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2026 Dance Studies Association de la Torre Bueno First Book Award Shortlist Finalist

A Beautiful Fight examines the potentials and limits of capoeira Angola to cohere a multiracial community committed to antiracist struggle. Capoeira, a musical fight-game that originated among enslaved Africans in Brazil, holds special significance for Black Brazilian activists as a spiritual and political practice that affirms the value of Black lives, thus countering anti-Black violence sanctioned by the Brazilian state. However, many capoeira groups count more white practitioners than Black, especially groups of the politicized, Afrocentric style capoeira Angola, raising debates about appropriation of Black culture that resonate across the Americas. A Beautiful Fight addresses these tensions. Drawing on ethnographic research with a multiracial capoeira Angola group in Brazil’s Bahian sertão or backlands, Esther Viola Kurtz explores diverse group members’ understandings of capoeira’s spiritual and political meanings and considers how white participation impacts capoeira’s antiracist politics. A Beautiful Fight argues that white practitioners occupying space in capoeira divert attention from Black members’ concerns and reproduce racist and colonialist ideologies, albeit unintentionally. In this way, the book complicates claims that shared music and dance bridge differences and facilitate cross-racial unity, yet Kurtz proposes that capoeira still transmits knowledge and tools that, when used with intention, commitment, and care, can be wielded to collaboratively contest racism and imagine a more just world.

Southwest Book of the Year Award Winner

Pubwest Book Design Award Winner

Drawing on thousands of years of foodways, Tucson cuisine blends the influences of Indigenous, Mexican, mission-era Mediterranean, and ranch-style cowboy food traditions. This book offers a food pilgrimage, where stories and recipes demonstrate why the desert city of Tucson became American’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy.

Both family supper tables and the city’s trendiest restaurants feature native desert plants and innovative dishes incorporating ancient agricultural staples. Award-winning writer Carolyn Niethammer deliciously shows how the Sonoran Desert’s first farmers grew tasty crops that continue to influence Tucson menus and how the arrival of Roman Catholic missionaries, Spanish soldiers, and Chinese farmers influenced what Tucsonans ate.

White Sonora wheat, tepary beans, and criollo cattle steaks make Tucson’s cuisine unique. In A Desert Feast, you’ll see pictures of kids learning to grow food at school, and you’ll meet the farmers, small-scale food entrepreneurs, and chefs who are dedicated to growing and using heritage foods. It’s fair to say, “Tucson tastes like nowhere else.”

A Guru's Journey provides an ethnographic study of the dance form in the San Francisco Bay Area community formed by Das. Sarah Morelli, a kathak dancer and one of Das's former students, investigates issues in teaching, learning, and performance that developed around Das during his time in the United States. In modifying kathak's form and teaching for Western students, Das negotiates questions of Indianness and non-Indianness, gender, identity, and race. Morelli lays out these issues for readers with the goal of deepening their knowledge of kathak aesthetics, technique, and theory. She also shares the intricacies of footwork, facial expression in storytelling, and other aspects of kathak while tying them to the cultural issues that inform the dance.

• 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.

Aesthetics of Displacement centers the embodied aesthetic practices of Afro-Colombian people and their experiences, asking readers to reassess Colombian national history, legacies of colonialism and racism, politics of memory, and the inheritances of violence related to the Colombian armed conflict. Through a theoretical frame of destierro or “displacement” and an examination of the Afro-Colombian philosophy vivir sabroso or “to live harmoniously,” Aesthetics of Displacement focuses on how theatre-makers, choreographers, filmmakers, activist groups, and photojournalists create an embodied Colombian perspective informed by decolonial practices and thinking that rely on movement as a strategy for existence and that counter European hegemonic aesthetics as the major foundations of taste and value. This approach not only enhances our understanding of contemporary Colombian culture, but also highlights the importance of performance as a means of resistance and identity formation.

African Performance Arts and Political Actspresents innovative formulations for how African performance and the arts shape the narratives of cultural history and politics. This collection, edited by Naomi André, Yolanda Covington-Ward, and Jendele Hungbo, engages with a breadth of African countries and art forms, bringing together speech, hip hop, religious healing and gesture, theater and social justice, opera, radio announcements, protest songs, and migrant workers’ dances. The spaces include village communities, city landscapes, prisons, urban hostels, Township theaters, opera houses, and broadcasts through the airwaves on television and radio as well as in cyberspace. Essays focus on case studies from Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania.

2021 Best Travel Book, International Latino Book Awards

In search of every taco variety from California to Texas and beyond, Ralat traveled from coast to coast and border to border, visiting thirty-eight cities across the country. He examines the pervasive crunchy taco and the new Alta California tacos from chefs Wes Avila, Christine Rivera, and Carlos Salgado. He tastes famous Tex-Mex tacos like the puffy taco and breakfast taco, then tracks down the fry bread taco and the kosher taco. And he searches for the regional hybrid tacos of the American South and the modern, chef-driven tacos of restaurants everywhere. Throughout, he tells the story of how each style of taco came to be, creating a rich look at the diverse taco landscape north of the border. Featuring interviews with taqueros and details on taco paraphernalia and the trappings of taco culture, American Tacos is a book no taco fan will want to take a bite without.

The first history of tacos developed in the United States, now revised and expanded, this book is the definitive survey that American taco lovers must have for their own taco explorations.

“Everything a food history book should be: illuminating, well-written, crusading, and inspiring a taco run afterwards. You’ll gain five pounds reading it, but don’t worry—most of that will go to your brain.”—Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times

“[Ralat] gives an in-depth look at each taco’s history and showcases other aspects of taco culture that has solidified it as a go-to dish on dinner tables throughout the nation.”—Smithsonian Magazine

“A fascinating look at America’s many regional tacos. . . . From California’s locavore tacos to Korean ‘K-Mex’ tacos to Jewish ‘deli-Mex’ to Southern-drawl ‘Sur-Mex’ tacos to American-Indian-inspired fry bread tacos to chef-driven ‘moderno’ tacos, Ralat lays out a captivating landscape.”—Houston Chronicle

“You’ll learn an enormous and entertaining amount about [tacos] in . . . American Tacos. . . . The book literally covers the map of American tacos, from Texas and the South to New York, Chicago, Kansas City and California.”—Forbes

“An impressively reported new book . . . a fast-paced cultural survey and travel guide . . . American Tacos is an exceptional book.”—Taste

New essays from foodways archaeology related to cuisine in social, cultural, and environmental contexts.

This collection of original essays is the first to cover recent trends in foodways archaeology in the Midwest using the concept of cuisine: the selection of food ingredients and methods of food preparation, cooking, and serving/consumption in relation to their social, cultural, and environmental contexts. This work span the Early Archaic (9000 BC) to Late Precontact (up to around AD 1500) in ecological zones of present-day Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Manitoba. Chapters trace development from hunter-gathering to horticultural practices to the more robust farming/fishing/hunting model centered on maize, squash, and other domesticates.

As Susan M. Kooiman, Jodie A. O’Gorman, and Autumn M. Painter note, identification of past cooking habits and evolving methods for foodstuffs identification can help archaeologists to reconstruct foodways and connect food behaviors with identity and associated fundamental societal beliefs. Contributors to this collection use cutting-edge methods and perspectives and consider a range of questions and outcomes that demonstrate the versatility and strength of culinary studies. To move the field forward, contributors also note areas for further analysis and improvement.

This volume targets archaeologists and students, archaeobotanists and zooarchaeologists, and those curious about Indigenous food culture. Engaging content includes chapters on the construction of earth ovens, the use-alteration of pottery and residue, a discussion of cuisine combining plant and animal data with ceramic trends, and the various contexts of plates to understand cooking methods and the social role of cuisine. Others examine faunal remains, the plant remains of feasting, the introduction of maize, the use of limestone nixtamalization, and archaeobotanical assemblages that reveal shifts in cuisine. A conclusion addresses the question, Why cuisine?

 

CONTRIBUTORS

Rebecca K. Albert / Alleen Betzenhauser / Jennifer R. Haas / Mary M. King / Susan M. Kooiman / Mary E. Malainey / Terrance J. Martin / Fernanda Neubauer / Kelsey Nordine / Jodie A. O’Gorman / Autumn M. Painter / Jeffrey M. Painter / Kimberly Schaefer / Mary Simon

The delicious recipes and community spirit that have made Appetite for Change a force for good in North Minneapolis

Feed someone a delicious meal, and you've satisfied a moment’s hunger. Show someone how to cultivate, cook, and share good food, and you satisfy the hungry soul of a whole community. Feeding the soul is what Appetite for Change does, working to improve the foodscape in its Northside community through youth-led urban gardens and farmers markets, cooking workshops and a meal box delivery service, and the Breaking Bread Cafe. Sharing both enticing recipes and heartfelt stories of sustenance, Appetite for Change is filled with soul food classics that feature light twists and local touches and show how multiple cultures can commingle within one cookbook—and even one plate.

There are recipes here for everyone: side dishes like Caribbean Coleslaw, Okra Succotash, and Curried Potato Bites; salads, including Purple Rain Salad and Beet It Salad, both created by AFC youth members to sell at Twins baseball games; small plates, from Jackfruit Nachos to Fried Green Tomatoes; and family-favorite soups and stews, like Lentil Sweet Potato Stew and Jambalaya. There are even breakfast options—including Jerk Shrimp and Cheese Grits, Banana Pecan Bread, and a Big, Beautiful Frittata—and desserts ranging from Flourless Chocolate Cake to Cranberry Cream Cheese Bars. And when it’s time to feed a crowd, look no further than the “Community Feasts” chapter, chock-full of recipes as familiar as Fried Chicken and as singular as Delicata Black Bean Tacos.

Healthy, affordable, easy, and delicious, all of the recipes shared here connect with stories of how the people and purpose behind Appetite for Change have brought nourishing hope and new life to an entire community.