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496 books match the query 'Ethnic identity' and 22 start with s

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Savages and Citizens

Andrew Canessa and Manuela Lavinas Picq; Foreword by Jeff Ganohalidoh Corntassel

University of Arizona Press, 2024

Although Indigenous peoples are often perceived as standing outside political modernity, Savages and Citizens takes the provocative view that Indigenous people have been fundamental to how contemporary state sovereignty was imagined, theorized, and practiced.

Delving into European political philosophy, comparative politics, and contemporary international law, the book shows how the concept of indigeneity has shaped the development of the modern state. The exclusion of Indigenous people was not a collateral byproduct; it was a political project in its own right. The book argues that indigeneity is a political identity relational to modern nation-states and that Indigenous politics, although marking the boundary of the state, are co-constitutive of colonial processes of state-making. In showing how indigeneity is central to how the international system of states operates, the book forefronts Indigenous peoples as political actors to reject essentializing views that reduce them to cultural “survivors” rooted in the past.

With insights drawn from diverse global contexts and empirical research from Bolivia and Ecuador, this work advocates for the relevance of Indigenous studies within political science and argues for an ethnography of sovereignty in anthropology. Savages and Citizens makes a compelling case for the centrality of Indigenous perspectives to understand the modern state from political theory to international studies.

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Seeing and Being Seen

The Q'eqchi' Maya of Livingston, Guatemala, and Beyond

By Hilary E. Kahn

University of Texas Press, 2006

The practice of morality and the formation of identity among an indigenous Latin American culture are framed in a pioneering ethnography of sight that attempts to reverse the trend of anthropological fieldwork and theory overshadowing one another.

In this vital and richly detailed work, methodology and theory are treated as complementary partners as the author explores the dynamic Mayan customs of the Q'eqchi' people living in the cultural crossroads of Livingston, Guatemala. Here, Q'eqchi', Ladino, and Garifuna (Caribbean-coast Afro-Indians) societies interact among themselves and with others ranging from government officials to capitalists to contemporary tourists.

The fieldwork explores the politics of sight and incorporates a video camera operated by multiple people—the author and the Q'eqchi' people themselves—to watch unobtrusively the traditions, rituals, and everyday actions that exemplify the long-standing moral concepts guiding the Q'eqchi' in their relationships and tribulations. Sharing the camera lens, as well as the lens of ethnographic authority, allows the author to slip into the world of the Q'eqchi' and capture their moral, social, political, economic, and spiritual constructs shaped by history, ancestry, external forces, and time itself.

A comprehensive history of the Q'eqchi' illustrates how these former plantation laborers migrated to lands far from their Mayan ancestral homes to co-exist as one of several competing cultures, and what impact this had on maintaining continuity in their identities, moral codes of conduct, and perception of the changing outside world.

With the innovative use of visual methods and theories, the author's reflexive, sensory-oriented ethnographic approach makes this a study that itself becomes a reflection of the complex set of social structures embodied in its subject.

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Selenidad

Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory

Deborah Paredez

Duke University Press, 2009

An outpouring of memorial tributes and public expressions of grief followed the death of the Tejana recording artist Selena Quintanilla Pérez in 1995. The Latina superstar was remembered and mourned in documentaries, magazines, websites, monuments, biographies, murals, look-alike contests, musicals, drag shows, and more. Deborah Paredez explores the significance and broader meanings of this posthumous celebration of Selena, which she labels “Selenidad.” She considers the performer’s career and emergence as an icon within the political and cultural transformations in the United States during the 1990s, a decade that witnessed a “Latin explosion” in culture and commerce alongside a resurgence of anti-immigrant discourse and policy.

Paredez argues that Selena’s death galvanized Latina/o efforts to publicly mourn collective tragedies (such as the murders of young women along the U.S.-Mexico border) and to envision a brighter future. At the same time, reactions to the star’s death catalyzed political jockeying for the Latino vote and corporate attempts to corner the Latino market. Foregrounding the role of performance in the politics of remembering, Paredez unravels the cultural, political, and economic dynamics at work in specific commemorations of Selena. She analyzes Selena’s final concert, the controversy surrounding the memorial erected in the star’s hometown of Corpus Christi, and the political climate that served as the backdrop to the touring musicals Selena Forever and Selena: A Musical Celebration of Life. Paredez considers what “becoming” Selena meant to the young Latinas who auditioned for the biopic Selena, released in 1997, and she surveys a range of Latina/o queer engagements with Selena, including Latina lesbian readings of the star’s death scene and queer Selena drag. Selenidad is a provocative exploration of how commemorations of Selena reflected and changed Latinidad.

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Semiotics of Peasants in Transition

Slovene Villagers and Their Ethnic Relatives in America

Irene Portis-Winner

Duke University Press, 2002

In Semiotics of Peasants in Transition Irene Portis-Winner examines the complexities of ethnic identity in a traditional Slovene village with unique ties to an American city. At once an investigation into a particular anthropological situation and a theoretical exploration of the semiotics of ethnic culture—in this case a culture permeated by transnational influences—Semiotics of Peasants in Transition describes the complex relationships that have existed between and among the villagers remaining in Slovenia and those who, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emigrated to Cleveland, Ohio.
Describing a process of continuous and enduring interaction between these geographically separate communities, Portis-Winner explains how, for instance, financial assistance from the emigrants enabled their Slovenian hometown to survive the economic depressions of the 1890s and 1930s. She also analyzes the extent to which memories, rituals, myths, and traditional activities from Slovenia have sustained their Cleveland relatives. The result is a unique anthropological investigation into the signifying practices of a strongly cohesive—yet geographically split—ethnic group, as well as an illuminating application of semiotic analyses to communities and the complex problems they face.

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Settlement, Subsistence, and Change Among the Labrador Inuit

David Natcher

University of Manitoba Press, 2012

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Settler Militarism

World War II in Hawai'i and the Making of US Empire

Juliet Nebolon

Duke University Press, 2024

Under martial law during World War II, Hawaiʻi was located at the intersection of home front and war front. In Settler Militarism, Juliet Nebolon shows how settler colonialism and militarization simultaneously perpetuated, legitimated, and concealed one another in wartime Hawaiʻi for the purposes of empire building in Asia and the Pacific Islands. She demonstrates how settler militarism operated through a regime of racial liberal biopolitics that purported to protect all people in Hawaiʻi, even as it intensified the racial and colonial differentiation of Kanaka Maoli, Asian settlers, and white settlers. Nebolon identifies settler militarism’s inherent contradiction: It depends on life, labor, and land to reproduce itself, yet it avariciously consumes, via violent and extractive projects, those same lives and natural resources that it needs to subsist. From vaccination and blood bank programs to the administration of internment and prisoner-of-war camps, Nebolon reveals how settler militarism and racial liberal biopolitics operated together in the service of capitalism. Collectively, the social reproduction of these regimes created the conditions for the late-twentieth-century expansion of US military empire.

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Shade-Grown Slavery

The Lives of Slaves on Coffee Plantations in Cuba

William C. Van Norman

Vanderbilt University Press, 2013

Within the world of Cuban slave-holding plantations, all enslaved people had to negotiate a life defined by forces beyond their control, and indeed beyond the control of their masters. Slaves on coffee farms survived in ways that allowed them to marry, have children, and maintain and redefine cultural practices that they passed on to their children. Slaves were an important factor in creating a nascent Afro-Cuban culture and identity.

In this broad, interdisciplinary study, William Van Norman describes how each type of plantation and the amount of manual labor it required directly influenced the nature of slave life in that community. Slaves on coffee plantations lived in a unique context in comparison to that of their fellow slaves on sugar plantations, one that gave them greater flexibility in cultural and artistic creativity. To gain a deeper understanding of plantation slavery in Cuba, Van Norman explores what life and labor was like for coffee slaves and how it was different from what sugar slaves experienced. Shade-Grown Slavery reconstructs their world and in turn deconstructs the picture we now have of Cuba in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Ultimately, Shade-Grown Slavery reveals the lives of enslaved Africans on Cuban coffee plantations and shows how they were able to maintain and transform their cultural traditions in spite of slavery.

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Shaming into Brown

Somatic Transactions of Race in Latina/o Literature

Stephanie Fetta

The Ohio State University Press, 2018

Winner of the 2019 MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies

In Shaming into Brown: Somatic Transactions of Race in Latina/o Literature, Stephanie Fetta asserts that our bodies are fundamental to how we live and how we make meaning. Anchored by two psychoanalytic theories, bioenergetic analysis developed by Alexander Lowen and affect theory put forth by Silvan Tomkins, Fetta examines Latinx fiction to draw attention to the cultural role of the intelligent, emotional, and communicative body—the soma—in relation to shame. She argues that we bring the soma—the physical, emotive, and social register of our subjectivity—to the text as we do to our lives,proposing that the power of racialization operates at the level of somatic expression and reception through habituated, socially cued behaviors that are not readily subject to intentional control.

Fetta examines shame beyond individual experiences, looking at literary renderings of the cultural practice of racial shaming that are deeply embedded into our laws, hiring practices, marketing strategies, and more. Grounding her analysis in the works of Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, Shaming into Brown focuses on exposing the underpinnings of racialized shame and does so through analyzing “scenes of racialization” in prominent works by authors such as Junot Díaz, Sandra Cisneros, and Oscar Zeta Acosta.

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Shaping Society through Dance

Mestizo Ritual Performance in the Peruvian Andes

Zoila S. Mendoza

University of Chicago Press, 2000

During the patron saint fiesta in the Andean town of San Jerónimo, Peru, crowds gather at sunset in the town square, eagerly awaiting the entrance of the colorful dance troupes, or comparsas. With their masks, music, and surprising interpretations of contemporary events, the comparsas of the Cusco region are the focus of this multifaceted work. At the crossroads of folklore and ritual, mass media and local preferences, and regional and national identity, the comparsas—recorded here on VHS, DVD, and compact disc—have become a powerful way for the local people to make sense of their place in Peru and in the world. As Zoila Mendoza shows, they do more than reflect societal changes, they actively transform society.

In this fluid world, she argues, racial and ethnic identities are shaped more by notions of what is decent, elegant, and modern rather than by skin color or status. As the different troupes vie for the townspeople's recognition as the most "authentic" group, these notions are challenged and reworked. A fascinating look at a rich tradition, this innovative work is also a compelling example of the critical anthropology of performance.

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Shipwrecked Identities

Navigating Race on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast

Pineda, Baron

Rutgers University Press, 2006

Global identity politics rest heavily on notions of ethnicity and authenticity, especially in contexts where indigenous identity becomes a basis for claims of social and economic justice. In contemporary Latin America there is a resurgence of indigenous claims for cultural and political autonomy and for the benefits of economic development. Yet these identities have often been taken for granted.

In this historical ethnography, Baron Pineda traces the history of the port town of Bilwi, now known officially as Puerto Cabezas, on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua to explore the development, transformation, and function of racial categories in this region. From the English colonial period, through the Sandinista conflict of the 1980s, to the aftermath of the Contra War, Pineda shows how powerful outsiders, as well as Nicaraguans, have made efforts to influence notions about African and Black identity among the Miskito Indians, Afro-Nicaraguan Creoles, and Mestizos in the region. In the process, he provides insight into the causes and meaning of social movements and political turmoil. Shipwrecked Identities also includes important critical analysis of the role of anthropologists and other North American scholars in the Contra-Sandinista conflict, as well as the ways these scholars have defined ethnic identities in Latin America.

As the indigenous people of the Mosquito Coast continue to negotiate the effects of a long history of contested ethnic and racial identity, this book takes an important step in questioning the origins, legitimacy, and consequences of such claims.

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Singing for the Dead

The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico

Paja Faudree

Duke University Press, 2013

Singing for the Dead chronicles ethnic revival in Oaxaca, Mexico, where new forms of singing and writing in the local Mazatec indigenous language are producing powerful, transformative political effects. Paja Faudree argues for the inclusion of singing as a necessary component in the polarized debates about indigenous orality and literacy, and she considers how the coupling of literacy and song has allowed people from the region to create texts of enduring social resonance. She examines how local young people are learning to read and write in Mazatec as a result of the region's new Day of the Dead song contest. Faudree also studies how tourist interest in local psychedelic mushrooms has led to their commodification, producing both opportunities and challenges for songwriters and others who represent Mazatec culture. She situates these revival movements within the contexts of Mexico and Latin America, as well as the broad, hemisphere-wide movement to create indigenous literatures. Singing for the Dead provides a new way to think about the politics of ethnicity, the success of social movements, and the limits of national belonging.

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Skunk Hill

A Native Ceremonial Community in Wisconsin

Robert A. Birmingham

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2015

Rising above the countryside of Wood County, Wisconsin, Powers Bluff is a large outcrop of quartzite rock that resisted the glaciers that flattened the surrounding countryside. It is an appropriate symbol for the Native people who once lived on its slopes, quietly resisting social forces that would have crushed and eroded their culture. A large band of Potawatomi, many returnees from the Kansas Prairie Band Potawatomi reservation, established the village of Tah-qua-kik or Skunk Hill in 1905 on the 300-foot-high bluff, up against the oddly shaped rocks that topped the hill and protected the community from the cold winter winds.

In Skunk Hill, archeologist Robert A. Birmingham traces the largely unknown story of this community, detailing the role it played in preserving Native culture through a harsh period of US Indian policy from the 1880s to 1930s. The story’s central focus is the Drum Dance, also known as the Dream Dance or Big Drum, a pan-tribal cultural revitalization movement that swept the Upper Midwest during the Great Suppression, emphasizing Native values and rejecting the vices of the white world. Though the community disbanded by the 1930s, the site, now on the National Register of Historic
Places with two dance circles still visible on the grounds, stands as testimony to the efforts of its members to resist cultural assimilation.

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Sociolinguistic Constructs of Ethnic Identity

The Syntactic Delineation of an American Indian English, Volume 77

Clare J. Dannenberg, ed.

Duke University Press, 0

Sociolinguistic Constructs of Ethnic Identity examines ethnic language boundaries displayed in the various uses of the verb be in a multiethnic community in Robeson County, North Carolina. Clare J. Dannenberg demonstrates that ethnic identity is a dynamic process that shifts over time and social space. Ethnic groups that have been stripped of their ancestral source language, like the Lumbee Indians, may be quite resilient and able to carve out unique language varieties in their replacement language.

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Somos Tejanas!

Chicana Identity and Culture in Texas

Edited by Jody A. Marín and Norma E. Cantú

University of Texas Press, 2025

2026 Outstanding Book Award for Non-Fiction, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) Tejas Foco
2026 Silver Medal for the Dolores Huerta Best Cultural & Community Themed Book – English, Conference on Latin American History (CLAH)

An expansive volume on Tejana identity and Tejanidad told through personal narratives, poetry, and essays.

Being Tejanx is different than just being from Texas. Being Tejanx means you are a border subject. Being Tejanx means living in and from a certain history of oppression, possibility, activism, and cultural-linguistic hybridity arising within the US-Mexico borderland that is home. And being Tejanx means something in particular if you are a woman.

In ¡Somos Tejanas!, editors Norma E. Cantú and Jody A. Marín assemble contemporary Tejanx writers who provide firsthand accounts of their experience of identity, enriching the field of Tejanx studies through an encounter with gender and sexuality. The contributions, including personal and scholarly essays, poems, criticism, and artworks, explore the heterogeneity of Tejana identity and the sociopolitical movements, stories, dances, music, and athletic feats that mark Tejanidad. Authors contemplate the history and memory of segregation in Texas, the struggles of surviving the unnatural disaster and blackouts of 2021 amid the global pandemic of COVID-19, and the drug-war violence and ever-tightening immigration restrictions that strangle a transborder way of life shared by millions. An unrepentant act of expression from women under attack by state policymakers, this collection dispels the silence imposed by colonial erasure.

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Spectacular Wealth

The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns

By Lisa Voigt

University of Texas Press, 2016

Bridging print culture and performance, Spectacular Wealth draws on eighteenth-century festival accounts to explore how colonial residents of the silver-mining town of Potosí, in the viceroyalty of Peru, and the gold-mining region of Minas Gerais, in Brazil, created rich festive cultures that refuted European allegations of barbarism and greed. In her examination of the festive participation of the towns’ diverse inhabitants, including those whose forced or slave labor produced the colonies’ mineral wealth, Lisa Voigt shows how Amerindians, Afro-descendants, Europeans, and creoles displayed their social capital and cultural practices in spectacular performances.

Tracing the multiple meanings and messages of civic festivals and religious feast days alike, Spectacular Wealth highlights the conflicting agendas at work in the organization, performance, and publication of festivals. Celebrants and writers in mining boomtowns presented themselves as far more than tributaries yielding mineral wealth to the Spanish and Portuguese empires, using festivals to redefine their reputations and to celebrate their cultural, spiritual, and intellectual wealth.

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Spiral to the Stars

Mvskoke Tools of Futurity

Laura Harjo

University of Arizona Press, 2019

All communities are teeming with energy, spirit, and knowledge, and Spiral to the Stars taps into and activates this dynamism to discuss Indigenous community planning from a Mvskoke perspective. This book poses questions about what community is, how to reclaim community, and how to embark on the process of envisioning what and where the community can be.

Geographer Laura Harjo demonstrates that Mvskoke communities have what they need to dream, imagine, speculate, and activate the wishes of ancestors, contemporary kin, and future relatives—all in a present temporality—which is Indigenous futurity.

Organized around four methodologies—radical sovereignty, community knowledge, collective power, and emergence geographies—Spiral to the Stars provides a path that departs from traditional community-making strategies, which are often extensions of the settler state. Readers are provided a set of methodologies to build genuine community relationships, knowledge, power, and spaces for themselves. Communities don’t have to wait on experts because this book helps them activate their own possibilities and expertise. A detailed final chapter provides participatory tools that can be used in workshop settings or one on one.

This book offers a critical and concrete map for community making that leverages Indigenous way-finding tools. Mvskoke narratives thread throughout the text, vividly demonstrating that theories come from lived and felt experiences. This is a must-have book for community organizers, radical pedagogists, and anyone wishing to empower and advocate for their community.

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States Of Exception

Everyday Life and Postcolonial Identity

Keya Ganguly

University of Minnesota Press, 2001

Explores the conflict between capitalism and tradition in an immigrant community.

A philosophical anthropology of everyday experience, this book is also a deeply informed and thought-provoking reflection on the work of cultural critique. States of Exception looks into a community of immigrants from India living in southern New Jersey—a group to whom the author, as a daughter of two of its members, enjoyed unprecedented access.

Her position allows Keya Ganguly to approach the culture of a middle-class group (albeit one that is marginalized by racial prejudice), while the group’s relatively comfortable and protected style of life offers unusual insight into the concept of the everyday and the sense in which a seemingly commonplace existence can be understood as in crisis: a state of exception. Thus, Ganguly draws on the work of the Frankfurt School, particularly Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, to explore the possibilities of a dialectical critique of the everyday—a state of exception informing ordinary yet crisis-ridden narratives of the self under late capitalism.

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Staying Italian

Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia

Jordan Stanger-Ross

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Despite their twin positions as two of North America’s most iconic Italian neighborhoods, South Philly and Toronto’s Little Italy have functioned in dramatically different ways since World War II. Inviting readers into the churches, homes, and businesses at the heart of these communities, Staying Italian reveals that daily experience in each enclave created two distinct, yet still Italian, ethnicities.

As Philadelphia struggled with deindustrialization, Jordan Stanger-Ross shows, Italian ethnicity in South Philly remained closely linked with preserving turf and marking boundaries. Toronto’s thriving Little Italy, on the other hand, drew Italians together from across the wider region. These distinctive ethnic enclaves, Stanger-Ross argues, were shaped by each city’s response to suburbanization, segregation, and economic restructuring. By situating malleable ethnic bonds in the context of political economy and racial dynamics, he offers a fresh perspective on the potential of local environments to shape individual identities and social experience.

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Subject to Colonialism

African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library

Gaurav Desai

Duke University Press, 2001

Subject to Colonialism provides a much needed revisionist perspective on the way twentieth-century Africa is viewed and analyzed among scholars. Employing literary, historical, and anthropological techniques, Gaurav Desai attempts to generate a new understanding of issues that permeate discussions of Africa by disrupting the centrality of postcolonial texts and focusing instead on the cultural and intellectual production of colonial Africans. In particular, Desai calls for a reevaluation of the “colonial library”—that set of representations and texts that have collectively “invented” Africa as a locus of difference and alterity.
Presenting colonialism not as a singular, monolithic structure but rather as a practice frought with contradictions and tensions, Desai works to historicize the foundation of postcolonialism by decentering both canonical texts and privileged categories of analysis such as race, capitalism, empire, and nation. To achieve this, he focuses on texts that construct or reform—rather than merely reflect—colonialism, placing explicit emphasis on processes, performances, and the practices of everyday life. Reading these texts not merely for the content of their assertions but also for how they were created and received, Desai looks at works such as Jomo Kenyatta’s ethnography of the Gikuyu and Akiga Sai’s history of the Tiv and makes a particular plea for the canonical recuperation of African women’s writing.
Scholars in African history, literature, and philosophy, postcolonial studies, literary criticism, and anthropology will welcome publication of this book.

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Swahili Origins

Swahili Culture and The Shungwaya Phenomenon

James de Vere Allen

Ohio University Press, 1993

Kiswahili has become the lingua franca of eastern Africa. Yet there can be few historic peoples whose identity is as elusive as that of the Swahili. Some have described themselves as Arabs, as Persians or even, in one place, as Portuguese. It is doubtful whether, even today, most of the people about whom this book is written would unhesitatingly and in all contexts accept the name Swahili.

This book was central to the thought and lifework of the late James de Vere Allen. It is his major study of the origin of the Swahili and of their cultural identity. He focuses on how the African element in their cultural patrimony was first modified by Islam and later changed until many Swahili themselves lost sight of it.

They share a language and they share a culture. Their territory stretches from the coast of southern Somalia to the Lamu archipelago in Kenya, to the Rovuma River in modern Mozambique and out into the islands of the Indian Ocean. But they lack a shared historical experience.

James de Vere Allen, in this study of contentious originality, set out to give modern Swahili evidence of their shared history during a period of eight centuries.

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Sweating Saris

Indian Dance as Transnational Labor

Priya Srinivasan

Temple University Press, 2011

A groundbreaking book that seeks to understand dance as labor, Sweating Saris examines dancers not just as aesthetic bodies but as transnational migrant workers and wage earners who negotiate citizenship and gender issues.

Srinivasan merges ethnography, history, critical race theory, performance and post-colonial studies among other disciplines to investigate the embodied experience of Indian dance. The dancers’ sweat stained and soaked saris, the aching limbs are emblematic of global circulations of labor, bodies, capital, and industrial goods. Thus the sweating sari of the dancer stands in for her unrecognized labor.

Srinivasan shifts away from the usual emphasis on Indian women dancers as culture bearers of the Indian nation. She asks us to reframe the movements of late nineteenth century transnational Nautch Indian dancers to the foremother of modern dance Ruth St. Denis in the early twentieth century to contemporary teenage dancers in Southern California, proposing a transformative theory of dance, gendered-labor, and citizenship that is far-reaching.

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