Results by title

8812 books match the query 'Political Science' and 358 start with b

cover of Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle

Black Revolutionary

William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle

Gerald Horne

University of Illinois Press, 2013

A leading African American Communist, lawyer William L. Patterson (1891–1980) was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the defeat of Jim Crowby virtue of his leadership of the Scottsboro campaign in the 1930s. In this watershed biography, historian Gerald Horne shows how Patterson helped to advance African American equality by fostering and leveraging international support for the movement. Horne highlights key moments in Patterson's global activism: his early education in the Soviet Union, his involvement with the Scottsboro trials and other high-profile civil rights cases of the 1930s to 1950s, his 1951 "We Charge Genocide" petition to the United Nations, and his later work with prisons and the Black Panther Party.
 
Through Patterson's story, Horne examines how the Cold War affected the freedom movement, with civil rights leadership sometimes disavowing African American leftists in exchange for concessions from the U.S. government. He also probes the complex and often contradictory relationship between the Communist Party and the African American community, including the impact of the FBI's infiltration of the Communist Party. Drawing from government and FBI documents, newspapers, periodicals, archival and manuscript collections, and personal papers, Horne documents Patterson's effectiveness at carrying the freedom struggle into the global arena and provides a fresh perspective on twentieth-century struggles for racial justice.
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cover of Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry

Black Skin, White Coats

Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry

Matthew M. Heaton

Ohio University Press, 2013

Black Skin, White Coats is a history of psychiatry in Nigeria from the 1950s to the 1980s. Working in the contexts of decolonization and anticolonial nationalism, Nigerian psychiatrists sought to replace racist colonial psychiatric theories about the psychological inferiority of Africans with a universal and egalitarian model focusing on broad psychological similarities across cultural and racial boundaries. Particular emphasis is placed on Dr. T. Adeoye Lambo, the first indigenous Nigerian to earn a specialty degree in psychiatry in the United Kingdom in 1954. Lambo returned to Nigeria to become the medical superintendent of the newly founded Aro Mental Hospital in Abeokuta, Nigeria’s first “modern” mental hospital. At Aro, Lambo began to revolutionize psychiatric research and clinical practice in Nigeria, working to integrate “modern” western medical theory and technologies with “traditional” cultural understandings of mental illness. Lambo’s research focused on deracializing psychiatric thinking and redefining mental illness in terms of a model of universal human similarities that crossed racial and cultural divides.

Black Skin, White Coats is the first work to focus primarily on black Africans as producers of psychiatric knowledge and as definers of mental illness in their own right. By examining the ways that Nigerian psychiatrists worked to integrate their psychiatric training with their indigenous backgrounds and cultural and civic nationalisms, Black Skin, White Coats provides a foil to Frantz Fanon’s widely publicized reactionary articulations of the relationship between colonialism and psychiatry. Black Skin, White Coats is also on the cutting edge of histories of psychiatry that are increasingly drawing connections between local and national developments in late-colonial and postcolonial settings and international scientific networks. Heaton argues that Nigerian psychiatrists were intimately aware of the need to engage in international discourses as part and parcel of the transformation of psychiatry at home.

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cover of Black Star: African American Activism in the International Political Economy

Black Star

African American Activism in the International Political Economy

Ramla M. Bandele

University of Illinois Press, 2007

This book describes how the first African American mass political organization was able to gain support from throughout the African diaspora to finance the Black Star Line, a black merchant marine that would form the basis of an enclave economy after World War I. Ramla M. Bandele explores the concept of diaspora itself and how it has been applied to the study of émigré and other ethnic networks.

In characterizing the historical and political context of the Black Star Line, Bandele analyzes the international political economy during 1919-25 and considers the black politics of the era, focusing particularly on Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association for its creation of the Black Star Line. She offers an in-depth case study of the Black Star Line as an instance of the African diaspora attempting to link communities and carry out a transnational political and economic project. Arguing that ethnic networks can be legitimate actors in international politics and economics, Bandele also suggests, however, that activists in any given diaspora do not always function as a unit.

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cover of Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas

Black Victory

The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas

Darlene Clark Hine & Essays by Darlene Clark Hine, Steven F. Lawson, & Merline Pitre

University of Missouri Press, 2003

In Black Victory, Darlene Clark Hine examines a pivotal breakthrough in the struggle for black liberation through the voting process. She details the steps and players in the 1944 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright, a precursor to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. She discusses the role that NAACP attorneys such as Thurgood Marshall played in helping black Texans regain the right denied them by white Texans in the Democratic Party: the right to vote and to have that vote count. Hine illuminates the mobilization of black Texans. She effectively demonstrates how each part of the African American community—from professionals to laborers—was essential to this struggle and the victory against disfranchisement.
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cover of Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies

Black Visions

The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies

Michael C. Dawson

University of Chicago Press, 2001

This stunning book represents the most comprehensive analysis to date of the complex relationships between black political thought and black political identity and behavior. Ranging from Frederick Douglass to rap artist Ice Cube, Michael C. Dawson brilliantly illuminates the history and current role of black political thought in shaping political debate in America.
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cover of Black Wave: How Networks and Governance Shaped Japan’s 3/11 Disasters

Black Wave

How Networks and Governance Shaped Japan’s 3/11 Disasters

Daniel P. Aldrich

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Despite the devastation caused by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 60-foot tsunami that struck Japan in 2011, some 96% of those living and working in the most disaster-stricken region of Tōhoku made it through. Smaller earthquakes and tsunamis have killed far more people in nearby China and India. What accounts for the exceptionally high survival rate? And why is it that some towns and cities in the Tōhoku region have built back more quickly than others?
           
Black Wave illuminates two critical factors that had a direct influence on why survival rates varied so much across the Tōhoku region following the 3/11 disasters and why the rebuilding process has also not moved in lockstep across the region. Individuals and communities with stronger networks and better governance, Daniel P. Aldrich shows, had higher survival rates and accelerated recoveries. Less-connected communities with fewer such ties faced harder recovery processes and lower survival rates. Beyond the individual and neighborhood levels of survival and recovery, the rebuilding process has varied greatly, as some towns and cities have sought to work independently on rebuilding plans, ignoring recommendations from the national government and moving quickly to institute their own visions, while others have followed the guidelines offered by Tokyo-based bureaucrats for economic development and rebuilding.
 
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cover of Black Women and Politics in New York City

Black Women and Politics in New York City

Julie A. Gallagher

University of Illinois Press, 2014

An essential contribution to twentieth-century political history, Black Women and Politics in New York City documents African American women in New York City fighting for justice, civil rights, and equality in the turbulent world of formal politics from the suffrage and women's rights movements to the feminist era of the 1970s.

Historian and human rights activist Julie A. Gallagher deftly examines how race, gender, and the structure of the state itself shape outcomes, and exposes the layers of power and discrimination at work in American society. She combines her analysis with a look at the career of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress and the first to run for president on a national party ticket. In so doing, she rewrites twentieth-century women's history and the dominant narrative arcs of feminist history that hitherto ignored African American women and their accomplishments.

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cover of Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: Critical Research and Perspectives

Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean

Critical Research and Perspectives

Melanie A. Medeiros

Rutgers University Press, 2023

Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: Critical Research and Perspectives employs an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to examine Black cisgender women’s social, cultural, economic, and political experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean. It presents critical empirical research emphasizing Black women’s innovative, theoretical, and methodological approaches to activism and class-based gendered racism and Black politics. While there are a few single-authored books focused on Black women in Latin American and Caribbean, the vast majority of the scholarship on Black women in Latin America and the Caribbean has been published as theses, dissertations, articles, and book chapters. This volume situates these social and political analyses as interrelated and dialogic and contributes a transnational perspective to contemporary conversations surrounding the continued relevance of Black women as a category of social science inquiry. Many of the contributing authors are from Latin American and Caribbean countries, reflecting a commitment to representing the valuable observations and lived experiences of scholars from this region. When read together, the chapters offer a hemispheric framework for understanding the lasting legacies of colonialism, transatlantic slavery, plantation life, and persistent socio-economic and cultural violence.
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cover of Black Workers' Struggle for Equality in Birmingham

Black Workers' Struggle for Equality in Birmingham

Edited by Horace Huntley and David Montgomery

University of Illinois Press, 2004

Horace Huntley and David Montgomery curate a collection of annotated oral interviews of black workers who served on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, Alabama. As the interviewees recount their struggles against discrimination, they show how collective action--whether through unions, the Movement, or networks of workplace activists--sought to gain access to better jobs, municipal services, housing, and less restrictive voter registration. 

Powerful and honest, Black Workers' Struggle for Equality in Birmingham draws on work by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to offer readers vivid eyewitness accounts of American history in the making.

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cover of Black and Green: The Fight For Civil Rights in Northern Ireland & Black America

Black and Green

The Fight For Civil Rights in Northern Ireland & Black America

Brian Dooley

Pluto Press, 1998

‘An excellent book.’ Irish Voice (New York)

'Focusing on the period from the 1960s onward, Brian Dooley suggests that the black rights struggle in the US had a formative influence on Northern Ireland's civil rights movement which adopted similar tactics of protest marches and sit-ins ... A well researched book, written from an unusual angle that illuminates this understudied international influence on the Ulster conflict' Political Studies

Ties between political activists in Black America and Ireland span several centuries, from the days of the slave trade to the close links between Frederick Douglass and Daniel O’Connell, and between Marcus Garvey and Eamon de Valera. This timely book traces those historic links and examines how the struggle for black civil rights in America in the 1960s helped shape the campaign against discrimination in Northern Ireland. The author includes interviews with key figures such as Angela Davis, Bernadette McAliskey and Eamonn McCann.
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cover of Black in Selma: The Uncommon Life of J. L. Chestnut Jr.

Black in Selma

The Uncommon Life of J. L. Chestnut Jr.

J. L. Chestnut

University of Alabama Press, 2007

One man’s fight for justice. One town’s reckoning with history.

Born in Selma in 1930, J. L. Chestnut left home to study law at Howard University in Washington, DC. Returning to Selma, Chestnut was the town’s first and only African American attorney in the late 1950s. As the turbulent struggle for civil rights spread across the South, Chestnut became an active and ardent promoter of social and legal equality in his hometown. A key player on the local and state fronts, Chestnut accrued deep insights into the racial tensions in his community and deftly opened paths toward a more equitable future.

Though intimately involved in many events that took place in Selma, Chestnut was nevertheless often identified in history books simply as “a local attorney.” Black in Selma reveals his powerful yet little-known story.

In the 2014 film Selma, director Ava DuVernay takes audiences to the climactic confrontation between civil rights advocates and the state’s security forces of March 1965. Readers looking for a deeper understanding of the events that preceded that epic moment, as well as how racial integration unfolded in Selma in the decades that followed, will find Chestnut’s story and memories both a vital primary source and an inspiration.

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cover of Blackhood Against the Police Power: Punishment and Disavowal in the "Post-Racial" Era

Blackhood Against the Police Power

Punishment and Disavowal in the "Post-Racial" Era

Tryon P. Woods

Michigan State University Press, 2019

Both significant and timely, Blackhood Against the Police Power addresses the punishment of “race” and the disavowal of sexual violence central to the contemporary “post-racial” culture of politics. Here the author asserts that the post-racial presents an antiblack animus that should be read as desiring the end of blackness and the black liberation movement’s singular ethical claims. The book redefines policing as a sociohistorical process of implementing antiblackness and, in so doing, redefines racism as an act of sexual violence that produces the punishment of race. It smartly critiques the way leading antiracist discourse is frequently complicit with antiblackness and recalls the original 1960s conception of black studies as a corrective to the deficiencies in today’s critical discourse on race and sex. The book explores these lines of inquiry to pinpoint how the history of racial slavery wraps itself in a new discourse of disavowal. In this way, Blackhood Against the Police Power responds to a range of texts, policies, practices, and representations complicit with the police power—from the Fourth Amendment and the movements to curtail stop-and-frisk policing and mass incarceration to popular culture treatments of blackness to the leading academic discourses on race and sex politics.
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cover of Blacks, Coloureds and National Identity in Nineteenth-century Latin America

Blacks, Coloureds and National Identity in Nineteenth-century Latin America

Edited by Nancy Priscilla Naro

University of London Press, 2003

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cover of Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation

Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation

Julia M. Wright

Ohio University Press, 2027

William Blake’s reputation as a staunch individualist is based in large measure on his repeated attacks on institutions and belief systems that constrain the individual’s imagination. Blake, however, rarely represents isolation positively, suggesting that the individual’s absolute freedom from communal pressures is not the ideal. Instead, as Julia Wright argues in her award-winning study Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation, Blake’s concern lies with the kind of community that is being established. Moreover, writing at the moment of the emergence of modern nationalism, Blake reveals a concern with the national community in particular.

Beginning with a discussion of the priority of national narrative in late-eighteenth-century art theory and antiquarianism, Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation traces its relevance in Blake’s printed works, from The Poetical Sketches and the Lambeth Prophecies to The Laocoön. Professor Wright then turns to Europe, America, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, focusing on Blake’s portrayals of particular characters’ alienation from the groups and ideologies represented in the texts. The book closes by arguing that Blake’s major printed works, Milton and Jerusalem, are explicit and extensive engagements with the question of nation—and empire.

Although nationalism existed in various forms during the Romantic period, Blake’s contemporaries generally assumed that nations should progress continuously, producing a clear narrative line from an auspicious origin to the perfect fulfillment of that promise. Wright argues that these mutually determining constructs of national character and national narrative inform Blake’s handling of the problem of the individual-within-a-community.

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cover of Blaming the Poor: The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images about Poverty

Blaming the Poor

The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images about Poverty

Greenbaum, Susan D

Rutgers University Press, 2015

In 1965, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan—then a high-ranking official in the Department of Labor—sparked a firestorm when he released his report “The Negro Family,” which came to be regarded by both supporters and detractors as an indictment of African American culture. Blaming the Poor examines the regrettably durable impact of the Moynihan Report for race relations and social policy in America, challenging the humiliating image the report cast on poor black families and its misleading explanation of the causes of poverty.
 
A leading authority on poverty and racism in the United States, Susan D. Greenbaum dismantles Moynihan’s main thesis—that the so called matriarchal structure of the African American family “feminized” black men, making them inadequate workers and absent fathers, and resulting in what he called a tangle of pathology that led to a host of ills, from teen pregnancy to adult crime. Drawing on extensive scholarship, Greenbaum highlights the flaws in Moynihan’s analysis. She reveals how his questionable ideas have been used to redirect blame for substandard schools, low wages, and the scarcity of jobs away from the societal forces that cause these problems, while simultaneously reinforcing stereotypes about African Americans. Greenbaum also critiques current policy issues that are directly affected by the tangle of pathology mindset—the demonization and destruction of public housing; the criminalization of black youth; and the continued humiliation of the poor by entrepreneurs who become rich consulting to teachers, non-profits, and social service personnel.  
 
A half century later, Moynihan’s thesis remains for many a convenient justification for punitive measures and stingy indifference to the poor. Blaming the Poor debunks this infamous thesis, proposing instead more productive and humane policies to address the enormous problems facing us today.
 
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cover of Blessings from Beijing: Inside China's Soft-Power War on Tibet

Blessings from Beijing

Inside China's Soft-Power War on Tibet

Greg C. Bruno

University Press of New England, 2018

As we approach the sixtieth anniversary of China’s 1959 invasion of Tibet—and the subsequent creation of the Tibetan exile community—the question of the diaspora’s survival looms large. Beijing’s foreign policy has grown more adventurous, particularly since the post-Olympic expansion of 2008. As the pressure mounts, Tibetan refugee families that have made their homes outside China—in the mountains of Nepal, the jungles of India, or the cold concrete houses high above the Dalai Lama’s monastery in Dharamsala—are migrating once again. Blessings from Beijing untangles the chains that tie Tibetans to China and examines the political, social, and economic pressures that are threatening to destroy Tibet’s refugee communities. Journalist Greg Bruno has spent nearly two decades living and working in Tibetan areas. Bruno journeys to the front lines of this fight: to the high Himalayas of Nepal, where Chinese agents pay off Nepali villagers to inform on Tibetan asylum seekers; to the monasteries of southern India, where pro-China monks wish the Dalai Lama dead; to Asia’s meditation caves, where lost souls ponder the fine line between love and war; and to the streets of New York City, where the next generation of refugees strategizes about how to survive China’s relentless assault. But Bruno’s reporting does not stop at well-worn tales of Chinese meddling and political intervention. It goes beyond them—and within them—to explore how China’s strategy is changing the Tibetan exile community forever.
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cover of Blindness Through the Looking Glass: The Performance of Blindness, Gender, and the Sensory Body

Blindness Through the Looking Glass

The Performance of Blindness, Gender, and the Sensory Body

Gili Hammer

University of Michigan Press, 2019

Modern Western culture is saturated with images, imprinting visual standards of concepts such as beauty and femininity onto our collective consciousness. Blindness Through the Looking Glass examines how gender and femininity are performed and experienced in everyday life by women who do not rely on sight as their dominant mode of perception, identifying the multiple senses involved in the formation of gender identity within social interactions. Challenging visuality as the dominant mode to understand gender, social performance, and visual culture, the book offers an ethnographic investigation of blindness (and sight) as a human condition, putting both blindness and vision “on display” by discussing people’s auditory, tactile, and olfactory experiences as well as vision and sight, and by exploring ways that individuals perform blindness and “sightedness” in their everyday lives. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 blind women in Israel and anthropological fieldwork, the book investigates the social construction and daily experience of blindness in a range of domains. Uniquely, the book brings together blind symbolism with the everyday experiences of blind and sighted individuals, joining in mutual conversation the fields of disability studies, visual culture, anthropology of the senses, and gender studies.
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cover of Blockading the Border and Human Rights: The El Paso Operation that Remade Immigration Enforcement

Blockading the Border and Human Rights

The El Paso Operation that Remade Immigration Enforcement

By Timothy J. Dunn

University of Texas Press, 2009

To understand border enforcement and the shape it has taken, it is imperative to examine a groundbreaking Border Patrol operation begun in 1993 in El Paso, Texas, "Operation Blockade." The El Paso Border Patrol designed and implemented this radical new strategy, posting 400 agents directly on the banks of the Rio Grande in highly visible positions to deter unauthorized border crossings into the urban areas of El Paso from neighboring Ciudad Juárez—a marked departure from the traditional strategy of apprehending unauthorized crossers after entry. This approach, of "prevention through deterrence," became the foundation of the 1994 and 2004 National Border Patrol Strategies for the Southern Border. Politically popular overall, it has rendered unauthorized border crossing far less visible in many key urban areas. However, the real effectiveness of the strategy is debatable, at best. Its implementation has also led to a sharp rise in the number of deaths of unauthorized border crossers.

Here, Dunn examines the paradigm-changing Operation Blockade and related border enforcement efforts in the El Paso region in great detail, as well as the local social and political situation that spawned the approach and has shaped it since. Dunn particularly spotlights the human rights abuses and enforcement excesses inflicted on local Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants as well as the challenges to those abuses. Throughout the book, Dunn filters his research and fieldwork through two competing lenses, human rights versus the rights of national sovereignty and citizenship.

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cover of Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts

Blood Narrative

Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts

Chadwick Allen

Duke University Press, 2002

Blood Narrative is a comparative literary and cultural study of post-World War II literary and activist texts by New Zealand Maori and American Indians—groups who share much in their responses to European settler colonialism. Chadwick Allen reveals the complex narrative tactics employed by writers and activists in these societies that enabled them to realize unprecedented practical power in making both their voices and their own sense of indigeneity heard.
Allen shows how both Maori and Native Americans resisted the assimilationist tide rising out of World War II and how, in the 1960s and 1970s, they each experienced a renaissance of political and cultural activism and literary production that culminated in the formation of the first general assembly of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. He focuses his comparison on two fronts: first, the blood/land/memory complex that refers to these groups' struggles to define indigeneity and to be freed from the definitions of authenticity imposed by dominant settler cultures. Allen's second focus is on the discourse of treaties between American Indians and the U.S. government and between Maori and Great Britain, which he contends offers strong legal and moral bases from which these indigenous minorities can argue land and resource rights as well as cultural and identity politics.

With its implicit critique of multiculturalism and of postcolonial studies that have tended to neglect the colonized status of indigenous First World minorities, Blood Narrative will appeal to students and scholars of literature, American and European history, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and comparative cultural studies.
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cover of Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West, First Paperback Edition

Blood Passion

The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West, First Paperback Edition

Scott Martelle

Rutgers University Press, 2008

By early April 1914, Colorado Governor Elias Ammons thought the violence in his state’s strike-bound southern coal district had eased enough that he could begin withdrawing the Colorado National Guard, deployed six months earlier as military occupiers. But Ammons misread the signals, and on April 20, 1914, a full-scale battle erupted between the remaining militiamen and armed strikers living in a tent colony at the small railroad town of Ludlow. Eight men were killed in the fighting, which culminated in the burning of the colony. The next day, the bodies of two women and eleven children were found suffocated in a below-ground shelter. The “Ludlow Massacre,” as it quickly became known, launched a national call-to-arms for union supporters to join a ten-day guerrilla war along more than two hundred miles of the eastern Rockies. The convulsion of arson and violence killed more than thirty people and didn’t end until President Woodrow Wilson sent in the U.S. Army. Overall at least seventy-five men, women, and children were killed in seven months, likely the nation’s deadliest labor struggle.

In Blood Passion, journalist Scott Martelle explores this little-noted tale of political corruption and repression and immigrants’ struggles against dominant social codes of race, ethnicity, and class. More than a simple labor dispute, the events surrounding Ludlow embraced some of the most volatile social movements of the early twentieth century, pitting labor activists, socialists, and anarchists against the era’s powerful business class, including John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and helped give rise to the modern twins of corporate public relations and political “spin.” But at its heart, Blood Passion is the dramatic story of small lives merging into a movement for change and of the human struggle for freedom and dignity.

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cover of Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia

Blood and Capital

The Paramilitarization of Colombia

Jasmin Hristov

Ohio University Press, 2009

WOLA-Duke Book Award Finalist

In Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia, Jasmin Hristov examines the complexities, dynamics, and contradictions of present-day armed conflict in Colombia. She conducts an in-depth inquiry into the restructuring of the state’s coercive apparatus and the phenomenon of paramilitarism by looking at its military, political, and legal dimensions. Hristov demonstrates how various interrelated forms of violence by state forces, paramilitary groups, and organized crime are instrumental to the process of capital accumulation by the local elite as well as the exercise of political power by foreign enterprises. She addresses, as well, issues of forced displacement, proletarianization of peasants, concentration of landownership, growth in urban and rural poverty, and human rights violations in relation to the use of legal means and extralegal armed force by local dominant groups and foreign companies.

Hristov documents the penetration of major state institutions by right-wing armed groups and the persistence of human rights violations against social movements and sectors of the low-income population. Blood and Capital raises crucial questions about the promised dismantling of paramilitarism in Colombia and the validity of the so-called demobilization of paramilitary groups, both of which have been widely considered by North American and some European governments as proof of Colombian president Álvaro Uribe’s advances in the wars on terror and drugs.

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cover of Blood and Culture: Youth, Right-Wing Extremism, and National Belonging in Contemporary Germany

Blood and Culture

Youth, Right-Wing Extremism, and National Belonging in Contemporary Germany

Cynthia Miller-Idriss

Duke University Press, 2009

Over the past decade, immigration and globalization have significantly altered Europe’s cultural and ethnic landscape, foregrounding questions of national belonging. In Blood and Culture, Cynthia Miller-Idriss provides a rich ethnographic analysis of how patterns of national identity are constructed and transformed across generations. Drawing on research she conducted at German vocational schools between 1999 and 2004, Miller-Idriss examines how the working-class students and their middle-class, college-educated teachers wrestle with their different views about citizenship and national pride. The cultural and demographic trends in Germany are broadly indicative of those underway throughout Europe, yet the country’s role in the Second World War and the Holocaust makes national identity, and particularly national pride, a difficult issue for Germans. Because the vocational-school teachers are mostly members of a generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s and hold their parents’ generation responsible for National Socialism, many see national pride as symptomatic of fascist thinking. Their students, on the other hand, want to take pride in being German.

Miller-Idriss describes a new understanding of national belonging emerging among young Germans—one in which cultural assimilation takes precedence over blood or ethnic heritage. Moreover, she argues that teachers’ well-intentioned, state-sanctioned efforts to counter nationalist pride often create a backlash, making radical right-wing groups more appealing to their students. Miller-Idriss argues that the state’s efforts to shape national identity are always tempered and potentially transformed as each generation reacts to the official conception of what the nation “ought” to be.

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cover of Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900-1940

Blood and Homeland

Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900-1940

Paul J. Weindling

Central European University Press, 2007

The history of eugenics and racial nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe is a neglected topic of analysis in contemporary scholarship. The 20 essays in this volume, written by distinguished scholars of eugenics and fascism alongside a new generation of scholars, excavate the hitherto unknown eugenics movements in Central and Southeast Europe, including Austria and Germany. Eugenics and racial nationalism are topics that have constantly been marginalized and rated as incompatible with local national traditions in Central and Southeast Europe. These topics receive a new treatment here. On the one hand, the historiographic perspective connects developments in the history of anthropology and eugenics with political ideologies such as racial nationalism and anti-Semitism; on the other hand, it contests the 'Sonderweg' approach adopted by scholars dealing with these issues.
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cover of Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State

Blood and Religion

The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State

Jonathan Cook

Pluto Press, 2006

"Timely and important . . . by far the most penetrarting and comprehensive [book] on the subject to date. . . . This work should be required reading." --Nur Masalha, Director of Holy Land Studies, St. Mary's College, University of Surrey, and author of The Politics of Denial

"An original and powerful book." --Ilan Pappe, Senior Lecturer in Political Science, Haifa University, and author of A Modern History of Palestine

"Very impressive. . . . Some of his findings will astound even the knowledgeable reader." --Salim Tamari, Director, Institute of Jerusalem Studies

What is Israel hoping to achieve with its recent withdrawal from Gaza and the buildiing of a 700 km wall? Journalist Jonathan Cook presents a lucid account of the motives. The heart of the issue, he argues, is demography. Israel fears the moment when the region's Palestinians--Israel's own Palestinian citizens and those in the Occupied Territories--become a majority. Inevitable omparisons with apartheid in South Africa will be drawn. The book charts Israel's increasingly desperate responses, including military repression of Palestinian dissent; a ban on marriages between Israel's Palestinian population and Palestinians living under occupation to prevent a right of return "through the back door;" and the redrawing of the Green Line to create an expanded state. Ultimately, the author concludes, these abuses will lead to a third, far deadlier intifada.

Jonathan Cook, a former staff journalist of the Guardian newspaper, has written for the Times, Le Monde diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, al-Ahram Weekly, and Aljazeera.net. He is based in Nazareth.
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cover of Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Massacre of 1919

Blood in Their Eyes

The Elaine Massacre of 1919

Grif Stockley

University of Arkansas Press, 2020

On September 30, 1919, local law enforcement in rural Phillips County, Arkansas, attacked black sharecroppers at a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. The next day, hundreds of white men from the Delta, along with US Army troops, converged on the area “with blood in their eyes.” What happened next was one of the deadliest incidents of racial violence in the history of the United States, leaving a legacy of trauma and silence that has persisted for more than a century. In the wake of the massacre, the NAACP and Little Rock lawyer Scipio Jones spearheaded legal action that revolutionized due process in America.

The first edition of Grif Stockley’s Blood in Their Eyes, published in 2001, brought renewed attention to the Elaine Massacre and sparked valuable new studies on racial violence and exploitation in Arkansas and beyond. With contributions from fellow historians Brian K. Mitchell and Guy Lancaster, this revised edition draws from recently uncovered source material and explores in greater detail the actions of the mob, the lives of those who survived the massacre, and the regime of fear and terror that prevailed under Jim Crow.
 
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cover of Blood on Their Hands: How Greedy Companies, Inept Bureaucracy, and Bad Science Killed Thousands of Hemophiliacs

Blood on Their Hands

How Greedy Companies, Inept Bureaucracy, and Bad Science Killed Thousands of Hemophiliacs

Weinberg, Eric

Rutgers University Press, 2017

A few short years after HIV first entered the world blood supply in the late 1970s and early 1980s, over half the hemophiliacs in the United States were infected with the virus. But this was far more than just an unforeseeable public health disaster. Negligent doctors, government regulators, and Big Pharma all had a hand in this devastating epidemic.
 
Blood on Their Hands is an inspiring, firsthand account of the legal battles fought on behalf of hemophiliacs who were unwittingly infected with tainted blood. As part of the team behind the key class action litigation filed by the infected, young New Jersey lawyer Eric Weinberg was faced with a daunting task: to prove the negligence of a powerful, well-connected global industry worth billions. Weinberg and journalist Donna Shaw tell the dramatic story of how idealistic attorneys and their heroic, mortally-ill clients fought to achieve justice and prevent further infections. A stunning exposé of one of the American medical system’s most shameful debacles, Blood on Their Hands is a rousing reminder that, through perseverance, the victims of corporate greed can sometimes achieve great victory.
[more]
cover of Blood, Ink, and Culture: Miseries and Splendors of the Post-Mexican Condition

Blood, Ink, and Culture

Miseries and Splendors of the Post-Mexican Condition

Roger Bartra

Duke University Press, 2002

Pens and swords, words and blows: for Roger Bartra, the culture of ink and the culture of blood offer two contrasting approaches to the political transformations of our time. In this compilation of essays, Bartra thinks through these transformations by tracing the complex interplay between popular culture, nationalist ideology, civil society, and the state in contemporary Mexico.

Written with verve over a period of twenty years, these essays—most translated into English here for the first time—suggest why Bartra has become one of Latin America’s leading public intellectuals. The essays cover a broad range of topics, from the canonical forms of Mexican culture to the meaning of postnational identity in a globalizing age, from the repercussions of the 1994 Zapatista uprising to the 2000 election of Vicente Fox and the end of the PRI’s seven-decade rule. Across this range of topics, Bartra imparts astute insights into a critical period of transition in Mexican history, stressing throughout the importance of democracy, the complexity of identity, and the vibrancy of the Left. In Blood, Ink, and Culture, he provides a stimulating inside look at political and intellectual life in the southern reaches of North America.

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cover of Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960-80

Blood, Sweat, and Fear

Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960-80

Jeremy Milloy

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Going postal. We hear the chilling phrase and think of the rogue employee who snaps. But Blood, Sweat, and Fear shows that on-the-job bloodshed never occurs in isolation. Using violence as a lens, Jeremy Milloy provides fresh insights into the everyday workings of capitalism, class conflict, race, and gender in the United States and Canada. The result is a study that reveals the workplace as a battleground--one that saw a late-century paradigm shift from the collective violence of strikes and riots to the individualized violence of assaults and shootings.

Explosive and original, Blood, Sweat, and Fear brings historical perspective to contemporary debates about North American workplace violence.

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cover of Bloody Williamson: A Chapter in American Lawlessness

Bloody Williamson

A Chapter in American Lawlessness

Paul M. Angle; Introduction by John Y. Simon

University of Illinois Press, 1952

"In Williamson County some men took to violence almost as a way of life. A shocking story, well told."--New Yorker

Williamson County in southern Illinois has been the scene of almost unparalleled violence, from the Bloody Vendetta between two families in the 1870s through the Herrin Massacre of 1922, Ku Klux Klan activities that ended in fatalities, and the gang war of the 1920s between the Charlie Birger and Shelton brothers gangs. Paul Angle was fascinated by this more-than-fifty-year history, and his account of this violence has become a classic.

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cover of Blooming through the Ashes: An International Anthology on Violence and the Human Spirit

Blooming through the Ashes

An International Anthology on Violence and the Human Spirit

Edited by Clifford Chanin and Aili McConnon

Rutgers University Press, 2008

The twentieth century is frequently characterized in terms of its unprecedented levels of bloodshed. More human beings were killed or allowed to die by human cause than ever before in history. The impact of the century’s carnage does not end with the lives that were taken; the atrocities continue to take their toll on those who survived, on those who bore witness, and on succeeding generations.

Blooming through the Ashes features over sixty writings about this historic violence and its aftermath in a global anthology that brings together the work of Nobel laureates Seamus Heaney, Toni Morrison, Czeslaw Milosz, Wole Soyinka, Elie Wiesel, Imre Kertesz, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Eugenio Montale, and Pablo Neruda. In non-fiction and fiction, these writers and others reflect on the litany of man-made violence that marred the twentieth century and that shadows the twenty-first, including the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, apartheid, repression in Latin America, genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, and the attacks of 9/11.

The texts are arranged thematically, rather than by event, in order to highlight the shared themes of memory expressed across culture and geography. Starting with visceral reactions to a violent event, chapters proceed through recognitions of loss, and move into statements of public remembrance through which future generations attempt to understand the impact of past violence.

[more]
cover of Blue-State Republican: How Larry Hogan Won Where Republicans Lose and Lessons for a Future GOP

Blue-State Republican

How Larry Hogan Won Where Republicans Lose and Lessons for a Future GOP

Mileah K. Kromer

Temple University Press, 2023

Larry Hogan is one of the most popular political figures in the United States today. The two-term Republican governor of Maryland first won his seat after upsetting a favorite of the Democratic political establishment, and then overcame the Trump-driven wave in the heartland of the #resistance to win a second term in 2018. 

Blue-State Republican is the remarkable story of how his carefully messaged, pragmatic approach to governance helped build a coalition of moderate and conservative Democrats, independents, women, college-educated and Black voters and maintained his GOP base during a time of polarization and negative partisanship. Mileah Kromer takes readers inside Maryland politics to illustrate exactly how Hogan won where Republicans lose and consider whether the un-Trump Republican offers any lessons for how the GOP can win the center-right voters who continue to make up a majority of the country.

Kromer conducts interviews with key political leaders and insiders, including Hogan himself, to explain the mechanics of his political success. She also provides a cogent analysis of public opinion polls and focus groups, ultimately showing why the success of a blue-state Republican matters outside of his home state, especially as Hogan considers a 2024 Presidential run.

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cover of Blueprints for a House Divided: The Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflicts

Blueprints for a House Divided

The Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflicts

Robert M. Hayden

University of Michigan Press, 2000

If a house divided against itself cannot stand, does it help to declare it a condominium? This book examines why the common Yugoslav and Bosnian houses came to be divided, and how international diplomatic activities to resolve the conflicts have been misconceived. Through an analysis that combines cultural examination and constitutional study, Robert Hayden argues that almost everything that has happened in the former Yugoslavia since 1989 is congruent with the logic of the politicians who won election in the free and fair elections of 1990 and with the constitutional structures that these politicians have created. Once the idea of a common state for all of the Yugoslav peoples lost electorally, the conflicts that followed were so logical as to be inescapable. Throughout, the analysis relies almost exclusively on materials from the former Yugoslavia itself and on what participants said to each other in their own languages rather than in English to the world community. Drawing on the work of Max Weber and Tzvetan Todorov, this book also discusses the ethical and moral dangers of ignoring the probable consequences of actions that might be desirable in the abstract. A major conclusion is that the actions of the international community were never likely to achieve their stated goals, because they were based on premises unrelated to those driving the Yugoslav peoples themselves. This book addresses issues of interest in anthropology, political science, international relations, law, ethics, East European studies, and policy making.
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cover of Boko Haram

Boko Haram

Brandon Kendhammer

Ohio University Press, 2018

From its small-time origins in the early 2000s to its transformation into one of the world’s most-recognized terrorist groups, this remarkable short book tells the story of Boko Haram’s bloody, decade-long war in northeastern Nigeria. Going beyond the headlines, including the group’s 2014 abduction of 276 girls in Chibok and the international outrage it inspired, Boko Haram provides readers new to the conflict with a clearly written and comprehensive history of how the group came to be, the Nigerian government’s failed efforts to end it, and its enormous impact on ordinary citizens.

Drawing on years of research, Boko Haram is a timely addition to the acclaimed Ohio Short Histories of Africa. Brandon Kendhammer and Carmen McCain—two leading specialists on northern Nigeria—separate fact from fiction within one of the world’s least-understood conflicts. Most distinctively, it is a social history, one that tells the story of Boko Haram’s violence through the journalism, literature, film, and music made by people close to it.

[more]
cover of Bolivia: Revolution and the Power of History in the Present

Bolivia

Revolution and the Power of History in the Present

James Dunkerley

University of London Press, 2007

This volume brings together essays written over three decades on Bolivian history and politics. The book opens with a contemporary survey of the new government of the MAS headed by Evo Morales. Subsequent chapters review the neoliberal experiments of the 1980s and 1990s, the strategic and intellectual failures of Che Guevara's guerrilla foco; the origins of the Revolution of 1952; explanations for the dominance of the caudillos of the 19th century; and the extraordinary story of Francisco Burdett O'Connor, whose life combined liberation struggles on both sides of the Atlantic.
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cover of Bolsonarismo: The Global Origins and Future of Brazil’s Far Right

Bolsonarismo

The Global Origins and Future of Brazil’s Far Right

Fernando Brancoli

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Bolsonarismo: The Global Origins and Future of Brazil’s Far Right documents the rise of the far-right alliance that emerged in Brazil in 2020 around the figure of former president Jair Bolsonaro. Unlike a cohesive organization with uniform practices, Bolsonarismo is marked by fragmentation and a broad variety of ideologies. Fernando Brancoli delves deeply into how Bolsonarismo has developed a specific political orientation through its partnerships with other groups, practices, and subjectivities within Brazil, as well as internationally.

Through interviews, archival research, and newly available public documents, this book presents a comprehensive and compelling portrait of the neo-evangelical pastors, military personnel, and meritocratic ideologues who are the actors behind the far-right movement. Adding to our understanding of Bolsonarismo's growth in Brazilian politics and the contributing factors behind it, the book also sheds light on the impact of Bolsonarismo on world politics. As a prominent leader of the far-right movement, Jair Bolsonaro's political views and policies have reverberated beyond Brazil's borders, influencing the discourse on issues such as climate change, democracy, and human rights around the world.
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cover of Bombs in the Backyard: Atomic Testing and American Politics

Bombs in the Backyard

Atomic Testing and American Politics

A. Constandina Titus

University of Nevada Press, 2001

On January 27, 1951, the first atomic weapon was detonated over a section of desert known as Frenchman Flat in southern Nevada, providing dramatic evidence of the Nevada Test Site's beginnings. Fifty years later, author A. Costandina Titus reviews contemporary nuclear policy issues concerning the continued viability of that site for weapons testing. Titus has updated her now-classic study of atomic testing with fifteen years of political and cultural history, from the mid-1980s Reagan-Gorbachev nuclear standoff to the authorization of the Nevada Test Site Research Center, a Desert Research Institute facility scheduled to open in 2001. In this second edition of Bombs in the Backyard, Titus deftly covers the post-Cold War transformation of American atomic policy as well as our overarching cultural interest in all matters atomic, making this a must-read for anyone interested in atomic policy and politics.
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cover of Bones of Contention: The living archive of Vasil Levski and the making of Bulgaria's national hero

Bones of Contention

The living archive of Vasil Levski and the making of Bulgaria's national hero

Maria Todorova

Central European University Press, 2009

This book is about documenting and analyzing the living archive around the figure of Vasil Levski (1837–1873), arguably the major and only uncontested hero of the Bulgarian national pantheon. The processes described, although with a chronological depth of almost two centuries, are still very much in the making, and the living archive expands not only in size but constantly adding surprising new forms. The monograph is a historical study, taking as its narrative focus the life, death and posthumous fate of Levski. By exploring the vicissitudes of his heroicization, glorification, appropriations, reinterpretation, commemoration and, finally, canonization, it seeks to engage in several broad theoretical debates, and provide the basis for subsequent regional comparative research. The analysis of Levski's consecutive and simultaneous appropriations by different social platforms, political parties, secular and religious institutions, ideologies, professional groups, and individuals, demonstrates how boundaries within the framework of the nation are negotiated around accepted national symbols.
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cover of Bong Hits 4 Jesus: A Perfect Constitutional Storm in Alaska's Capital

Bong Hits 4 Jesus

A Perfect Constitutional Storm in Alaska's Capital

James C. Foster

University of Alaska Press, 2010

In January 2002, for the first time, the Olympic Torch Relay visited Alaska on its way to the Winter Games. When the relay runner and accompanying camera cars passed Juneau-Douglas High School, senior Joseph Frederick and several friends unfurled a fourteen-foot banner reading "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS."

An in-depth look at student rights within a public high school, this book chronicles the events that followed: Frederick's suspension, the subsequent suit against the school district, and, ultimately, the escalation of a local conflict into a federal case. Brought to life through interviews with the principal figures in the case, Bong Hits 4 Jesus is a gripping tale of the boundaries of free speech in an American high school.

[more]
cover of Book of the Disappeared: The Quest for Transnational Justice

Book of the Disappeared

The Quest for Transnational Justice

Jennifer Heath and Ashraf Zahedi, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2023

Book of the Disappeared confronts worldwide human rights violations of enforced disappearance and genocide and explores the global quest for justice with forceful, outstanding contributions by respected scholars, expert practitioners, and provocative contemporary artists. This profoundly humane book spotlights our historic inhumanity while offering insights for survival and transformation.

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cover of Books against Tyranny: Catalan Publishers under Franco

Books against Tyranny

Catalan Publishers under Franco

Laura Vilardell

Vanderbilt University Press, 2022

Catalan-language publishers were under constant threat during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–75). Both the Catalan language and the introduction of foreign ideas were banned by the regime, preoccupied as it was with creating a "one, great, and free Spain." Books against Tyranny compiles, for the first time, the strategies Catalan publishers used to resist the censorship imposed by Franco's regime.

Author Laura Vilardell examines documents including firsthand witness accounts, correspondence, memoirs, censorship files, newspapers, original interviews, and unpublished material housed in various Spanish archives. As such, Books against Tyranny opens up the field and serves as an informative tool for scholars of Franco's Spain, Catalan social movements, and censorship more generally.
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cover of Boomtown Columbus: Ohio’s Sunbelt City and How Developers Got Their Way

Boomtown Columbus

Ohio’s Sunbelt City and How Developers Got Their Way

Kevin R. Cox

The Ohio State University Press, 2021

Columbus, Ohio, and its ample cloud cover may be on the eastern edge of the Midwest, but the city’s unfettered suburbanization and rapid postwar expansion recall its Sunbelt peers. To understand why—and the social and economic stakes of this all-too-common model of urban growth—pioneering geographer Kevin R. Cox takes us through the postwar history of development in Columbus, a city that has often welcomed corporate influence at the expense of livability and equal opportunity for its residents.
How have development interests become entwined with government? How has a policy of annexation reformed the city’s map? Why have airline service and major league prestige lagged behind its status as a regional center? And what, if anything, makes this city with a reputation for being average stand apart? In Boomtown Columbus, Cox applies both scholarly expertise and his personal experience as a long-time resident of the city to look at the real-life costs of policy. The resulting narrative will fascinate not only locals but anyone with a stake in understanding American cities and a path toward urban livability for all.
 
[more]
cover of Border Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of Haunting

Border Afterlives

Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of Haunting

Gabriella Soto

University of Arizona Press, 2026

Border Afterlives begins with the undocumented individuals who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico border—deaths that are both preventable and politically produced.
 
Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic, participatory, and community-engaged research, author Gabriella Soto examines the postmortem journeys of these migrants through the fragmented infrastructure of medicolegal death investigation in the U.S. Southwest. She reveals how the state’s deterrence-based border policies not only generate death but also fail to provide adequate care for the dead. Soto argues that these deaths should be understood as structural homicides and that the forensic neglect they face is a form of ongoing violence.
 
Moving between the practical and the philosophical, Soto asks what it means to care for the dead and what society owes to those who die in its name. Through the lens of haunting, she explores how the dead continue to shape the living, not as objects of horror but as moral agents whose presence demands justice. Border Afterlives offers a border-scale comparative account of forensic practices, critiques the limits of “best practices” in under-resourced systems, and calls for a reimagining of forensic humanitarianism grounded in reciprocity and dignity, beyond human rights. This is a book that insists on remembering the dead.
[more]
cover of Border Air: A History of US-Mexico Environmental Cooperation

Border Air

A History of US-Mexico Environmental Cooperation

Laura M. Uribarri

University of Texas Press, 0

Tracing a century of pollution and transnational collaboration in the Paso del Norte air basin.

The air knows no borders, which makes atmospheric pollution a devilish legal and environmental challenge. The problem is especially dangerous in the Paso del Norte, where the industry and urbanization of Juárez-El Paso stretch across the international boundary, and surrounding mountains trap airborne pollutants. Laura Uribarri traces the nineteenth- and twentieth-century transformations of the region, uncovering the sources of pollution and analyzing transnational efforts to regulate and improve the air.

Border Air shows how a favorable location, rail expansion, and numerous trade and labor agreements made Juárez-El Paso a global manufacturing hub, leading to unfettered growth and declining air quality. By the mid-1990s, El Paso and Juárez ranked among the most polluted cities on the continent. Environmental treaties crafted in Washington and Mexico City made little difference. But fronterizos themselves had an impact. Uribarri focuses on the Paso del Norte Air Quality Task Force, a citizen group that pioneered successful mitigation projects such as working with emitters to design cleaner production methods without disrupting workers’ livelihoods. This history shows what can be accomplished at the grassroots and offers lessons on how border communities can collaborate to address complex environmental problems.

[more]
cover of Border Diplomacy: The Caroline and McLeod Affairs in Anglo-American-Canadian Relations, 1837-1842

Border Diplomacy

The Caroline and McLeod Affairs in Anglo-American-Canadian Relations, 1837-1842

Kenneth R. Stevens

University of Alabama Press, 1989

How the United States began to mature and establish itself as a nation contributing to international law
 
Long after Americans and Britons signed treaties ending the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, ill will between the two nations simmered under the sur­face of their relations and periodically boiled over. In the mid­-nineteenth century, Americans, the British, and British subjects in Canada continued to dispute borders, sovereign rights and responsibilities, and the American republican experiment.
 
Some of the antagonism arose from a fundamental difference in attitude toward democracy. Britons believed that democratic government was inadequate to control the baser elements of a population. Further, they disliked the aggressiveness and arrogance of their former colonists. Americans sensed and resented this contempt; in turn, they regarded British aristocratic pretensions with scorn and believed that country sought world domination. In view of such attitudes, even relatively minor incidents threatened to erupt into violence between the two nations. Such was the case in 1837, when British troops set fire to the American steamer Caroline in American waters, killing a United States citizen, and in 1840, when the state of New York arrested a Canadian, Alexander McLeod, for the murder.
 
These events, taken together, are not simply examples of diplomatic relations or political problems for particular administrations. The dash of attitudes and loyalties along the American-Canadian frontier also demonstrates the instability of the border region, socially as well as politically, and conflicting motives of patriotism and political opportunism in both the American and British governments. Thus, the Caroline and McLeod affairs, occurring as they did at a pivotal moment in American history, reveal how the republic began to mature in its relations with its long-established forebear, refined its own definitions of state and federal powers, and established itself as a nation contributing to, as well as influenced by, international law.
 
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cover of Border Economies: Cities Bridging the U.S.-Mexico Divide

Border Economies

Cities Bridging the U.S.-Mexico Divide

James Gerber

University of Arizona Press, 2024

The border between the United States and Mexico is one of the most unique and complex regions of the world. The asymmetry of the border region, together with the profound cultural differences of the two countries, create national controversies around migration, security, and illegal flows of drugs and weapons. The national narratives miss the fact that the 15 million or more people living in the border regions of Mexico and the United States are highly interactive and responsive to conditions on the other side.

Enormous legal cross-border flows of people, goods, and finance are embedded in the region’s history and prompted by the need to respond to new opportunities and challenges that originate on the other side. In Border Economies James Gerber examines how the interactivity and sensitivity of communities to conditions across the border differentiates them from communities in the interiors of Mexico and the United States. Gerber explains what makes the region not only unique but uniquely interesting.

In Border Economies readers who want to understand the conditions that make the border controversial but also want to go beyond shallow political narratives will find an in-depth exploration of the economic forces shaping the region and an antidote to common prejudices and misunderstandings.
[more]
cover of Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US-Mexico Frontier

Border Rhetorics

Citizenship and Identity on the US-Mexico Frontier

Edited by D. Robert DeChaine

University of Alabama Press, 2012

Undertakes a wide-ranging examination of the US-Mexico border as it functions in the rhetorical production of civic unity in the United States

A “border” is a powerful and versatile concept, variously invoked as the delineation of geographical territories, as a judicial marker of citizenship, and as an ideological trope for defining inclusion and exclusion. It has implications for both the empowerment and subjugation of any given populace. Both real and imagined, the border separates a zone of physical and symbolic exchange whose geographical, political, economic, and cultural interactions bear profoundly on popular understandings and experiences of citizenship and identity.

The border’s rhetorical significance is nowhere more apparent, nor its effects more concentrated, than on the frontier between the United States and Mexico. Often understood as an unruly boundary in dire need of containment from the ravages of criminals, illegal aliens, and other undesirable threats to the national body, this geopolitical locus exemplifies how normative constructions of “proper”; border relations reinforce definitions of US citizenship, which in turn can lead to anxiety, unrest, and violence centered around the struggle to define what it means to be a member of a national political community.

[more]
cover of Border Thinking: Latinx Youth Decolonizing Citizenship

Border Thinking

Latinx Youth Decolonizing Citizenship

Andrea Dyrness

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

Rich accounts of how Latinx migrant youth experience belonging across borders 

As anti-immigrant nationalist discourses escalate globally, Border Thinking offers critical insights into how young people in the Latinx diaspora experience belonging, make sense of racism, and long for change. Every year thousands of youth leave Latin America for the United States and Europe, and often the young migrants are portrayed as invaders and, if able to stay, told to integrate into their new society. Border Thinking asks not how to help the diaspora youth assimilate but what the United States and Europe can learn about citizenship from these diasporic youth. 

Working in the United States, Spain, and El Salvador, Andrea Dyrness and Enrique Sepúlveda III use participatory action research to collaborate with these young people to analyze how they make sense of their experiences in the borderlands. Dyrness and Sepúlveda engage them in reflecting on their feelings of belonging in multiple places—including some places that treat them as outsiders and criminals. Because of their transnational existence and connections to both home and host countries, diaspora youth have a critical perspective on national citizenship and yearn for new forms of belonging not restricted to national borders. The authors demonstrate how acompañamiento—spaces for solidarity and community-building among migrants—allow youth to critically reflect on their experiences and create support among one another.

Even as national borders grow more restricted and the subject of immigration becomes ever more politically fraught, young people’s identities are increasingly diasporic. As the so-called migrant crisis continues, change in how citizenship and belonging are constructed is necessary, and urgent, to create inclusive and sustainable futures. In Border Thinking, Dyrness and Sepúlveda decouple citizenship from the nation-state, calling for new understandings of civic engagement and belonging. 

[more]
cover of Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the U.S.-Mexico Underground

Border Tunnels

A Media Theory of the U.S.-Mexico Underground

Juan Llamas-Rodriguez

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A comparative media analysis of the representation of the U.S.–Mexico border

 

Border tunnels at the U.S.–Mexico border are ubiquitous in news, movies, and television, yet, because they remain hidden and inaccessible, the public can encounter them only through media. Analyzing the technologies, institutional politics, narrative tropes, and aesthetic decisions that go into showing border tunnels across multiple forms of media, Juan Llamas-Rodriguez argues that we cannot properly address border issues without attending to—and fully understanding—the fraught relationship between their representation and reality.

 

Llamas-Rodriguez reveals that every media text about border tunnels, whether meant for entertainment, cable news, video games, or speculative design, implicitly takes a position on the politics of the border. The examples laid out in Border Tunnels will teach readers how to look differently at the border as it is commonly presented in various forms of media, from ABC’s Nightline and CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360º to reality TV, propaganda videos, and even digital effects in Hollywood action films. Llamas-Rodriguez examines how creative decisions in the production, promotion, and distribution of these media texts either emphasize or downplay issues such as border security, racial dynamics of migration, and sustainability of the borderlands. 

 

Focusing on tunnels to show how media representations can influence all kinds of audiences—even those physically near the border—Border Tunnels helps us make sense of this pressing social issue, ultimately advancing understanding of the U.S.–Mexico border in all of its complexity and precariousness.

[more]
cover of Border Water: The Politics of U.S.-Mexico Transboundary Water Management, 1945–2015

Border Water

The Politics of U.S.-Mexico Transboundary Water Management, 1945–2015

Stephen Paul Mumme

University of Arizona Press, 2023

The international boundary between the United States and Mexico spans more than 1,900 miles. Along much of this international border, water is what separates one country from the other. Border Water provides a historical account of the development of governance related to transboundary and border water resources between the United States and Mexico in the last seventy years.

This work examines the phases and pivot points in the development of U.S.-Mexico border water resources and reviews the theoretical approaches and explanation that impart a better understanding of these events. Author Stephen Paul Mumme, a leading expert in water policy and border studies, describes three important periods in the chronology of transboundary water management. First, Mumme examines the 1944 Water Treaty, the establishment of the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) in 1945, and early transborder politics between the two governments. Next, he describes the early 1970s and the rise of environmentalism. In this period, pollution and salinization of the Colorado River Delta come into focus. Mumme shows how new actors, now including environmentalists and municipalities, broadened and strengthened the treaty’s applications in transboundary water management. The third period of transborder interaction described covers the opening and restricting of borders due to NAFTA and then 9/11.

Border Water places transboundary water management in the frame of the larger binational relationship, offering a comprehensive history of transnational water management between the United States and Mexico. As we move into the next century of transnational water management, this important work offers critical insights into lessons learned and charts a path for the future.

[more]
cover of Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas: Autonomy in the Spaces of Neoliberal Neglect

Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas

Autonomy in the Spaces of Neoliberal Neglect

Michelle Téllez

University of Arizona Press, 2021

Near Tijuana, Baja California, the autonomous community of Maclovio Rojas demonstrates what is possible for urban place-based political movements. More than a community, Maclovio Rojas is a women-led social movement that works for economic and political autonomy to address issues of health, education, housing, nutrition, and security.

Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas tells the story of the community’s struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. This ethnography by Michelle Téllez demonstrates the state’s neglect in providing social services and local infrastructure. This neglect exacerbates the structural violence endemic to the border region—a continuation of colonial systems of power on the urban, rural, and racialized poor. Téllez shows that in creating the community of Maclovio Rojas, residents have challenged prescriptive notions of nation and belonging. Through women’s active participation and leadership, a women’s political subjectivity has emerged—Maclovianas. These border women both contest and invoke their citizenship as they struggle to have their land rights recognized, and they transform traditional political roles into that of agency and responsibility.

This book highlights the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a space of resistance, conviviality, agency, and creative community building where transformative politics can take place. It shows hope, struggle, and possibility in the context of gendered violences of racial capitalism on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border.

 
[more]