Faculty Publications

Beth Piatote | Native American Studies, Ethnic Studies | 2019 | Counterpoint Press, 2019

Beth Piatote’s luminous debut collection opens with a feast, grounding its stories in the landscapes and lifeworlds of the Native Northwest, exploring the inventive and unforgettable pattern of Native American life in the contemporary world

Told with humor, subtlety, and spareness, the mixed-genre works of Beth Piatote’s first collection find unifying themes in the strength of kinship, the pulse of longing, and the language of return.

A woman teaches her niece to make a pair of beaded earrings while ruminating on a fractured relationship. An eleven-year-old girl narrates the unfolding of the Fish Wars in the 1960s as her family is propelled to its front lines. In 1890, as tensions escalate at Wounded Knee, two young men at college—one French and the other Lakota—each contemplate a death in the family. In the final, haunting piece, a Nez Perce–Cayuse family is torn apart as they debate the fate of ancestral remains in a moving revision of the Greek tragedy Antigone.

Formally inventive and filled with vibrant characters, The Beadworkers draws on Indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful, sustaining vision of Native life.

Judith Butler | Department of Comparative Literature | 2020 | Verso Press, 2020

Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilised in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence. Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how ‘racial phantasms’ inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.

Zeus Leonardo | Education | Routledge, 2020

Lisa Garcia Bedolla | Graduate School of Education | Oxford University Press, 2020

Over five decades of research has made clear that social networks can have an important impact on our political behavior. Specifically, when we engage in political conversation within these networks we develop connections that increase the likelihood that we will become politically active. Yet, most studies of political behavior focus on individuals, rather than the effects of networks on political behavior. Furthermore, any studies of networks have, by and large, been based on White Americans. Given what we know about the ways in which neighborhood, cultural, friend, and family networks tend to segregate along ethnic and racial lines, the authors of this book argue that we can assume that political networks segregate in much the same way. This book draws on quantitative and qualitative analyses of 4000 White American, African American, Latino, and Asian American people to explore inter and intra-ethnoracial differences in social network composition, size, partisanship, policy attitudes, and homophily in political and civic engagement. The book thus makes three key contributions: 1) it provides, for the first time, detailed comparative analysis of how political networks vary across and within ethnoracial groups; 2) demonstrates how historical differences in partisanship, policy attitudes, and engagement are reflected within groups’ social networks; and, 3) reveals the impact that networks can have on individuals’ political and civic engagement.

Minoo Moallem & Sima Shakhsari | Gender and Women's Studies & Media Studies | Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research, 2020

Steven Lee | English | University of Toronto Press, 2020

Founded by Vladimir Lenin in 1919 to instigate a world revolution, the Comintern advanced not just the proletarian struggle but also a wide variety of radical causes, including those against imperialism and racism in settings as varied as Ireland, India, the United States, and China. Notoriously, and from the organization’s outset, these causes grew ever more subservient to Soviet state interest and Stalinist centralization. Comintern Aesthetics shows how the cultural and political networks emerging from the Comintern have continued, even after its demise in 1943. Tracking these networks through a multiplicity of artistic forms geared towards advancing a common, liberated humanity, this volume captures the failure of a Soviet-centered world revolution, but also its enduring allure in the present.

The sixteen chapters in this edited volume examine cultural and revolutionary circuits that once connected Moscow to China, Southeast Asia, India, the Near East, Eastern Europe, Germany, Spain, and the Americas. The Soviet Union of the interwar years provided a template for the convergence of party politics and cultural history, but the volume traces how this template was adapted and reworked around the world. By emphasizing the shared, Soviet routes of these far-flung circuits, Comintern Aesthetics recaptures a long-lost moment in which cultures could not only transform perception, but also highlight alternatives to capitalism, namely, an anti-colonial world imaginary foregrounding race, class, and gender equality.

Bryan Wagner | English | Louisiana State University Press, 2019

This edition collects and introduces the most important versions of the Bras-Coupé story from the major phase of its development between the 1830s and the 1960s. One of the most notorious outlaws in the history of New Orleans, Bras-Coupé was a leader of the maroons who subsisted in the cypress swamps behind the city. Bras-Coupé’s historical career is presented with evidence from newspapers, census and city directories, police records, treasurer’s books, proclamations by the mayor, city council minutes, and family histories. After his death in 1837, Bras-Coupé became a legend, and over time, this legend took on fantastic dimensions. Bras-Coupé was given superpowers. His skin, it was alleged, could not be punctured by bullets. His gaze could turn you to stone. Moreover, it was said that he was an African prince before he was kidnapped and brought to Louisiana. He was the most famous performer at Congo Square, playing an indispensable role in the preservation of African music and dance. Sidney Bechet, one of the city’s most celebrated reed players, even held in his autobiography, Treat It Gentle, that Bras-Coupé invented jazz. This edition provides the definitive account of the development of the Bras-Coupé legend as it was recorded in folklore collections, magazines, memoirs, city histories, tourist guides, novels, poems, short stories, opera, and cinema. It includes original historical maps of the city and swamp, facsimile manuscripts, and a comprehensive bibliography.

Catherine Ceniza Choy | Ethnic Studies | Brill Publishing, 2019

Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture by Doreen G. Fernandez is a groundbreaking work that introduces readers to the wondrous history of Filipino foodways. First published by Anvil in 1994, Tikim explores the local and global nuances of Philippine cuisine through its people, places, feasts, and flavors. Doreen Gamboa Fernandez (1934–2002) was a cultural historian, professor, author, and columnist. Her food writing educated and inspired generations of chefs and food enthusiasts in the Philippines and throughout the world. This Brill volume honors and preserves Fernandez’s legacy with a reprinting of Tikim, a foreword by chef and educator Aileen Suzara, and an editor’s preface by historian Catherine Ceniza Choy.

Kurt Organista | School of Social Welfare | AIDS and Behavior, 2020

A structural-environmental model of alcohol and substance-related sexual HIV risk in 344 Latino migrant day laborers, participants in a cross-sectional survey, is tested using structural equation modeling. Hypothesized pathways include: (1) direct paths between environmental conditions and both distress related risk factors, and cultural and community protective factors; (2) indirect paths between environmental conditions and distress through cultural and community protective factors; and (3) indirect paths between environmental conditions and sexual risk through both distress risk factors and cultural and community protective factors. As hypothesized, the environmental factors, discrimination and working conditions, were indirectly related to sexual risk through the distress related factor, problem drinking, and through the protective factor, contact with family in country of origin. More specifically, as discrimination and working conditions worsen, contact with family decreases, problem drinking increases, and sexual risk increases. Implications for multi-level interventions are discussed.

Bryan Wagner | English | 33 ⅓ Series, Bloomsbury, 2019

Catherine Ceniza Choy | Ethnic Studies | Zócalo Public Square, 2019

Erin M. Kerrison | Social Welfare | Victims & Offenders, 2019

Erin M. Kerrison | Social Welfare | Police Practice and Research: An International Journal, 2019

Translational policing science must begin with explicitly communicated research aims and a shared vision for promoting safety. For researchers to approach police departments without first considering the concerns held by officers and their departments at large, is unethical, unproductive, and undermines efforts to secure longstanding mutually useful researcher-practitioner partnerships. In presenting a case study analysis of the multi-method National Justice Database’s recruitment practices, this article highlights some of the challenges that emerge when articulating study aims that hold relevance for public safety; defining theoretically- and solution-oriented research questions; administrative police data collection, analysis, and dissemination; and bolstering human research subject protection protocols for sworn officers who may be justifiably reluctant to participate in social science research endeavors. Implications for ethical policing research practice, fostering collaborative researcher-practitioner partnerships, and leveraging the benefits of data science are also discussed.

Dan Kammen | Goldman School of Public Policy; Energy & Resources Group | PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE, 2019

Dan Kammen | Goldman School of Public Policy; Energy & Resources Group | Pontifical Academy of Sciences Press, 2020

Michael Mascarenhas | Environmental Science, Policy, and Management | Multicultural Perspectives, 2019

Michael Mascarenhas | Environmental Science, Policy, and Management | Sage Publishing, 2020

Lessons in Environmental Justice provides an entry point to the field by bringing together the works of individuals who are creating a new and vibrant wave of environmental justice scholarship. methodology, and activism. The 18 essays in this collection explore a wide range of controversies and debates, from the U.S. and other societies. An important theme throughout the book is how vulnerable and marginalized populations–the incarcerated, undocumented workers, rural populations, racial and ethnic minorities–bear a disproportionate share of environmental risks. Each reading concludes with a suggested assignment that helps student explore the topic independently and deepen their understanding of the issues raised.

Juana María Rodríguez | Ethnic Studies | Duke University Press Books, 2020

AIDS and the Distribution of Crises engages with the AIDS pandemic as a network of varied historical, overlapping, and ongoing crises born of global capitalism and colonial, racialized, gendered, and sexual violence. Drawing on their investments in activism, media, anticolonialism, feminism, and queer and trans of color critiques, the scholars, activists, and artists in this volume outline how the neoliberal logic of “crisis” structures how AIDS is aesthetically, institutionally, and politically reproduced and experienced. Among other topics, the authors examine the writing of the history of AIDS; settler colonial narratives and laws impacting risk in Indigenous communities; the early internet regulation of both content and online AIDS activism; the Black gendered and sexual politics of pleasure, desire, and (in)visibility; and how persistent attention to white men has shaped AIDS as intrinsic to multiple, unremarkable crises among people of color and in the Global South.

Janelle Scott | Graduate School of Education, African American Studies, Goldman School of Public Policy, | Routledge, 2019

SanSan Kwan | Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies | Methuen, 2020

Elena A. Schneider | History | University of North Carolina Press, 2018

In 1762, British forces mobilized more than 230 ships and 26,000 soldiers, sailors, and enslaved Africans to attack Havana, one of the wealthiest and most populous ports in the Americas. They met fierce resistance. Spanish soldiers and local militias in Cuba, along with enslaved Africans who were promised freedom, held off the enemy for six suspenseful weeks. In the end, the British prevailed, but more lives were lost in the invasion and subsequent eleven-month British occupation of Havana than during the entire Seven Years’ War in North America.

The Occupation of Havana offers a nuanced and poignantly human account of the British capture and Spanish recovery of this coveted Caribbean city. The book explores both the interconnected histories of the British and Spanish empires and the crucial role played by free people of color and the enslaved in the creation and defense of Havana. Tragically, these men and women would watch their promise of freedom and greater rights vanish in the face of massive slave importation and increased sugar production upon Cuba’s return to Spanish rule. By linking imperial negotiations with events in Cuba and their consequences, Elena Schneider sheds new light on the relationship between slavery and empire at the dawn of the Age of Revolutions.

Bryan Wagner | English | LSU Press, 2019

Although the name of Bras-Coupé is little known today, Bryan Wagner shows us that his life and legend should be a touchstone among scholars and students in the humanities and social sciences with an interest in the African diaspora. Bras-Coupé was notorious as an escaped slave who lost an arm in a pitched battle with the New Orleans police in the 1830s. For several years he hid out in a swamp near the city, and the police widely publicized their manhunt for him through the newspapers, wanted posters, and the like. Messages from the mayor’s office cast Bras-Coupé as perhaps the main reason police needed the right to use deadly force in the course of their duties. In July 1837 he was killed by a former friend who betrayed him. His body was put on display in the Place d’Armes, where slaves were ordered to view it. The Bras-Coupé legend exploded after his death. There are many examples of the legend transcribed by folklorists and adapted by novelists including George Washington Cable and Robert Penn Warren. Over time, new incidents were added and the legend was transformed. Wagner’s critical edition collects the most important primary materials related to Bras-Coupé’s life and legend, starting with fugitive slave advertisements, arrest records, and journalism from the 1830s.

Paola Bacchetta | Gender & Women's Studies

Books

Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, and Decoloniality. Co-edited with Sunaina Maira and Howard Winant. New York: Routledge, 2019.

Chapters

“Dyketactics!” In Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History, Howard Chiang (editor in chief). New York: MacMillan Reference, 2019.

“Groupe du 6 Novembre: Lesbiennes Issues du Colonialisme, de l’Esclavage et de l’Immigration.” In Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History, Howard Chiang (editor in chief). New York: MacMillan Reference, 2019.

“Introduction: Global Raciality, Empire, Postcoloniality, Decoloniality.” With Sunaina Maira and Howard Winant.  In Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, and Decoloniality, co-edited with Sunaina Maira and Howard Winant, 1-20. New York: Routledge, 2019.

“Queers of Color and (De)Colonial Spaces in Europe.” With Fatima El-Tayeb and Jin Haritaworn. In Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, and Decoloniality, co-edited with Sunaina Maira and Howard Winant, 158-170. New York: Routledge, 2019.

“Queer Presence in/and Hindu Nationalism.” In The Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India, co-edited by Angana Chatterji, Thomas Hanson, Christophe Jaffrelot, pp. 375-396. London: Hurst and Company, 2019.

Aya de León | African American Studies | Kensington, 2019

Dulce García was a teen sexually exploited by a violent New York pimp until Marisol Rivera rescued her. But Dulce didn’t stay rescued for long. In Side Chick Nation, Dulce’s unhealed trauma and appetite for thrills lead her into an endless party of sugar daddies in the Caribbean. Until she gets caught in Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico—and witnesses both the heartbreaking disaster of climate change, and the international vultures who plunder the tragedy for a financial killing, making shady use of relief funds to devastate the island even more . . .

Meanwhile, New York-based mastermind thief Marisol already has her hands full fleecing a ruthless CEO who’s stealing her family’s land in Puerto Rico and getting her relatives out alive. An addional crew member could be game-changing, but she’s wary of Dulce’s unpredictability and history of indiscretion. Still, Dulce’s growing determination to get justice draws Marisol in, along with her formidable Lower East Side Women’s Health Clinic’s heist squad. But their on-the-fly race-against-the-clock plan is soon complicated by a sexy crusading journalist—not to mention powerful men who turn deadly when ex-side chicks step out of the shadows and demand to call the shots…

Minoo Moallem | Gender & Women's Studies | Routledge, 2018

Persian Carpets: the Nation As a Transnational Commodity tracks the Persian carpet as an exotic and mythological object, as a commodity, and as an image from mid-nineteenth-century England to contemporary Iran and the Iranian diaspora. Following the journey of this single object, the book brings issues of labor into conversation with the politics of aesthetics. It focuses on the carpet as a commodity which crosses the boundaries of private and public, religious and secular, culture and economy, modern and traditional, home and diaspora, and art and commodity to tell the story of transnational interconnectivity.

Bringing transnational feminist cultural studies, ethnography, and network studies within the same frame of reference, this book sheds light on Orientalia as civilizational objects that emerged as commodities in the encounter between the West and the many directly or indirectly colonized Middle Eastern and West Asian cultures, focusing on the specific example of Persian carpets as some of the most extensively valued and traded objects since colonial modernity.

Minoo Moallem | Gender & Women Studies | 2018 | Palgrave, 2018

The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema

Feminist Approaches to Media Theory and Research

Marcial González and Carlos Gallego, Editors | English | 2018 | University of Michigan Press, 2018

Dialectical Imaginaries brings together essays that analyze the effects of class conflict and capitalist ideology on contemporary works of U.S. Latino/a literature. The editors argue that recent global events have compelled contemporary scholars to reexamine traditional interpretive models that center on identity politics and an ethics of multiculturalism. The volume seeks to demonstrate that materialist methodologies have a greater critical reach than other methods, and that Latino/a literary criticism should be more attuned to interpretive approaches that draw on Marxism and other globalizing social theories. The contributors analyze a wide range of literary works in fiction, poetry, drama, and memoir by writers including Rudolfo Anaya, Gloria Anzaldúa, Daniel Borzutzky, Angie Cruz, Sergio de la Pava, Mónica de la Torre, Sergio Elizondo, Juan Felipe Herrera, Rolando Hinojosa, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Óscar Martínez, Cherríe Moraga, Urayoán Noel, Emma Pérez, Pedro Pietri, Miguel Piñero, Ernesto Quiñónez, Ronald Ruiz, Hector Tobar, Rodrigo Toscano, Alfredo Véa, Helena María Viramontes, and others.

Hatem Bazian | Near Eastern Studies & Asian American Studies

Islamophobia in India: Stoking Bigotry. Editor: Dr. Hatem Bazian. Authors: Paula Thompson and Rhonda Itaoui

Islamophobia and Psychiatry. Editors: Moffic, H.S., Peteet, J., Hankir, A., Awaad, R. (Eds.) Chapter by Dr. Hatem Bazian: “Islamophobia: An Introduction to the Academic Field, Methods, and Approaches.”

Islamophobia in Majority Muslim Societies. Editors: Enes Bayraklı, Farid Hafez (Eds.) Chapter by Dr. Hatem Bazian: “‘Religion-Building’ and Foreign Policy.”

Tina K. Sacks | Social Welfare | Oxford University Press, 2019

Although the United States spends almost one-fifth of all its resources on funding healthcare, the American system is dogged by persistent inequities in the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities and women. Invisible Visits analyzes how Black women navigate the complexities of dealing with doctors in this environment. It challenges the idea that race and gender discrimination, particularly in healthcare settings, is a thing of the past. In telling the stories of Black women who are middle class, Invisible Visits also questions the persistent myth that discrimination only affects racial minorities who are poor. In so doing, Invisible Visits expands our understanding of how Black middle-class women are treated when they go to the doctor and why they continue to face inequities in securing proper medical care. The book also analyzes the strategies Black women use to fight for the best treatment and the toll that these adaptations take on their health. Invisible Visits shines a light on how women perceive the persistently negative stereotypes that follow them into the exam room and makes the bold claim that simply providing more cultural competency or anti-bias training to doctors is insufficient to overcome the problem. For Americans to really address these challenges, we must first reckon with how deeply embedded discrimination is in our prized institutions, including healthcare. Invisible Visits tells the story of Black women in their own words and forces us to consider their experiences in the context of America’s fraught history of structural discrimination.

Abigail De Kosnik & Keith P. Feldman | Theater, Dance & Performance Studies; Ethnic Studies

Abigail de Kosnik and Keith P. Feldman, eds., #identity: Hastagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019).

Keith P. Feldman, “You (Shall) Have the Body: Patterns of Life in the Shadow of Guantánamo.” The Comparatist 42 (October 2018): 189-203.

Sonia K. Katyal | Law | UCLA Law Review, 2019

In this Article, I explore the impending conflict between the protection of civil rights and artificial intelligence (AI). While both areas of law have amassed rich and well-developed areas of scholarly work and doctrinal support, a growing body of scholars are interrogating the intersection between them. This Article argues that the issues surrounding algorithmic accountability demonstrate a deeper, more structural tension within a new generation of disputes regarding law and technology. As I argue, the true promise of AI does not lie in the information we reveal to one another, but rather in the questions it raises about the interaction of technology, property, and civil rights.

For this reason, I argue that we are looking in the wrong place if we look only to the state to address issues of algorithmic accountability. Instead, we must turn to other ways to ensure more transparency and accountability that stem from private industry, rather than public regulation. The issue of algorithmic bias represents a crucial new world of civil rights concerns, one that is distinct in nature from the ones that preceded it. Since we are in a world where the activities of private corporations, rather than the state, are raising concerns about privacy, due process, and discrimination, we must focus on the role of private corporations in addressing the issue. Towards this end, I discuss a variety of tools to help eliminate the opacity of AI, including codes of conduct, impact statements, and whistleblower protection, which I argue carries the potential to encourage greater endogeneity in civil rights enforcement. Ultimately, by examining the relationship between private industry and civil rights, we can perhaps develop a new generation of forms of accountability in the process.

Philip Gotanda and David Hang | Theater, Dance & Performative Studies | Yokohama California, 2019

Edited by Angana P. Chatterji and Thomas Blom Hansen and Christophe Jaffrelot | Hurst Publishers, 2018

Majoritarian State traces the ascendance of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India. Led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP administration has established an ethno-religious and populist style of rule since 2014. Its agenda is also pursued beyond the formal branches of government, as the new dispensation portrays conventional social hierarchies as intrinsic to Indian culture while condoning communal and caste- and gender-based violence.

The contributors explore how Hindutva ideology has permeated the state apparatus and formal institutions, and how Hindutva activists exert control over civil society via vigilante groups, cultural policing and violence. Groups and regions portrayed as ‘enemies’ of the Indian state are the losers in a new order promoting the interests of the urban middle class and business elites. As this majoritarian ideology pervades the media and public discourse, it also affects the judiciary, universities and cultural institutions, increasingly captured by Hindu nationalists. Dissent and difference silenced and debate increasingly sidelined as the press is muzzled or intimidated in the courts. Internationally, the BJP government has emphasised hard power and a fast- expanding security state.

This collection of essays offers rich empirical analysis and documentation to investigate the causes and consequences of the illiberal turn taken by the world’s largest democracy.

Dan Kammen | Goldman School of Public Policy; Energy & Resources Group | Nature Sustainability, 2019

The rooftop solar industry in the United States has experienced dramatic growth—roughly 50% per year since 2012, along with steadily falling prices. Although the opportunities this affords for clean, reliable power are transformative, the benefits might not accrue to all individuals and communities. Combining the location of existing and potential sites for rooftop photovoltaics (PV) from Google’s Project Sunroof and demographic information from the American Community Survey, the relative adoption of rooftop PV is compared across census tracts grouped by racial and ethnic majority. Black- and Hispanic-majority census tracts show on average significantly less rooftop PV installed. This disparity is often attributed to racial and ethnic differences in household income and home ownership. In this study, significant racial disparity remains even after we account for these differences. For the same median household income, black- and Hispanic-majority census tracts have installed less rooftop PV compared with no-majority tracts by 69 and 30%, respectively, while white-majority census tracts have installed 21% more. When correcting for home ownership, black- and Hispanic-majority census tracts have installed less rooftop PV compared with no-majority tracts by 61 and 45%, respectively, while white-majority census tracts have installed 37% more.

Jeroen Dewulf | Department of German & Dutch Studies | Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 2019

Since the slave population in New Netherland (1614-1664) was small compared to that of other Dutch Atlantic colonies such as Curaçao, Dutch Brazil and Suriname, it has traditionally received little attention by scholars, including creolists. It is, therefore, not well known that traces of Iberian languages can be found among the black population of seventeenth-century Manhattan. While the paucity of sources does not allow us to make any decisive claims with regard to the importance of Spanish and Portuguese for the colony’s black community, this article attempts to reconstruct the language use of this population group on the basis of an analysis of historical sources from New Netherland in an Atlantic context.

Juana María Rodríguez | Ethnic Studies | Differences 30, 2019

Juana María Rodríguez | Ethnic Studies | Duke University Press, 2019

Shifting the geopolitics of trans studies, travesti theory is a Latinx American body of work with an extensive transregional history. As a particular body politics, travesti identification is not only a sexed, gendered, classed, and racialized form of relation, but a critical mode and an epistemology. Throughout the Américas, trans and travesti studies take a multiplicity of forms: scholarly work that engages identitarian and anti-identitarian analytical frameworks as well as interventions into state practices, cultural production, and strategic activist actions. These multiple critical approaches—both travesti and trans—are regionally inflected by the flows of people, ideas, technologies, and resources that shape the hemisphere, opening up space to explore the productive tensions and expansive possibilities within this body of work.

Stefania Pandolfo | Anthropology

Through a dual engagement with the unconscious in psychoanalysis and Islamic theological-medical reasoning, Stefania Pandolfo’s unsettling and innovative book reflects on the maladies of the soul at a time of tremendous global upheaval. Drawing on in-depth historical research and testimonies of contemporary patients and therapists in Morocco, Knot of the Soul offers both an ethnographic journey through madness and contemporary formations of despair and a philosophical and theological exploration of the vicissitudes of the soul.

Knot of the Soul moves from the experience of psychosis in psychiatric hospitals, to the visionary torments of the soul in poor urban neighborhoods, to the melancholy and religious imaginary of undocumented migration, culminating in the liturgical stage of the Qur’anic cure. Demonstrating how contemporary Islamic cures for madness address some of the core preoccupations of the psychoanalytic approach, she reveals how a religious and ethical relation to the “ordeal” of madness might actually allow for spiritual transformation.

This sophisticated and evocative work illuminates new dimensions of psychoanalysis and the ethical imagination while also sensitively examining the collective psychic strife that so many communities endure today.

Hertha D. Sweet Wong | English | University of North Carolina Press, 2018

Picturing Identity examines the intersection of writing and visual art in the autobiographical work of eight 20^th and 21^st-century American writers and artists–including Maus comic book author Art Spiegelman, story quilt artist Faith Ringgold, Dictée author and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cheyenne conceptual artist Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, illustrated memoirist Peter Najarian, book artist Julie Chen, and celebrated Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon,–each of whom employ a mix of written and visual forms of self-narration.

Combining approaches from autobiography studies and visual studies, Wong argues that grappling with the breakdown of stable definitions of identity and unmediated representation, these writers-artists experiment with hybrid autobiography in image and text to break free of inherited visual-verbal regimes and revise painful histories.

Jeroen Dewulf | German Studies | University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2018

From the Kingdom of Kongo to Congo Square: Kongo Dances and the Origins of the Mardi Gras Indians  is a very intricate study that challenges the ways we should think about the interactions between European and African societies. The author does not skirt the horrific elements of these interactions. Rather, they make up one aspect of a large tapestry tracing the movement of performance tradition from the Kingdom of Kongo throughout the Diaspora.”–Matthew Teutsch in Black Perspectives.  This book presents a provocatively new interpretation of one of New Orleans’s most enigmatic traditions—the Mardi Gras Indians. By interpreting the tradition in an Atlantic context, Dewulf traces the “black Indians” back to the ancient Kingdom of Kongo and its war dance known as sangamento. Enslaved Kongolese brought the rhythm, dancing moves, and feathered headwear of sangamentos to the Americas in performances that came to be known as “Kongo dances.”

Julia Bryan-Wilson | Modern and Contemporary Art | The University of Chicago Press, 2017

In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto t-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of “craftivism”—the politics and social practices associated with handmaking—Fray explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval.

Steven Lee | English | Columbia University Press, 2017

During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called “the magic pilgrimage” to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West.

Shining rare light on these efforts, The Ethnic Avant-Garde makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued “ethnic avant-garde.” These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International.

Minoo Moallem | Gender & Women's Studies | Routledge, 2018

Persian Carpets: the Nation As a Transnational Commodity tracks the Persian carpet as an exotic and mythological object, as a commodity, and as an image from mid-nineteenth-century England to contemporary Iran and the Iranian diaspora. Following the journey of this single object, the book brings issues of labor into conversation with the politics of aesthetics. It focuses on the carpet as a commodity which crosses the boundaries of private and public, religious and secular, culture and economy, modern and traditional, home and diaspora, and art and commodity to tell the story of transnational interconnectivity.

Aya de Leon | African American Studies | Kensington Books, 2018

The Justice Hustlers Series carves out space for women of color in the crime genre at the intersection of wealth redistribution, sexual capital, labor rights, and women’s healthcare. They envision an unstoppable double rainbow coalition of racially diverse straight, queer, and trans women. These novels are action packed and sexually charged stories of hood problems, political struggle, international solidarity and brown romance. It’s a literary mash-up of my MFA in fiction, my craft as an award-winning poet and my skills as a hip hop artist, reaching for a new language of urban women’s insurrection.

Lauren Kroiz | History of Art | University of California Press, 2018

During the 1930s and 1940s, painters Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry formed a loose alliance as American Regionalists. Some lauded their depictions of the rural landscape and hardworking inhabitants of America’s midwestern heartland; others deemed their painting dangerous, regarding its easily understood realism as a vehicle for jingoism and even fascism. Cultivating Citizens focuses on Regionalists and their critics as they worked with and against universities, museums, and the burgeoning field of sociology. Lauren Kroiz shifts the terms of an ongoing debate over subject matter and style, producing the first study of Regionalist art education programs and concepts of artistic labor.

Chris Zepeda-Millán | Ethnic Studies | Cambridge University Press, 2017

In the spring of 2006, millions of Latinos across the country participated in the largest civil rights demonstrations in American history. In this timely and highly anticipated book, Chris Zepeda-Millán analyzes the background, course, and impacts of this unprecedented wave of protests, highlighting their unique local, national, and demographic dynamics. He finds that because of the particular ways the issue of immigrant illegality was racialized, federally proposed anti-immigrant legislation (H.R. 4437) helped transform Latinos’ sense of latent group membership into the racial group consciousness that incited their engagement in large-scale collective action. Zepeda-Millán shows how nativist policy threats against disenfranchised undocumented immigrants can provoke a political backlash – on the streets and at the ballot box – from not only ‘people without papers’, but also naturalized and US-born citizens. Latino Mass Mobilization is an important intervention into contemporary debates regarding immigration policy, social movements, and racial politics in the United States.

Read the CRG Faculty Spotlight interview with Prof. Zepeda-Millán, and listen to a 2017 Voces Criticas interview with Prof. Zepeda-Millán about this publication:

Tianna S. Paschel | African American and African Diaspora Studies | Princeton University Press, 2016

After decades of denying racism and underplaying cultural diversity, Latin American states began adopting transformative ethno-racial legislation in the late 1980s. In addition to symbolic recognition of indigenous peoples and black populations, governments in the region created a more pluralistic model of citizenship and made significant reforms in the areas of land, health, education, and development policy. Becoming Black Political Subjects explores this shift from color blindness to ethno-racial legislation in two of the most important cases in the region: Colombia and Brazil. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, Tianna Paschel shows how, over a short period, black movements and their claims went from being marginalized to become institutionalized into the law, state bureaucracies, and mainstream politics. The strategic actions of a small group of black activists—working in the context of domestic unrest and the international community’s growing interest in ethno-racial issues—successfully brought about change. Paschel also examines the consequences of these reforms, including the institutionalization of certain ideas of blackness, the reconfiguration of black movement organizations, and the unmaking of black rights in the face of reactionary movements. Winner of the 2017 Gordon Hirabayashi Book Award, Human Rights Section of the American Sociological Association.

Bryan Wagner | English | Princeton University Press, 2017

Perhaps the best-known version of the tar baby story was published in 1880 by Joel Chandler Harris in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, and popularized in Song of the South, the 1946 Disney movie. Other versions of the story, however, have surfaced in many other places throughout the world, including Nigeria, Brazil, Corsica, Jamaica, India, and the Philippines. The Tar Baby offers a fresh analysis of this deceptively simple story about a fox, a rabbit, and a doll made of tar and turpentine, tracing its history and its connections to slavery, colonialism, and global trade. Bryan Wagner explores how the tar baby story, thought to have originated in Africa, came to exist in hundreds of forms on five continents. Examining its variation, reception, and dispersal over time, he argues that the story is best understood not merely as a folktale but as a collective work in political philosophy. Circulating at the same time and in the same places as new ideas about property and politics developed in colonial law and political economy, the tar baby comes to embody an understanding of the interlocking processes by which custom was criminalized, slaves were captured, and labor was bought and sold.

Read an interview of Bryan Wagner about the volume. 

Alberto Ledesma | Arts & Humanities Graduate Diversity Office | The Ohio State University Press, 2017

Exploring Ledesma’s experiences from immigrant to student to academic, Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer presents a humorous, gritty, and multilayered portrait of undocumented immigrant life in urban America. Ledesma’s vignettes about life in the midst of ongoing social trauma give voice to a generation that has long been silent about its struggles. Delving into the key moments of cultural transition throughout his childhood and adulthood—police at the back door waiting to deport his family, the ex-girlfriend who threatens to call INS and report him, and the interactions with law enforcement even after he is no longer undocumented—Ledesma, through his art and his words, provides a glimpse into the psychological and philosophical concerns of undocumented immigrant youth who struggle to pinpoint their identity and community.

Dr. Ledesma’s work is also featured in the CRG publication, It Was All A Dream: Writings by Undocumented Youth.

Hatem Bazian | Ethnic Studies | Amrit Publishers, 2017

The veneer of post-racial America, the insistence on color blindness across Europe, the callous treatment of refugees and the brutalities inflicted on Muslims and Islam, all derive from lies perpetrated by the powerful (and the powerless) to perpetuate white supremacy. Dr. Hatem Bazian’s book reveals the truth – that the twisted roots of institutional racism, religious animosity and western arrogance are planted deeply in the fertile soil of the West; their legacies continue to shape our lives in the 21st century. Dr. Bazian describes their manifestations, their consequences and the sustained efforts to resist them, and maintain human dignity. This is a powerful set of essays, in vivid and compelling terms, that speaks to the most urgent matters of the 21st century.”– Stephen Small, Professor of African American Studies, UC Berkeley

Hatem Bazian | Ethnic Studies | Amrit Publishers, 2016

In 1902, Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, wrote to Cecil Rhodes, the Minister of Colonies for Great Britain: “You are being invited to help make history. It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews … How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.” The occupation of Palestine was the last settler-colonial project the British empire commissioned, and this colonial project is still unfolding more than one hundred years later. In centering Palestine’s modern history around settler-colonial discourses, Dr. Bazian offers a theoretical basis for understanding Palestine while avoiding the pitfalls of the internationally failed “peace process” that, on the one hand, affirms settler-colonial rights and, on the other, problematizes the colonialized indigenous Palestinians and dispenses with the ramifications of the colonial project.

Edited by Ayelet Shachar, Rainer Baubock, Irene Bloemraad, and Maarten Vink | Irene Bloemraad, Sociology | Oxford University Press, 2017

• Brings together the latest normative and empirical debates synthesized by leading experts in the field
• Revisits classic questions of citizenship and lays out cutting-edge contemporary approaches
• Analyzes citizenship from multiple disciplinary perspectives

Edited by Erik Bleich, Irene Bloemraad (Sociology), Els de Graauw | Routledge, 2017

In the past, researchers studying migrants and minorities have rarely engaged in systematic media analysis. This volume advances analytical strategies focused on information, representation, and participation to examine the media, migrants, and minorities, and it offers a set of compelling original analyses of multiple minority groups from countries in Europe, North America, and East Asia, considering both traditional newspapers and new social media. The contributors analyze the framing and type of information that the media provide about particular groups or about issues related to migration and diversity; they examine how the media convey or construct particular depictions of minorities and immigrants, including negative portrayals; and they interrogate whether and how the media provide space for minorities’ participation in a public sphere where they can advance their interests and identities. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Edited by Leigh Raiford and Heike Raphael-Hernandez | Leigh Raiford, African American Studies | University of Washington Press, 2017

Migrating the Black Body explores how visual media-from painting to photography, from global independent cinema to Hollywood movies, from posters and broadsides to digital media, from public art to graphic novels-has shaped diasporic imaginings of the individual and collective self. How is the travel of black bodies reflected in reciprocal black images? How is blackness forged and remade through diasporic visual encounters and reimagined through revisitations with the past? And how do visual technologies structure the way we see African subjects and subjectivity? This volume brings together an international group of scholars and artists who explore these questions in visual culture for the historical and contemporary African diaspora. Examining subjects as wide-ranging as the appearance of blackamoors in Russian and Swedish imperialist paintings, the appropriation of African and African American liberation images for Chinese Communist Party propaganda, and the role of YouTube videos in establishing connections between Ghana and its international diaspora, these essays investigate routes of migration, both voluntary and forced, stretching across space, place, and time.

Listen to the CRG podcast of the roundtable discussion with contributors from this volume.

Rivera-Rideau, Petra R., Jones, Jennifer A., Paschel, Tianna S. (Eds.) | Tianna Paschel, African American Studies | Palgrave MacMillan, 2016

Through a collection of theoretically engaging and empirically grounded texts, this book examines African-descended populations in Latin America and Afro-Latin@s in the United States in order to explore questions of black identity and representation, transnationalism, and diaspora in the Americas.

Aya De Leon | African American Studies | Kensington Books, 2016, 2017, 2018

The Justice Hustlers series carves out space for women of color in the crime genre at the intersection of wealth redistribution, sexual capital, labor rights, and women’s healthcare. They envision an unstoppable double rainbow coalition of racially diverse straight, queer, and trans women. These novels are action packed and sexually charged stories of hood problems, political struggle, international solidarity and brown romance. It’s a literary mash-up of my MFA in fiction, my craft as an award-winning poet and my skills as a hip hop artist, reaching for a new language of urban women’s insurrection.

Catherine Ceniza Choy (ed) | Ethnic Studies | Brill, 2017

As the inaugural volume of the new Brill book series Gendering the Trans-Pacific World: Diaspora, Empire, and Race, this anthology presents an emergent interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field that highlights the inextricable link between gender and the trans-Pacific world. The anthology features twenty-one chapters by new and established scholars and writers. They collectively examine the geographies of empire, the significance of intimacy and affect, the importance of beauty and the body, and the circulation of culture. This is an ideal volume to introduce advanced undergraduate and graduate students to trans-Pacific Studies and gender as a category of analysis.

Charles P. Henry | African American and African Diaspora Studies | Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

This book aims to expand what scholars know and who is included in this discussion about black studies, which aids in the democratization of American higher education and the deconstruction of traditional disciplines of high education, to facilitate a sense of social justice. By challenging traditional disciplines, black studies reveals not only the political role of American universities but also the political aspects of the disciplines that constitute their core. While black studies is post-modern in its deconstruction of positivism and universalism, it does not support a radical rejection of all attempts to determine truth.  Evolving from a form of black cultural nationalism, it challenges the perceived white cultural nationalist norm and has become a critical multiculturalism that is more global and less gendered. Henry argues for the inclusion of black studies beyond the curriculum of colleges and universities.

T. Carlis Roberts | Music | Oxford University Press, 2016

Cultural hybridity is celebrated as a hallmark of U.S. American music and identity. But when hybrid music meets the culture industry, it is generally marked and marketed under a singular racial label. This book examines musical projects that resist this tendency by foregrounding racial mixture in players, audiences, and sound. Examining Afro Asian musical settings as part of a genealogy of cross-racial culture and politics, the book argues that they are sites of sono-racial collaboration: musical engagements in which participants pointedly use race to form and perform interracial politics. Analyzing ensembles and individual artists who cross numerous genres, the book offers a glimpse into how artists live multiracial lives that inhabit yet exceed multicultural frameworks built on racial essentialism and segregation.

Trinh T. Minh-ha | Gender & Women's Studies | Fordham University Press, 2016

“Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared is filled with provocation and guided by evocation. Encompassing various forms (poetry, treatise, memoir, and historiography) and capaciously conceived, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s contemplation of war, state-authorized violence, state-sanctioned ‘security,’ and international amnesia is skillfully tempered by observations of beauty, humanity, and resistance. To say that this is an important book is in many ways an understatement; rather, Lovecidal is transformative.” —Cathy Schlund-Vials, author of War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work

Nadia Ellis | English | Duke University Press, 2015

Nadia Ellis attends to African diasporic belonging as it comes into being through black expressive culture. Living in the diaspora, Ellis asserts, means existing between claims to land and imaginative flights unmoored from the earth—that is, to live within the territories of the soul. Drawing on the work of Jose Muñoz, Ellis connects queerness’ utopian potential with diasporic aesthetics. Occupying the territory of the soul, being neither here nor there, creates in diasporic subjects feelings of loss, desire, and a sensation of a pull from elsewhere. Ellis locates these phenomena in the works of C.L.R. James, the testy encounter between George Lamming and James Baldwin at the 1956 Congress of Negro Artists and Writers in Paris, the elusiveness of the queer diasporic subject in Andrew Salkey’s novel Escape to an Autumn Pavement, and the trope of spirit possession in Nathaniel Mackey’s writing and Burning Spear’s reggae. Ellis’ use of queer and affect theory shows how geographies claim diasporic subjects in ways that nationalist or masculinist tropes can never fully capture. Diaspora, Ellis concludes, is best understood as a mode of feeling and belonging, one fundamentally shaped by the experience of loss.

Khatharya Um | Ethnic Studies | New York University Press, 2015

In a century of mass atrocities, the Khmer Rouge regime marked Cambodia with one of the most extreme genocidal instances in human history. What emerged in the aftermath of the regime’s collapse in 1979 was a nation fractured by death and dispersal. It is estimated that nearly one-fourth of the country’s population perished from hard labor, disease, starvation, and executions. Another half million Cambodians fled their ancestral homeland, with over one hundred thousand finding refuge in America.

From the Land of Shadows surveys the Cambodian diaspora and the struggle to understand and make meaning of this historical trauma. Drawing on more than 250 interviews with survivors across the United States as well as in France and Cambodia, Khatharya Um places these accounts in conversation with studies of comparative revolutions, totalitarianism, transnationalism, and memory works to illuminate the pathology of power as well as the impact of auto-genocide on individual and collective healing. Exploring the interstices of home and exile, forgetting and remembering, From the Land of Shadows follows the ways in which Cambodian individuals and communities seek to rebuild connections frayed by time, distance, and politics in the face of this injurious history.

Read the CRG FaultLines interview with Khatharya Um discussing this volume.

Charles Briggs | Anthropology | Duke University Press, 2016

This book examines the relationship between media and medicine, considering the fundamental role of news coverage in constructing wider cultural understandings of health and disease. The authors advance the notion of ‘biomediatization’ and demonstrate how health knowledge is co-produced through connections between dispersed sites and forms of expertise. The chapters offer an innovative combination of media content analysis and ethnographic data on the production and circulation of health news, drawing on work with journalists, clinicians, health officials, medical researchers, marketers, and audiences. The volume provides students and scholars with unique insight into the significance and complexity of what health news does and how it is created.

Aihwa Ong | Anthropology | Duke University Press, 2016

In Fungible Life Aihwa Ong explores the dynamic world of cutting-edge bioscience research, offering critical insights into the complex ways Asian bioscientific worlds and cosmopolitan sciences are entangled in a tropical environment brimming with the threat of emergent diseases. At biomedical centers in Singapore and China scientists map genetic variants, disease risks, and biomarkers, mobilizing ethnicized “Asian” bodies and health data for genomic research. Their differentiation between Chinese, Indian, and Malay DNA makes fungible Singapore’s ethnic-stratified databases that come to “represent” majority populations in Asia. By deploying genomic science as a public good, researchers reconfigure the relationships between objects, peoples, and spaces, thus rendering “Asia” itself as a shifting entity. In Ong’s analysis, Asia emerges as a richly layered mode of entanglements, where the population’s genetic pasts, anxieties and hopes, shared genetic weaknesses, and embattled genetic futures intersect. Furthermore, her illustration of the contrasting methods and goals of the Biopolis biomedical center in Singapore and BGI Genomics in China raises questions about the future direction of cosmopolitan science in Asia and beyond.

Edited by Milla Cozart Riggio, Angela Marino, & Paolo Vignolo | Angela Marino, Theater, Dance & Performance Studies | University of Chicago Press, 2015

The devil is a defiant, nefarious figure, the emblem of evil, and harbinger of the damned. However, the festive devil—the devil that dances—turns the most hideous acts into playful transgressions. Festive Devils of the Americas is the first volume to present a transnational and performance-centered approach to this fascinating, feared, and revered character of fiestas, street festivals, and carnivals in North, Central, and South America. As produced and performed in both rural and urban communities and among neighborhood groups and councils, festive devils challenge the principles of colonialism and nation-states reliant on the straight and narrow opposition between good and evil, black and white, and us and them.

Listen to the CRG podcast featuring Angela Marino discussing themes from this volume.

Paola Bacchetta and Laura Fantone | Gender & Women's Studies | Ombre Corte, 2015

Femminismi queer postcoloniali Critiche transnazionali all’omofobia, all’islamofobia e all’omonazionalismo

(Queer Post-Colonial Feminisms: Transnational Critiques of Homophobia, Islamophobia, and Homonationalism)

Angana Chatterji | Center for Race & Gender | University of Chicago Press, 2015

Conflicted Democracies and Gendered Violence elucidates the centrality of political and foundational violence in the governance of conflicted democracies in the postcolony, calling attention to the urgent need for transformation. Spectacular and quotidian gendered and sexualized violence by states and collectives holds in place fraught and unjust histories and relations between elites and subalterns, majoritarian subjects and non-dominant “Others.” At the intersections of nationalist and decolonial confrontations, such violence regularizes states of emergency and exception. Through oral history, archival, and legal research undertaken over three years, this interdisciplinary work underscores the need for transitional and transformative justice mechanisms in conflicted democracies to address protracted conflict (focusing on their internal dimensions) and social upheaval.

Learn more about the ongoing research in this volume led by the CRG research initiative, Political Conflicts, Gender, and People’s Rights Project.

Edited by Rhona S. Weinstein and Frank C. Worrell | Frank C. Worrell, Education | Oxford University Press, 2016

• Features the inspiring story of a more than decade-long partnership between a research university and charter district
• Provides a longitudinal look at new school creation and partnerships across the secondary-tertiary divide
• Focuses on how to transform high schools for underserved students, raising expectations for college-preparedness and success for all
• Provides new ways of thinking about advisories, integrating academic rigor and support, school culture today, deepening engagement in subject-matter, and student formation of an academic identity
• Represents diverse perspectives from students to superintendents; from schools and districts to universities

Claudia Carr | Environmental Science, Policy, & Management | Springer International Publishing, 2017

This book offers a devastating look at deeply flawed development processes driven by international finance, African governments and the global consulting industry. It examines major river basin development underway in the semi-arid borderlands of Ethiopia, Kenya and South Sudan and its disastrous human rights consequences for a half-million indigenous people. The volume traces the historical origins of Gibe III megadam construction along the Omo River in Ethiopia—in turn, enabling irrigation for commercial-scale agricultural development and causing radical reduction of downstream Omo and (Kenya’s) Lake Turkana waters. Presenting case studies of indigenous Dasanech and northernmost Turkana livelihood systems and Gibe III linked impacts on them, the author predicts agropastoral and fishing economic collapse, region-wide hunger with exposure to disease epidemics, irreversible natural resource destruction and cross-border interethnic armed conflict spilling into South Sudan.

Chana Kronfeld | Comparative Literature | Stanford University Press, 2015

Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000) was the foremost Israeli poet of the twentieth century and an internationally influential literary figure whose poetry has been translated into some 40 languages. Hitherto, no comprehensive literary study of Amichai’s poetry has appeared in English. This long-awaited book seeks to fill the gap. Widely considered one of the greatest poets of our time and the most important Jewish poet since Paul Celan, Amichai is beloved by readers the world over. Beneath the carefully crafted and accessible surface of Amichai’s poetry lies a profound, complex, and often revolutionary poetic vision that deliberately disrupts traditional literary boundaries and distinctions. Chana Kronfeld focuses on the stylistic implications of Amichai’s poetic philosophy and on what she describes as his “acerbic critique of ideology.” She rescues Amichai’s poetry from complacent appropriations, showing in the process how his work obliges us to rethink major issues in literary studies, including metaphor, intertextuality, translation, and the politics of poetic form. In spotlighting his deeply egalitarian outlook, this book makes the experimental, iconoclastic Amichai newly compelling.

Trinh T. Minh-ha | Gender & Women's Studies | A film by Trinh T. Minh-ha, Produced by Jean-Paul Bourdier, 2015

Charles Briggs (UCB Anthropology) and Clara Mantini-Briggs | Duke University Press, 2016

Tell Me Why My Children Died tells the gripping story of indigenous leaders’ efforts to identify a strange disease that killed thirty-two children and six young adults in a Venezuelan rain forest between 2007 and 2008. In this pathbreaking book, Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs relay the nightmarish and difficult experiences of doctors, patients, parents, local leaders, healers, and epidemiologists; detail how journalists first created a smoke screen, then projected the epidemic worldwide; discuss the Chávez government’s hesitant and sometimes ambivalent reactions; and narrate the eventual diagnosis of bat-transmitted rabies. The book provides a new framework for analyzing how the uneven distribution of rights to produce and circulate knowledge about health are wedded at the hip with health inequities. By recounting residents’ quest to learn why their children died and documenting their creative approaches to democratizing health, the authors open up new ways to address some of global health’s most intractable problems.

Charles L. Briggs (UCB Anthropology), Norbelys Gómez, Tirso Gómez, Clara Mantini-Briggs, Conrado Moraleda Izco, and Enrique Moraleda Izc | 2015

A Monster Disease: Indigenous Peoples Breaking Down the Wall of Health-Based Discrimination

Edited by Khatharya Um (UCB Ethnic Studies) and Sofia Gaspar | Sussex Academic Press, 2015

Southeast Asia has long been a crossroad of cultural influence and transnational movement, but the massive migration of Southeast Asians throughout the world in recent decades is historically unprecedented. Dispersal, compelled by economic circumstance, political turmoil, and war, engenders personal, familial, and spiritual dislocation, and provokes a questioning of identity and belonging. This volume features original works by scholars from Asia, America, and Europe that highlight these trends and perspectives on Southeast Asian migration within and beyond the Asia-Pacific region. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach – with contributions from sociology, political science, anthropology, and history – and anchored in empirical case studies from various Southeast Asian countries, it extends the scope of inquiry beyond the economic concerns of migration, and beyond a single country source or destination, and disciplinary focus. Analytic focus is placed on the forces and factors that shape migration trajectories and migrant incorporation experiences in Asia and Europe; the impact of migration and immigration status on individuals, families, and institutions, on questions of equity, inclusion, and identity; and the triangulated relationships between diasporic communities, the sending and receiving countries. Of particular importance is the scholarly attention to lesser known populations and issues such as Vietnamese in Poland, children and the 1.5 generation immigrants, health and mental consequences of state sponsored violence and protracted encampment, ethnic media, and the challenges of both transnational parenting and family reunification. In examining the complex and creative negotiations that immigrants engage locally and transnationally in their daily lives, it foregrounds immigrant resilience in the strategies they adopt not only to survive but thrive in displacement.

Read the CRG FaultLines interview with Khatharya Um discussing this volume.

Juana María Rodríguez | Gender & Women’s Studies | 2014

Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings proposes a theory of sexual politics that works in the interstices between radical queer desires and the urgency of transforming public policy, between utopian longings and everyday failures. Considering the ways in which bodily movement is assigned cultural meaning, Juana María Rodríguez takes the stereotypes of the hyperbolically gestural queer Latina femme body as a starting point from which to discuss how gestures and forms of embodiment inform sexual pleasures and practices in the social realm. Centered on the sexuality of racialized queer female subjects, the book’s varied archive—which includes burlesque border crossings, daddy play, pornography, sodomy laws, and sovereignty claims—seeks to bring to the fore alternative sexual practices and machinations that exist outside the sightlines of mainstream cosmopolitan gay male culture. Finalist for the 2015 LGBT Studies Award presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation.

Keith P. Feldman | Ethnic Studies | 2015

A Shadow over Palestine brings a new, deeply informed, and transnational perspective to the cultural forces that have shaped sharply differing ideas of Israel’s standing with the United States—right up to the violent divisions of today. Focusing on the period from 1960 to 1985, author Keith P. Feldman reveals the centrality of Israel and Palestine in postwar U.S. imperial culture.

Prof. Feldman explores themes from the book in this CRG podcast and an interview at Jadaliyya.

Scott Saul | English | 2014

Becoming Richard Pryor brings the man and his comic genius into focus as never before. Drawing upon a mountain of original research—interviews with family and friends, court transcripts, unpublished journals, screenplay drafts—Scott Saul traces Pryor’s rough journey to the heights of fame: from his heartbreaking childhood, his trials in the Army, and his apprentice days in Greenwich Village to his soul-searching interlude in Berkeley and his ascent in the “New Hollywood” of the 1970s. Becoming Richard Pryor illuminates an entertainer who, by bringing together the spirits of the black freedom movement and the counterculture, forever altered the DNA of American comedy. It reveals that, while Pryor made himself a legend with his own account of his life onstage, the full truth of that life is more bracing still. Visit the digital companion to the book at the website, Richard Pryor’s Peoria.

Michael R. Dove and Daniel M. Kammen | Public Policy | 2015

In an era when pressing environmental problems make collaboration across the divide between sciences and arts and humanities essential, this book presents the results of a collaborative analysis by an anthropologist and a physicist of four key junctures between science, society, and environment. The first focuses on the systemic bias in science in favour of studying esoteric subjects as distinct from the mundane subjects of everyday life; the second is a study of the fire-climax grasslands of Southeast Asia, especially those dominated by Imperata cylindrica (sword grass); the third reworks the idea of ‘moral economy’, applying it to relations between environment and society; and the fourth focuses on the evolution of the global discourse of the culpability and responsibility of climate change. The volume concludes with the insights of an interdisciplinary perspective for the natural and social science of sustainability. It argues that failures of conservation and development must be viewed systemically, and that mundane topics are no less complex than the more esoteric subjects of science. The book addresses a current blind spot within the academic research community to focusing attention on the seemingly common and mundane beliefs and practices that ultimately play the central role in the human interaction with the environment.

Linda Williams | Film Studies & Rhetoric | 2014

Many television critics, legions of fans, even the president of the United States, have cited The Wire as the best television series ever. In this sophisticated examination of the HBO serial drama that aired from 2002 until 2008, Linda Williams, a leading film scholar and authority on the interplay between film, melodrama, and issues of race, suggests what exactly it is that makes The Wire so good. She argues that while the series is a powerful exploration of urban dysfunction and institutional failure, its narrative power derives from its genre. The Wire is popular melodrama, not Greek tragedy, as critics and the series creator David Simon have claimed. Entertaining, addictive, funny, and despairing all at once, it is a serial melodrama grounded in observation of Baltimore’s people and institutions: of cops and criminals, schools and blue-collar labor, local government and local journalism. The Wire transforms close observation into an unparalleled melodrama by juxtaposing the good and evil of individuals with the good and evil of institutions.

Charis Thompson | Gender & Women’s Studies | 2014

After a decade and a half, human pluripotent stem cell research has been normalized. There may be no consensus on the status of the embryo—only a tacit agreement to disagree—but the debate now takes place in a context in which human stem cell research and related technologies already exist. In this book, Charis Thompson investigates the evolution of the controversy over human pluripotent stem cell research in the United States and proposes a new ethical approach for “good science.” Thompson traces political, ethical, and scientific developments that came together in what she characterizes as a “procurial” framing of innovation, based on concern with procurement of pluripotent cells and cell lines, a pro-cures mandate, and a proliferation of bio-curatorial practices.

Catherine Ceniza Choy | Ethnic Studies | 2013

In the last fifty years, transnational adoption—specifically, the adoption of Asian children—has exploded in popularity as an alternative path to family making. Despite the cultural acceptance of this practice, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the factors that allowed Asian international adoption to flourish. In Global Families, Catherine Ceniza Choy unearths the little-known historical origins of Asian international adoption in the United States. Beginning with the post-World War II presence of the U.S. military in Asia, she reveals how mixed-race children born of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese women and U.S. servicemen comprised one of the earliest groups of adoptive children.

C. D. Blanton, Colleen Lye and Kent Puckett | English, UC Berkeley | 2014

The essays that make up this special issue of Representations turn on the relation between those two terms. How, they ask, should we understand the formal and cultural effects of a world economy ever more dependent on finance’s increasingly abstract calculations of value? In one respect, the metaphor of a “culture industry” might now appear anachronistic, swept aside by the postindustrial speed, scale, and global reach of contemporary finance. But what then remains of notions—inherited from the Frankfurt School and elsewhere—of high and low culture, art and reification, commitment and commodity, class struggle and rationalization in an economy now conceived as immaterial or disembodied, frictionless or flat?

Leanne Hinton, Prof. Emerita | Linguistics | 2013

Throughout the world individuals in the intimacy of their homes innovate, improvise, and struggle daily to pass on endangered languages to their children. Elaina Albers of Northern California holds a tape recorder up to her womb so her baby can hear old songs in Karuk. The Baldwin family of Montana put labels all over their house marked with the Miami words for common objects and activities, to keep the vocabulary present and fresh. In Massachusetts, at the birth of their first daughter, Jesse Little Doe Baird and her husband convince the obstetrician and nurses to remain silent so that the first words their baby hears in this world are Wampanoag. Thirteen autobiographical accounts of language revitalization, ranging from Irish Gaelic to Mohawk, Kawaiisu to Māori, are brought together by Leanne Hinton, professor emerita of linguistics at UC Berkeley, who for decades has been leading efforts to preserve the rich linguistic heritage of the world. Those seeking to save their language will find unique instruction in these pages; everyone who admires the human spirit will find abundant inspiration.

Seth Holmes | Public Health | 2013

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies provides an intimate examination of the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants in our contemporary food system. An anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, Holmes shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes’s material is visceral and powerful. He trekked with his companions illegally through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with them before they were deported. He lived with indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the U.S., planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This “embodied anthropology” deepens our theoretical understanding of the ways in which social inequalities and suffering come to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care.

SanSan Kwan | Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies | 2013

Kinesthetic City takes as its premise the idea that moving bodies, place, history, and identity are mutually productive. Analyzing both everyday movement and contemporary concert dance in five Chinese urban sites – Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, New York’s Chinatown, and the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles – this book explores transnational formations of Chineseness. Not definable by national boundaries, biological essences, central political systems, or even shared cultural norms, Chineseness is a mobile yet abiding idea. This book examines the ways that Chineseness is, at key historical moments, highly contested in each of these cities while paradoxically sustained as a collective consciousness across all of them. It argues that global communities can be studied through an investigation of dance and everyday movement practices as they are situated in particular places and times.

Deborah Gray White , Mia Bay , Waldo E. Martin Jr. | History, University of California, Berkeley | 2013

Award-winning scholars and veteran teachers Deborah Gray White, Mia Bay, and Waldo E. Martin Jr. have collaborated to create a fresh, innovative new African American history textbook that weaves together narrative and a wealth of carefully selected primary sources. The narrative focuses on the diversity of black experience, on culture, and on the impact of African Americans on the nation as a whole. Every chapter contains two themed sets of written documents and a visual source essay, guiding students through the process of analyzing sources and offering the convenience and value of a “two-in-one” textbook and reader.

Joshua Bloom, Waldo Martin | History, UC Berkeley | 2013

Black against Empire is the first comprehensive overview and analysis of the history and politics of the Black Panther Party. The authors analyze key political questions, such as why so many young black people across the country risked their lives for the revolution, why the Party grew most rapidly during the height of repression, and why allies abandoned the Party at its peak of influence. Bold, engrossing, and richly detailed, this book cuts through the mythology and obfuscation, revealing the political dynamics that drove the explosive growth of this revolutionary movement, and its disastrous unraveling. Informed by twelve years of meticulous archival research, as well as familiarity with most of the former Party leadership and many rank-and-file members, this book is the definitive history of one of the greatest challenges ever posed to American state power.

Mel Y. Chen | Gender & Women's Studies | 2012

In Animacies, Mel Y. Chen draws on recent debates about sexuality, race, and affect to examine how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, or deathly, animates cultural lives. Toward that end, Chen investigates the blurry division between the living and the dead, or that which is beyond the human or animal. Within the field of linguistics, animacy has been described variously as a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, sentience, or liveness. Chen turns to cognitive linguistics to stress how language habitually differentiates the animate and the inanimate. Expanding this construct, Chen argues that animacy undergirds much that is pressing and indeed volatile in contemporary culture, from animal rights debates to biosecurity concerns.

Charles P. Henry, Robert Allen, Robert Chrisman | African American Studies | 2011

Barack Obama’s campaign and electoral victory demonstrated the dynamic nature of American democracy. Beginning as a special issue of The Black Scholar, this probing collection illustrates the impact of “the Obama phenomenon” on the future of race relations within the United States through readings on Barack Obama’s campaign as well as the idealism and pragmatism of the Obama administration. Some of the foremost scholars of African American politics and culture from an array of disciplines – including political science, theology, economics, history, journalism, sociology, cultural studies, and law – offer critical analyses of topics as diverse as Obama and the media, Obama’s connection with the hip hop community, the public’s perception of first lady Michele Obama, voter behaviour, and the history of racial issues in presidential campaigns since the 1960s. Contributors are Josephine A. V. Allen, Robert L. Allen, Herb Boyd, Donald R. Deskins Jr., Cheryl Harris, Charles P. Henry, Dwight N. Hopkins, John L. Jackson, Maulana Karenga, Robin D. G. Kelley, Martin Kilson, Clarence Lusane, Julianne Malveaux, Shaun Ossei-Owusu, Dianne Pinderhughes, Sherman C. Puckett, Scharn Robinson, Ula Taylor, Alice Walker, Hanes Walton Jr., and Ronald Williams II.

Kurt C. Organista | Social Welfare | 2012

This book, written by leading authorities on theory, research, and practice in preventing HIV with diverse Latino populations and communities, responds to the diminishing returns of the behavioral model of HIV risk by deconstructing the many social ecological contexts of risk within the Latino experience. Each of the chapters explores the most innovative thinking and original research on the prevention of HIV for a comprehensive span of subgroups and situations, including: preventing HIV in LGBT Latinos through community involvement and AIDS activism; in migrant laborers by scaling up community and cultural resources; in adolescent Latinas by facilitating communication with their mothers about sex; by decreasing the racism, homophobia, and poverty often experienced by Latino men who have sex with men; in transgender Latinas by decreasing familial, peer, and social rejection, and by providing structures of care at local, state, and national levels; and in Latinas by improving their economic autonomy as well as improving gender-equity ideologies among men.

Tyler Stovall | History | March 2012

This transnational history of Paris in 1919 explores the global implications of the revolutionary crisis of French society at the end of World War I. As the site of the peace conference Paris was a victorious capital and a city at the center of the world, and Tyler Stovall explores these intersections of globalization and local revolution. The book takes as its central point the eruption of political activism in 1919, using the events of that year to illustrate broader tensions in working-class, race, and gender politics in Parisian, French, and ultimately global society which fueled debates about colonial subjects and the empire. Viewing consumerism and consumer politics as key both to the revolutionary crisis and to new ideas about working-class identity, and arguing against the idea that consumerism depoliticized working people, this history of local labor movements is a study in the making of the modern world.

Stephen Small co-edited with Marten Schalkwijk | African American Studies | 2012 | Amrit Publishers, 2012

Analysis of slavery in the Caribbean, including variations in the nature, functioning and legacies of slavery across territories with different imperial masters – including the English, Spanish and French – has a long history and has produced a very substantial literature. There is far less work on the Dutch Caribbean, including Suriname. This reader makes a contribution to increasing our attention on the Dutch Caribbean, as well as its relationship to institutional practices and themes common elsewhere in the Caribbean.

Elaine H. Kim | Ethnic Studies | 2011

Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded is a 30-minute sequel to Slaying the Dragon. Reloaded looks at the past 25 years of representation of Asian and Asian American women in U.S. visual media — from blockbuster films and network television to Asian American cinema and YouTube — to explore what’s changed, what’s been recycled, and what we can hope for in the future.

Shannon Jackson | Rhetoric and Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies | 2011

At a time when art world critics and curators heavily debate the social, and when community organizers and civic activists are reconsidering the role of aesthetics in social reform, this book makes explicit some of the contradictions and competing stakes of contemporary experimental art-making. Social Works is an interdisciplinary approach to the forms, goals and histories of innovative social practice in both contemporary performance and visual art. Shannon Jackson uses a range of case studies and contemporary methodologies to mediate between the fields of visual and performance studies. The result is a brilliant analysis that not only incorporates current political and aesthetic discourses but also provides a practical understanding of social practice.

Taeku Lee and Zoltan L. Hajnal | Political Science and Law , UC San Diego | 2011

The book explores why so many Americans–in particular, Latinos and Asians–fail to develop ties to either major party, why African Americans feel locked into a particular party, and why some white Americans are shut out by ideologically polarized party competition. Through extensive analysis, the authors demonstrate that when the Democratic and Republican parties fail to raise political awareness, to engage deeply held political convictions, or to affirm primary group attachments, nonpartisanship becomes a rationally adaptive response. By developing a model of partisanship that explicitly considers America’s new racial diversity and evolving nonpartisanship, this book provides the Democratic and Republican parties and other political stakeholders with the means and motivation to more fully engage the diverse range of Americans who remain outside the partisan fray. For more info, here is an audio recording of Prof. Lee discussing research from his book at a CRG Thursday Forum: https://www.crg.berkeley.edu/content/political-parties-grassroots-resistance-audio

Trinh T. Minh-ha | Rhetoric and Gender and Women's Studies | 2011

Elsewhere, Within Here is an engaging look at travel across national borders–as a foreigner, a tourist, an immigrant, a refugee—in a pre- and post-9/11 world. Who is welcome where? What does it mean to feel out of place in the country you call home? When does the stranger appear in these times of dark metamorphoses? These are some of the issues addressed by the author as she examines the cultural meaning and complexities of travel, immigration, home and exile. The boundary, seen both as a material and immaterial event, is where endings pass into beginnings. Building upon themes present in her earlier work on hybridity and displacement in the median passage, and illuminating the ways in which “every voyage can be said to involve a re-siting of boundaries,” Trinh T. Minh-ha leads her readers through an investigation of what it means to be an insider and an outsider in this “epoch of global fear.”

Leigh Raiford | African American Studies | University of North Carolina Press, 2011

In Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare, Leigh Raiford argues that over the past one hundred years activists in the black freedom struggle have used photographic imagery both to gain political recognition and to develop a different visual vocabulary about black lives. Raiford analyzes why activists chose photography over other media, explores the doubts some individuals had about the strategies, and shows how photography became an increasingly effective, if complex, tool in representing black political interests.

Kim Voss and Irene Bloemraad | Sociology | 2011

From Alaska to Florida, millions of immigrants and their supporters took to the streets across the United States to rally for immigrant rights in the spring of 2006. The scope and size of their protests, rallies, and boycotts made these the most significant events of political activism in the United States since the 1960s. This accessibly written volume offers the first comprehensive analysis of this historic moment. Perfect for students and general readers, its essays, written by a multidisciplinary group of scholars and grassroots organizers, trace the evolution and legacy of the 2006 protest movement in engaging, theoretically informed discussions. The contributors cover topics including unions, churches, the media, immigrant organizations, and immigrant politics. Today, one in eight U.S. residents was born outside the country, but for many, lack of citizenship makes political voice through the ballot box impossible. This book helps us better understand how immigrants are making their voices heard in other ways.

Prof. Tamara Roberts, Music | Prof. Brandi Wilkins Catanese, Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies; African American Studies | Journal on Popular Music Studies (vol 23, issue 1), 2011

On October 1, 2009, the Center for Race Gender hosted the national symposium, “Michael Jackson: Critical Reflection on a Life & a Phenomenon.” Inspired by the rich papers and performances at this event, UC Berkeley professors Tamara Roberts (Department of Music) and Brandi Wilkins Catanese (African American Studies; Department of Theater, Dance, Performance Studies) were invited to edit a special issue of the Journal on Popular Music Studies (vol 23, issue 1) focusing on Michael Jackson’s extensive and transformative cultural production. This exciting issue, “Michael Jackson in/as U.S. Popular Culture,” features a wide variety of topics about and approaches to Jackson’s profound impact on popular culture. The editorial introduction to the volume is also available.

Evelyn Nakano Glenn | Ethnic Studies and Gender and Women's Studies | June 2010

Evelyn Nakano Glenn offers an innovative interpretation of care labor in the United States by tracing the roots of inequity along two interconnected strands: unpaid caring within the family; and slavery, indenture, and other forms of coerced labor. By bringing both into the same analytic framework, she provides a convincing explanation of the devaluation of care work and the exclusion of both unpaid and paid care workers from critical rights such as minimum wage, retirement benefits, and workers’ compensation. Glenn reveals how assumptions about gender, family, home, civilization, and citizenship have shaped the development of care labor and been incorporated into law and social policies. She exposes the underlying systems of control that have resulted in women—especially immigrants and women of color—performing a disproportionate share of caring labor. Finally, she examines strategies for improving the situation of unpaid family caregivers and paid home healthcare workers.

David Montejano | Chicano/Latino Studies | University of Texas Press, 2010

In the mid-1960s, San Antonio, Texas, was a segregated city governed by an entrenched Anglo social and business elite. The Mexican American barrios of the west and south sides were characterized by substandard housing and experienced seasonal flooding. Gang warfare broke out regularly. Then the striking farmworkers of South Texas marched through the city and set off a social movement that transformed the barrios and ultimately brought down the old Anglo oligarchy. In Quixote’s Soldiers, David Montejano uses a wealth of previously untapped sources, including the congressional papers of Henry B. Gonzalez, to present an intriguing and highly readable account of this turbulent period.

Elizabeth Abel | English | 2010

Signs of the Times traces the career of Jim Crow signs—simplified in cultural memory to the “colored/white” labels that demarcated the public spaces of the American South—from their intellectual and political origins in the second half of the nineteenth century through their dismantling by civil rights activists in the 1960s and ’70s. In this beautifully written, meticulously researched book, Elizabeth Abel assembles a variegated archive of segregation signs and photographs that translated a set of regional practices into a national conversation about race. Abel also brilliantly investigates the semiotic system through which segregation worked to reveal how the signs functioned in particular spaces and contexts that shifted the grounds of race from the somatic to the social sphere.