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Oil is one of the world’s most important commodities, but few people know how its extraction affects the residents of petroleum-producing regions. In the 1960s, the Texaco corporation discovered crude in the territory of Ecuador’s indigenous Cofán nation. Within a decade, Ecuador had become a member of OPEC, and the Cofán watched as their forests fell, their rivers ran black, and their bodies succumbed to new illnesses. In 1993, they became plaintiffs in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit that aims to compensate them for the losses they have suffered. Yet even in the midst of a tragic toxic disaster, the Cofán have refused to be destroyed. While seeking reparations for oil’s assault on their lives, they remain committed to the survival of their language, culture, and rainforest homeland.

Life in Oil presents the compelling, nuanced story of how the Cofán manage to endure at the center of Ecuadorian petroleum extraction. Michael L. Cepek has lived and worked with Cofán people for more than twenty years. In this highly accessible book, he goes well beyond popular and academic accounts of their suffering to share the largely unknown stories that Cofán people themselves create—the ones they tell in their own language, in their own communities, and to one another and the few outsiders they know and trust. Their words reveal that life in oil is a form of slow, confusing violence for some of the earth’s most marginalized, yet resilient, inhabitants.

An expanded, updated edition of the classic study of Cuban-American culture, this engaging book, which mixes the author’s own story with his reflections as a trained observer, explores how both famous and ordinary members of the “1.5 Generation” (Cubans who came to the United States as children or teens) have lived “life on the hyphen”—neither fully Cuban nor fully American, but a fertile hybrid of both. Offering an in-depth look at Cuban-Americans who have become icons of popular and literary culture—including Desi Arnaz, Oscar Hijuelos, musician Pérez Prado, and crossover pop star Gloria Estefan, as well as poets José Kozer and Orlando González Esteva, performers Willy Chirino and Carlos Oliva, painter Humberto Calzada, and others—Gustavo Pérez Firmat chronicles what it means to be Cuban in America.

The first edition of Life on the Hyphen won the Eugene M. Kayden National University Press Book Award and received honorable mentions for the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize and the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award.

The essential collection of African American voices that shaped the struggle for freedom, equality, and citizenship.

Lift Every Voice is a completely revised, updated, and expanded version of Philip Foner's 1972 classic Voice of Black America, which Library Journal hailed as "indispensable.""This well-edited and
richly inclusive work," wrote Benjamin Quarles, "unveils the full sweep of Black expression as found in platform addresses" by "men and women who join eloquence with reason in articulating their
grievances and their aspirations and in arousing their listeners with their ringing and prophetic challenges." This new collection includes over 60 additional texts and revised and expanded introductory essays that provide historical, biographical, and critical information for each speech.

For Americans of the 19th century, as W. E. B. Du Bois observed, eloquent speeches were 'the shining lights of civilization' that both expressed and sought to improve the lives and communities from which they sprang. Through political speeches, sermons, lectures, oral testimonies, and ceremonial addresses, African Americans offered diverse responses to the issues and events of their times, including not only slavery and racial equality but also women's rights, education, religion, immigration, socialism, war, Indian policy, and labor organization, among others. The speeches in this
collection are among the most powerful expressions of African American opinions on these issues and were delivered on occasions and before audiences where the speakers believed their words might be transformative.

Containing more than 150 speeches, this anthology represents the most extensive and diverse collection of African American oratory of the 18th and 19th centuries ever published. Lift Every Voice makes readily accessible not only the classic orations of such well-known figures as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Booker T. Washington but also dozens of lesser-known but important speeches deserving greater recognition and study. Many of these speeches are previously unpublished, uncollected, or long out of print.

In 1933, John A. Lomax and his son Alan set out as emissaries for the Library of Congress to record the folksong of the “American Negro” in several southern African-American prisons. Listening to the Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of African American Folksong in the 1930s asks how the Lomaxes’ field recordings—including their prison recordings and a long-form oral history of jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton—contributed to a new mythology of Americana for a nation in the midst of financial, social, and identity crises. Jonathan W. Stone argues that folksongs communicate complex historical experiences in a seemingly simple package, and can thus be a key element—a sonic rhetoric—for interpreting the ebb and flow of cultural ideals within contemporary historical moments. He contends that the Lomaxes, aware of the power folk music, used the folksongs they collected to increase national understanding of and agency for the subjects of their recordings (including the reconstitution of prevailing stereotypes about African American identity) even as they used the recordings to advance their own careers. Listening to the Lomax Archive gives readers the opportunity to listen in on these seemingly contradictory dualities, demonstrating that they are crucial to the ways that we remember and write about the subjects of the Lomaxes archive and other repositories of historicized sound.

Honorable Mention of the 2023 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies

• Longlist Finalist of the 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Moving Image Book Award

Listening with a Feminist Ear is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities of sound in cinema. Eschewing ocularcentric and siloed disciplinary formations, the book takes seriously the radical theoretical and methodological potential of listening. It models a feminist interpretive practice that is not just attuned to how power and privilege are materialized in sound, but that engenders new, counter-hegemonic imaginaries.

Focusing on mainstream Bombay cinema, Sundar identifies singing, listening, and speaking as key sites in which gendered notions of identity and difference take form. Charting new paths through seven decades of film, media, and cultural history, Sundar identifies key shifts in women’s playback voices and the Islamicate genre of the qawwali. She also conceptualizes spoken language as sound, and turns up the volume on a capacious, multilingual politics of belonging that scholarly and popular accounts of nation typically render silent. All in all, Listening with a Feminist Ear offers a critical sonic sensibility that reinvigorates debates about the gendering of voice and body in cinema, and the role of sound and media in conjuring community.

Highlighting efforts to address today’s most pressing social challenges through the study of texts in languages other than English.

Literature for Change examines how the study, production, circulation, and reception of literary texts in languages other than English contribute to addressing contemporary social challenges. Through eleven case studies across diverse languages and cultures, it analyzes the real-world impact of literary research, showing its relevance to sectors such as museums and heritage, the environmental and medical humanities, and the digital sphere. Combining hermeneutic and aesthetic approaches, the chapters demonstrate the value of varied methods, including theoretically grounded creative inquiry, and the connections between literary studies and other disciplines. The book affirms the importance of the field of modern languages and the continuing role of literary texts in shaping social and cultural life.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

Living in the Future reveals the unexplored impact of utopian thought on the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement.
 
Utopian thinking is often dismissed as unrealistic, overly idealized, and flat-out impractical—in short, wholly divorced from the urgent conditions of daily life. This is perhaps especially true when the utopian ideal in question is reforming and repairing the United States’ bitter history of racial injustice. But as Victoria W. Wolcott provocatively argues, utopianism is actually the foundation of a rich and visionary worldview, one that specifically inspired the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement in ways that haven’t yet been fully understood or appreciated.

Wolcott makes clear that the idealism and pragmatism of the Civil Rights Movement were grounded in nothing less than an intensely utopian yearning. Key figures of the time, from Martin Luther King Jr. and Pauli Murray to Father Divine and Howard Thurman, all shared a belief in a radical pacificism that was both specifically utopian and deeply engaged in changing the current conditions of the existing world. Living in the Future recasts the various strains of mid-twentieth-century civil rights activism in a utopian light, revealing the power of dreaming in a profound and concrete fashion, one that can be emulated in other times that are desperate for change, like today.

In closely analyzing the political and spiritual uses of black theatre during the Progressive Era, Mitchell demonstrates that audiences were shown affective ties in black families, a subject often erased in mainstream images of African Americans. Examining lynching plays as archival texts that embody and reflect broad networks of sociocultural activism and exchange in the lives of black Americans, Mitchell finds that audiences were rehearsing and improvising new ways of enduring in the face of widespread racial terrorism. Images of the black soldier, lawyer, mother, and wife helped readers assure each other that they were upstanding individuals who deserved the right to participate in national culture and politics. These powerful community coping efforts helped African Americans band together and withstand the nation's rejection of them as viable citizens.

The Left of Black interview with author Koritha Mitchell begins at 14:00.

An interview with Koritha Mitchell at The Ohio Channel.