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4531 books match the query 'Cultural & Ethnic Studies' and 804 start with t

cover of The Visual Guillotine: The Cinematic Cut and Politics in Latin America

The Visual Guillotine

The Cinematic Cut and Politics in Latin America

Thomas Matusiak

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

The violence of the cinematic cut in twentieth-century Latin American film

Splice, montage, close-up: modern cinema routinely presents bodies in pieces. Not unlike the guillotine, argues Thomas Matusiak, these techniques have served both overt and symbolic political ends as they accomplish and project the efficient production of severed bodies. In The Visual Guillotine, Matusiak traces the use of cinematic tools of dismemberment in twentieth-century Latin American film to theorize the symbolic and material violence of the cut.

A robust genealogy of Latin American cinematic politics, The Visual Guillotine encompasses national filmmaking traditions; radical and reactionary political registers; and the proliferated aesthetics of narrative, documentary, experimental, and expanded cinema through an innovative critical viewing practice. From the national cinemas of the 1930s to the decapitation videos produced in the Mexican narco-conflict and beyond, Matusiak shows how the cinematic cut has been employed to inspire terror as well as invoke and critique a range of political programs.

A refreshing dialogue between film theory and Latin American cultural studies, The Visual Guillotine offers a new way for film to conceptualize politics. In our present political moment, with rapidly generated and circulated visual media central to a resurgent leftist-populist battle against oligarchy and authoritarianism, this book calls for readers to reassess their viewing position when confronted with violent imagery.

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cover of The Walls of Jericho

The Walls of Jericho

Rudolph Fisher

University of Michigan Press, 1994

The first novel by one of the legends of the Harlem Renaissance
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cover of The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany

The War against Catholicism

Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Michael B. Gross

University of Michigan Press, 2005

"A lucid, innovative work of top-flight scholarship. Gross shows us the depths of anti-Catholicism in nineteenth-century Germany; he explains why the German Kulturkampf had such force and why prominent liberals imagined it as a turning point not only in Germany but in world history."
---Helmut Walser Smith, Vanderbilt University

"A marvelously original account of how the Kulturkampf emerged from the cultural, social, and gendered worlds of German liberalism. While not neglecting the 1870s, Gross's analysis directs historians' attention to the under-researched 1850s and 1860s-decades in which liberals' anti-Catholic arguments were formulated against a backdrop of religious revival, democratic innovation, national ambition, and the articulation of new roles for women in society, politics, and the church. The drama of these decades resonates in every chapter of Gross's fine study."
---James Retallack, University of Toronto

"Michael Gross has put the culture back into the Kulturkampf! Integrating social and political analysis with illuminating interpretations of visual and linguistic evidence, Gross explores the work of religious cleavage in defining German national identity. An emerging women's movement, liberal virtues, and Catholic difference come together to explain why, in a century of secularization, Germany's Catholics experienced a religious revival, and why its liberals responded with enmity and frustration. Vividly written and a pleasure to read, this groundbreaking study offers real surprises."
---Margaret Lavinia Anderson, University of California, Berkeley


An innovative study of the relationship between the two most significant, equally powerful, and irreconcilable movements in Germany, Catholicism and liberalism, in the decades following the 1848 Revolution.

After the defeat of liberalism in the Revolution of 1848, and in the face of the dramatic revival of popular Catholicism, German middle-class liberals used anti-Catholicism to orient themselves culturally in a new age. Michael B. Gross's study shows how anti-Catholicism and specifically the Kulturkampf, the campaign to break the power of the Catholic Church, were not simply attacks against the church nor were they merely an attempt to secure state autonomy. Gross shows that the liberal attack on Catholicism was actually a complex attempt to preserve moral, social, political, and sexual order during a period of dramatic pressures for change.

Gross argues that a culture of anti-Catholicism shaped the modern development of Germany including capitalist economics, industrial expansion, national unification, and gender roles. He demonstrates that images of priests, monks, nuns, and Catholics as medieval, backward, and sexually deviant asserted the liberal middle-class claim to social authority after the Revolution of 1848. He pays particular attention to the ways anti-Catholicism, Jesuitphobia, and antimonastic hysteria were laced with misogyny and expressed deeper fears of mass culture and democracy in the liberal imagination. In doing so, he identifies the moral, social, and cultural imperatives behind the Kulturkampf in the 1870s.

By offering a provocative reinterpretation of liberalism and its relationship to the German anti-Catholic movement, this work ultimately demonstrates that in Germany, liberalism itself contributed to a culture of intolerance that would prove to be a serious liability in the twentieth century. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of culture, ideology, religion, and politics.
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cover of The War for the Heart and Soul of a Highland Maya Town: Revised Edition

The War for the Heart and Soul of a Highland Maya Town

Revised Edition

By Robert S. Carlsen, with a contribution by Martín Prechtel

University of Texas Press, 2011

This compelling ethnography explores the issue of cultural continuity and change as it has unfolded in the representative Guatemala Mayan town Santiago Atitlán. Drawing on multiple sources, Robert S. Carlsen argues that local Mayan culture survived the Spanish Conquest remarkably intact and continued to play a defining role for much of the following five centuries. He also shows how the twentieth-century consolidation of the Guatemalan state steadily eroded the capacity of the local Mayas to adapt to change and ultimately caused some factions to reject—even demonize—their own history and culture. At the same time, he explains how, after a decade of military occupation known as la violencia, Santiago Atitlán stood up in unity to the Guatemalan Army in 1990 and forced it to leave town.

This new edition looks at how Santiago Atitlán has fared since the expulsion of the army. Carlsen explains that, initially, there was hope that the renewed unity that had served the town so well would continue. He argues that such hopes have been undermined by multiple sources, often with bizarre outcomes. Among the factors he examines are the impact of transnational crime, particularly gangs with ties to Los Angeles; the rise of vigilantism and its relation to renewed religious factionalism; the related brutal murders of followers of the traditional Mayan religion; and the apocalyptic fervor underlying these events.

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cover of The War on the Social Factory: The Struggle for Community Safety in the Silicon Valley

The War on the Social Factory

The Struggle for Community Safety in the Silicon Valley

Annie Paradise

Northwestern University Press, 2024

A collective ethnography of grassroots mobilizations for community safety across the Silicon Valley
 
This is a narrative of struggle and solidarity and a collective toolkit for grassroots opposition to militarization, policing, and ongoing conditions of war in the current conjuncture of racial patriarchal capitalism. Grassroots researcher Annie Paradise presents here a collective ethnography of the mothers and community matriarchs whose children have been murdered by police across the San Francisco Bay Area as they develop and practice autonomous, creative forms of resistance.
 
The War on the Social Factory: The Struggle for Community Safety in the Silicon Valley maps local families’ struggles to reclaim their households and their communities—to create a social infrastructure of care, justice, and safety outside state- and market-determined modes of “security.” Practices such as sustained vigil, testimony, and the production and circulation of insurgent knowledges are shown here to be part of interconnected justice efforts to demilitarize and decarcerate communities in the face of the multiple forms of violence enacted under late racial patriarchal capitalism. Paradise examines the expanding carceral processes of enclosure, criminalization, dispossession, expropriation, and disposability that mark the neoliberal "security” regime across the Silicon Valley and offers counter-counterinsurgent strategies and practices of co-generative, dynamic resistance.

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cover of The Washing Away of Wrongs: Forensic Medicine in Thirteenth-Century China

The Washing Away of Wrongs

Forensic Medicine in Thirteenth-Century China

Sung Tz’u; Translated by Brian E. McKnight

University of Michigan Press, 1981

T'zu's The Washing Away of Wrongs (Hsi yüan chi lu), printed in 1247, is the oldest extant book on forensic medicine in the world. Written as a guide for magistrates in conducting inquests, the book is a major source on early Chinese knowledge of pathology and morbid anatomy. Includes a lengthy introductory essay by the translator.  
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cover of The Well-Being of the Elderly in Asia: A Four-Country Comparative Study

The Well-Being of the Elderly in Asia

A Four-Country Comparative Study

Albert I. Hermalin, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2010

In the broadest sense, The Well-Being of the Elderly in Asia is a study of social change and of anticipating future social change. It examines the effects on the current and future elderly of the rapid demographic transition that has occurred over much of Asia, accompanied in many countries by equally dramatic social and economic transformations. Policymakers in Asia have been aware of these trends and their potentially deleterious consequences for a decade or more, and have sought to fashion appropriate policies and programs that anticipate and mitigate their effects. Accordingly, any study of the sociodemographic trends and their impact must be examined in the light of policies put in place and under development.
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cover of The Western Bahr Al Ghazal under British Rule, 1898–1956: Mis Af#57

The Western Bahr Al Ghazal under British Rule, 1898–1956

Mis Af#57

Ahmad Alawad Sikainga

Ohio University Press, 1991

Western Bahr al-Ghazal is perhaps one of the least known places in Africa. Yet this remote part of the Republic of Sudan can be regarded as a historical barometer, registering major developments in the history of the Nile valley. In the nineteenth century the region became one of the most active slave-exporting zones in Africa. The area is distinguished from the rest of southern Sudan by its veneer of Muslim influence and an Arabic pidgin. British officials regarded it as a Muslim enclave and in the twentieth century, western Bahr al-Ghazal became a laboratory in which the British colonial administration applied one of its most controversial policies in the Sudan, the so-called Southern Policy. Several decades of colonial rule failed to establish any significant links between the western Bahr al-Ghazal and the world economy. It is hoped that this book will contribute to the understanding of the general impact of colonialism on rural societies in the southern Sudan and the roots of their underdevelopment.
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cover of The Western Disease: Contesting Autism in the Somali Diaspora

The Western Disease

Contesting Autism in the Somali Diaspora

Claire Laurier Decoteau

University of Chicago Press, 2021

Because autism is an increasingly common diagnosis, North Americans are familiar with its symptoms and treatments. But what we know and think about autism is shaped by our social relationship to health, disease, and the medical system. In The Western Disease Claire Laurier Decoteau explores the ways that recent immigrants from Somalia to Canada and the US make sense of their children’s diagnosis of autism. Having never heard of autism before migrating to North America, they often determine that it must be a Western disease. Given its apparent absence in Somalia, they view it as Western in nature, caused by environmental and health conditions unique to life in North America. 

Following Somali parents as they struggle to make sense of their children's illness and advocate for alternative care, Decoteau unfolds how complex interacting factors of immigration, race, and class affect Somalis’ relationship to the disease. Somalis’ engagement with autism challenges the prevailing presumption among Western doctors that their approach to healing is universal.   Decoteau argues that centering an analysis on autism within the Somali diaspora exposes how autism has been defined and institutionalized as a white, middle-class disorder, leading to health disparities based on race, class, age, and ability. The Western Disease asks us to consider the social causes of disease and the role environmental changes and structural inequalities play in health vulnerability.

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cover of The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories

The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories

Charles W. Chesnutt

University of Michigan Press, 1968

Chesnutt writes of the black search for identity in the period between the Civil War and the turn of the century
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cover of The Wild Goose

The Wild Goose

Mori Ogai; Translated with an Introduction by Burton Watson

University of Michigan Press, 1995

Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), one of the giants of modern Japanese literature, wrote The Wild Goose at the turn of the century. Set in the early 1880s, it was, for contemporary readers, a nostalgic return to a time when the nation was embarking on an era of dramatic change. Ōgai’s narrator is a middle-aged man reminiscing about an unconsummated affair, dating to his student days, between his classmate and a young woman kept by a moneylender. At a time when writers tended to depict modern, alienated male intellectuals, the characters of The Wild Goose are diverse, including not only students preparing for a privileged intellectual life and members of the plebeian classes who provide services to them, but also a pair of highly developed female characters. The author’s sympathetic and penetrating portrayal of the dilemmas and frustrations faced by women in this early period of Japan’s modernization makes the story of particular interest to readers today.
Ōgai was not only a prolific and popular writer, but also a protean figure in early modern Japan: critic, translator, physician, military officer, and eventually Japan’s Surgeon General. His rigorous and broad education included the Chinese classics as well as Dutch and German; he gained admittance to the Medical School of Tokyo Imperial University at the age of only fifteen. Once established as a military physician, he was sent to Germany for four years to study aspects of European medicine still unfamiliar to the Japanese. Upon his return, he produced his first works of fiction and translations of English and European literature. Ōgai’s writing is extolled for its unparalleled style and psychological insight, nowhere better demonstrated than in The Wild Goose.
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cover of The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront

The Williamsburg Avant-Garde

Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront

Cisco Bradley

Duke University Press, 2023

In The Williamsburg Avant-Garde Cisco Bradley chronicles the rise and fall of the underground music and art scene in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn between the late 1980s and the early 2010s. Drawing on interviews, archival collections, musical recordings, videos, photos, and other ephemera, Bradley explores the scene’s social, cultural, and economic dynamics. Building on the neighborhood’s punk DIY approach and aesthetic, Williamsburg's free jazz, postpunk, and noise musicians and groups---from Mary Halvorson, Zs, and Nate Wooley to Matana Roberts, Peter Evans, and Darius Jones---produced shows in a variety of unlicensed venues as well as in clubs and cafes. At the same time, pirate radio station free103point9 and music festivals made Williamsburg an epicenter of New York’s experimental culture. In 2005, New York’s rezoning act devastated the community as gentrification displaced its participants farther afield in Brooklyn and in Queens. With this portrait of Williamsburg, Bradley not only documents some of the most vital music of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; he helps readers better understand the formation, vibrancy, and life span of experimental music and art scenes everywhere.
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cover of The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense

The Witch's Flight

The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense

Kara Keeling

Duke University Press, 2007

Kara Keeling contends that cinema and cinematic processes had a profound significance for twentieth-century anticapitalist Black Liberation movements based in the United States. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “the cinematic”—not just as a phenomenon confined to moving-image media such as film and television but as a set of processes involved in the production and reproduction of social reality itself —Keeling describes how the cinematic structures racism, homophobia, and misogyny, and, in the process, denies viewers access to certain images and ways of knowing. She theorizes the black femme as a figure who, even when not explicitly represented within hegemonic cinematic formulations of raced and gendered subjectivities, nonetheless haunts those representations, threatening to disrupt them by making alternative social arrangements visible.

Keeling draws on the thought of Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and others in addition to Deleuze. She pursues the elusive figure of the black femme through Haile Gerima’s film Sankofa, images of women in the Black Panther Party, Pam Grier’s roles in the blaxploitation films of the early 1970s, F. Gary Gray’s film Set It Off, and Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou.

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cover of The Wolf at Number 4: A Novel

The Wolf at Number 4

A Novel

Ayo Tamakloe-Garr

Ohio University Press, 2018

Desire Mensah, a disgraced schoolteacher in her thirties, sees moving to sleepy little Cape Coast, Ghana, as her chance to get away from a shameful secret not buried deeply enough. And maybe, just maybe, she will find the love she craves and the husband her mother craves for her. But in Cape Coast, the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past. That’s the kind of thing Wolfgang “Wolf” Ofori would say. Everyone says the eleven-year-old is a genius—eccentric though he is—and is bound to win Wonderkids, a quiz competition ordinarily for high school students. Wolf and Desire form a strange friendship, even as their mutual understanding both precipitates and reinforces the downfall of each. Before long, their struggles to exist in a world that dehumanizes and then throws the first stone whip up a perfect storm, with deadly consequences. Debut novelist Ayo Tamakloe-Garr drew inspiration from works such as A Streetcar Named Desire and Frankenstein to create The Wolf at Number 4, a story set in 1990s Ghana. The result is a chilling and funny gothic tale that will disarm readers even as it forces them to confront whether the wolves around us are born or made.
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cover of The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory

The Woman in the Zoot Suit

Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory

Catherine S. Ramírez

Duke University Press, 2009

The Mexican American woman zoot suiter, or pachuca, often wore a V-neck sweater or a long, broad-shouldered coat, a knee-length pleated skirt, fishnet stockings or bobby socks, platform heels or saddle shoes, dark lipstick, and a bouffant. Or she donned the same style of zoot suit that her male counterparts wore. With their striking attire, pachucos and pachucas represented a new generation of Mexican American youth, which arrived on the public scene in the 1940s. Yet while pachucos have often been the subject of literature, visual art, and scholarship, The Woman in the Zoot Suit is the first book focused on pachucas.

Two events in wartime Los Angeles thrust young Mexican American zoot suiters into the media spotlight. In the Sleepy Lagoon incident, a man was murdered during a mass brawl in August 1942. Twenty-two young men, all but one of Mexican descent, were tried and convicted of the crime. In the Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943, white servicemen attacked young zoot suiters, particularly Mexican Americans, throughout Los Angeles. The Chicano movement of the 1960s–1980s cast these events as key moments in the political awakening of Mexican Americans and pachucos as exemplars of Chicano identity, resistance, and style. While pachucas and other Mexican American women figured in the two incidents, they were barely acknowledged in later Chicano movement narratives. Catherine S. Ramírez draws on interviews she conducted with Mexican American women who came of age in Los Angeles in the late 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s as she recovers the neglected stories of pachucas. Investigating their relative absence in scholarly and artistic works, she argues that both wartime U.S. culture and the Chicano movement rejected pachucas because they threatened traditional gender roles. Ramírez reveals how pachucas challenged dominant notions of Mexican American and Chicano identity, how feminists have reinterpreted la pachuca, and how attention to an overlooked figure can disclose much about history making, nationalism, and resistant identities.

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cover of The Wongs of Beloit, Wisconsin

The Wongs of Beloit, Wisconsin

Beatrice McKenzie

University of Wisconsin Press, 2022

Through family interviews, original photographs, and national records, Beatrice Loftus McKenzie traces the many lives of a resilient multigenerational family whose experiences parallel the complicated relationship between America and China in the twentieth century. In the early 1900s, Charles Wong moved from Guangdong Province to the United States and opened the Nan King Lo Restaurant in Beloit, Wisconsin. Soon after, his wife Yee Shee joined him to build the "Chop House" into a local institution and start a family. When the Great Depression hit, the Wongs shared what they had with their neighbors. In 1938, Charles's tragic murder left Yee Shee to raise their seven children—ages one through fourteen—on her own. Rather than return to family property in Hong Kong, she and her children stayed in Beloit, buoyed by the friendships they had forged during the worst parts of the 1930s. 

The Wongs thrived in Beloit despite facing racism and classism, embracing wartime opportunities, education, love, and careers within the U. S. McKenzie's collaboration with descendent Mary Wong Palmer reveals a poignant story of Chinese immigrant life in the Upper Midwest that adds a much-needed Wisconsin perspective to existing literature by and about Asian Americans. 
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cover of The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line

The Work of Disaster

Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line

Aidan Seale-Feldman

University of Chicago Press, 2025

A compelling portrait of post-disaster imaginaries of repair in Nepal.

In a world marked by escalating disasters, the forms that care takes are increasingly fraught. In this powerful book, anthropologist Aidan Seale-Feldman focuses on Nepal, where in 2015 a 7.8-magnitude earthquake and equally powerful aftershock struck the country’s central region. The disaster claimed more than nine thousand lives and inspired a surge of humanitarian concern for the mental health of Nepali people. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, The Work of Disaster examines the possibilities generated by disaster, as well as the vexed relationship between crisis and care.
 
Moving between NGO offices, mountain trails, therapeutic interventions, and affected villages, Seale-Feldman tells the story of an emergent “mental health crisis” and the forms of care that followed in the disaster’s wake. She also analyzes the changes emergency services bring about in the places they seek to assist, the challenges of psychiatric support provided by international organizations, and the place of mental health counseling in a modern biopolitical reality. The Work of Disaster reveals the simultaneous violence and gentleness of humanitarian encounters, engaging along the way with broader debates about world making and the ethics of care.
 
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cover of The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora

The Work of Mothering

Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora

Harrod Suarez

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Women make up a majority of the Filipino workforce laboring overseas. Their frequent employment in nurturing, maternal jobs--nanny, maid, caretaker, nurse--has found expression in a significant but understudied body of Filipino and Filipino American literature and cinema.

Harrod J. Suarez's innovative readings of this cultural production explores issues of diaspora, gender, and labor. He details the ways literature and cinema play critical roles in encountering, addressing, and problematizing what we think we know about overseas Filipina workers. Though often seen as compliant subjects, the Filipina mother can also destabilize knowledge production that serves the interests of global empire, capitalism, and Philippine nationalism. Suarez examines canonical writers like Nick Joaquín, Carlos Bulosan, and Jessica Hagedorn to explore this disruption and understand the maternal specificity of the construction of overseas Filipina workers. The result is a series of readings that develop new ways of thinking through diasporic maternal labor that engages with the sociological imaginary.

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cover of The Work of Rape

The Work of Rape

Rana M. Jaleel

Duke University Press, 2021

In The Work of Rape Rana M. Jaleel argues that the redefinition of sexual violence within international law as a war crime, crime against humanity, and genocide owes a disturbing and unacknowledged debt to power and knowledge achieved from racial, imperial, and settler colonial domination. Prioritizing critiques of racial capitalism from women of color, Indigenous, queer, trans, and Global South perspectives, Jaleel reorients how violence is socially defined and distributed through legal definitions of rape. From Cold War conflicts in Latin America, the 1990s ethnic wars in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and the War on Terror to ongoing debates about sexual assault on college campuses, Jaleel considers how legal and social iterations of rape and the terms that define it—consent, force, coercion—are unstable indexes and abstractions of social difference that mediate racial and colonial positionalities. Jaleel traces how post-Cold War orders of global security and governance simultaneously transform the meaning of sexualized violence, extend US empire, and disavow legacies of enslavement, Indigenous dispossession, and racialized violence within the United States.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
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cover of The World as Abyss: The Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene

The World as Abyss

The Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene

Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler

University of Westminster Press, 2023

This book is about a distinctive ‘abyssal’ approach to the crisis of modernity. In this framing, influenced by contemporary critical Black studies, another understanding of the world of modernity is foregrounded – a world violently forged through the projects of Indigenous dispossession, chattel slavery and colonial world-making. Modern and colonial world-making violently forged the ‘human’ by dividing those with ontological security from those without, and by carving out the ‘world’ in a fixed grid of space and time, delineating a linear temporality of ‘progress’ and ‘development’. The distinctiveness of abyssal thought is that it inverts the stakes of critique and brings indeterminacy into the heart of ontological assumptions of a world of entities, essences, and universal determination. This is an approach that does not focus upon tropes of rescue and salvation but upon the generative power of negation. In doing so, it highlights how Caribbean experiences and writings have been drawn upon to provide an important and distinct perspective for critical thought.

"How is it that ontology has come to be seen as the antidote for modernity? While Foucault denigrated ontology as a mistaken and parochial exercise, contemporary social theory holds out the promise that new modes of planetary knowledge will save us from our own excesses. Drawing together long traditions in Caribbean scholarship with Afro-pessimist thought, Pugh and Chandler illustrate how the search for more emancipatory ontologies - relational ontologies, indigenous ontologies, non-human ontologies, etc. – not only misunderstands the problem of modernity but (more importantly) works to veil the negative force that marks both the limit and cause of all such knowledge practices: what they term the abyss. To engage in abyssal thought – as they lay out – is to inhabit a site of refusal: a determination not to be drawn into the lure of ontological ‘correction’ and to recognise that the practice of world making cannot not bear the imprint of colonial violence. Articulated in passionate declarative prose, these authors powerfully illuminate the trap of the emancipatory instinct and the promise of a deconstructive ethic." — Mitch Rose, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Aberystwyth University, UK

“A much-needed intellectual effort in the non-reductionist and non-essentialising style of Pugh and Chandler's previous book. The World as Abyss gives Caribbean thought and culture the place they deserve within critical theory and materialist studies.” — Mónica Fernández Jiménez, Valladolid University, Spain

“For some time now scholars have questioned the overly general assumptions about the ‘anthropos’ of the Anthropocene, but much work needs to be done to flesh out what a decolonized Anthropocene might be. Pugh and Chandler’s The World as Abyss provides an original, intriguing and compelling counterpoint to bland Anthropocene humanism (and posthumanism). This timely work explores the poetics of the Caribbean and provides a way to think about the Anthropocene and the future beyond the managerialism of the present. This book is essential reading for those working in the environmental humanities or Anthropocene studies.” — Claire Colebrook, Professor, Penn State University, USA

“This book names an apocalypse that began long ago. Pugh and Chandler patiently follow the journey of thought as it travels from the Middle Passage to the Caribbean. This brings them face-to-face with the horror of anti-Black violence, not as just another resource to strip-mine, but as an unavoidable abyss that confines all thought. Its reminder: that we have still not yet begun to think a truly Black world.” — Andrew Culp, Professor, California Institute of the Arts, USA 

"With the force of a manifesto, the intensity of a polemic, and the nuance of a treatise, thisbook sets out to disavow the disavowal of Colonial violence in the making of thecontemporary world and thought. Learning from Caribbean thinkers, writers, and poets, itsets to work unworking, desedimenting and deconstructing, the violent ontologicalfoundations by which anti-Black worlds maintain and reproduce their innocence andignorance. Replaying and reiterating, extending and multiplying, gestures of refusal –refusals of subjection, of History, of Geography, of meaning, of Being – there is the refusalof the World as it is and of the World as it could be. The World as Abyss artfully combines acritique of the historical forces which make and unmake the contemporary moment withthe suspension of horizons, of ends, of grounds. What emerges in the wake is anintensification of the generative capacity of this refusal; voids, arrhythmia, counter-times,displacements, dislocations, the abyssal. First as threat and then as promise" — PaulHarrison, Associate Professor of Human Geography, Durham University, UK

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cover of The World in a City: Multiethnic Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles

The World in a City

Multiethnic Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles

David M. Struthers

University of Illinois Press, 2019

A massive population shift transformed Los Angeles in the first decades of the twentieth century. Americans from across the country relocated to the city even as an unprecedented transnational migration brought people from Asia, Europe, and Mexico. Together, these newcomers forged a multiethnic alliance of anarchists, labor unions, and leftists dedicated to challenging capitalism, racism, and often the state.

David M. Struthers draws on the anarchist concept of affinity to explore the radicalism of Los Angeles's interracial working class from 1900 to 1930. Uneven economic development created precarious employment and living conditions for laborers. The resulting worker mobility led to coalitions that, inevitably, remained short lived. As Struthers shows, affinity helps us understand how individual cooperative actions shaped and reshaped these alliances. It also reveals social practices of resistance that are often too unstructured or episodic for historians to capture. What emerges is an untold history of Los Angeles and a revolutionary movement that, through myriad successes and failures, produced powerful examples of racial cooperation.

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cover of The X Catalogue: Notes on Madrid's LatinX Flora and Fauna

The X Catalogue

Notes on Madrid's LatinX Flora and Fauna

Claudia Milian

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

A transatlantic, more-than-human exploration of LatinX presence, memory, and empire in the heart of Madrid

How does LatinXness begin in the Kingdom of Spain? In The X Catalogue, Claudia Milian offers a vade mecum of Madrid, exploring it as an ecological archive and former imperial metropolis. Approaching the “X” as metaphor, method, and philosophical practice, she extends inquiry beyond the human. Milian traces the “X” through transplanted life from the Americas: the roots of the ahuehuete tree (the Montezuma cypress), the engineering and renaming of the acocoxochitl (the dahlia), the “invasion” of the cotorras argentinas (Monk parakeets), and the exhibition of the caimán (the alligator) as a conquered object.

Critical theory and historical cultural studies meet to remap the Atlantic world through the “Xs” of arrival, circulation, and transformation. By examining how LatinXness inhabits the Spanish capital, Milian breaks open LatinX Spain and global LatinX studies. The X Catalogue resists containment, mirroring its objects of study and challenging categories such as native, foreign, or authentic. It advances a more-than-human, transatlantic understanding of LatinXness within empire studies, environmental humanities, and the critical study of tourism.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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cover of The Xavante in Transition: Health, Ecology, and Bioanthropology in Central Brazil

The Xavante in Transition

Health, Ecology, and Bioanthropology in Central Brazil

Carlos E. A. Coimbra, Jr., Nancy M. Flowers, Francisco M. Salzano, and Ricardo V. Santos

University of Michigan Press, 2004

The Xavánte in Transition presents a diachronic view of the long and complex interaction between the Xavánte, an indigenous people of the Brazilian Amazon, and the surrounding nation, documenting the effects of this interaction on Xavánte health, ecology, and biology.
A powerful example of how a small-scale society, buffeted by political and economic forces at the national level and beyond, attempts to cope with changing conditions, this study will be important reading for demographers, economists, environmentalists, and public health workers.

". . . an integrated and politically informed anthropology for the new millennium. They show how the local and the regional meet on the ground and under the skin."
--Alan H. Goodman, Professor of Biological Anthropology, Hampshire College
"This volume delivers what it promises. Drawing on twenty-five years of team research, the authors combine history, ethnography and bioanthropology on the cutting edge of science in highly readable form."
--Daniel Gross, Lead Anthropologist, The World Bank
"No doubt it will serve as a model for future interdisciplinary scholarship. It promises to be highly relevant to policy formulation and implementation of health care programs among small-scale populations in Brazil and elsewhere."
--Laura R. Graham, Professor of Anthropology, University of Iowa

Carlos E. A. Coimbra Jr. is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the National School of Public Health, Rio de Janeiro.Nancy M. Flowers is Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology, Hunter College. Francisco M. Salzano is Emeritus Professor, Department of Genetics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Ricardo V. Santos is Professor of Biological Anthropology at the National School of Public Health and at the National Museum IUFRJ, Rio de Janeiro.
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cover of The Years of Blood: Stories from a Reporting Life in Latin America

The Years of Blood

Stories from a Reporting Life in Latin America

Alma Guillermoprieto

Duke University Press, 2025

For forty years and more Alma Guillermoprieto has wandered tirelessly over the countries of Latin America, interviewing assassins and the families of their victims, talking to street sweepers and artists, rowdy carnival makers and thoughtful politicians (and plenty of rowdy politicians as well). Guillermoprieto draws out common threads in different contexts, like the effects of The War on Drugs in rural and poverty-stricken regions and the experiences of people mixed up in the fray of state- or cartel-sponsored violence. At the same time, she shows how Latin American art translates nostalgia and pain into great beauty. In The Years of Blood, the third volume of her collected reporting, she completes her complex and always compelling portrait of the Latin America of our times, in all its tragedy and glory, as it enters a new era of populism and demagoguery, and tries, yet again, to answer the great unsolved question: How do we change our future so that it does not so exhaustingly resemble our past?
[more]
cover of The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation

The Zoot-Suit Riots

The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation

By Mauricio Mazón

University of Texas Press, 1984

Los Angeles, the summer of 1943. For ten days in June, Anglo servicemen and civilians clashed in the streets of the city with young Mexican Americans whose fingertip coats and pegged, draped trousers announced their rebellion. At their height, the riots involved several thousand men and women, fighting with fists, rocks, sticks, and sometimes knives. In the end none were killed, few were seriously injured, and property damage was slight and yet, even today, the zoot-suit riots are remembered and hold emotional and symbolic significance for Mexican Americans and Anglos alike. The causes of the rioting were complex, as Mazón demonstrates in this illuminating analysis of their psychodynamics. Based in part on previously undisclosed FBI and military records, this engrossing study goes beyond sensational headlines and biased memories to provide an understanding of the zoot-suit riots in the context of both Mexican American and Anglo social history.
[more]
cover of Theater in Israel

Theater in Israel

Linda Ben-Zvi, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1996

The first volume of its kind in English or Hebrew, Theater in Israel gathers original essays, interviews, and commentaries by leading international theater practitioners and critics. The book explores the rich history and diversity of Israel's theater and illustrates the ways in which this politically committed theater mirrors the historical and cultural forces that have shaped Israeli-Arab relations, the events in the Middle East, and the post-Holocaust Jewish experience. The collection provides a thorough and engaging survey of the playwrights, directors, actors, and productions that comprise this dynamic theater, a theater whose evolution and ideology diverge from Anglo-American models. 

The book's early essays trace the development of Hebrew drama from its inception in Moscow in 1918 to the establishment of a national theater and the emergence of a national repertoire. Succeeding essays explore the personalities and themes that have dominated the Israeli stage, featuring interviews with leading Israeli playwrights, actors, directors, and dramaturgs. The book also provides highlights from the first Palestinian and Israeli Arab Theater Symposium, focusing on the history, themes, and future of Arab theater. The contributors include Karen Alkalay-Gut, Shosh Avigal, Linda Ben-Zvi, Erella Brown, Joseph Chaikin, Scott Cummings, Ben-Ami Feingold, Gad Kaynar, Shimon Lev- Ari, Shimon Levy, Gabriella Moscati-Steindler, Freddie Rokem, Eli Rozik, Gershon Shaked, Chaim Shoham, Michael Taub, Dan Urian, Shoshana Weitz, and Nurit Yaari.

[more]
cover of Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany

Theaters of Occupation

Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany

Jennifer Fay

University of Minnesota Press, 2008

In the aftermath of total war and unconditional surrender, Germans found themselves receiving instruction from their American occupiers. It was not a conventional education. In their effort to transform German national identity and convert a Nazi past into a democratic future, the Americans deployed what they perceived as the most powerful and convincing weapon-movies.

In a rigorous analysis of the American occupation of postwar Germany and the military’s use of “soft power,” Jennifer Fay considers how Hollywood films, including Ninotchka, Gaslight, and Stagecoach, influenced German culture and cinema. In this cinematic pedagogy, dark fantasies of American democracy and its history were unwittingly played out on-screen. Theaters of Occupation reveals how Germans responded to these education efforts and offers new insights about American exceptionalism and virtual democracy at the dawn of the cold war.

Fay’s innovative approach examines the culture of occupation not only as a phase in U.S.–German relations but as a distinct space with its own discrete cultural practices. As the American occupation of Germany has become a paradigm for more recent military operations, Fay argues that we must question its efficacy as a mechanism of cultural and political change.

Jennifer Fay is associate professor and codirector of film studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University.

[more]
cover of Theatre History Studies 2009, Vol. 29

Theatre History Studies 2009, Vol. 29

Edited by Rhona Justice-Malloy, with contributions from Christin Essin, Carolyn D. Roark, Meredith Lowe, Valleri J. Hohman, Fonzie D. Geary II, Robert B. Shimko, Robert B. Theatre History Studies, Elizabeth Osborne, Paul Cornwell, Harry J. Elam Jr., etc.

University of Alabama Press, 2009

Reimagining the archive, one performance at a time.

Theatre History Studies is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to excellence in theatre historiography. Volume 29, edited by Rhona Justice-Malloy, includes essays that span a wide range of historical periods, geographic regions, and thematic concerns. Highlights include explorations of pain and torment in performance, the aesthetics of American modernity through Belasco and Jones, and the cultural politics of prohibition on stage. The volume also features visual and archival studies, including an interview with playwright Wendy Wasserstein and analyses of Shakespeare’s reception in Restoration theatre. With contributions from over thirty scholars, this edition offers a rich and multifaceted view of how theatre reflects, resists, and reshapes historical narratives.



 

[more]
cover of Theatre History Studies 2020, Vol. 39

Theatre History Studies 2020, Vol. 39

Edited by Lisa Jackson-Schebetta

University of Alabama Press, 2020

Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference 

Reframing the past to illuminate the future of performance.

Theatre History Studies is a peer-reviewed journal devoted to excellence in theatre historiography. Volume 38, edited by Lisa Jackson-Schebetta, features three distinct sections: foundational studies in theatre history, a special section on hemispheric historiographies, and award-winning essays from the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Contributors examine topics ranging from Shakespeare and racial antagonism to systemic dramaturgy, labor unions in regional theatre, and digital diasporic activism. The volume also includes visual histories and decolonial methodologies that challenge Eurocentric narratives and foreground Latinx, feminist, and socialist performance traditions. With 272 pages and 18 black-and-white figures, this edition is a rich resource for scholars seeking to expand the scope and methods of theatre history.


 

[more]
cover of Theatre History Studies 2024, Vol 43

Theatre History Studies 2024, Vol 43

Edited by Jocelyn L. Buckner

University of Alabama Press, 2025

The official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference

Where past and performance converge—scholarship that moves the stage forward.

Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference (MATC), a regional body devoted to theatre scholarship and practice. The conference encompasses the states of Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. The purpose of the conference is to unite persons and organizations within the region with an interest in theatre and to promote the growth and development of all forms of theatre. THS is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and is included in the MLA Directory of Periodicals. THS is indexed in Humanities Index, Humanities Abstracts, Book Review Index, MLA International Bibliography, International Bibliography of Theatre, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, IBZ International Bibliography of Periodical Literature, and IBR International Bibliography of Book Reviews. Full texts of essays appear in the databases of both Humanities Abstracts Full Text as well as SIRS.

Along with books reviews on the latest publications from established and emerging voices in the field, this issue of Theatre History Studies contains four sections with two introductions, nine essays, and eleven book reviews total. In the general section, three essays offer an array of insights, methods, and provocations. In the special section titled “Manifestos for Black Theatre, Then and Now,” contributors capture their moment, their ways of working, and their experience as scholars, humans, and citizens in 2023. In part III, Ariel Nereson’s Robert A. Schanke Research Award-winning paper from the 2023 MATC conference examines collective dance histories through the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company’s Continuous Replay. Taken together, volume 43 captures how this journal serves theatre historians as scholars and laborers as they work to attend and tend to their field.
 

CONTRIBUTORS

Daniel E. Atkinson / Ashlyn K. Barnett / David Bisaha / Jocelyn L. Buckner / Julie Burrell / Jordana Cox / Jordan Ealey / Eric M. Glover / Adam Goldstein / Chao Guo / Amy B. Huang / Ariel Nereson / Zachary F. Price / Danielle Rosvally / Letica L. Ridley / Bradford G. Sadler / Richard Sautter / Michael Schweikardt / Margo Skornia / Dennis Sloan / Josh Stenberg / Paul Michael Thomson / Scott Venters / Isaiah Matthew Wooden

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cover of Theatres of the Body: Dance and Discourse in Antebellum Philadelphia

Theatres of the Body

Dance and Discourse in Antebellum Philadelphia

Lynn Matluck Brooks

Temple University Press, 2025

Theatres of the Body is Lynn Matluck Brooks’ critical examination of danced stage productions in antebellum Philadelphia. Starting in the 1820s, Brooks explores visual art and social and theatrical dancing across different classes, focusing on the work of E. W. Clay. Continuing through the 1830s, she looks at pantomime ballets and blackface minstrelsy through a political lens, asking questions regarding citizenship, slavery, and freedom. At the time, the city boasted the largest number of native-born ballet dancers in the young nation. Philadelphia also became a creative home to blackface star T. D. Rice, who helped popularize that performance genre.

Reviewing print culture in the 1840s, Brooks shows how newspapers, magazines, and popular fiction provided documentation of dancing in Philadelphia as well as the responses of dance commentators, practitioners, and moralists. Theatres of the Body also considers the interplay of science with dance in the 1850s, which impacted both dance practices and reception.

Providing an expansive historiography of these significant contributions to dance in the United States, Brooks deepens our understanding of antebellum culture and history.
[more]
cover of Them Goon Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism

Them Goon Rules

Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism

Marquis Bey

University of Arizona Press, 2019

Marquis Bey’s debut collection, Them Goon Rules, is an un-rulebook, a long-form essayistic sermon that meditates on how Blackness and nonnormative gender impact and remix everything we claim to know.

A series of essays that reads like a critical memoir, this work queries the function and implications of politicized Blackness, Black feminism, and queerness. Bey binds together his personal experiences with social justice work at the New York–based Audre Lorde Project, growing up in Philly, and rigorous explorations of the iconoclasm of theorists of Black studies and Black feminism. Bey’s voice recalibrates itself playfully on a dime, creating a collection that tarries in both academic and nonacademic realms.

Fashioning fugitive Blackness and feminism around a line from Lil’ Wayne’s “A Millie,” Them Goon Rules is a work of “auto-theory” that insists on radical modes of thought and being as a refrain and a hook that is unapologetic, rigorously thoughtful, and uncompromising.
[more]
cover of Themes in West Africa’s History

Themes in West Africa’s History

Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong

Ohio University Press, 2006

There has long been a need for a new textbook on West Africa’s history. In Themes in West Africa’s History, editor Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong and his contributors meet this need, examining key themes in West Africa’s prehistory to the present through the lenses of their different disciplines.

The contents of the book comprise an introduction and thirteen chapters divided into three parts. Each chapter provides an overview of existing literature on major topics, as well as a short list of recommended reading, and breaks new ground through the incorporation of original research. The first part of the book examines paths to a West African past, including perspectives from archaeology, ecology and culture, linguistics, and oral traditions. Part two probes environment, society, and agency and historical change through essays on the slave trade, social inequality, religious interaction, poverty, disease, and urbanization. Part three sheds light on contemporary West Africa in exploring how economic and political developments have shaped religious expression and identity in significant ways.

Themes in West Africa’s History represents a range of intellectual views and interpretations from leading scholars on West Africa’s history. It will appeal to college undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars in the way it draws on different disciplines and expertise to bring together key themes in West Africa’s history, from prehistory to the present.

[more]
cover of Theorizing Music for Antiracist Futures: Key Terms and Critical Methods

Theorizing Music for Antiracist Futures

Key Terms and Critical Methods

Edited by Jade Conlee and Tatiana Koike

University of Michigan Press, 2027

Every day, musicians and teachers use terms like “pitch,” “scale,” and “meter” to describe what music is made of and how it works. But what are the stories behind our musical terminology? Theorizing Music for Antiracist Futures contends that seemingly neutral musical terms are entangled with human histories of oppression and resistance. Bringing together scholars from music theory, ethnomusicology, music history, and popular music studies, the book reads music history alongside critical philosophies of race and ethnic studies to illuminate the power structures that inform musical description and analysis across disciplines. With each chapter focusing on a single musical term, topics covered include: how ancient Greek philosophers used “harmony” to promote peaceful relationships between the ruling class and their subordinates; how sixteenth-century European colonizers perceived Indigenous groups as “dissonant;” and how nineteenth-century scholars measured “pitch” to form now-discredited scientific proof of Europe’s cognitive and musical superiority over its colonized populations. Other chapters take a global perspective, examining theorizations of meter, scale, and musical texture in Japan, Iraq, Malawi, Georgia, and Central Africa. Theorizing Music for Antiracist Futures brings these histories to light and is a crucial volume in creating antiracist futures for music studies.

[more]
cover of Theory from the Trenches: Decolonization and the Horizons of Subaltern Marxism

Theory from the Trenches

Decolonization and the Horizons of Subaltern Marxism

Shozab Raza

Duke University Press, 2027

Decolonization has become a buzzword claimed by liberals and fascists, nonprofits and for-profits alike, and stripped of its liberatory force. In Theory from the Trenches, Shozab Raza recovers a radical vision of decolonization: one driven not by political or intellectual elites but by ordinary, subaltern actors, a vision at once global and local, dedicated as much to dismantling imperialist political economies as it is to transforming the terms of theory itself. Raza offers a striking example of this “trench theory” in his ethnographic study of Marxism in post-independence Pakistan. Drawing on oral histories, archival materials, and fieldwork among surviving organizers, he recounts how Pakistani peasants joined the communist Mazdoor Kisan Party (MKP) in the 1970s and began reading and remaking Marxist theory for their own contexts. Inspired by Maoism, Sufi Islam, Baloch tribal ethics, and more, MKP cadres developed a theory and practice primed for political combat. By examining how peasants became theorists for a global communist movement, Raza buries assumptions about peasant parochialism, upends a long-presumed divide between fieldwork and theory work, and plots the horizons of a revolutionary decolonization.
[more]
cover of There Used to Be Order: Life on the Copperbelt after the Privatisation of the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines

There Used to Be Order

Life on the Copperbelt after the Privatisation of the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines

Patience Mususa

University of Michigan Press, 2021

In There Used to Be Order, Patience Mususa considers social change in the Copperbelt region of Zambia following the re-privatization of the large state mining conglomerate, the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM), in the mid-1990s. As the copper mines were Zambia’s most important economic asset, the sale of ZCCM was considered a major loss to the country. More crucially, privatization marked the end of a way of life for mine employees and mining communities. Based on three years of ethnographic field research, this book examines life for those living in difficult economic circumstances, and considers the tension between the life they live and the nature of an “extractive area.” This account, unusual in its examination of middle-income decline in Africa, directs us to think of the Copperbelt not only as an extractive locale for copper whose activities are affected by the market, but also as a place where the residents’ engagement with the harsh reality of losing jobs and struggling to earn a living after the withdrawal of welfare is simultaneously changing both the material and social character of the place. Drawing on phenomenological approaches, the book develops a theoretical model of “trying,” which accounts for both Copperbelt residents’ aspirations and efforts.
[more]
cover of There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture

There Was a Woman

La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture

By Domino Renee Perez

University of Texas Press, 2008

"How is it that there are so many lloronas?" A haunting figure of Mexican oral and literary traditions, La Llorona permeates the consciousness of her folk community. From a ghost who haunts the riverbank to a murderous mother condemned to wander the earth after killing her own children in an act of revenge or grief, the Weeping Woman has evolved within Chican@ imaginations across centuries, yet no truly comprehensive examination of her impact existed until now. Tracing La Llorona from ancient oral tradition to her appearance in contemporary material culture, There Was a Woman delves into the intriguing transformations of this provocative icon.

From La Llorona's roots in legend to the revisions of her story and her exaltation as a symbol of resistance, Domino Renee Perez illuminates her many permutations as seductress, hag, demon, or pitiful woman. Perez draws on more than two hundred artifacts to provide vivid representations of the ways in which these perceived identities are woven from abstract notions—such as morality or nationalism—and from concrete, often misunderstood concepts from advertising to television and literature. The result is a rich and intricate survey of a powerful figure who continues to be reconfigured.

[more]
cover of They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir

They Call You Back

A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir

Tim Z. Hernandez

University of Arizona Press, 2024

2025 Memoir Prize for Books Finalist

A haunting, an obsession, a calling: Tim Z. Hernandez has been searching for people his whole life. Now, in this highly anticipated memoir, he takes us along on an investigative odyssey through personal and collective history to uncover the surprising conjunctions that bind our stories together.

Hernandez’s mission to find the families of the twenty-eight Mexicans who were killed in the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon formed the basis for his acclaimed documentary novel All They Will Call You, which the San Francisco Chronicle dubbed “a stunning piece of investigative journalism,” and the New York Times hailed as “painstaking detective work by a writer who is the descendant of farmworkers.”

In this riveting new work, Hernandez continues his search for the plane crash victims while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations—a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world.

They Call You Back is the true chronicle of one man’s obsession to restore dignity to an undignified chapter in America’s past, while at the same time making a case for why we must heal our personal wounds if we are ever to heal our political ones.
 
[more]
cover of They Came to Japan: An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543-1640

They Came to Japan

An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543-1640

Michael Cooper, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1995

The Japan accidentally discovered by the Europeans in 1543 was a country torn by internecene wars waged by independent barons who recognised no effective central government and were free to appropriate as many neighbouring fiefs as force of arms and treachery would permit. The Japan which deported the Europeans a century later was a stable, highly centralised bureaucracy under the firm control of a usurping family which was to continue to rule the country until well into the Victorian age. Europeans living in Japan at the time have not only recorded the events of this fascinating period but also provided a picture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Japanese life. Apart from a few lacunae, a remarkably full description of the country in this century—its history, people, traditions, culture, and religion—can be pieced together.
They Came to Japan collects and translates excerpts from more than thirty early European accounts of Japan, many previously unpublished and extremely rare. Arranged into thematic chapters on aspects of Japanese society, these commentaries are most interesting not for what they say about the Japan but about the European writers themselves. Their attitude towards the newly discovered country and its inhabitants is clearly reflected in their letters and reports, especially when implicit comparisons are made between Japan and Europe. During the course of their discovery of the East, the Europeans had generally adopted the role of representatives of a superior race. They had taken for granted that Europe was synonymous with the civilised world, and thus the discovery of the highly developed Japanese culture and civilisation, which had grown up quite independently of Europe, came as a salutary shock. Because they could not aggressively assert themselves by force of arms in such a remote place, as was their norm, this was to be the first confrontation between East and West on equal terms.
[more]
cover of They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression

They Came to Toil

Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression

By Melita M. Garza

University of Texas Press, 2018

As the Great Depression gripped the United States in the early 1930s, the Hoover administration sought to preserve jobs for Anglo-Americans by targeting Mexicans, including long-time residents and even US citizens, for deportation. Mexicans comprised more than 46 percent of all people deported between 1930 and 1939, despite being only 1 percent of the US population. In all, about half a million people of Mexican descent were deported to Mexico, a “homeland” many of them had never seen, or returned voluntarily in fear of deportation.

They Came to Toil investigates how the news reporting of this episode in immigration history created frames for representing Mexicans and immigrants that persist to the present. Melita M. Garza sets the story in San Antonio, a city central to the formation of Mexican American identity, and contrasts how the city’s three daily newspapers covered the forced deportations of Mexicans. She shows that the Spanish-language La Prensa not surprisingly provided the fullest and most sympathetic coverage of immigration issues, while the locally owned San Antonio Express and the Hearst chain-owned San Antonio Light varied between supporting Mexican labor and demonizing it. Garza analyzes how these media narratives, particularly in the English-language press, contributed to the racial “othering” of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Adding an important new chapter to the history of the Long Civil Rights Movement, They Came to Toil brings needed historical context to immigration issues that dominate today’s headlines.

[more]
cover of They Came to Wisconsin

They Came to Wisconsin

Julia Pferdehirt

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2002

They Came to Wisconsin presents three themes of the state’s immigrant history: leaving the homeland, making the journey, and enduring the first year of settlement. Journal and diary entries and letters from European groups and oral histories from African American, Latino, Hmong, and Amish sources make this book dynamic and wholly inclusive. They Came to Wisconsin breaks fresh ground in presenting document-centered Wisconsin history to a young audience. More important, these firsthand stories add a real human dimension to history, helping students to compare the experiences of the varied groups who came to Wisconsin in the last two hundred years.

Distributed for the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.

[more]
cover of They Came to Wisconsin: Teacher's Guide and Student Materials

They Came to Wisconsin

Teacher's Guide and Student Materials

Harriet Brown

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2002

The companion teacher’s guide to They Came from Wisconsin offers educators in every setting—classroom, library, and at home—vocabulary lists, objectives, skills, strategies, standards-based activities, and dozens of blackline masters for worksheets and handouts. Engages students in hands-on exploration of the immigration theme.

Distributed for the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
[more]
cover of Thinking While Black: Translating the Politics and Popular Culture of a Rebel Generation

Thinking While Black

Translating the Politics and Popular Culture of a Rebel Generation

Daniel McNeil

Rutgers University Press, 2023

Thinking While Black brings together the work and ideas of the most notorious film critic in America, one of the most influential intellectuals in the United Kingdom, and a political and cultural generation that consumed images of rebellion and revolution around the world as young Black teenagers in the late 1960s. Drawing on hidden and little known archives of resistance and resilience, it sheds new light on the politics and poetics of young people who came together, often outside of conventional politics, to rock against racism in the 1970s and early ‘80s. It re-examines debates in the 1980s and ‘90s about artists who “spread out” to mount aggressive challenges to a straight, white, middle-class world, and entertainers who “sold out” to build their global brands with performances that attacked the Black poor, rejected public displays of introspection, and expressed unambiguous misogyny and homophobia. Finally, it thinks with and through the work of writers who have been celebrated and condemned as eminent intellectuals and curmudgeonly contrarians in the twenty-first century. In doing so, it delivers the smartest and most nuanced investigation into thinkers such as Paul Gilroy and Armond White as they have evolved from “young soul rebels” to “middle-aged mavericks” and “grumpy old men,” lamented the debasement and deskilling of Black film and music in a digital age, railed against the discourteous discourse and groupthink of screenies and Internet Hordes, and sought to stimulate some deeper and fresher thinking about racism, nationalism, multiculturalism, political correctness and social media.

Listen along with this Spotify playlist inspired by the book!

For copyright reasons, this book is available in the U.S.A only.
 
[more]
cover of Thinking in English, Speaking in Hindi: Translation, Creativity, and Value in Bollywood and Beyond

Thinking in English, Speaking in Hindi

Translation, Creativity, and Value in Bollywood and Beyond

Tejaswini Ganti

Duke University Press, 2027

Centered on the booming world of Bollywood and the dubbing industry based in Mumbai, Thinking in English, Speaking in Hindi illustrates the essential role translation plays in the political economy of media industries. Tejaswini Ganti draws on five years of extensive fieldwork to investigate the translation practices, linguistic ideologies, and regimes of value structuring mainstream media creation. By analyzing screenwriting and dubbing practices in Mumbai, she argues that translation is not merely a linguistic bridge but a constitutive and material force in media production. Foregrounding the symbiotic relationship between Hindi and English within Mumbai’s media industries, she demonstrates that translation operates beyond notions of linguistic purity or inherent hierarchy and is a dynamic and multimodal process of creating social, aesthetic, and economic value. By examining language labor in cultural production from a dominant media center in the Global South, Ganti offers new ways of thinking about global flows of culture, language politics, and ideologies of creativity and expertise in the contemporary world.
[more]
cover of Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Practice and Vice Versa

Thinking with Ngangas

What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Practice and Vice Versa

Stephan Palmié

University of Chicago Press, 2023

A comparative investigation of Afro-Cuban ritual and Western science that aims to challenge the rationality of Western expert practices.
 
Inspired by the exercises of Father Lafitau, an eighteenth-century Jesuit priest and protoethnographer who compared the lives of the Iroquois to those of the ancient Greeks, Stephan Palmié embarks on a series of unusual comparative investigations of Afro-Cuban ritual and Western science. What do organ transplants have to do with ngangas, a complex assemblage of mineral, animal, and vegetal materials, including human remains, that serve as the embodiment of the spirits of the dead? How do genomics and “ancestry projects” converge with divination and oracular systems? What does it mean that Black Cubans in the United States took advantage of Edisonian technology to project the disembodied voice of a mystical entity named ecué onto the streets of Philadelphia? Can we consider Afro-Cuban spirit possession as a form of historical knowledge production?
 
By writing about Afro-Cuban ritual in relation to Western scientific practice, and vice versa, Palmié hopes to challenge the rationality of Western expert practices, revealing the logic that brings together enchantment and experiment.
[more]
cover of Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation

Third World Studies

Theorizing Liberation

Gary Y. Okihiro

Duke University Press, 2016

In 1968 the Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State College demanded the creation of a Third World studies program to counter the existing curricula that ignored issues of power—notably, imperialism and oppression. The administration responded by institutionalizing an ethnic studies program; Third World studies was over before it began. Detailing the field's genesis and premature death, Gary Y. Okihiro presents an intellectual history of ethnic studies and Third World studies and shows where they converged and departed by identifying some of their core ideas, concepts, methods, and theories. In so doing, he establishes the contours of a unified field of study—Third World studies—that pursues a decolonial politics by examining the human condition broadly, especially in regard to oppression, and critically analyzing the locations and articulations of power as manifested in the social formation. Okihiro's framing of Third World studies moves away from ethnic studies' liberalism and its U.S.-centrism to emphasize the need for complex thinking and political action in the drive for self-determination. 
[more]
cover of Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation

Third World Studies

Theorizing Liberation

Gary Y. Okihiro

Duke University Press, 2024

In this revised and expanded second edition of Third World Studies, Gary Y. Okihiro considers the methods and theories that might constitute the formation of Third World studies. Proposed in 1968 at San Francisco State College by the Third World Liberation Front but replaced by faculty and administrators with ethnic studies, Third World studies was over before it began. As opposed to ethnic studies, which Okihiro critiques for its liberalism and US-centrism, Third World studies begins with the colonized world and the anti-imperial, anticolonial, and antiracist projects located therein as described by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1900. Third World studies analyzes the locations and articulations of power around the axes of race, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, class, and nation. In this new edition, Okihiro emphasizes the work of Third World intellectuals such as M. N. Roy, José Carlos Mariátegui, and Oliver Cromwell Cox; foregrounds the importance of Bandung and the Tricontinental; and adds discussions of eugenics, feminist epistemologies, and religion. With this work, Okihiro establishes Third World studies as a theoretical formation and a liberatory practice.
[more]
cover of Third Worlds Within: Multiethnic Movements and Transnational Solidarity

Third Worlds Within

Multiethnic Movements and Transnational Solidarity

Daniel Widener

Duke University Press, 2024

In Third Worlds Within, Daniel Widener expands conceptions of the struggle for racial justice by reframing antiracist movements in the United States in a broader internationalist context. For Widener, antiracist struggles at home are connected to and profoundly shaped by similar struggles abroad. Drawing from an expansive historical archive and his own activist and family history, Widener explores the links between local and global struggles throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He uncovers what connects seemingly disparate groups like Japanese American and Black communities in Southern California or American folk musicians and revolutionary movements in Asia. He also centers the expansive vision of global Indigenous movements, the challenges of Black/Brown solidarity, and the influence of East Asian organizing on the US Third World Left. In the process, Widener reveals how the fight against racism unfolds both locally and globally and creates new forms of solidarity. Highlighting the key strategic role played by US communities of color in efforts to defeat the conjoined forces of capitalism, racism, and imperialism, Widener produces a new understanding of history that informs contemporary social struggle.
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cover of Thirteen Cents: A Novel

Thirteen Cents

A Novel

K. Sello Duiker

Ohio University Press, 2013

Every city has an unspoken side. Cape Town, between the picture postcard mountain and sea, has its own shadow: a place of dislocation and uncertainty, dependence and desperation, destruction and survival, gangsters, pimps, pedophiles, hunger, hope, and moments of happiness. Living in this shadow is Azure, a thirteen-year-old who makes his living on the streets, a black teenager sought out by white men, beholden to gang leaders but determined to create some measure of independence in this dangerous world. Thirteen Cents is an extraordinary and unsparing account of a coming of age in Cape Town. Reminiscent of some of the greatest child narrators in literature, Azure’s voice will stay with the reader long after this short novel is finished. Based on personal experiences, Thirteen Cents is Duiker’s debut novel, originally published in 2000. This first edition to be published outside South Africa includes an introduction by Shaun Viljoen and a special glossary of South African words and phrases from the text translated into English.
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cover of Thirteen Ways of Looking at Latino Art

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Latino Art

Ilan Stavans, Jorge J. E. Gracia

Duke University Press, 2014

The essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans and the analytic philosopher Jorge J. E. Gracia share long-standing interests in the intersection of art and ideas. Here they take thirteen pieces of Latino art, each reproduced in color, as occasions for thematic discussions. Whether the work at the center of a particular conversation is a triptych created by the brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre, Andres Serrano's controversial Piss Christ, a mural by the graffiti artist BEAR_TCK, or Above All Things, a photograph by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Stavans and Gracia's exchanges inevitably open out to literature, history, ethics, politics, religion, and visual culture more broadly. Autobiographical details pepper Stavans and Gracia's conversations, as one or the other tells what he finds meaningful in a given work. Sparkling with insight, their exchanges allow the reader to eavesdrop on two celebrated intellectuals—worldly, erudite, and unafraid to disagree—as they reflect on the pleasures of seeing.
 
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