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In 1941, Irene Drusilla Namaganda, the reigning queen mother of British-occupied Buganda, shocked the kingdom when she revealed she was six months pregnant—only fifteen months after the king’s death. The father of her child, a schoolteacher nearly two decades her junior, quickly became the focal point for a scandal that engulfed the monarchy. The ensuing political crisis led to Namaganda’s removal from the office of queen mother (Nnamasole) and her companion’s exile, spurring her own departure.

Drawing from extensive archival research and in-depth oral interviews, this long-awaited biography analyzes Namaganda’s roles as wife, mother, widow, and prominent yet controversial cultural-political icon. Nakanyike Musisi moves beyond the scandal to explore how the monarch’s character and personal choices defied expectations of royal women and redefined motherhood, power, and tradition. She challenges dominant narratives in African political history and gender studies to show how African women navigated competing systems of authority and in doing so reshaped both the institution of monarchy and broader cultural and historical landscapes.

In the United States today, almost three-quarters of the people teaching in two- and four-year colleges and universities work as contingent faculty. They share the hardships endemic in the gig economy: lack of job security and health care, professional disrespect, and poverty wages that require them to juggle multiple jobs.

This collection draws on a wide range of perspectives to examine the realities of the contingent faculty system through the lens of labor history. Essayists investigate structural changes that have caused the use of contingent faculty to skyrocket and illuminate how precarity shapes day-to-day experiences in the academic workplace. Other essays delve into the ways contingent faculty engage in collective action and other means to resist austerity measures, improve their working conditions, and instigate reforms in higher education. By challenging contingency, this volume issues a clear call to reclaim higher education’s public purpose.

Interdisciplinary in approach and multifaceted in perspective, Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education surveys the adjunct system and its costs.

Contributors: Gwendolyn Alker, Diane Angell, Joe Berry, Sue Doe, Eric Fure-Slocum, Claire Goldstene, Trevor Griffey, Erin Hatton, William A. Herbert, Elizabeth Hohl, Miguel Juárez, Aimee Loiselle, Maria C. Maisto, Anne McLeer, Steven Parfitt, Jiyoon Park, Claire Raymond, Gary Rhoades, Jeff Schuhrke, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Steven Shulman, Joseph van der Naald, Anne Wiegard, Naomi R Williams, and Helena Worthen

How did the global Cold War influence American politics at home? For Might and Right traces the story of how Cold War defense spending remade participatory politics, producing a powerful and dynamic political coalition that reached across party lines. This “Cold War coalition” favored massive defense spending over social welfare programs, bringing together a diverse array of actors from across the nation, including defense workers, community boosters, military contractors, current and retired members of the armed services, activists, and politicians. Faced with neoliberal austerity and uncertainty surrounding America's foreign policy after the 1960s, increased military spending became a bipartisan solution to create jobs and stimulate economic growth, even in the absence of national security threats.

Using a rich array of archival sources, Michael Brenes draws important connections between economic inequality and American militarism that enhance our understanding of the Cold War's continued impact on American democracy and the resilience of the military-industrial complex, up to the age of Donald Trump.

Examines how India’s cattle underwent profound changes during the years of British colonial rule.

Drawing on extensive, untapped archives, Modern Cowsand Bovine Transformations illustrates the radical remaking of India’s cattle against the backdrop of colonial policies, environmental change, and anticolonial politics. Historian David Arnold examines the history of cows in India from 1790 to 1950, focusing on science, technology, and medicine to provide a secular account of imperial animal husbandry.

Doing justice to the wide variety of Indian cattle breeds, Arnold unpacks “bovine technology” and its subaltern linkages, covering topics such as the role of cattle in agriculture and the military; haulage and transport; breeding strategies; bacteriology and nutrition science, and India’s milk revolution. He also examines the dispersal of Indian cattle around the globe and the role that colonial policies played in spreading knowledge of Indian cattle breeds and facilitating their export. Finally, he addresses the “cattle crisis” brought on by famines, droughts, and disease, and disputes between colonial rulers and Hindu nationalists. He concludes with the impact of World War II and Partition on bovine populations, illustrating the consequences for independent India’s attempts to restore the milk supply and rebuild cattle breeds while also respecting the Hindu cow protection agenda. In the end, Arnold argues, the history of cattle in India provides us with a new way of understanding the power of the colonial state, its ambitions to transform India, its appropriation of the Indian subcontinent’s resources, and the myriad contradictions of its policies.

Latinas/os and Asians are rewriting the meaning and history of race in the American South by complicating the black/white binary that has frequently defined the region since before the Civil War. Arriving in southern communities as migrants or refugees, Latinas/os and Asians have experienced both begrudging acceptance and prejudice as their presence confronts and troubles local understandings of race and difference—understandings that have deep roots in each community’s particular racial history, as well as in national fears and anxieties about race.

Nuevo South offers the first comparative study showing how Latinas/os and Asians are transforming race and place in the contemporary South. Integrating political, economic, and social analysis, Perla M. Guerrero examines the reception of Vietnamese, Cubans, and Mexicans in northwestern Arkansas communities that were almost completely white until the mid-1970s. She shows how reactions to these refugees and immigrants ranged from reluctant acceptance of Vietnamese as former US allies to rejection of Cubans as communists, criminals, and homosexuals and Mexicans as “illegal aliens” who were perceived as invaders when they began to establish roots and became more visible in public spaces. Guerrero’s research clarifies how social relations are constituted in the labor sphere, particularly the poultry industry, and reveals the legacies of regional history, especially anti-Black violence and racial cleansing. Nuevo South thus helps us to better understand what constitutes the so-called Nuevo South and how historical legacies shape the reception of new people in the region.

Contributors: Alba Alexander, Megan Houston, Dennis R. Judd, Cynthia Klein-Banai, William C. Kling, Howard A. Learner, David A. McDonald, David C. Perry, Emily Stiehl, Anthony Townsend, Natalia Villamizar-Duarte, and Moira Zellner.

Considers the question “Who is a Jew?”— a critical rhetorical issue with far-reaching consequences for Jews and non-Jews alike

Hatzaad Harishon ("The First Step") was a New York-based, multiracial Jewish organization that worked to increase recognition and legitimacy for Black Jews in the sixties and seventies. In Stepping into Zion, Janice W. Fernheimer examines the history and archives of Hatzaad Harishon to illuminate the shifting definitions and borders of Jewish identity, which have critical relevance to Jews of all traditions as well as to non-Jews.

Fernheimer focuses on a period when Jewish identity was in flux and deeply influenced by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In 1964, white and Black Jews formed Hatzaad Harishon to foster interaction and unity between Black and white Jewish communities. They raised the question of who or what constitutes Jewishness or Jewish identity, and in searching for an answer succeeded—both historically and rhetorically—in gaining increased recognition for Black Jews. Fernheimer traces how, despite deep disagreement over definitions, members of Hatzaad Harishon were able to create common ground in a process she terms "interruptive invention": an incremental model for rhetorical success that allows different groups to begin and continue important but difficult discussions when they share little common ground or make unequal claims to institutional and discursive power, or when the nature of common ground is precisely what is at stake. Consequently, they provide a practical way out of the seemingly incommensurable stalemate incompatible worldviews present.

Through insightful interpretations of Hatzaad Harishon's archival materials, Fernheimer chronicles the group's successes and failures within the larger rhetorical history of conflicts that emerge when cultural identities shift or expand.

From the essential chronicler of the world economy, a portrait of the Great Powers in transition.

The world’s two great economic powers are on opposite trajectories. In the United States, decades of neoliberal policies produced a small class of rich elites and gutted the middle class. In China, the same global forces have created a massive new upper class. The result is the greatest reshuffling of global incomes since the Industrial Revolution—a dramatic shakeup of each country’s political order. As the two powers retreat from one another, the implications for their futures, and for the world economy, are uncertain.

In The Great Global Transformation, acclaimed economist Branko Milanovic draws on original research to chart how these seismic shifts will shape the next century of the global economy. As both the US and China retreat into protectionism, Milanovic shows how a new and multipolar world order will follow—and how rising nationalism will have dramatically different effects on the two countries. And he shows us the fight ahead: as plutocracy returns, global war threatens, and a new system silently shapes our nations, driving populist discontent to the breaking point.

A worthy successor to Capitalism, Alone and his other landmark works, Milanovic’s new book announces the arrival of a new era he terms “national market liberalism,” in which liberalism survives in domestic economies, but not necessarily in the social arena. The Great Global Transformation is Milanovic’s indispensable account of the new twenty-first century now underway.
 

Over the past two decades, Latin American politicians and activists have reckoned with their nations’ histories of racism, forced displacement of native peoples, and inequality by acknowledging Indigenous communities as peoples preexisting the modern states. In Argentina—a nation long fixated on presenting itself as “white” and “European”—this shift has been dramatic. After decades of erasure and racism toward Indigenous peoples, Argentinian civil society is identifying Indigenous groups as not just an element from the past, but as nations central to the country’s culturally plural and multiracial identity.

In Urban Indigenous Assemblages, Ana Vivaldi considers how Argentina’s urban Indigenous population fits into this recent political and social movement. To do this, she focuses on how the Qom Indigenous people—whose traditional territories are in northern Argentina—have moved to Buenos Aires, made homes in shantytowns alongside other migrants, and remade urban space by building Indigenous lives in the city. Starting from a Qom barrio in Greater Buenos Aires, Vivaldi traces how Qom peoples’ travels to rural communities and movement across the city create complex networks and produce an urban life always in connection to other places. She argues that urban racialized indigeneities represent sites of contradictory relations visible and invisible to state actors and hypervisible to development agencies, as the Qom are expected to prove their authenticity and remove themselves from important relationships with nonwhite neighbors to access rights and recognition.

Based on eighteen months of fieldwork, this book analyzes the historical process that created the barrio: the constant remaking of this Indigenous space in interaction with state institutions and NGOs, the links between the barrio and northern Argentina through travels “far out” to rural communities in the Chaco, and the expansion of “Indigenous territories” beyond bounded location.