4531 books match the query 'Cultural & Ethnic Studies' and 272 start with r

cover of Regulating Religious Coexistence: The Intricacies of Interfaith Cooperation in Coastal Kenya

Regulating Religious Coexistence

The Intricacies of Interfaith Cooperation in Coastal Kenya

Erik Meinema

Ohio University Press, 0

Regulating Religious Coexistence offers a compelling ethnographic analysis of how Muslims, Christians, and practitioners of indigenous African religions negotiate coexistence in Kenya’s coastal region. The book conceptualizes religious diversity as a dynamic field shaped by multiple partly intersecting and partly conflicting models of interaction. These include the political secularism promoted by the Kenyan state and civil society organizations focused on interfaith harmony, forms of competition between religious groups, and pluralistic practices in which individuals draw on multiple traditions to meet spiritual needs.

Through a close examination of civil society initiatives funded by Western donors to foster peacebuilding and to counter violent extremism, the book investigates how these models for coexistence are negotiated and contested and how they intersect with historical and contemporary patterns. It demonstrates that modes of religious coexistence in coastal Kenya have been shaped by colonial and postcolonial governance, transregional connections, and interactions between Christians, Muslims, and Traditionalists across time.

As one of the few monographs on political secularism in an African context, Regulating Religious Coexistence makes a significant contribution to scholarship on religious diversity and coexistence. It situates Christianity, Islam, and indigenous African traditions within a single conceptual framework, broadening earlier studies that mostly treated them in isolation. This book is essential reading for scholars of religion, anthropology, African studies, and political theory, offering fresh insights into the complex realities of religious diversity in Africa and beyond.

[more]
cover of Rehabilitative Postsocialism: Disability, Sex, and Race in Eastern Europe

Rehabilitative Postsocialism

Disability, Sex, and Race in Eastern Europe

Katerina Kolárová

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Winner of the 2019 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities

Kateřina Kolářová’s Rehabilitative Postsocialism offers a timely interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis of how disability, race, class, and gender operate as ideological tools within the postsocialist Czech Republic (formerly Czechoslovakia). Kolářová presents postsocialism as an analytic that can and should be brought to bear to understand cultural politics, economic formations, and state politics through the present day. 

Rehabilitative Postsocialism names disability, sexuality, and race as central yet invisible to negotiations of the postsocialist consensus. Drawing from a rich and varied archive, Rehabilitative Postsocialism maps the formation of new structures of inequalities and social imaginaries of wellness, merit, and justice in order to understand current articulations of global disenchantment with democracy, social justice, and solidarity. The book also makes clear that disability, race, and ethnicity continue to circulate in depictions of Eastern Europe as suspended in a chronic developmental “delay.” Rehabilitative Postsocialism both situates this positioning within its political and historical formation and offers the analytical tools to challenge its continued deployment.

[more]
cover of Reimagining National Belonging: Post-Civil War El Salvador in a Global Context

Reimagining National Belonging

Post-Civil War El Salvador in a Global Context

Robin Maria DeLugan

University of Arizona Press, 2012

Reimagining National Belonging is the first sustained critical examination of post–civil war El Salvador. It describes how one nation, after an extended and divisive conflict, took up the challenge of generating social unity and shared meanings around ideas of the nation. In tracing state-led efforts to promote the concepts of national culture, history, and identity, Robin DeLugan highlights the sites and practices—as well as the complexities—of nation-building in the twenty-first century.

Examining events that unfolded between 1992 and 2011, DeLugan both illustrates the idiosyncrasies of state and society in El Salvador and opens a larger portal into conditions of constructing a state in the present day around the globe—particularly the process of democratization in an age of neoliberalism. She demonstrates how academics, culture experts, popular media, and the United Nations and other international agencies have all helped shape ideas about national belonging in El Salvador. She also reveals the efforts that have been made to include populations that might have been overlooked, including indigenous people and faraway citizens not living inside the country’s borders. And she describes how history and memory projects have begun to recall the nation’s violent past with the goal of creating a more just and equitable nation.

This illuminating case study fills a gap in the scholarship about culture and society in contemporary El Salvador, while offering an “ethnography of the state” that situates El Salvador in a global context.
[more]
cover of Reinventing Citizenship: Black Los Angeles, Korean Kawasaki, and Community Participation

Reinventing Citizenship

Black Los Angeles, Korean Kawasaki, and Community Participation

Kazuyo Tsuchiya

University of Minnesota Press, 2014


In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States and Japan went through massive welfare expansions that sparked debates about citizenship. At the heart of these disputes stood African Americans and Koreans. Reinventing Citizenship offers a comparative study of African American welfare activism in Los Angeles and Koreans’ campaigns for welfare rights in Kawasaki. In working-class and poor neighborhoods in both locations, African Americans and Koreans sought not only to be recognized as citizens but also to become legitimate constituting members of communities.

Local activists in Los Angeles and Kawasaki ardently challenged the welfare institutions. By creating opposition movements and voicing alternative visions of citizenship, African American leaders, Tsuchiya argues, turned Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty into a battle for equality. Koreans countered the city’s and the nation’s exclusionary policies and asserted their welfare rights. Tsuchiya’s work exemplifies transnational antiracist networking, showing how black religious leaders traveled to Japan to meet Christian Korean activists and to provide counsel for their own struggles.

Reinventing Citizenship reveals how race and citizenship transform as they cross countries and continents. By documenting the interconnected histories of African Americans and Koreans in Japan, Tsuchiya enables us to rethink present ideas of community and belonging.

[more]
cover of Reinventing the State: Economic Strategy and Institutional Change in Peru

Reinventing the State

Economic Strategy and Institutional Change in Peru

Carol Wise

University of Michigan Press, 2003

The political economic history of Latin America in the post-World War II era has largely been one of underachievement and opportunities lost. This all changed with the wave of market reforms that were implemented in the 1990s. However, the precise role of these reforms as an agent of change is still hotly debated. This in-depth analysis of the Peruvian case argues for an explanation that treats institutional innovation and state reconstruction as necessary conditions for the apparent success of the market in Latin America.
Exploring how state intervention has been both the cause of Latin America's economic downfall in the 1980s and the solution to its recovery, Reinventing the State analyzes three main phases of state intervention: the developmentalism that lasted until 1982, the state in retreat of the 1980s, and the streamlined state of the 1990s. Through a comprehensive examination of the Peruvian experience, the book explains the country's impressive turnaround from the standpoint of institutional modernization and internal state reform.
Written for a broad academic audience, the public-policy community, and the private sector, this book is also meant as a quick primer for any journalist, consultant, or private-sector analyst in need of an overview of the region's market-reform effort and how it has played out in Peru.
Carol Wise is Associate Professor, School of International Relations, University of Southern California.
[more]
cover of Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America

Relative Races

Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America

Brigitte Fielder

Duke University Press, 2020

In Relative Races, Brigitte Fielder presents an alternative theory of how race is ascribed. Contrary to notions of genealogies by which race is transmitted from parents to children, the examples Fielder discusses from nineteenth-century literature, history, and popular culture show how race can follow other directions: Desdemona becomes less than fully white when she is smudged with Othello's blackface, a white woman becomes Native American when she is adopted by a Seneca family, and a mixed-race baby casts doubt on the whiteness of his mother. Fielder shows that the genealogies of race are especially visible in the racialization of white women, whose whiteness often depends on their ability to reproduce white family and white supremacy. Using black feminist and queer theories, Fielder presents readings of personal narratives, novels, plays, stories, poems, and images to illustrate how interracial kinship follows non-heteronormative, non-biological, and non-patrilineal models of inheritance in nineteenth-century literary culture.
[more]
cover of Religion and Spirituality in Korean America

Religion and Spirituality in Korean America

Edited by David K. Yoo and Ruth H. Chung

University of Illinois Press, 2007

Religion and Spirituality in Korean America examines the ambivalent identities of predominantly Protestant Korean Americans in Judeo-Christian American culture. Focusing largely on the migration of Koreans to the United States since 1965, this interdisciplinary collection investigates campus faith groups and adoptees. The authors probe factors such as race, the concept of diaspora, and the ways the improvised creation of sacred spaces shape Korean American religious identity and experience. In calling attention to important trends in Korean American spirituality, the essays highlight a high rate of religious involvement in urban places and participation in a transnational religious community.

Contributors: Ruth H. Chung, Jae Ran Kim, Jung Ha Kim, Rebecca Kim, Sharon Kim, Okyun Kwon, Sang Hyun Lee, Anselm Kyongsuk Min, Sharon A. Suh, Sung Hyun Um, and David K. Yoo

[more]
cover of Religious Change in Post-Mao China: Toward a New Sociology of Religion

Religious Change in Post-Mao China

Toward a New Sociology of Religion

Yanfei Sun

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A sweeping examination of how the religious landscape has changed in post-Mao China.
 
In Religious Change in Post-Mao China, sociologist Yanfei Sun examines the transformation of major religions and the broader religious ecology in China in the wake of the death of Mao Zedong. Drawing on two decades of research that integrates ethnographic, historical, and comparative methods, this book explores the remarkable rise of Protestantism, the challenges faced by Catholicism, the revival of Chinese popular religion, the complex dynamics of Chinese Buddhism, and the unrealized potential of new religious movements. Why do some religions thrive and others struggle in post-Mao China? Sun describes both the internal institutional factors that allow some religions to flourish and the wider sociopolitical context that supports or discourages religious expansion. She thereby introduces an ambitious theoretical framework—one whose applicability extends beyond China, offering a template for analyzing religious dynamics in other parts of the world.

A must-read for scholars of religious studies, sociology, and China studies, Religious Change in Post-Mao China not only provides critical insights into China’s evolving religious landscape but also offers a powerful lens for examining the forces behind religious change, both past and present.
 
[more]
cover of Religious Pluralism and the Nigerian State: Mis Af#66

Religious Pluralism and the Nigerian State

Mis Af#66

Simeon O. Ilesanmi

Ohio University Press, 1996

In the case of Nigeria, scholarship on religious politics has not adequately taken into account the pluralistic context and the idealistic pretensions of the state that inhibit the possibility of forging an enduring civic amity among Nigeria’s diverse groups. Ilesanmi proposes a new philosophy or model of religio-political interaction, which he calls dialogic politics. Dialogic politics celebrates pluralism and suggests that religious institutions he construed as mediating structures functioning as buffers between individual citizens in search of existential meaning and cultural identity and the impersonal state, which tends to gravitate toward instrumental objectives. Ilesanmi’s study offers a fresh perspective on the complex relations between political attitudes and religious convictions.
[more]
cover of Relocating Authority: Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration

Relocating Authority

Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration

Mira Shimabukuro

University Press of Colorado, 2015

Relocating Authority examines the ways Japanese Americans have continually used writing to respond to the circumstances of their community’s mass imprisonment during World War II. Using both Nikkei cultural frameworks and community-specific history for methodological inspiration and guidance, Mira Shimabukuro shows how writing was used privately and publicly to individually survive and collectively resist the conditions of incarceration.

Examining a wide range of diverse texts and literacy practices such as diary entries, note-taking, manifestos, and multiple drafts of single documents, Relocating Authority draws upon community archives, visual histories, and Asian American history and theory to reveal the ways writing has served as a critical tool for incarcerees and their descendants. Incarcerees not only used writing to redress the “internment” in the moment but also created pieces of text that enabled and inspired further redress long after the camps had closed.

Relocating Authority highlights literacy’s enduring potential to participate in social change and assist an imprisoned people in relocating authority away from their captors and back to their community and themselves. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of ethnic and Asian American rhetorics, American studies, and anyone interested in the relationship between literacy and social justice.

[more]
cover of Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940-1965

Remaking Chinese America

Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940-1965

Zhao, Xiaojian

Rutgers University Press, 2001

In Remaking Chinese America, Xiaojian Zhao explores the myriad forces that changed and unified Chinese Americans during a key period in American history. Prior to 1940, this immigrant community was predominantly male, but between 1940 and 1965 it was transformed into a family-centered American ethnic community. Zhao pays special attention to forces both inside and outside of the country in order to explain these changing demographics. She scrutinizes the repealed exclusion laws and the immigration laws enacted after 1940. Careful attention is also paid to evolving gender roles, since women constituted the majority of newcomers, significantly changing the sex ratio of the Chinese American population.

As members of a minority sharing a common cultural heritage as well as pressures from the larger society, Chinese Americans networked and struggled to gain equal rights during the cold war period. In defining the political circumstances that brought the Chinese together as a cohesive political body, Zhao also delves into the complexities they faced when questioning their personal national allegiances. Remaking Chinese America uses a wealth of primary sources, including oral histories, newspapers, genealogical documents, and immigration files to illuminate what it was like to be Chinese living in the United States during a period that—until now—has been little studied.

[more]
cover of Remaking New Orleans: Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity

Remaking New Orleans

Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity

Thomas J. Adams and Matt Sakakeeny, editors

Duke University Press, 2019

Approached as a wellspring of cultural authenticity and historical exceptionality, New Orleans appears in opposition to a nation perpetually driven by progress. Remaking New Orleans shows how this narrative is rooted in a romantic cultural tradition, continuously repackaged through the twin engines of tourism and economic development, and supported by research that has isolated the city from comparison and left unquestioned its entrenched inequality. Working against this feedback loop, the contributors place New Orleans at the forefront of national patterns of urban planning, place-branding, structural inequality, and racialization. Nontraditional sites like professional wrestling matches, middle-class black suburbs, and Vietnamese gardens take precedence over clichéd renderings of Creole cuisine, voodoo queens, and hot jazz. Covering the city's founding through its present and highlighting changing political and social formations, this volume remakes New Orleans as a rich site for understanding the quintessential concerns of American cities.

Contributors. Thomas Jessen Adams, Vincanne Adams, Vern Baxter, Maria Celeste Casati Allegretti, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Rien Fertel, Megan French-Marcelin, Cedric G. Johnson, Alecia P. Long, Vicki Mayer, Toby Miller, Sue Mobley, Marguerite Nguyen, Aaron Nyerges, Adolph Reed Jr., Helen A. Regis, Matt Sakakeeny, Heidi Schmalbach, Felipe Smith, Bryan Wagner
[more]
cover of Remapping Biblical Studies: CUREMP at Thirty

Remapping Biblical Studies

CUREMP at Thirty

Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder

SBL Press, 2023

For decades, scholars of African, African American, Asian, Asian American, Latino/a/x, and Native American heritage have employed their intellect, histories, and lived experience as a means to produce new and courageous scholarship and imagine greater in the Society of Biblical Literature. This volume celebrates the thirty years of service of SBL’s Committee on Underrepresented Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Profession (CUREMP), a vital body in SBL dedicated to advancing the representation and work of racial and ethnic minoritized scholars in biblical studies. The volume includes the presidential addresses of groundbreaking scholars Brian K. Blount, Fernando F. Segovia, Vincent L. Wimbush, and Gale A. Yee. Gay L. Byron, Ahida Calderón Pilarski, Leslie D. Callahan, Jin Young Choi, Gregory L. Cuéllar, Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Velma E. Love, Andrew Mbuvi, Raj Nadella, Janette H. Ok, Angela N. Parker, Abraham Smith, Yak-hwee Tan, and Ekaputra Tupamahu provide reflections and responses that honor those who have led the way and point in new directions for future generations of scholars.
[more]
cover of Remedios: The Healing Life of Eva Castellanoz, Updated Edition

Remedios

The Healing Life of Eva Castellanoz, Updated Edition

Joanne B. Mulcahy

Oregon State University Press, 2010

The result of a twenty-year friendship between Joanne Mulcahy and Eva Castellanoz, Remedios traces the transformation of an indigenous Mexican migrant worker to a curandera (healer), community activist, and winner of a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Blending creative nonfiction and ethnographic research, Mulcahy shares Eva’s stories, from her early years in Mexico and the Rio Grande Valley to her adult years as a wife, mother, and grandmother in Nyssa, Oregon. Her testimonios capture the hardships and resilience of her life and the lives of others in her community. As a healer, Eva combines rituals, metaphors, and herbs to attend to those who seek her help. The floral crowns she fashions for young women’s quinceañeras and other arts preserve traditions while offering life lessons. Remedios gives us an intimate glimpse into Eva’s family life, her passionate activism, and her complex identity as an indigenous, Catholic curandera.

This updated edition includes revisions throughout the text and a new afterword by the author underscoring the changes in Eva’s life and in the larger world since Remedios’s original publication. For her important work, Eva has been recognized by several organizations and programs including the Oregon Arts Commission, Arts Build Communities, and the Portland Opera. The Crown Maker, a youth opera by the Portland Opera To Go program, celebrates Eva Castellanoz’s legacy and displays how even in a time of fear and divisiveness, hope endures through people who advocate for others and inspire social change.

[more]
cover of Remembering Brown at Fifty: The University of Illinois Commemorates Brown v. Board of Education

Remembering Brown at Fifty

The University of Illinois Commemorates Brown v. Board of Education

Edited by Orville Vernon Burton and David O'Brien

University of Illinois Press, 2009

Inspired by the University of Illinois's celebration of the Brown v. Board of Education decision's fiftieth anniversary, this collection addresses the significance of Brown in the contributors' lives or work in education and civil rights. Several authors describe their personal roles in the Brown case or similar cases, while others examine and illustrate events, performances, and exhibitions that were part of the anniversary commemoration. The book not only explores the repercussions of the Brown decision, but also stands as a historic document in its own right, preserving the reactions of many prominent intellectuals, artists, and activists fifty years after the decision.
 
Contributors are Kal Alston, Margaret L. Andersen, Kathryn H. Anthony, Nathaniel C. Banks, Bernice McNair Barnett, Christopher Benson, Ed Blankenheim, Julian Bond, Orville Vernon Burton, Jason Chambers, Constance Curry, Joseph A. De Laine Jr., Mary L. Dudziak, Joe R. Feagin, John Hope Franklin, Ophelia De Laine Gona, Lani Guinier, Darlene Clark Hine, Freeman A. Hrabowski III, John Jennings, Ralph Lemon, George Lipsitz, Jim Loewen, Laughlin McDonald, David O'Brien, James C. Onderdonk, Sekou Sundiata, Christopher Teal, Nicholas Watkins, Carrie Mae Weems, Juan Williams, and Joy Ann Williamson.

[more]
cover of Remembering Emmett Till

Remembering Emmett Till

Dave Tell

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Take a drive through the Mississippi Delta today and you’ll find a landscape dotted with memorials to major figures and events from the civil rights movement. Perhaps the most chilling are those devoted to the murder of Emmett Till, a tragedy of hate and injustice that became a beacon in the fight for racial equality. The ways this event is remembered have been fraught from the beginning, revealing currents of controversy, patronage, and racism lurking just behind the placid facades of historical markers.

In Remembering Emmett Till, Dave Tell gives us five accounts of the commemoration of this infamous crime. In a development no one could have foreseen, Till’s murder—one of the darkest moments in the region’s history—has become an economic driver for the Delta. Historical tourism has transformed seemingly innocuous places like bridges, boat landings, gas stations, and riverbeds into sites of racial politics, reminders of the still-unsettled question of how best to remember the victim of this heinous crime. Tell builds an insightful and persuasive case for how these memorials have altered the Delta’s physical and cultural landscape, drawing potent connections between the dawn of the civil rights era and our own moment of renewed fire for racial justice.
 
[more]
cover of Remembering Pinochet's Chile: On the Eve of London 1998

Remembering Pinochet's Chile

On the Eve of London 1998

Steve J. Stern

Duke University Press, 2004

During the two years just before the 1998 arrest in London of General Augusto Pinochet, the historian Steve J. Stern had been in Chile collecting oral histories of life under Pinochet as part of an investigation into the form and meaning of memories of state-sponsored atrocities. In this compelling work, Stern shares the recollections of individual Chileans and draws on their stories to provide a framework for understanding memory struggles in history.


“A thoughtful, nuanced study of how Chileans remember the traumatic 1973 coup by Augusto Pinochet against Salvador Allende and the nearly two decades of military government that followed. . . . In light of the recent revelations of American human rights abuses of Iraqi prisoners, [Stern’s] insights into the legacies of torture and abuse in the Chilean prisons of the 1970s certainly have contemporary significance for any society that undergoes a national trauma.”—Publishers Weekly

“This outstanding work of scholarship sets a benchmark in the history of state terror, trauma, and memory in Latin America.”—Thomas Miller Klubock, American Historical Review

“This is a book of uncommon depth and introspection. . . . Steve J. Stern has not only advanced the memory of the horrors of the military dictatorship; he has assured the place of Pinochet’s legacy of atrocity in our collective conscience.”—Peter Kornbluh, author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability

“Steve J. Stern’s book elegantly recounts the conflicted recent history of Chile. He has found a deft solution to the knotty problem of evenhandedness in representing points of view so divergent they defy even the most careful attempts to portray the facts of the Pinochet period. He weaves a tapestry of memory in which narratives of horror and rupture commingle with the sincere perceptions of Chileans who remember Pinochet’s rule as salvation. The facts are there, but more important is the understanding we gain by knowing how ordinary Chileans—Pinochet’s supporters and his victims—work through their unresolved past.”—John Dinges, author of The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents

[more]
cover of Remembering Victoria: A Tragic Nahuat Love Story

Remembering Victoria

A Tragic Nahuat Love Story

By James M. Taggart

University of Texas Press, 2007

On October 15, 1983, a young mother of six was murdered while walking across her village of Huitzilan de Serdán, Mexico, with her infant son and one of her daughters. This woman, Victoria Bonilla, was among more than one hundred villagers who perished in violence that broke out soon after the Mexican army chopped down a cornfield that had been planted on an unused cattle pasture by forty Nahuat villagers.

In this anthropological account, based on years of fieldwork in Huitzilan, James M. Taggart turns to Victoria's husband, Nacho Angel Hernández, to try to understand how a community based on respect and cooperation descended into horrific violence and fratricide. When the army chopped down the cornfield at Talcuaco, the war that broke out resulted in the complete breakdown of the social and moral order of the community.

At its heart, this is a tragic love story, chronicling Nacho's feelings for Victoria spanning their courtship, marriage, family life, and her death. Nacho delivered his testimonio to the author in Nahuat, making it one of the few autobiographical love stories told in an Amerindian language, and a very rare account of love among the indigenous people of Mesoamerica. There is almost nothing in the literature on how a man develops and changes his feelings for his wife over his lifetime. This study contributes to the anthropology of emotion by focusing on how the Nahuat attempt to express love through language and ritual.

[more]
cover of Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol

Remembering the Alamo

Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol

By Richard R. Flores

University of Texas Press, 2002

"Remember the Alamo!" reverberates through Texas history and culture, but what exactly are we remembering? Over nearly two centuries, the Mexican victory over an outnumbered band of Alamo defenders has been transformed into an American victory for the love of liberty. Why did the historical battle of 1836 undergo this metamorphosis in memory and mythology to become such a potent master symbol in Texan and American culture?

In this probing book, Richard Flores seeks to answer that question by examining how the Alamo's transformation into an American cultural icon helped to shape social, economic, and political relations between Anglo and Mexican Texans from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. In the first part of the book, he looks at how the attempts of heritage society members and political leaders to define the Alamo as a place have reflected struggles within Texas society over the place and status of Anglos and Mexicans. In the second part, he explores how Alamo movies and the transformation of Davy Crockett into an Alamo hero/martyr have advanced deeply racialized, ambiguous, and even invented understandings of the past.

[more]
cover of Remembering the Cajun Past: Memory, Race, and the Politics of Public History in Louisiana

Remembering the Cajun Past

Memory, Race, and the Politics of Public History in Louisiana

Marc David

University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

Exploring how public history creates collective memory of this white ethnic group through memorials
 
Cajuns arrived in southern Louisiana in the 18th century after the British exiled them from eastern Canada. Also known as Acadians, they retain a unique dialect of French, and their distinctive music, food, and other cultural traits characterized them as an ethnic group. Until the 1960s, authorities viewed them as a serious problem, allegedly blocking the state’s progress as they clung to their antiquated ways. Few Cajun residents in the region remembered the remote past of their ancestors, but by the 1970s, organizations ranging from local non-profits to the National Park Service created sites that commemorated their history, such as the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville, allowing Cajuns to connect their lives to their past and claim it as their own.
 
In Remembering the Cajun Past, anthropologist Marc David studies the cultural and political dynamics that reconfigured Cajun memory and identity. Focusing on St. Martinville and the Acadian Memorial, he explores how authorities changed their minds about Cajuns and demonstrates how Cajuns’ historical memories took shape. Part ethnography and part history, David examines the racial aspects of the Memorial’s creation in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and the growth of a new Cajun history, one through which individual Cajuns rejected the label’s connotation of “white trash” and embraced belonging within a storied white ethnic group. Based on decades of fieldwork and deep engagement with public history practices, David explores how historical memory and the historic sites that foster it are intertwined with the politics of civic life.

[more]
cover of Remembering the Forgotten War: The Enduring Legacies of the U.S.-Mexican War

Remembering the Forgotten War

The Enduring Legacies of the U.S.-Mexican War

Michael Scott Van Wagenen

University of Massachusetts Press, 2012

On February 2, 1848, representatives of the United States and Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, officially ending hostilities between the two countries and ceding over one-half million square miles of land to the northern victors. In Mexico, this defeat has gradually moved from the periphery of dishonor to the forefront of national consciousness. In the United States, the war has taken an opposite trajectory, falling from its once-celebrated prominence into the shadowy margins of forgetfulness and denial.

Why is the U.S.–Mexican War so clearly etched in the minds of Mexicans and so easily overlooked by Americans? This book investigates that issue through a transnational, comparative analysis of how the tools of collective memory—books, popular culture, historic sites, heritage groups, commemorations, and museums—have shaped the war's multifaceted meaning in the 160 years since it ended. Michael Van Wagenen explores how regional, ethnic, and religious differences influence Americans and Mexicans in their choices of what to remember and what to forget. He further documents what happens when competing memories clash in a quest for dominance and control.

In the end, Remembering the Forgotten War addresses the deeper question of how remembrance of the U.S.–Mexican War has influenced the complex relationship between these former enemies now turned friends. It thus provides a new lens through which to view today's cross-border rivalries, resentments, and diplomatic pitfalls.

[more]
cover of Remembering to Live: Illness at the Intersection of Anxiety and Knowledge in Rural Indonesia

Remembering to Live

Illness at the Intersection of Anxiety and Knowledge in Rural Indonesia

M. Cameron Hay

University of Michigan Press, 2004


Sasaks, a people of the Indonesian archipelago, cope with one of the country's worst health records by employing various medical traditions, including their own secret ethnomedical knowledge. But anxiety, in the presence and absence of illness, profoundly shapes the ways Sasaks use healing and knowledge. Hay addresses complex questions regarding cultural models, agency, and other relationships to conclude that the ethnomedical knowledge they use to cope with their illnesses ironically inhibits improvements in their health care.
M. Cameron Hay is a NSF Advance Fellow and an Assistant Adjunct Professor at the UCLA Center for Culture and Health.
[more]
cover of Remembrances in Black: Personal Perspectives of the African American Experience at the University of Arkansas, 1940s–2000s

Remembrances in Black

Personal Perspectives of the African American Experience at the University of Arkansas, 1940s–2000s

Charles F. Robinson II

University of Arkansas Press, 2015

With the admittance in 1948 of Silas Hunt to the University of Arkansas Law School, the university became the first southern public institution of higher education to officially desegregate without being required to do so by court order. The process was difficult, but an important first step had been taken. Other students would follow in Silas Hunt's footsteps, and they along with the university would have to grapple with the situation. Remembrances in Black is an oral history that gathers the personal stories of African Americans who worked as faculty and staff and of students who studied at the state's flagship institution. These stories illustrate the anguish, struggle, and triumph of individuals who had their lives indelibly marked by their experiences at the school. Organized chronologically over sixty years, this book illustrates how people of color navigated both the evolving campus environment and that of the city of Fayetteville in their attempt to fulfill personal aspirations. Their stories demonstrate that the process of desegregation proved painfully slow to those who chose to challenge the forces of exclusion. Also, the remembrances question the extent to which desegregation has been fully realized.
[more]
cover of Remittance as Belonging: Global Migration, Transnationalism, and the Quest for Home

Remittance as Belonging

Global Migration, Transnationalism, and the Quest for Home

Hasan Mahmud

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Remittance as Belonging: Global Migration, Transnationalism, and the Quest for Home argues that migrants' remittances express their  sense of belonging and connectedness to their home country of origin, making an integral part of both migrants’ ethnic identity and sense of what they call home. Drawing on three and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork with Bangladeshi migrants in Tokyo and Los Angeles, Hasan Mahmud demonstrates that while migrants go abroad for various reasons, they do not travel alone. Although they leave behind their families in Bangladesh, they move abroad essentially as members of their family and community and maintain their belonging to home through transnational practices, including remittance sending. By conceptualizing remittance as an expression of migrants’ belonging, this book presents detailed accounts of the emergence, growth, decline, and revival of remittances as a function of transformations in migrants’ sense of belonging to home.
[more]
cover of Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico

Remixing Reggaetón

The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico

Petra R. Rivera-Rideau

Duke University Press, 2015

Puerto Rico is often depicted as a "racial democracy" in which a history of race mixture has produced a racially harmonious society. In Remixing Reggaetón, Petra R. Rivera-Rideau shows how reggaetón musicians critique racial democracy's privileging of whiteness and concealment of racism by expressing identities that center blackness and African diasporic belonging. Stars such as Tego Calderón criticize the Puerto Rican mainstream's tendency to praise black culture but neglecting and marginalizing the island's black population, while Ivy Queen, the genre's most visible woman, disrupts the associations between whiteness and respectability that support official discourses of racial democracy. From censorship campaigns on the island that sought to devalue reggaetón, to its subsequent mass marketing to U.S. Latino listeners, Rivera-Rideau traces reggaetón's origins and its transformation from the music of San Juan's slums into a global pop phenomenon. Reggaetón, she demonstrates, provides a language to speak about the black presence in Puerto Rico and a way to build links between the island and the African diaspora.
 
[more]
cover of Remixing Wong Kar-wai: Music, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Oblivion

Remixing Wong Kar-wai

Music, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Oblivion

Giorgio Biancorosso

Duke University Press, 2025

Like his fellow filmmakers Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino, and Sofia Coppola, Wong Kar-wai crafts the soundtracks of his films by jettisoning original scores in favor of commercial recordings. In Remixing Wong Kar-wai, Giorgio Biancorosso examines the combinatorial practice at the heart of Wong’s cinema to retheorize musical borrowing, appropriation, and repurposing. Wong’s irrepressible penchant for poaching music from other films—whether old Chinese melodramas, Hollywood blockbusters, or European art films—subsumes familiar music under his own brand of cinema. As Wong combs through musical and cinematic archives and splices disparate music together, exceedingly well-known music loses its previous associations and acquires an infinite new constellation of meanings in his films. Drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage, Biancorosso contends that Wong’s borrowing is akin to a practice of creative destruction in which Wong becomes a bricoleur who remixes music at hand to create new and complete, self-sustaining statements. By outlining Wong’s modus operandi of indiscriminate borrowing and remixing, Biancorosso prompts readers to reconsider the significance of transforming preexisting music into new compositions for film and beyond.
[more]
cover of Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, Activism, and Mothering

Remnants

A Memoir of Spirit, Activism, and Mothering

Rosemarie Freeney Harding with Rachel Elizabeth Harding

Duke University Press, 2015

An activist influential in the civil rights movement, Rosemarie Freeney Harding’s spirituality blended many traditions, including southern African American mysticism, Anabaptist Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism, and Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Remnants, a multigenre memoir, demonstrates how Freeney Harding's spiritual life and social justice activism were integral to the instincts of mothering, healing, and community-building. Following Freeney Harding’s death in 2004, her daughter Rachel finished this decade-long collaboration, using recorded interviews, memories of her mother, and her mother's journal entries, fiction, and previously published essays.
[more]
cover of Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago

Renegade Dreams

Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago

Laurence Ralph

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Every morning Chicagoans wake up to the same stark headlines that read like some macabre score: “13 shot, 4 dead overnight across the city,” and nearly every morning the same elision occurs: what of the nine other victims? As with war, much of our focus on inner-city violence is on the death toll, but the reality is that far more victims live to see another day and must cope with their injuries—both physical and psychological—for the rest of their lives. Renegade Dreams is their story. Walking the streets of one of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods—where the local gang has been active for more than fifty years—Laurence Ralph talks with people whose lives are irrecoverably damaged, seeking to understand how they cope and how they can be better helped.
           
Going deep into a West Side neighborhood most Chicagoans only know from news reports—a place where children have been shot just for crossing the wrong street—Ralph unearths the fragile humanity that fights to stay alive there, to thrive, against all odds. He talks to mothers, grandmothers, and pastors, to activists and gang leaders, to the maimed and the hopeful, to aspiring rappers, athletes, or those who simply want safe passage to school or a steady job. Gangland Chicago, he shows, is as complicated as ever. It’s not just a warzone but a community, a place where people’s dreams are projected against the backdrop of unemployment, dilapidated housing, incarceration, addiction, and disease, the many hallmarks of urban poverty that harden like so many scars in their lives. Recounting their stories, he wrestles with what it means to be an outsider in a place like this, whether or not his attempt to understand, to help, might not in fact inflict its own damage. Ultimately he shows that the many injuries these people carry—like dreams—are a crucial form of resilience, and that we should all think about the ghetto differently, not as an abandoned island of unmitigated violence and its helpless victims but as a neighborhood, full of homes, as a part of the larger society in which we all live, together, among one another.
[more]
cover of Renegade Rhymes: Rap Music, Narrative, and Knowledge in Taiwan

Renegade Rhymes

Rap Music, Narrative, and Knowledge in Taiwan

Meredith Schweig

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A close look at how Taiwanese musicians are using rap music as a creative way to explore and reconcile Taiwanese identity and history.

Like many states emerging from oppressive political rule, Taiwan saw a cultural explosion in the late 1980s, when nearly four decades of martial law under the Chinese Nationalist Party ended. As members of a multicultural, multilingual society with a complex history of migration and colonization, Taiwanese people entered this moment of political transformation eager to tell their stories and grapple with their identities. In Renegade Rhymes, ethnomusicologist Meredith Schweig shows how rap music has become a powerful tool in the post-authoritarian period for both exploring and producing new knowledge about the ethnic, cultural, and political history of Taiwan.
​
Schweig draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, taking readers to concert venues, music video sets, scenes of protest, and more to show how early MCs from marginalized ethnic groups infused rap with important aspects of their own local languages, music, and narrative traditions. Aiming their critiques at the educational system and a neoliberal economy, new generations of rappers have used the art form to nurture associational bonds and rehearse rituals of democratic citizenship, making a new kind of sense out of their complicated present.
[more]
cover of Reparations and Reparatory Justice: Past, Present, and Future

Reparations and Reparatory Justice

Past, Present, and Future

Edited by Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Mary Frances Berry, and V. P. Franklin

University of Illinois Press, 2024

Changes at the global, federal, state, and municipal level are pushing forward the reparations movement for people of African descent. The distinguished editors of this volume have gathered works that chronicle the historical movement for reparations both in the United States and around the world.

Sharing a focus on reparations as an issue of justice, the contributors provide a historical primer of the movement; introduce the philosophical, political, economic, legal and ethical issues surrounding reparations; explain why government, corporations, universities, and other institutions must take steps to rehabilitate, compensate, and commemorate African Americans; call for the restoration of Black people’s human and civil rights and material and psychological well-being; lay out specific ideas about how reparations can and should be paid; and advance cutting-edge interpretations of the complex long-lasting effects that enslavement, police and vigilante actions, economic discrimination, and other behaviors have had on people of African descent.

Groundbreaking and innovative, Reparations and Reparatory Justice offers a multifaceted resource to anyone wishing to explore a defining moral issue of our time.

Contributors: Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Hilary McDonald Beckles, Mary Frances Berry, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Chuck Collins, Ron Daniels, V. P. Franklin, Danny Glover, Adom Gretachew, Charles Henry, Kamm Howard, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Jesse Jackson, Sr., Brian Jones, Sheila Jackson Lee, James B. Stewart, the Movement 4 Black Lives, the National African American Reparations Commission, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, the New Afrikan Peoples Organization/Malcolm X Grassroots Movement

[more]
cover of Replaying Marc Anthony: Sonic, Political, and Cultural Resonances

Replaying Marc Anthony

Sonic, Political, and Cultural Resonances

Frances R. Aparicio

The Ohio State University Press, 2025

Replaying Marc Anthony is the first book-length study of Marc Anthony’s cultural, aesthetic, and political contributions to Latinx popular music and Latinx communities. Despite the trivializing label of “Latino pop,” Anthony’s repertoire has had a tremendous impact on his audience, particularly within the US Latinx community. Considering his music outside of limiting frameworks imposed by the music industry, Frances R. Aparicio situates Anthony’s songs within specific musical genealogies and histories, demonstrating that his songs not only foster healing from colonial violence but also produce, textually and sonically, multiple identities that resonate with his listeners. Relistening to five of Anthony’s most canonical songs—“Preciosa,” “Hasta Que Te Conocí,” “I Need to Know,” “Aguanile,” and “Vivir Mi Vida”—Aparicio traces the circulation of these sonic texts, examining their social, cultural, gender, and political meanings. Among the myriad topics Marc Anthony’s music critically reflects on are Puerto Rican and Diasporican itinerant subjectivities, Blackness, environmental crises, MexiRican sonic exchanges, Latinidad, masculinities, struggles with belonging as an “American,” and Global South solidarities.
[more]
cover of Repossessing Shanland: Myanmar, Thailand, and a Nation-State Deferred

Repossessing Shanland

Myanmar, Thailand, and a Nation-State Deferred

Jane M. Ferguson

University of Wisconsin Press, 2022

Around five million people across Southeast Asia identify as Shan. Though the Shan people were promised an independent state in the 1947 Union of Burma constitution, successive military governments blocked their liberation. From 1958 onward, insurgency movements, including the Shan United Revolution Army, have fought for independence from Myanmar. Refugees numbering in the hundreds of thousands fled to Thailand to escape the conflict, despite struggling against oppressive citizenship laws there. Several decades of continuous rebellion have created a vacuum in which literati and politicians have constructed a virtual Shan state that lives on in popular media, rock music, and Buddhist ritual.

Based on close readings of Shan-language media and years of ethnographic research in a community of soldiers and their families, Jane M. Ferguson details the origins of these movements and tells the story of the Shan in their own voices. She shows how the Shan have forged a homeland and identity during great upheaval by using state building as an ongoing project of resistance, resilience, and accommodation within both countries. In avoiding a good/bad moral binary and illuminating cultural complexities, Repossessing Shanland offers a fresh perspective on identity formation, transformation, and how people understand and experience borderlands today.
[more]
cover of Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema

Representing

Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema

S. Craig Watkins

University of Chicago Press, 1998

In this engaging and provocative book, S. Craig Watkins examines two of the most important developments in the recent history of black cinema—the ascendancy of Spike Lee and the proliferation of "ghettocentric films." Representing explores a distinct contradiction in American society: at the same time that black youth have become the targets of a fierce racial backlash, their popular expressive cultures have become highly visible and commercially viable.

"Watkins is at his most sophisticated and persuasive when he explains the surprising success of hyper-talented, entrepreneurial, and energetic black artists."—Archon Fung, Boston Book Review
[more]
cover of Reproducing Inequities: Poverty and the Politics of Population in Haiti

Reproducing Inequities

Poverty and the Politics of Population in Haiti

Maternowska, M. Catherine

Rutgers University Press, 2006

Residents of Haiti-one of the poorest and most unstable countries in the world-face a grim reality of starvation, violence, lack of economic opportunity, and minimal health care. For years, aid organizations have sought to alleviate the problems by creating health and family planning clinics, including one modern (and, by local standards, luxurious) center in the heart of Cit Soleil. During its height of service in the 1980s and 1990s, the clinic boasted nineteen staff members, an array of modern contraceptives, an accessible location, and convenient hours-but very few clients.

Why did this initiative fail so spectacularly despite surveys finding that residents would like to have fewer children? Why don't poor women heed the message of family planning, when smaller families seem to be in their best interest? In Reproducing Inequities, M. Catherine Maternowska argues that we too easily overlook the political dynamics that shape choices about family planning. Through a detailed study of the attempt to provide modern contraception in the community of Cit Soleil, Maternowska demonstrates the complex interplay between local and global politics that so often thwarts well-intended policy initiatives.

Medical anthropologists, she argues, have an important role to play in developing new action plans for better policy implementation. Ethnographic studies in desperate, dangerous locations provide essential data that can point the way to solutions for the dilemmas of contraception in poor communities worldwide.

 

[more]
cover of Reproductive Technologies as Global Form: Ethnographies of Knowledge, Practices, and Transnational Encounters

Reproductive Technologies as Global Form

Ethnographies of Knowledge, Practices, and Transnational Encounters

Edited by Michi Knecht, Maren Klotz, and Stefan Beck

Campus Verlag, 2012

In the thirty years since the first “test-tube baby,” in-vitro fertilization and other methods of reproductive assistance have become a common aspect of family life and medicine in developed nations—and, increasingly, throughout the world. This collection brings together ethnographic studies of how these reproductive technologies are deployed across a wide variety of nations and cultures, taking special account of how they are linked to aspirations towards modernity—and how they contribute to an ongoing reconfiguration of the boundaries of knowledge and human agency. The resulting volume offers both a current snapshot of the cultural state of reproductive technologies and a plethora of provocative questions for the future.

[more]
cover of Research Directions of Black Psychologists

Research Directions of Black Psychologists

Wade Boykin

Russell Sage Foundation, 1979

Focusing on issues of particular importance to black people, and confronting the rich variety and the complexity of the black experience, the many contributors demonstrate the broad diversity of research interests and strategies among black psychologists, from the traditional to the innovative. Topics covered include studies of motivation, cognitive development, life-span development, and cultural difference versus deficit theories. Many of the studies directly refute previous conceptions of the psychological functioning of blacks and offer alternative models and formulations. This book is the first to present soundly designed and executed research that is emphatically linked to the perspectives and the psychological concerns of black Americans. In designing these studies, the authors aimed to ameliorate the pressing educational and social problems of blacks through a better understanding of their life conditions.
[more]
cover of Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies

Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies

Abé Mark Nornes and Aaron Gerow

University of Michigan Press, 2009

The Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies provides a snapshot of all the archival and bibliographic resources available to students and scholars of Japanese cinema. Among the nations of the world, Japan has enjoyed an impressively lively print culture related to cinema. The first film books and periodicals appeared shortly after the birth of cinema, proliferating wildly in the 1910s with only the slightest pause in the dark days of World War II. The numbers of publications match the enormous scale of film production, but with the lack of support for film studies in Japan, much of it remains as uncharted territory, with few maps to negotiate the maze of material.
This book is the first comprehensive guide ever published for approaching the complex archive for Japanese cinema. It lists all the libraries and film archives in the world with significant collections of film prints, still photographs, archival records, books, and periodicals. It provides a full annotated bibliography of the core books and magazines for the field. And it supplies hints for how to find and access materials for any research project. Above and beyond that, Nornes and Gerow’s Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies constitutes a comprehensive overview of the impressive dimensions and depth of the print culture surrounding Japanese film, and a guideline for future research in the field. This is an essential book for anyone seriously thinking about Japan and its cinema.
[more]
cover of Research Guide to People’s Daily Editorials, 1949–1975

Research Guide to People’s Daily Editorials, 1949–1975

Michel Oksenberg and Gail Henderson, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1982

An indispensable aid to researching a crucial series of policy statements, the present guide provides access to the only continuous source from China which illuminates high-level policy.
Includes an extensive subject index.
[more]
cover of Researching Black Communities: A Methodological Guide

Researching Black Communities

A Methodological Guide

James S. Jackson, Cleopatra Howard Caldwell, Sherrill L. Sellers, editors

University of Michigan Press, 2014

Experts from a range of disciplines offer practical advice for conducting social science research in racial and ethnic minority populations. Readers will learn how to choose appropriate methods—longitudinal studies, national surveys, quantitative analysis, personal interviews, and other qualitative approaches—and how best to employ them for research on specific demographic groups. The volume opens with a brief introduction to the difficulty of defining a population and designing a research program and then moves to illustrative examples drawn from the contributors’ own studies of Blacks in the United States, the Caribbean, and South Africa. Case studies cover research on the media, mental health, churches, work, marital relationships, education, and family roles.
[more]
cover of Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck

Reshaping the German Right

Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck

Geoff Eley

University of Michigan Press, 1991

Examines the conditions under which a particular right-wing ideology was generated
[more]
cover of Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures

Residual Governance

How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures

Gabrielle Hecht

Duke University Press, 2023

In Residual Governance, Gabrielle Hecht dives into the wastes of gold and uranium mining in South Africa to explore how communities, experts, and artists fight for infrastructural and environmental justice. Hecht outlines how mining in South Africa is a prime example of what she theorizes as residual governance—the governance of waste and discard, governance that is purposefully inefficient, and governance that treats people and places as waste and wastelands. She centers the voices of people who resist residual governance and the harms of toxic mining waste to highlight how mining’s centrality to South African history reveals the links between race, capitalism, the state, and the environment. In this way, Hecht shows how the history of mining in South Africa and the resistance to residual governance and environmental degradation is a planetary story: the underlying logic of residual governance lies at the heart of contemporary global racial capitalism and is a major accelerant of the Anthropocene.
[more]
cover of Resilient Kitchens: American Immigrant Cooking in a Time of Crisis, Essays and Recipes

Resilient Kitchens

American Immigrant Cooking in a Time of Crisis, Essays and Recipes

Philip Gleissner

Rutgers University Press, 0

Winner of the James Beard Award for Best Book in Food Issues and Advocacy

Immigrants have left their mark on the great melting pot of American cuisine, and they have continued working hard to keep America’s kitchens running, even during times of crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. For some immigrant cooks, the pandemic brought home the lack of protection for essential workers in the American food system. For others, cooking was a way of reconnecting with homelands they could not visit during periods of lockdown. 

 Resilient Kitchens: American Immigrant Cooking in a Time of Crisis is a stimulating collection of essays about the lives of immigrants in the United States before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, told through the lens of food. It includes a vibrant mix of perspectives from professional food writers, restaurateurs, scholars, and activists, whose stories range from emotional reflections on hardship, loss, and resilience to journalistic investigations of racism in the American food system. Each contribution is accompanied by a recipe of special importance to the author, giving readers a taste of cuisines from around the world. Every essay is accompanied by gorgeous food photography, the authors’ snapshots of pandemic life, and hand-drawn illustrations by Filipino American artist Angelo Dolojan. 

 

[more]
cover of Resilient Memories: Amerindian Cognitive Schemas in Latin American Art

Resilient Memories

Amerindian Cognitive Schemas in Latin American Art

Arij Ouweneel

The Ohio State University Press, 2018

Arij Ouweneel’s Resilient Memories: Amerindian Cognitive Schemas in Latin American Art takes a cognitive approach to the mediation of collective memory by works of art. In looking at cultural production of Amerindians—the transnational mnemonic community comprised of indígenas, originarios, mestizos, and cholos—Ouweneel argues that cultural memories and identity are not simply the sum total of individuals’ expressions of self, but that some cultural artifacts become privileged to inform the heart of the mnemonic community. Ouweneel seeks to identify a series of cognitive schemas as the foundation of an Amerindian Cognitive Unconsciousness as a viable alternative to the Freudian Dynamic Unconscious. Art, then, serves to trigger the cognitive schemas embedded within the Amerindian community and act as the mediator of collective memory. 
 
Exploring works ranging in popularity, from Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También to the paintings of Peruvian artists Claudia Coca and Jorge Miyagui, and from Mexican Zapatistas to hip-hop, Ouweneel details the ways in which artists interact with the embodied memory of the community but also assert their own place within it as crucial, furthering their audiences’ understanding of and interaction with existing cultural schemas. In this way, Ouweneel shows that memories must serve the present or they will be forgotten.
[more]
cover of Resistance and Abolition in the Borderlands: Confronting Trump's Reign of Terror

Resistance and Abolition in the Borderlands

Confronting Trump's Reign of Terror

Edited by Arturo J. Aldama and Jessica Ordaz; Foreword by Leo R. Chavez; Afterword by Karma R. Chávez

University of Arizona Press, 2024

While there is a long history of state violence toward immigrants in the United States, the essayists in this interdisciplinary collection tackle head-on the impacts of the Trump administration.

This volume provides a well-argued look at the Trump era. Insightful contributions delve into the impact of Donald Trump’s rhetoric and policies on migrants detained and returned, immigrant children separated from their parents and placed in detention centers, and migrant women subjected to sexual and reproductive abuses, among other timely topics. The chapter authors document a long list in what the book calls “Trump’s Reign of Terror.”

Organized thematically, the book has four sections: The first gathers histories about the Trump years’ roots in a longer history of anti-migration; the second includes essays on artistic and activist responses on the border during the Trump years; the third critiques the normalization of Trump’s rhetoric and actions in popular media and culture; and the fourth envisions the future.

Resistance and Abolition in the Borderlands is an essential reader for those wishing to understand the extent of the damage caused by the Trump era and its impact on Latinx people.

Contributors
Arturo J. Aldama
Rebecca Avalos
Cynthia Bejarano
Tria Blu Wakpa
Renata Carvalho Barreto
Karma R. Chávez
Leo R. Chavez
Jennifer Cullison
Jasmin Lilian Diab
Allison Glover
Jamila Hammami
Alexandria Herrera
Diana J. Lopez
Sergio A. Macías
Cinthya Martinez
Alexis N. Meza
Roberto A. Mónico
José Enrique Navarro
Jessica Ordaz
Eliseo Ortiz
Kiara Padilla
Leslie Quintanilla
J-M Rivera
Heidy Sarabia
Tina Shull
Nishant Upadhyay
Maria Vargas
Antonio Vásquez
[more]
cover of Resisting Dispossession: Embodied Aesthetics in the Southwest

Resisting Dispossession

Embodied Aesthetics in the Southwest

Karen R. Roybal

University of Arizona Press, 2027

Illuminating the impacts of ongoing dispossession across the modern American Southwest

Resisting Dispossession examines how Native/Indigenous, Chicana/o/x, and Black communities in the American Southwest have confronted displacement and dispossession from the nineteenth century to the present. Moving beyond abstract theory, Karen R. Roybal centers cultural expression and embodied knowledge, revealing how colonialism, preservation, urban renewal, and gentrification continue to shape relationships to land, place, and belonging.

Drawing on Indigenous, Chicana feminist, and Black epistemologies, Roybal explores a diverse cultural archive of photographs, literature, musical compositions, oral histories, and storytelling practices. Through analyses of figures such as Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Raven Chacon, and Louis Carlos Bernal, alongside the stories of Chicana land grant heirs in New Mexico and southern Colorado, she demonstrates how artistic and cultural expression becomes a powerful tool for resisting erasure and reclaiming presence. Contesting representations of the Southwest made popular by figures like Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keeffe, these works preserve alternative histories, challenge dominant narratives, and illuminate the ongoing impacts of dispossession across the region.

Interdisciplinary in scope, this work offers a fresh perspective on the intersections of aesthetics, embodiment, and power in the West and Southwest. 

[more]
cover of Resisting War: The Politics of Conscientious Objection

Resisting War

The Politics of Conscientious Objection

Pinar Kemerli

Duke University Press, 2027

Political theorists conventionally frame conscientious objection as a private and apolitical corollary of civil disobedience. In Resisting War, Pınar Kemerli challenges this depoliticized interpretation and argues that conscientious objection can be a radically political practice that calls into question the state’s right to coerce individuals to partake in wars deemed oppressive and unjust. Interweaving a study of the evolution of conscientious objection theory and practice from the First World War onward with extensive fieldwork examining the Turkish antiwar movement, Kemerli tracks the many ways this resistance practice taps into the diverse histories and paradigms of anticolonialism and anti-imperialism. Connecting the stories of African American Muslims to Vietnam and then to Turks and Kurds in the Middle East, Kemerli shows how the refusal to participate in war ultimately raises its own distinct contestation of state sovereignty, nationalist allegiance, and the normative religiosities that claim people in the service of militarized nationalism.
[more]
cover of Resisting War: The Politics of Conscientious Objection

Resisting War

The Politics of Conscientious Objection

Pinar Kemerli

Duke University Press, 2027

Political theorists conventionally frame conscientious objection as a private and apolitical corollary of civil disobedience. In Resisting War, Pınar Kemerli challenges this depoliticized interpretation and argues that conscientious objection can be a radically political practice that calls into question the state’s right to coerce individuals to partake in wars deemed oppressive and unjust. Interweaving a study of the evolution of conscientious objection theory and practice from the First World War onward with extensive fieldwork examining the Turkish antiwar movement, Kemerli tracks the many ways this resistance practice taps into the diverse histories and paradigms of anticolonialism and anti-imperialism. Connecting the stories of African American Muslims to Vietnam and then to Turks and Kurds in the Middle East, Kemerli shows how the refusal to participate in war ultimately raises its own distinct contestation of state sovereignty, nationalist allegiance, and the normative religiosities that claim people in the service of militarized nationalism.
[more]
cover of Resolana: Emerging Chicano Dialogues on Community and Globalization

Resolana

Emerging Chicano Dialogues on Community and Globalization

Miguel Montiel

University of Arizona Press, 2009

Villagers in northern New Mexico refer to the south-facing side of a wall as la resolana, meaning “the place where the sun shines.” Every culture has a resolana, a place where the resolaneros—the villagers—gather, dialogue, and reflect on society, culture, and politics. The buried knowledge that emerges from this process may be “pure gold,” or el oro del barrio, a metaphor for the culturally contextualized knowledge gathered at the resolana.

Coming from diverse backgrounds in social work, sociology, public administration, literature, history, and education, three modern resolaneros take the twin concepts of resolana and el oro del barrio on a breathtaking journey from their rural roots to their application in an urban setting and on to a holistic view of globalization. The authors offer a humane perspective on transborder cultures and all communities struggling to maintain their cultural and linguistic identities. They share an optimistic view of how ordinary people everywhere can take back control of their own destinies. This book is about uncovering subjugated knowledge—el oro del barrio—through resolana, a dynamic process of thought and action.

Resolana will inspire dialogue and creativity from those interested in sociology, political science, social work, and Chicano studies, as well as public-policy makers and the general public.
[more]
cover of Resourceful Kingdoms: Customary Institutions, Contested Ownership, and Community Development in Africa

Resourceful Kingdoms

Customary Institutions, Contested Ownership, and Community Development in Africa

Shingirai Taodzera

Ohio University Press, 0

Resourceful Kingdoms investigates the struggle for control over Uganda’s emerging oil sector, centering on the Bunyoro Kingdom’s unsuccessful effort to secure ownership of resources discovered on its ancestral lands. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the book shows how the military-backed National Resistance Movement government consolidated authority over an estimated two billion barrels of oil, while Bunyoro communities experienced displacement, land loss, political tension, and significant environmental harm even before production began. The Bunyoro case reflects a wider pattern in which rural, resource-rich populations across Africa are marginalized as governments and multinational corporations convert natural resources into state-centered revenues.

The book further explores how indigenous kingdoms might come to own resources and channel revenues toward sustainable, culturally grounded development. Through comparative case studies of Uganda’s powerful Buganda Kingdom and South Africa’s Bafokeng Kingdom—widely recognized for community-based mineral ownership and effective wealth management—Resourceful Kingdoms illustrates how traditional institutions can pair with corporate structures, private land ownership, and diversified investment strategies to strengthen community prosperity.

From this analysis emerges strategic coexistence, a new framework that outlines how kingdoms can secure resource rights independent of shifting state policies or corporate social-responsibility initiatives. Presented as both a philosophy and a set of practical steps, strategic coexistence urges kingdoms to formalize land ownership, build strong indigenous governance systems, create community-owned corporations, reinvest resource revenues in long-term development, and transition away from dependence on extractive industries. Resourceful Kingdoms ultimately repositions African kingdoms as dynamic, contemporary governance institutions with significant potential to influence natural resource administration and advance community well-being.

[more]
cover of Restless Ecologies: Climate Change and Socioecological Futures in the Peruvian Highlands

Restless Ecologies

Climate Change and Socioecological Futures in the Peruvian Highlands

Allison Caine

University of Arizona Press, 2025

In the high Andean grasslands 4,500 meters above sea level, Quechua alpaca herders live on the edges of glaciers that have retreated more rapidly in the past fifty years than at any point in the previous six millennia. Women are the primary herders, and their specialized knowledge and skill is vital to the ability of high-elevation communities to survive in changing climatic conditions. In the past decade, however, these herders and their animals have traversed a rapidly shifting terrain. 

Drawing on the Quechua concept of k’ita, or restlessness, Allison Caine explores how herders in the community of Chillca in the Cordillera Vilcanota mountain range of the southeastern Peruvian Andes sense and make sense of changing conditions. Capricious mountains, distracted alpacas, and wayward children deviate from their expected spatial and temporal trajectories. When practices of sociality start to fall apart—when animals no longer listen to herders’ whistles, children no longer visit their parents, and humans no longer communicate with mountains—these failures signal a broader ecological instability that threatens the viability of the herder’s world.

For more than two years, the author herded alongside the women of the Cordillera Vilcanota, observing them and talking with them about their interactions with their animals, landscapes, and neighbors. Emphasizing the importance of Indigenous knowledge and traditional ecological practices, Caine argues that Quechua understandings of restlessness align with and challenge broader theoretical understandings of what it is to be vulnerable in a time of planetary crisis.
[more]