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This book is about the Americanization of Yugoslav culture and everyday life during the nineteen-sixties. After falling out with the Eastern bloc, Tito turned to the United States for support and inspiration. In the political sphere the distance between the two countries was carefully maintained, yet in the realms of culture and consumption the Yugoslav regime was definitely much more receptive to the American model. For Titoist Yugoslavia this tactic turned out to be beneficial, stabilising the regime internally and providing an image of openness in foreign policy.

Coca-Cola Socialism addresses the link between cultural diplomacy, culture, consumer society and politics. Its main argument is that both culture and everyday life modelled on the American way were a major source of legitimacy for the Yugoslav Communist Party, and a powerful weapon for both USA and Yugoslavia in the Cold War battle for hearts and minds.

Radina Vučetić explores how the Party used American culture in order to promote its own values and what life in this socialist and capitalist hybrid system looked like for ordinary people who lived in a country with communist ideology in a capitalist wrapping. Her book offers a careful reevaluation of the limits of appropriating the American dream and questions both an uncritical celebration of Yugoslavia’s openness and an exaggerated depiction of its authoritarianism.

A decolonial study of the toys that were produced and collected in Latin America during the Cold War. 

Cold War Toys examines playthings manufactured, promoted, and commercialized in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay during the second half of the twentieth century. Establishing connections and conversations with toys produced in earlier periods, including nineteenth-century dollhouses and building blocks created in the 1920s by Joaquín Torres-García, it goes on to analyze, among other items, construction sets made in 1970s Chile during Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government, scale-model household appliances distributed by the Eva Perón Foundation, and more recent figurines such as the Latin American versions of G.I. Joe and Latin Barbie dolls.

The book approaches toys as “dispositifs”—cultural formations that condense the discourses, institutions, architectural forms, scientific statements, and philosophical propositions of Latin America’s Cold War. Drawing on a rich compendium of objects, many inspired by European or US brands, it shows how South American toys incorporated local characters, designs, messages, and materials through a process of creative adaptation, thereby acquiring new identities. These and other original artifacts are examined variously as commodities from a once-flourishing industry, works of art, originators of cultural myths, and training tools for Cold War childhoods. They are also seen as undervalued expressions of children’s material culture, imbued with the collective memory of a turbulent and contested era.

Collaborative Archaeology brings together a diverse group of scholars and tribal cultural resource professionals to showcase how Indigenous knowledge is transforming archaeological practice. Edited by Chris Loendorf, this volume features twelve case studies that highlight the power of partnership between Native American communities and archaeologists. These collaborations not only enrich our understanding of the past but also affirm Indigenous cultural continuity. From the establishment of Tribal Historic Preservation Offices to tribally led research initiatives, the book illustrates how Native voices are reshaping the field.
 
This timely collection bridges disciplinary divides between archaeology, history, and traditional knowledge, challenging outdated narratives that separate “prehistory” from living Indigenous communities. Contributors demonstrate how ethical, community-based research can lead to more accurate and respectful interpretations of the past. Collaborative Archaeology is essential reading for scholars, students, and practitioners committed to scientific understanding and cultural preservation.

Contributors
Nicole Armstrong-Best
Skylar Begay
Jennifer Bess
Hannah F. Chavez
Robert B. Ciaccio
Shannon Cowell
William H. Doelle
Karl A. Hoerig
Anabel Galindo
Barnaby V. Lewis
Chris Loendorf
Brian Medchill
Linda Morgan
Laurene G. Montero
Stephen E.  Nash
Eloise Pedro
Glen E. Rice
Teresa Rodrigues
Hoski Schaafsma
Thomas E. Sheridan
Katrina Soke
Lindsey Vogel-Teeter
Anastasia Walhovd
Reylynne Williams
M. Kyle Woodson
Aaron M. Wright

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.

An illuminating look at the concepts of race, nation, and equality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America

The idea that “all men are created equal” is as close to a universal tenet as exists in American history. In this hard-hitting book, David Kazanjian interrogates this tenet, exploring transformative flash points in early America when the belief in equality came into contact with seemingly contrary ideas about race and nation. The Colonizing Trick depicts early America as a white settler colony in the process of becoming an empire-—one deeply integrated with Euro-American political economy, imperial ventures in North America and Africa, and pan-American racial formations.

Through Punjabi men’s struggles to marry, migrate, love, and escape, Coming of Age in Macholand reveals what patriarchy costs the men it promises to empower.

In 2019, Sandeep, a twenty-seven-year-old from a Punjabi family, killed five relatives and himself after a date was set for his wedding. His suicide note described feeling trapped by social expectations and condemned to a life he had not chosen. Harjant S. Gill recognized something unsettling in his story. Gill grew up in Punjab as the eldest grandson of a Sikh patriarch before immigrating to California as a teenager. Although he built an openly gay life in Washington, DC, he returned to the closet for safety while researching in India, even as his grandfather sought a “suitable” bride for him. Gill could refuse marriage and return to America, but many men he met had no easy exit. What happens when patriarchy promises men power while denying them the freedom to choose who they will become?

Coming of Age in Macholand explores how young men respond to patriarchy—submitting, rebelling, escaping, and sometimes coming undone. Drawing on research spanning a decade, Gill enters the worlds of Punjabi boys learning to become men, where masculinity is shaped through violence yet sustained by emotional bonds. Amid political upheaval, a faltering agrarian economy, and migration hollowing out Punjab’s villages, this book portrays men struggling for power while losing intimacy and control over their lives. Blending memoir, ethnography, and social investigation, Gill exposes a system that brutalizes women and queer people while constricting the men it claims to serve. At a moment when men feel angry, lonely, and adrift, this book asks what they must relinquish—and reclaim—to become truly free.

Prisoners at Mittelbau-Dora built the V-1 and V-2 missiles, some of them coming into direct contact with Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, who later became leading engineers in the U.S. space program. Through the continuing story of Mittelbau-Dora, from its operation as a labor camp to its social construction as a monument, Schafft and Zeidler reflect an abiding interest in the memory and commemoration of notorious national events. In extending the analysis of Mittelbau-Dora into post-war and present-day Germany, Commemorating Hell uncovers the intricate relationship between the politics of memory and broader state and global politics, revealing insights about the camp's relationship to the American space pioneers and the fate of the nearby city of Nordhausen.

Common Ground explores the philosophical relationship between collectivity, individuality, affect and agency in the neoliberal era. Jeremy Gilbert argues that individualism is forced upon us by neoliberal culture, fatally limiting our capacity to escape the current crisis of democratic politics.

The book asks how forces and ideas opposed to neoliberal hegemony, and to the individualist tradition in Western thought, might serve to protect some form of communality, and how far we must accept assumptions about the nature of individuality and collectivity which are the legacy of an elitist tradition. Along the way it examines different ideas and practices of collectivity, from conservative notions of hierarchical and patriarchal communities to the politics of ‘horizontality’ and ‘the commons’ which are at the heart of radical movements today.

Exploring this fundamental faultline in contemporary political struggle, Common Ground proposes a radically non-individualist mode of imagining social life, collective creativity and democratic possibility.

African Studies Association Women’s Caucus’s Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize winner

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title

The monumental palace of Kano, Nigeria, was built circa 1500 and is today inhabited by more than one thousand persons. Historically, its secluded interior housed hundreds of concubines whose role in the politics, economics, and culture of Kano city-state has been largely overlooked. In this pioneering work, Heidi J. Nast demonstrates how human-geographical methods can tell us much about a site like the palace, a place bereft of archaeological work or relevant primary sources.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic work and mapping data, Concubines and Power presents new evidence that palace concubines controlled the production of indigo-dyed cloth centuries before men did. The women were also key players in the assessment and collection of the state's earliest grain taxes, forming a complex and powerful administrative hierarchy that used the taxes for palace community needs. In addition, royal concubines served as representatives of their places of origin, their freeborn children providing the king with additional human capital to cement territorial alliances through marriage.

Social forces undoubtedly shaped and changed concubinage for hundreds of years, but Nast shows how the women’s reach extended far beyond the palace walls to the formation of the state itself.

Confronting Theory presents a critique of what has come to be known as theory in cross-disciplinary humanities education. Rather than dismissing theory writing as pretentious and abstract, Confronting Theory examines its principal concepts from the perspective of academic psychology and shows that although many of these analyses sound like revolutionary psychological theory, few, if any, have empirical implications that students can evaluate. By considering the educational implications of cultural theory, Confronting Theory will empower students with arguments, not just opinions, about the increasingly idealist and irrelevant anti-realist curricula they confront in their humanities education in today’s universities.

The first comprehensive, book-length study of its kind, Conquistadores de la Calle presents the findings of nearly two years of ethnographic research on the streets of Guatemala City, toppling conventional wisdom that the region's youth workers are solely victims, or that their labor situations are entirely the result of poverty and family breakdown.

Documenting the voices and experiences of the city's working children, this fascinating study reveals counterintuitive motivations for those who choose to abandon schooling in favor of participating more fully in their families' economies. The processes of developing skills and planning for their social and economic futures are covered in depth, presenting evidence that many members of this population operate well above survival level and are decidedly not marginalized or members of an underclass. Conquistadores de la Calle also makes important distinctions between these young workers—a generation of Maya and Ladino boys and girls—and the homeless children or gang youth who have been so much more widely studied.

Contextualizing a variety of data, ranging from detailed ethnographic portraits of the children's lives and the monthly income of children engaged in common street vocations (such as shining shoes or serving as porters) to educational histories and socialization activities, Thomas Offit has produced a rich trove of findings in a significant segment of urban economics that is tremendously important for anthropologists, Latin Americanists, and those interested in the lives and labors of children in the cities of the developing world.