Results by title

Winner of the ASA Race, Gender, and Class section's Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award

Winner of the ASA Racial and Ethnic Minorities section’s Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award

Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender, and Care Work in Portugal examines the everyday lives of an African-descendant care service workforce that labors in an ostensibly “anti-racial” Europe and against the backdrop of the Portuguese colonial empire. While much of the literature on global care work has focused on Asian and Latine migrant care workers, there is comparatively less research that explicitly examines African care workers and their migration histories to Europe. Sociologist Celeste Vaughan Curington focuses on Portugal—a European setting with comparatively liberal policies around family settlement and naturalization for migrants. In this setting, rapid urbanization in the late twentieth century, along with a national push to reconcile work and family, has shaped the growth of paid home care and cleaning service industries. Many researchers focus on informal work settings, where immigrant rights are restricted and many workers are undocumented or without permanent residence status. Curington instead examines workers who have accessed citizenship or permanent residence status and also explores African women’s experiences laboring in care and service industries in the formal market, revealing how deeply colonial and intersectional logics of a racialized and international division of reproductive labor in Portugal render these women “hyper-invisible” and “hyper-visible” as “appropriate” workers in Lisbon.

But it was as a columnist for the famous African-American newspaper the Chicago Defender that Hughes chronicled the hopes and despair of his people. For twenty years, he wrote forcefully about international race relations, Jim Crow, the South, white supremacy, imperialism and fascism, segregation in the armed forces, the Soviet Union and communism, and African-American art and culture. None of the racial hypocrisies of American life escaped his searing, ironic prose.

This is the first collection of Hughes's nonfiction journalistic writings. For readers new to Hughes, it is an excellent introduction; for those familiar with him, it gives new insights into his poems and fiction.

The untold story of how liberal reform, Indigenous resistance, and the rubber trade transformed Ecuador’s Amazon.

Ecuador’s 1895 Liberal Revolution was a turning point for the nation. Along with crippling the power of the Catholic Church, the new Liberal government expanded the ranks of political participation, spearheaded projects to soften endemic regionalism, integrated the national economy into global markets through an export-oriented economic strategy, and launched a program of “Indian Redemption” aimed at “civilizing” what elites deemed as the “backward” Indigenous masses. The cacao economy was essential to the Liberal state reform, as it facilitated infrastructure modernizatoin and the ability to provide unprecedented public goods and services.

East of the Andes, the Liberal state launched the first attempt to incorporate the Amazonian frontier (the “Oriente”) and expand state power into the region. But, as Matthew Ford shows, a very different global commodity was transforming the Oriente. Unlike most economic booms, the global demand for rubber debilitated state efforts in the region. Liberalism in the Jungle traces how local, national, and global forces shaped the contours of Liberal efforts in the Amazon. By the end, readers will understand how the region transformed from an isolated outpost to the heart of the national economy and home to one of the world’s most powerful social movements.

Winner, 2022 Ottis Lock Endowment “Best Book” Award from the East Texas Historical Association

In Lynching and Leisure, Terry Anne Scott examines how white Texans transformed lynching from a largely clandestine strategy of extralegal punishment into a form of racialized recreation in which crowd involvement was integral to the mode and methods of the violence. Scott powerfully documents how lynchings came to function not only as tools for debasing the status of Black people but also as highly anticipated occasions for entertainment, making memories with friends and neighbors, and reifying whiteness. In focusing on the sense of pleasure and normality that prevailed among the white spectatorship, this comprehensive study of Texas lynchings sheds new light on the practice understood as one of the chief strategies of racial domination in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South.