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The Puerto Rican debt crisis, the challenges of social, political, and economic transition in Cuba, and the populist politics of Duterte in the Philippines—these topics are typically seen as disparate experiences of social reality. Though these island territories were colonized by the same two colonial powers—by the Spanish Empire and, after 1898, by the United States—research in the fields of history and the social sciences rarely draws links between these three contexts.

Located at the intersection of Postcolonial Studies, Latin American Studies, Caribbean Studies, and History, this interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from the US, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines to examine the colonial legacies of the three island nations of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Instead of focusing on the legacies of US colonialism, the continuing legacies of Spanish colonialism are put center-stage. The analyses offered in the volume yield new and surprising insights into the study of colonial and postcolonial constellations that are of interest not only for experts, but also for readers interested in the social, political, economic, and cultural dynamics of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines during Spanish colonization and in the present. The empirical material profits from a rigorous and systematic analytical framework and is thus easily accessible for students, researchers, and the interested public alike.

Beginning in the 1830s and continuing for more than a century, blackface minstrelsy—stage performances that claimed to represent the culture of black Americans—remained arguably the most popular entertainment in North America. A renewed scholarly interest in this contentious form of entertainment has produced studies treating a range of issues: its contradictory depictions of class, race, and gender; its role in the development of racial stereotyping; and its legacy in humor, dance, and music, and in live performance, film, and television. The style and substance of minstrelsy persist in popular music, tap and hip-hop dance, the language of the standup comic, and everyday rituals of contemporary culture. The blackface makeup all but disappeared for a time, though its influence never diminished—and recently, even the makeup has been making a comeback. 

This collection of original essays brings together a group of prominent scholars of blackface performance to reflect on this complex and troublesome tradition. Essays consider the early relationship of the blackface performer with American politics and the antislavery movement; the relationship of minstrels to the commonplace compromises of the touring “show” business and to the mechanization of the industrial revolution; the exploration and exploitation of blackface in the mass media, by D. W. Griffith and Spike Lee, in early sound animation, and in reality television; and the recent reappropriation of the form at home and abroad.

In addition to the editor, contributors include Dale Cockrell, Catherine Cole, Louis Chude-Sokei, W. T. Lhamon, Alice Maurice, Nicholas Sammond, and Linda Williams.

Culture in the Anteroom introduces an English-speaking readership to the full range of Siegfried Kracauer's work as novelist, architect, journalist, sociologist, historian, exile critic, and theorist of visual culture. This interdisciplinary anthology---including pieces from Miriam Bratu Hansen, Andreas Huyssen, Noah Isenberg, Lutz Koepnick, Eric Rentschler, and Heide Schlüpmann---brings together literary and film scholars, historians and art historians, sociologists, and architects to address the scope and current relevance of a body of work dedicated to investigating all aspects of modernism and modernity. The contributors approach Kracauer's writings from a variety of angles, some by placing them in dialogue with his contemporaries in Weimar Germany and the New York Intellectuals of the 1940s and '50s; others by exploring relatively unknown facets of Kracauer's oeuvre by considering his contributions to architectural history, the history of radio as well as other new media, and museum and exhibition culture.

Traces the changing meanings of lynching and examines the political power of lynching as metaphor

Between 1880 and 1930, thousands of African Americans were lynched in the United States. Beyond the horrific violence inflicted on these individuals, lynching terrorized whole communities and became a defining characteristic of Southern race relations in the Jim Crow era. As spectacle, lynching was intended to serve as a symbol of white supremacy. Yet, Jonathan Markovitz notes, the act's symbolic power has endured long after the practice of lynching has largely faded away.

Documents conversations between two southern writers and friends whose families were intertwined in slavery

Legacies of Slavery commemorates a story of racial reconciliation in the South.  Writers, educators, and friends Frye Gaillard and Myra Davis-Branic discovered a shared family history of slavery in Eutawville, South Carolina, where Davis-Branic’s family was enslaved by Gaillard’s family.

In 2024, the University of South Alabama’s Kern Jackson moderated three conversations with Davis-Branic and Gaillard in Mobile. These conversations are presented here in an edited format. Davis-Branic and Gaillard discussed their intertwined family history and what they each learned from research into their ancestors. They relay origin stories and the role of a key grandparent who greatly impacted their lives. They also talk about their own trajectories in a historical context, the issue of slavery in their families, and the legacy of slavery for their children and families. 

The book concludes with short excerpts, one from Davis-Branic’s book Cornbread My Soul: The Davis Family of Eutawville, South Carolina, and one from Gaillard’s family history, Lessons from the Big House: One Family’s Passage Through the History of the South, a Memoir. Legacies of Slavery stands as a powerful and unique documentation for all who are interested in how two southern families, bound by slavery in the past and now by friendship and a degree of understanding, have found some measure of redemption.
 

The story of Don Juan first appeared in writing in seventeenth-century Spain, reaching Russia about a century later. Its real impact, however, was delayed until Russia’s most famous poet, Alexander Pushkin, put his own, unique, and uniquely inspirational, spin on the tale. Published in 1830, TheStone Guest is now recognized, with other Pushkin masterpieces, as part of the Russian literary canon. Alexander Burry traces the influence of Pushkin’s brilliant innovations to the legend, which he shows have proven repeatedly fruitful through successive ages of Russian literature, from the Realist to the Silver Age, Soviet, and contemporary periods. Burry shows that, rather than creating a simple retelling of an originally religious tale about a sinful, consummate seducer, Pushkin offered open-ended scenes, re-envisioned and complicated characters, and new motifs that became recursive and productive parts of Russian literature, in ways that even Pushkin himself could never have predicted.

The contributions to this volume not only indicate the intellectual vibrancy and diversity of cutting-edge research in Holocaust studies but also reflect multiple approaches to the necessary work of expanding the canon of research in the field and of adopting varied disciplinary perspectives, engaging with global perspectives as well as local studies.

This collection’s chapters manifest three broad categories: history, literature, and memory; at the same time, however, as the interdisciplinary nature of these chapters indicate, these categories should not be regarded as mutually exclusive or discrete. On the contrary, they overlap and intersect in compelling ways, demonstrating the dynamic character of contemporary Holocaust studies, which views history, narrative representation, and commemoration as mutually informative. Further, the contributors continue the recent trend in Holocaust studies whereby specific regional and national narratives are integrated into a more global approach to the event: Newer studies have continued to incorporate what was once termed the periphery into a more global examination of the experiences of Jewish refugees in flight to Latin America, Africa, and the Soviet Union. At the same time, very specific local studies deepen our knowledge of the mechanics of genocide, along with the experiences of refugees in flight, and the subsequent dimensions of Holocaust memory and representation. 

Bringing forth new perspectives previously unrepresented in Holocaust studies

Lessons and Legacies, Volume XVI: Rethinking Paradigms does the difficult but crucial work of thinking through new methods and modes of representation that speak to where we find ourselves in Holocaust studies today, responding to—and developing new tools to analyze—the shifting shape of Holocaust memory: spatially, temporally, and in and across diverse media. The collection foregrounds the challenges visual sources pose to how we think about the Holocaust, including how it is represented differently in visual media, from photography to graphic novels, and establishes translation as a crucial concept for reframing Holocaust testimony and memory. The contributing authors also model ethical, nuanced ways to conduct comparative, connective work that challenges Eurocentric narratives of the Holocaust. The volume concludes with a section on memory work and activism that approaches the subject of post-1945 memory through different lenses to surface lesser-known aspects of Holocaust history.

An insightful examination of Latin America’s contemporary democratic landscape and how it is marked by patterns of polarization and volatility.

Although Latin American democracies have shown considerable resilience, today they face new forms of political polarization and instability. These challenges are closely connected to the legacies of the region’s “left turn,” which sought to transform entrenched inequalities and social hierarchies in the early twenty-first century. Unprecedented in its scope and duration, the left turn reflected an underlying realignment of political contestation in a highly unequal region. Yet despite notable achievements in addressing social needs, leftist parties struggled to deepen democracy by empowering popular majorities, and they faced powerful elite backlashes.

Through a comparative analysis of seven South American countries, Santiago Anria and Kenneth M. Roberts trace the different origins and trajectories in power of the populist and social democratic currents that emerged within the left turn. Anria and Roberts argue that today’s democratic orders face intensifying polarization and institutional fragility, even where social democratic parties made explicit efforts to build broad coalitions and temper political conflict. They show how activist networks and social movements on the left and the right triggered latent political conflicts and are now reshaping democratic competition and the terms of social inclusion in South American politics.

Between 1980 and 1994, Peru endured a bloody internal armed conflict, with some 69,000 people killed in clashes involving two insurgent movements, state forces, and local armed groups. In 2003, a government-sponsored “Truth and Reconciliation Committee” reported that the conflict lasted longer, affected broader swaths of the national territory, and inflicted higher costs in both human and economic terms than any other conflict in Peru’s history. Of those killed, 75 percent were speakers of an indigenous language, and almost 40 percent were among the poorest and most rural members of Peruvian society. These unequal impacts of the violence on the Peruvian people revealed deep and historical disparities within the country.

This collection of original essays by leading international experts on Peruvian politics, society, and institutions explores the political and institutional consequences of Peru’s internal armed conflict in the long 1980s. The essays are grouped into sections that cover the conflict itself in historical, comparative, and theoretical perspectives; its consequences for Peru’s political institutions; its effects on political parties across the ideological spectrum; and its impact on public opinion and civil society. This research provides the first systematic and nuanced investigation of the extent to which recent and contemporary Peruvian politics, civil society, and institutions have been shaped by the country’s 1980s violence.