Results by title

Millions across the world face the daily challenge to find enough food to survive. Hunger is on the rise globally, with more than 1.2 billion people suffering from food insecurity. Rising prices are further restricting food access.

In this deeply informative study, Majda Bne Saad identifies the causes for global hunger embedded in the current global political and economic system and highlights the key challenges facing food deficit countries. She shows how Western countries share the blame for global hunger through their support for subsidies to agricultural production and biofuels, which have created new challenges to food security worldwide.

Bne Saad argues that, as world population rises from 7 billion to 9.2 billion by 2050, there needs to be a ‘second green revolution’ to grow more food. She looks at the factors constraining low-income nations from achieving food security and considers policies which could generate income and enhance individuals' entitlement to food.

Through incisive analysis of the museum’s five institutions, Greg Dickinson and his coauthors reveal how narratives of Native American heritage, violent colonial settlement, Western art, natural history, and ever‑present gun culture collide to shape a haunted sense of American identity.  By tracing the tensions between what is memorialized, what is mythologized, and what is suppressed, the authors expose the ghosts that linger in contemporary understandings of the West and offer a compelling rethinking of how memory and commemoration continue to influence the nation’s cultural imagination.

Examining Filipinx cultural representations in the Midwest since the early twentieth century, Thomas Sarmiento shrewdly considers the impact of American exceptionalism and U.S. imperialism in a region where white, middle class, heterosexual, and Christian is the norm. The Heartland of U.S. Empire offers a cogent analysis of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and its infamous Philippine Exhibit alongside minor museum displays and archives of Midwesterners in the Philippines. Sarmiento also considers the “exile literature” of Filipino/American writer Bienvenido Santos as well as the TV shows Glee and Superstore, which provide mainstream visibility of the queer Filipinx Midwest.

He employs a queer, decolonial Filipinx methodology that traces how narratives of America’s heartland position Filipinxs in the region as nonnormative due to their racial, gender, sexual, and national statuses. The Heartland of U.S. Empire locates queer Filipinxs in the geographic center of the nation and at the center of cultural narratives, thereby mapping alternative images of diasporic Filipinx identity and experience alongside U.S. regional and national identities, histories, and realities.

In the series Asian American History and Culture

Capoeira, a Brazilian battle dance and national sport, has become popular all over the world. First brought to Brazil by African slaves and first documented in the late eighteenth century, capoeira has undergone many transformations as it has diffused throughout Brazilian society and beyond, taking on a multiplicity of meanings for those who participate in it and for the societies in which it is practiced. In this book, Maya Talmon-Chvaicer combines cultural history with anthropological research to offer an in-depth study of the development and meaning of capoeira, starting with the African cultures in which it originated and continuing up to the present day.

Using a wealth of primary sources, Talmon-Chvaicer analyzes the outlooks on life, symbols, and rituals of the three major cultures that inspired capoeira—the Congolese (the historic area known today as Congo-Angola), the Yoruban, and the Catholic Portuguese cultures. As she traces the evolution of capoeira through successive historical eras, Talmon-Chvaicer maintains a dual perspective, depicting capoeira as it was experienced, observed, and understood by both Europeans and Africans, as well as by their descendants. This dual perspective uncovers many covert aspects of capoeira that have been repressed by the dominant Brazilian culture.

This rich study reclaims the African origins and meanings of capoeira, while also acknowledging the many ways in which Catholic-Christian culture has contributed to it. The book will be fascinating reading not only for scholars but also for capoeira participants who may not know the deeper spiritual meanings of the customs, amulets, and rituals of this jogo da vida, "game of life."

Tracing the cultural history of play—from Fluxus to SimCity

Games and gamified activities have become ubiquitous in many adults’ lives, and play is widely valued for fostering creativity, community, growth, and empathy. But how did we come to our current understanding of what it means to play? The Impossible Reversal charts the transformation of notions of playfulness beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, when a legion of artists, academics, and engineers developed new ways of theorizing, structuring, and designing ludic activity.

Through examples ranging from experimental Fluxus games to corporate role-playing exercises and from the Easy Bake Oven to Tetris, The Impossible Reversal presents four styles of playfulness characteristic of the “era of designed play”: the impossible reversal, which puts a player in a seemingly hopeless scenario they must upend with a tiny gesture; expending the secret, which involves silly rules that gain an obscure power and require players to embrace failure; simulated freedom, a satiric criticism of the ordinary world; and oblique repetition, a way of playing that stumbles toward unimaginable outcomes through simple, meaningless, and endlessly iterated acts.

A unique genealogical account of play as both concept and practice, The Impossible Reversal illuminates how playfulness became essential for understanding cultural, technical, and economic production in the United States.

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

There is an alluring desire that research should lead us to find the practical knowledge that enables people to live a good life in a just and equitable society. This desire haunted the 19th century emergence of the social sciences as a discipline, then became more pronounced in the postwar mobilizations of research. Today that desire lives on in the international assessments of national schools and in the structure of professional education, both of which influence government modernization of schools and also provide for people’s well-being. American policy thus reflects research in which reforms are verified by “scientific, empirical evidences” about “what works” in experiments, and “will work” therefore in society.

The book explores the idea that practical and useful knowledge changes over time, and shows how this knowledge has been (re)visioned in contemporary research on educational reform, instructional improvement, and professionalization. The study of science draws on a range of social and cultural theories and historical studies to understand the politics of science, as well as scientific knowledge that is concerned with social and educational change. Research hopes to change social conditions to create a better life, and to shape people whose conduct embodies these valued characteristics—the good citizen, parent, or worker. Yet this hope continually articulates the dangers that threaten this future. Thomas Popkewitz explores how the research to correct social wrongs is paradoxically entangled with the inscription of differences that ultimately hamper the efforts to include.

The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibilityaddresses a series of questions about common beliefs about adoption. Underlying these beliefs is the assumption that human qualities are innate and intrinsic, an assumption often held by adoptees and their families, sometimes at great emotional cost. This book explores representations of adoption—transracial, transnational, and domestic same-race adoption—that reimagine human possibility by questioning this assumption and conceiving of alternatives.

Literary scholar Margaret Homans examines fiction making’s special relationship to themes of adoption, an “as if” form of family making, fabricated or fictional instead of biological or “real.” Adoption has tended to generate stories rather than uncover bedrock truths. Adoptive families are made, not born; in the words of novelist Jeanette Winterson, “adopted children are self-invented because we have to be.” In attempting to recover their lost histories and identities, adoptees create new stories about themselves. While some believe that adoptees cannot be whole unless they reconnect with their origins, others believe that privileging biology reaffirms hierarchies (such as those of race) that harm societies and individuals. Adoption is lived and represented through an irresolvable tension between belief in the innate nature of human traits and belief in their constructedness, contingency, and changeability. The book shows some of the ways in which literary creation, and a concept of adoption as a form of creativity, manages this tension.

The texts examined include fiction (e.g., classic novels such as Silas Marner, What Maisie Knew, and Beloved); memoirs by adoptees, adoptive parents, and birthmothers; drama, documentary films, advice manuals, social science writing; and published interviews with adoptees, parents, and birth parents. Along the way the book tracks the quests of adoptees who, whether or not they meet their original families, must construct their own stories rather than finding them; follows transnational adoptees as they return, hopes held high, to Korea and China; looks over the shoulders of a generation of girls adopted from China as they watch Disney’s iconic Mulan, with its alluring story of destiny written on the skin; and listens to birthmothers as they struggle to tell painful secrets held for decades.

This book engages in debates within adoption studies, women’s and gender studies, transnational studies, and ethnic studies; it will appeal to literary scholars and critics, including specialists in memoir or narrative theory, and to general readers interested in adoption and in race.

Revealing the unheralded contributions of women of color to the foundation and development of the digital economy

The Inattention Economy challenges the widespread myth that the internet was born from the labor of a handful of white male entrepreneurs, recovering the uncredited and unpaid contributions of women of color. Focusing on three key inflection points in computing—the microchip era of the 1960s and ’70s, the rise of social media in the 2000s, and A.I.-fueled virtual reality in the 2020s—Lisa Nakamura illuminates these women’s instrumental roles in building new technologies and making them coherent to users.

From the Navajo women who manufactured the first semiconductor circuits in New Mexico to Tila Tequila, the queer Vietnamese American refugee who became the first true internet influencer in the MySpace age, to Black virtual reality creators, Nakamura highlights how women’s gendered and racialized identities have uniquely positioned them to mediate the development and proliferation of new technologies. She exposes how these women have been structurally excluded from racial capitalism’s benefits while their labor is considered as exploitable and inexhaustible as that of machines. Confronting this injustice, she focuses our attention on their work, which undergirds and makes possible the platforms ingrained in our daily lives.

Arguing for both recognition and material compensation for these women’s labor, The Inattention Economy is a powerful counterhistory of Silicon Valley and a persuasive call to imagine a different kind of internet.

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

The first English-language translation of the 1968 activist play about inequality and access to education

In The Inheritor, surrealist imagery and experimental forms convey the radically different experience of two students, the Inheritor and the Non-Inheritor, as they prepare for a high-stakes exam. Revealing a world of privilege where “there is no such thing as luck,” the play features a beheaded knight, a talking record player, and a boisterous chorus of professors depicted as a flock of squawking birds.

Based on sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron’s The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture, the play was collectively created by Théâtre de l’Aquarium, a company then composed entirely of students. It proved a powerful success when it premiered in May 1968 amid student and worker protests in Paris, and it continues to speak forcefully to education inequity on campuses across anglophone countries today.

Throughout the nineteenth century, African heritage played an important role in black America, as personal memories and cultural practices continued to shape the everyday experience of people of African descent living under the shadow of slavery. Resisting efforts to de-Africanize their values, customs, and beliefs, Black Americans invoked their African roots in public arguments about their identity and place in the “new” world. At the outset of the twentieth century many still saw Africa primarily as the source of a common cultural and spiritual past. But after the 1920s, the meaning of African heritage changed as people of African descent expressed new relationships between themselves, the United States, and the African Diaspora.

In The Insistent Call, Aric Putnam studies the rhetoric of newspapers, literature, and political pamphlets that expressed this shift. He demonstrates that as people of African descent debated the United States' occupation of Haiti, the Liberian labor crisis, and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, they formed a new collective identity, one that understood the African Diaspora in primarily political rather than cultural terms. In addition to uncovering a neglected period in the history of Black rhetoric, Putnam shows how rhetoric that articulates the interests of a population not defined by the boundaries of a state can still motivate collective action and influence policies.

A feminist perspective on the early history of personal computing, revealing how computers were integrated into the most intimate aspects of family life

 

The Intimate Life of Computers shows how the widespread introduction of home computers in the 1980s was purposefully geared toward helping sustain heteronormative middle-class families by shaping relationships between users. Moving beyond the story of male-dominated computer culture, this book emphasizes the neglected history of the influence of women’s culture and feminist critique on the development of personal computing despite women’s underrepresentation in the industry.

Proposing the notion of “companionate computing,” Reem Hilu reimagines the spread of computers into American homes as the history of an interpersonal, romantic, and familial medium. She details the integration of computing into family relationships—from helping couples have better sex and offering thoughtful simulations of masculine seduction to animating cute robot companions and giving voice to dolls that could talk to lonely children—underscoring how these computer applications directly responded to the companionate needs of their users as a way to ease growing pressures on home life.

The Intimate Life of Computers is a vital contribution to feminist media history, highlighting how the emergence of personal computing dovetailed with changing gender roles and other social and cultural shifts. Eschewing the emphasis on technologies and institutions typically foregrounded in personal-computer histories, Hilu uncovers the surprising ways that domesticity and family life guided the earlier stages of our all-pervasive digital culture.