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22279 books match the query 'Social Science' and 1072 start with r

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Reading the Literatures of Asian America

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Temple University Press, 1992

With the recent proliferation of critically acclaimed literature by Asian American writers, this groundbreaking collection of essays provides a unique resource for students, scholars, and the general reading public. The homogeneity implied by the term "Asian American" is replaced in this volume with the rich diversity of highly disparate peoples. Languages, religions, races and cultural and national backgrounds. Examining a century of Asian American literature from the late 19th century up through the contemporary experimental drama of Ping Chong, the contributors address the work of writers with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, East Indian, and Pacific Island ancestry. Asian Canadian and Hawaiian literature are also considered.

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Reading with the Transcendentalists

Ten Works that Made a Movement

Philip F. Gura

University of Massachusetts Press, 2026

Exploring the books and reading practices behind the creation of Transcendentalist philosophy and community

Transcendentalism emerged in early 19th century New England as a uniquely American philosophical, spiritual, and literary movement. Its first generation of thinkers—including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Margaret Fuller—created a worldview that stressed the inherent goodness of the “self-reliant” individual and the presence of the divine in nature. These intellectuals gathered in informal symposia devoted to what Emerson called “creative reading,” a practice that stresses the transformative potential of the written word that was central to the movement’s emergence, growth, and spread. But what were these thinkers reading and how did it influence the development of Transcendentalism?

In Reading with the Transcendentalists, renowned literary scholar Philip F. Gura focuses on 10 American, British, and European books that were essential to the movement’s thoughts, writings, and activities. Many of the authors of these books—James Marsh, Madame de Staël, Samson Reed, George Ripley, Thomas Carlyle, Albert Brisbane, and George Sand—stood outside of Transcendentalism yet profoundly influenced it. Others such as Emerson, Parker, and Fuller were the movement’s central architects, whose writings in turn inspired the next generation, including Henry David Thoreau and Caroline Healey Dall. Each of these books challenged prevailing religious, philosophical, and social conventions in ways that resonated deeply with burgeoning Transcendentalist ideals.

Blending intellectual biography with book history, Gura crafts a captivating cultural history that reconstructs the dynamic social networks of the early Transcendentalists, in which ideas from the written word circulated, evolved, and acquired new meanings. The result is an rich portrait of reading as a creative and communal act, and an exploration of how books ignite curiosity, sustain friendship, and catalyze intellectual transformation. Through a carefully developed narrative structure that is filled not only with books and reading but with headline-worthy scandals, disputes, and falling outs and realignments, Gura traces the historical arc of a transnational intellectual movement that helped lay the foundation for the idea of “America.”

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Readings In American Indian Law

Jo Carrillo

Temple University Press, 1998

This selection of works -- many by Native American scholars -- introduces selected topics in federal Indian law. Readings in American Indian Law covers contemporary issues of identity and tribal recognition; reparations for historic harms; the valuation of land in land claims; the return to tribal owners of human remains, sacred items, and cultural property; tribal governance and issues of gender, democracy informed by cultural awareness, and religious freedom.

Courses in federal Indian law are often aimed at understanding rules, not cultural conflicts. This book expands doctrinal discussions into understandings of culture, strategy, history, identity, and hopes for the future. Contributions from law, history, anthropology, ethnohistory, biography, sociology, socio-legal studies, and fiction offer an array of alternative paradigms as strong antidotes to our usual conceptions of federal Indian law.

Each selection reveals an aspect of how federal Indian law is made, interpreted, implemented, or experienced. Throughout, the book centers on the ever present and contentious issue of identity. At the point where identity and law intersect lies an important new way to contextualize the legal concerns of Native Americans.

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Readings at the Edge of Literature

Myra Jehlen

University of Chicago Press, 2002

Myra Jehlen's aim in these essays is to read for what she calls the edge of literature: the point at which writing seems unable to say more, which is also, for Jehlen, the threshold of the real. It is here, she argues, that the central paradoxes of the American project become clear—self-reliance and responsibility, universal equality and the pursuit of empire, writing from the heart and representing shared values and ideas. Developing these paradoxes to their utmost tension, American writers often produce penetrating critiques of American society without puncturing its basic myths. For instance, Mark Twain's Puddn'head Wilson begins as a slashing satire of racism, only to conclude by demonstrating that even an invisible portion of black blood can make a man a murderer.

Throughout these essays Jehlen demonstrates the crucial role that the process of writing itself plays in unfolding these paradoxes, whether in the form of novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Virginia Woolf; the histories of Captain John Smith; or even a work of architecture, such as the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.

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Readings in Evaluation Research, 2ed

Francis G. Caro

Russell Sage Foundation, 1977

Affords a comprehensive overview of evaluative research, answering questions regarding the adequacy of organized programs in health, justice, education, employment, and welfare. Included are general statements about evaluative research, discussing the nature of the evaluative task, the role of evaluative research in programs for change, and appropriate methodological strategies. In this revised and expanded collection of readings, which includes more case materials and more illustrations of completed evaluations than the first edition, the editor presents a variety of viewpoints and a broad range of materials for the social planner, administrator, and social scientist.

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Ready Player Juan

Latinx Masculinities and Stereotypes in Video Games

Carlos Gabriel Kelly González

University of Arizona Press, 2023

Written for all gaming enthusiasts, this book fuses Latinx studies and video game studies to document how Latinx masculinities are portrayed in high-budget action-adventure video games, inviting Latinxs and others to insert their experiences into games made by an industry that fails to see them.

The book employs an intersectional approach through performance theory, border studies, and lived experience to analyze the designed identity “Player Juan.” Player Juan manifests in video game representations through a discourse of criminality that sets expectations of who and what Latinxs can be and do. Developing an original approach to video game experiences, the author theorizes video games as border crossings, and defines a new concept—digital mestizaje—that pushes players, readers, and scholars to deploy a Latinx way of seeing and that calls on researchers to consider a digital object’s constructive as well as destructive qualities.

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Ready Player Two

Women Gamers and Designed Identity

Shira Chess

University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Cultural stereotypes to the contrary, approximately half of all video game players are now women. A subculture once dominated by men, video games have become a form of entertainment composed of gender binaries. Supported by games such as Diner Dash, Mystery Case Files, Wii Fit, and Kim Kardashian: Hollywood—which are all specifically marketed toward women—the gamer industry is now a major part of imagining what femininity should look like.

In Ready Player Two, media critic Shira Chess uses the concept of “Player Two”—the industry idealization of the female gamer—to examine the assumptions implicit in video games designed for women and how they have impacted gaming culture and the larger society. With Player Two, the video game industry has designed specifically for the feminine ideal: she is white, middle class, heterosexual, cis-gendered, and abled. Drawing on categories from time management and caregiving to social networking, consumption, and bodies, Chess examines how games have been engineered to shape normative ideas about women and leisure.

Ready Player Two presents important arguments about how gamers and game developers must change their thinking about both women and games to produce better games, better audiences, and better industry practices. Ultimately, this book offers vital prescriptions for how one of our most powerful entertainment industries must evolve its ideas of women.

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Real Black

Adventures in Racial Sincerity

John L. Jackson Jr.

University of Chicago Press, 2005

New York's urban neighborhoods are full of young would-be emcees who aspire to "keep it real" and restaurants like Sylvia's famous soul food eatery that offer a taste of "authentic" black culture. In these and other venues, authenticity is considered the best way to distinguish the real from the phony, the genuine from the fake. But in Real Black, John L. Jackson Jr. proposes a new model for thinking about these issues—racial sincerity.

Jackson argues that authenticity caricatures identity as something imposed on people, imprisoning them within stereotypes: an African American high school student who excels in the classroom, for instance, might be dismissed as "acting white." On the other hand, sincerity, as Jackson defines it, imagines authenticity as an incomplete measuring stick, an analytical model that attempts to deny people agency in their search for identity.

Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic research in and around New York City, Jackson offers a kaleidoscope of subjects and stories that directly and indirectly address how race is negotiated in today's world—including tales of book-vending numerologists, urban conspiracy theorists, corrupt police officers, mixed-race neo-Nazis, and gospel choirs forbidden to catch the Holy Ghost. Jackson records and retells their interconnected sagas, all the while attempting to reconcile these stories with his own crisis of identity and authority as an anthropologist terrified by fieldwork. Finding ethnographic significance where mere mortals see only bricks and mortar, his invented alter ego Anthroman takes to the streets, showing how race is defined and debated, imposed and confounded every single day.

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Real Folks

Race and Genre in the Great Depression

Sonnet H. Retman

Duke University Press, 2011

During the Great Depression, people from across the political spectrum sought to ground American identity in the rural know-how of “the folk.” At the same time, certain writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals combined documentary and satire into a hybrid genre that revealed the folk as an anxious product of corporate capitalism, rather than an antidote to commercial culture. In Real Folks, Sonnet Retman analyzes the invention of the folk as figures of authenticity in the political culture of the 1930s, as well as the critiques that emerged in response. Diverse artists and intellectuals—including the novelists George Schuyler and Nathanael West, the filmmaker Preston Sturges, and the anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston—illuminated the fabrication and exploitation of folk authenticity in New Deal and commercial narratives. They skewered the racist populisms that prevented interracial working-class solidarity, prophesized the patriotic function of the folk for the nation-state in crisis, and made their readers and viewers feel self-conscious about the desire for authenticity. By illuminating the subversive satirical energy of the 1930s, Retman identifies a rich cultural tradition overshadowed until now by the scholarly focus on Depression-era social realism.

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Real Gangstas

Legitimacy, Reputation, and Violence in the Intergang Environment

Lauger, Timothy R

Rutgers University Press, 2012

Street gangs are a major concern for residents in many inner-city communities. However, gangs’ secretive and, at times, delinquent tendencies limit most people’s exposure to the realities of gang life. Based on eighteen months of qualitative research on the streets of Indianapolis, Real Gangstas provides a unique and intimate look at the lives of street gang members as they negotiate a dangerous peer environment in a major midwestern city.

Timothy R. Lauger interviewed and observed a mix of fifty-five gang members, former gang members, and non-gang street offenders. He spent much of his fieldwork time in the company of a particular gang, the “Down for Whatever Boyz,” who allowed him to watch and record many of their day-to-day activities and conversations. Through this extensive research, Lauger is able to understand and explain the reasons for gang membership, including a chaotic family life, poverty, and the need for violent self-assertion in order to foster the creation of a personal identity.

Although the book exposes many troubling aspects of gang life, it is not a simple descriptive or a sensationalistic account of urban despair and violence. Steeped in the tradition of analytical ethnography, the study develops a central theoretical argument: combinations of street gangs within cities shape individual gang member behavior within those urban settings. Within Indianapolis, members of rival gangs interact on a routine basis within an ambiguous and unstable environment. Participants believe that many of their contemporaries claiming gang affiliations are not actually “real” gang members, but instead are imposters who gain access to the advantages of gang membership through fraud and pretense. Consequently, the ability to discern “real” gang members—or to present oneself successfully as a real gang member—is a critical part of gangland Indianapolis.

Real Gangstas offers an objective and fair characterization of active gang members, successfully balancing the seemingly conflicting idea that they generally seem like normal teenagers, yet are abnormally concerned with—and too often involved in—violence. Lauger takes readers to the edge of an actual gang conflict, providing a rare and up-close look at the troubling processes that facilitate hostility and violence.

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Real Heat

Gender and Race in the Urban Fire Service

Chetkovich, Carol

Rutgers University Press, 1997

In the struggle over affirmative action, no employment setting has seen more friction than urban fire departments. Thirty years of legal and political efforts have opened the doors of this historically white male preserve, but men of color have yet to consolidate their gains, and women's progress has been even more tenuous. In this unique and compelling account of affirmative action at the "street level," Carol Chetkovich explores the ways in which this program has succeeded and failed.

Chetkovich follows the men and women of the Oakland Fire Department Class 1-91 through their academy training and eighteen-month probation. In vivid and sometimes surprising narratives, newcomers tell of their first battle with a full-fledged fire, their reactions to hazing rituals, and their relationships with veterans and fellow trainees. Real Heat explores how the process of becoming a firefighter interacts with the dimensions of race and gender to support some and discourage others. The book examines the implications of these interactions for public policy and social justice.

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Real Men Don't Sing

Crooning in American Culture

Allison McCracken

Duke University Press, 2015

The crooner Rudy Vallée's soft, intimate, and sensual vocal delivery simultaneously captivated millions of adoring fans and drew harsh criticism from those threatened by his sensitive masculinity. Although Vallée and other crooners reflected the gender fluidity of late-1920s popular culture, their challenge to the Depression era's more conservative masculine norms led cultural authorities to stigmatize them as gender and sexual deviants. In Real Men Don't Sing Allison McCracken outlines crooning's history from its origins in minstrelsy through its development as the microphone sound most associated with white recording artists, band singers, and radio stars. She charts early crooners’ rise and fall between 1925 and 1934, contrasting Rudy Vallée with Bing Crosby to demonstrate how attempts to contain crooners created and dictated standards of white masculinity for male singers. Unlike Vallée, Crosby survived the crooner backlash by adapting his voice and persona to adhere to white middle-class masculine norms. The effects of these norms are felt to this day, as critics continue to question the masculinity of youthful, romantic white male singers. Crooners, McCracken shows, not only were the first pop stars: their short-lived yet massive popularity fundamentally changed American culture.

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Real Pigs

Shifting Values in the Field of Local Pork

Brad Weiss

Duke University Press, 2016

In addition to being one of the United States' largest pork producers, North Carolina is home to a developing niche market of pasture-raised pork. In Real Pigs Brad Weiss traces the desire for "authentic" local foods in the Piedmont region of central North Carolina as he follows farmers, butchers, and chefs through the process of breeding, raising, butchering, selling, and preparing pigs raised on pasture for consumption. Drawing on his experience working on Piedmont pig farms and at farmers’ markets, Weiss explores the history, values, social relations, and practices that drive the pasture-raised pork market. He shows how pigs in the Piedmont become imbued with notions of authenticity, illuminating the ways the region's residents understand local notions of place and culture. Full of anecdotes and interviews with the market's primary figures, Real Pigs reminds us that what we eat and why have implications that resonate throughout the wider social, cultural, and historical world.

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Real Places

An Unconventional Guide to America's Generic Landscape

Grady Clay

University of Chicago Press, 1994

In Real Places, Grady Clay presents the American landscape in a completely fresh and untypical way. Rather than look at locations, he studies constructed, imaginative sites. Clay explores the fascination of "Fall Color Country," or "Lover's Lane." What draws people to these "generic" landscapes and keeps them coming back literally and figuratively time and time again? Real Places catalogs and describes a unique cross-section of America, emphasizing the beauty and intrigue of these hidden gems. Heavily illustrated with maps and photographs depicting the everyday as well as the bizarre, Clay's entertaining Baedeker allows us to see in a new way what has always been "right before our eyes."

"This book provides a language for the architecture of everyday life."—Ross Miller, Chicago Tribune

"Spirited observations and capsule histories."—Suzanne Stephens, New York Times Book Review

"Compelling. . . . Included here are many nuggets of insight and illumination."—Brad Knickerbocker, Christian Science Monitor

"An amusing and touching book about the reality we Americans have captured in our language."—Boston Sunday Globe

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Real Recognizes Real

The Credible Messenger Mentoring Movement

David C. Brotherton, Danny Kessler, Bahiyyah M. Muhammad, Rodrigo Martinez, and Louis Kontos

Temple University Press, 2027

The Credible Messenger Mentoring Initiative (CMMI), launched in New York City in 2012, is a transformative program where adults who had been in the justice system serve as mentors, role models, and life coaches for 16- to 24-year-olds. The program socializes and empowers these at-risk and formerly incarcerated youth offenders, diverting them from juvenile justice institutions and rehabilitation centers. It aims to build trust, deepen their ties to their community and family, and help them become peacemakers and role models for other youths.

Real Recognizes Real is the first in-depth study of the CMMI, focusing on the Washington, DC branch of the program, which is becoming a model for a new movement of anti-violent interventions. It shows the advantages of the CMMI being built on the love that members of a community have for one another rather than on outside intervention. The authors also explain how this state-run, non-profit program reduced recidivism rates and helped its participants, youth and mentors alike, develop more meaningful and lasting relationships.

Featuring interviews with youths and their mentors, Real Recognizes Real evaluates the successes, challenges, failures, and lessons of the CMMI, while emphasizing its value in the campaign for juvenile justice reform.

In the series Studies in Transgression

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Real Role Models

Successful African Americans Beyond Pop Culture

By Joah Spearman and Louis Harrison, Jr.

University of Texas Press, 2010

All young people need good role models, and black youth especially need positive and real examples beyond the famous and wealthy people they see on SportsCenter highlights and MTV Cribs. While success as a celebrity athlete or entertainer may seem like an achievable dream, the reality is that young African Americans have a much greater chance of succeeding in the professions through education and hard work—and a mentor to show them the path. Real Role Models introduces high school and college-age African Americans to twenty-three black professionals who have achieved a high level of success in their chosen fields and who tell their stories to inspire young people to pursue a professional career and do the work necessary to achieve their dreams.

Some of the individuals profiled by Joah Spearman and Louis Harrison, Jr., include Leonard Pitts, Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for the Miami Herald; Melody Barnes, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council; Danyel Smith, editor-in-chief of Vibe; and Dr. Tim George, Chief of Pediatric Neuroscience at Dell Children's Medical Center of Central Texas. They and other interviewees describe their backgrounds, career paths, and desire to give back by helping others reach their goals. Representing a wide range of occupations, these real role models prove to African American youths that a whole world of successful, rewarding careers awaits them.

The Real Role Models

Rufus Cormier, JD, Partner at the Baker Botts Law Firm, Houston, Texas
Melody Barnes, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, Washington, D.C.
Eric Motley, PhD, Managing Director of the Aspen Institute's Henry Crown Fellowship Program, Aspen, Colorado
James McIntyre, Spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Washington, D.C.
Tracie Hall, Assistant Dean and Librarian at Dominican University, River Forest, Illinois
Kimberlydawn Wisdom, MD, Surgeon General of the State of Michigan, Lansing, Michigan
Timothy George, MD, Chief of Pediatric Neuroscience at Dell Children's Medical Center, Austin, Texas
Victoria Holloway Barbosa, MD, Ethnic Dermatologist and Former Executive for L'Oreal, Chicago, Illinois
Bill Douglas, White House Correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, Washington, D.C.
Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for the Miami Herald, Miami, Florida
Danyel Smith, Editor of Vibe Magazine, New York, New York
Ed Stewart, Managing Director of External Communications for Delta Airlines, Atlanta, Georgia
Lynn Tyson, Vice President of Investor Relations for Dell, Austin, Texas
Willie Miles, Jr., Founder and CEO of Miles Wealth Management, Houston, Texas
Horace Allen, Founder and CEO of TeamPact, Atlanta, Georgia
Deavra Daughtry, President and CEO of Excellent Care Management, Houston, Texas
Je'Caryous Johnson, Founder and CEO of I'm Ready Productions, Houston, Texas
Steve Jones, Cofounder of a graphic design company, Oakland, California
Isiah Warner, PhD, Chemistry Professor at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Gloria Ladson-Billings, PhD, Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin
Bernard Muir, Athletic Director at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
Craig Littlepage, Athletic Director at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
Beverly Kearney, Women's Track Coach at the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas

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Real Sister

Stereotypes, Respectability, and Black Women in Reality TV

Ward, Jervette R

Rutgers University Press, 2015

From The Real Housewives of Atlanta to Flavor of Love, reality shows with predominantly black casts have often been criticized for their negative representation of African American women as loud, angry, and violent. Yet even as these programs appear to be rehashing old stereotypes of black women, the critiques of them are arguably problematic in their own way, as the notion of “respectability” has historically been used to police black women’s behaviors.

The first book of scholarship devoted to the issue of how black women are depicted on reality television, Real Sister offers an even-handed consideration of the genre. The book’s ten contributors—black female scholars from a variety of disciplines—provide a wide range of perspectives, while considering everything from Basketball Wives to Say Yes to the Dress. As regular viewers of reality television, these scholars are able to note ways in which the genre presents positive images of black womanhood, even as they catalog a litany of stereotypes about race, class, and gender that it tends to reinforce.

Rather than simply dismissing reality television as “trash,” this collection takes the genre seriously, as an important touchstone in ongoing cultural debates about what constitutes “trashiness” and “respectability.” Written in an accessible style that will appeal to reality TV fans both inside and outside of academia, Real Sister thus seeks to inspire a more nuanced, thoughtful conversation about the genre’s representations and their effects on the black community.

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Real, Recent, or Replica

Precolumbian Caribbean Heritage as Art, Commodity, and Inspiration

Edited by Joanna Ostapkowicz and Jonathan A. Hanna

University of Alabama Press, 2021

A CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE, 2022

Examines the largely unexplored topics in Caribbean archaeology of looting of heritage sites, fraudulent artifacts, and illicit trade of archaeological materials

Real, Recent, or Replica: Precolumbian Caribbean Heritage as Art, Commodity, and Inspiration is the first book-length study of its kind to highlight the increasing commodification of Caribbean Precolumbian heritage. Amerindian art, including “Taíno” art, has become highly coveted by collectors, spurring a prolific and increasingly sophisticated black market of forgeries, but also contemporary artistic engagement, openly appreciated as modern artworks taking inspiration from the past. The contributors to this volume contend with difficult subject matter including the continued looting of archaeological sites in the region, the seismic increase of forgeries, and the imbalance of power and economic relations between the producers and consumers of neo-Amerindian art.

The case studies document the considerable time depth of forgeries in the region (since the late nineteenth century), address the policies put in place by Caribbean governments and institutions to safeguard national patrimony, and explore the impact looted and forged artifacts have on how museums and institutions collect and ultimately represent the Caribbean past to their audiences. Overall, the volume emphasizes the continued desire for the “authentic” Precolumbian artifact, no matter the cost. It provides insights for archaeologists, museum professionals, art historians, and collectors to combat illegal trade and support communities in creating sustainable heritage industries.

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Reality Bites

Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in U.S. Political Culture

Dana L. Cloud

The Ohio State University Press, 2018

Fake news, alternative facts, post truth—terms all too familiar to anyone in U.S. political culture and concepts at the core of Dana L. Cloud’s new book, Reality Bites, which explores truth claims in contemporary political rhetoric in the face of widespread skepticism regarding the utility, ethics, and viability of an empirical standard for political truths. Cloud observes how appeals to truth often assume—mistakenly—that it is a matter of simple representation of facts. However, since neither fact-checking nor “truthiness” can respond meaningfully to this problem, she argues for a rhetorical realism—the idea that communicators can bring knowledge from particular perspectives and experiences into the domain of common sense. Through a series of case studies—including the PolitiFact fact-checking project, the Planned Parenthood “selling baby parts” scandal, the Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden cases, Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos, the rhetoric of Thomas Paine and the American Revolution, and the Black Lives Matter movement—Cloud advocates for the usefulness of narrative, myth, embodiment, affect, and spectacle in creating accountability in contemporary U.S. political rhetoric. If dominant reality “bites”—in being oppressive and exploitative—it is time, Cloud argues, for those in the reality-based community to “bite back.”

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Reality Gendervision

Sexuality and Gender on Transatlantic Reality Television

Brenda R. Weber, ed.

Duke University Press, 2014

This essay collection focuses on the gendered dimensions of reality television in both the United States and Great Britain. Through close readings of a wide range of reality programming, from Finding Sarah and Sister Wives to Ghost Adventures and Deadliest Warrior, the contributors think through questions of femininity and masculinity, as they relate to the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality. They connect the genre's combination of real people and surreal experiences, of authenticity and artifice, to the production of identity and norms of citizenship, the commodification of selfhood, and the naturalization of regimes of power. Whether assessing the Kardashian family brand, portrayals of hoarders, or big-family programs such as 19 Kids and Counting, the contributors analyze reality television as a relevant site for the production and performance of gender. In the process, they illuminate the larger neoliberal and postfeminist contexts in which reality TV is produced, promoted, watched, and experienced.

Contributors. David Greven, Dana Heller, Su Holmes, Deborah Jermyn, Misha Kavka, Amanda Ann Klein, Susan Lepselter, Diane Negra, Laurie Ouellette, Gareth Palmer, Kirsten Pike, Maria Pramaggiore, Kimberly Springer, Rebecca Stephens, Lindsay Steenberg, Brenda R. Weber

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Realizing the Dream of R. A. Kartini

Her Sisters’ Letters from Colonial Java

Joost J. Coté

Ohio University Press, 2008

Realizing the Dream of R. A. Kartini: Her Sisters’ Letters from Colonial Java presents a unique collection of documents reflecting the lives, attitudes, and politics of four Javanese women in the early twentieth century. Joost J. Coté translates the correspondence between Raden Ajeng Kartini, Indonesia’s first feminist, and her sisters, revealing for the first time her sisters’ contributions in defining and carrying out her ideals. With this collection, Coté aims to situate Kartini’s sisters within the more famous Kartini narrative–and indirectly to situate Kartini herself within a broader narrative.

The letters reveal the emotional lives of these modern women and their concerns for the welfare of their husbands and the success of their children in rapidly changing times. While by no means radical nationalists, and not yet extending their horizons to the possibility of an Indonesian nation, these members of a new middle class nevertheless confidently express their belief in their own national identity.

Realizing the Dream of R. A. Kartini is essential reading for scholars of Indonesian history, providing documentary evidence of the culture of modern, urban Java in the late colonial era and an insight into the ferment of the Indonesian nationalist movement in which these women and their husbands played representative roles.

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Really Fake

Alexandra Juhasz

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

More important than flagging things “really fake” is to understand why they are dismissed as fake

The new truth is the one that circulates: digital truth emerges from lists, databases, archives, and conditions of storage. Multiple truths may be activated through search, link, and retrieve queries. Alexandra Juhasz, Ganaele Langlois, and Nishant Shah respond by taking up story, poetry, and other human logics of care, intelligence, and dignity to explore sociotechnological and politico-aesthetic emergences in a world where information overload has become a new ontology of not-knowing. Their feminist digital methods allow considerations of internet things through alternative networked internet time: slowing down to see, honor, and engage with our past; invoking indeterminacy as a human capacity that lets multiple truths commingle on a page or in a body; and saving the truths of ourselves and our others differently from the corporate internet’s perpetual viral movement.

Writing across their own shared truisms, actors, and touchstones, the authors propose creative tactics, theoretical overtures, and experimental escape routes built to a human scale as ways to regain our capacities to know and tell truths about ourselves.

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Reason's Muse

Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy

Geneviève Fraisse

University of Chicago Press, 1994

The French Revolution proclaimed the equality of all human beings, yet women remained less than equal in the new society. The exclusion of women at the birth of modern democracy required considerable justification, and by tracing the course of this reasoning through early nineteenth-century texts, Genevieve Fraisse maps a moment of crisis in the history of sexual difference.

Through an analysis of literary, religious, legal, philosophical, and medical texts, Fraisse links a range of positions on women's proper role in society to specific historical and rhetorical circumstances. She shows how the Revolution marked a sharp break in the way women were represented in language, as traditional bantering about the "war of the sexes" gave way to serious discussions of the political and social meanings of sexual difference. Following this discussion on three different planes—the economical, the political, and the biological—Fraisse looks at the exclusion of women against the backdrop of democracy's inevitable lie: the affirmation of an equality so abstract it was impossible to concretely apply.

This study of the place of sexual equality in the founding moment of democracy offers insight into a persistent question: whether female emancipation is to be found through the achievement of equality with men or in the celebration of female difference.

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Reasons of Conscience

The Bioethics Debate in Germany

Stefan Sperling

University of Chicago Press, 2013

The implicit questions that inevitably underlie German bioethics are the same ones that have pervaded all of German public life for decades: How could the Holocaust have happened? And how can Germans make sure that it will never happen again? In Reasons of Conscience, Stefan Sperling considers the bioethical debates surrounding embryonic stem cell research in Germany at the turn of the twenty-first century, highlighting how the country’s ongoing struggle to come to terms with its past informs the decisions it makes today.

Sperling brings the reader unmatched access to the offices of the German parliament to convey the role that morality and ethics play in contemporary Germany. He describes the separate and interactive workings of the two bodies assigned to shape German bioethics—the parliamentary Enquiry Commission on Law and Ethics in Modern Medicine and the executive branch’s National Ethics Council—tracing each institution’s genesis, projected image, and operations, and revealing that the content of bioethics cannot be separated from the workings of these institutions. Sperling then focuses his discussion around three core categories—transparency, conscience, and Germany itself—arguing that without fully considering these, we fail to understand German bioethics. He concludes with an assessment of German legislators and regulators’ attempts to incorporate criteria of ethical research into the German Stem Cell Law.

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Reassembling the UAW

Insurgency, Contention, and the Struggle for Unionism in the American South

Abe Walker

Temple University Press, 2026

When Volkswagen’s Chattanooga Assembly Plant opened in 2012, the United Auto Workers were excited by the golden opportunity to organize in the anti-union South, where their efforts had been routinely thwarted. However, it took ten years and several attempts before the UAW was successful in unionizing the plant. Reassembling the UAW explains why.

Abe Walker chronicles the organizing campaign from its origin in 2014 to the union’s breakthrough victory in 2024, illustrating what went wrong—and what went right—along the way. Walker provides a systematic analysis of the strategic challenges and tactical shifts, showing the patterns that persisted across three election cycles while highlighting their differences, from global-level alliances to local labor issues.

Reassembling the UAW also demonstrates how rebel rank-and-file workers ousted the old-guard leadership and transformed the UAW into a militant union to achieve results. Ultimately, Walker offers valuable lessons for organizational strategy, the power of collective action, and the future of the labor movement.

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Reassessing Communism

Concepts, Culture, and Society in Poland 1944–1989

Instytutem Badan Literackich PAN Chmielewska

Central European University Press, 2021

The thirteen authors of this collective work undertook to articulate matter-of-fact critiques of the dominant narrative about communism in Poland while offering new analyses of the concept, and also examining the manifestations of anticommunism. Approaching communist ideas and practices, programs and their implementations, as an inseparable whole, they examine the issues of emancipation, upward social mobility, and changes in the cultural canon.

The authors refuse to treat communism in Poland in simplistic categories of totalitarianism, absolute evil and Soviet colonization, and similarly refuse to equate communism and fascism. Nor do they adopt the neoliberal view of communism as a project doomed to failure. While wholly exempt from nostalgia, these essays show that beyond oppression and bad governance, communism was also a regime in which people pursued a variety of goals and sincerely attempted to build a better world for themselves.

The book is interdisciplinary and applies the tools of social history, intellectual history, political philosophy, anthropology, literature, cultural studies, and gender studies to provide a nuanced view of the communist regimes in east-central Europe.

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Reassessing the Aztatlán World

Ethnogenesis and Cultural Continuity in Northwest Mesoamerica

Edited by Michael D. Mathiowetz and John M. D. Pohl

University of Utah Press, 2024

The Aztatlán tradition of northwest Mesoamerica (AD 850/900–1350+) is one of the most understudied and enigmatic cultural developments in the Americas. This volume presents a spectrum of interdisciplinary research into Aztatlán societies, combining innovative archaeological methods with historical and ethnographic investigations. The results offer significant revelations about west Mexico’s critical role in over a millennium of cultural interaction between Indigenous societies in northwest and northeast Mexico, the Greater U.S. Southwest, Mesoamerica, lower Central America, and beyond.

Volume contributors show how those responsible for the Aztatlán tradition were direct ancestors of diverse Indigenous peoples such as the Náayeri (Cora), Wixárika (Huichol), O’dam (Tepehuan), Caz’ Ahmo (Caxcan), Yoeme (Yaqui), Yoreme (Mayo), and others who continue to reside across the former Aztatlán region and its frontiers. The prosperity of the Aztatlán tradition was achieved through long-distance networks that fostered the development of new ritual economies and integrated peoples in Greater Mesoamerica with those in the U.S. Southwest/Mexican Northwest.

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Reattachment Theory

Queer Cinema of Remarriage

Lee Wallace

Duke University Press, 2020

In Reattachment Theory Lee Wallace argues that homosexuality—far from being the threat to “traditional” marriage that same-sex marriage opponents have asserted—is so integral to its reimagining that all marriage is gay marriage. Drawing on the history of marriage, Stanley Cavell's analysis of Hollywood comedies of remarriage, and readings of recent gay and lesbian films, Wallace shows that queer experiments in domesticity have reshaped the affective and erotic horizons of heterosexual marriage and its defining principles: fidelity, exclusivity, and endurance. Wallace analyzes a series of films—Dorothy Arzner's Craig's Wife (1936); Tom Ford's A Single Man (2009); Lisa Cholodenko's High Art (1998), Laurel Canyon (2002), and The Kids Are All Right (2010); and Andrew Haigh's Weekend (2011) and 45 Years (2015)—that, she contends, do not simply reflect social and legal changes; they fundamentally alter our sense of what sexual attachment involves as both a social and a romantic form.

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Rebel Imaginaries

Labor, Culture, and Politics in Depression-Era California

Elizabeth E. Sine

Duke University Press, 2021

During the Great Depression, California became a wellspring for some of the era's most inventive and imaginative political movements. In response to the global catastrophe, the multiracial laboring populations who formed the basis of California's economy gave rise to an oppositional culture that challenged the modes of racialism, nationalism, and rationalism that had guided modernization during preceding decades. In Rebel Imaginaries Elizabeth E. Sine tells the story of that oppositional culture's emergence, revealing how aggrieved Californians asserted political visions that embraced difference, fostered a sense of shared vulnerability, and underscored the interconnectedness and interdependence of global struggles for human dignity. From the Imperial Valley's agricultural fields to Hollywood, seemingly disparate communities of African American, Native American, Mexican, Filipinx, Asian, and White working-class people were linked by their myriad struggles against Depression-era capitalism and patterns of inequality and marginalization. In tracing the diverse coalition of those involved in labor strikes, citizenship and immigration reform, and articulating and imagining freedom through artistic practice, Sine demonstrates that the era's social movements were far more heterogeneous, multivalent, and contested than previously understood.

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Rebel Women

Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel

Jane Eldridge Miller

University of Chicago Press, 1996

With the rise of women's suffrage, challenges to marriage and divorce laws, and expanding opportunities for education and employment for women, the early years of the twentieth century were a time of social revolution. Examining British novels written in 1890-1914, Jane Eldridge Miller demonstrates how these social, legal, and economic changes rendered the traditional narratives of romantic desire and marital closure inadequate, forcing Edwardian novelists to counter the limitations and ideological implications of those narratives with innovative strategies. The original and provocative novels that resulted depict the experiences of modern women with unprecedented variety, specificity, and frankness. Rebel Women is a major re-evaluation of Edwardian fiction and a significant contribution to literary history and criticism.

"Miller's is the best account we have, not only of Edwardian women novelists, but of early 20th-century women novelists; the measure of her achievement is that the distinction no longer seems workable." —David Trotter, The London Review of Books

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Rebellion or Revolution?

Harold Cruse

University of Minnesota Press, 2009

A classic work of African American cultural, social, and political thought by a forerunner of the Black Power movement

One of the leading writers of African American intellectual life in the second half of the twentieth century, Harold Cruse first came to international attention in 1967 with the publication of his influential and inflammatory book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. This fiercely opinionated and deeply informed critique of both integrationism and black nationalism established Cruse as a bold new voice on race and resistance in America.

First published in the wake of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual’s success, Rebellion or Revolution? collects reviews and essays Cruse wrote between 1950 and 1966, examining the relevance of such figures as James Baldwin, Booker T. Washington, Albert Camus, and Josephine Baker, as well as such subjects as Marxism and the African American community, the economics of black nationalism, and the emerging Black Power movement. Rebellion or Revolution? contains a number of significant writings not available elsewhere.Now, with a new foreword by Cedric Johnson, this work finally emerges as both an essential document from a crucial moment in African American history and a road map to the origins and evolution of Cruse’s critical thought, asserting its importance in today’s debates on race in America.

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Rebels and Runaways

Slave Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Florida

Larry Eugene Rivers

University of Illinois Press, 2013

This gripping study examines slave resistance and protest in antebellum Florida and its local and national impact from 1821 to 1865. Using a variety of sources such as slaveholders' wills and probate records, ledgers, account books, court records, oral histories, and numerous newspaper accounts, Larry Eugene Rivers discusses the historical significance of Florida as a runaway slave haven dating back to the seventeenth century and explains Florida's unique history of slave resistance and protest. In moving detail, Rivers illustrates what life was like for enslaved blacks whose families were pulled asunder as they relocated from the Upper South to the Lower South to an untamed place such as Florida, and how they fought back any way they could to control small parts of their own lives.

Against a smoldering backdrop of violence, this study analyzes the various degrees of slave resistance--from the perspectives of both slave and master--and how they differed in various regions of antebellum Florida. In particular, Rivers demonstrates how the Atlantic world view of some enslaved blacks successfully aided their escape to freedom, a path that did not always lead North but sometimes farther South to the Bahama Islands and Caribbean. Identifying more commonly known slave rebellions such as the Stono, Louisiana, Denmark (Telemaque) Vesey, Gabriel, and the Nat Turner insurrections, Rivers argues persuasively that the size, scope, and intensity of black resistance in the Second Seminole War makes it the largest sustained slave insurrection ever to occur in American history.

Meticulously researched, Rebels and Runaways offers a detailed account of resistance, protest, and violence as enslaved blacks fought for freedom.

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Rebels in Law

Voices in History of Black Women Lawyers

J. Clay Smith, Jr., Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2000

Black women lawyers are not new to the practice of law or to leadership in the fight for justice and quality. Black women formally entered the practice of American law in 1872, the year that Charlotte E. Ray became the first black woman to graduate from an American law school. Rebels in Lawintroduces some of these women and through their own writing tells a compelling story about the little-known involvement of black women in law and politics. Beginning with a short essay written in 1897, the writing collected by J. Clay Smith, Jr., tells us how black women came to the practice of law, the challenges they faced as women and as blacks in making a place for themselves in the legal profession, their fight to become legal educators, and their efforts to encourage other black women and black men to come to the practice of law.
The essays demonstrate the involvement of black women lawyers in important public issues of our time and show them addressing the sensitive subjects of race, equality, justice and freedom. Drawing together many writings that have never been published or have been published in obscure journals or newspapers, Rebels in Law is a groundbreaking study. In addition, it offers historical background information on each writer and on the history of black women lawyers. Providing an opportunity to study the origins of black women as professionals, community leaders, wives, mothers, and feminists, it will be of interest to scholars in the fields of law, history, political science, sociology, black studies and women's studies.
J. Clay Smith, Jr., is Professor of Law, Howard University Law School. He was formerly a member of the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Dean of Howard University Law School, and President of the Washington Bar Association. He is the author of Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844-1944 and numerous articles.

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Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones

Queering Space in the Stonewall South

Sears, James T.

Rutgers University Press, 2001

While Scarlett O'Hara may resemble a drag queen, and Mardi Gras inspires more camp than a gay pride parade, the American South also boasts a rich, authentic and transgressive gay and lesbian history. In this chatty, free-ranging cultural survey, Sears (Growing Up Gay in the South) presents a vivid kaleidoscope of the mores and political activities of many gay Southerners following the 1969 Stonewall riots and leading up to the 1979 march on Washington. Sears unspools this history through portraits of activists and community organizers including Merril Mushroom, Jack Nichols, Lige Clark, Vicki Gabriner, Minnie Bruce Pratt and Sgt. Leonard Matlovitch who helped shape the social and political climate below the Mason Dixon line and often in the rest of the country. While giving a nod to historic events like Anita Bryant's Save Our Children campaign, Sears focuses more closely on obscure but important local political events, like the founding of the lesbian journal Sinister Wisdom, the emergence of the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance and community response to a deadly firebombing that killed 31 patrons in a New Orleans bar in the mid-1970s. Sears's multifaceted approach pays off when he sketches such relatively unknown players as comedian Ray Bourbon and radical fairy Faygele ben Miriam, and he conveys well the complexity and intensity of the political activity of the decade. While not as historically conclusive or theoretically astute as John Howard's masterful Men Like That (2000), Sears provides a panoply of emotionally riveting snapshots that aptly portray Southern gay experience in the 1970s. B&w photos.

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Rebels

Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity

Leerom Medovoi

Duke University Press, 2005

Holden Caulfield, the beat writers, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and James Dean—these and other avatars of youthful rebellion were much more than entertainment. As Leerom Medovoi shows, they were often embraced and hotly debated at the dawn of the Cold War era because they stood for dissent and defiance at a time when the ideological production of the United States as leader of the “free world” required emancipatory figures who could represent America’s geopolitical claims. Medovoi argues that the “bad boy” became a guarantor of the country’s anti-authoritarian, democratic self-image: a kindred spirit to the freedom-seeking nations of the rapidly decolonizing third world and a counterpoint to the repressive conformity attributed to both the Soviet Union abroad and America’s burgeoning suburbs at home.

Alongside the young rebel, the contemporary concept of identity emerged in the 1950s. It was in that decade that “identity” was first used to define collective selves in the politicized manner that is recognizable today: in terms such as “national identity” and “racial identity.” Medovoi traces the rapid absorption of identity themes across many facets of postwar American culture, including beat literature, the young adult novel, the Hollywood teen film, early rock ‘n’ roll, black drama, and “bad girl” narratives. He demonstrates that youth culture especially began to exhibit telltale motifs of teen, racial, sexual, gender, and generational revolt that would burst into political prominence during the ensuing decades, bequeathing to the progressive wing of contemporary American political culture a potent but ambiguous legacy of identity politics.

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Rebirth of the Clinic

Places and Agents in Contemporary Health Care

Cindy Patton

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

From physical location to payment processes to expectations of both patients and caregivers, nearly everything surrounding the contemporary medical clinic's central activity has changed since Michel Foucualt's Birth of the Clinic. Indebted to that work, but recognizing the gap between what the modern clinic hoped to be and what it has become, Rebirth of the Clinic explores medical practices that shed light on the fraught relationship between medical systems, practitioners, and patients.

Combining theory, history, and ethnography, the contributors to this volume ground today's clinic in a larger scheme of power relations, identifying the cultural, political, and economic pressures that frame clinical relationships, including the instrumentalist definition of health, actuarial-based medical practices, and patient self-help movements, which simultaneously hem in and create the conditions under which agents creatively change ideas of illness and treatment.

From threatened community health centers in poor African American locales to innovative nursing practices among the marginally housed citizens of Canada's poorest urban neighborhood, this volume addresses not just the who, what, where, and how of place-specific clinical practices, but also sets these local experiences against a theoretical backdrop that links them to the power of modern medicine in shaping fundamental life experiences.

Contributors: Christine Ceci, U of Alberta; Lisa Diedrich, Stony Brook U; Suzanne Fraser, Monash U; John Liesch, Simon Fraser U; Jenna Loyd, CUNY; Annemarie Mol, U of Amsterdam; Mary Ellen Purkis, U of Victoria.

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Rebuilding Community after Katrina

Transformative Education in the New Orleans Planning Initiative

Ken Reardon

Temple University Press, 2015

Rebuilding Community after Katrina chronicles the innovative and ambitious partnership between Cornell University’s City and Regional Planning department and ACORN Housing, an affiliate of what was the nation’s largest low-income community organization. These unlikely allies came together to begin to rebuild devastated neighborhoods in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

The editors and contributors to this volume allow participants’ voices to show how this partnership integrated careful, technical analysis with aggressive community outreach and organizing. With essays by activists, organizers, community members, and academics on the ground, Rebuilding Community after Katrina presents insights on the challenges involved in changing the way politicians and analysts imagined the future of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward.

What emerges from this complex drama are lessons about community planning, organizational relationships, and team building across multi-cultural lines. The accounts presented in Rebuilding Community after Katrina raise important and sensitive questions about the appropriate roles of outsiders in community-based planning processes.

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Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany

Jay Howard Geller

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Seventy-five years after the Holocaust, 100,000 Jews live in Germany. Their community is diverse and vibrant, and their mere presence in Germany is symbolically important. In Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany, scholars of German-Jewish history, literature, film, television, and sociology illuminate important aspects of Jewish life in Germany from 1949 to the present day. In West Germany, the development of representative bodies and research institutions reflected a desire to set down roots, despite criticism from Jewish leaders in Israel and the Diaspora. In communist East Germany, some leftist Jewish intellectuals played a prominent role in society, and their experience reflected the regime’s fraught relationship with Jewry. Since 1990, the growth of the Jewish community through immigration from the former Soviet Union and Israel have both brought heightened visibility in society and challenged preexisting notions of Jewish identity in the former “land of the perpetrators.”

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Rebuilding Native Nations

Strategies for Governance and Development

Edited by Miriam Jorgensen; Foreword by Oren Lyons; Afterword by Satsan (Herb George)

University of Arizona Press, 2007

A revolution is underway among the Indigenous nations of North America. It is a quiet revolution, largely unnoticed in society at large. But it is profoundly important. From High Plains states and Prairie Provinces to southwestern deserts, from Mississippi and Oklahoma to the northwest coast of the continent, Native peoples are reclaiming their right to govern themselves and to shape their future in their own ways. Challenging more than a century of colonial controls, they are addressing severe social problems, building sustainable economies, and reinvigorating Indigenous cultures. In effect, they are rebuilding their nations according to their own diverse and often innovative designs.

Produced by the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy at the University of Arizona and the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, this book traces the contours of that revolution as Native nations turn the dream of self-determination into a practical reality. Part report, part analysis, part how-to manual for Native leaders, it discusses strategies for governance and community and economic development being employed by American Indian nations and First Nations in Canada as they move to assert greater control over their own affairs.

Rebuilding Native Nations provides guidelines for creating new governance structures, rewriting constitutions, building justice systems, launching nation-owned enterprises, encouraging citizen entrepreneurs, developing new relationships with non-Native governments, and confronting the crippling legacies of colonialism. For nations that wish to join that revolution or for those who simply want to understand the transformation now underway across Indigenous North America, this book is a critical resource.

CONTENTS
Foreword by Oren Lyons
Editor's Introduction

Part 1
Starting Points

1. Two Approaches to the Development of Native Nations: One Works, the Other Doesn't
Stephen Cornell and Joseph P. Kalt
2. Development, Governance, Culture: What Are They and What Do They Have to Do with Rebuilding Native Nations?
Manley A. Begay, Jr., Stephen Cornell, Miriam Jorgensen, and Joseph P. Kalt

Part 2
Rebuilding the Foundations

3. Remaking the Tools of Governance: Colonial Legacies, Indigenous Solutions
Stephen Cornell
4. The Role of Constitutions in Native Nation Building: Laying a Firm Foundation
Joseph P. Kalt
5 . Native Nation Courts: Key Players in Nation Rebuilding
Joseph Thomas Flies-Away, Carrie Garrow, and Miriam Jorgensen
6. Getting Things Done for the Nation: The Challenge of Tribal Administration
Stephen Cornell and Miriam Jorgensen

Part 3
Reconceiving Key Functions

7. Managing the Boundary between Business and Politics: Strategies for Improving the Chances for Success in Tribally Owned Enterprises
Kenneth Grant and Jonathan Taylor
8. Citizen Entrepreneurship: An Underutilized Development Resource
Stephen Cornell, Miriam Jorgensen, Ian Wilson Record, and Joan Timeche
9. Governmental Services and Programs: Meeting Citizens' Needs
Alyce S. Adams, Andrew J. Lee, and Michael Lipsky
10. Intergovernmental Relationships: Expressions of Tribal Sovereignty
Sarah L. Hicks

Part 4
Making It Happen

11. Rebuilding Native Nations: What Do Leaders Do?
Manley A. Begay, Jr., Stephen Cornell, Miriam Jorgensen, and Nathan Pryor
12. Seizing the Future: Why Some Native Nations Do and Others Don't
Stephen Cornell, Miriam Jorgensen, Joseph P. Kalt, and Katherine Spilde Contreras

Afterword by Satsan (Herb George)
References
About the Contributors
Index

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Rebuilding Story Worlds

The Obscure Cities by Schuiten and Peeters

Jan Baetens

Rutgers University Press, 2020

A collaboration between Belgian artist François Schuiten and French writer Benoît Peeters, The Obscure Cities is one of the few comics series to achieve massive popularity while remaining highly experimental in form and content. Set in a parallel world, full of architecturally distinctive city-states, The Obscure Cities also represents one of the most impressive pieces of world-building in any form of literature.

Rebuilding Story Worlds offers the first full-length study of this seminal series, exploring both the artistic traditions from which it emerges and the innovative ways it plays with genre, gender, and urban space. Comics scholar Jan Baetens examines how Schuiten’s work as an architectural designer informs the series’ concerns with the preservation of historic buildings. He also includes an original interview with Peeters, which reveals how poststructuralist critical theory influenced their construction of a rhizomatic fictional world, one which has made space for fan contributions through the Alta Plana website.

Synthesizing cutting-edge approaches from both literary and visual studies, Rebuilding Story Worlds will give readers a new appreciation for both the aesthetic ingenuity of The Obscure Cities and its nuanced conception of politics.

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Rebuilding the News

Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age

C. W. Anderson

Temple University Press, 2013

Breaking down the walls of the traditional newsroom, Rebuilding the News traces the evolution of news reporting as it moves from print to online. As the business models of newspapers have collapsed, author C. W. Anderson chronicles how bloggers, citizen journalists, and social networks are implicated in the massive changes confronting journalism.

Through a combination of local newsroom fieldwork, social-network analysis, and online archival research, Rebuilding the News places the current shifts in news production in socio-historical context. Focusing on the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, Anderson presents a gripping case study of how these papers have struggled to adapt to emerging economic, social, and technological realities.

As he explores the organizational, networked culture of journalism, Anderson lays bare questions about the future of news-oriented media and its evolving relationship with “the public” in the digital age.

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Recasting Commodity and Spectacle in the Indigenous Americas

Edited by Helen Gilbert and Charlotte Gleghorn

University of London Press, 2014

Indigenous artists frequently voice concerns over the commodification of their cultures, a process acutely felt by those living with the consequences of colonialism. This timely book, which features color illustrations throughout, examines the ways in which contemporary indigenous peoples in different parts of the Americas have harnessed performance practices to resist imposed stereotypes and shape their own complex identities. Essays by leading academics and practitioners show the vibrancy of a wide array of indigenous arts and cultural events in the United States, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Canada, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Belize. As well as analyzing performance idioms, the authors trace the circulation of creative products and practices as commodities, as cultural capital, and/or as heritage. Making reference to aesthetic forms, intellectual property, and political empowerment, these essays weigh the impact of music, festivities, film, photography, theater, and museum installations among diverse audiences and discuss ways in which spectacles of cultural difference are remodeled in the hands of indigenous practitioners.

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Recasting Folk in the Himalayas

Indian Music, Media, and Social Mobility

Stefan Fiol

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Colonialist, nationalist, and regionalist ideologies have profoundly influenced folk music and related musical practices among the Garhwali and Kumaoni of Uttarakhand. Stefan Fiol blends historical and ethnographic approaches to unlock these influences and explore a paradox: how the œfolk designation can alternately identify a universal stage of humanity, or denote alterity and subordination. Fiol explores the lives and work of Gahrwali artists who produce folk music. These musicians create art as both a discursive idea and as a set of expressive practices across strikingly different historical and cultural settings. Juxtaposing performance contexts in Himalayan villages with Delhi recording studios, Fiol shows how the practices have emerged within and between sites of contrasting values and expectations. Throughout, Fiol presents the varying perspectives and complex lives of the upper-caste, upper-class, male performers spearheading the processes of folklorization. But he also charts their resonance with, and collision against, the perspectives of the women and hereditary musicians most affected by the processes. Expertly observed, Recasting Folk in the Himalayas offers an engaging immersion in a little-studied musical milieu.

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Recasting Race after World War II

Germans and African Americans in American-Occupied Germany

Timothy L. Schroer

University Press of Colorado, 2007

Historian Timothy L. Schroer's Recasting Race after World War II explores the renegotiation of race by Germans and African American GIs in post-World War II Germany. Schroer dissects the ways in which notions of blackness and whiteness became especially problematic in interactions between Germans and American soldiers serving as part of the victorious occupying army at the end of the war.

The segregation of U.S. Army forces fed a growing debate in America about whether a Jim Crow army could truly be a democratizing force in postwar Germany. Schroer follows the evolution of that debate and examines the ways in which postwar conditions necessitated reexamination of race relations. He reveals how anxiety about interracial relationships between African American men and German women united white American soldiers and the German populace. He also traces the importation and influence of African American jazz music in Germany, illuminating the subtle ways in which occupied Germany represented a crucible in which to recast the meaning of race in a post-Holocaust world.

Recasting Race after World War II will appeal to historians and scholars of American, African American, and German studies.

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Receiving States

Refugee Policy in Central America During the Salvadoran Civil War

Rachael De La Cruz

University of Wisconsin Press, 2026

Between the outbreak of civil war in El Salvador in 1979 and its conclusion in 1992, some 1.5 million Salvadorans fled the violence. This book focuses on the displaced Salvadorans who remained in Central America, seeking refuge in Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. Their story has been almost entirely overshadowed by the greater numbers who fled farther north to the United States; however, as Rachael De La Cruz shows, the Central American history of Salvadoran refugees is rich, complex, and instructive for scholars of refugee studies, international relations, and human rights.

The isthmus nations that received Salvadoran refugees did not react consistently, and the arriving Salvadorans themselves were not passive participants. National mythologies, perceptions of economic contributions and burdens, regional militarization, state violence, and varying capacities for refugee activism, compounded by the fraught and variable circumstances of the Cold War, together shaped the multitude of government attitudes and policies toward the refugee communities within these countries’ borders. Rarely were refugees simply “a problem to solve”; rather, they represented and acted as catalysts for economic, social, and geopolitical change.

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