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Hearing southern women in the pauses of history

Southern women of all classes, races, and walks of life practiced music during and after the Civil War. Candace L. Bailey examines the history of southern women through the lens of these musical pursuits, uncovering the ways that music's transmission, education, circulation, and repertory help us understand its meaning in the women's culture of the time. Bailey pays particular attention to the space between music as an ideal accomplishment—part of how people expected women to perform gentility—and a real practice—what women actually did. At the same time, her ethnographic reading of binder’s volumes, letters and diaries, and a wealth of other archival material informs new and vital interpretations of women’s place in southern culture.

A fascinating collective portrait of women's artistic and personal lives, Unbinding Gentility challenges entrenched assumptions about nineteenth century music and the experiences of the southern women who made it.

Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America brings together scholars and artists across regions, generations, disciplines, and modes of expression to decenter the US-Mexico border as both a site and a concept. Calling for renewed attention to the spaces, identities, and conflicts that remain understudied and excluded from our hemispheric knowledge of forced movement, the volume reveals a wider diversity of migratory realities and considers race, ethnicity, and class beyond the hegemonic formations that eclipse non-US histories. Through multidisciplinary and geographically expansive essays that draw from history, social anthropology, environmental studies, feminist studies, and lived experience, the volume examines diverse migratory flows from Chile and Argentina in the South to Georgia and New York in the North. Individually and collectively, the essays remap migratory movements other than through the most studied South-to-North trajectories and remove the US and US-based racial formations from the center of analysis. By tracking East-West flows, intraregional mobilities, and changing conceptions of racial identity, Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America complicates the concepts of forced mobility and border crossing by highlighting alternative liminalities in sites of transit, destination, and return. Demanding engagement with the submerged histories of racism and the production of ethnoracial categories beyond the Black/white binary, the collection brings into focus identities, sites, and forces that have not yet occupied the foreground of global migration study.

Uncovering the spirit of freedom and self-determination in New Orleans

In Under a Black Star, Amari Johnson explores what he defines as the “maroon impulse” among the BlackStar Community in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans. This community sought autonomy for Black people facing systemic marginalization through denied employment, insufficient education, and a housing crisis following Hurricane Katrina, establishing initiatives such as Kamali Academy, a homeschool collective, and BlackStar Books and Caffé, a bookstore and gathering place. Instead of appealing to the city, they built the community they desired by employing legacies of marronage: disengagement, flight, and reengagement.

An active participant in the physical and ideological development of these autonomous spaces, Johnson provides nuanced insights into the community’s work toward liberation and self-determination. Demonstrating that marronage is a cultural tradition throughout the African Diaspora, he focuses on the transtemporal maroon process to show how it is central to the pursuit of autonomy, community, and freedom.

From the swamps of southeastern Louisiana, across urban obstacles, and into BlackStar’s creative spaces, Johnson’s path leads him to ask: How did the New Orleans community mobilize the tradition of marronage to create autonomous spaces amid gentrification? What forms might the maroon impulse take in the twenty-first century? This dynamic ethnographic memoir ultimately illuminates marronage as a potent form of liberatory potential, offering strategies for similar communities across the country and around the world.

How did workers experience cut glass during its cultural heyday? Rather than privilege the stories of factory owners or wealthy consumers, Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life During the Long Gilded Age refracts the medium’s history through the labors required to make and maintain these dazzling artifacts as well as popular representations of this work, from demonstrations at world's fairs to images of domestic workers with finished pieces in their charge. Cut glass and the many manifestations of public interest in its labors offered working people, too, occasions for self-reflection and, perhaps, self-realization. Foregrounding their lives, Undercut offers a multifaceted social art history of a once-popular genre of decorative art that cuts across class, gender, and race.

Somalia has been devastated by a US-backed Ethiopian invasion and years of civil war, and it has long been without a central government. Against this background of violence, Somali academic Afyare Abdi Elmi, attempts to explain the multiple dimensions of the conflict and find a peace-building consensus.

Somalia is a failed state and a Muslim state. This combination means the West assumes that it will become a breeding ground for extremism. The country regularly hits the headlines as a piracy hotspot. This combination of internal division and outside interference makes for an intensely hostile landscape. Elmi shows that only by addressing the problem of the statelessness in the country can the long process of peace begin. He highlights clan identities, Islam and other countries in the region as the key elements in any peace-building effort.

This unique account from an author who truly understands Somalia should be required reading for students and academics of international relations and peace / conflict studies.

2023 SANA Book Award, Society for the Anthro­pology of North Amer­ica
2023 Honorable Mention, Outstanding Book Award NACCS Tejas Foco Award for Non-Fiction, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies
2022 Nonfiction Discovery Prize, Writers' League of Texas

An intimate portrayal of the hardships faced by an undocumented family navigating the medical and educational systems in the United States.

Claudia Garcia crossed the border because her toddler, Natalia, could not hear. Leaving behind everything she knew in Mexico, Claudia recounts the terror of migrating alone with her toddler and the incredible challenges she faced advocating for her daughter’s health in the United States. When she arrived in Texas, Claudia discovered that being undocumented would mean more than just an immigration status—it would be a way of living, of mothering, and of being discarded by even those institutions we count on to care.

Elizabeth Farfán-Santos spent five years with Claudia. As she listened to Claudia’s experiences, she recalled her own mother’s story, another life molded by migration, the US-Mexico border, and the quest for a healthy future on either side. Witnessing Claudia’s struggles with doctors and teachers, we see how the education and medical systems enforce undocumented status and perpetuate disability. At one point, in the midst of advocating for her daughter, Claudia suddenly finds herself struck by debilitating pain. Claudia is lifted up by her comadres, sent to the doctor, and reminded why she must care for herself.

A braided narrative that speaks to the power of stories for creating connection, this book reveals what remains undocumented in the motherhood of Mexican women who find themselves making impossible decisions and multiple sacrifices as they build a future for their families.

How do you document the undocumented? UNDOCUMENTS both poses and attempts to answer this complex question by remixing the forms and styles of the first encyclopedia of the New World, the Florentine Codex, in order to tell a modern story of Greater Mexico. Employing a broad range of writing genres and scholarly approaches, UNDOCUMENTS catalogs, recovers, and erases documents and images by and about peoples of Greater Mexico from roughly the first colonial moment. This brave and bracing volume organizes and documents ancient New World Mexican peoples from the Florentine Codex (1592) to our current technology-heavy age, wherein modern lawmakers and powerful global figures desire to classify, deport, and erase immigrants and their experiences.

Recently, many critics have questioned the idea of universal citizenship by pointing to the racial, class, and gendered exclusions on which the notion of universality rests. Rather than jettison the idea of universal citizenship, however, R. Andrés Guzmán builds on these critiques to reaffirm it especially within the fields of Latina/o and ethnic studies. Beyond conceptualizing citizenship as an outcome of recognition and admittance by the nation-state—in a negotiation for the right to have rights—he asserts that, insofar as universal citizenship entails a forceful entrance into the political from the latter’s foundational exclusions, it emerges at the limits of legality and illegality via a process that exceeds identitarian capture.

Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis and philosopher Alain Badiou’s notion of “generic politics,” Guzmán advances his argument through close analyses of various literary, cultural, and legal texts that foreground contention over the limits of political belonging. These include the French Revolution, responses to Arizona’s H.B. 2281, the 2006 immigrant rights protests in the United States, the writings of Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, Frantz Fanon’s account of Algeria’s anticolonial struggle, and more. In each case, Guzmán traces the advent of the “citizen” as a collective subject made up of anyone who seeks to radically transform the organizational coordinates of the place in which she or he lives.

Christin L. Hancock looks through the lens of feminist disability to examine the popular but ethically suspect treatment and its consequences. As Hancock shows, the treatment’s purported success rate relied on the disabled minds and bodies of people incarcerated in mental hospitals. The backgrounds and identities of these patients reflected and perpetuated attitudes around poverty, gender, race, and disability while betraying authorities’ desire to protect the public from women and men perceived as abnormal, sexually tainted, and unworthy of community life.

Paying special attention to the patients’ voices and experiences, Unmentionable Madness offers a disability history that confronts the ethics of experimentation.

2024 Flora Tristán Book Award, Sección Perú, Latin American Studies Association

How the international war on poverty shapes identities, relationships, politics, and urban space in Peru.

Unruly Domestication investigates how Peru’s ongoing, internationally endorsed "war on poverty" shapes politics, intimate identities, and urban space in Lima. Drawing on a decade of embedded, ethnographic research in Lima’s largest and most recently founded “extreme poverty zone,” Kristin Skrabut demonstrates how Peru’s efforts to fight poverty by formalizing property, identity, and family status perpetuate environmentally unsustainable urban sprawl, deepen discrimination against single mothers, and undermine Peruvians’ faith in public officials and in one another. In the process, Skrabut reveals myriad entanglements of poverty, statecraft, and private life, exploring how families are made and unmade through political practices, how gender inequalities are perpetuated through policy, and how Peruvians’ everyday pursuits of state-sanctioned domestic ideals reproduce informality and landscapes of poverty in the urban periphery.

The only full-length ethnography written about Lima’s iconic and policy-inspiring shantytowns in thirty years, Unruly Domestication provides valuable insight into the dynamics of housing and urban development in the Global South, elucidating the most intimate and profound effects of global efforts to do good.

National Book Award winner Patricia Smith presents a portrait of Black America in the nineteenth century 
 
Over the course of two decades, Patricia Smith has amassed a collection of rare nineteenth-century photographs of Black men, women, and children who, in these pages, regard us from the staggering distance of time.  

Unshuttered is a vessel for the voices of their incendiary and critical era. Smith’s searing stanzas and revelatory language imbue the subjects of the photos with dynamism and revived urgency while she explores how her own past of triumphs and losses is linked inextricably to their long-ago lives:  

We ache for fiction etched in black and white. Our eyes never touch. These tragic grays and bustles, mourners’ 
hats plopped high upon our tamed but tangled crowns, strain to disguise what yearning does with us. 

In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois brilliantly details the African American experience. Yet the renowned sociologist was also an astute chronicler of white people, particularly their racism. As Unveiling the Color Line demonstrates, Du Bois’s trenchant analysis of whiteness and white supremacy began in his earliest work—his 1890 speech on Jefferson Davis—and continued in every major book he published in his more than sixty-year career, up to The Black Flame Trilogy.

Lisa J. McLeod traces the development of Du Bois’s conception of whiteness, and the racism inherent to it, as an all-encompassing problem, whether predicated on ignorance, moral failure, or the inability to recognize the humanity in other people. In clear, elegant prose, McLeod investigates Du Bois’s complex and nuanced thinking, putting his insights into dialogue with contemporary racial theorists to demonstrate his continuing value to present-day critical thought and activism.

Using the U.S. wall at the border with Mexico as a focal point, two experts examine the global surge of economic and environmental refugees, presenting a new vision of the relationships between citizen and migrant in an era of “Juan Crow,” which systematically creates a perpetual undercaste.

Winner, National Association for Ethnic Studies (NAES) Outstanding Book Award, 2017

As increasing global economic disparities, violence, and climate change provoke a rising tide of forced migration, many countries and local communities are responding by building walls—literal and metaphorical—between citizens and newcomers. Up Against the Wall: Re-imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border examines the temptation to construct such walls through a penetrating analysis of the U.S. wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as investigating the walling out of Mexicans in local communities. Calling into question the building of a wall against a friendly neighboring nation, Up Against the Wall offers an analysis of the differences between borders and boundaries. This analysis opens the way to envisioning alternatives to the stark and policed divisions that are imposed by walls of all kinds. Tracing the consequences of imperialism and colonization as citizens grapple with new migrant neighbors, the book paints compelling examples from key locales affected by the wall—Nogales, Arizona vs. Nogales, Sonora; Tijuana/San Diego; and the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. An extended case study of Santa Barbara describes the creation of an internal colony in the aftermath of the U.S. conquest of Mexican land, a history that is relevant to many U.S. cities and towns.

Ranging from human rights issues in the wake of massive global migration to the role of national restorative shame in the United States for the treatment of Mexicans since 1848, the authors delve into the broad repercussions of the unjust and often tragic consequences of excluding others through walled structures along with the withholding of citizenship and full societal inclusion. Through the lens of a detailed examination of forced migration from Mexico to the United States, this transdisciplinary text, drawing on philosophy, psychology, and political theory, opens up multiple insights into how nations and communities can coexist with more justice and more compassion.

The archaeology of four New Orleans neighborhoods that were replaced by public housing projects

Uprooted: Race, Public Housing, and the Archaeology of Four Lost New Orleans Neighborhoods uses archaeological research on four neighborhoods that were razed during the construction of public housing in World War II–era New Orleans. Although each of these neighborhoods was identified as a “slum” historically, the material record challenges the simplicity of this designation. D. Ryan Gray provides evidence of the inventiveness of former residents who were marginalized by class, color, or gender and whose everyday strategies of survival, subsistence, and spirituality challenged the city’s developing racial and social hierarchies.

These neighborhoods initially appear to have been quite distinct, ranging from the working-class Irish Channel, to the relatively affluent Creole of Color–dominated Lafitte area, to the former location of Storyville, the city’s experiment in semilegal prostitution. Archaeological and historical investigations suggest that race was the crucial factor in the areas’ selection for clearance. Each neighborhood manifested a particular perceived racial disorder, where race intersected with ethnicity, class, or gender in ways that defied the norms of Jim Crow segregation.

Gray’s research makes use of both primary documents—including census records, city directories, and even the brothel advertising guides called “Blue Books”—and archaeological data to examine what this entailed at a variety of scales, reconstructing narratives of the households and communities affected by clearance. Public housing, both in New Orleans and elsewhere, imposed a new kind of control on urban life that had the effect of making cities both more segregated and less equal. The story of the neighborhoods that were destroyed provides a reminder that their erasure was not an inevitable outcome, and that a more equitable and just city is still possible today. A critical examination of the rise of public housing helps inform the ongoing debates over its demise, especially in light of the changing face of post-Katrina New Orleans.