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The first critical edition of the writings of the prolific radical workers’ newspaper columnist and musician who rode the rails during the Great Depression

The Popular Wobbly brings together a wide selection of writings by T-Bone Slim, the most popular and talented writer belonging to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Slim wrote humorous, polemical pieces, engaging with topics like labor and class injustice, which were mostly published in IWW publications from 1920 until his death in 1942. Although relatively little is known about Slim, editors Owen Clayton and Iain McIntyre coalesce the latest research on this enigmatic character to create a vivid portrait that adds valuable context for the array of writings assembled here.

Known as “the laureate of the logging camps,” Slim also composed numerous songs that have been performed and recorded by Pete Seeger, Utah Phillips, and Candie Carawan, who in 1960 updated Slim’s song “The Popular Wobbly” with Civil Rights–era lyrics. Slim’s witticisms, sayings, and exhortations (“Wherever you find injustice, the proper form of politeness is attack”; “Only the poor break laws—the rich evade them”) were widely discussed among fellow hobos across the “jungle” campfires that dotted the railways, and some even transcribed his commentary on boxcars that traveled the country. Yet despite Slim’s importance and fame during his lifetime, his work disappeared from public view almost immediately after his death.

The Popular Wobbly is the first critical edition of Slim’s work and also a significant contribution to literature about working-class writers, the radical labor movement, and the history and culture of nomadism and precarity. With this publication, Slim’s rediscovered writings can once again inspire artists and activists to march and agitate for a more just and equitable world.

The expression “the New South” was introduced by Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, to a New York audience in 1886; every generation of writers since has used the term. The southern population, unique in its socioeconomic and cultural characteristics, has always been a topic of major interest with U.S. demographers.

The articles in this book, the majority of which were originally presented at the Southern Regional Demographic Group meeting in 1976, deal with fertility, mortality, migration, and the factors that influence these components. A number of the contributors trace patterns of demographic change in the South showing convergence with the rest of the United States. Questions are raised about whether the convergence represents a permanent trend—possibly due to increased communication—or whether further divergence may be expected in the future.

The contributors include Dudley L. Poston, Jr., William J. Serow, Robert H. Weller, Ronald R. Rindfuss, Harry M. Rosenberg, Drusilla Burnham, David F. Sly, Omer R. Galle, Robert N. Stern, Joachim Singelmann, Susan E. Clarke, and George C. Myers.

The Post-Global City seeks to open a new field of analytical inquiry that examines knowledge production and technological developments in urban Africa rooted in local, historical realities, while also partaking in transnational, global processes. This work explores the ways in which urban residents have utilized technologies and networks to operate around, under, and beyond the state and the international “order,” and challenges the stereotypical images of Africa as a continent either devoid of technology or filled with either broken technologies or technologies from the Global North or Asia. This book focuses on accounts and critiques of new “Rising Africa” ideologies, examining megaprojects such as geothermal and hydroelectric plants with new networked startups that circumvent state and patriarchal hierarchies, women vendors selling online, youths designing and constructing oil refining technologies and tech startups working across diasporas.

Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork carried out in urban spaces in Nigeria, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Gabon, Cameroon, and Tanzania, The Post-Global City brings together voices from Africa, Europe, and the United States to inquire into the dialectics between technology and the urban on the African continent. 

Rethinking the state through everyday life in South Sudan

In 2011, after decades of war, South Sudan became the newest nation-state to emerge in the twenty-first century. Independence brought hopes for peace and self-determination, yet those aspirations soon confronted renewed conflict and the challenges of building a nation amid significant political, environmental, and economic uncertainty. The Post-State State is a political and urban ethnography of how South Sudanese people navigate this unsettled moment by imagining and striving for their possible futures in an open-ended state of becoming.

Christian J. Doll explores how residents of the capital, Juba, make and remake urban space through everyday practices of state-making and state-imagining. In a place where civilians’ fear of the state’s violent potential and the limits of territorial sovereignty are particularly extreme, Doll centers the ways South Sudanese people transform uncertainty into possibility. Hope, disappointment, and anticipation emerge not as opposing forces but as intertwined ways of understanding and acting in the world.

Through analyses of political rituals, social infrastructures, ethnic spatial claims, humanitarian governance, and plans for a new capital city, The Post-State State offers a new understanding of how the state is imagined and enacted. In doing so, this book advances broader conversations about state-making, sovereignty, precarity, and futurity in an increasingly uncertain political world.

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A history of how decolonization shaped Jewish political identity in late-twentieth-century France.

In The Postcolonial Jewish Question, Mendel Kranz shows how France’s colonial history fundamentally shaped contemporary debates among Jews in France about racism, discrimination, and minority politics during the late twentieth century. As the wider country confronted the legacies of the Holocaust and the decline of its colonial empire, Jewish thinkers questioned the boundaries of their own political identity and challenged prevailing paradigms of Western universalism. This book traces how prominent and lesser-known thinkers—including Albert Memmi, Emmanuel Levinas, Alain Finkielkraut, and Wladimir Rabi—as well as organizations like the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française engaged with issues of oppression, nationhood, and communal identity, and the ways that colonialism and its afterlives shaped those discussions. Kranz reveals how the Jewish question itself changed shape through confrontations with postcolonial politics. In doing so, he calls for a reassessment of the parameters of the Jewish question amid colonialism’s enduring legacies in the present.

This archaeological study of the interactions between Western Shoshone families and Euro-American ranchers in the late nineteenth century helps fill the gap between what is known regarding Late Prehistoric foragers of the American West and ethnohistoric understanding of Native American peoples of the Great Basin.

Pottery Hill, an archaeological site located in Grass Valley, Nevada, northeast of the historic mining town of Austin, represents a small settlement of Native Americans who lived there in the late 1800s. The Grass Valley Shoshone, whose environment and traditional lifeways were disrupted by the arrival of miners and settlers in the 1860s, found work on the ranches and farms in the valley.

Archaeological fieldwork conducted in the 1970s investigated house remains, hearths, and artifacts. A recent analysis of these data, enhanced by the use of archival documents and oral history, provides new insights into the dynamics of late nineteenth-century life in central Nevada. The Pottery Hill Site addresses a critical period in the history of the Grass Valley Shoshone, who adopted and modified Euro-American artifacts and materials while maintaining important aspects of their traditional culture. It gives readers a deeper understanding of the effects of Euro-American settlement on the Shoshone, the history of the western United States, and the reciprocal impacts of cultural contact.

There is a long history of sororities such as Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) and Delta Sigma Theta (Delta) participating in activism and social justice efforts—from the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s to Kamala Harris’s recent political campaigns. But radical movements like Black Lives Matter have posed more challenging questions for these organizations.

In The Power We Need Right Now, Aisha Upton Azzam investigates the legacies of AKA and Delta to understand the considerations that weigh on their engagement with present day Black movements. These organizations wield a significant amount of political power to mobilize in support of their causes. The response each sorority has had to movements fifty years apart is strikingly similar—even if their approaches are quite different.

Using a Black feminist theoretical framework, Upton Azzam brings context and meaning to the interactions of these sororities with Black radical movements. She highlights the costs communities bear from sororities’ adherence to respectability and racial uplift ideologies by tracing each sorority’s history and response to emerging Black feminist and Black Power movements during the tumultuous 1970s.

The Power We Need Right Now emphasizes that Black communities still have the ability to wield their political power and influence to further the struggle for Black liberation.

Based on extensive archival research, The Power of Huacas is the first book to take account of the reciprocal effects of religious colonization as they impacted Andean populations and, simultaneously, dramatically changed the culture and beliefs of Spanish Christians.

Winner, Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Historical Studies, American Academy of Religion, 2015

The role of the religious specialist in Andean cultures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was a complicated one, balanced between local traditions and the culture of the Spanish. In The Power of Huacas, Claudia Brosseder reconstructs the dynamic interaction between religious specialists and the colonial world that unfolded around them, considering how the discourse about religion shifted on both sides of the Spanish and Andean relationship in complex and unexpected ways. In The Power of Huacas, Brosseder examines evidence of transcultural exchange through religious history, anthropology, and cultural studies. Taking Andean religious specialists—or hechizeros (sorcerers) in colonial Spanish terminology—as a starting point, she considers the different ways in which Andeans and Spaniards thought about key cultural and religious concepts. Unlike previous studies, this important book fully outlines both sides of the colonial relationship; Brosseder uses extensive archival research in Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Spain, Italy, and the United States, as well as careful analysis of archaeological and art historical objects, to present the Andean religious worldview of the period on equal footing with that of the Spanish. Throughout the colonial period, she argues, Andean religious specialists retained their own unique logic, which encompassed specific ideas about holiness, nature, sickness, and social harmony. The Power of Huacas deepens our understanding of the complexities of assimilation, showing that, within the maelstrom of transcultural exchange in the Spanish Americas, European paradigms ultimately changed more than Andean ones.

The first of its kind, The Power of Signed Songs: Deaf Artists, Intercultural Reach, and the Politics of Music Making analyzes musical performances that were translated or created in signed languages. Written by an international team of Deaf community researchers, The Power of Signed Songs explores the politics of music making in the form of signed songs, an often controversial art form in Deaf communities. 

While raising questions about culture, translation, and authorship, signed songs demonstrate forms of Deaf cultural resistance, defy traditional conceptions of music, and draw attention to language diversity and intersectionality within Deaf communities in varied European settings. Drawing on both signed music performances and field research, the authors highlight the unique contributions of signing musical artists from both the UK and Portugal. Signed songs and translations illustrate a wide range of creative performance strategies, linguistic word and sign play across languages, and sociolinguistic variation. 

By analyzing how translated songs created by Deaf artists serve as cultural products, translations, and performance, The Power of Signed Songs provides a glimpse into how translations of music can be a form of both transnational and localized cultural resistance. Ultimately, Deaf-centered signed songs are not just artistic expressions but also political statements, challenging the idea that music belongs exclusively to the hearing world.

CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE, 2022

“This fascinating book explores the unique circumstances of white slaveholding women in 19th-century Cuba and the enslaved peoples they controlled . . .This is a must read for scholars of the Caribbean and the African diaspora. Essential.” —CHOICE

In the early nineteenth century, while abolitionism was rising and the slave trade was declining in the Atlantic world, Spain used this opportunity to massively expand plantation slavery in Cuba. Between 1501 and 1866, more than 778,000 Africans were torn from their homelands and brought to work for the Cuban slaveholding class.

An understudied aspect of Cuban slaveholding society is the role of the white Cuban slave mistress (amas). The Power of Their Will: Slaveholding Women in Nineteenth-Century Cuba illuminates the interaction of female slaveholders and the enslaved during this time. Teresa Prados-Torreira shows, despite the lack of political power in a highly patriarchal society, Cuban women as property owners were instrumental in supporting the long duration of slavery, whether by enforcing the disciplining of the enslaved in the domestic sphere or helping to create the illusion of slavery as a humane institution. Thousands of Creole slaveholding women relied on slaves to lead a comfortable life. Even the subsistence of many poor women depended on the income derived from the hiring out of their enslaved.

In this accessible cultural history, culled from government documents, fiction, newspaper articles, traveler’s accounts, women’s wills, and archival research, Prados-Torreira coalesces a valuable narrative out of the often paradoxical and conflicting stories of the human bonds between the female owner and the enslaved. Narrative chapters, enlivened by vignettes, describe the daily life of slave mistresses in the main cities of Havana and Santiago and other towns, workings of sugar mills and coffee plantations, how slaveholding women coping with slave rebellions and wartime during the Ten Years’ War, and how personal relationships could occasionally affect the balance of power.