Kenneth A. R. Kennedy
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Kajri Jain
Duke University Press, 2007
Jain draws on interviews with artists, printers, publishers, and consumers as well as analyses of the prints themselves to trace the economies—of art, commerce, religion, and desire—within which calendar images and ideas about them are formulated. For Jain, an analysis of the bazaar, or vernacular commercial arena, is crucial to understanding not only the calendar art that circulates within the bazaar but also India’s postcolonial modernity and the ways that its mass culture has developed in close connection with a religiously inflected nationalism. The bazaar is characterized by the coexistence of seemingly incompatible elements: bourgeois-liberal and neoliberal modernism on the one hand, and vernacular discourses and practices on the other. Jain argues that from the colonial era to the present, capitalist expansion has depended on the maintenance of these multiple coexisting realms: the sacred, the commercial, and the artistic; the official and the vernacular.
Gabriel A. Peoples
University of Illinois Press, 2025
Peoples’s analysis ranges from abolitionist and proslavery visual culture to Do the Right Thing to “Bed Intruder Song” and the cellphone video of Derrion Albert’s murder. After identifying these moments, he considers how performances go viral in Black ways. He also thinks through the ways Black virality circulates ideas that materially affect Black life. As he shows, an interacting person’s vulnerability to racialized gender and racialized sexuality knowledge inspires how they spread a performance. Non-iconic elements of viral moments reveal hard-to-find nuances of Black life while the artists and others represented in viral moments promote both collective and individual liberation by harnessing their visibility and audibility.
Rigorous and expansive, Goin’ Viral uses Black virality as a new way to understand and frame Black performances.
Joan W. Moore
Temple University Press, 1991
In this illuminating look at two Chicano gangs in East Los Angeles, Joan W. Moore examines the changes and continuities among three generations of barrio gangs. As a sequel to the author's award-winning study, Homeboys (Temple, 1979), this book returns to the same neighborhoods to chart the development of gang behavior, especially in terms of violence and drug use, and to compare experiences of male and female gang members.
In a remarkable research collaborative effort, Moore and gang members worked together to develop an understanding of both male and female gangs and an internal vision of gang members' lives. By using excerpts from individual interviews, the author depicts more about the gangs than simply their life together as a unit; she gives them a voice. Gang members discuss their personal reaction to violence, drug using and selling, family relations and intra-gang dating; they share intimacies that reveal varying levels of loyalty to and dependency on their affiliations, which often become a family substitute.
After maintaining neighborhood ties for 17 years, Moore's research group has established a relationship with these communities that gives her a rare perspective. This is a fascinating and informative book for anyone interested in sociology, criminology, youth behavior and deviance, and ethnic studies.
Richard F. Fenno
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Lara Langer Cohen
Duke University Press, 2023
Patricia G. Steinhoff, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2014
Michael V Singh
University of Minnesota Press, 2024
The unintended consequences of youth empowerment programs for Latino boys
Educational research has long documented the politics of punishment for boys and young men of color in schools—but what about the politics of empowerment and inclusion? In Good Boys, Bad Hombres, Michael V. Singh focuses on this aspect of youth control in schools, asking on whose terms a positive Latino manhood gets to be envisioned.
Based on two years of ethnographic research in an urban school district in California, Good Boys, Bad Hombres examines Latino Male Success, a school-based mentorship program for Latino boys. Instead of attempting to shape these boys’ lives through the threat of punishment, the program aims to provide an “invitation to a respectable and productive masculinity” framed as being rooted in traditional Latinx signifiers of manhood. Singh argues, however, that the promotion of this aspirational form of Latino masculinity is rooted in neoliberal multiculturalism, heteropatriarchy, and anti-Blackness, and that even such empowerment programs can unintentionally reproduce attitudes that paint Latino boys as problematic and in need of control and containment.
An insightful gender analysis, Good Boys, Bad Hombres sheds light on how mentorship is a reaction to the alleged crisis of Latino boys and is governed by the perceived remedies of the neoliberal state. Documenting the ways Latino men and boys resist the politics of neoliberal empowerment for new visions of justice, Singh works to deconstruct male empowerment, arguing that new narratives and practices—beyond patriarchal redemption—are necessary for a reimagining of Latino manhood in schools and beyond.
by Joyce N. Bennett
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Gaskins, Bill
Rutgers University Press, 1997
In a time when image is indeed everything, our personal appearance has a tremendous effect on nearly every aspect of our lives on a daily basis. Our choice of hairstyle can mean the difference between acceptance and rejection by groups and individuals. The choices made by African Americans are particularly charged, often affecting the wearer and the viewer in unique and sometimes life-altering ways.
Good and Bad Hair emerges out of photographer Bill Gaskins's traveling photo exhibition of the same name. The book features 60 evocative photographs of African American men, women, and children, documenting contemporary black hairstyles and their role as a feature of African American culture.
On one level, the photographs present readers with a variety of popular and personal approaches to wearing one's hair. On another level, they isolate what amounts to a bold, assertive departure from the common definition of American beauty that excludes the physical features of many people of African descent. This narrow definition of beauty has created a race-based measurement for what is considered "good" and "bad" hair. Gaskins's pictures identify African Americans from different regions of the United States who expressively symbolize their sense of self and often their sense of an African or black identity through their hair.
Hadi Gharabaghi and Terri Ginsberg
Temple University Press, 2026
The editors of and contributors to Governing Genealogies of International Film Education offer a critical historiographic understanding of governmentalized film education during the Cold War. Chapters examine the production of hygiene and cultural films in Travancore, India during the postcolonial period, and Michigan State University’s documentary collaboration with Iran during the 1970s, among other topics, elucidating cinema’s deployment as a state apparatus and its implications for global cultures, subject positions, and social relations.
Governing Genealogies of International Film Education investigates this distinct modality of cultural production and policy to shed necessary light on the ideological overdetermination of institutionalized film education as well as on audiovisual education as an international academic discipline. The contributors show how governmentalized film education has taught American exceptionalism, hegemony, and colonialism. They also theorize about and provide methodological examples of how film archives and film studies have framed prevailing understandings of cinema’s role in American and world history.
Contributors: Kaveh Askari, Zoë Druick, Bindu Menon Mannil, Wissam Mouawad, and the editors
Laurie Kroshus Medina
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Alex Diamond
University of Chicago Press, 2026
Robert Laxalt
University of Nevada Press, 1997
Lauren Miller Griffith
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Capoeira began as a martial art developed by enslaved Afro-Brazilians. Today, the practice incorporates song, dance, acrobatics, and theatrical improvisation—and leads many participants into activism.
Lauren Miller Griffith’s extensive participant observation with multiple capoeira groups informs her ethnography of capoeiristas--both individuals and groups--in the United States. Griffith follows practitioners beyond their physical training into social justice activities that illuminate capoeira’s strong connection to resistance and subversion. As both individuals and communities of capoeiristas, participants march against racial discrimination, celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, organize professional clothing drives for job seekers, and pursue economic and environmental justice in their neighborhoods. For these people, capoeira becomes a type of serious leisure that contributes to personal growth, a sense of belonging, and an overall sense of self, while also imposing duties and obligations.
An innovative look at capoeira in America, Graceful Resistance reveals how the practicing of an art can catalyze action and transform communities.
Edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González
University of Texas Press, 2016
From the influential work of Los Bros Hernandez in Love & Rockets, to comic strips and political cartoons, to traditional superheroes made nontraditional by means of racial and sexual identity (e.g., Miles Morales/Spider-Man), comics have become a vibrant medium to express Latino identity and culture. Indeed, Latino fiction and nonfiction narratives are rapidly proliferating in graphic media as diverse and varied in form and content as is the whole of Latino culture today.
Graphic Borders presents the most thorough exploration of comics by and about Latinos currently available. Thirteen essays and one interview by eminent and rising scholars of comics bring to life this exciting graphic genre that conveys the distinctive and wide-ranging experiences of Latinos in the United States. The contributors’ exhilarating excavations delve into the following areas: comics created by Latinos that push the boundaries of generic conventions; Latino comic book author-artists who complicate issues of race and gender through their careful reconfigurations of the body; comic strips; Latino superheroes in mainstream comics; and the complex ways that Latino superheroes are created and consumed within larger popular cultural trends. Taken as a whole, the book unveils the resplendent riches of comics by and about Latinos and proves that there are no limits to the ways in which Latinos can be represented and imagined in the world of comics.
Kavita Daiya
Temple University Press, 2020
In Graphic Migrations, Kavita Daiya provides a literary and cultural archive of refugee stories and experiences to respond to the question “What is created?” after decolonization and the 1947 Partition of India. She explores how stories of Partition migrations shape and influence the political and cultural imagination of secularism and contribute to gendered citizenship for South Asians in India and its diasporas.
Daiya analyzes modern literature, Bollywood films, Margaret Bourke-White’s photography, advertising, and print culture to show how they memorialize or erase refugee experiences. She also uses oral testimonies of Partition refugees from Hong Kong, South Asia, and North America to draw out the tensions of the nation-state, ethnic discrimination, and religious difference. Employing both Critical Refugee Studies and Feminist Postcolonial Studies frameworks, Daiya traces the cultural, affective, and political legacies of Partition migrations.
The precarity generated by modern migration and expressed through public culture prompts a rethinking of how dominant media represents gendered migrants and refugees. Graphic Migrations demands that we redraw the boundaries of how we tell the story of modern world history and the intricately interwoven, intimate production of statelessness and citizenship across the world’s communities.
Amanda Frisken
University of Illinois Press, 2020
Clarence Lang
University of Michigan Press, 2010
"This is a theoretically sophisticated and thoroughly documented historical case study of the movements for African American liberation in St. Louis. Through detailed analysis of black working class mobilization from the depression years to the advent of Black Power, award-winning historian Clarence Lang describes how the advances made in earlier decades were undermined by a black middle class agenda that focused on the narrow aims of black capitalists and politicians. The book is a major contribution to our understanding of the black working class insurgency that underpinned the civil rights and Black Power campaigns of the twentieth century."
---V. P. Franklin, University of California, Riverside
"A major work of scholarship that will transform historical understanding of the pivotal role that class politics played in both civil rights and Black Power activism in the United States. Clarence Lang's insightful, engagingly written, and well-researched study will prove indispensable to scholars and students of postwar American history."
---Peniel Joseph, Brandeis University
Breaking new ground in the field of Black Freedom Studies, Grassroots at the Gateway reveals how urban black working-class communities, cultures, and institutions propelled the major African American social movements in the period between the Great Depression and the end of the Great Society. Using the city of St. Louis in the border state of Missouri as a case study, author Clarence Lang undermines the notion that a unified "black community" engaged in the push for equality, justice, and respect. Instead, black social movements of the working class were distinct from---and at times in conflict with---those of the middle class. This richly researched book delves into African American oral histories, records of activist individuals and organizations, archives of the black advocacy press, and even the records of the St. Louis' economic power brokers whom local black freedom fighters challenged. Grassroots at the Gateway charts the development of this race-class divide, offering an uncommon reading of not only the civil rights movement but also the emergence and consolidation of a black working class.
Clarence Lang is Assistant Professor in African American Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Photo courtesy Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri, St. Louis
Carol Cadou
The Artist Book Foundation, 2025
Great American Treasures is a comprehensive survey of America's historic sites and buildings, their furnishings, and their gardens.
America’s historic sites, homes, and public buildings are a living record of the diverse ethnicities that, over four centuries, helped to build a growing nation. Since 1891, the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America (NSCDA) has actively promoted our national heritage through historic preservation, restoration, and the interpretation of historic sites across the United States. In conjunction with NSCDA, in 2025 The Artist Book Foundation (TABF) published Great American Treasures, a comprehensive survey of the architecture, furnishings, and gardens that epitomize the nation’s diverse material culture over more than 400 years.
The publication features the NSCDA’s collection of historic places, which span the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, and highlights the residences of those who established themselves in America during this time. It features an array of buildings that speak to the diversity of traditions, people, and architecture in a growing nation—from English Georgian houses on the eastern seaboard to a French Colonial dwelling in Missouri and mission houses in Hawai’i. This survey illuminates the stories and material traditions of the wide range of individuals who contributed to the founding of the United States and to the development of America as a dynamic multicultural nation.
Many of the sites tell the stories of familiar historic figures like George and Martha Washington, John Adams, James and Dolley Madison, John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and George Mason. Other sites offer the narratives of figures who contributed to America’s artistic heritage, such as John James Audubon and John Smibert, or those who helped to shape the country’s mercantile system, like Frederick Van Cortlandt and James Logan. Some places were designed by well-known architects such as Robert Mills or McKim, Mead & White, while most were the work of unknown or little-known architects, builders, joiners, and slave laborers. The classic architecture of these sites, their exquisite furnishings and lush gardens, and even the headstones in historic cemeteries all provide a window into the rich diversity of men, women, and children—free, indentured, and enslaved—who came together to build America.
Rubin Patterson
Temple University Press, 2014
Grant Farred
Prickly Paradigm Press, 2024
Nikki A. Greene
Duke University Press, 2024
Priscilla A. Dowden-White
University of Missouri Press, 2011

Dasha A. Chapman
University of Michigan Press, 2027
Grounding Practice: Dancing Haiti on Tè Glise tracks the responsive physical techniques Haitian dancers devised for navigating precarity, making place, and igniting repair in the decade following the 2010 earthquake. Via the concept “grounding practice,” which connotes the powerful community building and placemaking made possible by the teaching and practice of Haitian folkloric dance, this interdisciplinary study illustrates how the embodied labor of revitalizing traditions took on increasing relevance as vital reparative worldmaking amidst instability, or tè glise–—Haitian Creole for sliding land or slippery ground.
The dancers in Grounding Practice regenerate understandings of Haitian dance’s potential for fomenting decolonial consciousness, meaningfully sustaining African-derived culture, birthing new social relations, activating the queer potentials of tradition, and ultimately making place. Through ethnography and vivid descriptions, Dasha A. Chapman’s attention to embodied knowledge illuminates how movement practice operates as a site of theorization—wherein not just subjectivity, but also concepts of sovereignty, relation, and futurity, are articulated through the body. Paying homage to important forebears yet moving us beyond static narratives, this study brings our understanding of Haitian dance—and Haiti—through expansive landscapes into the contemporary.
Stephane Robolin
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Rose K. Keimig
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori
Rutgers University Press, 2027
Growing Old on the Margins is a moving portrait of aging at the edge of social life. Set in a state-run shelter for older adults in urban Lima, Peru, the book traces the everyday lives of men and women who have been left behind by family, institutions, and the promises of care. Based on more than two years of close ethnographic engagement, it follows residents as they navigate loneliness, illness, intimacy, and the quiet anticipation of death. Through small gestures—shared silences, requests for affection, moments of tenderness and conflict—the book reveals how people strive to remain present in a world that offers them little reason to hope. Care appears here not as a simple act of kindness, but as a fragile and uneven practice, shaped by scarcity, power, and moral ambiguity. Attentive to suffering without romanticizing it, Growing Old on the Margins reflects on what it means to age, endure, and remain human when one’s life is no longer considered worthy of attention.
Min Zhou
Russell Sage Foundation, 1998
Japtok, Martin
University of Iowa Press, 2005
Leigh M. Campoamor
University of Texas Press, 2026
A deep ethnography on children who work in Lima, Peru, and a critique of the global anti-child labor effort.
Children juggling at traffic lights and selling candy from car to car are ubiquitous in Lima, Peru’s capital, making the country a hotspot for child labor reformers. Even when the intentions behind the anti-child labor movement are benevolent, in practice this effort affects children and their families in unexpected and often harmful ways.
Anthropologist Leigh Campoamor argues that the concept of child labor is stuck in an industrial-era framing that fails to capture the reality of working youth in the global south today. Following children who work on Lima’s streets through their daily routines, Campoamor shows how these youth—and often their mothers—become subjects of moral intervention by state institutions, NGOs, and the general public. Arguing that reformers reinforce hierarchies of race, class, gender and age in the name of children's rights, Growing Up Working shows how working youth assert agency while also performing invisible caring and affective labor that doesn't count as work under neoliberal capitalism. Campoamor follows the children at the center of her ethnography into adulthood, providing an intimate and dynamic portrait of their lives while critiquing the ways anti–child labor discourses imagine working children’s futures.
E.L. Jones
University of Michigan Press, 2000
By Susanne Jonas and Nestor Rodríguez
University of Texas Press, 2015
Guatemala-U.S. Migration: Transforming Regions is a pioneering, comprehensive, and multifaceted study of Guatemalan migration to the United States from the late 1970s to the present. It analyzes this migration in a regional context including Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States. This book illuminates the perilous passage through Mexico for Guatemalan migrants, as well as their settlement in various U.S. venues. Moreover, it builds on existing theoretical frameworks and breaks new ground by analyzing the construction and transformations of this migration region and transregional dimensions of migration.
Seamlessly blending multiple sociological perspectives, this book addresses the experiences of both Maya and ladino Guatemalan migrants, incorporating gendered as well as ethnic and class dimensions of migration. It spans the most violent years of the civil war and the postwar years in Guatemala, hence including both refugees and labor migrants. The demographic chapter delineates five phases of Guatemalan migration to the United States since the late 1970s, with immigrants experiencing both inclusion and exclusion very dramatically during the most recent phase, in the early twenty-first century. This book also features an innovative study of Guatemalan migrant rights organizing in the United States and transregionally in Guatemala/Central America and Mexico. The two contrasting in-depth case studies of Guatemalan communities in Houston and San Francisco elaborate in vibrant detail the everyday experiences and evolving stories of the immigrants’ lives.
Irene O. Sandvold
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2011
The youngest of a large Norwegian immigrant family, Gudrun Thue Sandvold was known for her beaming blue eyes and a reserve that gave way to laughter whenever she got together with her sisters. She took immeasurable pride in her children and grandchildren, kept an exquisite home, and turned the most mundane occasion into a party. And to all who knew her, Gudrun’s cooking was the stuff of legend.
Part cookbook, part immigrant story, and part family memoir, Gudrun's Kitchen features hundreds of Gudrun Sandvold’s recipes for comfort food from a time when families and friends gathered at the table and connected with one another every single day. But this book is much more than a guide to Norwegian culinary traditions; it is an important contribution to immigrant history and a vital documentation of our nation’s multicultural heritage.
Sean McCann
Duke University Press, 2000