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This remarkable biography features a white American pacifist minister whose tireless work for justice and human rights helped reshape Black civil rights in the U.S. and Africa.

George M. Houser (1916–2015) was one of the most important civil rights and antiwar activists of the twentieth century. A conscientious objector during World War II, in 1942 Houser cofounded and led the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), whose embrace of nonviolent protest strategies and tactics characterized the modern American Civil Rights Movement. Beginning in the 1950s, Houser played a critical role in pan-Africanist anticolonial movements, and his more than thirty-year dedication to the cause of human rights and self-determination helped prepare the ground for the toppling of the South African apartheid regime.

Throughout his life, Houser shunned publicity, preferring to let his actions speak his faith. Sheila Collins’s well-researched biography recounts the events that informed Houser’s life of activism—from his childhood experiences as the son of missionaries in the Philippines to his early grounding in the Social Gospel and the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi. In light of the corruption the U.S. and the world face today, Houser’s story of faith and decisive action for human rights and social justice is one for our time.

 

Taller than the Rio de Janiero’s Christ the Redeemer statue, the Virgen del Panecillo draws visitors to the center of Quito, Ecuador, to take advantage of the site’s unique view of the city. But few know the history behind El Panecillo or the monument.

María Célleri examines the eighty-year effort to complete Quito’s soaring monument to the Virgin Mary. Focusing on the negotiations behind the project, Célleri uncovers the links between the government and Church—links that became stronger during moments of political and economic transition. Célleri also investigates how the city’s residents and activists, and artists like filmmakers, graffiti artists, and photographers, interact with the monument. Throughout, she looks at questions like the Virgen del Panecillo’s service to Ecuador as a form of cultural capital, the Virgen’s symbolic meanings to different groups, and the often-hidden connections between colonialism, Catholicism, and artistic production.

Original and multifaceted, Uncovering the Virgen del Panecillo provides readers with a rigorous decolonial analysis of an iconic monument and its history.

In Unreasonable Histories, Christopher J. Lee unsettles the parameters and content of African studies as currently understood. At the book's core are the experiences of multiracial Africans in British Central Africa—contemporary Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Zambia—from the 1910s to the 1960s. Drawing on a spectrum of evidence—including organizational documents, court records, personal letters, commission reports, popular periodicals, photographs, and oral testimony—Lee traces the emergence of Anglo-African, Euro-African, and Eurafrican subjectivities which constituted a grassroots Afro-Britishness that defied colonial categories of native and non-native. Discriminated against and often impoverished, these subaltern communities crafted a genealogical imagination that reconfigured kinship and racial descent to make political claims and generate affective meaning. But these critical histories equally confront a postcolonial reason that has occluded these experiences, highlighting uneven imperial legacies that still remain. Based on research in five countries, Unreasonable Histories ultimately revisits foundational questions in the field, to argue for the continent's diverse heritage and to redefine the meanings of being African in the past and present—and for the future.