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A collaborative effort to address some of the chronic issues affecting the preservation and revitalization of indigenous languages.

What does it mean to "revitalize" an indigenous language when approximately 6,700 of the nearly 7,000 left in the world need protection? Where to begin? Each language offers a sense of history, identity, and belonging within society to the people actively using it. The Word Tree begins by hearing directly from those still communicating in some of these less dominant languages, from Achi'es to Zapotec, and offers the metaphor of a tree whose political roots sustain the trunk of education that will bear the fruit of learning languages anew. Whether describing the tension between indigenous and state-recognized languages; the process of linguistics displacement resulting from migration; or the value of locally focused efforts in a cultural cooperative, these nine essays offer fresh and useful perspectives.

The Word Tree is the result of a collaboration between the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the University of Texas at Austin. Gathering diverse concerns, experiences, explorations, proposals, and perspectives on the revitalization of some of the continent's most imperiled indigenous languages, the contributors aim to introduce their struggle for existence to a modern world. From south to north, the Quecha or Runasimi, Maya, Zapotec or Diidxazá, Chatino, Mè'pháá or Tlapaneco, Mixteco, Mixe or Auukj, and Nahuatl languages exist in all their vast complexities and contexts. At its most fundamental level, this book is a call to develop alternative paths for human existence in which caring for one another is the consensus.

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.

A critical analysis of historical and contemporary discourses around worklessness, economic inactivity, and the factors that contribute to people withdrawing from the conventional labor market. 

How do we define and respond to worklessness? This book combines analysis of media and political narratives around worklessness and factors that limit individuals’ capacity for conventional paid work—from disability and long-term illness to caring responsibilities—with interviews that shed light on the lived experience of so-called economic inactivity.

In dissecting popular portrayals of “the workless” in the present and tracing the historical evolution of discourses around “inactivity”—especially work-limiting disability—James Morrison draws heavily on sociological theories of stigma and symbolic annihilation. Conceptualising the contemporary narrative about the UK's supposed crisis in economic inactivity as the latest in a continuum of periodic moral panics about worklessness, he argues that neoliberal definitions of work and worklessness are too narrow, as they deny—and render invisible—the importance of various forms of unpaid labor performed by many people classified as “inactive,” notably informal caregiving and volunteering. 

Utilizing works of art as a primary source, Lisa Farrington's research in The World Before Racism conclusively answers the questions: Who invented racism? When? And why?

The term racism is understood to mean that race is the principal determinant of specific human traits and capacities and that due to racial differences, one race is inherently superior to all others. Over time, racism has commonly referenced the notion that the White race is superior to all others, fostering prejudice and discrimination. In The World Before Racism: An Art Story, author and art historian Lisa Farrington meticulously examines the intersection of art, history, and race, using original works of art as primary source materials to support her premise that racism is a construct, invented in the mid-1700s, to support the financial, political, and religious structures of European colonialism.

Using art from ancient Egypt, classical Greece, and the Roman Empire, through Medieval Europe and the colonization of the New World, to the art of the present day—sources that cannot be easily altered, edited, or selectively translated—Farrington expertly examines the intricate interplay between the Black and White races, how they saw and understood each other over the centuries. The artworks serve as powerful voices, precisely conveying the artist’s intended messages. The goal of The World Before Racism is to present irrefutable evidence that the ideology of racism is unfounded, unsupported, unjustified, and destined to fade away like so many other archaic and erroneous ideas.

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

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.

The Moche, or Mochica, created an extraordinary civilization on the north coast of Peru for most of the first millennium AD. Although they had no written language with which to record their history and beliefs, the Moche built enormous ceremonial edifices and embellished them with mural paintings depicting supernatural figures and rituals. Highly skilled Moche artisans crafted remarkable ceramic vessels, which they painted with figures and scenes or modeled like sculpture, and mastered metallurgy in gold, silver, and copper to make impressive symbolic ornaments. They also wove textiles that were complex in execution and design.

A senior scholar renowned for her discoveries about the Moche, Elizabeth P. Benson published the first English-language monograph on the subject in 1972. Now in this volume, she draws on decades of knowledge, as well as the findings of other researchers, to offer a grand overview of all that is currently known about the Moche. Touching on all significant aspects of Moche culture, she covers such topics as their worldview and ritual life, ceremonial architecture and murals, art and craft, supernatural beings, government and warfare, and burial and the afterlife. She demonstrates that the Moche expressed, with symbolic language in metal and clay, what cultures in other parts of the world presented in writing. Indeed, Benson asserts that the accomplishments of the Moche are comparable to those of their Mesoamerica contemporaries, the Maya, which makes them one of the most advanced civilizations of pre-Columbian America.

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.

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The Yanoama are one of the most numerous remaining aboriginal populations of the South American tropical forests, and their large territory constitutes a significant culture region. Although other scholars (anthropologists, geneticists, linguists) have studied this contemporary "neolithic" population, this is the first geographic study of the Yanoama. It is also the only book to focus on the Yanoama highland core area—the Parima massif—and it is the first study to analyze Yanoama horticulture as an integral part of their ecosystem.

The author is concerned principally with the spatial dimension as developed in Yanoama culture, with the spatial patterns of functioning systems, and with Yanoama ecology in this highland habitat. The natural environment is viewed, not as a cultural determinant, but as part of the total ecosystem. Livelihood activities constitute a major organizing theme and, among these, gardening receives the most attention. Frequently classified as a nomadic hunter-gatherer group, the Yanoama are found to have a deep-seated horticultural tradition, and many new data on this tradition are presented. As this study reveals, the Yanoama have created and maintained a cultural landscape that bears their distinctive stamp.