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Wangari Muta Maathai was a scholar-activist known for founding the Green Belt Movement, an environmental campaign that earned her the Nobel Peace Prize. While many studies of Maathai highlight her activism, few examine Maathai as a scholar whose contributions to various disciplines and causes spanned more than three decades. In Radical Utu: Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai, Besi Brillian Muhonja presents the words and works of Maathai as theoretical concepts attesting to her contributions to gender equality, democratic spaces, economic equity and global governance, and indigenous African languages and knowledges. Muhonja’s well-rounded portrait of Maathai’s ideas offers a corrective to the one-dimensional characterization of Maathai typical of other works.

In Refusals and Reinventions, artist-scholar-organizer Daniel Coleman considers his critical trajectories and participation in intersectional justice struggles in the US and Mexico, situating them within larger abolitionist and decolonial movements for Black civil rights and Native/Indigenous sovereignty. He identifies how Black and Indigenous people create, exist in, and reclaim many worlds—the pluriverse—through their artistic refusals and reinventions. Coleman thus contributes to a growing body of pluriversal thought, inspired by the Zapatista motto “a world in which many worlds fit.” Charting previously unrecognized connections among the creative struggles of Indigenous people in southern Mexico and Black people in the southern United States, Coleman draws on performance praxis, decolonial pedagogies, and Afro-diasporic and Native/Indigenous cosmologies to frame four case studies of people refusing racialized, gendered violences as world-making tools. In looking at creative responses among activists in Chiapas and in North Carolina, Coleman uses transfeminist, Black feminist, and decolonial frameworks to ask: How do creative insurgent practices give us access to our humanity? And what do praxis and engaged witnessing have to teach us about what worlds from the pluriverse hold?

In 1983 Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities revolutionized the anthropology of nationalism. Anderson argued that "print capitalism" fostered nations as imagined communities in a modular form that became the culture of modernity.

Now, in Represented Communities, John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan offer an extensive and devastating critique of Anderson's depictions of colonial history, his comparative method, and his political anthropology. The authors build a forceful argument around events in Fiji from World War II to the 2000 coups, showing how focus on "imagined communities" underestimates colonial history and obscures the struggle over legal rights and political representation in postcolonial nation-states. They show that the "self-determining" nation-state actually emerged with the postwar construction of the United Nations, fundamentally changing the politics of representation.

Sophisticated and impassioned, this book will further anthropology's contribution to the understanding of contemporary nationalisms.

In Rewriting Islam, Hasnul Insani Djohar examines how women writers of the Ummah, or Muslim religious community, portray Muslim women fighting for gender and social justice while living as minorities in prosperous countries. Focusing on the body of Muslimah writing that has emerged since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Djohar considers fiction such as Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home, Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, and G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen. Djohar also examines poetry, memoirs, and short stories. Together, these works depict the diversity of Muslimah identities and cultures worldwide. Operating within postcolonial and Islamic studies frameworks, Djohar investigates how these writers contribute to larger debates around gender and globalization—including justice for immigrants and refugees, who are often blamed for social problems rather than recognized as victims of US imperialism and transnational capitalist globalization. By way of close readings and careful attention to historical, cultural, and religious contexts, Djohar illuminates how Muslimah American writers decolonize justice and white sovereignty by elevating interconnectedness, spirituality, and sisterhood across diverse communities.