Faculty Publications

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.