By James M. Taggart
University of Texas Press, 1997
First published in 1983, Nahuat Myth and Social Structure brings together an important collection of modern-day Aztec Indian folktales and vividly demonstrates how these tales have been shaped by the social structure of the communities in which they are told.
Bianca Sofia Rubalcava
Rutgers University Press, 2026
What happens when we move beyond a Black-and-white understanding of racism? This provocative book challenges conventional narratives by exploring how Mexican Americans navigate the US racial hierarchy—not simply as victims of white supremacy but as complex participants in systems of racial oppression. Tracing the construction of race from colonial regimes to the present, author Bianca Sofia Rubalcava argues that non-Black people of color, particularly Mexican Americans, often negotiate their racial position by distancing themselves from Blackness. Through legal history, social movement archives, and survey data, this work reveals how anti-Blackness has persisted across borders and generations, from the pursuit of legal whiteness to enduring family biases around interracial relationships. Ultimately, the book offers a powerful critique of how anti-Black ideologies hinder cross-racial solidarity and perpetuate marginalization. A bold and necessary intervention, this study pushes the Latinx community—and all readers—to confront complicity and reimagine racial justice in more inclusive and transformative ways.
Jason Ruiz
University of Texas Press, 2023
2024 Honorable Mention — The Victor Villaseñor Best Latino Focused Nonfiction Book Award – English, Empowering Latino Futures’ International Latino Book Awards
Exploring representations of Latinx people from Scarface to Narcos, this book examines how pop culture has framed Latin America as the villain in America’s long and ineffectual War on Drugs.
If there is an enemy in the War on Drugs, it is people of color. That is the lesson of forty years of cultural production in the United States. Popular culture, from Scarface and Miami Vice to Narcos and Better Call Saul, has continually positioned Latinos as an alien people who threaten the US body politic with drugs. Jason Ruiz explores the creation and endurance of this trope, its effects on Latin Americans and Latinx people, and its role in the cultural politics of the War on Drugs.
Even as the focus of drug anxiety has shifted over the years from cocaine to crack and from methamphetamines to opioids, and even as significant strides have been made in representational politics in many areas of pop culture, Latinx people remain an unshakeable fixture in stories narrating the production, distribution, and sale of narcotics. Narcomedia argues that such representations of Latinx people, regardless of the intentions of their creators, are best understood as a cultural front in the War on Drugs. Latinos and Latin Americans are not actually America’s drug problem, yet many Americans think otherwise—and that is in no small part because popular culture has largely refused to imagine the drug trade any other way.
Jamie Winders
Russell Sage Foundation, 2013
Antonio F. Holland
University of Missouri Press, 2006
Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2000
György Csepeli
Central European University Press, 2021
Nation and Migration provides a way to understand recent migration events in Europe that have attracted the world's attention. The emergence of the nations in the West promised homogenization, but instead the imagined national communities have everywhere become places of heterogeneity, and modern nation states have been haunted by the specter of minorities. This study analyses experiences relating to migration in 23 European countries. It is based on data from the International Social Survey Programme, a global cross-national collaborative exercise, with surveys made in 1995, 2003, and 2013. In the authors' view, a critical test for Europe will be its ability to find adequate responses to the challenges of globalization.
The book provides a detailed overview of how citizens in Europe are coping with a xenophobia fueled by their own sense of insecurity. The authors reconstruct the competing sociological reactions to migration in the forms of integration, assimilation and segregation. Hungary receives special attention: the data show that people living there are far less closed and xenophobic than they might seem through the prism of a media-instigated moral panic.
Karen Shimakawa
Duke University Press, 2002
Shimakawa looks at the origins of Asian American theater, particularly through the memories of some of its pioneers. Her examination of the emergence of Asian American theater companies illuminates their strategies for countering the stereotypes of Asian Americans and the lack of visibility of Asian American performers within the theater world. She shows how some plays—Wakako Yamauchi’s 12-1-A, Frank Chin’s Chickencoop Chinaman, and The Year of the Dragon—have both directly and indirectly addressed the displacement of Asian Americans. She analyzes works attempting to negate the process of abjection—such as the 1988 Broadway production of M. Butterfly as well as Miss Saigon, a mainstream production that enacted the process of cultural displacement both onstage and off. Finally, Shimakawa considers Asian Americanness in the context of globalization by meditating on the work of Ping Chong, particularly his East-West Quartet.

Rachael Miyung Joo
Duke University Press, 2027
Rachel Sandwell
Ohio University Press, 2025
The first book-length study to reveal how women in exile shaped South Africa’s antiapartheid movement
This groundbreaking book explores the often-overlooked role of women in South Africa’s liberation movements, particularly within the African National Congress during its years in exile from 1960 to 1990. It examines how transformations in gender roles—though contested—were central to imagining a postapartheid South Africa.
Through an analysis of women’s diplomatic work and their advocacy for policies on sexual education, birth control, family life, and childcare, Rachel Sandwell challenges traditional narratives that have ignored or minimized women’s contributions. She highlights how South African women played a crucial role in connecting exiles to left-wing international organizations like the Women’s International Democratic Federation, positioning women as key figures in global anticolonial politics.
The book also explores how gender transformation was at the heart of the exiled antiapartheid movement’s vision for a free South Africa. Women fought for recognition beyond the role of “mothers of the nation,” sparking internal debates over revolutionary morality, the compatibility of motherhood with military service, and responses to sexual and domestic violence within the movement. These struggles mirrored broader ideological conflicts over nation building, belonging, and political identity as the African National Congress sought legitimacy as a government-in-exile.
Ultimately, National Liberation and the Political Life of Exile asks how we write histories of revolutionary movements—especially those that, despite their transformative ambitions, did not fully realize their goals. A vital contribution to feminist history, anticolonial studies, and the history of global liberation struggles, this book reshapes our understanding of gender and politics in the antiapartheid movement.
George Lamming
University of Michigan Press, 1992
Pamela Fox
University of Michigan Press, 2009
Siobhan B. Somerville
Duke University Press, 2026
By Martha Menchaca
University of Texas Press, 2011
2013 — NACCS Book Award – National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a majority of the Mexican immigrant population in the United States resided in Texas, making the state a flashpoint in debates over whether to deny naturalization rights. As Texas federal courts grappled with the issue, policies pertaining to Mexican immigrants came to reflect evolving political ideologies on both sides of the border.
Drawing on unprecedented historical analysis of state archives, U.S. Congressional records, and other sources of overlooked data, Naturalizing Mexican Immigrants provides a rich understanding of the realities and rhetoric that have led to present-day immigration controversies. Martha Menchaca's groundbreaking research examines such facets as U.S.-Mexico relations following the U.S. Civil War and the schisms created by Mexican abolitionists; the anti-immigration stance that marked many suffragist appeals; the effects of the Spanish American War; distinctions made for mestizo, Afromexicano, and Native American populations; the erosion of means for U.S. citizens to legalize their relatives; and the ways in which U.S. corporations have caused the political conditions that stimulated emigration from Mexico.
The first historical study of its kind, Naturalizing Mexican Immigrants delivers a clear-eyed view of provocative issues.
Gabriel Horowitz
Bucknell University Press, 2024
In this original study, Gabriel Horowitz examines the work of select nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American writers through the lens of contemporary theoretical debates about nature, postcoloniality, and national identity. In the work of José Martí, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Jorge Luis Borges, Augusto Roa Bastos, Cesar Aira, and others, he traces historical constructions of nature in regional intellectual traditions and texts as they inform political culture on the broader global stage. By investigating national literary discourses from Cuba, Argentina, and Paraguay, he identifies a common narrative thread that imagines the utopian wilderness of the New World as a symbolic site of independence from Spain. In these texts, Horowitz argues, an expressed desire to return to the nation’s foundational nature contributed to a movement away from political and social engagement and toward a “biopolitical state,” in which nature, traditionally seen as pre-political, conversely becomes its center.
Childs, Erica Chito
Rutgers University Press, 2005
Is love color-blind, or at least becoming increasingly so? Today’s popular rhetoric and evidence of more interracial couples than ever might suggest that it is. But is it the idea of racially mixed relationships that we are growing to accept or is it the reality? What is the actual experience of individuals in these partnerships as they navigate their way through public spheres and intermingle in small, close-knit communities?
In Navigating Interracial Borders, Erica Chito Childs explores the social worlds of black-white interracial couples and examines the ways that collective attitudes shape private relationships. Drawing on personal accounts, in-depth interviews, focus group responses, and cultural analysis of media sources, she provides compelling evidence that sizable opposition still exists toward black-white unions. Disapproval is merely being expressed in more subtle, color-blind terms.
Childs reveals that frequently the same individuals who attest in surveys that they approve of interracial dating will also list various reasons why they and their families wouldn’t, shouldn’t, and couldn’t marry someone of another race. Even college students, who are heralded as racially tolerant and open-minded, do not view interracial couples as acceptable when those partnerships move beyond the point of casual dating. Popular films, Internet images, and pornography also continue to reinforce the idea that sexual relations between blacks and whites are deviant.
Well-researched, candidly written, and enriched with personal narratives, Navigating Interracial Borders offers important new insights into the still fraught racial hierarchies of contemporary society in the United States.
David C Oh
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Maya Angela Smith
Duke University Press, 2025
P. Khalil Saucier
Michigan State University Press, 2015
Russ Castronovo
Duke University Press, 2001
Achille Mbembe
Duke University Press, 2019
Cyrus R. K. Patell
Duke University Press, 2001
Darren W. Davis
Russell Sage Foundation, 2007
Juanita Solano Roa
Duke University Press, 2025
Peter A. Yacavone
University of Michigan Press, 2023
Purkayastha, Bandana
Rutgers University Press, 2005
In the continuing debates on the topic of racial and ethnic identity in the United States, there are some that argue that ethnicity is an ascribed reality. To the contrary, others claim that individuals are becoming increasingly active in choosing and constructing their ethnic identities.Focusing on second-generation South Asian Americans, Bandana Purkayastha offers fresh insights into the subjective experience of race, ethnicity, and social class in an increasingly diverse America. The young people of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese origin that are the subjects of the study grew up in mostly white middle class suburbs, and their linguistic skills, education, and occupation profiles are indistinguishable from their white peers. By many standards, their lifestyles mark them as members of mainstream American culture. But, as Purkayastha shows, their ethnic experiences are shaped by their racial status as neither “white” nor “wholly Asian,” their continuing ties with family members across the world, and a global consumer industry, which targets them as ethnic consumers.”
Drawing on information gathered from forty-eight in-depth interviews and years of research, this book illustrates how ethnic identity is negotiated by this group through choice—the adoption of ethnic labels, the invention of “traditions,” the consumption of ethnic products, and participation in voluntary societies. The pan-ethnic identities that result demonstrate both a resilient attachment to heritage and a celebration of reinvention.
Lucidly written and enriched with vivid personal accounts, Negotiating Ethnicity is an important contribution to the literature on ethnicity and racialization in contemporary American culture.
Frances R. Aparicio
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Robert P. Clark
University of Nevada Press, 1990
Since the late 1960s, the Basque insurgent organization ETA (Euzkadi ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Freedom) has been engaged in a violent struggle against the Spanish state in an effort to gain the independence of the Basque Country. ETA violence has led to the death of hundreds of people, making the organization the most violent insurgent group in Europe. Between 1975 and 1988, nearly thirty attempts to negotiate an end to violence, with a few limited exceptions, all ended in failure. This important book examines why the efforts to negotiate have failed and makes suggestions on how to improve the chances for successful discussion in the future. Although Clark does not disprove the conventional wisdom that negotiation with terrorists is a bad idea, he does begin from the opposing point of view that there may be some positive values to be realized from such negotiation.Negotiating with ETA describes the various factions that are interested in the outcome of such negotiations and the Spanish antiterrorist policy throughout the period under examination. The book also recounts the early attempts to negotiate, the first attempt at "social reintegration," various attempts by the Basque Government to get negotiations started, negotiation efforts under the Spanish socialist government of Felipe González, and the lengthy negotiations that took place in Algeria. A wide range of scholars and specialists will find this book valuable, including those interested in contemporary Spanish politics, ethnic nationalism, Basque affairs, the problem of terrorism, and conflict resolution.
Caldwell, Kia Lilly
Rutgers University Press, 2006
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
Rediscovers the crucial role that women played in the influential Negritude movement.
The Negritude movement, which signaled the awakening of a pan-African consciousness among black French intellectuals, has been understood almost exclusively in terms of the contributions of its male founders: Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon G. Damas. This masculine genealogy has completely overshadowed the central role played by French-speaking black women in its creation and evolution. In Negritude Women, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting offers a long-overdue corrective, revealing the contributions made by the women who were not merely integral to the success of the movement, but often in its vanguard.
Through such disparate tactics as Lacascade’s use of Creole expressions in her French prose writings, the literary salon and journal founded by the Martinique-born Nardal sisters, and Roussy-Césaire’s revolutionary blend of surrealism and Negritude in the pages of Tropiques, the journal she founded with her husband, these four remarkable women made vital contributions. In exploring their influence on the development of themes central to Negritude-black humanism, the affirmation of black peoples and their cultures, and the rehabilitation of Africa-Sharpley-Whiting provides the movement’s first genuinely inclusive history.By Otis A. Singletary
University of Texas Press, 1957
Much of the violence that characterized Reconstruction was directly associated with the Negro militia movement organized by Radical politicians to support their precarious regimes in Southern states. This book is the story of that ill-fated movement, a story with important implication for later times.
Most Southern whites did not disguise their hostility toward the governments that were imposed on their states after Reconstruction entered its Radical phase. and Radical leaders lived in constant fear that this hostility would flare into open revolt. Organization of a loyal protective force was imperative if they were to remain in power.
Although planned originally as a defensive force, the Negro militia was quickly used by the Radicals for such purposes as controlling elections. The resentment of Southern whites resulting from this political activity was aggravated by crimes of violence, depredations, and minor social offenses committed by some of the militiamen. However, the white Southerner’s fundamental enmity toward the Negro militia stemmed from the racial implications of a policy that armed the Negroes and placed them in positions of authority over white men.
At first, opposition to the Negro militia movement took the form of legal stratagems and other measures short of force, but the final blow to the Negro militia was dealt by white volunteer rifle companies— illegal, armed counterforces that were at the very core of the White Line movement. The race riot as a political technique was born, the most notorious riot occurring at Hamburg, South Carolina, where, the author states, the policy of “disbandment through extermination” was successfully employed. Disintegration of the entire movement was inevitable.
“It is ironic,” Singletary states, “that the organization of this protective force, because of its racial implications, actually aided in the destruction of the very thing it was created to protect.”
Before its publication, Negro Militia and Reconstruction won the Moncado Prize, a cash award made biennially by the American Military Institute for “the best original book-length manuscript in any field of United States Military history.”
August Meier
University of Michigan Press, 1963
Carl Degler
University of Wisconsin Press, 1986
Carl Degler’s 1971 Pulitzer-Prize-winning study of comparative slavery in Brazil and the United States is reissued in the Wisconsin paperback edition, making it accessible for all students of American and Latin American history and sociology.
Until Degler’s groundbreaking work, scholars were puzzled by the differing courses of slavery and race relations in the two countries. Brazil never developed a system of rigid segregation, such as appeared in the United States, and blacks in Brazil were able to gain economically and retain far more of their African culture. Rejecting the theory of Giberto Freyre and Frank Tannenbaum—that Brazilian slavery was more humane—Degler instead points to a combination of demographic, economic, and cultural factors as the real reason for the differences.
“In the early 1970s when studies in social history were beginning to blossom on the North American scene, Carl Degler’s prize-winning contribution was a thoughtful provocative essay in comparative history. Its thoughtfulness has not diminished with the years. Indeed, it is as topical today as when it was first published. The Brazilian experience with rapid industrialization and its attempt to restore democratic government indicates that the issues which Degler treated in the early 1970s are more pertinent than ever today.”—Franklin W. Knight, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University.
Lynn Sally
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Edited by Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young: Foreword by Gayle Wald Afterword by Michele Elam
University of Illinois Press, 2018
Nicole D. Peterson
University of Arizona Press, 2025
In Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico, artisanal fishing families and staff of Loreto Bay National Park face an array of choices as tourism, environmental concerns, and economic precarity challenge livelihoods and natural resource availability. In Net Values, Nicole D. Peterson offers a critical examination of how the idea of “choice” is understood, and what it means for policies, planning, and programs to ignore the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts surrounding these choices.
Anchored by more than twenty years of research, Peterson provides insight into the fishing community of Loreto and reveals an important role in decision-making that diverges from previous studies. She argues that decisions about fishing, natural resource management, and other aspects of life are influenced by context, values, and expectations in ways that go beyond the typical psychological or cognitive theories of choice. Instead, Net Values highlights the ways that choices are constrained and enabled by values and expectations of cultures, histories, relationships, and experiences, both personal and shared. Peterson answers questions such as “why do the fishermen fish?” or “what is the marine park staff doing?” These decisions and choices are related to the larger implication addressed by this book: that in order to make effective policies around natural resource management and other issues, we must understand how those potential policies interact with the decision processes already underway.
Divided into five chapters, Net Values is rich in ethnographic detail, drawing from real people to inform the narratives, chapters, and theoretical elaboration. Peterson’s interactions with fishers such as Don Javier and his family and friends support the ideas offered around choice, values, and strategies, connecting ideas to real experiences.
Robert Laxalt
University of Nevada Press, 1991
Linda Frost
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
Tani E. Barlow, ed.
Duke University Press, 2002
While some of these essays take up key thinkers in Marxist history or draw attention to outstanding problematics, others focus on national literature and discourse in North and South Korea, the "Mao Zedong Fever" of the 1990s, the implications of Li Dazhao's poetry, and the Indian Naxalite movement. Illustrating the importance of central analytical categories like exploitation, alienation, and violence to studies on the politics of knowledge, contributors confront prevailing global consumerist fantasies
with accounts of political struggle, cultural displacement, and theoretical strategies.
Contributors. Tani E. Barlow, Dai Jinhua, Michael Dutton, D. R. Howland, Marshall Johnson, Liu Kang, You-me Park, William Pietz, Claudia Pozzana, Alessandro Russo, Sanjay Seth, Gi-Wook Shin, Sugiyama Mitsunobu, Jing Wang
Charles M. Tatum
University of Arizona Press, 1992
R. Drew Smith, ed.
Duke University Press, 2003
This collection of essays analyzes the results of an unprecedented survey of nearly 2,000 African American churches across the country conducted by The Public Influences of African-American Churches Project, which is based at Morehouse College in Atlanta. These essays—by political scientists, theologians, ethicists, and others—draw on the survey findings to analyze the social, historical, and institutional contexts of black church activism and to consider the theological and moral imperatives that have shaped black church approaches to civic life—including black civil religion and womanist and afrocentric critiques. They also look at a host of faith-based initiatives addressing economic development and the provision of social services. New Day Begun presents necessary new interpretations of how black churches have changed—and been changed by—contemporary American political culture.
Contributors. Lewis Baldwin, Allison Calhoun-Brown, David D. Daniels III, Walter Earl Fluker, C.R.D. Halisi, David Howard-Pitney, Michael Leo Owens, Samuel Roberts, David Ryden, Corwin Smidt, R. Drew Smith
William L. Van Deburg
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Michael Szalay
Duke University Press, 2000
Victor Zuniga
Russell Sage Foundation, 2005
Douglas S. Massey
Russell Sage Foundation, 2008
Jasmine Nichole Cobb
Duke University Press, 2022
Edited by Laura E. Ruberto and Joseph Sciorra: Afterword by Donna Gabaccia
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Contributors: Ottorino Cappelli, Donna Gabaccia, Stefano Luconi, Maddalena Marinari, James S. Pasto, Rodrigo Praino, Laura E. Ruberto, Joseph Sciorra, Donald Tricarico, and Elizabeth Zanoni.
Laura Ruberto, Joseph Sciorra
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Thomas Aiello
University of Arkansas Press, 2019
Joshi, Khyati Y
Rutgers University Press, 2006
In this compelling look at second-generation Indian Americans, Khyati Y. Joshi draws on case studies and interviews with forty-one second-generation Indian Americans, analyzing their experiences involving religion, race, and ethnicity from elementary school to adulthood. As she maps the crossroads they encounter as they navigate between their homes and the wider American milieu, Joshi shows how their identities have developed differently from their parents’ and their non-Indian peers’ and how religion often exerted a dramatic effect.
The experiences of Joshi’s research participants reveal how race and religion interact, intersect, and affect each other in a society where Christianity and whiteness are the norm. Joshi shows how religion is racialized for Indian Americans and offers important insights in the wake of 9/11 and the backlash against Americans who look Middle Eastern and South Asian.
Through her candid insights into the internal conflicts contemporary Indian Americans face and the religious and racial discrimination they encounter, Joshi provides a timely window into the ways that race, religion, and ethnicity interact in day-to-day life.