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Winner of the 2024 Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize, New England Council for Latin American Studies (NECLAS)

In the early twentieth century, historical imaginings of Japan contributed to the Argentine vision of “transpacific modernity." Intellectuals such as Eduardo Wilde and Manuel Domecq García celebrated Japanese customs and traditions as important values that can be integrated into Argentine society. But a new generation of Nikkei or Japanese Argentines is rewriting this conventional narrative in the twenty-first century. Nikkei writers such as Maximiliano Matayoshi and Alejandra Kamiya are challenging the earlier, unapologetic view of Japan based on their own immigrant experiences.

Compared to the experience of political persecution against Japanese immigrants in Brazil and Peru, the Japanese in Argentina generally lived under a more agreeable sociopolitical climate. In order to understand the "positive" perception of Japan in Argentine history and literature, Samurai in the Land of the Gaucho turns to the current debate on race in Argentina, particularly as it relates to the discourse of whiteness. One of the central arguments is that Argentina's century-old interest in Japan represents a disguised method of (re)claiming its white, Western identity.

Through close readings of diverse genres (travel writing, essay, novel, short story, and film) Samurai in the Land of the Gaucho yields a multi-layered analysis in order to underline the role Japan has played in both defining and defying Argentine modernity from the twentieth century to the present.  

Human habitation in Colorado's San Luis Valley stretches back to distant times. Ancient peoples lived there thousands of years ago, as did the Utes, who claim the valley has been theirs forever. Others, both native peoples and Europeans, knew the valley-Don Juan de Oñate claimed the valley for King Phillip II of Spain in 1598. Consequently, the San Luis Valley has many stories, told in many voices.

In this sparkling new edition of The San Luis Valley: Land of the Six-Armed Cross, Virginia McConnell Simmons lays before the reader the stories and voices of this multicultural land. Ranging from prehistoric peoples and historic Indians to early Spanish settlers, trappers, American explorers, railroads, and Euro-American pioneers, this book is a comprehensive volume covering the geography and social history of Colorado's San Luis Valley.

New to the second edition is additional material on Hispanic culture (in particular a description of their fiber arts) and a lengthy appendix cataloging and describing all of the San Luis Valley's Hispanic place names. In addition, the notes and bibliography have been expanded, and the book contains a new introduction by David Fridtjof Halaas, Chief Historian of the Colorado Historical Society. Acclaimed as the standard history for the south-central region of Colorado, The San Luis Valley: Land of the Six-Armed Cross is a book for students, scholars, and others interested in the history of this fascinating and culturally rich corner of the state.

Singers Die Twice: A Journey to the Land of Dhrupad tells the story of Peter Pannke’s life in music, his travels from Cologne to Varanasi, from Delhi to the forests of Vrindavan, from Darbhanga back to Berlin, of how he studied in the gharana of the famous Mallik family and became Germany’s best-known exponent of Indian classical music. His richly woven tale takes readers from the beginning of the gharana in the 1700s, through the last splendid days of the maharaja of Darbhanga and other proud patrons who inspired Satyajit Ray’s 1957 classic film The Music Room, to the Maha Kumbh Mela that opened the twenty-first century. Along the way, we meet colourful characters whose names are still known to every devotee of dhrupad: the grand old Pandit Ram Chatur Mallik, the pious and inspiring Pandit Vidur Mallik, Pannke himself, a master of the sarangi, and the humbler musicians and travelling players who bring music of all kinds to the fields of Bihar, across India and beyond. Singers Die Twice is the inspiring story of a master musician in the world that he loves.

A little over two decades ago, Zimbabwe undertook its Fast Track Land Reform Programme. Critics saw it as nothing more than an assault on human and property rights for political expedience by a ruling elite that was fast losing its power. In contrast, those sympathetic to the land reform program saw it as fundamental to the righting of colonialism’s historical wrongs. Yet, rural displacements at the hands of state actors, or of those closely connected to them, continue. As in the past, the continuing land conflicts are mostly understood as the result of the actions of an authoritarian state that exploits its control of land for the political and economic benefit of those who inhabit it. These explanations share one thing in common: each understands the country’s perpetual land questions in terms of the actions or inactions of the colonial or the postcolonial state.

This book refocuses attention on how regimes of power rooted in kinship, gender, generation, and status have, individually and in combination, informed access to land in precolonial northeastern Zimbabwe. It then examines how these regimes of power interacted with colonial policies to inform the African experience in colonial Zimbabwe. Further, the book places land and the ability to ensure its fecundity at the center of the making and moderation of precolonial political power and how this power was impacted by the imposition of colonial rule.

Tracing the dynamics of land and power from precolonial times, together with their entanglement with colonial policies, is important, for this relationship is almost always neglected by both scholars and policymakers drawn to the high drama of colonial and postcolonial politics of land. This oversight has real consequences on our understandings of landed inequalities and how they are addressed. When Zimbabwe’s postcolonial state focused on colonially induced racialized land inequalities, its land reform efforts left older forms of landed inequalities based on gender, generation, and ideas of belonging intact. The book, which details these inequalities, reminds Zimbabweans and others that if the quest for equity espoused in postcolonial land reforms is to be meaningful, it must be attentive to both colonially induced inequalities and those enduring disparities that predated, were deepened by, and outlived colonial rule. At the same time, Zimbabweans who now live with a postcolonial state that is increasingly centralizing power over land may well learn from past societies’ creative efforts to limit the authority of their leaders.

The Spanish Peaks stand alone some distance from the main cordillera of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, south of Pueblo, Colorado. The towering twin mountains have served as beacons for Native Americans, Spaniards, trappers, traders, travelers on the Santa Fe trail, miners, and homesteaders. Spanish Peaks shares the legends the mountains have inspired and tells of the peoples drawn to the peaks' shelter. Author Conger Beasley Jr. and photographer Barbara Sparks portray the people who struggle to sustain their lives here and document traditional events such as the Ute Bear Dance and Holy Week among the penitentes of Huerfano Church. Beasley's vivid writing and Sparks's photographs offer tribute to a rugged, mysterious place.

The history of medicine is much more than the story of doctors, nurses, and hospitals. Seeking to understand the patient’s perspective, historians scour the archives, searching for rare personal accounts. Bringing together a trove of more than 400 family letters by Charles Dwight Willard, Suffering in the Land of Sunshine provides a unique window into the experience of sickness.

A Los Angeles civic leader at the turn of the twentieth century, Willard is well known to historians of the West, but exclusively for his public life as a booster and reformer. Willard’s evocative story offers fresh insights into several critical issues, including how concepts of gender, class, and race shape patients’ representations of their illness, how expectations of cure affect the illness experience, how different cultures constrain the coping strategies of the sick, and why robust health is such an exalted value in certain societies.