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In Somebody's Children, Laura Briggs examines the social and cultural forces—poverty, racism, economic inequality, and political violence—that have shaped transracial and transnational adoption in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. Focusing particularly on the experiences of those who have lost their children to adoption, Briggs analyzes the circumstances under which African American and Native mothers in the United States and indigenous and poor women in Latin America have felt pressed to give up their children for adoption or have lost them involuntarily.

The dramatic expansion of transracial and transnational adoption since the 1950s, Briggs argues, was the result of specific and profound political and social changes, including the large-scale removal of Native children from their parents, the condemnation of single African American mothers in the context of the civil rights struggle, and the largely invented "crack babies" scare that inaugurated the dramatic withdrawal of benefits to poor mothers in the United States. In Guatemala, El Salvador, and Argentina, governments disappeared children during the Cold War and then imposed neoliberal economic regimes with U.S. support, making the circulation of children across national borders easy and often profitable. Concluding with an assessment of present-day controversies surrounding gay and lesbian adoptions and the struggles of immigrants fearful of losing their children to foster care, Briggs challenges celebratory or otherwise simplistic accounts of transracial and transnational adoption by revealing some of their unacknowledged causes and costs.

Imagine trying to tell someone something about yourself and your desires for which there are no words. What if the mere attempt at expression was bound to misfire, to efface the truth of that ineluctable something? 

In Someone, Michael Lucey considers characters from twentieth-century French literary texts whose sexual forms prove difficult to conceptualize or represent. The characters expressing these “misfit” sexualities gravitate towards same-sex encounters. Yet they differ in subtle but crucial ways from mainstream gay or lesbian identities—whether because of a discordance between gender identity and sexuality, practices specific to a certain place and time, or the fleetingness or non-exclusivity of desire. Investigating works by Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, Jean Genet, and others, Lucey probes both the range of same-sex sexual forms in twentieth-century France and the innovative literary language authors have used to explore these evanescent forms.

As a portrait of fragile sexualities that involve awkward and delicate maneuvers and modes of articulation, Someone reveals just how messy the ways in which we experience and perceive sexuality remain, even to ourselves.

From 1989 through 2002 there was an unprecedented surge in American sitcoms featuring explicitly Jewish lead characters, thirty-two compared to seven in the previous forty years.  Several of these—Mad About You, The Nanny, and Friends—were among the most popular and influential of all shows over this period; one program—Seinfeld—has been singled out as the “defining” series of the nineties.  In addition, scriptwriters have increasingly created “Jewish” characters, although they may not be perceived to be by the show’s audience, Rachel Green on Friends being only one example.

In Something Ain’t Kosher Here, Vincent Brook asks two key questions: Why has this trend appeared at this particular historical moment and what is the significance of this phenomenon for Jews and non-Jews alike?  He takes readers through three key phases of the Jewish sitcom trend: The early years of television before and after the first Jewish sitcom, The Goldbergs’, appeared; the second phase in which America found itself “Under the Sign of Seinfeld”; and the current era of what Brook calls “Post- Jewishness.”

Interviews with key writers, producers, and “showrunners” such as David Kohan, (Will and Grace), Marta Kauffman (Friends and Dream On), Bill Prady (Dharma and Greg), Peter Mehlman and Carol Leifer (Seinfeld), and close readings of individual episodes and series provoke the inescapable conclusion that we have entered uncharted “post-Jewish” territory.  Brook reveals that the acceptance of Jews in mainstream white America at the very time when identity politics have put a premium on celebrating difference reinforces and threatens the historically unique insider/outsider status of Jews in American society. This paradox upsets a delicate balance that has been a defining component of American Jewish identity.

The rise of the Jewish sitcom represents a broader struggle in which American Jews and the TV industry, if not American society as a whole, are increasingly operating at cross-purposes—  torn between the desire to celebrate unique ethnic identities, yet to assimilate: to assert independence, yet also to build a consensus to appeal to the widest possible audience.   No reader of this book will ever be able to watch these television programs in quite the same way again.

Since 1990, Grant Hill has thrilled sports fans with his artistry on the basketball court, first as an All-American player at Duke University and then as a six-time NBA All-Star for the Detroit Pistons and the Orlando Magic. During these years, Hill has amassed a collection of art by African Americans that he now shares with the public through this book, which accompanies a traveling exhibition.
The forty-six pieces documented here include thirteen works that span the career of the great Romare Bearden, from his 1941 gouache painting Serenade to the important collages of the 1980s. Hill’s fascination with artists’ depiction of women is represented in Elizabeth Catlett’s lithographs, many of them from the 1992 series “For My People,” and her sculptures in stone, bronze, and onyx. In addition to these two giants of twentieth-century art, the Hill Collection features pieces by Phoebe Beasley, Arthello Beck Jr., John Biggers, Malcolm Brown, John Coleman, Edward Jackson, and Hughie Lee Smith.
Hill began collecting art in the early 1990s after learning from his parents to appreciate artworks not only as objects of beauty but as expressions of heritage and culture. According to the internationally known curator Alvia J. Wardlaw, he is part of an emerging group of young African American collectors who have “raised the bar for others.” Hill writes, “Getting to know yourself means understanding your background and appreciating those who have come before you. My father has a saying he uses in speeches: ‘To be ignorant of your past is to remain a boy. ‘The interest in my heritage as an African American is reflected in this collection.”
Something All Our Own features Wardlaw’s essay on the history of African American collecting. It also features articles about Bearden and Catlett by the scholars Elizabeth Alexander and Beverly Guy-Sheftall and reflections about Hill by the historian John Hope Franklin, Duke’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, and the sportswriter William C. Rhoden. Hill and his father, the NFL great Calvin Hill, contribute a dialogue that explores their motivations for collecting art.
At the heart of the book are the exquisite color photographs of the forty-six artworks included in the exhibition, with commentary by Wardlaw and by Hill himself.
As a star athlete, Grant Hill is well aware that African Americans who excel in sports and entertainment are more broadly recognized than their counterparts in artistic fields. He strives to inspire young people to explore their heritage and broaden their concept of excellence by learning more about African American art. By sharing his artworks with collectors and fans, Hill reminds us that while the jump shot is ephemeral, art is enduring.

Homelessness is usually discusses in terms of its origins or in terms of its amelioration. Media accounts focus on poverty, drug use, lack of shelter, the social safety net, or attempts by the homeless, social service agencies, and government to end homelessness by policy and direct action. Yet we never seem to get a clear picture of who the homeless are. We are exposed to them as a social problem, but we learn little about their daily existence.

In Something Left to Lose, Gwendolyn A. Dordick gives us a dramatic portrait of the social and personal lives of the homeless. Through her extensive "hanging out" with homeless people, Dordick came to a profound understanding of the web of relationships that provides complex social structure in situations where, to the casual eye, there appears to be only chaos and paralysis.

The author shows us that improvising shelter means working hard to co-exist with others. Lacking conventional private dwellings, the homeless find or create shelter in unconventional places -- on street corners adjoining bus stations, on empty lots of land, or in shelters, public or private -- and negotiate the rules of these places with authorities, passersby, and fellow homeless.

The different environments lead to quite different social relations. The Armory, for example, is a frightening place, thanks to the authoritarian attitudes of the employees and cliques of homeless people in charge. In the Shanty, on the other hand, the difficult issues are those of a self-governing community concerned about safety -- controlling the drug use of some residents, deciding who is allowed to tap into the electricity, and worrying about intruders.

In all settings, daily life for people without  homes, like daily life for people with homes, if full of the concerns of personal relationships. How will we share our goods and emotions, speak respectfully to each other, love and joke and work out our disputes, and act in a trustworthy fashion?

This book is also a miniature research odyssey, complete with moments of fear, frustration, blunders, distrust, and trust. In order to gather these interviews, Dordick had to not only win the the confidence of the homeless people she visited (the women at the Station thought she was interested in their boyfriends) but also negotiate with unsympathetic police and shelters employees or defy them.

Raymond Chandler’s eminence as a mystery writer is unchallenged. Somerset Maugham and George Grella both rate him above Dashiell Hammett; Eric Partridge deems him “a serious artist and a very considerable novelist,” while praising him as “one of the finest novelists of his time.” Peter Wolfe examines the many sides of Chandler and his work—his apparent will to self-destruct, his obsession with beautiful women, and his apparent brush with homosexuality—and casts much new and needed light on this major American author.

Weddings in the United States are often extravagant, highly ritualized, and costly affairs.  In this book, Beth Montemurro takes a fresh look at the wedding process, offering a perspective not likely to be found in the many planning books and magazines readily available to the modern bride.  Montemurro draws upon years of ethnographic research to explore what prenuptial events mean to women participants and what they tell us about the complexity and ambiguity of gender roles. Through the bachelorette party and the bridal shower, the bride-to-be is initiated into the role of wife by her friends and family, who present elaborate scenarios that demonstrate both what she is sacrificing and what she is gaining.

            Montemurro argues that American society at the turn of the twenty-first century is still married to traditional conceptions of masculinity and femininity and that prenuptial rituals contribute to the stabilization of gender inequalities

Song Walking explores the politics of land, its position in memories, and its foundation in changing land-use practices in western Maputaland, a borderland region situated at the juncture of South Africa, Mozambique, and Swaziland. Angela Impey investigates contrasting accounts of this little-known geopolitical triangle, offsetting textual histories with the memories of a group of elderly women whose songs and everyday practices narrativize a century of borderland dynamics. Drawing evidence from women’s walking songs (amaculo manihamba)—once performed while traversing vast distances to the accompaniment of the European mouth-harp (isitweletwele)—she uncovers the manifold impacts of internationally-driven transboundary environmental conservation on land, livelihoods, and local senses of place.

This book links ethnomusicological research to larger themes of international development, environmental conservation, gender, and local economic access to resources. By demonstrating that development processes are essentially cultural processes and revealing how music fits within this frame, Song Walking testifies to the affective, spatial, and economic dimensions of place, while contributing to a more inclusive and culturally apposite alignment between land and environmental policies and local needs and practices.

Beginning with their battle against the forces of Ponce de Leon, the Calusa Indians of southwest Florida entered a dark period of European invasion and native resistance, which changed the nature and course of life on the North American continent.

 

Song of the Tides is a work of anthropological fiction that is set during the period of the Spanish entrada into southwest Florida and their encounters with the Calusa. Relying on letters and memoirs, especially those of explorer Pedro Menendez de Aviles, shipwrecked captive Escalante Fontaneda, and the Jesuit priest Juan Rogel, Joseph has woven a tale of vivid historical detail and compelling human drama. Working with Calusa scholars, the author has created a superbly written account of the clash of two proud and dominant cultures. Told through the voice of Aesha, daughter of the great Calusa chief Caalus, as well as those of other political and spiritual leaders, the fictional narrative spans half a century of conflict with Spanish soldiers and Jesuits, infighting between bands, struggle to preserve their culture, and eventual defeat of the Spanish through wit and deceit.

If the title Song-Poems from Xanadu seems hauntingly familiar to the reader, it is because there is another book called Songs from Xanadu, written by the same author between 1979 and 1983, primarily as a rigorous attempt to make some sense out of the technical and prosodic questions which these songs raise about themselves. The editor at the Center for Chinese Studies noted somewhat wistfully that Songs from Xanadu would have been a perfect title for the present book. Since the author already used that title up on a somewhat stuffier work, he tried to mollify the editor by choosing a title that sounded as much like the one he preferred as possible. Being largely directed at specialists in Chinese literature, the first book differs greatly from this, its sequel, which is written for those who know next to nothing about its subject. [ix-x]

Motivated by a love of her Mexican American heritage, Patricia Preciado Martin set out to document the lives and memories of the women of her mother's and grandmother's eras; for while the role of women in Southwest has begun to be chronicled, that of Hispanic women largely remains obscure. In Songs My Mother Sang to Me, she has preserved the oral histories of many of these women before they have been lost or forgotten.

Martin's quest took her to ranches, mining towns, and cities throughout southern Arizona, for she sought to document as varied an experience of the contributions of Mexican American women as possible. The interviews covered family history and genealogy, childhood memories, secular and religious traditions, education, work and leisure, environment and living conditions, rites of passage, and personal values. Each of the ten oral histories reflects not only the spontaneity of the interview and personality of each individual, but also the friendship that grew between Martin and her subjects.

Songs My Mother Sang to Me collects voices not often heard and brings to print accounts of social change never previously recorded. These women document more than the details of their own lives; in relating the histories of their ancestors and communities, they add to our knowledge of the culture and contributions of Mexican American people in the Southwest.

In a society that has seen epochal change over a few generations, what remains to hold people together and offer them a sense of continuity and meaning? In Songs for Dead Parents, Erik Mueggler shows how in contemporary China death and the practices surrounding it have become central to maintaining a connection with the world of ancestors, ghosts, and spirits that socialism explicitly disavowed.
 
Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork in a mountain community in Yunnan Province, Songs for Dead Parents shows how people view the dead as both material and immaterial, as effigies replace corpses, tombstones replace effigies, and texts eventually replace tombstones in a long process of disentangling the dead from the shared world of matter and memory. It is through these processes that people envision the cosmological underpinnings of the world and assess the social relations that make up their community. Thus, state interventions aimed at reforming death practices have been deeply consequential, and Mueggler traces the transformations they have wrought and their lasting effects.

Songs for the Spirits examines the Vietnamese practice of communing with spirits through music and performance. During rituals dedicated to a pantheon of indigenous spirits, musicians perform an elaborate sequence of songs--a "songscape"--for possessed mediums who carry out ritual actions, distribute blessed gifts to disciples, and dance to the music's infectious rhythms. Condemned by French authorities in the colonial period and prohibited by the Vietnamese Communist Party in the late 1950s, mediumship practices have undergone a strong resurgence since the early 1990s, and they are now being drawn upon to promote national identity and cultural heritage through folklorized performances of rituals on the national and international stage. By tracing the historical trajectory of traditional music and religion since the early twentieth century, this groundbreaking study offers an intriguing account of the political transformation and modernization of cultural practices over a period of dramatic and often turbulent transition. An accompanying DVD contains numerous video and music extracts that illustrate the fascinating ways in which music evokes the embodied presence of spirits and their gender and ethnic identities.

Drawing on fieldwork conducted at eight women's music festivals, Eileen M. Hayes shows how studying these festivals--attended by predominately white lesbians--provides critical insight into the role of music and lesbian community formation. She argues that the women's music festival is a significant institutional site for the emergence of black feminist consciousness in the contemporary period. Hayes also offers sage perspectives on black women's involvement in the women's music festival scene, the ramifications of their performances as drag kings in those environments, and the challenges and joys of a black lesbian retreat based on the feminist festival model. With acuity and candor, longtime feminist activist Hayes elucidates why this music scene matters. Veteran vocalist, percussionist, producer, and cultural historian Linda Tillery provides a foreword.

Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau explores the role of song as a transformative force in the twentieth century, tracing a cultural, spiritual, and musical encounter that upended notions of indigeneity and the rules of engagement for Indians and priests in the Columbia Plateau.

In Chad Hamill’s narrative, a Jesuit and his two Indian “grandfathers”—one a medicine man, the other a hymn singer—engage in a collective search for the sacred. The priest becomes a student of the medicine man. The medicine man becomes a Catholic. The Indian hymn singer brings indigenous songs to the Catholic mass. Using song as a thread, these men weave together two worlds previously at odds, realizing a promise born two centuries earlier within the prophecies of Circling Raven and Shining Shirt.

Songs of Power and Prayer reveals how song can bridge worlds: between the individual and Spirit, the Jesuits and the Indians. Whether sung in an indigenous ceremony or adapted for Catholic Indian services, song abides as a force that strengthens Native identity and acts as a conduit for power and prayer.

A First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies book

Sad songs and love songs. For Vietnamese refugees who fled Vietnam after the 1975 takeover by the Viet Cong, the predominant music of choice falls into these two general categories rather than any particular musical genre. In fact, Adelaida Reyes discovers, music that exiles call "Vietnamese music" -- that is, music sung in Vietnamese and almost exclusively written before 1975 -- includes such varied influences as Western rock, French-derived valse, Latin chacha, tango, bolero, an d paso doble.

The Vietnamese refugee experience calls attention to issues commonly raised by migration: the redefinition of group relations, the reformulation of identity, and the reconstruction of social and musical life in resettlement. Fifteen years ago, Adelaida Reyes began doing fieldwork on the musical activities of Vietnamese refugees. She entered the emotion-driven world of forced migrants through expressive culture; learned to see the lives of refugee-resettlers through the music they made and enjoyed; and, in turn, gained a deeper understanding of their music through knowledge of their lives.

In Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free, Reyes brings history, politics, and decades of research to her study of four resettlement communities, including refugee centers in Palawan and Bataan; the early refugee community in New Jersey; and the largest of all Vietnamese communities -- Little Saigon, in southern California's Orange County.

Looking closely at diasporic Vietnamese in each location, Reyes demonstrates that expressive culture provides a valuable window into the refugee experience. Showing that Vietnamese immigrants deal with more than simply a new country and culture in these communities, Reyes considers such issues as ethnicity, socio-economic class, and differing generations. She considers in her study music of all kinds -- performed and recorded, public and private -- and looks at music as listened to and performed by all age groups, including church music, club music, and music used in cultural festivals. Moving from traditional folk music to elite and modern music and from the recording industry to pirated tapes. Reyes looks at how Vietnamese in exile struggled, in different ways, to hold onto a part of their home culture and to assimilate into their  new, most frequently American, culture.

Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free will attract the attention of readers in Asian American studies, Asian studies, music, and ethnomusicology.

Despite his importance and influence, jazz musician, educator, and community leader Horace Tapscott remains relatively unknown to most Americans. In Songs of the Unsung Tapscott shares his life story, recalling his childhood in Houston, moving with his family to Los Angeles in 1943, learning music, and his early professional career. He describes forming the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra in 1961 and later the Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension to preserve African American music and serve the community. Tapscott also recounts his interactions with the Black Panthers and law enforcement, the Watts riots, his work in Hollywood movie studios, and stories about his famous musician-activist friends. Songs of the Unsung is the captivating story of one of America’s most unassuming heroes as well as the story of L.A.'s cultural and political evolution over the last half of the twentieth century.

From Edison’s invention of the phonograph through contemporary field recording and sound installation, artists have become attracted to those domains against which music has always defined itself: noise, silence, and environmental sound. Christoph Cox argues that these developments in the sonic arts are not only aesthetically but also philosophically significant, revealing sound to be a continuous material flow to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds those expressions. Cox shows how, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, philosophers and sonic artists have explored this “sonic flux.”

Through the philosophical analysis of works by John Cage, Maryanne Amacher, Max Neuhaus, Christian Marclay, and many others, Sonic Flux contributes to the development of a materialist metaphysics and poses a challenge to the prevailing positions in cultural theory, proposing a realist and materialist aesthetics able to account not only for sonic art but for artistic production in general.

Through the lens of popular music in and from Hong Kong, Sonic Multiplicities examines the material, ideological, and geopolitical implications of music production and consumption. Yiu Fai Chow and Jeroen de Kloet draw on rich empirical research and industry experience to trace the worldwide flow of popular culture and the people who produce and consume it. In doing so, the authors make a significant contribution to our understanding of the political and social roles such circulation plays in today’s world—and in a city under cultural threat in a country whose prominence is on the rise. Just as important, they clear a new path for the study of popular music.

Yaqui is a Southern Uto-Aztecan language spoken by a people living predominantly in Sonora, with some communities in Arizona. This comprehensive reference on the Sonoran Yaqui language is a descriptive grammar that covers topics on phonology, word classes, verb structure, and complex sentences. John M. Dedrick, who lived and worked among the Yaquis for more than thirty years, shares his extensive knowledge of the language, while Uto-Aztecan specialist Eugene H. Casad helps put the material in a comparative perspective.

The book includes useful sections on quantifiers and adverbial and deictic particles, often inadequately treated in reference grammars. A section on auxiliary verbs and well-documented information on voice, aspect, and other features of verbal inflection provide readers with useful data for particular lines of linguistic inquiry. Each grammatical point is illustrated by example sentences distinguished by their naturalness and cultural relevance. At the end of the book, a Yaqui text provides a sample of connected sentences in a natural context.

Sonora Yaqui Language Structures is a valuable source not only for research on this language family but also for anthropological studies of the Arizona-Sonora cultural region. In addition, it documents an indigenous language for future generations of Yaqui speakers.

Los Angeles. A city that is synonymous with celebrity and mass-market culture, is also, according to David James, synonymous with social alienation and dispersal. In the communities of Los Angeles, artists, cultural institutions and activities exist in ways that are often concealed from sight, obscured by the powerful presence of Hollywood and its machinations. In this significant collection of original essays, The Sons and Daughters of Los reconstructs the city of Los Angeles with new cultural connections. Explored here are the communities that offer alternatives to the picture of L..A. as a conglomeration of studios and mass media. Each essay examines a particular piece of, or place in, Los Angeles cultural life: from the Beyond Baroque Poetry Foundation, the Woman's Building, to Highways, and LACE, as well as the achievements of these grassroots initiatives. Also included is critical commentary on important artists, including Harry Gamboa, Jr., and others whose work have done much to shape popular culture in L.A. The cumulative effect of reading this book is to see a very different city take shape, one whose cultural landscape is far more innovative and reflective of the diversity of the city's people than mainstream notions of it suggest. The Sons and Daughters of Los offers a substantive and complicated picture of the way culture plays itself it out on the smallest scale—in one of the largest metropolises on earth—contributing to a richer, more textured understanding of the vibrancy of urban life and art.

"Wolf drew on anthropology, archaeology, history, and geography to mold a magnificent, sweeping, and beautifully written synthesis. With style and deep personal engagement he unraveled the complexity of Mexico and Guatemala's past with its multiple ethnicities, many languages, and environmental diversity. . . . Armies of graduate students have challenged many of the details, but the book stands as a monument to a time when social scientists were able to think large thoughts and write elegant English"—Foreign Affairs, Significant Books of the Last 75 Years.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp was a quiet innovator whose fame has too often been yoked to that of her husband, Jean Arp. Over time, however, she has slowly come to be seen as one of the foremost abstract artists and designers of the twentieth century. The Swiss-born Taeuber-Arp had a front row seat to the first wave of Dadaism and was, along with Mondrian and Malevich, a pioneer of Constructivism. Her singular artwork incorporated painting, sculpture, dance, fiber arts, and architecture, as hers was one of the first oeuvres to successfully bridge the divide between fine and functional art.
 
Now Roswitha Mair has brought us the first biography of this unique polymath, illuminating not just Tauber-Arp’s own life and work, but also the various milieux and movements in which she traveled.  No fan of the Dadaists and their legacy will want to miss this first English-language translation.
 

The curanderos of northern Peru, traditional healing specialists who invoke Jesus Christ and the saints with a mescaline sacrament and a shamanic rattle, are not vestigial curiosities nor are their patients rural illiterates without access to "modern medicine." Instead, many of these shamans have thriving urban practices with clients from all levels of society.

Sorcery and Shamanism documents the lives and rituals of twelve curanderos, offering a perspective on their curing role and shared knowledge. Authors Donald Joralemon and Douglas Sharon also consider the therapeutic experiences of over one hundred patients, including case histories and follow-ups. They offer a broad view of the shamans’ work in modern Peruvian society, particularly in connection with gender-based conflicts.

The significant work goes a long way toward dispelling the stereotype of shamans as enigmatic and wise, showing them to be pragmatic curers confronting the health effects of everyday aggressions and betrayals.

Rebellions broke out in many areas of South Africa shortly after the institution of white rule in the late nineteenth century and continued into the next century. However, distrust of the colonial regime reached a new peak in the mid-twentieth century, when revolts erupted across a wide area of rural South Africa. All these uprisings were rooted in grievances over taxes. Rebels frequently invoked supernatural powers for assistance and accused government officials of using witchcraft to enrich themselves and to harm ordinary people.

As Sean Redding observes in Sorcery and Sovereignty, beliefs in witchcraft and supernatural powers were part of the political rhetoric; the system of taxation—with all its prescribed interactions between ruler and ruled—was intimately connected to these supernatural beliefs.

In this fascinating study, Redding examines how black South Africans’ beliefs in supernatural powers, along with both economic and social change in the rural areas, resulted in specific rebellions and how gender relations in black South African rural families changed. Sorcery and Sovereignty explores the intersection of taxation, political attitudes, and supernatural beliefs among black South Africans, shedding light on some of the most significant issues in the history of colonized Africa.

Soul Covers is an engaging look at how three very different rhythm and blues performers—Aretha Franklin, Al Green, and Phoebe Snow—used cover songs to negotiate questions of artistic, racial, and personal authenticity. Through close readings of song lyrics and the performers’ statements about their lives and work, the literary critic Michael Awkward traces how Franklin, Green, and Snow crafted their own musical identities partly by taking up songs associated with artists such as Dinah Washington, Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, George Gershwin, Billie Holiday, and the Supremes.

Awkward sees Franklin’s early album Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington, released shortly after Washington’s death in 1964, as an attempt by a struggling young singer to replace her idol as the acknowledged queen of the black female vocal tradition. He contends that Green’s album Call Me (1973) reveals the performer’s attempt to achieve formal coherence by uniting seemingly irreconcilable aspects of his personal history, including his career in popular music and his religious yearnings, as well as his sense of himself as both a cosmopolitan black artist and a forlorn country boy. Turning to Snow’s album Second Childhood (1976), Awkward suggests that through covers of blues and soul songs, Snow, a white Jewish woman from New York, explored what it means for non-black enthusiasts to perform works considered by many to be black cultural productions. The only book-length examination of the role of remakes in American popular music, Soul Covers is itself a refreshing new take on the lives and work of three established soul artists.

Soul Power is a cultural history of those whom Cynthia A. Young calls “U.S. Third World Leftists,” activists of color who appropriated theories and strategies from Third World anticolonial struggles in their fight for social and economic justice in the United States during the “long 1960s.” Nearly thirty countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America declared formal independence in the 1960s alone. Arguing that the significance of this wave of decolonization to U.S. activists has been vastly underestimated, Young describes how literature, films, ideologies, and political movements that originated in the Third World were absorbed by U.S. activists of color. She shows how these transnational influences were then used to forge alliances, create new vocabularies and aesthetic forms, and describe race, class, and gender oppression in the United States in compelling terms.

Young analyzes a range of U.S. figures and organizations, examining how each deployed Third World discourse toward various cultural and political ends. She considers a trip that LeRoi Jones, Harold Cruse, and Robert F. Williams made to Cuba in 1960; traces key intellectual influences on Angela Y. Davis’s writing; and reveals the early history of the hospital workers’ 1199 union as a model of U.S. Third World activism. She investigates Newsreel, a late 1960s activist documentary film movement, and its successor, Third World Newsreel, which produced a seminal 1972 film on the Attica prison rebellion. She also considers the L.A. Rebellion, a group of African and African American artists who made films about conditions in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. By demonstrating the breadth, vitality, and legacy of the work of U.S. Third World Leftists, Soul Power firmly establishes their crucial place in the history of twentieth-century American struggles for social change.

During the 1950s, when less than 20 percent of American high school graduates attended college, a group of ambitious young African Americans enrolled at Ohio University, a predominantly white school in Athens, Ohio. Because they were a tiny, barely tolerated minority, they banded together, supported each other, and formed lasting bonds. Years later, at a series of “Soulful Reunions,” they recalled the joys and challenges of living on a white campus before the civil rights era, and eighteen of them decided to share their stories.

The authors of the eighteen autobiographical sketches in Soulful Bobcats were a diverse group. They were athletes, rhetoricians, musicians, and actresses; they aspired to professions in the military, business, education, government, architecture, and the arts. Some grew up in poor families, while others enjoyed the comforts of the middle class. But they had several things in common. They all came from families that believed education was important. They had been taught to avoid trouble, to persist despite setbacks, and to expect to encounter prejudice and even discrimination.

The authors vividly describe instances in which they were humiliated—by other students, by professors, or by townspeople—as well as the few occasions when violence seemed inevitable. In addition, they describe their “first,” including becoming the first African American students at Ohio University to be awarded scholarships for their prowess in football, basketball, track, and tennis; the first to compete for titles such as “Mr. Fraternity” or “Queen of the Military Ball”; the first to appear in theatrical performances alongside their white schoolmates. They also tell of their success in providing a social life for themselves by organizing two Greek letter fraternities and one sorority, holding their own off-campus dances, and joining the few campus organizations that were open to them. Above all, their stories speak to a resilience that allowed these “Soulful Bobcats” to learn from their experiences at Ohio University, to engage in meaningful careers, and to lead rich, fulfilling lives.

For an outsider, the prospect of blending into the fabric of an urban African American ghetto might be an intimidating one. But for a Scandinavian scholar, the idea of getting to know one of Washington DC's toughest neighborhoods from the inside during the racially tense, late 1960s, could well have seemed impossible. Conducting fieldwork in and around Winston Street, Ulf Hannerz did just that. Soulside details the everyday lives of the ghetto inhabitants he observed and participated with during this period, revealing their beliefs and expectations and the diversity of their life styles.

Originally published 35 years ago, Soulside became an urban anthropological classic. The book helped to dispel many false impressions about ghetto life and questioned the idea, precipitated in the influential Moynihan Report and in notions of a "culture of poverty," that the poor had chosen to lead the lives they do. Raising central moral and political questions about American society in a turbulent period, Soulside became an example of public engagement in anthropology. In a new afterword, Ulf Hannerz discusses the book's place in the debates of the time and its relevance to current arguments in anthropology.