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For over a hundred years, Venezuelans have referred to themselves as a café con leche (coffee with milk) people. This colorful expression well describes the racial composition of Venezuelan society, in which European, African, and Indian peoples have intermingled to produce a population in which almost everyone is of mixed blood. It also expresses a popular belief that within their blended society Venezuelans have achieved a racial democracy in which people of all races live free from prejudice and discrimination. Whether or not historical facts actually support this popular perception is the question Winthrop Wright explores in this study.

Wright's research suggests that, contrary to popular belief, blacks in Venezuela have not enjoyed the full benefits of racial democracy. He finds that their status, even after the abolition of slavery in 1854, remained low in the minds of Venezuelan elites, who idealized the European somatic type and viewed blacks as inferior. Indeed, in an effort to whiten the population, Venezuelan elites promoted European immigration and blocked the entry of blacks and Asians during the early twentieth century.

These attitudes remained in place until the 1940s, when the populist Acción Democrática party (AD) challenged the elites' whitening policies. Since that time, blacks have made significant strides and have gained considerable political power. But, as Wright reveals, other evidence suggests that most remain social outcasts and have not accumulated significant wealth. The popular perception of racial harmony in Venezuela hides the fact of ongoing discrimination.

A surprising and innovative look at class that proposes new approaches to this important topic

While references to gender, race, and class are everywhere in social theory, class has not received the kind of theoretical and empirical attention accorded to gender and race. A welcome and much-needed corrective, this book offers a novel theoretical approach to class and an active practice of class analysis.

The authors offer new and compelling ways to look at class through examinations of such topics as sex work, the experiences of African American women as domestic laborers, and blue- and white-collar workers. Their work acknowledges that individuals may participate in various class relations at one moment or over time and that class identities are multiple and changing, interacting with other aspects of identity in contingent and unpredictable ways.

The essays in the book focus on class difference, class transformation and change, and on the intersection of class, race, gender, sexuality, and other dimensions of identity. They find class in seemingly unlikely places-in households, parent-child relationships, and self-employment-and locate class politics on the interpersonal level as well as at the level of enterprises, communities, and nations. Taken together, they will prompt a rethinking of class and class subjectivity that will expand social theory.

Contributors: Enid Arvidson, U of Texas, Arlington; Jenny Cameron, Monash U, Australia; Harriet Fraad; Janet Hotch; Susan Jahoda, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Amitava Kumar, U of Florida; Cecilia Marie Rio; Jacquelyn Southern; Marjolein van der Veen.

In Kenyan colonialist imagery, the Kikuyu were vilified as deceitful servants while the Maasai were romanticized as noble savages in a fashion similar to American representation of the Black slave and the "wild" Indian. Carolyn Martin Shaw examines this imagery in the works of historians and ethnographers, as well as in novels and films.

What urban food networks reveal about middle class livability in times of transformation

In recent years, the concept of “livability” has captured the global imagination, influencing discussions about the implications of climate change on human life and inspiring rankings of “most livable cities” in popular publications. But what really makes for a livable life, and for whom?

Cultivating Livability takes Bengaluru, India, as a case study—a city that is alternately described as India’s most and least livable megacity, where rapid transformation is undergirded by inequalities evident in the food networks connecting peri-urban farmers and the middle-class public. Anthropologist Camille Frazier probes the meaning of “livability” in Bengaluru through ethnographic work among producers and consumers, corporate intermediaries and urban information technology professionals.

Examining the varying efforts to reconfigure processes of food production, distribution, retail, and consumption, she reveals how these intersections are often rooted in and exacerbate ongoing forms of disenfranchisement that privilege some lives at the expense of others.

Asking how Americans’ fraught relationship with class has played out in public history

In 1966, a Smithsonian curator proposed recreating a “slum” dwelling inside the Museum of History and Technology, complete with rats in the walls, synthesized smells, and heat in summer and cold in winter. The public was not pleased. One editorialist called it “preserving a very insignificant aspect of civilization.” A Life magazine reporter worried that schoolchildren on field trips might find the exhibit’s horrors “pretty tame compared to their own homes.” The proposal was shelved. But the debate it ignited over whether poverty could or should be presented in museums cast a long shadow in US public history. 

In Curating Poverty, Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan examines how public historians have curated, preserved, and interpreted the experiences of people living in poverty—and how different publics have responded to these efforts. Poverty and economic inequality have shaped the lives of millions of Americans since the colonial period. For most of the nation’s history, welfare institutions such as almshouses and poor farms could be found in nearly every county in the United States. Yet explicit interpretation of poverty, welfare, and inequality remains an outlier in public history.

Documenting attempts to incorporate histories of poverty and class into exhibitions from the 1930s to the present, O’Brassill-Kulfan interrogates institutions of varying sizes and missions, paying particular attention to museums within the Smithsonian network. She traces how communities and public historians have remembered, neglected, erased, and sometimes reclaimed the surviving landscapes of poverty relief—from preserved almshouses and poor farm cemeteries to tenement museums and public housing sites. By placing poverty at the center of public history, Curating Poverty reveals how Americans have constructed, contested, and obscured histories of class and inequality and what it might look like to finally tell those stories honestly.