Results by title

In A Nation of Family and Friends, sociologist Aarti Ratna examines the complex and dynamic relationships between South Asian women and sporting and leisure cultures. Mining autobiographical insights (as a South Asian scholar living in the UK) she links the chapters of this innovative book using the sociological concepts of family and friends, particularly as they relate to an analysis of wider debates about the complexities of race, gender, and the nation. Ratna underscores the importance of studying informal spaces of sport and leisure as friendly, familial, sociable, and political spaces. She simultaneously highlights the role of earlier sociological research in disseminating myths about South Asian women as too physically weak to play competitive sports; culturally passive victims of South Asian cultures and religions; and as sexually exotic women requiring saving through colonial and imperial projects led by white men and women.

Ratna also examines two key cultural objects - the popular films "Bend it Like Beckham" and “Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal” - to examine in detail the gendered representation of South Asian soccer players’ engagement in amateur and elite levels of the sport. She critiques studies of women’s football fandom and sport that fail to acknowledge social differences relating to race, class, age, disability, and sexuality. By linking the social forces (across time and space) that differentially affect their sporting choices and leisure lifestyles, Ratna portrays the women of the South Asian diaspora as active agents in the shaping of their life courses and as skilled navigators of the complexities affecting their own identities. Ultimately Ratna examines the intersections of class, caste, age, generation, gender, and sexuality, to provide a rich and critical exploration of British Asian women's sport and leisure choices, pleasures, and lived realities.
 

Basques of the American West: New and Collected Essays on History and Ethnicity brings together new and previously published work by Richard W. Etulain, blending historical analysis and literary criticism to explore the lives, stories, and representations of the Basques in this region. The essays examine key figures such as Robert Laxalt and Frank Bergon; survey historical studies, memoirs, and novels; and trace evolving interpretations of Basque identity in Western literature and scholarship. Etulain highlights major trends in both Basque and Western American historiography while identifying important topics that remain open for additional research. 

This collection offers readers a thoughtful and engaging look at the enduring presence and influence of Basques across the cultural and historical landscape of the American West.

Twenty years ago, Margaret Mulrooney's history of the community of Irish immigrant workers at the du Pont powder yards, Black Powder, White Lace, was published to wide acclaim. Now, as much of the materials Mulrooney used in her research are now electronically available to the public, and as debates about immigration continue to rage, a new edition of the book is being published to remind readers of the rich materials available on the du Pont workers, and of Mulrooney's powerful conclusions about immigrant communities in America. Explosives work was dangerous, but the du Ponts provided a host of benefits to their workers. As a result, the Irish remained loyal to their employers, convinced by their everyday experiences that their interests and the du Ponts' were one and the same. Employing a wide array of sources, Mulrooney turns away from the worksite and toward the domestic sphere, revealing that powder mill families asserted their distinctive ethno-religious heritage at the same time as they embraced what U.S. capitalism had to offer.

Walloon is a language still spoken by a minority population in its home country of Belgium. It can also still be found among a few sparse communities descended from Belgian immigrants in northeastern Wisconsin. Although spoken by a small number of people, the language plays a vital role in the ethnic heritage of the state and is audible in local words like “booyah” and “trippe.”

This book is the first to introduce the language without recourse to French, of which Walloon is sometimes mistakenly described as a variant or dialect. With this text, English-language speakers will need nothing more than interest to pick up basic conversational Walloon, thanks to Kelly Biers’s clear guidance for pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. Additionally, readers will learn about how this minority language arrived in the Upper Midwest, the history of Belgian American immigration and settlement, and the language’s linguistic features.

Boojoo and welcome to Wisconsin Walloon!

As Ice Age glaciers left behind erratics, so the external forces of history tumbled the Irish into America. Existing both out of time and out of space, a diverse range of these Roman-Catholic immigrants saw their new country in a much different way than did the Protestants who settled and claimed it. These erratics chose backward looking tradition and independence over assimilation and embraced a quintessentially Irish form of subversiveness that arose from their culture, faith, and working-class outlook. David M. Emmons draws on decades of research and thought to plumb the mismatch of values between Protestant Americans hostile to Roman Catholicism and the Catholic Irish strangers among them. Joining ethnicity and faith to social class, Emmons explores the unique form of dissidence that arose when Catholic Irish workers and their sympathizers rejected the beliefs and symbols of American capitalism.

A vibrant and original tour de force, History’s Erratics explores the ancestral roots of Irish nonconformity and defiance in America.

A century after the publication of the controversial Two Portuguese Communities in New England, Migration and Mill Work brings together analytical research essays, personal testimonies, poems, fiction, photos and drawings on Portuguese and Portuguese-Americans in their predicaments, struggles, encounters and achievements experienced under the pressures of upwards mobility, racialized tensions, politics of assimilation or multiculturalism, and labor and ethnic revival movements.
 

In the remote community of Elko, Nevada, the Altube brothers and the Garats started fabled ranches in the early 1870s. These hardy citizens created the foundation of a community that still exists today, rooted in the traditions and cultures of American Basque families.

Joxe K. Mallea-Olaetxe presents a modern study focused on the post-1970s, when the retired Basque sheepherders and their families became the dominant Americanized minority in the area. During this time, the Fourth of July National Basque Festival began to attract thousands of visitors from as far away as Europe to the small Nevada community and brought to light the vibrant customs of these Nevadans.

This book explores the American Basques’ present-day place in the West, bolstered by the collaborative efforts of four contributors, including two women—all who have been residents of Elko. The writers offer firsthand knowledge of their heritage through numerous vignettes, and these deeply personal perspectives will entice readers into Mallea-Olaetxe’s singular and entertaining historical account.
 

Ideological terms such as “Christian nationalism” or “far right” serve as shorthand for religious and political extremism but do not offer insight into why some men perpetrate political violence while others do not. Radicalizing Men analyzes radicalization as a social process, the networking of fascist desires, imaginaries, and feelings through great replacement propaganda enacted in sermons, during school board meetings, on campuses, and on digital platforms through algorithms, rhetoric, and memes. Jessica Johnson considers the affective—bodily, sensory, and emotional—processes of radicalization constitutive of political subjectivity and collective action to reassess medias, technologies, shootings, and policies that create and target racialized, religious, and gendered threats to imaginary white Christian homelands. Johnson explores how fascist desires move bodies in decentralized yet coordinated ways by examining the socioeconomic, infrastructural, and affective connections between neoliberal capitalism and militarized nationalism that proliferate citizen-soldiers and inspire them to commit transnationally linked acts of political violence as multiracial, multiethnic, and multifaith antifascist coalitions emerge to fight them.