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The Selfie Machine offers novel insight into personalized communication practices in the digital age through the medium of the selfie. While the selfie has achieved notoriety due to pop-psychology accounts of Narcissism-related selfie "disorders," this book examines the selfie as a mode of meaning making and self-presentation that includes not just still images, but also short videos, hashtag practices and economies of liking and following. In taking India as the starting point of its investigation, The Selfie Machine inverts the "West-then-the-rest" model of understanding global digital media practices. The book considers selfie culture’s impact on personal and public digital practices and trends—ranging from cellphone markets, to influencer entrepreneurship and microcelebrity, to the conduct of politics and protest. In doing so, it not only offers an expanded definition of selfies in digital media culture, but also demonstrates how “global” digital media (including selfies) cannot be understood as a monolith.

Huichol Indian yarn paintings are one of the world's great indigenous arts, sold around the world and advertised as authentic records of dreams and visions of the shamans. Using glowing colored yarns, the Huichol Indians of Mexico paint the mystical symbols of their culture—the hallucinogenic peyote cactus, the blue deer-spirit who appears to the shamans as they croon their songs around the fire in all-night ceremonies deep in the Sierra Madre mountains, and the pilgrimages to sacred sites, high in the central Mexican desert of Wirikuta.

Hope MacLean provides the first comprehensive study of Huichol yarn paintings, from their origins as sacred offerings to their transformation into commercial art. Drawing on twenty years of ethnographic fieldwork, she interviews Huichol artists who have innovated important themes and styles. She compares the artists' views with those of art dealers and government officials to show how yarn painters respond to market influences while still keeping their religious beliefs.

Most innovative is her exploration of what it means to say a tourist art is based on dreams and visions of the shamans. She explains what visionary experience means in Huichol culture and discusses the influence of the hallucinogenic peyote cactus on the Huichol's remarkable use of color. She uncovers a deep structure of visionary experience, rooted in Huichol concepts of soul-energy, and shows how this remarkable conception may be linked to visionary experiences as described by other Uto-Aztecan and Meso-American cultures.

Exploring forms of desire unaccounted for in previous histories of sexuality

What can the Renaissance tell us at our present moment about who and what is “queer,” as well as the political consequences of asking? In posing this question, The Shapes of Fancy offers a powerful new method of accounting for ineffable and diffuse forms of desire, mining early modern drama and prose literature to describe new patterns of affective resonance.

Starting with the question of how and why readers seek traces of desire in texts from bygone times and places, The Shapes of Fancy demonstrates a practice of critical attunement to the psychic and historical circulations of affect across time within texts, from texts to readers, and among readers. Closely reading for uncharted desires as they recur in early modern drama, witchcraft pamphlets, and early Atlantic voyage narratives and demonstrating how each is structured by qualities of secrecy, impossibility, and excess, Christine Varnado follows four “shapes of fancy”: the desire to be used to others’ ends; indiscriminate, bottomless appetite; paranoid self-fulfilling suspicion; and melancholic longings for impossible transformations and affinities. These affective dynamics go awry in atypical and perverse ways. In other words, argues Varnado, these modes of feeling are recognizable on the page or stage as “queer” because of how, and not by whom, they are expressed.

This new theorization of desire expands the notion of queerness in literature, decoupling the literary trace of queerness from the binary logics of same-sex versus opposite-sex and normative versus deviant that have governed early modern sexuality studies. Providing a set of methods for analyzing affect and desire in texts from any period, The Shapes of Fancy stages an impassioned defense of the inherently desirous nature of reading, making a case for readerly investment and identification as vital engines of meaning making and political insight.

Until recently, historians have assumed that Central Algonquians derive from politically unified tribes, but by analyzing the crucial role that individuals, institutions, and policies played in shaping modern tribal governments, Warren reveals a messier, more complicated history of migration and conflict. Ultimately, Warren establishes that the form of the modern Shawnee "tribe" was coerced in accordance with the U.S. government's desire for an entity with whom to do business, rather than as a natural development of traditional Shawnee ways.

Explores the untold impacts of colonialism in New England through diverse colonist lives, Indigenous encounters, and environmental legacies.

In The Shock of Colonialism in New England, archaeologist Meghan C. L. Howey uses excavations in the seventeenth-century colonial frontier of the Great Bay Estuary/P8bagok in today’s New Hampshire to trace the connection between European global colonialism and the planetary climate crises. Howey shows how this landscape holds forgotten stories of what it meant to live through the shock of colonialism.

These stories reveal an unexpected diversity and dynamism among English colonists, multifaceted encounters with Indigenous peoples, and lasting environmental damage from labor-intensive industries. Early Euro-American maps and stunning archaeological finds, such as a broken pickaxe embedded in a hearth, and a historical marker for the Oyster River “Massacre” of 1694 complicate our limited views of a shared past.

The reality of English colonialism in the dispossession of Indigenous lands and its wake is not commemorated. Howey’s work is a powerful corrective that traces the rise of intergenerational colonial wealth made possible by land commodified as property, the increased labor required to work newly opened land, the importation of indentured Scots and enslaved Africans to provide that labor, and the resulting degradation of the natural environment. Through Howey’s insights into the stories they tell, these fragments from a frontier can help contemporary readers better understand the past as they seek a more just and sustainable future.

Originally published in 1955, The Silver Cradle is the story of a year in the life of the Mexican American people of San Antonio, Texas. During the 1950s, Julia Nott Waugh recorded the performances of such seasonal and religious traditions as Las Posadas, Los Pastores, Las Calaveras, the Blessing of the Animals, the liturgical observances of Holy Week, and festivities of el diez y seis de septiembre (Mexican Independence Day), among others.

Although years have passed and many of the details of observances have changed, the festival calendar and the joy and sincerity of the Mexican American people in honoring its customs and obligations have not disappeared. Now, in fact, a much wider population shares and appreciates the pageantry preserved for us by people like Graciana Reyes, in whose prized silver cradle the Christ Child slept every year at Christmas, and like Doroteo Domínguez, whose annual devotion to presenting a thousand-year-old pastoral epic in his back yard was legendary.

Waugh has done much more than just open a window onto a charming past. She has captured for us one of the true gifts of our Mexican American heritage—the willingness to ritually celebrate the passage of time and to embellish the occasions with sensitivity and fervor. This book will appeal to the general reader as well as to those interested in folk traditions and Mexican American culture.

The Quechua people, the "singing mountaineers" of Peru, still sing the songs that their Inca ancestors knew before the Spaniards invaded the Andes. Some of these songs, collected and translated into Spanish by José María Arguedas and María Lourdes Valladares from the Quechua language and the Huanca dialect, are now presented for the first time in English in the beautiful translations of Ruth Stephan, author of the recent prize-winning novel, The Flight. Also included in this rich collection are nine folk tales collected by Father Jorge A. Lira, translated into Spanish by Sr. Arguedas, and into English by Kate and Angel Flores.

Exploring the Varied Roles of Bachelors during the Renaissance

What if the Renaissance bachelor wasn’t just a social outlier but a literary lens through which early modern masculinity reveals its cracks? In The Single Life: Unpatriarchal Manhoods in English Renaissance Literature, Jordan Windholz examines the overlooked and often subversive roles played by never-married men in shaping gender, sexuality, and social order.

Windholz challenges conventional views on gender and sexuality, identifying five archetypes of bachelorhood that complicate our understanding of patriarchal success: the chaste youth, the journeyman bachelor, the true gallant, the incel scholar, and the unmarried eunuch. These figures don’t conform to ideals of marriage, legacy, or economic productivity, but they also weren’t merely left behind. Instead, they served to define what early modern society valued by embodying what it resisted. Windholz shows how Renaissance texts constructed, contained, and occasionally celebrated these “unpatriarchal manhoods.”

By examining the intersections of sexuality, labor, gentility, emotion, and gender, the book provides a nuanced understanding of how single men both upheld and resisted patriarchal norms. Each chapter offers a detailed analysis of literary texts, blending historical and literary analysis with feminist and queer theory. The first study of its kind, Windholz’s work is essential reading for anyone interested in Renaissance literature, gender studies, or those looking to understand the margins of masculinity and the meanings of singledom—then and now.

A collective memoir in poetry of an Ojibwe family and tribal community, from creation myth to this day, updated with new poems
 

Reaching from the moment of creation to the cry of a newborn, The Sky Watched gives poetic voice to Ojibwe family life. In English and Ojibwe, those assembled here—voices of history, of memory and experience, of children and elders, Indian boarding school students, tribal storytellers, and the Manidoog, the unseen beings who surround our lives—come together to create a collective memoir in poetry as expansive and particular as the starry sky.

This world unfolds in the manner of traditional Ojibwe storytelling, shaped by the seasons and the stages of life, marking the significance of the number four in the Ojibwe worldview. Summoning spiritual and natural lore, award-winning poet and scholar Linda LeGarde Grover follows the story of a family, a tribe, and a people through historical ruptures and through intimate troubles and joys—from the sundering of Ojibwe people from their land and culture to singular horrors like the massacre at Wounded Knee to personal trauma suffered at Indian boarding schools. Threaded throughout are the tribal traditions and knowledge that sustain a family and a people through hardship and turmoil, passed from generation to generation, coming together in the manifold power and beauty of the poet’s voice.

A deeply researched and definitive account of the climactic battle at the end of the Haitian Revolution 

Among the many rebellions against European colonial empires, the Haitian Revolution against France is among the most dramatic and complex. Having begun in 1791 as France was in the throes of its own young revolution, the conflict reached its dramatic climax when Napoleon dispatched a heavily armed expeditionary force led by his brother-in-law Charles Leclerc to re-establish slavery and the sugar economy that had so enriched France. Philippe Girard’s Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon is a deeply researched and engrossing account of this invasion and its spectacular defeat.

For this ambitious account, Philippe Girard has studied not only primary records in Haiti itself but also rare documents from nineteen public and private archives and research libraries in French, U.S., British, and Spanish collections. His more inclusive approach provides a fuller, more accurate and detailed narrative. He reveals not only key military movements, but also less-known aspects like the activities of U.S. merchants, in-fighting within Napoleon’s government, and communication between both sides and other European powers. Girard fills the work with unforgettable stories of those who led or were caught up in the war, people like poorly armed Black soldiers who ambushed Bonaparte’s columns, French child drummers, Jewish bankers in Kingston, weapon smugglers from Quaker Philadelphia, Polish artillerists, and mixed-raced people struggling to preserve their freedom against both Black and white opponents.

Transcending pat ideological and racial categories, the book brings into focus an Atlantic society at the crossroads of African and European influences, where Haitian rebels fought France while embracing its ideals.

A collection of Mahasweta Devi's activist essays, reportage, and editorials on rural development and dispossession.  

What do India’s poorest communities reveal about power, land, and survival? In the late 1970s, writer Mahasweta Devi shifted her focus to the lives of Adivasi (Indigenous peoples of the Indian subcontinent) and Dalit communities in eastern India, especially Bihar and West Bengal. Traveling widely and staying with the communities she wrote about, she drew on these firsthand encounters in her writing. She also edited the Bengali quarterly Bortika, making the journal a space for peasants, laborers, workers, and other marginalized groups to speak for themselves.

The Slaves of Palamau and Other Writings brings together a representative selection from her activist prose of the 1980s and early 1990s, drawn from essays, reportage, and editorials. These pieces examine rural development; dispossession and land alienation; environmental damage; and the conditions of landless laborers, sharecroppers, bonded and contract workers, miners, and Indigenous communities, with the steady attention that also informs her fiction.

    Today Ireland’s population is rising, immigration outpaces emigration, most families have two or at most three children, and full-time farmers are in steady decline. But the opposite was true for more than a century, from the great famine of the 1840s until the 1960s. Between 1922 and 1966—most of the first fifty years after independence—the population of Ireland was falling, in the 1950s as rapidly as in the 1880s. Mary Daly’s The Slow Failure examines not just the reasons for the decline, but the responses to it by politicians, academics, journalists, churchmen, and others who publicly agonized over their nation’s “slow failure.” Eager to reverse population decline but fearful that economic development would undermine Irish national identity, they fashioned statistical evidence to support ultimately fruitless policies to encourage large, rural farm families. Focusing on both Irish government and society, Daly places Ireland’s population history in the mainstream history of independent Ireland.
    Daly’s research reveals how pastoral visions of an ideal Ireland made it virtually impossible to reverse the fall in population. Promoting large families, for example, contributed to late marriages, actually slowing population growth further. The crucial issue of emigration failed to attract serious government attention except during World War II; successive Irish governments refused to provide welfare services for emigrants, leaving that role to the Catholic Church. Daly takes these and other elements of an often-sad story, weaving them into essential reading for understanding modern Irish history