A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY76 start with Y start with Y
Michelle M. Jacob employs ethnographic case studies to demonstrate the tension between reclaiming traditional cultural practices and adapting to change. Through interviewees’ narratives, she carefully tacks back and forth between the atrocities of colonization and the remarkable actions of individuals committed to sustaining Yakama heritage. Focusing on three domains of Indigenous revitalization—dance, language, and foods—Jacob carefully elucidates the philosophy underlying and unifying each domain while also illustrating the importance of these practices for Indigenous self-determination, healing, and survival.
In the impassioned voice of a member of the Yakama Nation, Jacob presents a volume that is at once intimate and specific to her home community and that also advances theories of Indigenous decolonization, feminism, and cultural revitalization. Jacob’s theoretical and methodological contributions make this work valuable to a range of students, academics, tribal community members, and professionals, and an essential read for anyone interested in the ways that grassroots activism can transform individual lives, communities, and society.
Roe Cloud’s white-collar activism was entwined with the Progressive Era formation of an Indian professional and managerial class, a Native “talented tenth,” whose members strategically used their contingent entry into arenas of white social, intellectual, and political power on behalf of Indians without such access. His Yale training provided a cross-cultural education in class-structured emotions and individuality. While at Yale, Roe Cloud was informally adopted by a white missionary couple. Through them he was schooled in upper-middle-class sentimentality and incentives. He also learned how interracial romance could jeopardize Indian acceptance into their class. Roe Cloud expanded the range of what modern Indians could aspire to and achieve.
To understand the creation of such a startling place, Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz explore the perspectives of the diverse participants that had a hand in its creation. In examining these views, they also consider those of Yali, a local Papua New Guinean political leader. Significantly, Yali features not only in the story of RSL, but also in Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning world history Guns, Germs, and Steel—a history probed through its contrast with RSL's. The authors' disagreement with Diamond stems, not from the generality of his focus and the specificity of theirs, but from a difference in view about how history is made—and from an insistence that those with power be held accountable for affecting history.
The Yanoama are one of the most numerous remaining aboriginal populations of the South American tropical forests, and their large territory constitutes a significant culture region. Although other scholars (anthropologists, geneticists, linguists) have studied this contemporary "neolithic" population, this is the first geographic study of the Yanoama. It is also the only book to focus on the Yanoama highland core area—the Parima massif—and it is the first study to analyze Yanoama horticulture as an integral part of their ecosystem.
The author is concerned principally with the spatial dimension as developed in Yanoama culture, with the spatial patterns of functioning systems, and with Yanoama ecology in this highland habitat. The natural environment is viewed, not as a cultural determinant, but as part of the total ecosystem. Livelihood activities constitute a major organizing theme and, among these, gardening receives the most attention. Frequently classified as a nomadic hunter-gatherer group, the Yanoama are found to have a deep-seated horticultural tradition, and many new data on this tradition are presented. As this study reveals, the Yanoama have created and maintained a cultural landscape that bears their distinctive stamp.
Yaqui regard song as a kind of lingua franca of the intelligent universe. It is through song that experience with other living things is made intelligible and accessible to the human community. Deer songs often take the form of dialogues in which the deer and others in the wilderness world speak with one another or with the deer singers themselves. It is in this way, according to one deer singer, that “the wilderness world listens to itself even today.”
In this book authentic ceremonial songs, transcribed in both Yaqui and English, are the center of a fascinating discussion of the Deer Song tradition in Yaqui culture. Yaqui Deer Songs/Maso Bwikam thus enables non-Yaquis to hear these dialogues with the wilderness world for the first time.
Yaquis live in a portion of their ancestral homeland in Sonora, about 250 miles south of the Arizona border. A long history of displacement and ethnic struggle continues to shape the Yaqui sense of self, as Erickson discovered during the sixteen months that she lived in Potam, one of the eight historic Yaqui pueblos. She found that themes of identity frequently arise in the stories that Yaquis tell and that geography and location—space and place—figure prominently in their narratives.
Revisiting Edward Spicer’s groundbreaking anthropological study of the Yaquis of Potam pueblo undertaken more than sixty years ago, Erickson pays particular attention to the “cultural work” performed by Yaqui women today. She shows that by reaffirming their gendered identities and creating and occupying female-gendered spaces such as kitchens, household altars, and domestic ceremonial spaces, women constitute Yaqui ethnicity in ways that are as significant as actions taken by males in tribal leadership and public ceremony.
This absorbing study contributes new empirical knowledge about a Native American community as it adds to the growing anthropology of space/place and gender. By inviting readers into the homes and patios where Yaqui women discuss their lives, it offers a highly personalized account of how they construct—and reconstruct—their identity.
Tumbaga examines colonial documents and nineteenth-century political literature that produce a Yaqui warrior mystique and reexamines the Mexican Revolution through indigenous culture. He delves into literary depictions of Yaqui battalions by writers like Martín Luis Guzmán and Carlos Fuentes and concludes that they conceal Yaqui politics and stigmatize Yaqui warriorhood, as well as misrepresent frequently performed deer dances as isolated exotic events.
Yaqui Indigeneity draws attention to a community of Chicana/o writers of Yaqui descent: Chicano-Yaqui authors such as Luis Valdez, Alma Luz Villanueva, Miguel Méndez, Alfredo Véa Jr., and Michael Nava, who possess a diaspora-based indigenous identity. Their writings rebut prior colonial and Mexican depictions of Yaquis—in particular, Véa’s La Maravilla exemplifies the new literary tradition that looks to indigenous oral tradition, religion, and history to address questions of cultural memory and immigration.
Using indigenous forms of knowledge, Tumbaga shows the important and growing body of literary work on Yaqui culture and history that demonstrates the historical and contemporary importance of the Yaqui nation in Mexican and Chicana/o history, politics, and culture.
In this revised edition of her groundbreaking work, Hu-DeHart reviews and reflects on the growth in scholarship about the Yaqui, including advances in theoretical frameworks and methodologies on borderlands, transnationalism, diaspora, and collective memory that are especially relevant to their history.
As archaeologists peel away the jungle covering that has both obscured and preserved the ancient Maya cities of Mexico and Central America, other scholars have only a limited time to study and understand the sites before the jungle, weather, and human encroachment efface them again, perhaps forever. This urgency underlies Yaxchilan: The Design of a Maya Ceremonial City, Carolyn Tate's comprehensive catalog and analysis of all the city's extant buildings and sculptures.
During a year of field work, Tate fully documented the appearance of the site as of 1987. For each sculpture and building, she records its discovery, present location, condition, measurements, and astronomical orientation and reconstructs its Long Counts and Julian dates from Calendar Rounds. Line drawings and photographs provide a visual document of the art and architecture of Yaxchilan.
More than mere documentation, however, the book explores the phenomenon of art within Maya society. Tate establishes a general framework of cultural practices, spiritual beliefs, and knowledge likely to have been shared by eighth-century Maya people. The process of making public art is considered in relation to other modes of aesthetic expression, such as oral tradition and ritual. This kind of analysis is new in Maya studies and offers fresh insight into the function of these magnificent cities and the powerful role public art and architecture play in establishing cultural norms, in education in a semiliterate society, and in developing the personal and community identities of individuals.
Several chapters cover the specifics of art and iconography at Yaxchilan as a basis for examining the creation of the city in the Late Classic period. Individual sculptures are attributed to the hands of single artists and workshops, thus aiding in dating several of the monuments. The significance of headdresses, backracks, and other costume elements seen on monuments is tied to specific rituals and fashions, and influence from other sites is traced. These analyses lead to a history of the design of the city under the reigns of Shield Jaguar (A.D. 681-741) and Bird Jaguar IV (A.D. 752-772).
In Tate's view, Yaxchilan and other Maya cities were designed as both a theater for ritual activities and a nexus of public art and social structures that were crucial in defining the self within Maya society.
Harouna and Stoller would meet in Harlem, at a bustling African market where Harouna built a life as an African art trader and Stoller was conducting research. Moving from Belayara in Niger to Silver Spring, Maryland, and from the Peace Corps to fieldwork to New York, Stoller recounts their separate lives and how the threat posed by cancer brought them a new, profound, and shared sense of meaning. Combining memoir, ethnography, and philosophy through a series of interconnected narratives, he tells a story of remarkable friendship and the quest for well-being. It’s a story of difference and unity, of illness and health, a lyrical reflection on human resiliency and the shoulders we lean on.
In her intimate investigation of the “year in white,” Carr draws on fifty-two in-depth interviews with other participants, an online survey of nearly two hundred others, and almost a decade of her own ethnographic fieldwork, gathering stories that allow us to see how cultural newcomers and natives thought, felt, and acted with regard to their initiation. She documents how, during the iyawo year, the ritual slowly transforms the initiate’s identity. For the first three months, for instance, the iyawo may not use a mirror, even to shave, and must eat all meals while seated on a mat on the floor using only a spoon and their own set of dishes. During the entire year, the iyawo loses their name and is simply addressed as “iyawo” by family and friends.
Carr also shows that this year-long religious ritual—which is carried out even as the iyawo goes about daily life—offers new insight into religion in general, suggesting that the sacred is not separable from the profane and indeed that religion shares an ongoing dynamic relationship with the realities of everyday life. Religious expression happens at home, on the streets, at work and school.
Offering insight not only into Santería but also into religion more generally, A Year in White makes an important contribution to our understanding of complex, dynamic religious landscapes in multicultural, pluralist societies and how they inhabit our daily lives.
So began the Hollars family’s year of plenty—a cancer diagnosis on top of the ongoing COVID pandemic, then feelings of falling short as parents, partners, and people. While Hollars traces his family’s daily devastations alongside his father-in-law’s decline, he recounts the small mercies along the way: birthdays, campfires, fishing trips, kayaking, and fireflies. As he, his wife, Meredith, and their three young children grapple with how best to say goodbye to the person they love, they are forced to reassess their own lives. How can we make the most of our time, they wonder, when time feels so short?
Written in vignettes and accompanied by photographs and family interviews, Year of Plenty provides a poignant and unflinching account of how death separates us not only from the people we love but from places and memories too. Hollars explores how death’s all-consuming weight has the potential to fracture—rather than strengthen—even those relationships we think we know the best. Ultimately, he cracks wide personal moments from his own life and allows the world to peer in.
Park provides a genealogy of oriental style through contextualized readings of popular films-from the multicultural city in Blade Runner and the Japanese American mentor in The Karate Kid to the Afro-Asian reworking of the buddy genre in Rush Hour and the mixed-race hero in The Matrix. Throughout these analyses Park shows how references to the Orient have marked important changes in American popular attitudes toward East Asia in the past thirty years, from abjection to celebration, invisibility to hypervisibility.
Music and performance provide a unique window into the ways that cultural information is circulated and perceptions are constructed. Because they both require listening, are inherently ephemeral, and most often involve collaboration between disparate groups, they inform cultural perceptions differently from literary or visual art forms, which tend to be more tangible and stable.
In Yellowface, Krystyn R. Moon explores the contributions of writers, performers, producers, and consumers in order to demonstrate how popular music and performance has played an important role in constructing Chinese and Chinese American stereotypes. The book brings to life the rich musical period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this time, Chinese and Chinese American musicians and performers appeared in a variety of venues, including museums, community theaters, and world’s fairs, where they displayed their cultural heritage and contested anti-Chinese attitudes. A smaller number crossed over into vaudeville and performed non-Chinese materials. Moon shows how these performers carefully navigated between racist attitudes and their own artistic desires.
While many scholars have studied both African American music and blackface minstrelsy, little attention has been given to Chinese and Chinese American music. This book provides a rare look at the way that immigrants actively participated in the creation, circulation, and, at times, subversion of Chinese stereotypes through their musical and performance work.
Cravens also demonstrates the mobilizing power of faith for LGBT people by contrasting the effects of participation in faith and secular communities on political activism. He explores how factors such as coming out, race, and LGBT-affirming churches influence political attitudes and behavior and explains how the development of LGBT politico-religious activism provides opportunities for LGBT people to organize politically.
Ultimately, Cravens provides a cohesive account of how religion acts as a catalyst for and facilitator in the political development of LGBT people in the United States. In the process, he shows that there is room for both religion in LGBT communities and LGBT people in religious communities.
A sweeping reassessment of our longing for the past, from the rise of “retro” to the rhetoric of Brexit and Trump.
Nostalgia has a bad reputation. Its critics dismiss it as mere sentimentality or, worse, a dangerous yearning for an imagined age of purity. And nostalgia is routinely blamed for trivializing the past and obscuring its ugly sides. In Yesterday, Tobias Becker offers a more nuanced and sympathetic view. Surveying the successive waves of nostalgia that swept the United States and Europe after the Second World War, he shows that longing for the past is more complex and sometimes more beneficial than it seems.
The current meaning of “nostalgia” is surprisingly recent: until the 1960s, it usually just meant homesickness, in keeping with the original Greek word. Linking popular culture to postwar politics in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, Becker explains the shift in meaning. He also responds to arguments against nostalgia, showing its critics as often shortsighted in their own ways as they defend an idea of progress no less naïve than the wistfulness they denounce. All too often, nostalgia itself is criticized, as if its merit did not depend on which specific past one longs for.
Taking its title from one of the most popular songs of all time, and grounded in extensive research, Yesterday offers a rigorous and entertaining perspective on divisive issues in culture and politics. Whether we are revisiting, reviving, reliving, reenacting, or regressing, and whether these activities find expression in politics, music, fashion, or family history, nostalgia is inevitable. It is also powerful, not only serving to define the past but also orienting us toward the future we will create.
This book and its companion volumes are concerned with the slow shaping of many literary conventions over many decades. This volume begins the study with the dime novels and several early series characters who influenced the direction of pulp fiction at its source.
The development of these characters is traced across more than two decades of crime fiction published in Detective Story Magazine, Flynn’s, Black Mask, and other magazines. The conventions that made these stories a special part of popular fiction are examined in detail.
On a cold February evening, a group of students at Bowdoin College, an elite and historically white liberal arts college in Maine, gathered to drink tequila at a party referred to as “not not a fiesta.” By noon the next day, Instagram videos of students sporting miniature sombreros had spread like wildfire through campus. Over the next few weeks, national media outlets would broadcast the embarrassing fallout. But the frequency with which similar parties recur on campuses across the United States begs the question: what, if anything, do undergraduates learn about race and racism from these encounters?
Drawing on interviews and archival research, Yet Another Costume Party Debacle shows us how colleges both contest and reproduce racialized systems of power. Sociologist Ingrid A. Nelson juxtaposes how students and administrators discuss race with how they behave in the aftermath of racially charged campus controversies. Nelson spoke in-depth with students and other key players in several controversial parties—“Cracksgiving,” a “gangster party,” and the “not not a fiesta” tequila party—at Bowdoin. The college’s administrative response failed to encourage productive dialogue or address larger questions about race on campus. Nelson shows how the underlying campus structures at elite liberal arts colleges foster an environment that is ripe for racially charged incidents; we shouldn’t be surprised when we read about yet another costume party debacle. Nelson advises how we can take charge of diversity on our campuses by changing the systems that bring students together and drive them apart.
“If Wisconsin wasn’t on the yodel music map before, this book puts it there.”—Wisconsin State Journal
Framed by Rodríguez’s personal testimony of police violence, this book offers a historia profunda of the culture of extralegal violence against Red-Black-Brown communities in the United States. In addition to Rodríguez’s story, this book includes several short essays from victims and survivors that bring together personal accounts of police brutality and state-sponsored violence. This wide-ranging work touches on historical and current events, including the Watts rebellion, the Zoot Suit Riots, Operation Streamline, Standing Rock, and much more.
From the eyewitness accounts of Bartolomé de las Casas to the protestors and allies at Standing Rock, this book makes evident the links between colonial violence against Red-Black-Brown bodies to police violence in our communities today. Grounded in the stories of the lives of victims and survivors of police violence, Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World illuminates the physical, spiritual, and epistemic depths and consequences of racialized dehumanization.
Rodríguez offers us an urgent, poignant, and personal call to end violence and the philosophies that permit such violence to flourish. Like the Nahuatl yolqui, this book is intended as a means of healing, offering a footprint going back to the origins of violence, and, more important, a way forward.
With contributions by Raúl Alcaraz-Ochoa, Citalli Álvarez, Tanya Alvarez, Rebekah Barber, Juvenal Caporale, David Cid, Arianna Martinez Reyna, Carlos Montes, Travis Morales, Simon Moya Smith, Cesar Noriega, Kimberly Phillips, Christian Ramirez, Michelle Rascon Canales, Carolyn Torres, Jerry Tello, Tara Trudell, and Laurie Valdez.
Yorùbá Bàtá Goes Global describes the dramatic changes and reinventions of traditional bàtá performance in recent years, showing how they are continually recreated, performed, and sold. Klein delves into the lives of Yorùbá musicians, focusing on their strategic collaborations with artists, culture brokers, researchers, and entrepreneurs worldwide. And she explores how reinvigorated performing ensembles are beginning to parlay success on the world stage into increased power and status within Nigeria. Klein’s study of the interwoven roles of innovation and tradition will interest scholars of African, global, and cultural studies, anthropology, and ethnomusicology alike.
While a graduate student, Andrea Riley Mukavetz was invited into Geri’s home to listen to her stories and assist in compiling and publishing a memoir. Geri wanted her stories to serve as a resource, form of support, and affirmation that Indigenous people can be proud of who they are and overcome trauma. Geri hoped to be a model to current and future generations, and she believed strongly that more Indigenous people should become substance abuse counselors and work with their communities in tribally specific ways.
Geri died in 2019, but Riley Mukavetz carried on the work. This book presents Geri’s stories, lightly edited and organized for clarity, with an introduction by Riley Mukavetz that centers Geri’s life and the process of oral history in historical and theoretical context.
Over the course of twelve essays, Shinner holds a mirror up to the complex desires, fears, confusions, and mysteries that shape our bodily perceptions. Driven by the collision between herself and the larger world, she examines her feet through the often-skewed lens of history to understand what makes them, in the eyes of some, decidedly Jewish; considers bras, breasts, and the storied skills of the bra fitter; asks, from the perspective of a confused and grieving daughter, what it means to cut the body open; and takes a reeling time-trip through myth, culture, and history to look at women’s hair in ancient Rome, Laos, France, Syria, Cuba, India, and her own past. Some pieces investigate the body under emotional or physical duress, while others use the body to consider personal heritage and legacy. Throughout, Shinner writes with elegance and assurance, weaving her wide-ranging thoughts into a firm and fascinating fabric.
Turning the category of body books on, well, its ear, You Feel So Mortal offers a probing view of our preoccupation with the body that is both idiosyncratic and universal, leaving us with the deep satisfaction of our shared humanity.
The four principal writers covered are Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, R. Austin Freeman, and Arthur B. Reeve. Another dozen more writers are treated somewhat more briefly: Gaboriau, Pinkerton, Green, Morrison, Futrelle, and Leroux, among others.
Passover is among the most widely observed holidays for American Jews. During this festival of redemption, Jewish families retell the biblical story of Exodus using a ritual book known as a haggadah, often weaving modern tales of oppression through the biblical narrative. References to the Holocaust are some of the most common additions to contemporary haggadot. However, the parallel between ancient and modern oppression, which seems obvious to some, raises troubling questions for many others. Is it possible to find any redemptive meaning in the Nazi genocide? Are we adding value to this unforgivable moment in history?
Liora Gubkin critiques commemorations that violate memory by erasing the value of everyday life that was lost and collapse the diversity of responses both during the Shoah and afterward. She recounts oral testimonies from Holocaust survivors, cites references to the holiday in popular American culture, and analyzes examples of actual haggadot. Ultimately, Gubkin concludes that it is possible and important to make a space for Holocaust commemoration, all the time recognizing that haggadot must be constantly revisited and “performed.”
The past few decades have seen a remarkable surge in Jewish influences on American culture. Entertainers and artists such as Jerry Seinfeld, Adam Sandler, Allegra Goodman, and Tony Kushner have heralded new waves of television, film, literature, and theater; a major klezmer revival is under way; bagels are now as commonplace as pizza; and kabbalah has become as cool as crystals. Does this broad range of cultural expression accurately reflect what it means to be Jewish in America today?
Bringing together fourteen new essays by leading scholars, You Should See Yourself examines the fluctuating representations of Jewishness in a variety of areas of popular culture and high art, including literature, the media, film, theater, music, dance, painting, photography, and comedy. Contributors explore the evolution that has taken place within these cultural forms and how we can best explain these changes. Are variations in our understanding of Jewishness the result of general phenomena such as multiculturalism, politics, and postmodernism, or are they the product of more specifically Jewish concerns such as the intermarriage/continuity crisis, religious renewal, and relations between the United States and Israel?
Accessible to students and general readers alike, this volume takes an important step toward advancing the discussion of Jewish cultural influences in this country.
As the 1960s ended, Herbie Hancock embarked on a grand creative experiment. Having just been dismissed from the celebrated Miles Davis Quintet, he set out on the road, playing with his first touring group as a leader until he eventually formed what would become a revolutionary band. Taking the Swahili name Mwandishi, the group would go on to play some of the most innovative music of the 1970s, fusing an assortment of musical genres, American and African cultures, and acoustic and electronic sounds into groundbreaking experiments that helped shape the American popular music that followed. In You’ll Know When You Get There, Bob Gluck offers the first comprehensive study of this influential group, mapping the musical, technological, political, and cultural changes that they not only lived in but also effected.
On January 2, 1932, near Springfield, Missouri, ten poorly armed law enforcement officers set out to arrest two local farm boys for auto theft. A few minutes later, six of the officers lay dead and three were wounded, setting a record that stands to this day for the greatest number of police officers killed in one incident in the history of the United States. This is the story of how it happened and of the unlikely people whose lives were forever changed.
The two killers, Jennings and Harry Young, were from a peaceful, tiny community named Brookline in central Greene County, Missouri. The "massacre" itself took place at the quiet orderly farm home of the J. D. Young family. Paul and Mary Barrett trace the personalities of those involved in the incident, describe the events of the fateful day, and examine the aftermath of the killings, detailing what was called "the greatest man hunt in the history of Texas," which culminated in the brothers' deaths in Houston.
In the midst of societal optimism, how do young men cope with the loss of a vibrant future? Young Men, Time, and Boredom in the Republic of Georgia provides a vivid exploration of the tension between subjective and societal time and the ways these tensions create experiences of marginality among under- or unemployed young men in the Republic of Georgia.
Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Martin Demant Frederiksen shows how the Georgian state has attempted to make the so-called post-Soviet transition a thing of the past as it creates new ideas about the future. Yet some young men in the regional capital of Batumi do not feel that they are part of the progression these changes create. Instead, they feel marginalized both by space and time—passed over and without prospects.
This distinctive case study provides empirical evidence for a deeper understanding of contemporary societal developments and their effects on individual experiences.
Some in the New Left were dubious of this strategy and asked how it might damage long-term progress. Young feminists and people of color were particularly quick to question the idea that age alone was enough to sustain a movement. And the media often presented young people as impulsive and naive, undermining their political legitimacy. In tracing how "youth" took on multiple meanings as the 1960s progressed, Scott demonstrates the power of this idea to both promote and hinder social change.
Youngest Recruits is an unflinching examination of the complex motivations that drive Ivoirian children in and out of armed groups. Drawing on firsthand experience with child soldiers, Magali Chelpi-Den Hamer argues that the popular narrative about children’s limited agency is insufficient to explain their participation in violent conflicts. Rather she explores in detail the pre- to postwar trajectories of child and adolescent recruits in order to show that even the youngest exercise some degree of reflection and agency when enlisting into the armed forces. In addition to shedding light on an area of great cultural concern, the author invites readers to reflect on the mixed impact of humanitarian interventions that attempt to reintegrate these children into society.
Who’s worse, the Young-Girl or the Man-Child?
Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl is a controversial work of anticapitalist philosophy that has attracted musicians, playwrights, feminist theorists, and men's-rights activists since its publication in 1999. More than twenty years after its publication the international reverberation of Young-Girls shows no signs of weakening.
Young-Girls in Echoland: #Theorizing Tiqqun is a guide to this ongoing postdigital conversation, engaging with artworks and textual criticism provoked by Tiqqun’s audacious, arguably misogynistic textual voice. Heather Warren-Crow and Andrea Jonsson show how Tiqqun’s polarizing figure has grown and matured but also stayed unapologetically girly in the works of artists and scholars discussed here. Rethinking the myth of Echo and Narcissus by performing a different kind of listening, they take us on a journey from VSCO girls to basic bitches to vampires.
With an ear for the sound of Tiqqun’s polemic and its ensemble of Anglophone and Francophone rejoinders, Young-Girls in Echoland offers a model for analyzing the call-and-response of pop philosophy and for hearing the affective rhythms of communicative capitalism.
In the early twentieth century, new mass media—popular newspapers, radio, film—exploded at the same time that millions of Britons received the vote in the franchise expansions of 1918 and 1928. The growing centrality of the commercial media to democratic life quickly became evident as organizations of all stripes saw its potential to reach new voters. The new media presented both an exciting opportunity and a significant challenge to the new Labour Party.
Laura Beers traces Labour’s rise as a movement for working-class men to its transformation into a national party that won a landslide victory in 1945. Key to its success was a skillful media strategy designed to win over a broad, diverse coalition of supporters. Though some in the movement harbored reservations about a socialist party making use of the “capitalist” commercial media, others advocated using the media to hammer home the message that Labour represented not only its traditional base but also women, office workers, and professionals. Labour’s national leadership played a pivotal role in the effective use of popular journalism, the BBC, and film to communicate its message to the public. In the process Labour transformed not only its own national profile but also the political process in general.
New Labour’s electoral success of the late twentieth century was due in no small part to its grasp of media communication. This insightful book reminds us that the importance of the mass media to Labour’s political fortunes is by no means a modern phenomenon.
Contributors. John Akomfrah, Sinazo Chiya, Mark Gevisser, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Katerina Gregos, Brenda Hollweg, William Kentridge, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Griselda Pollock, Laura Rascaroli, Zineb Sedira, Penny Siopis, Hedley Twidle, Zoé Whitley
While offering a critique of neoliberal health policies, Your Pocket Is What Cures You remains grounded in ethnography to highlight the struggles of men and women who are precariously balanced on twin precipices of crumbling health systems and economic decline. Their stories demonstrate what happens when market-based health reforms collide with material, political, and social realities in African societies.
Even before the emergence of the civil rights movement with black churches at its center, African American religion and progressive politics were assumed to be inextricably intertwined. In her revelatory book, Barbara Savage counters this assumption with the story of a highly diversified religious community whose debates over engagement in the struggle for racial equality were as vigorous as they were persistent. Rather than inevitable allies, black churches and political activists have been uneasy and contentious partners.
From the 1920s on, some of the best African American minds—W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Benjamin Mays, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Mary McLeod Bethune, Charles S. Johnson, and others—argued tirelessly about the churches’ responsibility in the quest for racial justice. Could they be a liberal force, or would they be a constraint on progress? There was no single, unified black church but rather many churches marked by enormous intellectual, theological, and political differences and independence. Yet, confronted by racial discrimination and poverty, churches were called upon again and again to come together as savior institutions for black communities.
The tension between faith and political activism in black churches testifies to the difficult and unpredictable project of coupling religion and politics in the twentieth century. By retrieving the people, the polemics, and the power of the spiritual that animated African American political life, Savage has dramatically demonstrated the challenge to all religious institutions seeking political change in our time.
You’re Doing it Wrong! investigates the storied history of mothering advice in the media, from the newspapers, magazines, doctors’ records and personal papers of the nineteenth-century to today’s websites, Facebook groups, and Instagram feeds. Johnson and Quinlan find surprising parallels between today’s mothering experts and their Victorian counterparts, but they also explore how social media has placed unprecedented pressures on new mothers, even while it may function as social support for some. They further examine the contentious construction of prenatal and baby care expertise itself, as individuals such as everyone from medical professionals to experienced moms have competed to have their expertise acknowledged in the public sphere.
Exploring potential health crises from infertility treatments to “better babies” milestones, You’re Doing it Wrong! provides a provocative look at historical and contemporary medical expertise during conception, pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum, and infant care stages.
This is a funny, moving story about life in a small town, from the point of view of a pregnant lesbian. Louise A. Blum, author of the critically acclaimed novel Amnesty, now tells the story of her own life and her decision to be out, loud, and pregnant. Mixing humor with memorable prose, Blum recounts how a quiet, conservative town in an impoverished stretch of Appalachia reacts as she and a local woman, Connie, fall in love, move in together, and determine to live their life together openly and truthfully.
The town responds in radically different ways to the couple’s presence, from prayer vigils on the village green to a feature article in the family section of the local newspaper. This is a cautionary, wise, and celebratory tale about what it’s like to be different in America—both the good and the bad. A depiction of small town life with all its comforts and its terrors, this memoir speaks to anyone who has ever felt like an outsider in America. Blum tells her story with a razor wit and deft precision, a story about two "girls with grit," and the child they decide to raise, right where they are, in small town America.
“This is the book to throw at your human resources director—not literally, of course—when any attempt is being made to bamboozle you about how decisions on pay have been made…It is a closely argued, thoroughly researched treatise on how we got here and how pay could be both fairer and more effective as a reward.”
—Stefan Stern, Financial World
“A flat-out revelation of a book by one of the nation’s top scholars of the labor market…required reading for anyone who cares about the future of work in America.”
—Matthew Desmond, author of Poverty, by America
“Jake Rosenfeld pulls back the curtain on the multifaceted cultural, institutional, and market forces at play in wage-setting. This timely book illuminates the power dynamics and often arbitrary forces that have contributed to the egregious inequality in the U.S. labor market—and then lays out a clear blueprint for progressive change.”
—Thea Lee, President of the Economic Policy Institute
Job performance and where you work play a role in determining pay, but judgments of productivity and value are highly subjective. What makes a lawyer more valuable than a teacher? How do you measure the output of a police officer, a professor, or a reporter? Why, in the past few decades, did CEOs suddenly become hundreds of times more valuable than their employees? The answers lie not in objective criteria but in battles over interests and ideals.
Four dynamics are paramount: power, inertia, mimicry, and demands for equity. Power struggles legitimize pay for particular jobs, and organizational inertia makes that pay seem natural. Mimicry encourages employers to do what their peers are doing. And workers are on the lookout for practices that seem unfair. Jake Rosenfeld shows us how these dynamics play out in real-world settings, drawing on cutting-edge economics and original survey data, with an eye for compelling stories and revealing details.
You’re Paid What You’re Worth gets to the heart of that most basic of social questions: Who gets what and why?
The Deep South has seen a 36 percent increase in AIDS cases while the rest of the nation has seen a 2 percent decline. Many of the underlying reasons for the disease’s continued spread in the region—ignorance about HIV, reluctance to get tested, non-adherence to treatment protocols, resistance to behavioral changes—remain unaddressed by policymakers.
In this extensively revised second edition, Kathryn Whetten and Brian Wells Pence present a rich discussion of twenty-five ethnographic life stories of people living with HIV in the South. Most importantly, they incorporate research from their recent quantitative study, “Coping with HIV/AIDS in the Southeast” (CHASE), which includes 611 HIV-positive patients from North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana. This new edition continues to bring the participants’ voices to life while highlighting how the CHASE study confirmed many of the themes that originally emerged from the life histories. This is the first cohesive compilation of up-to-date evidence on the unique and difficult aspects of living with HIV in the Deep South.
In the aftermath of armed conflict, how do new generations of young people learn about peace, justice, and democracy? Michelle J. Bellino describes how, following Guatemala’s civil war, adolescents at four schools in urban and rural communities learn about their country’s history of authoritarianism and develop civic identities within a fragile postwar democracy.
Through rich ethnographic accounts, Youth in Postwar Guatemala, traces youth experiences in schools, homes, and communities, to examine how knowledge and attitudes toward historical injustice traverse public and private spaces, as well as generations. Bellino documents the ways that young people critically examine injustice while shaping an evolving sense of themselves as civic actors. In a country still marked by the legacies of war and division, young people navigate between the perilous work of critiquing the flawed democracy they inherited, and safely waiting for the one they were promised...
The economic deregulation that followed the East Asian financial crisis and recession in the 1990s blocked youth from the labor market. This issue investigates the resulting youth labor crisis and its predominant manifestations—youth unemployment and underemployment. The contributors examine these phenomena not as social anomalies but as the new faces of labor for youth. They conceptualize this situation as emblematic of a global crisis in capitalism and study how the politics of youth unemployment and underemployment emerge interconnected in China, Japan, and South Korea. The essays highlight how political leaders in these countries gamble with the futures of their young people to secure their places in neoliberal globalization, disconnecting national futures from personal ones.
Gabriella Lukács is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan, also published by Duke University Press.
Contributors: Cho Hae-joang, Jennifer Jihye Chun, Mark Driscoll, Michael Fisch, Ju Hui Judy Han, Anita Koo, Gabriella Lukács, Pun Ngai, Xia Zhang
In an information age of youth social movements, Youth Media Matters examines how young people are using new media technologies to tell stories about themselves and their social worlds. They do so through joint efforts in a range of educational settings and media environments, including high school classrooms, youth media organizations, and social media sites. Korina M. Jocson draws on various theories to show how educators can harness the power of youth media to provide new opportunities for meaningful learning and “do-it-together production.” Describing the impact that youth media can have on the broader culture, Jocson demonstrates how it supports expansive literacy practices and promotes civic engagement, particularly among historically marginalized youth.
In Youth Media Matters, Jocson offers a connective analysis of content area classrooms, career and technical education, literary and media arts organizations, community television stations, and colleges and universities. She provides examples of youth media work—including videos, television broadcasts, websites, and blogs—produced in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, and St. Louis. At a time when educators are increasingly attentive to participatory cultures yet constrained by top-down pedagogical requirements, Jocson highlights the knowledge production and transformative potential of youth media with import both in and out of the classroom.
Violence by and against youth continues to be one of the most challenging subjects facing criminologists. In this comprehensive and integrated analysis of the interrelationships of youth violence, violent victimization, and gang membership, Finn-Aage Esbensen, Dana Peterson, Terrance J. Taylor and Adrienne Freng seek to understand what causes youth violence and what can be done about it. Using the results from an inclusive study they conducted of eighth-graders in eleven American cities, the authors examine how the nature, etiology, and intersections of youth violence are structured by both sex and race/ethnicity.
Youth Violence is pertinent to juvenile justice policy considerations. The authors frame their discussion within the public health perspective, focusing on risk factors associated with violent behavior. Thefindings address prevalence and incidence, as well as the demographic correlates and cumulative effects of the risk factors associated with engagement in violence. Ultimately, the theories and research methodologies here are essential for understanding the dynamics of youth violence.
When cases of domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST) by predatory men are reported in the media, it is often presented that a young, innocent girl has been abused by bad men with their demand for sex and profit. This narrative has shaped popular understandings of young people in the commercialized sex trades, sparking new policy responses. However, the authors of Youth Who Trade Sex in the U.S. challenge this dominant narrative as incomplete. Carisa Showden and Samantha Majic investigate young people’s engagement in the sex trades through an intersectional lens.
The authors examine the dominant policy narrative’s history and the political circumstances generating its emergence and current form. With this background, Showden and Majic review and analyze research published since 2000 about young people who trade sex since 2000 to develop an intersectional “matrix of agency and vulnerability” designed to improve research, policy, and community interventions that center the needs of these young people. Ultimately, they derive an understanding of the complex reality for most young people who sell or trade sex, and are committed to ending such exploitation.
The crown jewel of the Inka Empire was their capital, Cusco. So celebrated was the Cusco of Inka times that we sometimes forget how little we know of earlier times in the region. This book presents Allison Davis’ pioneering excavations at the high-altitude Formative site of Yuthu. Davis presents all her data on early households and evidence for the villagers’ subsistence strategies, craft production, and mortuary practices. From her excavations we learn a great deal about daily life and public rituals, each conducted in a different sector of Yuthu. An unexpected bonus of Davis’ excavations was the discovery that some well-known Inka practices actually had their origin in the early villages of the Cusco region. Before her work at Yuthu, so few early houses and ceremonial structures had been published in detail for the Cusco area that we had much less evidence for understanding sacred versus secular space. Davis’ excavations contribute to our understanding of one of the most important transitions in Andean history: the shift from autonomous egalitarian villages to multicommunity polities with hereditary inequality. She is able to link archaeological houses, sites, and multisite clusters to socially meaningful units such as families, villages, and communities. Davis is also able to combine her excavations with settlement pattern data to develop a regional picture of the Formative period in Cusco. This volume is not only the first excavation report on a Formative village in the Cusco area, but is also a study that contributes new data on many traditional Andean themes, including zonal complementarity, sacred landscapes, community composition, mummies and ancestor veneration, ritual canals and religious rites, and intra-village subdivisions.
Around 400 BCE, inhabitants of the Southern Andes took up a sedentary lifestyle that included the practice of agriculture. Settlements were generally solitary or clustered structures with walled agricultural fields and animal corrals, and the first small villages appeared in some regions. Surprisingly, people were also producing and circulating exotic goods: polychrome ceramics, copper and gold ornaments, bronze bracelets and bells. To investigate the apparent contradiction between a lack of social complexity and the broad circulation of elaborated goods, archaeologist Joan Gero co-directed a binational project to excavate the site of Yutopian, an unusually well-preserved Early Formative village in the mountains of Northwest Argentina.
In Yutopian, Gero describes how archaeologists from the United States and Argentina worked with local residents to uncover the lifeways of the earliest sedentary people of the region. Gero foregounds many experiential aspects of archaeological fieldwork that are usually omitted in the archaeological literature: the tedious labor and constraints of time and personnel, the emotional landscape, the intimate ethnographic settings and Andean people, the socio-politics, the difficult decisions and, especially, the role that ambiguity plays in determining archaeological meanings. Gero’s unique approach offers a new model for the site report as she masterfully demonstrates how the decisions made in conducting any scientific undertaking play a fundamental role in shaping the knowledge produced in that project.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press