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Visual Cultures is the first study of the place of visuality and literacy in specific nations around the world, featuring authoritative, insightful essays on the value accorded to the visual and the verbal in Japan, Poland, China, Russia, Ireland, and Slovenia.

Focusing on the national instead of the global, distinguished art critic James Elkins offers a critique of general histories of visuality, such as those of Martin Jay or Jean Baudrillard, as well as a critique of local histories of visuality, as in Third Text and other postcolonial studies. The content is not only analytic, but also historical, tracing changes in the significance of visual and verbal literacy in each nation. Visual Cultures also explores questions of national identity and the many issues Elkins raises suggest a wealth of promising avenues for future research.

Analyzing the visual syntax and display rhetoric applied in newspaper photos, national historical albums, and museum exhibitions, Noa Hazan shows that although racial thought was and still is verbally suppressed in Israel, it is vividly present in its nonverbal official and public visual sphere. The racist perspective of newspaper editors, book publishers, photographers, and museum curators were morally justified in its time by such patronizing ideals as realistic news coverage or the salvation of Jewish heritage assets. Although their perspectives played a dominant role in establishing a visual syntax of race in Israel, they were not seen as racially discriminating at the time. The racist motifs and actions are revealed here by colligating multiple cases into a coherent narrative in retrospect. 

This book points to a direct influence of the anti-Semitic discourse in Europe toward Mizrahim in Israel, highlighting the shared visual stereotypes used in both Europe and the fledgling state of Israel. Engraved in their body, these cultural traits were depicted and understood as racial-biological qualities and were visually manipulated to silo Ashkenazim and Mizrahim in Israel as distinct racial types. 

An eye-opening union of analysis and fieldwork, Visualizing Black Lives examines the alternative and activist Black media and the people creating it in today's Brazil.

Over the past two decades secular polities across the globe have witnessed an increasing turn to religion-based political movements, such as the rise of political Islam and Hindu nationalism, which have been fueling new and alternative notions of nationhood and national ideologies. The rise of such movements has initiated widespread debates over the meaning, efficacy, and normative worth of secularism. Visualizing Secularism and Religion examines the constitutive role of religion in the formation of secular-national public spheres in the Middle East and South Asia, arguing that in order to establish secularism as the dominant national ideology of countries such as Turkey, Lebanon, and India, the discourses, practices, and institutions of secular nation-building include rather than exclude religion as a presence within the public sphere. The contributors examine three fields---urban space and architecture, media, and public rituals such as parades, processions, and commemorative festivals---with a view to exploring how the relation between secularism, religion, and nationalism is displayed and performed. This approach demands a reconceptualization of secularism as an array of contextually specific practices, ideologies, subjectivities, and "performances" rather than as simply an abstract legal bundle of rights and policies.

The prehistoric native peoples of the Mississippi River Valley and other areas of the Eastern Woodlands of the United States shared a complex set of symbols and motifs that constituted one of the greatest artistic traditions of the pre-Columbian Americas. Traditionally known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, these artifacts of copper, shell, stone, clay, and wood were the subject of the groundbreaking 2007 book Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms: Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography, which presented a major reconstruction of the rituals, cosmology, ideology, and political structures of the Mississippian peoples.

Visualizing the Sacred advances the study of Mississippian iconography by delving into the regional variations within what is now known as the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere (MIIS). Bringing archaeological, ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and iconographic perspectives to the analysis of Mississippian art, contributors from several disciplines discuss variations in symbols and motifs among major sites and regions across a wide span of time and also consider what visual symbols reveal about elite status in diverse political environments. These findings represent the first formal identification of style regions within the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere and call for a new understanding of the MIIS as a network of localized, yet interrelated religious systems that experienced both continuity and change over time.

Lively and filled with vivid anecdotes, Viva Baseball! chronicles the struggles of Latin American professional baseball players in the United States from the late 1800s to the present. 

As Latino players, managers, and owners continue to blossom into baseball's biggest stars, they have benefited from a growing Spanish-language media, a group identity, an increase in financial leverage and attention, and a burgeoning Latino culture in the United States. Although there have been several positive developments in the treatment of Latin American players, many, such as Albert Pujols, Pedro Martinez, Alex Rodriguez, and Ozzie Guillen, still face shocking racism. Samuel O. Regalado draws upon archives and rich interviews with Latin baseball stars like Felipe Alou, Orlando Cepeda, and Minnie Minoso to show the changing tenor of discrimination in the twenty-first-century game.

Voice Lessons explores the rich personal and political terrain of Alice Embree, a 1960s activist and convert to the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, bringing a woman’s perspective to a transformational time in US history. This riveting memoir traces the author’s roots in segregated Austin and her participation in efforts to integrate the University of Texas. It follows her antiwar activism from a vigil in front of President Lyndon Johnson’s ranch in 1965 to a massive protest after the shootings at Kent State in 1970. Embree’s activism brought her and the Students for a Democratic Society into conflict with Frank Erwin, the powerful chairman of the UT Board of Regents, and inspired a campus free speech movement. She recounts her experiences living in New York during the tumultuous years of 1968 and 1969, including the Columbia University strike and the Woodstock music festival. She also tells about protesting at the Chicago Democratic Convention, her interactions with Yippies and poets, and her travels to Chile, Cuba, and Mexico. Embree highlights the radical roots of the women’s liberation movement in Austin and the audacious women’s community that challenged gender roles, fought for reproductive justice, and inspired a lifetime of activism.

A fine-grained ethnography exploring the sociopolitical power of Kurdish women’s voices in contemporary Turkey.

“Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, and inclusion for marginalized subjects. Marlene Schäfers’s Voices That Matter reveals where such assumptions fall short, demonstrating that “raising one’s voice” is no straightforward path to emancipation but fraught with anxieties, dilemmas, and contradictions. In its attention to the voice as form, this book examines not only what voices say but also how they do so, focusing on Kurdish contexts where oral genres have a long, rich legacy. Examining the social labor that voices carry out as they sound, speak, and resonate, Schäfers shows that where new vocal practices arise, they produce new selves and practices of social relations. In Turkey, recent decades have seen Kurdish voices gain increasing moral and political value as metaphors of representation and resistance. Women’s voices, in particular, are understood as potent means to withstand patriarchal restrictions and political oppression. By ethnographically tracing the transformations in how Kurdish women relate to and employ their voices as a result of these shifts, Schäfers illustrates how contemporary politics foster not only new hopes and desires but also create novel vulnerabilities as they valorize, elicit, and discipline voice in the name of empowerment and liberation.

• The fundamentals of federal, state, local, and Tribal government  
• How Wisconsin’s constitution was created and how it has changed 
• The way elections work and why voting matters 

• Gaylord Nelson, who advocated for the environment as a state senator, member of Congress, and governor 
• Vel Phillips, who helped expand housing opportunities as a member of Milwaukee’s city council 
• Jesus Salas, who worked with state agencies to improve the lives of migrant farmworkers in Wisconsin 

2007 — LASA Peru Flora Tristán Book Prize from the Peru Section – Latin American Studies Association

Voices from the Global Margin looks behind the generalities of debates about globalization to explore the personal impact of global forces on the Peruvian poor. In this highly readable ethnography, William Mitchell draws on the narratives of people he has known for forty years, offering deep insight into how they have coped with extreme poverty and rapid population growth—and their creation of new lives and customs in the process. In their own passionate words they describe their struggles to make ends meet, many abandoning rural homes for marginal wages in Lima and the United States. They chronicle their terror during the Shining Path guerrilla war and the government's violent military response. Mitchell's long experience as an anthropologist living with the people he writes about allows him to put the stories in context, helping readers understand the impact of the larger world on individuals and their communities. His book reckons up the human costs of the global economy, urging us to work toward a more just world.

Women are conspicuously absent from traditional cultural histories of south-east Europe. This book addresses that imbalance by describing the contribution of women to literary culture in the Orthodox/ Ottoman areas of Serbia and Bosnia.

The first complete literary history in relation to women's writing in south-east Europe. The author provides a broad chronological account of this contribution, dividing the book into two main parts; the earlier period up until the eighteenth century concentrates on the projections of gender through the medium of oral tradition and the lives of a handful of educated women in medieval Serbia and the few works of literature they left. Hawkesworth also looks at the written literature produced by women, first in the mid-nineteenth century and then at the turn of the century. The second part focuses on the trials and tribulations that affected feminism and women's literature throughout the twentieth century. The author finishes by highlighting the new women's movement, 1975-1990, a great period for women in Yugoslavia which created a stimulating atmosphere for outstanding pieces of women's journalism, prose and verse, culminating in the creation of new women's studies courses in many universities.