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In Peruvian Lives across Borders, M. Cristina Alcalde examines the evolution of belonging and the making of home among middle- and upper-class Peruvians in Peru, the United States, Canada, and Germany.

Alcalde draws on interviews, surveys, participant observation, and textual analysis to argue that to belong is to exclude. To that end, transnational Peruvians engage in both subtle and direct policing along the borders of belonging. These acts allow them to claim and maintain the social status they enjoyed in their homeland even as they profess their openness and tolerance. Alcalde details these processes and their origins in Peru's gender, racial, and class hierarchies. As she shows, the idea of return—whether desired or rejected, imagined or physical—spurs constructions of Peruvianness, belonging, and home.

Deeply researched and theoretically daring, Peruvian Lives across Borders answers fascinating questions about an understudied group of migrants.

Rural cemeteries—named for their expansive, picturesque landscape design rather than location—were established during the middle decades of the nineteenth century in the United States. An instant cultural phenomenon, Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the nation’s first such burial ground to combine the functions of the public park and the cemetery, becoming a popular place to picnic and go for strolls even for people who didn’t have graves to visit. It sparked a nationwide movement in which communities sought to establish their own cities of the dead. 

Pleasure Grounds of Death considers the history of the rural cemetery in the United States throughout the duration of the nineteenth century as not only a critical cultural institution embedded in the formation of community and national identities, but also as major sites of contest over matters of burial reform, taste and respectability, and public behavior; issues concerning race, class, and gender; conflicts over the burial of the Civil War dead and formation of postwar memory; and what constituted the most appropriate ways to structure the landscape of the dead in a modern and progressive society. As cultural landscapes that served the needs of the living as well as the dead, rural cemeteries offer a mirror for the transformations and conflicts taking place throughout the nineteenth century in American society.

A timely look at how our globalized era has reconfigured experiences of belonging.

What happens to a sense of belonging when national and regional governments, religious organizations, community groups, political parties, and corporations become unstable and incoherent, as they have in these nationalist and postnationalist times? From a richly interdisciplinary perspective, the authors examine notions of citizenship and cultural hybridization, migration and other forms of mobility, displacements and ethnic cleansing, and the nature of national belonging in a world turning ever more fluid, aided by transnational flows of capital, information, people, and ideas.

Contributors: Seyla Benhabib, Yale; John A. Hall, McGill U; Ulf Hannerz, Stockholm U; Jeffrey Herf, U of Maryland; Michael Herzfeld, Harvard; Richard Jenkins, U of Sheffield, UK; Mark Juergensmeyer, U of California, Santa Barbara; Riva Kastoryano, Center for International Studies and Research (CERI), Paris; Michèle Lamont, Princeton; Benjamin Lee, Rice U; Orvar Löfgren, U of Lund, Sweden; Philip Schlesinger, U of Stirling, Scotland; Yasemin Nuhõglu Soysal, U of Essex, UK; Ray Taras, Tulane U; James Tully, U of Victoria, British Columbia.

In recent decades, Chicana/o literary and cultural productions have dramatically shifted from a nationalist movement that emphasized unity to one that openly celebrates diverse experiences. Charting this transformation, Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and Culture looks to the late 1970s, during a resurgence of global culture, as a crucial turning point whose reverberations in twenty-first-century late capitalism have been profound.

Arguing for a postnationalism that documents the radical politics and aesthetic processes of the past while embracing contemporary cultural and sociopolitical expressions among Chicana/o peoples, Hernández links the multiple forces at play in these interactions. Reconfiguring text-based analysis, she looks at the comparative development of movements within women's rights and LGBTQI activist circles. Incorporating economic influences, this unique trajectory leads to a new conception of border studies as well, rethinking the effects of a restructured masculinity as a symbol of national cultural transformation. Ultimately positing that globalization has enhanced the emergence of new Chicana/o identities, Hernández cultivates important new understandings of borderlands identities and postnationalism itself.

Silvio Torres-Saillant’s collected writings examine political contradictions within Latinx identity in the United States.

Since the 1990s Silvio Torres-Saillant’s work has questioned the notion of Latinidad, challenging presumptions of panethnic unity within the US Hispanic population and assessing dominant modes of Latinx representation. The essays in Problematic Paradigms and the Contours of US Latinidad examine the dynamics of a diverse collective of over 65 million people whose cultural heritage, ancestral origins, and belief systems arguably differ as much as they resemble one another. The volume dissects prevailing assumptions, namely the essentializing sense of homogeneity in the Latinx “community,” which mask important nuances and fascinating contradictions. Torres-Saillant also targets the role of marketing and mass communications in shaping popular perceptions of ethnic groups, thereby tracing connections between media rhetoric and the language of scholarship.

Newly revised by editors Nancy Kang and Michael Nieto Garcia, this collection curates Torres-Saillant’s core contributions to Latinx studies over the last two decades and underscores the veteran scholar’s evolving thoughts on key conversations in the field. The epilogue narrates his beginnings in Caribbean studies, acknowledges his ongoing analysis of Dominican blackness, and discourages uncritical views of cultural heritage.

"The conversation between political psychology and constructivism is essential and long overdue. By exploring the interaction of individual cognition and social processes, this 'ideational alliance' more fully explains how ideas work all the way down to shape world politics."
---Theo Farrell, King's College London

"This is a worthwhile and engaging volume. Political psychology is gaining ground as an essential perspective to consider when analyzing international relations, and the book's focus on constructivism provides key insights into the relationship between identity, norms, and behavior---bedrock concepts in understanding the social underpinnings of global politics."
---Mira Sucharov, Carleton University

"An indispensable guide to understanding what distinguishes and what unites psychology and constructivism. A wonderful resource for political psychologists, constructivists, and their critics."
---Jonathan Mercer, University of Washington

Constructivist IR scholars study the ways in which international norms, culture, and identities---all intersubjective phenomena---inform foreign policy and affect the reaction to and outcomes of international events. Political psychologists similarly investigate divergent national self-conceptions as well as the individual cognitive and emotional propensities that shape ideology and policy. Given their mutual interest in human subjectivity and identity politics, a dialogue and synthesis between constructivism and political psychology is long overdue.

The contributors to this volume discuss both theoretical and empirical issues of complementarity and critique, with an emphasis on the potential for integrating the viewpoints within a progressive ideational paradigm. Moreover, they make a self-conscious effort to interrogate, rather than gloss over, their differences in the hope that such disagreements will prove particularly rich sources of analytical and empirical insight. 

Jacket illustration © Ocean Photography/Veer