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Ask anyone to name an archetypal Texan, and you're likely to get a larger-than-life character from film or television (say John Wayne's Davy Crockett or J. R. Ewing of TV's Dallas) or a politician with that certain swagger (think LBJ or George W. Bush). That all of these figures are white and male and bursting with self-confidence is no accident, asserts Leigh Clemons. In this thoughtful study of what makes a "Texan," she reveals how Texan identity grew out of the history—and, even more, the myth—of the heroic deeds performed by Anglo men during the Texas Revolution and the years of the Republic and how this identity is constructed and maintained by theatre and other representational practices.

Clemons looks at a wide range of venues in which "Texanness" is performed, including historic sites such as the Alamo, the battlefield at Goliad, and the San Jacinto Monument; museums such as the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum; seasonal outdoor dramas such as Texas! at Palo Duro Canyon; films such as John Wayne's The Alamo and the IMAX's Alamo: The Price of Freedom; plays and TV shows such as the Tuna trilogy, Dallas, and King of the Hill; and the Cavalcade of Texas performance at the 1936 Texas Centennial. She persuasively demonstrates that these performances have created a Texan identity that has become a brand, a commodity that can be sold to the public and even manipulated for political purposes.

"They wouldn't let him rest—even in his grave." Thus Charles Carver opens his story of the climactic years of a journalist who had poured out such blazing prose that readers from England to Hawaii mourned his murder.

The impact of William Cowper Brann's Iconoclast upon the town of Waco, Texas, in the 1890's was like a rocket burst in a quiet sky. Rebelling against Victorian hypocrisy, the newspaperman took aim at organized virtue, exemplified for him by Baylor University and other Baptist organizations.

Dr. Roy Bedichek, noted author and naturalist, knew Brann, and after reading this book in manuscript said, "I am at once delighted and disappointed: disappointed to find my teen-age hero reduced to size... delighted with the art of the biographer.... It has genuine literary excellence... is a chapter in the history of the publishing business in Texas that needs to be put into print...."

Portugal extracted wealth from its Brazilian colony. Slaves--first indigenous peoples, later Africans--mined its ore and cut its sugarcane. From the customs of the colonists and the aspirations of the enslaved rose Brazil. Bosi scrutinizes signal points in the creation of Brazilian culture--the plays and poetry, the sermons of missionaries and Jesuit priests, the Indian novels of José de Alencar and the Voices of Africa of poet Castro Alves. His portrait of the country's response to the pressures of colonial conformity offers a groundbreaking appraisal of Brazilian culture as it emerged from the tensions between imposed colonial control and the African and Amerindian cults--including the Catholic-influenced ones--that resisted it.

An ethnography and media analysis of LGBT+ activism in São Paulo during Brazil’s conservative turn from 2010 to 2018.

For decades, LGBT+ activists across the globe have secured victories by persuasively articulating rights to sexual autonomy. Brazilian activists, some of the world’s most energetic, have kept pace. But since 2010, a backlash has set in, as defenders of “tradition” and “family” have countered LGBT+ rights discourses using a rights-based language of their own.

To understand this shifting ground, Joseph Jay Sosa collaborated with Brazilian LGBT+ activists, who use the language of rights while knowing that rights are not what they seem. Drawing on the symbolic and affective qualities of rights, activists mobilize slogans, bodies, and media to articulate an alternative democratic sensorium. Beyond conventional notions of rights as tools for managing the obligations of states vis-à-vis citizens, activists show how rights operate aesthetically—enjoining the public to see and feel as activists do. Sosa tracks the fate of LGBT+ rights in a growing authoritarian climate that demands “human rights for the right humans.” Interpreting conflicts between advocates and opponents over LGBT+ autonomy as not just an ideological struggle but an aesthetic one, Brazil’s Sex Wars rethinks a style of politics that seems both utterly familiar and counterintuitive.

At most recent count, there are no fewer than forty-five women in Brazil directing or codirecting feature-length fiction or documentary films. In the early 1990s, women filmmakers in Brazil were credited for being at the forefront of the rebirth of filmmaking, or retomada, after the abolition of the state film agency and subsequent standstill of film production. Despite their numbers and success, films by Brazilian women directors are generally absent from discussions of Latin American film and published scholarly works.

Upends the “broken systems” myth and reveals how the law deliberately criminalizes and punishes Black women, inflicting lasting harm on Black communities in the process.
 
The United States has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, with Black Americans representing a disproportionate share of theimprisoned. Many view this statistic as evidence of a broken system. But sociologist Susila Gurusami argues that the carceral system that so disproportionately harms Black families is not broken at all. In fact, it works just as it was intended. Looking closely at the lives of formerly incarcerated Black mothers, Gurusami shows how state institutions—the criminal-legal, child welfare, and healthcare systems—keep Black mothers from their families, harming Black communities in the process. She also shows how Black women work towards conditions that seem impossible—and even utopian—as part of their everyday mothering labor, but find themselves criminalized for these same actions.
 
Drawing on ethnographic data and interviews with formerly incarcerated Black women in South Los Angeles, Gurusami challenges dominant assumptions about mothering and criminal justice reform. Gurusami finds that criminalized Black women endure multigenerational political, social, and embodied assaults–what she calls “reproductive warfare”— and still, they build networks, practices, and theories of radical care that protect Black maternal life, legacies, and futures. With incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and system-impacted Black mothers at the forefront of the growing movement to abolish prisons and jails, Gurusami demonstrates how their everyday mothering work—what she calls “abolitionist motherwork”—is essential to imagining the end of incarceration and ultimately achieving it.
 
Written with a tender and honest voice, Break the System shares moving vignettes that underscore why we must break the system, rather than reform it, and why we must imagine a future that is radically different than the one we’re told we must accept or salvage.
 
 

A history of the activism that made public spaces in American cities more accessible to women.

From the closing years of the nineteenth century, women received subtle—and not so subtle—messages that they shouldn’t be in public. Or, if they were, that they were not safe. Breaking the Gender Code tells the story of both this danger narrative and the resistance to it.

Historian Georgina Hickey investigates challenges to the code of urban gender segregation in the twentieth century, focusing on organized advocacy to make the public spaces of American cities accessible to women. She traces waves of activism from the Progressive Era, with its calls for public restrooms, safe and accessible transportation, and public accommodations, through and beyond second-wave feminism, and its focus on the creation of alternative, women-only spaces and extensive anti-violence efforts. In doing so, Hickey explores how gender segregation intertwined with other systems of social control, as well as how class, race, and sexuality shaped activists' agendas and women's experiences of urban space. Drawing connections between the vulnerability of women in public spaces, real and presumed, and contemporary debates surrounding rape culture, bathroom bills, and domestic violence, Hickey unveils both the strikingly successful and the incomplete initiatives of activists who worked to open up public space to women.

This edited collection is an interdisciplinary dialogue about how breast cancer diagnosis, treatment, and healing is experienced by academic women. The contributors fostered dialogue rooted in critical, qualitative, and autoethnographic traditions about how breast cancer diagnosis, treatment, and healing was experienced by a group with academic privileges, such as the ability to research and advocate for themselves. The book takes on a global perspective, incorporating pieces from medical doctors who became patients, BIPOC women, as well as scholars who identify as LBGTQIA, as they faced decisions about issues such as flat closures, fertility treatments, and being one-sided. These seventeen academic women navigated and resisted healthcare systems to develop a theory of coalitional survivorship.

Amiri Baraka is unquestionably the most recognized leader of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and one of the key literary and cultural figures of the postwar United States. While Baraka's political and aesthetic stances changed considerably over the course of his career, Brick City Vanguard demonstrates the continuity in his thinking about the meaning of black music in the material, psychic, and ideological development of black people. Drawing on primary texts, paratexts (including album liner notes), audio and visual recordings, and archival sources, James Smethurst takes a new look at how Baraka's writing on and performance of music envisioned the creation of an African American people or nation, as well as the growth and consolidation of a black working class within that nation, that resonates to this day. This vision also provides a way of understanding the encounter of black people with what has been called “the urban crisis” and a projection of a liberated black future beyond that crisis.

Two weeks after the United States officially entered World War I, Irish American “Bricklayer Bill” Kennedy won the Boston Marathon wearing his stars-and-stripes bandana, rallying the crowd of patriotic spectators. Kennedy became an American hero and, with outrageous stories of his riding the rails and sleeping on pool tables, a racing legend whose name has since appeared in almost every book written on the Boston Marathon.

When journalist Patrick Kennedy and historian Lawrence Kennedy unearthed their uncle's unpublished memoir, they discovered a colorful character who lived a tumultuous life, beyond his multiple marathons. The bricklayer survived typhoid fever, a five-story fall, auto and train accidents, World War action, Depression-era bankruptcy, decades of back-breaking work, and his own tendency to tipple. In many ways, Bill typified the colorful, newly emerging culture and working-class ethic of competitive long-distance running before it became a professionalized sport. Bricklayer Bill takes us back to another time, when bricklayers, plumbers, and printers could take the stage as star athletes.

Walter Benjamin reimagined through the forgotten power of radio

Philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) has long been recognized for his influence on the fields of literature, film, media studies, critical legal theory, and philosophy. Bringing fresh attention to an often-overlooked aspect of his oeuvre, Bridging Benjamin examines the dozens of radio broadcasts he produced, primarily for children, between 1927 and 1933. Delivered after the academic rejection of his notoriously complex Trauerspiel, these shows became a testing ground for Benjamin’s developing ideas and experimental pedagogy. Though they were cast off as inconsequential by both Benjamin and his contemporaries, Dominic Smith reveals the broadcasts to be a fruitful site for a novel, “derailed” interpretation of Benjamin’s larger body of work.

Reading Benjamin’s radio production as a dynamic site of philosophical experimentation, Smith uses it as a channel and amplifier for three integral but underappreciated aspects of Benjamin’s work: his philosophies of technology, place, and education. Showing how he used broadcast media to explore the increasing “virtualization” of place in networked society, Bridging Benjamin encourages an embrace of Benjamin in contrast to his divisive historical counterparts in the philosophy of technology, such as Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt.

Interpreting Benjamin’s broadcasts as a form of peripatetic thinking—deeply embedded in place, yet mobile and mediated—Bridging Benjamin offers a compelling model for reassessing attachments to the technologies and practices shaping our contemporary worlds.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

2026 Creative Research Medal, Office of Research at the University of Georgia
2026 Isis Duarte Book Prize, Haiti/Dominican Republic Section, Latin American Studies Association

How music depicted in literature shapes Dominican and Dominican New Yorkers’ identities and links the homeland to the diaspora.

Music has played a large role in recent Dominican literature, whether of the island or the diaspora. Bridging Sonic Borders explores this sonic connection linking the homeland and far-flung locales—especially New York, the center of Dominican cultural production in the United States. Sharina Maíllo-Pozo argues that literary representations of popular music delineate a shared aesthetic territory for US and Caribbean Dominicans, fostering an inclusive and transnational Dominicanidad.

Examining works written in Spanish, English, and Dominicanish, Maíllo-Pozo focuses on Dominican/Dominicanyork writings that have nurtured a borderless aesthetics through their shared investment in hip-hop, jazz, blues, pop, rock, and merengue. For Dominican writers, popular music has become a way of exploring memory and nostalgia and a means of centering people rejected from hegemonic identity formation—the working class, those of African descent, rural and queer people. For example, many works focused on the life of rocker Luis “Terror” Días have emphasized the in-between identity of being both Dominican and a New Yorker. Collectively, these writings have created a space in which boundaries of nation and diaspora are revealed for their fundamental porosity.

A literary study of three important black women writers, this book examines the "inter-American" characteristics in the work of Marshall, Morrison, and Jones, including detailed discussions of Morrison's Song of Solomon and Tar Baby, Jones's Corregidora and Song of Anninho, and Marshall's The Chose Place, The Timeless People.

Coser defines the inter-American characteristics in these authors' novels as a connection based on a common African heritage and a shared legacy of colonialism and racism. These three authors redefine the boundaries between the Americas, bridging the "extended Caribbean" that stretches from the U.S. Atlantic coast to Brazil. Their work reinterprets ethnic and sexual identity. Issues of race, class, and nationality overlap. History and identity are reinvented. 

To explore the collective forms of resistance and cultural processes in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States, Coser also makes provocative connections between the visibility of black women writers and the popularity of male Latin American novelists like Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquéz.

Between 1848 and 1914, approximately 100,000 Jews emigrated from Hungary to the United States. They came in two waves. The first group, catalyzed by the 1848 revolutions against the Austrian monarchy, consisted mainly of political dissidents and well educated, cosmopolitan, middle-class Jews seeking greater personal, religious, and political freedoms in the New World. The second and much larger group, which began to arrive around 1880, consisted primarily of unskilled laborers and lower-middle-class artisans and tradespeople, beckoned to America by the promise of vast economic opportunity.  

In the abundant literature on Jewish immigration to the United States, virtually nothing has been written specifically about the Hungarian-Jewish experience, which differed in many respects from that of other Jewish national groups. Bridging Three Worlds offers such a chronicle, relating the immigrants’ history from their political and cultural roots in the Old Country to their acculturation as citizens in a newly adopted land. Based on primary archival materials, oral histories, and secondary sources, the book is also informed by the author’s own experiences as an American of Hungarian-Jewish origins. 

The inspirational writings of cultural theorist and social justice activist Gloria Anzaldúa have empowered generations of women and men throughout the world. Charting the multiplicity of Anzaldúa's impact within and beyond academic disciplines, community trenches, and international borders, Bridging presents more than thirty reflections on her work and her life, examining vibrant facets in surprising new ways and inviting readers to engage with these intimate, heartfelt contributions.

Bridging is divided into five sections: The New Mestizas: "transitions and transformations"; Exposing the Wounds: "You gave me permission to fly in the dark"; Border Crossings: Inner Struggles, Outer Change; Bridging Theories: Intellectual Activism with/in Borders; and "Todas somos nos/otras": Toward a "politics of openness." Contributors, who include Norma Elia Cantú, Elisa Facio, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Aída Hurtado, Andrea Lunsford, Denise Segura, Gloria Steinem, and Mohammad Tamdgidi, represent a broad range of generations, professions, academic disciplines, and national backgrounds. Critically engaging with Anzaldúa's theories and building on her work, they use virtual diaries, transformational theory, poetry, empirical research, autobiographical narrative, and other genres to creatively explore and boldly enact future directions for Anzaldúan studies.

A book whose form and content reflect Anzaldúa's diverse audience, Bridging perpetuates Anzaldúa's spirit through groundbreaking praxis and visionary insights into culture, gender, sexuality, religion, aesthetics, and politics. This is a collection whose span is as broad and dazzling as Anzaldúa herself.

By addressing the enigma of the exceptional success of Hungarian emigrant scientists and telling their life stories, Brilliance in Exile combines scholarly analysis with fascinating portrayals of uncommon personalities. István and Balazs Hargittai discuss the conditions that led to five different waves of emigration of scientists from the early twentieth century to the present. Although these exodes were driven by a broad variety of personal motivations, the attraction of an open society with inclusiveness, tolerance, and – needless to say – better circumstances for working and living, was the chief force drawing them abroad.

While emigration from East to West is a general phenomenon, this book explains why and how the emigration of Hungarian scientists is distinctive. The high number of Nobel Prizes among this group is only one indicator. Multicultural tolerance, a quickly emerging, considerably Jewish, urban middle class, and a very effective secondary school system were positive legacies of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Multiple generations, shaped by these conditions, suffered from the increasingly exclusionist, intolerant, antisemitic, and economically stagnating environment, and chose to go elsewhere. “I would rather have roots than wings, but if I cannot have roots, I shall use wings," explained Leo Szilard, one of the fathers of the Atom Bomb.