Results by title
4531 books match the query 'Cultural & Ethnic Studies' and 46 start with j
J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual
Jane Poyner
Ohio University Press, 2006
JAPANimals
History and Culture in Japan’s Animal LifeGregory M. Pflugfelder and Brett L. Walker, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Jackie Ormes
The First African American Woman CartoonistNancy Goldstein
University of Michigan Press, 2008
At a time of few opportunities for women in general and even fewer for African American women, Jackie Ormes (1911–85) blazed a trail as a popular cartoonist with the major black newspapers of the day. Her cartoon characters (including Torchy Brown, Candy, Patty-Jo, and Ginger) delighted readers and spawned other products, including an elegant doll with a stylish wardrobe and “Torchy Togs” paper dolls. Ormes was a member of Chicago’s black elite, with a social circle that included the leading political figures and entertainers of the day. Her cartoons and comic strips provide an invaluable glimpse into American culture and history, with topics that include racial segregation, U.S. foreign policy, educational equality, the atom bomb, and environmental pollution, among other pressing issues of the times—and of today’s world as well. This celebrated biography features a large sampling of Ormes’s cartoons and comic strips, and a new preface.
James Baldwin and the 1980s
Witnessing the Reagan EraJoseph Vogel
University of Illinois Press, 2018
Joseph Vogel offers the first in-depth look at Baldwin's dynamic final decade of work. Delving into the writer's creative endeavors, crucial essays and articles, and the impassioned polemic The Evidence of Things Not Seen, Vogel finds Baldwin as prescient and fearless as ever. Baldwin's sustained grappling with "the great transforming energy" of mass culture revealed his gifts for media and cultural criticism. It also brought him into the fray on issues ranging from the Reagan-era culture wars to the New South, from the deterioration of inner cities to the disproportionate incarceration of black youth, and from pop culture gender-bending to the evolving women's and gay rights movements.
Astute and compelling, James Baldwin and the 1980s revives and redeems the final act of a great American writer.
Jane the Citizen
Conditional Belonging and Latinx Representation on TVLitzy Galarza
University of Arizona Press, 2027
What does it mean to belong in the United States—and what does it cost? Jane the Citizen confronts one of the most urgent questions in contemporary cultural life by turning to an unlikely archive: the CW’s celebrated telenovela-inspired series Jane the Virgin (2014–2019).
Litzy Galarza argues that beneath the show’s warmth and wit lies a sustained interrogation of citizenship’s limits. Building on Hector Amaya’s framework of citizenship excess and extending it to theorize reproductive citizenship excess and deficit, the book exposes the widening gap between citizenship as formal legal status and citizenship as livable, protected belonging—a gap that Jane the Virgin maps with extraordinary precision.
Across five seasons and two presidential administrations, Galarza demonstrates how the series tracks the lived costs of immigration policy, racial hierarchy, and gendered control over reproduction. She shows how Latinx characters experience belonging differently as political conditions shift in real time.
Janelle Monáe's Queer Afrofuturism
Defying Every LabelDan Hassler-Forest
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Janelle Monáe is all these things and more, making her one of the most fascinating artists to emerge in the twenty-first century. This provocative new study explores how Monáe’s work has connected different media platforms to strengthen and enhance new movements in art, theory, and politics. It considers not only Monáe’s groundbreaking albums The ArchAndroid, The Electric Lady, and Dirty Computer, but also Monáe’s work as an actress in such films as Hidden Figures and Antebellum, as well as her soundtrack appearances in socially-engaged projects ranging from I May Destroy You to Us. Examining Monáe as a cultural icon whose work is profoundly intersectional, this book maps how she is actively reshaping discourses around race, gender, sexuality, and capitalism. Tracing Monáe’s performances of joy, desire, pain, and hope across a wide range of media forms, it shows how she imagines Afrofuturist, posthumanist, and postcapitalist utopias, while remaining grounded in the realities of being a Black woman in a white-dominated industry. This is an exciting introduction to an audacious innovator whose work offers us fresh ways to talk about identity, desire, and power.
Japan in the World, the World in Japan
Fifty Years of Japanese Studies at MichiganEdited by the Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Japanese American Millennials
Rethinking Generation, Community, and DiversityMichael Omi
Temple University Press, 2019
Whereas most scholarship on Japanese Americans looks at historical case studies or the 1.5 generation assimilating, this pioneering anthology, Japanese American Millennials, captures theexperiences, perspectives, and aspirations of Asian Americans born between 1980 and 2000. The editors and contributors present multiple perspectives on who Japanese Americans are, how they think about notions of community and culture, and how they engage and negotiate multiple social identities.
The essays by scholars both in the United States and Japan draw upon the Japanese American millennial experience to examine how they find self-expression in Youth Basketball Leagues or Christian youth camps as well as how they grapple with being mixed-race, bicultural, or queer. Featuring compelling interviews and observations, Japanese American Millennials dislodges the dominant generational framework toaddress absences in the current literature and suggests how we might alternatively study Japanese Americans as a whole.
Japanese American Resettlement through the Lens
Hikaru Iwasaki and the WRA's Photographic Section, 1943-1945Lane Ryo Hirabayashi
University Press of Colorado, 2009
In Japanese American Resettlement through the Lens, Lane Ryo Hirabayashi gathers a unique collection of photographs by War Relocation Authority photographer Hikaru Iwasaki, the only full-time WRA photographer from the period still living.
With substantive focus on resettlement - and in particular Iwasaki's photos of Japanese Americans following their release from WRA camps from 1943 to 1945 - Hirabayashi explores the WRA's use of photography in its mission not only to encourage "loyal" Japanese Americans to return to society at large as quickly as possible but also to convince Euro-Americans this was safe and advantageous. Hirabayashi also assesses the relative success of the WRA project, as well as the multiple uses of the photographs over time, first by the WRA and then by students, scholars, and community members in the present day.
Although the photos have been used to illustrate a number of publications, this book is the first sustained treatment addressing questions directly related to official WRA photographs. How and under what conditions were they taken? Where were they developed, selected, and stored? How were they used during the 1940s? What impact did they have during and following the war?
By focusing on the WRA's Photographic Section, Japanese American Resettlement through the Lens makes a unique contribution to the body of literature on Japanese Americans during World War II.
Japanese Americans
The Formation and Transformations of an Ethnic GroupSpickard, Paul
Rutgers University Press, 2008
In this concise history, Paul Spickard traces the struggles and achievements of Japanese Americans in claiming their place in American society. He outlines three forces shaping ethnic groups in general: shared interests, shared institutions, and shared culture, and chronicles the Japanese American experience within this framework, showing how these factors created and nurtured solidarity.
Japanese Civilization
A Comparative ViewS. N. Eisenstadt
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Japanese Corrections
Managing Convicted Offenders in an Orderly SocietyElmer H. Johnson
Southern Illinois University Press, 1996
In his analysis of the current Japanese corrections system, internationally respected criminologist Elmer H. Johnson focuses on three basic questions: What are the characteristics of the major programmatic elements? How do various personnel carry out their programmatic responsibilities? Why are the various duties and activities carried out in a particular way?
Johnson points out that compared with the United States, where prison populations are huge and often violent, Japan incarcerates relatively few criminals. In 1989, for example, Japan locked up only 34 out of every 100,000 citizens while the United States imprisoned people at a rate of 271 per 100,000. Examining the cultural differences leading to this disparity, Johnson notes that in Japan prosecutors are reluctant to refer defendants for trial and the courts often suspend sentences for convicted felons.
In Japan, two bureaus—the Correction Bureau and the Rehabilitation Bureau—administer all Japanese correctional activities. Placing these bureaus in the organizational scheme of the Ministry of Justice, Johnson traces the history, describes the organizational ideologies, and outlines the special features of each.
A central feature of the Japanese penal system is the industrial prison, a concept that met such fierce opposition in the United States that it lost almost all access to the free market by the 1940s. Johnson traces the history of the industrial prison, noting particularly that the industrial operations in adult institutions explain in part why there is almost no violence and why few try to escape. Juvenile institutions enjoy similar success; even though they produce no industrial products, the juvenile training schools emphasize education, vocational training, and counseling.
Japanese correctional officers rely heavily on the community and on unsalaried volunteer probation officers for supervision of probationers and parolees. Although Japanese courts regard probationary supervision as too punitive for most convicted defendants and return many to the community without supervision, the probation caseload is weighty. Johnson describes the responsibilities and operations of the Regional Parole Boards. He also discusses the aid hostels (halfway houses) that are primarily operated by private organizations and that serve released or paroled prisoners.
Johnson sums up by noting that both the Correction Bureau and the Rehabilitation Bureau depend on the overall operations of police, prosecutors, and judges. More broadly, he asserts, both bureaus are creatures of Japanese society and culture. The assets and disadvantages of the bureaus reflect society’s reluctance to sentence defendants to prison and, to a lesser extent, the reluctance to place them on probationary supervision.
Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Activists
Organizing in American and International Communist Movements, 1919–1933Fowler, Josephine
Rutgers University Press, 2007
Japanese and Chinese immigrants in the United States have traditionally been characterized as hard workers who are hesitant to involve themselves in labor disputes or radical activism. How then does one explain the labor and Communist organizations in the Asian immigrant communities that existed from coast to coast between 1919 and 1933? Their organizers and members have been, until now, largely absent from the history of the American Communist movement. In Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Activists, Josephine Fowler brings us the first in-depth account of Japanese and Chinese immigrant radicalism inside the United States and across the Pacific.
Drawing on multilingual correspondence between left-wing and party members and other primary sources, such as records from branches of the Japanese Workers Association and the Chinese Nationalist Party, Fowler shows how pressures from the Comintern for various sub-groups of the party to unite as an “American” working class were met with resistance. The book also challenges longstanding stereotypes about the relationships among the Communist Party in the United States, the Comintern, and the Soviet Party.
Jazz Journeys to Japan
The Heart WithinWilliam Minor
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Part music history, part cultural meditation, part travel narrative, Jazz Journeys to Japan is the first book to address the experiences of individual players -- Japanese jazz greats such as Toshiko Akiyoshi, Masahiko Satoh, Makoto Ozone, and Yosuke Yamashita.
William Minor navigates the converging streams of Western music and Eastern tradition, revealing through interviews with musicians, critics, and producers the unique synthesis that results from this convergence. And, turning conventional wisdom on its ear, he disproves the widely held notion that Japanese jazz artists don't "swing." Along the way, we experience Minor's growing appreciation of Japanese culture, which mirrors his subjects' discovery of American jazz.
William Minor's previous books include Unzipped Souls: A Jazz Journey through the Soviet Union, and Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years. He has written for Downbeat, Jazz Times, Jazz Notes, Coda, and Swing Journal.
Jazz Radio America
Aaron J. Johnson
University of Illinois Press, 2024
An interwoven story of a music and a medium, Jazz Radio America answers perennial questions about why certain kinds of jazz get played and why even that music is played in so few places.
Jazz in the Time of the Novel
The Temporal Politics of American Race and CultureBruce Evan Barnhart
University of Alabama Press, 2013
WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
Jazz in the Time of the Novel argues that a culture’s understanding of the concept of time plays a central role in its economic, social, and aesthetic affairs and that a culture arrives at its conception of time through its artistic practices.
Bruce Barnhart, in Jazz in the Time of the Novel, shows that American culture of the first three decades of the twentieth century was shaped by the kindred rhythms and movements of two particular art forms: jazz and fiction. At the beginning of the twentieth century, widespread changes in America’s social, demographic, and economic norms threatened longstanding faith in a unified and inevitable movement towards a better future. As Barnhart shows both jazz and novels of the period address these temporal uncertainties, inserting themselves into arguments about the proper unfolding of an affirmative American future. Barnhart proposes that these two aesthetic forms can be viewed as co-participants in an ongoing discussion about the way in which the future should be imagined and experienced—a discussion symptomatic of the broader exchanges taking place within the many trajectories comprising early twentieth-century American culture.
This book includes in-depth approaches to numerous examples of jazz and the novel, including performances by James P. Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, and Ethel Waters, and novels by James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen, among others. In addition to the details of specific musical and literary works, Jazz in the Time of the Novel offers careful consideration as to how these works impact their social context.
Jean Toomer & Harlem Renaissance
Edited by Geneviève Fabre and Michel Feith
Rutgers University Press, 2000
Jean Toomer's novel Cane has been hailed as the harbinger of the Harlem Renaissance and as a model for modernist writing, yet it eludes categorization and its author remains an enigmatic and controversial figure in American literature. The present collection of essays by European and American scholars gives a fresh perspective by using sources made available only in recent years, highlighting Toomer's bold experimentations, as well as his often ambiguous responses to the questions of his time.
Some of the essays achieve this through close readings of the text, leading to new and challenging interpretations of Toomer's transcendence of genres and styles. Others show how the publication of Cane and his later writings placed Toomer at the heart of contemporary ideological and artistic debates: race and identity, the negro writer and the white literary world, primitivism and modernism.
Jean Toomer
Race, Repression, and RevolutionBarbara Foley
University of Illinois Press, 2019
The 1923 publication of Cane established Jean Toomer as a modernist master and one of the key literary figures of the emerging Harlem Renaissance. Though critics and biographers alike have praised his artistic experimentation and unflinching eyewitness portraits of Jim Crow violence, few seem to recognize how much Toomer's interest in class struggle, catalyzed by the Russian Revolution and the post–World War One radical upsurge, situate his masterwork in its immediate historical context. In Jean Toomer: Race, Repression, and Revolution, Barbara Foley explores Toomer's political and intellectual connections with socialism, the New Negro movement, and the project of Young America. Examining his rarely scrutinized early creative and journalistic writings, as well as unpublished versions of his autobiography, she recreates the complex and contradictory consciousness that produced Cane. Foley's discussion of political repression runs parallel with a portrait of repression on a personal level. Examining family secrets heretofore unexplored in Toomer scholarship, she traces their sporadic surfacing in Cane. Toomer's text, she argues, exhibits a political unconscious that is at once public and private.
Jelly Roll
A Black Neighborhood in a Southern Mill TownCharles Thomas
University of Arkansas Press, 2012
Jerusalem Besieged
From Ancient Canaan to Modern IsraelEric H. Cline
University of Michigan Press, 2005
-Victor Davis Hanson, Stanford University; author of The Other Greeks and Carnage and Culture
"A beautifully lucid presentation of four thousand years of history in a single volume. Cline writes primarily as an archaeologist-avoiding polemic and offering evidence for any religious claims-yet he has also incorporated much journalistic material into this study. Jerusalem Besieged will enlighten anyone interested in the history of military conflict in and around Jerusalem."
-Col. Rose Mary Sheldon, Virginia Military Institute
"This groundbreaking study offers a fascinating synthesis of Jerusalem's military history from its first occupation into the modern era. Cline amply deploys primary source material to investigate assaults on Jerusalem of every sort, starting at the dawn of recorded history. Jerusalem Besieged is invaluable for framing the contemporary situation in the Middle East in the context of a very long and pertinent history."
-Baruch Halpern, Pennsylvania State University
A sweeping history of four thousand years of struggle for control of one city
"[An] absorbing account of archaeological history, from the ancient Israelites' first conquest to today's second intifada. Cline clearly lays out the fascinating history behind the conflicts."
-USA Today
"A pleasure to read, this work makes this important but complicated subject fascinating."
-Jewish Book World
"Jerusalem Besieged is a fascinating account of how and why a baffling array of peoples, ideologies, and religions have fought for some four thousand years over a city without either great wealth, size, or strategic importance. Cline guides us through the baffling, but always bloody, array of Jewish, Roman, Moslem, Crusader, Ottoman, Western, Arab, and Israeli fights for possession of such a symbolic prize in a manner that is both scholarly and engaging."
-Victor Davis Hanson, Stanford University; author of The Other Greeks and Carnage and Culture
Jesus, Jobs, and Justice
African American Women and ReligionBettye Collier-Thomas
Temple University Press, 2013
Jews, Germans, Memory
Reconstructions of Jewish Life in GermanyY. Michal Bodemann, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Jezebel Unhinged
Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and CultureTamura Lomax
Duke University Press, 2018
Jim Crow America
A Documentary HistoryCatherine M. Lewis
University of Arkansas Press, 2009
Jim Crow Networks
African American Periodical CulturesEurie Dahn
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
As Eurie Dahn demonstrates, authors like James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, and Jean Toomer wrote in the context of interracial and black periodical networks, which shaped the literature they produced and their concerns about racial violence. This original study also explores the overlooked intersections between the black press and modernist and Harlem Renaissance texts, and highlights key sites where readers and writers worked toward bottom-up sociopolitical changes during a period of legalized segregation.
Jim Crow from the Harbor
Black Freedom Struggle and Downtown Baltimore, 1945–1980John R. Tilghman
Temple University Press, 2026
How do poor Black communities co-exist with downtown revitalization? How do Black social movements respond to urban renewal to ensure access to better housing and city spaces? John Tilghman investigates these interlocking questions in Jim Crow from the Harbor. Looking at Baltimore, Maryland’s redevelopment in the post-war era of deindustrialization and population decline through white flight, Tilghman tells the story of how Black activists clashed with urban regimes.
Tilghman follows the money—redevelopment profits—which created tensions that prompted anti-freeway campaigns and affirmative action efforts. Through grassroots activism, protests, and community building, participants in the Black Freedom Struggle undermined downtown interests’ efforts to reinforce racial segregation as well as other civil, political, and economic inequalities.
While their efforts met with both success and limitations, Tilghman emphasizes the strengths of this minority majority population as they strove for urban equality. Jim Crow from the Harbor provides a new perspective that helps explain what has provoked today’s struggles in Baltimore for Black Americans.
John Coltrane
His Life and MusicLewis Porter
University of Michigan Press, 1998
John Coltrane was a key figure in jazz, a pioneer in world music, and an intensely emotional force whose following continues to grow. This biography, the first by a professional jazz scholar and performer, presents a huge amount of never-before-published material, including interviews with Coltrane, photos, genealogical documents, and innovative musical analysis that offers a fresh view of Coltrane's genius. Compiled from scratch with the assistance of dozens of Coltrane's colleagues, friends, and family, John Coltrane: His Life and Music corrects numerous errors from previous biographies. The significant people in Coltrane's life were reinterviewed, yielding new insights; some were interviewed for the first time ever. The musical analysis, which is accessible to the nonspecialist, makes its own revelations--for example, that some of Coltrane's well-known pieces are based on previously unrecognized sources. The Appendix is the most detailed chronology of Coltrane's performing career ever compiled, listing scores of previously unknown performances from the 1940s and early 1950s. Coltrane has become a musical inspiration for thousands of fans and musicians and a personal inspiration to as many more. For all of these, Porter's book will become the definitive resource--a reliable guide to the events of Coltrane's life and an insightful look into his musical practices. With illustrations and previously unseen photographs!
John Lewis and the Challenge of "Real" Black Music
Christopher Coady
University of Michigan Press, 2016
For critics and listeners, the reception of the 1950s jazz-classical hybrid Third Stream music has long been fraught. In John Lewis and the Challenge of “Real” Black Music, Christopher Coady explores the work of one of the form’s most vital practitioners, following Lewis from his role as an arranger for Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool sessions to his leadership of the Modern Jazz Quartet, his tours of Europe, and his stewardship of the Lenox School of Jazz.
Along the way Coady shows how Lewis’s fusion works helped shore up a failing jazz industry in the wake of the 1940s big band decline, forging a new sound grounded in middle-class African American musical traditions. By taking into account the sociocultural milieu of the 1950s, Coady provides a wider context for understanding the music Lewis wrote for the Modern Jazz Quartet and sets up new ways of thinking about Cool Jazz and Third Stream music more broadly.
John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829-65
William and Aimee Lee Cheek
University of Illinois Press, 1989
Privileged beyond other members of his race, yet sharing their disadvantages, the young John Mercer Langston stood in an uncertain position in the years before the Civil War. His confrontation with a critical personal question was tempered by a crucial national reality: from what sources could he derive his model of manhood and human dignity? This book explores John Mercer Langston's decisions to work out his destiny through the resources and fortunes of the northern black community.
Although Langston, who died in 1897, was a black Politician, orator, lawyer, intellectual, diplomat, and congressman, he has never before been accorded fullscale biographical treatment. Born free on a Virginia plantation, Langston graduated from Oberlin College in 1849, gained admission to the Ohio bar, and by the age of twenty-five, became the first black American to hold elective office. Still in the years of his political apprenticeship, he promoted black civil rights, helped shape the nascent Republican party, aided in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue and John Brown's raid, and recruited black soldier for the Union cause. In 1864 he became the first president of the National Equal Rights League.
From an extensive search of primary sources, the authors construct a richly textured picture of the beginnings of Langston's career as a national black leader. More than a biography, the work also incorporates social and political history. Embedded firmly in a study of northern black community life and activism, it reveals the degree to which Langston and his cohorts set the terms of the fight for freedom and citizenship.
Joining Africa
From Anthills to AsmaraCharles Cantalupo
Michigan State University Press, 2012
This eye-opening personal history tells the story of an American college professor’s twenty-year engagement with a thriving Africa rarely encountered by Western visitors, including an extraordinary connection to poets across the continent. At once adventurous, spiritual, political, dreamlike, and humorous, Joining Africa is a unique documentary of a journey through the continent, including an intense five-year encounter with economically struggling but culturally fertile Eritrea. The Africa presented here is neither a postcolonial study nor an exotic tourist destination. It is rich with the voices of its people, whose languages, Cantalupo argues, have greater potential to effect change than any NGO or high-profile celebrity. In vibrant prose, Cantalupo’s book extends a stirring invitation to reevaluate how we engage—both individually and collectively—with this remarkable part of the world.
Jookin'
The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American CultureKatrina Hazzard-Gordon
Temple University Press, 1992
Katrina Hazzard-Gordon offers the first analysis of the development of the jook—an underground cultural institution created by the black working class—together with other dance arenas in African-American culture. Beginning with the effects of African slaves’ middle passage experience on their traditional dances, she traces the unique and virtually autonomous dance culture that developed in the rural South. Like the blues, these secular dance forms and institutions were brought north and urbanized by migrating blacks. In northern cities, some aspects of black dance became integrated into white culture and commercialized. Focusing on ten African-American dance arenas from the period of enslavement to the mid-twentieth century, this book explores the jooks, honky-tonks, rent parties, and after-hours joints as well as the licensed membership clubs, dance halls, cabarets, and the dances of the black elite.
Jook houses emerged during the Reconstruction era and can be viewed as a cultural response to freedom. In the jook, Hazzard-Gordon explains, an immeasurable amount of core black culture including food, language, community fellowship, mate selection, music, and dance found a sanctuary of expression when no other secular institution flourished among the folk. The jook and its various derivative forms have provided both entertainment and an economic alternative (such as illegal lotteries and numbers) to people excluded from the dominant economy. Dances like the Charleston, shimmy, snake hips, funky butt, twist, and slow drag originated in the jooks; some can be traced back to Africa.
Social dancing links black Americans to their African past more strongly than any other aspect of their culture. Citing the significance of dance in the African-American psyche, this study explores the establishments that nurtured ancestral as well as communal links for African-Americans, vividly describing black dances, formal rituals, such as debutante balls, and the influence of black dance on white culture.
Jordan Peele's Get Out
Political HorrorEdited by Dawn Keetley
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham
Dances in Literature and CinemaHannah Durkin
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Josephine Baker in Art and Life
THE ICON AND THE IMAGEBennetta Jules-Rosette
University of Illinois Press, 2006
Josephine Baker (1906-1975) was a dancer, singer, actress, author, politician, militant, and philanthropist, whose images and cultural legacy have survived beyond the hundredth anniversary of her birth. Neither an exercise in postmodern deconstruction nor simple biography, Josephine Baker in Art and Life presents a critical cultural study of the life and art of the Franco-American performer whose appearances as the savage dancer Fatou shocked the world.
Although the study remains firmly anchored in Josephine Baker’s life and times, presenting and challenging carefully researched biographical facts, it also offers in-depth analyses of the images that she constructed and advanced. Bennetta Jules-Rosette explores Baker’s far-ranging and dynamic career from a sociological and cultural perspective, using the tools of sociosemiotics to excavate the narratives, images, and representations that trace the story of her life and fit together as a cultural production.
José Vasconcelos
The Prophet of RaceStavans, Ilan
Rutgers University Press, 2011
Journalism and Jim Crow
White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New AmericaEdited by Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield
University of Illinois Press, 2021
White publishers and editors used their newspapers to build, nurture, and protect white supremacy across the South in the decades after the Civil War. At the same time, a vibrant Black press fought to disrupt these efforts and force the United States to live up to its democratic ideals. Journalism and Jim Crow centers the press as a crucial political actor shaping the rise of the Jim Crow South. The contributors explore the leading role of the white press in constructing an anti-democratic society by promoting and supporting not only lynching and convict labor but also coordinated campaigns of violence and fraud that disenfranchised Black voters. They also examine the Black press’s parallel fight for a multiracial democracy of equality, justice, and opportunity for all—a losing battle with tragic consequences for the American experiment.
Original and revelatory, Journalism and Jim Crow opens up new ways of thinking about the complicated relationship between journalism and power in American democracy.
Contributors: Sid Bedingfield, Bryan Bowman, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Kathy Roberts Forde, Robert Greene II, Kristin L. Gustafson, D'Weston Haywood, Blair LM Kelley, and Razvan Sibii
Juan Bautista de Anza
Basque Explorer in the New World, 1693-1740Donald T. Garate
University of Nevada Press, 2005
The first biography of an eighteenth-century Basque immigrant who became a silver miner, a cattle rancher, and commander of the cavalry in Sonora, Mexico. The name of Juan Bautista de Anza the younger is a fairly familiar one in the contemporary Southwest because of the various streets, schools, and other places that bear his name. Few people, however, are familiar with his father, the elder Juan Bautista de Anza, whose activities were crucial to the survival of the tenuous and far-flung settlements of Spain’s northernmost colonial frontier. For this first comprehensive biography of the elder Anza, Donald T. Garate spent more than ten years researching archives in Spain and the Americas. The result is a lively picture of the Spanish borderlands and the hardy, ambitious colonists who peopled them.
Juan Felipe Herrera
Migrant, Activist, Poet LaureateEdited by Francisco A. Lomelí and Osiris Aníbal Gómez
University of Arizona Press, 2023
For the first time, this book presents the distinguished, prolific, and highly experimental writer Juan Felipe Herrera. This wide-ranging collection of essays by leading experts offers critical approaches on Herrera, who transcends ethnic and mainstream poetics. It expertly demonstrates Herrera’s versatility, resourcefulness, innovations, and infinite creativity.
As a poet Herrera has had an enormous impact within and beyond Chicano poetics. He embodies much of the advancements and innovations found in American and Latin American poetry from the early l970s to the present. His writings have no limits or boundaries, indulging in the quotidian as well as the overarching topics of his era at different periods of his life. Both Herrera and his work are far from being unidimensional. His poetics are eclectic, incessantly diverse, transnational, unorthodox, and distinctive.
Reading Herrera is an act of having to rearrange your perceptions about things, events, historical or intra-historical happenings, and people. The essays in this work delve deeply into Juan Felipe Herrera’s oeuvre and provide critical perspectives on his body of work. They include discussion of Chicanx indigeneity, social justice, environmental imaginaries, Herrera’s knack for challenging theory and poetics, transborder experiences, transgeneric constructions, and children’s and young adult literature.
This book includes an extensive interview with the poet and a voluminous bibliography on everything by, about, and on the author. The chapters in this book offer a deep dive into the life and work of an internationally beloved poet who, along with serving as the poet laureate of California and the U.S. poet laureate, creates work that fosters a deep understanding of and appreciation for people’s humanity.
Contributors
Trevor Boffone
Marina Bernardo-Flórez
Manuel de Jesús Hernández-G.
Whitney DeVos
Michael Dowdy
Osiris Aníbal Gómez
Carmen González Ramos
Cristina Herrera
María Herrera-Sobek
Francisco A. Lomelí
Tom Lutz
Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez
Marzia Milazzo
Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger
Rafael Pérez-Torres
Renato Rosaldo
Donaldo W. Urioste
Luis Alberto Urrea
Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez
Juan Soldado
Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, SaintPaul J. Vanderwood
Duke University Press, 2004
In addition to conducting extensive archival research, Vanderwood interviewed central actors in the events of 1938, including Olga Camacho’s mother, citizens who rioted to demand Morales’s release to a lynch mob, those who witnessed his execution, and some of the earliest believers in his miraculous powers. Vanderwood also interviewed many present-day visitors to the shrine at Morales’s grave. He describes them, their petitions—for favors such as health, a good marriage, or safe passage into the United States—and how they reconcile their belief in Juan Soldado with their Catholicism. Vanderwood puts the events of 1938 within the context of Depression-era Tijuana and he locates people’s devotion, then and now, within the history of extra-institutional religious activity. In Juan Soldado, a gripping true-crime mystery opens up into a much larger and more elusive mystery of faith and belief.
Jump for Joy
Jazz, Basketball, and Black Culture in 1930s AmericaGena Caponi-Tabery
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
If the 1930s was the Swing Era, then the years from 1937 on might well be called the Jump Era. That summer Count Basie recorded “Jumping at the Woodside,” and suddenly jump tunes seemed to be everywhere. Along with the bouncy beat came a new dance step—the high-flying aerials of the jitterbuggers—and the basketball games that took place in the dance halls of African America became faster, higher, and flashier. Duke Ellington and a cast of hundreds put the buoyant spirit of the era on stage with their 1941 musical revue, Jump for Joy, a title that captured the momentum and direction of the new culture of exuberance.
Several high-profile public victories accompanied this increasing optimism: the spectacular successes of African American athletes at the 1936 Olympics, the 1937 union victory of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Joe Louis's 1937 and 1938 heavyweight championship fights. For the first time in history, Black Americans emerged as cultural heroes and ambassadors, and many felt a new pride in citizenship.
In this book, Gena Caponi-Tabery chronicles these triumphs and shows how they shaped American music, sports, and dance of the 1930s and beyond. But she also shows how they emboldened ordinary African Americans to push for greater recognition and civil liberties—how cultural change preceded and catalyzed political action.
Tracing the path of one symbolic gesture—the jump—across cultural and disciplinary boundaries, Caponi-Tabery provides a unique political, intellectual, and artistic analysis of the years immediately preceding World War II.
Juneteenth Rodeo
Photos and essay by Sarah Bird; Afterword by Demetrius Pearson
University of Texas Press, 2024
Award of Excellence — Communication Arts
Honorable Mention — The International Photography Awards 2024 Book Category
Jury Top 5 Selection — The International Photography Awards 2024 Book Category
Silver Winner in Zines And Photo Book/Culture— 2024 International Film Photography Award, Analog Sparks
Timeless photos offer a rare portrait of the jubilant, vibrant, vital, nearly hidden, and now all-but-vanished world of small-town Black rodeos.
Long before Americans began to officially commemorate Juneteenth, in the heat of East Texas, saddles were being cinched, buckles shined, and lassoes adjusted for a day on the Black rodeo circuit in honor of the holiday. In the late 1970s, as they had been doing for generations, Black communities across the region held local rodeos for the talented cowboys and cowgirls who were segregated from the mainstream circuit. It was to these vibrant community events that bestselling Texas writer Sarah Bird, then a young photojournalist, found herself drawn.
In Juneteenth Rodeo, Bird’s lens celebrates a world that was undervalued at the time, capturing everything, from the moment the pit master fired up his smoker, through the death-defying rides, to the last celebratory dance at a nearby honky-tonk. Essays by Bird and sports historian Demetrius Pearson reclaim the crucial role of Black Americans in the Western US and show modern rodeo riders—who still compete on today’s circuit—as “descendants” in a more than two-hundred-year lineage of Black cowboys. A gorgeous tribute to the ropers and riders—legends like Willie Thomas, Myrtis Dightman, Rufus Green, Bailey’s Prairie Kid, Archie Wycoff, and Calvin Greeley—as well as the secretaries, judges, and pick-up men and even the audience members who were as much family as fans, Juneteenth Rodeo ultimately seeks to put Black cowboys and cowgirls where they have always belonged: in the center of the frame.
Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination
Monica Hanna, Jennifer Harford Vargas, José David Saldívar, editors
Duke University Press, 2016
Junot Díaz
On the Half-Life of LoveJosé David Saldívar
Duke University Press, 2022
Just Between Us
An Ethnography of Male Identity and Intimacy in Rural Communities of Northern MexicoGuillermo Núñez Noriega
University of Arizona Press, 2014
Using fieldwork from rural Sonora, Mexico, Guillermo Núñez Noriega posits that men accept this intimacy outside gender categories and stereotypes, despite the traditional patriarchal society. This work contests homophobia and the heterosexual ideal of men and attempts to break down the barriers between genders.
The photograph Núñez Noriega uses to explore the shifting attitudes and perceptions of sexuality and gender provokes more questions than answers. Recognizing the societal regulations at play, the author demonstrates the existence in contemporary Mexico of an invisible regime of power that constructs and regulates the field of possibilities for men’s social actions, especially acts of friendship, affection, and eroticism with other men. The work investigates “modes of speaking” about being a man, on being gay, on the implicit meanings of the words homosexual, masculine, trade, fairy, and others—words that construct possibilities for intimacy, particularly affective and erotic intimacy among men.
Multiple variants of homoeroticism fall outside the dominant model, Núñez Noriega argues, a finding that offers many lessons on men and masculine identities. This book challenges patriarchal definitions of sex, gender, and identity; it promotes the unlearning of dominant conventions of masculinity to allow new ways of being.
Just Language
Walter Benjamin, German-Jewish Exile, and the Critique of Linguistic ViolenceDennis Johannßen
University of Michigan Press, 2026
Just Language revisits the Weimar period and its representation in the postwar years to explore narratives of linguistic resistance in the works of Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan. How did this generation of exile writers grapple with their experiences of oppression and persecution? How did they create a language of resistance during the decades that prepared the Third Reich and the Shoah?
Facing the devastations of World War I, the book explores how Walter Benjamin analyzed language’s ability to radically break the cyclical violence of war and examines his opposition to expansionism and imperialism in Weimar education and culture. Based on Benjamin’s analysis, Johannßen traces the postwar responses of Hannah Arendt and Paul Celan. While Arendt proposed strategies of metaphorical thinking to counteract the formation of totalitarianism, Celan mobilized silence as a poetic counterforce against oppression and erasure. Just Language argues that every linguistic act and practice, no matter how small or marginalized, entails the ethical task of opposing the normalization and institutionalization of political violence. By tracing how Benjamin and his interlocutors struggled against German fascism, Johannßen presents a memory-based critique of linguistic violence, opening a dialogue between German-Jewish writers and today’s debates on nondiscrimination, propaganda, and social justice.
Just Neighbors?
Research on African American and Latino Relations in the United StatesEdward Telles
Russell Sage Foundation, 2012