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Black communities in America have a long history of constructing sanctuaries amid oppression, from the secret hush harbors of slavery to the digital refuges created in response to the resurgence of white supremacist violence in the Trump era. These havens have offered places to grieve and to gather, to imagine freedom when the world denied it, and to practice care and resistance in the face of constant danger. They remind us that even in the darkest moments, Black people have made space to grieve, rest, heal, strategize, and imagine new futures.

In Hush to Harbor traces this enduring sanctuary-making through both historical memory and contemporary expression from the legacy of Freedmen’s Towns and Green Books for Motorists in the Jim Crow era as testaments to Black mobility and mutual protection to present-day digital activism and grassroots organizing that reimagine safety in the public sphere. 

Blending literary criticism, cultural history, and ethnography, Scott demonstrates that sanctuary is not merely a place of retreat but a political and spiritual practice that calls forth a collective act of making space when none is offered. In Hush to Harbor offers not just a chronicle of survival but a blueprint for sustaining Black refuge in a time of urgent need, redefining what it means to be safe in a nation that has never guaranteed safety for Black life.

In a current era marked by carceral logics, authoritarianism, and white supremacy, there has never been a greater need for the tools and inspiration that radical feminism provides. In Insurgent Visions, Chandra Talpade Mohanty explores methods of anticapitalist resistance to radically transform everyday life. She presents insurgent feminism—a theory and praxis with which to contest and replace the practices of violence grounded in racialized gender relations. Insurgent feminism unsettles existing power structures in order to enact new relationships and forge new subjectivities, epistemologies, and communities. Drawing on organizing efforts in the US-Mexico borderlands, Palestine/Israel, and Kashmir, as well as on abolitionist and Dalit feminisms, Mohanty contends that the knowledge that emerges from the experiences of marginalized groups who are struggling for economic, racial, and social justice is key for imagining feminist futures. She also turns to the neoliberal landscape of higher education in the United States and the difficulties of instituting transformative antiracist and anti-imperialist feminist knowledge building. Mapping new challenges for radical praxis, Mohanty reconfigures feminist studies while offering a model for decolonial cross-border organizing and solidarity.

Austin, Texas, is renowned as a high-tech, fast-growing city for the young and creative, a cool place to live, and the scene of internationally famous events such as SXSW and Formula 1. But as in many American cities, poverty and penury are booming along with wealth and material abundance in contemporary Austin. Rich and poor residents lead increasingly separate lives as growing socioeconomic inequality underscores residential, class, racial, and ethnic segregation.

In Invisible in Austin, the award-winning sociologist Javier Auyero and a team of graduate students explore the lives of those working at the bottom of the social order: house cleaners, office-machine repairers, cab drivers, restaurant cooks and dishwashers, exotic dancers, musicians, and roofers, among others. Recounting their subjects’ life stories with empathy and sociological insight, the authors show us how these lives are driven by a complex mix of individual and social forces. These poignant stories compel us to see how poor people who provide indispensable services for all city residents struggle daily with substandard housing, inadequate public services and schools, and environmental risks. Timely and essential reading, Invisible in Austin makes visible the growing gap between rich and poor that is reconfiguring the cityscape of one of America’s most dynamic places, as low-wage workers are forced to the social and symbolic margins.