Subjects
Willful Subjects
Sara Ahmed
Duke University Press, 2014
In Willful Subjects Sara Ahmed explores willfulness as a charge often made by some against others. One history of will is a history of attempts to eliminate willfulness from the will. Delving into philosophical and literary texts, Ahmed examines the relation between will and willfulness, ill will and good will, and the particular will and general will. Her reflections shed light on how will is embedded in a political and cultural landscape, how it is embodied, and how will and willfulness are socially mediated. Attentive to the wayward, the wandering, and the deviant, Ahmed considers how willfulness is taken up by those who have received its charge. Grounded in feminist, queer, and antiracist politics, her sui generis analysis of the willful subject, the figure who wills wrongly or wills too much, suggests that willfulness might be required to recover from the attempt at its elimination.
[more]

front cover of Before Orthodoxy
Before Orthodoxy
The Satanic Verses in Early Islam
Shahab Ahmed
Harvard University Press, 2017

One of the most controversial episodes in the life of the Prophet Muhammad concerns an incident in which he allegedly mistook words suggested by Satan as divine revelation. Known as the Satanic verses, these praises to the pagan deities contradict the Islamic belief that Allah is one and absolute. Muslims today—of all sects—deny that the incident of the Satanic verses took place. But as Shahab Ahmed explains, Muslims did not always hold this view.

Before Orthodoxy wrestles with the question of how religions establish truth—especially religions such as Islam that lack a centralized authority to codify beliefs. Taking the now universally rejected incident of the Satanic verses as a case study in the formation of Islamic orthodoxy, Ahmed shows that early Muslims, circa 632 to 800 CE, held the exact opposite belief. For them, the Satanic verses were an established fact in the history of the Prophet. Ahmed offers a detailed account of the attitudes of Muslims to the Satanic verses in the first two centuries of Islam and traces the chains of transmission in the historical reports known as riwāyah.

Touching directly on the nature of Muhammad’s prophetic visions, the interpretation of the Satanic verses incident is a question of profound importance in Islam, one that plays a role in defining the limits of what Muslims may legitimately say and do—issues crucial to understanding the contemporary Islamic world.

[more]

front cover of Between Self and Community
Between Self and Community
Children’s Personhood in a Globalized South Korea
Junehui Ahn
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Between Self and Community investigates the early childhood socialization process in a rapidly changing, globalizing South Korea. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a South Korean preschool, it shows how both children and teachers interactively navigate, construct, and reconstruct their own multifaceted and sometimes conflicting models of what makes “a good child” amid Korea’s shifting educational and social contexts. Junehui Ahn details the conflicting and competing ways in which the ideologies of new personhood are enacted in actual everyday socialization contexts and reveals the confusions, dilemmas, and ruptures that occur when globally dominant ideals of childhood development are superimposed onto local experiences. Between Self and Community pays special attention to the way children, as active agents of socialization, create, construe, and sustain their own meanings of their personhood, thereby highlighting the dynamism children and their culturally rich peer world create in South Korea’s shifting socialization terrain.  
[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Bangtan Remixed
A Critical BTS Reader
Patty Ahn
Duke University Press, 2024
Bangtan Remixed delves into the cultural impact of celebrated K-Pop boy band BTS, exploring their history, aesthetics, fan culture, and capitalist moment. The collection’s contributors—who include artists, scholars, journalists, activists, and fans—approach BTS through inventive and wide-ranging transnational perspectives. From tracing BTS’s hip hop genealogy to analyzing how the band’s mid-2020 album reflects the COVID-19 pandemic to demonstrating how Baroque art history influences BTS’s music videos, the contributors investigate BTS’s aesthetic heritage. They also explore the political and technological dimensions of BTS’s popularity with essays on K-Pop and BTS’s fan culture as frontiers of digital technology, the complex relationship between BTS and Blackness, the impact of anti-Asian racism on BTS’s fandom, and the challenges BTS poses to conservative norms of gender and sexuality. Bangtan Remixed shows how one band can inspire millions of fans and provide a broad range of insights into contemporary social and political life.

Contributors. Andrea Acosta, Patty Ahn, Carolina Alves, Inez Amihan Anderson, Allison Anne Gray Atis, Kaina “Kai” Bernal, Mutlu Binark, Jheanelle Brown, Sophia Cai, Michelle Cho, Mariam Elba, Ameena Fareeda, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Rosanna Hall, Dal Yong Jin, JIN Youngsun, Despina Kakoudaki, Yuni Kartika, Alptekin Keskin, Rachel Kuo, Marci Kwon, Courtney Lazore, Regina Yung Lee, S. Heijin Lee, Wonseok Lee, Amanda Lovely, Melody Lynch-Kimery, Maria Mison, Noel Sajid I. Murad, Sara Murphy, UyenThi Tran Myhre, Rani Neutill, Johnny Huy Nguyễn, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Karlina Octaviany, Nykeah Parham, Stefania Piccialli, Raymond San Diego, Hannah Ruth L. Sison, Prerna Subramanian, Havannah Tran, Andrew Ty, Gracelynne West, Yutian Wong, Jaclyn Zhou
[more]

front cover of Bioinsecurities
Bioinsecurities
Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species
Neel Ahuja
Duke University Press, 2016
In Bioinsecurities Neel Ahuja argues that U.S. imperial expansion has been shaped by the attempts of health and military officials to control the interactions of humans, animals, viruses, and bacteria at the borders of U.S. influence, a phenomenon called the government of species. The book explores efforts to control the spread of Hansen's disease, venereal disease, polio, smallpox, and HIV through interventions linking the continental United States to Hawai'i, Panamá, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Congo, Iraq, and India in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ahuja argues that racial fears of contagion helped to produce public optimism concerning state uses of pharmaceuticals, medical experimentation, military intervention, and incarceration to regulate the immune capacities of the body. In the process, the security state made the biological structures of human and animal populations into sites of struggle in the politics of empire, unleashing new patient activisms and forms of resistance to medical and military authority across the increasingly global sphere of U.S. influence.
 

[more]

front cover of Slavery Unseen
Slavery Unseen
Sex, Power, and Violence in Brazilian History
Lamonte Aidoo
Duke University Press, 2018
In Slavery Unseen, Lamonte Aidoo upends the narrative of Brazil as a racial democracy, showing how the myth of racial democracy elides the history of sexual violence, patriarchal terror, and exploitation of slaves. Drawing on sources ranging from inquisition trial documents to travel accounts and literature, Aidoo demonstrates how interracial and same-sex sexual violence operated as a key mechanism of the production and perpetuation of slavery as well as racial and gender inequality. The myth of racial democracy, Aidoo contends, does not stem from or reflect racial progress; rather, it is an antiblack apparatus that upholds and protects the heteronormative white patriarchy throughout Brazil's past and on into the present.
[more]

front cover of The Life and Times of Louis Lomax
The Life and Times of Louis Lomax
The Art of Deliberate Disunity
Thomas Aiello
Duke University Press, 2021
Syndicated television and radio host. Serial liar. Pioneering journalist. Convicted criminal. Close ally of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Publicity-seeking provocateur. Louis Lomax's life was a study in contradiction. In this biography, Thomas Aiello traces the complicated and fascinating arc of Lomax's life and career, showing how the contradictions, tumult, and inconsistencies that marked his life reflected those of 1960s America. Aiello takes readers from Lomax's childhood in the Deep South to his early confidence schemes to his emergence as one of the loudest and most influential voices of the civil rights movement. Regardless of what political position he happened to take at any given moment, Lomax preached “the art of deliberate disunity,” in which the path to democracy could only be achieved through a diversity of opinions. Engaging and broad in scope, The Life and Times of Louis Lomax is the definitive study of one of the civil rights era's most complicated, important, and overlooked figures.
[more]

front cover of New Orleans Sports
New Orleans Sports
Playing Hard in the Big Easy
Thomas Aiello
University of Arkansas Press, 2019
New Orleans has long been a city fixated on its own history and culture. Founded in 1718 by the French, transferred to the Spanish in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, and sold to the United States in 1803, the city’s culture, law, architecture, food, music, and language share the influence of all three countries. This cultural mélange also manifests in the city’s approach to sport, where each game is steeped in the city’s history.

Tracing that history from the early nineteenth century to the present, while also surveying the state of the city’s sports historiography, New Orleans Sports places sport in the context of race relations, politics, and civic and business development to expand that historiography—currently dominated by a text that stops at 1900—into the twentieth century, offering a modern examination of sports in the city.
[more]

front cover of Sharing
Sharing
Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age
Philippe Aigrain
Amsterdam University Press, 2012

An in-depth exploration of digital culture and its dissemination, Sharing offers a counterpoint to the dominant view that file sharing is piracy. Instead, Philippe Aigrain looks at the benefits of file sharing, which allows unknown writers and artists to be appreciated more easily. Concentrating not only on the cultural enrichment caused by widely shared digital media, Sharing also discusses new financing models that would allow works to be shared freely by individuals without aim at profit. Aigrain carefully balances the needs to support and reward creative activity with a suitable respect for the cultural common good and proposes a new interpretation of the digital landscape.

[more]

front cover of A Chosen People, a Promised Land
A Chosen People, a Promised Land
Mormonism and Race in Hawai’i
Hokulani K. Aikau
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Christianity figured prominently in the imperial and colonial exploitation and dispossession of indigenous peoples worldwide, yet many indigenous people embrace Christian faith as part of their cultural and ethnic identities. A Chosen People, a Promised Land gets to the heart of this contradiction by exploring how Native Hawaiian members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (more commonly known as Mormons) understand and negotiate their place in this quintessentially American religion.

Mormon missionaries arrived in Hawai‘i in 1850, a mere twenty years after Joseph Smith founded the church. Hokulani K. Aikau traces how Native Hawaiians became integrated into the religious doctrine of the church as a “chosen people”—even at a time when exclusionary racial policies regarding black members of the church were being codified. Aikau shows how Hawaiians and other Polynesian saints came to be considered chosen and how they were able to use their venerated status toward their own spiritual, cultural, and pragmatic ends.

Using the words of Native Hawaiian Latter-Day Saints to illuminate the intersections of race, colonization, and religion, A Chosen People, a Promised Land examines Polynesian Mormon articulations of faith and identity within a larger political context of self-determination.

[more]

front cover of Detours
Detours
A Decolonial Guide to Hawai'i
Hokulani K. Aikau
Duke University Press, 2019
Many people first encounter Hawai‘i through the imagination—a postcard picture of hula girls, lu‘aus, and plenty of sun, surf, and sea. While Hawai‘i is indeed beautiful, Native Hawaiians struggle with the problems brought about by colonialism, military occupation, tourism, food insecurity, high costs of living, and climate change. In this brilliant reinvention of the travel guide, artists, activists, and scholars redirect readers from the fantasy of Hawai‘i as a tropical paradise and tourist destination toward a multilayered and holistic engagement with Hawai‘i's culture and complex history. The essays, stories, artworks, maps, and tour itineraries in Detours create decolonial narratives in ways that will forever change how readers think about and move throughout Hawai‘i.

Contributors. Hōkūlani K. Aikau, Malia Akutagawa, Adele Balderston, Kamanamaikalani Beamer, Ellen-Rae Cachola, Emily Cadiz, Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar, David A. Chang, Lianne Marie Leda Charlie, Greg Chun, Joy Lehuanani Enomoto, S. Joe Estores, Nicholas Kawelakai Farrant, Jessica Ka‘ui Fu, Candace Fujikane, Linda H. L. Furuto, Sonny Ganaden, Cheryl Geslani, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, Tina Grandinetti, Craig Howes, Aurora Kagawa-Viviani, Noelle M. K. Y. Kahanu, Haley Kailiehu, Kyle Kajihiro, Halena Kapuni-Reynolds, Terrilee N. Kekoolani-Raymond, Kekuewa Kikiloi, William Kinney, Francesca Koethe, Karen K. Kosasa, N. Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, Kapulani Landgraf, Laura E. Lyons, David Uahikeaikalei‘ohu Maile, Brandy Nālani McDougall, Davianna Pōmaika‘i McGregor, Laurel Mei-Singh, P. Kalawai‘a Moore, Summer Kaimalia Mullins-Ibrahim, Jordan Muratsuchi, Hanohano Naehu, Malia Nobrega-Olivera, Katrina-Ann R. Kapā‘anaokalāokeola Nākoa Oliveira, Jamaica Heolimelekalani Osorio, No‘eau Peralto, No‘u Revilla, Kalaniua Ritte, Maya L. Kawailanaokeawaiki Saffery, Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Noenoe K. Silva, Ty P. Kāwika Tengan, Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Stan Tomita, Mehana Blaich Vaughan, Wendy Mapuana Waipā, Julie Warech
 
[more]

front cover of Making Worlds
Making Worlds
Gender, Metaphor, Materiality
Susan Hardy Aiken
University of Arizona Press, 1997
Making Worlds brings together thirty-one distinguished feminist activists, artists, and scholars to address a series of questions that resonate with increasing urgency in our current global environment: How is space imagined, represented, arranged, and distributed? What are the lived consequences of these configurations? And how are these questions affected by gender and other socially constructed categories of "difference"—race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, nationality? How are the symbolic formations of place and space marked by cultural ideologies that carry across into the places and spaces we inhabit, the boundaries and institutions we maintain?

In recent years these questions have occasioned intensifying debates, but they have seldom extended beyond the boundaries of individual academic disciplines or crossed the divide that has traditionally separated the academy from the "outside" world. Making Worlds both questions and traverses those divisions by combining personal essays, activist political rhetoric, oral history, poetry, iconography, and performance art with interdisciplinary academic discourses.

Representing a wide range of perspectives, Making Worlds develops a provocative conversation about gender and spatiality in the interwoven symbolic and material environments we create. The contributors engage such issues as the body as site of symbolic action, fabrication, and desire; the place and play of sexualities; the cultural implications of everyday life—home, travel, work, childbirth, food, disease, and death; technology and mass media; surveillance, confinement, and the law; the dynamics of race and ethnicity; imperialism, oppression, and resistance; the politics of urban spaces; landscape and cultural memory; the experience of time; and the nature of "Nature." For students and scholars in cultural studies, geography, literary criticism, anthropology, history, and women's studies, it offers new ways of thinking about space, place, and the spatial contexts of social thought and action.
[more]

front cover of Excavations in Southwest Utah
Excavations in Southwest Utah
UUAP 76
C Melvin Aikens
University of Utah Press, 1965
AKA Glen Canyon Series Number 27. This volume reports on sites excavated in southwest Utah, three near St. George, three in Zion National Park, and two in Johnson Canyon, east of Kanab. The appendix also describes additional sites that were surveyed in these areas. 
[more]

front cover of Virgin-Kayenta Cultural Relationships
Virgin-Kayenta Cultural Relationships
UUAP 79
C Melvin Aikens
University of Utah Press, 1966
AKA Glen Canyon Series Number 29. This paper reports on the prehistory of the Virgin branch of the Anasazi in the Southwest. It incorporates information from sites excavated in the early 1960s in southwest Utah to reassess earlier studies of Virgin Anasazi culture that were based primarily on pottery. 
[more]

front cover of Oregon Archaeology
Oregon Archaeology
Melvin C. Aikens
Oregon State University Press, 2011

front cover of The Politics of Rape
The Politics of Rape
Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage
Jennifer L. Airey
University of Delaware Press, 2013
The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage is the first full-length study to examine representations of sexual violence on the Restoration stage. By reading theatrical depictions of sexual violence alongside political tracts, propaganda pamphlets, and circulating broadsides, this study argues that authors used dramatic representations of rape to respond to and engage with late-century upheavals in British political culture. Beginning with an examination of rape scenes in English Civil War propaganda, The Politics of Rape argues that Roundhead authors described acts of rape and atrocity to demonize their enemies, the Irish, the Catholics, and the Cavaliers. After the Restoration, propagandists and playwrights on each side of every political conflict would follow suit, altering the rhetoric of sexual violence in response to each new moment of political upheaval: The Restoration of Charles II, the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars, the Popish Plot, the Exclusion Crisis, the Glorious Revolution, and the accession of William and Mary. The study offers an intensive look at British propaganda culture, gathering together a wealth of understudied pamphlet texts, and identifying a series of stock figures that recur throughout the century: The demonic Irishman, sexually violent villain of the 1641 Irish Rebellion tracts; the debauched Cavalier, the secretly Catholic royalist rapist; the poisonous Catholic bride, the malignant consort who encourages the rapes of Protestant women; the cannibal father, the evil patriarch who rapes his daughters-in-laws before ingesting his own sons as a symbol of monarchical overreach; and the ravished monarch, the male rape victim whose sexual violation protests his political disenfranchisement. The study also traces the appearance of these figures on the British stage, examining well-known works by Dryden, Rochester, Behn, Lee, and Shadwell, alongside lesser-known plays by Orrery, Howard, Settle, Crowne, Ravenscroft, Pix, Cibber, and Brady. The Politics of Rape thus offers a new method for understanding of the geo-political implications of theatrical sexual violence.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
[more]

logo for University of Wisconsin Press
A Common Spring
Crime Novel and Classic
Nadya Aisenberg
University of Wisconsin Press, 1980

Nadya Aisenberg discusses the potentialities of the crime novel, its implications, principles, and scope, and its analogy ot myth and the fairy tale. She proposes that the detective story and the thriller have made an unacknowledged contribution to "serious" literature. Her discussion of Dickens, Conrad, and Green indicate that each borrowed many important ingredients from the formulaic novel.

[more]

front cover of Indians in Kenya
Indians in Kenya
The Politics of Diaspora
Sana Aiyar
Harvard University Press, 2014

Working as merchants, skilled tradesmen, clerks, lawyers, and journalists, Indians formed the economic and administrative middle class in colonial Kenya. In general, they were wealthier than Africans, but were denied the political and economic privileges that Europeans enjoyed. Moreover, despite their relative prosperity, Indians were precariously positioned in Kenya. Africans usually viewed them as outsiders, and Europeans largely considered them subservient. Indians demanded recognition on their own terms. Indians in Kenya chronicles the competing, often contradictory, strategies by which the South Asian diaspora sought a political voice in Kenya from the beginning of colonial rule in the late 1890s to independence in the 1960s.

Indians’ intellectual, economic, and political connections with South Asia shaped their understanding of their lives in Kenya. Sana Aiyar investigates how the many strands of Indians’ diasporic identity influenced Kenya’s political leadership, from claiming partnership with Europeans in their mission to colonize and “civilize” East Africa to successful collaborations with Africans to battle for racial equality, including during the Mau Mau Rebellion. She also explores how the hierarchical structures of colonial governance, the material inequalities between Indians and Africans, and the racialized political discourses that flourished in both colonial and postcolonial Kenya limited the success of alliances across racial and class lines. Aiyar demonstrates that only by examining the ties that bound Indians to worlds on both sides of the Indian Ocean can we understand how Kenya came to terms with its South Asian minority.

[more]

front cover of On the Edge of the Holocaust
On the Edge of the Holocaust
The Shoah in Latin American Literature and Culture
Edna Aizenberg
Brandeis University Press, 2015
In this bold study, Edna Aizenberg offers a much-needed corrective to both Latin American literary scholarship and popular assumptions that the whole of Latin America served as a Nazi refuge both during and after World War II. Analyzing the treatment of the Shoah by five leading figures in Argentine, Brazilian, and Chilean writing—Alberto Gerchunoff, Clarice Lispector, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriela Mistral, and Joao Guimaraes Rosa—Aizenberg illuminates how Latin American intellectuals engaged with the horrific information that reached them regarding the Holocaust, including the sympathy and collaboration of their own governments with the Nazis. Aizenberg emphasizes how—through fiction, journalism, and activism—these five culture-makers opposed and fought fascism. At the same time, her readings of individual texts confront shopworn clichés about Latin American writing and literature, suggesting deeper and richer dimensions to many canonical works. This interdisciplinary book fills critical gaps in both Holocaust and Latin American studies, and will be of great interest to scholars and students in both fields.
[more]

front cover of Mobile Subjects
Mobile Subjects
Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment
Aren Z. Aizura
Duke University Press, 2018
The first famous transgender person in the United States, Christine Jorgensen, traveled to Denmark for gender reassignment surgery in 1952. Jorgensen became famous during the ascent of postwar dreams about the possibilities for technology to transform humanity and the world. In Mobile Subjects Aren Z. Aizura examines transgender narratives within global health and tourism economies from 1952 to the present. Drawing on an archive of trans memoirs and documentaries as well as ethnographic fieldwork with trans people obtaining gender reassignment surgery in Thailand, Aizura maps the uneven use of medical protocols to show how national and regional health care systems and labor economies contribute to and limit transnational mobility. Aizura positions transgender travel as a form of biomedical tourism, examining how understandings of race, gender, and aesthetics shape global cosmetic surgery cultures and how economic and racially stratified marketing and care work create the ideal transgender subject as an implicitly white, global citizen. In so doing, he shows how understandings of travel and mobility depend on the historical architectures of colonialism and contemporary patterns of global consumption and labor.
[more]

front cover of The Stranger in Medieval Society
The Stranger in Medieval Society
Frank. R. P. Akehurst
University of Minnesota Press, 1998

The Stranger in Medieval Society was first published in 1998. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The Stranger in Medieval Society examines the presence of outsiders in medieval Europe. Whether welcome or unwelcome, voluntary or involuntary, strangers appear in every society; they leave their own communities, venture into new environments, confront differences, and often spark changes. The first collection in medieval studies to concentrate on the notion of the stranger, these essays show how outsiders influenced the culture of Europe in the Middle Ages.

Among the topics explored are Edward III and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as historical and literary instances of chivalric skill and courage; political conflict in the late French epic Renaut de Montauban; and a group of people who were doubly strangers-some thirty thousand Jews, who after being expelled from France in 1306 returned under an experimental agreement a few years later.

Contributors: William Calin, U of Florida; Susan Crane, Rutgers; Maria Dobozy, U of Utah; Edward R. Haymes, Cleveland State U; William Chester Jordan, Princeton U; Derek Pearsall, Harvard U; William D. Phillips Jr., U of Minnesota; Kathryn L. Reyerson, U of Minnesota; and Janet L. Solberg, Kalamazoo College.

F. R. P. Akehurst is professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota. Stephanie Cain Van D'Elden is director of graduate studies for the program in Germanic philology at the University of Minnesota.

This is volume 12 in the Medieval Cultures Series

[more]

front cover of Living in the Land of Death
Living in the Land of Death
The Choctaw Nation, 1830-1860
Donna L. Akers
Michigan State University Press, 2004

With the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Choctaw people began their journey over the Trail of Tears from their homelands in Mississippi to the new lands of the Choctaw Nation. Suffering a death rate of nearly 20 percent due to exposure, disease, mismanagement, and fraud, they limped into Indian Territory, or, as they knew it, the Land of the Dead (the route taken by the souls of Choctaw people after death on their way to the Choctaw afterlife). Their first few years in the new nation affirmed their name for the land, as hundreds more died from whooping cough, floods, starvation, cholera, and smallpox.
     Living in the Land of the Dead depicts the story of Choctaw survival, and the evolution of the Choctaw people in their new environment. Culturally, over time, their adaptation was one of homesteads and agriculture, eventually making them self-sufficient in the rich new lands of Indian Territory. Along the Red River and other major waterways several Choctaw families of mixed heritage built plantations, and imported large crews of slave labor to work cotton fields. They developed a sub-economy based on interaction with the world market. However, the vast majority of Choctaws continued with their traditional subsistence economy that was easily adapted to their new environment.
     The immigrant Choctaws did not, however, move into land that was vacant. The U.S. government, through many questionable and some outright corrupt extralegal maneuvers, chose to believe it had gained title through negotiations with some of the peoples whose homelands and hunting grounds formed Indian Territory. Many of these indigenous peoples reacted furiously to the incursion of the Choctaws onto their rightful lands. They threatened and attacked the Choctaws and other immigrant Indian Nations for years. Intruding on others’ rightful homelands, the farming-based Choctaws, through occupation and economics, disrupted the traditional hunting economy practiced by the Southern Plains Indians, and contributed to the demise of the Plains ways of life.

[more]

front cover of Flames after Midnight
Flames after Midnight
Murder, Vengeance, and the Desolation of a Texas Community, Revised Edition
Monte Akers
University of Texas Press, 2011

What happened in Kirven, Texas, in May 1922, has been forgotten by the outside world. It was a coworker's whispered words, "Kirven is where they burned the [Negroes]," that set Monte Akers to work at discovering the true story behind a young white woman's brutal murder and the burning alive of three black men who were almost certainly innocent of it. This was followed by a month-long reign of terror as white men killed blacks while local authorities concealed the real identity of the white probable murderers and allowed them to go free.

Writing nonfiction with the skill of a novelist, Akers paints a vivid portrait of a community desolated by race hatred and its own refusal to face hard truths. He sets this tragedy within the story of a region prospering from an oil boom but plagued by lawlessness, and traces the lynching's repercussions down the decades to the present day. In the new epilogue, Akers adds details that have come to light as a result of the book's publication, including an eyewitness account of the burnings from an elderly man who claimed to have castrated two of the men before they were lynched.

[more]

front cover of From Bureaucracy to Bullets
From Bureaucracy to Bullets
Extreme Domicide and the Right to Home
Bree Akesson
Rutgers University Press, 2022
There are currently a record-setting number of forcibly displaced persons in the world. This number continues to rise as solutions to alleviate humanitarian catastrophes of large-scale violence and displacement continue to fail. The likelihood of the displaced returning to their homes is becoming increasingly unlikely. In many cases, their homes have been destroyed as the result of violence. Why are the homes of certain populations targeted for destruction? What are the impacts of loss of home upon children, adults, families, communities, and societies? If having a home is a fundamental human right, then why is the destruction of home not viewed as a rights violation and punished accordingly? From Bureaucracy to Bullets answers these questions and more by focusing on the violent practice of extreme domicide, or the intentional destruction of the home, as a central and overlooked human rights issue.
[more]

front cover of Electronic Iran
Electronic Iran
The Cultural Politics of an Online Evolution
Niki Akhavan
Rutgers University Press, 2013

Electronic Iran introduces the concept of the Iranian Internet, a framework that captures interlinked, transnational networks of virtual and offline spaces.

Taking her cues from early Internet ethnographies that stress the importance of treating the Internet as both a site and product of cultural production, accounts in media studies that highlight the continuities between old and new media, and a range of works that have made critical interventions in the field of Iranian studies, Niki Akhavan traces key developments and confronts conventional wisdom about digital media in general, and contemporary Iranian culture and politics in particular.

Akhavan focuses largely on the years between 1998 and 2012 to reveal a diverse and combative virtual landscape where both geographically and ideologically dispersed individuals and groups deployed Internet technologies to variously construct, defend, and challenge narratives of Iranian national identity, society, and politics. While it tempers celebratory claims that have dominated assessments of the Iranian Internet, Electronic Iran is ultimately optimistic in its outlook. As it exposes and assesses overlooked aspects of the Iranian Internet, the book sketches a more complete map of its dynamic landscape, and suggests that the transformative powers of digital media can only be developed and understood if attention is paid to both the specificities of new technologies as well as the local and transnational contexts in which they appear.

Download open access ebook here.

[more]

front cover of Global Modernity from Coloniality to Pandemic
Global Modernity from Coloniality to Pandemic
A Cross-disciplinary Perspective
Hatem Akil
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Global Modernity from Coloniality to Pandemic explores issues related to the global crises of our time: reason, science, and the environment by revisiting the notions of modernity, modernism, and modernization, which can no longer be considered purely Western or strictly secular. The book poses questions about viewing modernity today from the vantage point of traditionally disparate disciplines – engaging scholars from sociology to science, philosophy to robotics, medicine to visual culture, mathematics to cultural theory, biology to environmental studies. Leading sociologist Alain Touraine contributes a new text in which he reflects on the role of women, refugees and migrants, and the future of democracy. In their conclusion, the editors posit a fundamental ethical distinction between modernization and modernity and call for a new understanding of modernity that is globally distributed, informed by the voices of many, and concerned with crises that threaten all of us at the level of the species – a modernity-to-come.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Narrating the City
Mediated Representations of Architecture, Urban Forms and Social Life
Aysegül Akçay Kavakoglu
Intellect Books, 2020

An analysis of the ways film and media create topographies of cities, architecture, and metropolitan experiences.

Narrating the City examines how film and related visual media offer insights and commentary on the city as both a constructed object and a lived social experience. It brings together filmmakers, architects, digital artists, designers, and media journalists who critically read, reinterpret, and create narratives of the city. Analyzing a variety of international films and placing them in dialogue with video art, photographic narratives, and emerging digital image-based technologies, the authors explore the expanding range of “mediated” narratives of contemporary architecture and urban culture from both a media and a sociological standpoint. 

The authors explore how moving-image narratives can create cinematic topographies, presenting familiar cities and modes of seeing in unfamiliar ways. The authors then turn to the new age of digital image making and consumption, revealing new techniques of representation, mediation, and augmentation of sensorial reality for city dwellers. The book’s emphasis on narrative also offers insights into critical societal issues including cultural identity, diversity, memory, and spatial politics, as they are both informed by and represented in various media.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Light from the East
Abbasid Freethinking in the Genealogies of Universal Humanism
Aziz Al-Azmeh
Harvard University Press

front cover of Who's Afraid of Meryl Streep?
Who's Afraid of Meryl Streep?
Rashid al-Daif
University of Texas Press, 2014

Rashid al-Daif’s provocative novel Who’s Afraid of Meryl Streep? takes an intimate look at the life of a recently married Lebanese man. Rashoud and his wife struggle as they work to negotiate not only their personal differences but also rapidly changing attitudes toward sex and marriage in Lebanese culture. As their fragile bond disintegrates, Rashoud finds television playing a more prominent role in his life; his wife uses the presence of a television at her parents’ house as an excuse to spend time away from her new home. Rashoud purchases a television in the hopes of luring his wife back home, but in a pivotal scene, he instead finds himself alone watching Kramer vs. Kramer. Without the aid of subtitles, he struggles to make sense of the film, projecting his wife’s behavior onto the character played by Meryl Streep, who captivates him but also frightens him in what he sees as an effort to take women’s liberation too far.

Who’s Afraid of Meryl Streep? offers a glimpse at evolving attitudes toward virginity, premarital sex, and abortion in Lebanon and addresses more universal concerns such as the role of love and lust in marriage. The novel has found wide success in Arabic and several European languages and has also been dramatized in both Arabic and French.

[more]

front cover of What Makes a Man?
What Makes a Man?
Sex Talk in Beirut and Berlin
Rashid al-Daif
University of Texas Press, 2015

In 2003, Lebanese writer Rashid al-Daif spent several weeks in Germany as part of the “West-East Divan” program, a cultural exchange effort meant to improve mutual awareness of German and Middle Eastern cultures. He was paired with German author Joachim Helfer, who then returned the visit to al-Daif in Lebanon. Following their time together, al-Daif published in Arabic a literary reportage of his encounter with Helfer in which he focuses on the German writer’s homosexuality. His frank observations have been variously read as trenchant, naïve, or offensive. In response, Helfer provided an equally frank point-by-point riposte to al-Daif’s text. Together these writers offer a rare exploration of attitudes toward sex, love, and gender across cultural lines. By stretching the limits of both fiction and essay, they highlight the importance of literary sensitivity in understanding the Other.

Rashid al-Daif’s “novelized biography” and Joachim Helfer’s commentary appear for the first time in English translation in What Makes a Man? Sex Talk in Beirut and Berlin. Also included in this volume are essays by specialists in Arabic and German literature that shed light on the discourse around sex between these two authors from different cultural contexts.

[more]

logo for University College London
Waiting For The Revolution To End
Syrian Displacement, Time and Subjectivity
Charlotte Al-Khalili
University College London, 2023
An exploration of the Syrian revolution through the experiences of citizens in exile.

Based on more than three years of embedded fieldwork with Syrians displaced in the border city of Gaziantep (southern Turkey), this book places the Syrian revolution and its tragic aftermath under ethnographic scrutiny. It charts the evolution from peaceful uprising (2011) to armed confrontation (2012), descent into fully fledged conflict (2013) and finally to proxy war (2015), to propose an understanding of revolution beyond success and failure.

While the Assad regime remains in place, the Syrian revolution (al-thawra) still holds a transformational power that can be located on intimate and world-making scales. Charlotte Al-Khalili traces the unintended consequences of revolution to reveal the reshaping of Syrian life-worlds and exiles’ evolving theorizations, experiences, and imaginations of al-thawra. She describes the in-between spatio-temporal realm inhabited by Syrians displaced to Turkey as they await the revolution’s outcomes and maps the revolution’s multidimensional and multi-scalar effects on their everyday life. By following the chronology of events inside Syria and Syrians’ geography of displacement, Waiting for the Revolution to End makes the relation between revolution and displacement its centerpiece, both as an ethnographic object and an analytical device.
 
[more]

front cover of Revolution Beyond the Event
Revolution Beyond the Event
The Afterlives of Radical Politics
Charlotte Al-Khalili
University College London, 2023
A critical perspective on the lived realities of revolutionary afterlives.

Revolution Beyond the Event brings together leading international anthropologists and emerging scholars to examine revolutionary legacies from the MENA region, Latin America, and the Caribbean. It explores the idea that revolutions have varied afterlives that complicate the assumptions about their duration, pace, and progression, and argues that a renewed focus on the temporality of radical politics is essential to our understanding of revolution. Through a careful selection of case studies, the book provides a critical perspective on the lived realities of revolutionary afterlives, challenging the liberal humanist assumptions implicit in the modern idea of revolution and reappraising the political agency of people caught up in revolutionary situations across a variety of ethnographic contexts.
[more]

front cover of Cyberwars in the Middle East
Cyberwars in the Middle East
Ahmed Al-Rawi
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Cyberwars in the Middle East argues that hacking is a form of online political disruption whose influence flows vertically in two directions (top-bottom or bottom-up) or horizontally. These hacking activities are performed along three political dimensions: international, regional, and local. Author Ahmed Al-Rawi argues that political hacking is an aggressive and militant form of public communication employed by tech-savvy individuals, regardless of their affiliations, in order to influence politics and policies. Kenneth Waltz’s structural realism theory is linked to this argument as it provides a relevant framework to explain why nation-states employ cyber tools against each other.

On the one hand, nation-states as well as their affiliated hacking groups like cyber warriors employ hacking as offensive and defensive tools in connection to the cyber activity or inactivity of other nation-states, such as the role of Russian Trolls disseminating disinformation on social media during the US 2016 presidential election. This is regarded as a horizontal flow of political disruption. Sometimes, nation-states, like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, use hacking and surveillance tactics as a vertical flow (top-bottom) form of online political disruption by targeting their own citizens due to their oppositional or activists’ political views. On the other hand, regular hackers who are often politically independent practice a form of bottom-top political disruption to address issues related to the internal politics of their respective nation-states such as the case of a number of Iraqi, Saudi, and Algerian hackers. In some cases, other hackers target ordinary citizens to express opposition to their political or ideological views which is regarded as a horizontal form of online political disruption. This book is the first of its kind to shine a light on many ways that governments and hackers are perpetrating cyber attacks in the Middle East and beyond, and to show the ripple effect of these attacks.
 
[more]

front cover of Macau and the Casino Complex
Macau and the Casino Complex
Stefan Al
University of Nevada Press, 2018
Special Award of the Jury Winner — 2018 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 

In only a decade, Macau has exploded from a sleepy backwater to the world’s casino capital. It was bound to happen. Macau, a former Portuguese colony that became a special administrative region within the People’s Republic of China in 1999, was the only place in China where gambling was legal. With a consumer base of 1.3 billion mainland Chinese deprived of casino gambling, and the world’s largest growing consumer class, international corporations rushed in to enter the games. As a result, the casino influx has permanently transformed the Macau peninsula: its ocean reclaimed, hillside excavated, roads congested, air polluted, and glimmering hotel towers tossed into the skyline, dwarfing the 19th century church towers.
 
Essays by a number of experts give a deeper insight on topics ranging from the myth of the Chinese gambler, the role of feng shui in casino design, the city’s struggle with heritage conservation, the politics of land reclamation, and the effect of the casino industry on the public realm. Drawings and photographs in vivid color visualize Macau’s patchwork of distinct urban enclaves: from downtown casinos, their neon-blasting storefronts eclipsing adjacent homes and schools, to the palatial complexes along a new highway, a Las Vegas-style strip. They also reveal how developers go to great lengths to impress the gambler with gimmicks such as fluorescent lighting, botanic gardens, feng shui dragon statues, cast members’ costumes, Chinese art imitations, and crystal chandelier-decked elevators. It is a book that helps readers grasp the complex process of the development of the casino industry and its overall impact on the social and architectural fabric of the first and last colonial enclave in China.
[more]

front cover of Hizbullah's Identity Construction
Hizbullah's Identity Construction
Joseph Alagha
Amsterdam University Press, 2011

As the dominant political force in Lebanon and one of the most powerful post-Islamist organizations in the world, Hizbullah is a source of great controversy and uncertainty in the West. Despite the significant attention paid to this group by the media, the details of Hizbullah’s evolution have frequently confounded politicians—and even scholars. In this important study, Joseph Alagha, a scholar with unprecedented access to the organization, exhaustively and objectively analyzes Hizbullah’s historical evolution and offers a revolutionary new perspective on the political phenomenon of the organization.

Hizbullah’s Identity Construction is a timely examination of one of the world’s most turbulent regions; a major contribution to the study of contemporary Islamic political movements in the Middle East; and a refreshing departure from the bland hagiographies and ad hominem attacks that are all too common in studies of Hizbullah’s murky history. Superbly documented and argued, and rooted in broad knowledge of contemporary Islamist political thought, this study brings much-needed clarity to a hot-button subject.
 
“Joseph Alagha remains one of the most thorough and careful analysts of Hizbullah’s political ideology and practice. Scholars, analysts, and policy makers will find in this work a veritable treasure trove of research and insights into this complex organization.”—Michaelle Browers, Wake Forest University
[more]

front cover of Exposed
Exposed
Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times
Stacy Alaimo
University of Minnesota Press, 2016

Opening with the statement “The anthropocene is no time to set things straight,” Stacy Alaimo puts forth potent arguments for a material feminist posthumanism in the chapters that follow.

From trans-species art and queer animals to naked protesting and scientific accounts of fishy humans, Exposed argues for feminist posthumanism immersed in strange agencies and scale-shifting ethics. Including such divergent topics as landscape art, ocean ecologies, and plastic activism, Alaimo explores our environmental predicaments to better understand feminist occupations of transcorporeal subjectivity.

She puts scientists, activists, artists, writers, and theorists in conversation, revealing that the state of the planet in the twenty-first century has radically transformed ethics, politics, and what it means to be human. Ultimately, Exposed calls for an environmental stance in which, rather than operating from an externalized perspective, we think, feel, and act as the very stuff of the world.

[more]

front cover of Deportes
Deportes
The Making of a Sporting Mexican Diaspora
José M Alamillo
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Spanning the first half of the twentieth century, Deportes uncovers the hidden experiences of Mexican male and female athletes, teams and leagues and their supporters who fought for a more level playing field on both sides of the border.  Despite a widespread belief that Mexicans shunned physical exercise, teamwork or “good sportsmanship,” they proved that they could compete in a wide variety of sports at amateur, semiprofessional, Olympic and professional levels. Some even made their mark in the sports world by becoming the “first” Mexican athlete to reach the big leagues and win Olympic medals or world boxing and tennis titles.
 
These sporting achievements were not theirs alone, an entire cadre of supporters—families, friends, coaches, managers, promoters, sportswriters, and fans—rallied around them and celebrated their athletic success. The Mexican nation and community, at home or abroad, elevated Mexican athletes to sports hero status with a deep sense of cultural and national pride. Alamillo argues that Mexican-origin males and females in the United States used sports to empower themselves and their community by developing and sustaining transnational networks with Mexico. Ultimately, these athletes and their supporters created a “sporting Mexican diaspora” that overcame economic barriers, challenged racial and gender assumptions, forged sporting networks across borders, developed new hybrid identities and raised awareness about civil rights within and beyond the sporting world.
[more]

front cover of Making Lemonade out of Lemons
Making Lemonade out of Lemons
Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California Town 1880-1960
José M. Alamillo
University of Illinois Press, 2006

Out of the “lemons” handed to Mexican American workers in Corona, California--low pay, segregated schooling, inadequate housing, and racial discrimination--Mexican men and women made “lemonade” by transforming leisure spaces such as baseball games, parades, festivals, and churches into politicized spaces where workers voiced their grievances, debated strategies for  advancement, and built solidarity. Using oral history interviews, extensive citrus company records, and his own experiences in Corona, José Alamillo argues that Mexican Americans helped lay the groundwork for civil rights struggles and electoral campaigns in the post-World War II era.

[more]

front cover of Resurrection
Resurrection
Comics in Post-Soviet Russia
José Alaniz
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
Winner, 2023 Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book

Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia traces the “kopecks to rubles” journey of Russian comics at the turn of the century. As the follow-up to José Alaniz’s groundbreaking Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (2010), Resurrection authoritatively and exhaustively details the Russian comic landscape of the last three decades: beginning after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union and encompassing the fourth Putin administration, the COVID-19 crisis, and beyond. Bolstering his analysis with interviews with some of the major figures in Russia’s comics industry, Alaniz particularly focuses on the representation of masculinity, disability, historical trauma, and superheroes, as well as on the recent rise of fandom, alternative micropresses, and nonfiction graphic narrative. Resurrection is a sweeping discussion of the metamorphosis of contemporary Russian comic art from its rebirth to its entry into mainstream culture.
[more]

front cover of From Strangers to Neighbors
From Strangers to Neighbors
Post-Disaster Resettlement and Community Building in Honduras
Ryan Alaniz
University of Texas Press, 2017

Natural disasters, the effects of climate change, and political upheavals and war have driven tens of millions of people from their homes and spurred intense debates about how governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) should respond with long-term resettlement strategies. Many resettlement efforts have focused primarily on providing infrastructure and have done little to help displaced people and communities rebuild social structure, which has led to resettlement failures throughout the world. So what does it take to transform a resettlement into a successful community?

This book offers the first long-term comparative study of social outcomes through a case study of two Honduran resettlements built for survivors of Hurricane Mitch (1998) by two different NGOs. Although residents of each arrived from the same affected neighborhoods and have similar demographics, twelve years later one resettlement wrestles with high crime, low participation, and low social capital, while the other maintains low crime, a high degree of social cohesion, participation, and general social health. Using a multi-method approach of household surveys, interviews, ethnography, and analysis of NGO and community documents, Ryan Alaniz demonstrates that these divergent resettlement trajectories can be traced back to the type and quality of support provided by external organizations and the creation of a healthy, cohesive community culture. His findings offer important lessons and strategies that can be utilized in other places and in future resettlement policy to achieve the most effective and positive results.

[more]

front cover of Dance for Me When I Die
Dance for Me When I Die
Cristian Alarcón
Duke University Press, 2019
On the morning of February 6, 1999, Buenos Aires police officers shot and killed seventeen-year-old Víctor Manuel Vital, better known as Frente, while he was unarmed, hiding under a table, and trying to surrender. Widely known and respected throughout Buenos Aires's shantytowns for his success as a thief, commitment to a code of honor, and generosity to his community, Frente became a Robin Hood--style legend who, in death, was believed to have the power to make bullets swerve and save gang members from shrapnel. In Dance for Me When I Die—first published in Argentina in 2004 and appearing here in English for the first time—Cristian Alarcón tells the story and legacy of Frente's life and death in the context of the everyday experiences of love and survival, murder and addiction, and crime and courage of those living in the slums. Drawing on interviews with Frente's friends, family, and ex-girlfriends, as well as with local thieves and drug dealers, and having immersed himself in Frente's neighborhood for eighteen months, Alarcón captures the world of the urban poor in all of its complexity and humanity.
[more]

front cover of Blurring the Color Line
Blurring the Color Line
The New Chance for a More Integrated America
Richard Alba
Harvard University Press, 2009

Richard Alba argues that the social cleavages that separate Americans into distinct, unequal ethno-racial groups could narrow dramatically in the coming decades. During the mid-twentieth century, the dominant position of the United States in the postwar world economy led to a rapid expansion of education and labor opportunities. As a result of their newfound access to training and jobs, many ethnic and religious outsiders, among them Jews and Italians, finally gained full acceptance as members of the mainstream. Alba proposes that this large-scale assimilation of white ethnics was a result of “non-zero-sum mobility,” which he defines as the social ascent of members of disadvantaged groups that can take place without affecting the life chances of those who are already members of the established majority.

Alba shows that non-zero-sum mobility could play out positively in the future as the baby-boom generation retires, opening up the higher rungs of the labor market. Because of the changing demography of the country, many fewer whites will be coming of age than will be retiring. Hence, the opportunity exists for members of other groups to move up. However, Alba cautions, this demographic shift will only benefit disadvantaged American minorities if they are provided with access to education and training. In Blurring the Color Line, Alba explores a future in which socially mobile minorities could blur stark boundaries and gain much more control over the social expression of racial differences.

[more]

front cover of Remaking the American Mainstream
Remaking the American Mainstream
Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration
Richard Alba
Harvard University Press, 2003

In this age of multicultural democracy, the idea of assimilation--that the social distance separating immigrants and their children from the mainstream of American society closes over time--seems outdated and, in some forms, even offensive. But as Richard Alba and Victor Nee show in the first systematic treatment of assimilation since the mid-1960s, it continues to shape the immigrant experience, even though the geography of immigration has shifted from Europe to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Institutional changes, from civil rights legislation to immigration law, have provided a more favorable environment for nonwhite immigrants and their children than in the past.

Assimilation is still driven, in claim, by the decisions of immigrants and the second generation to improve their social and material circumstances in America. But they also show that immigrants, historically and today, have profoundly changed our mainstream society and culture in the process of becoming Americans.

Surveying a variety of domains--language, socioeconomic attachments, residential patterns, and intermarriage--they demonstrate the continuing importance of assimilation in American life. And they predict that it will blur the boundaries among the major, racially defined populations, as nonwhites and Hispanics are increasingly incorporated into the mainstream.

[more]

front cover of Grow Food, Cook Food, Share Food
Grow Food, Cook Food, Share Food
Perspectives on Eating from the Past and a Preliminary Agenda for the Future
Ken Albala
Oregon State University Press, 2013
Grow Food, Cook Food, Share Food is a practical food history lesson, an editorial on our use of packaged convenience foods, and a call to arms—of the kitchen variety. Mixing food writing and history, adding a dash of cookbook, author and scholar Ken Albala shares the story of what happened when he started taking food history seriously and embarked on a mission to grow, cook, and share food in the ways that people did in the past.

Albala considers what the traditions we have needlessly lost have to offer us today: a serious appreciation for the generative power of the earth, the great pleasures of cooking food, and the joy of sharing food with family, friends, and even strangers. In Albala’s compelling book, obscure seventeenth-century Italian farmer-nobles, Roman statesmen, and quirky cheesemakers from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries all offer lessons about our relationship with the food we eat.

A rare form of historical activism, Grow Food, Cook Food, Share Food is written for anyone who likes to eat, loves to cook, and knows how to throw a great dinner party.

An OSU Press Horning Visiting Scholars Publication.
[more]

front cover of New Science, New World
New Science, New World
Denise Albanese
Duke University Press, 1996
In New Science, New World Denise Albanese examines the discursive interconnections between two practices that emerged in the seventeenth century—modern science and colonialism. Drawing on the discourse analysis of Foucault, the ideology-critique of Marxist cultural studies, and de Certeau’s assertion that the modern world produces itself through alterity, she argues that the beginnings of colonialism are intertwined in complex fashion with the ways in which the literary became the exotic “other” and undervalued opposite of the scientific.
Albanese reads the inaugurators of the scientific revolution against the canonical authors of early modern literature, discussing Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems and Bacon’s New Atlantis as well as Milton’s Paradise Lost and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. She examines how the newness or “novelty” of investigating nature is expressed through representations of the New World, including the native, the feminine, the body, and the heavens. “New” is therefore shown to be a double sign, referring both to the excitement associated with a knowledge oriented away from past practices, and to the oppression and domination typical of the colonialist enterprise. Exploring the connections between the New World and the New Science, and the simultaneously emerging patterns of thought and forms of writing characteristic of modernity, Albanese insists that science is at its inception a form of power-knowledge, and that the modern and postmodern division of “Two Cultures,” the literary and the scientific, has its antecedents in the early modern world.
New Science, New World makes an important contribution to feminist, new historicist, and cultural materialist debates about the extent to which the culture of seventeenth-century England is proto-modern. It will offer scholars and students from a wide range of fields a new critical model for historical practice.
[more]

front cover of At the Core and in the Margins
At the Core and in the Margins
Incorporation of Mexican Immigrants in Two Rural Midwestern Communities
Julia Albarracín
Michigan State University Press, 2016
Beardstown and Monmouth, Illinois, two rural Midwestern towns, have been transformed by immigration in the last three decades. This book examines how Mexican immigrants who have made these towns their homes have integrated legally, culturally, and institutionally. What accounts for the massive growth in the Mexican immigrant populations in these two small towns, and what does the future hold for them?
Based on 260 surveys and 47 in-depth interviews, this study combines quantitative and qualitative research to explore the level and characteristics of immigrant incorporation in Beardstown and Monmouth. It assesses the advancement of immigrants in the immigration/ residency/citizenship process, the immigrants’ level of cultural integration (via language, their connectedness with other members of society, and their relationships with neighbors), the degree and characteristics of discrimination against immigrants in these two towns, and the extent to which immigrants participate in different social and political activities and trust government institutions.
Immigrants in new destinations are likely to be poorer, to be less educated, and to have weaker English-language skills than immigrants in traditional destinations. Studying how this population negotiates the obstacles to and opportunities for incorporation is crucial.
[more]

front cover of Hend and the Soldiers
Hend and the Soldiers
Badriah Albeshr
University of Texas Press, 2017

Hend is a young Saudi Arabian woman struggling to challenge her conservative society, which is represented by various soldiers, real and metaphorical, in her life. After a failed arranged marriage to an army officer, she is determined to establish herself as a writer and make her own choices in love. Her mother, a firm supporter of their society’s traditional norms, works to block her efforts. As Hend engages with her mother, stories of her past and those of other female relatives reveal the extent of the suffering previous generations of women have endured while living in such a patriarchal society. Hend also comes to understand how such traditions have adversely affected the men in her family, including one brother who flees to the West and another who finds comradeship among the members of al-Qaeda.

Badriah Albeshr represents a growing number of women writers from the Arabian Peninsula who refuse to shy away from the taboo topics of religion and sexuality, which makes Hend and the Soldiers a valuable read for those seeking insights into the complexities surrounding these issues.

[more]

front cover of Building a Resilient Twenty-First-Century Economy for Rural America
Building a Resilient Twenty-First-Century Economy for Rural America
Don E. Albrecht
Utah State University Press, 2020
In Building a Resilient Twenty-First-Century Economy for Rural America, Don E. Albrecht visits rural communities that have traditionally been dependent on a variety of goods-producing industries, explores what has happened as employment in these industries has declined, and provides a path by which they can build a vibrant twenty-first-century economy. Albrecht describes how structural economic changes led rural voters to support Donald Trump in the 2016 election and why his policies will not relieve the economic problems of rural residents.
 
Trump’s promises to restore rural industrial jobs simply cannot be fulfilled because his policies do not address the base cause for this job loss—technological change, the most significant factor being the machine replacement of human labor in the production process. Bringing a personal understanding of the effects on rural communities and residents, Albrecht focuses each chapter on a community that has traditionally been economically dependent on a single industry—manufacturing, coal mining, agriculture, logging, oil and gas production, and tourism—and the consequences of losing that industry. He also lays out a plan for rebuilding America’s rural areas and creating an economically vibrant country with a more sustainable future.
 
The rural economy cannot return to the past as it was structured and instead must look to a new future. Building a Resilient Twenty-First-Century Economy for Rural America describes the source of economic concerns in rural America and offers real ways to address them. It will be vital to students, scholars, practitioners, community leaders, politicians, and policy makers concerned with rural community development.
 
[more]

front cover of Re
Re
Thinking Europe: Thoughts on Europe: Past, Present and Future
Yoeri Albrecht
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
What is Europe? This question is ever more pressing, as present day Europe wallows in crisis - its deepest since the process of European integration took off in the 1950s. The current state of affairs sets the stage for this book. It brings together leading international thinkers and scholars of different generations in a feverish quest to better understand Europe's present state.In their essays these authors engage in the paradoxes and puzzles of European identity and culture. They present new answers to the eternal question regarding 'the essence of Europe'.An anthology of influential texts from the making of present-day Europe completes the book as a very European exercise in thinking and re-thinking Europa, its culture, history and present.
[more]

logo for Pluto Press
Let Them Eat Junk
How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity
Robert Albritton
Pluto Press, 2009

Respected economist Robert Albritton argues that the capitalist system, far from delivering on the promise of cheap, nutritious food for all, has created a world where 25% of the world population are over-fed and 25% are hungry. This malnourishment of 50% of the world's population is explained systematically, a refreshing change from accounts that focus on cultural factors and individual greed. Albritton details the economic relations and connections that have put us in a situation of simultaneous oversupply and undersupply of food.

This explosive book provides yet more evidence that the human cost of capitalism is much bigger than those in power will admit.

[more]

front cover of The Webcam as an Emerging Cinematic Medium
The Webcam as an Emerging Cinematic Medium
Paula Albuquerque
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
All the world’s a stage - literally so, given the ubiquitous presence of webcams recording daily life in cities. This footage, allegedlydocumentary, recreates cities as cinematic environments as people interact with the multitudes of cameras and screens aroundthem. Paula Albuquerque’s original research and experimental films, presented in this groundbreaking book, expose fictionalising elements in archival webcams and explore video surveillance as an urban condition that influences both perceptions of the past and visions of the future.
[more]

front cover of Tentative Transgressions
Tentative Transgressions
Homosexuality, AIDS, and the Theater in Brazil
Severino J. Albuquerque
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

Starting at the beginning of the twentieth century, Albuquerque examines the way the Modernist movement both fueled and inhibited the use of gay imagery in Brazilian drama. This elegant and fluid study ultimately becomes an examination of a whole Latin society, and the ways in which Latin theatre has absorbed and reflected the culture's own changing sensibilities, that will intrigue anyone interested in Latin American culture, literature, or theater.

Winner, 2008 Elizabeth A. Steinberg Prize

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter