The United States detains and deports several hundred thousand migrants every year. Many spend significant amounts of time in immigration detention as they await adjudication of their immigration cases. The Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey is located in a converted warehouse, managed by a private, for-profit prison company. Over three decades, migrants and asylum seekers have been brought to EDC directly from Newark Airport or have been transferred to the site from elsewhere in the United States, including from the US-Mexico border region.

Through a longitudinal, site-specific study unique in its kind, this volume unites the voices and perspectives of formerly detained migrants, scholars, journalists, lawyers, and social and faith movement leaders, who share their experiences of Elizabeth Detention Center and reconstruct its social history, its location in New Jersey's political economy, and in the changing legal landscapes of immigration detention in the USA.

The definitive portrait of independent filmmaker Robert Kramer that traces the revolutionary dreams of the Left from the 1960s through the end of the twentieth century.
 
Robert Kramer (1939–99) was the emblematic filmmaker of the late-1960s New Left in the United States. Yet because most of his three dozen films have been out of circulation for decades, he has long been neglected by film historians and the Left. Kramer was the cofounder of the leftist documentary collective Newsreel and the director of underground films such as Ice (1970), Milestones (1975), and Route One/USA (1989). His films provide distinctive insights into how America’s political terrain has changed over time, capturing each era’s revolutionary ethos and its contradictions. Whitney Strub’s Films That Explode Like Grenades tracks the histories of leftist film and global revolutionary movements via Kramer’s life and travels. Moving among New York City, Chicago, North Vietnam, Paris, Portugal, Angola, and other crucial flashpoints, Kramer left a major and influential body of work in his wake that has fundamentally shaped the work of radical filmmakers across the globe. 

For Strub, Kramer’s career is a key thread in an intimate history of the 1960s New Left, one that emphasizes the complexities of the movement’s internal tensions and its legacies. Drawing on visual analysis, extensive archival research across the United States and France, and myriad interviews with Kramer contemporaries, including Bernardine Dohrn, Tom Hayden, Jonas Mekas, and Kramer’s relatives, Strub transforms Kramer’s life story into a dynamic and engaging social history of 1960s radicalism and its generational legacies.

With detailed mapping of Robert Kramer’s many social and artistic contexts, Films That Explode Like Grenades restores him to a place of global importance in leftist cinema.
 

For many Americans, the emergence of a “porno chic” culture provided an opportunity to embrace the sexual revolution by attending a film like Deep Throat (1972) or leafing through an erotic magazine like Penthouse. By the 1980s, this pornographic moment was beaten back by the rise of Reagan-era political conservatism and feminist anti-pornography sentiment.

This volume places pornography at the heart of the 1970s American experience, exploring lesser-known forms of pornography from the decade, such as a new, vibrant gay porn genre; transsexual/female impersonator magazines; and pornography for new users, including women and conservative Christians. The collection also explores the rise of a culture of porn film auteurs and stars as well as the transition from film to video. As the corpus of adult ephemera of the 1970s disintegrates, much of it never to be professionally restored and archived, these essays seek to document what pornography meant to its producers and consumers at a pivotal moment.

In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Peter Alilunas, Gillian Frank, Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Lucas Hilderbrand, Nancy Semin Lingo, Laura Helen Marks, Nicholas Matte, Jennifer Christine Nash, Joe Rubin, Alex Warner, Leigh Ann Wheeler, and Greg Youmans.

NJSAA Edited Works Award Winner (2024) 

Histories of gay and lesbian urban life typically focus on major metropolitan areas like San Francisco and New York, opportunity-filled destinations for LGBTQ migrants from across the country. Yet there are many other queer communities in economically depressed cities with majority Black and Hispanic populations that receive far less attention. Though just a few miles from New York, Newark is one of these cities, and its queer histories have been neglected—until now. 
 
Queer Newark charts a history in which working-class people of color are the central actors and in which violence, poverty, and homophobia could never suppress joy, resistance, love, and desire. Drawing from rare archives that range from oral histories to vice squad reports, this collection’s authors uncover the sites and people of Newark’s queer past in bars, discos, ballrooms, and churches. Exploring the intersections of class, race, gender, and sexuality, they offer fresh perspectives on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, community relations with police, Latinx immigration, and gentrification, while considering how to best tell the rich and complex stories of queer urban life. Queer Newark reveals a new side of New Jersey’s largest city while rewriting the history of LGBTQ life in America.