Ethnic studies / Ethnicity Books

Book SynopsisIn Relative Races, Brigitte Fielder presents an alternative theory of how race is ascribed. Contrary to notions of genealogies by which race is transmitted from parents to children, the examples Fielder discusses from nineteenth-century literature, history, and popular culture show how race can follow other directions: Desdemona becomes less than fully white when she is smudged with Othello''s blackface, a white woman becomes Native American when she is adopted by a Seneca family, and a mixed-race baby casts doubt on the whiteness of his mother. Fielder shows that the genealogies of race are especially visible in the racialization of white women, whose whiteness often depends on their ability to reproduce white family and white supremacy. Using black feminist and queer theories, Fielder presents readings of personal narratives, novels, plays, stories, poems, and images to illustrate how interracial kinship follows non-heteronormative, non-biological, and non-patrilineal models oTrade Review“In Relative Races, Brigitte Fielder enriches our understanding of the cultural landscape of the long nineteenth century. Demonstrating boldness, analytical clarity, and scholarly creativity, Fielder gives us language for the processes of racialization that clearly shape American realities but that we have often failed to name because we lacked a theoretical framework.” -- Koritha Mitchell, author of * From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture *“Brigitte Fielder makes the bold claim that racialization entails neither the annihilation of kin ties nor the simple linearity of descent. Instead, ‘race,’ and blackness in particular, travels unpredictably, transferred from skin to skin, from child to mother, across literary genres, through adoption, via residency, and through sibling relations. In essence, Fielder retheorizes race as the making and breaking of kin ties. After Relative Races, we will not be able to think about race and racialization, kinship, and queer theories of temporality separately again.” -- Elizabeth Freeman, author of * Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century *“Brigitte Fielder’s Relative Races is a sophisticated addition to ongoing discussions of race, kinship, and community.... Fielder’s rereadings of historical episodes of kinship in domestic spaces in the 19th century urge us to revisit the archives, and shed light on stories that have been erased and ignored." -- Mary Rambaran-Olm * Public Books *“Brigitte Fielder’s Relative Races expertly navigates new discussions centering on nineteenth-century representations of racialization in the United States. . . . Fielder’s work has broad-reaching effects and implications for the twenty-first century and beyond.” -- Tabitha Lowery * Early American Literature *“In her reconsiderations of kinship and racialization, Fielder brilliantly constellates important critical emphases central to recent interventions in queer theory . . . and Native studies. . . . Fielder’s work is both a call and an itinerary––a praxis and a map––for productively unsettling normative relations in the U.S.” -- Shelby Johnson * ABO *“[Relative Races] is a text that embodies its arguments about excessive and attenuated kindship ties under slavery, the circulation of ideas about racialization, and the many paths of racialized kinship. . . . This important new book of literary history illustrates alternative genealogies and possible futures to combat anti-Black racism. -- Jolie A. Sheffer * American Literary History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Genealogies of Interracial Kinship 1 Part I. Romance. Sexual Kinship 1. Blackface Desdemona, or, the White Woman "Begrimed" 29 2. "Almost Eliza": Reading and Racialization 55 Part II. Reproduction. Genealogies of (Re)racialization 3. Mothers and Mammies: Racial Maternity and Matriliny 85 4. Kinfullness: Mama's Baby, Racial Futures 119 Part III. Residency Domestic. Racial Relations 5. Mary Jemison's Cabin: Domestic Spaces of Racialization 161 6. Racial (Re)Construction: Interracial Kinship and the Interracial Nation 195 Conclusion. "Minus Bloodlines": White Womanhood and Failures of Interracial Kinship 229 Notes 245 Bibliography 283 Index

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Book SynopsisIn The Cry of the Senses, Ren Ellis Neyra examines the imaginative possibility for sound and poetics to foster new modes of sensorial solidarity in the Caribbean Americas. Weaving together the black radical tradition with Caribbean and Latinx performance, cinema, music, and literature, Ellis Neyra highlights the ways Latinx and Caribbean sonic practices challenge antiblack, colonial, post-Enlightenment, and humanist epistemologies. They locate and address the sonic in its myriad manifestations-across genres and forms, in a legal trial, and in the art and writing of Xandra Ibarra, the Fania All-Stars, Beatriz Santiago MuÑoz, Édouard Glissant, and Eduardo Corral-while demonstrating how it operates as a raucous form of diasporic dissent and connectivity. Throughout, Ellis Neyra emphasizes Caribbean and Latinx sensorial practices while attuning readers to the many forms of blackness and queerness. Tracking the sonic through their method of multisensorial, poetic listening, Ellis Neyra shows how attending to the senses can inspire alternate, ethical ways of collective listening and being.Trade Review“In this insightful and creative work, Ren Ellis Neyra centers affect against mandates to perform Latinidad as positivist, representational, and recuperative. Offering substantive methodological, theoretical, and analytical contributions, The Cry of the Senses is primed to reorient the direction of Latinx studies.” -- Leticia Alvarado, author of * Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production *“The Cry of the Senses is at once a poetic, disruptive, and critically demanding work. Ren Ellis Neyra theorizes the ways in which sensorial and material inventiveness, improvisation, and experimental ruptures are primary forms of thought and resistance in the Caribbean. It is a rare and profoundly pleasurable event when a critical work is exemplary of the material practices it explores, itself an eruption, a detour and a break. The work's poetic, expansive theorizing is promiscuous, high-low, feral, committed, and sly. It is a marvelous rearrangement of anticolonial frequencies and geologies, and a delight.” -- Beatriz Santiago Muñoz“This is a poetic and thought-provoking study.... The Cry of the Senses represents an important contribution to Caribbean and Latinx studies.” -- Michael Niblett * Journal of American Studies *“The Cry of the Senses shows—and, to some extent, argues—that the tools of poetics can be deployed to different ends, in non-totalizing ways. . . . Ellis Neyra demonstrates the creative potential and the conceptual excitement enabled by a more situated, more embodied response to, and examination of, literary and other texts.” -- Sarah Dowling * Poetics *“The Cry of the Senses offers a compelling elaboration of poetics through a Latinx, Caribbean, and African diasporic archive. . . . This is also a beautiful book in its own right that performs what it theorizes: poetic listening to a multifaceted archive that articulates worlds until now only imagined.” -- Pamela Zamora Quesada * Chiricú Journal *“Rejecting the white, Western focus on reason and the individual, the author foregrounds brownness, Afro-Latinidad, and Blackness to undermine racist and colonialist world views. . . . [The Cry of the Senses] is a rich and relevant text. Recommended.” * Choice *Table of ContentsPreface: The Ground? xi Acknowledgments xix Introduction: Cry Bomba 1 1. "¡Anormales!": Unruly Audition in Performances of 1970s Salsa 27 2. "I have been forced to hear a lot": The FALN, The Masses Are Asses, and the Sounds, Shapes, and Speeds of Puerto Rican Defiance 55 3. Sensorial Errancy in Beatriz Santiago Munoz's Cinema 91 4. Slow Lighting, Ecstatic Mourning, and Migratory Refuge 129 Coda, in Three: "fifty-two plastic bombs exploding as one, thundered against the sky" 163 Notes 171 Bibliography 203 Index 217

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Book SynopsisMaureen Mahon documents the major contributions African American women vocalists such as Big Mama Thornton, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, and Merry Clayton have made to rock and roll throughout its history.Trade Review“We've got to know where we came from in order to get where we want to go, and there's no doubt that Maureen knows where she is headed! You can absolutely feel the passion in every word she speaks, whether in person or on paper, and Black Diamond Queens is no exception.” -- Quincy Jones“I thought I knew the stories of the women who populate this stellar revisioning of rock and roll history. Now I realize how much I had to learn. A revolutionary read that should chasten rock historians and will delight anyone who wants the full picture of how black women shaped a culture that pushed them to the side and how they survived.” -- Ann Powers, author of * Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music *"... Mahon has done plenty to expose how Black women rockers have been marginalized by musicians, audiences, historians, and critics. A well-researched, sociologically savvy effort to expand the rock canon." * Kirkus Reviews *“The book that's poised to set rock history free. Maureen Mahon's Black Diamond Queens sets the record straight by offering a meticulously detailed study of the ways in which Black women musicians and entertainers played pivotal roles in the birth of the genre and fearlessly revolutionized the form. Essential reading for anyone who cares about popular music culture.” -- Daphne A. Brooks, author of * Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 *Starred Review. "With depth and breadth, Mahon’s work centers the many African American women who heavily influence rock and roll, from LaVern Baker to Tina Turner. Rock and roll emerged neither from a vacuum nor from the minds of white, male performers alone. Mahon’s comprehensive research and intelligent thinking are captured in her compelling writing." -- Emily Dziuban * Booklist *"If you are curious about music and its development across genres or would like more examples of Black women’s exquisite impact on every aspect of life, Black Diamond Queens is for you. You won’t find many of these queens on the walls of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or in canonical texts discussing the origins of rock and roll. Still, crucially and inspiringly, you might see yourself in this group of Black women whose manicured fingers are all over rock and roll. At the very least, you will be exposed to some incredible new songs." -- Briana Spivey * Women's Review of Books *"A rare gem. . . . this meticulously researched book is a key entry in the ongoing record-correction of 20th-century popular music history, one that recenters women, and most crucially, women of color. . . . The collective telling of their complex stories, within an intersectional feminist framework, is the kind of illuminating scholarship that rock really needs." -- Jillian Mapes * Pitchfork *"As I read each page of Black Diamond Queens, learning about the Black women who contributed to not only the sound but the ethos of rock and roll, I felt like I was also learning about myself. In the end, the stories felt less like a permission slip to feel at home in a genre I most resonate with, but a reminder that, like these women, I should never feel the need to ask for permission at all." -- Erica Campbell * UPROXX *"Black Diamond Queens does what the best music books do: It urges us to play this music again — or for the first time — and to listen to it. Mahon’s brilliant book repays careful reading and challenges us to think anew about the history of rock and roll and the ways we might have traditionally understood it." -- Henry Carrigan * No Depression *"[H]ighly recommended for anyone who is interested in deepening their knowledge of the legacies and profoundness of Black women in music.' -- Jordannah Elizabeth * Amsterdam News *"This monograph is not only a welcome addition to works on genre, gender, and race but contributes a unique insight into Black-middle-class respectability politics in twentieth-century America. Black Diamond Queens is a great jumping-off point for contemporary Black feminist theorists, musicologically trained or not. Mahon has gifted scholars with a mantle, leaving room for others to take it up and continue the work of re-storing music history through the investigation of race, gender, and genre." -- Larissa A. Irizarry * Notes *"Mahon’s use of contemporaneous accounts, interviews, and illustrations contributes immensely to 'setting the record straight' regarding the impact, role, and significance of a group of historic figures often subverted by a male-dominated record industry and largely overlooked in the standard literature on the evolution of rock 'n' roll. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers." -- D. V. Moskowitz * Choice *"Rich, engrossing, and profoundly important. . . . Black Diamond Queens offers a long-overdue correction of the rock and roll historical record. And the final verdict? Black women rock." -- Kimberly Mack * Journal of Popular Music Studies *Table of ContentsIllustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1. Rocking and Rolling with Big Mama Thornton 29 2. LaVern Baker, the Incredible Disappearing Queen of Rock and Roll 52 3. Remembering the Shirelles 76 4. Call and Response 105 5. Negotiating "Brown Sugar" 141 6. The Revolutionary Sisterhood of Labelle 182 7. The Fearless Funk of Betty Davis 213 8. Tina Turner's Turn to Rock 240 Epilogue 273 Notes 285 Bibliography 349 Index 375

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Book SynopsisIn Another Aesthetics Is Possible Jennifer Ponce de León examines the roles that art can play in the collective labor of creating and defending another social reality. Focusing on artists and art collectives in Argentina, Mexico, and the United States, Ponce de León shows how experimental practices in the visual, literary, and performing arts have been influenced by and articulated with leftist movements and popular uprisings that have repudiated neoliberal capitalism and its violence. Whether enacting solidarity with Zapatista communities through an alternate reality game or using surrealist street theater to amplify the more radical strands of Argentina''s human rights movement, these artists fuse their praxis with forms of political mobilization from direct-action tactics to economic resistance. Advancing an innovative transnational and transdisciplinary framework of analysis, Ponce de León proposes a materialist understanding of art and politics that briTrade Review“One of the most significant areas of new research in socially engaged art concerns the ways in which this work both challenges existing aesthetic paradigms and calls upon us to develop new ones that can account for its unique complexity as both artistic practice and political praxis. Another Aesthetics Is Possible breaks new ground in this endeavor, offering a materialist concept of the aesthetic, rooted in Marxist theory and anticolonial resistance, along with nuanced readings of key projects developed in the Americas over the past two decades. Sure to be required reading for classes in activist and engaged art as well as postcolonial studies.” -- Grant H. Kester, coeditor of * Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art, 1995–2010 *“Rather than thinking about art as a response to oppressive political moments, Jennifer Ponce de León points us to artistic practices that force us to read against the systems of domination that authoritarian regimes and liberal ideologies uphold. Another Aesthetics Is Possible makes a profound intervention in fields interested in the intersection of art and politics, serving as a model into the future for anyone interested in truly ameliorating social and economic circumstances for people across the Americas. Engaging and thoroughly provocative.” -- Laura G. Gutiérrez, author of * Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage *"The role of criticism is to enable this impact, to keep the aesthetic practice alive for one, two, three generations afterwards so it persists as a resource for building another world. Another Aesthetics is Possible is an exemplary model of performing this role." -- Michael Dango * Lateral *"With Another Aesthetics is Possible, Ponce de León raises the bar for cultural critics, particularly those on the left, by arguing that they should register and study people’s innovative ways of resisting oppression within the framework of collectively lived experience rather than the fantasy of the narcissist individual." -- Fouad Mami * Cleveland Review of Books *"A vital intervention this book makes is to challenge the notion of the arts as an autonomous production separate from world-defining social struggles. . . . Another Aesthetics Is Possible, like the movements and artists it examines, contributes to the collective work of reorienting our aesthetic frameworks so that we can materialize a livable world beyond the demands of totalitarian neoliberalism." -- Josh Rios * Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture *"Ambitious and often riveting. . . . Thanks to this theoretical intervention, and buttressed by its thorough case studies, Another Aesthetics is an important contribution to scholarship exploring the relationship between art and capitalism, between aesthetics and politics, and between contemporary art and history." -- Niko Vicario * Hispanic Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Through an Anticolonial Looking Glass 29 2. Historiographers of the Invisible 80 3. Reframing Violence and Justice: Human Rights and Class Warfare 126 4. State Theater, Security, T/Errorism 192 Conclusion: Another Aesthetics—Another Politics—Is Possible 247 Notes 251 Bibliography 279 Index 303

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Book SynopsisAnthony Reed takes the recorded collaborations between African American poets and musicians such as Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Cecil Taylor, and Charles Mingus to trace the overlaps between experimental music and poetry and the ways in which intellectuals, poets, and musicians define black sound as a radical aesthetic practice.Trade Review“Offering a new way of thinking about black soundwork as an understanding of text, Anthony Reed makes a deep theoretical intervention in black studies by opening up the role of recordings in the black aesthetic avant-garde. The beauty and appeal of Soundworks lies in Reed's fresh focus on the records that allow us to hear the more ephemeral and unrecordable situation of blackness.” -- Margo Natalie Crawford, author of * Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics *“Anthony Reed adds his instrument to the slowly swelling chorus of intently listening, jazzed readers and critics. We've gone from the veritable whisper to a scream, and now is the time to consider the black media concept we have been inhabiting. Reed argues for an ‘overhearing,’ a phonographic mode of what he terms disalienation. Baraka called it ‘word-music’ form. Whatever we term it, it remains Black soundwork. Give it a listen.” -- Aldon Lynn Nielsen, author of * Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation *"Reed’s work . . . clears needed space to think through Black creative production on its own terms, and likewise, to see its revolutionary and radical ambitions as immanent expressions of Black soundwork. Overall, Soundworks offers a rich and nuanced account of media and materiality that will aid scholars in rethinking the conceptual tools and labor with which we approach Black music." -- Celeste Day Moore * Journal of Musicological Research *"[T]his book is a vital addition to the growing secondary literature about the jazz-poetry interface. . . . Reed is certainly qualified to address this topic, because in addition to being an established scholar he writes poetry and is a musician. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." -- B. Wallenstein * Choice *"The most satisfying aspects of Soundworks are found in Reed’s analysis of the recordings and performances he examines. Moreover, it is these sections that contain Reed’s best writing. He seems able to match the tone of his analysis and description of the musical and poetic personalities of these artists, and his enthusiasm for their art is evident." -- Duncan Heining * Popular Music *"A critical contribution to music, jazz, and Black studies in particular. . . . A richly poetic text, whose depth and subtlety rewards patient, repeated engagement." -- Dan DiPiero * Journal of Popular Music Studies *“It is significant that Reed describes this work as recreation, and that he highlights the significance of remediation in Black soundwork. One of this book’s key innovations is that it is a media history of poetry, and an examination of poetry’s work as mediation.” -- Sarah Dowling * Poetics *"The conceptualization of soundwork as both a textual and auditory practice is perhaps the most revelatory contribution made by Reed’s book, for it is a concept whose salience extends beyond phonographic poetry or black radical performance. . . . Across the book, Reed balances heady theoretical imaginings of contingent practices of freedom with attentive close listening to mediated forms of black sound." -- Jessica E. Teague * Contemporary Literature *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Black Sonic: Textuality 1 1. Voice Prints: Toward a Black Media Concept 23 2. Communities in Transition: A Poetics of Black Communism 61 3. Tomorrow is the Question! Amiri Baraka's Poetics for a Post-Revolutionary Age 103 4. Body/Language: The Semiotics and Poetics of Improvisation and Black Embodiment 143 Coda. No Simple Explanations 181 Notes 195 Bibliography 235 Index 251

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Book SynopsisNick Bromell examines how Frederick Douglass forged a distinctively black political philosophy out of his experiences as an enslaved and later nominally free man in ways that challenge Anglo-Continental traditions of political thought.Trade Review“The Powers of Dignity is an impressive, thorough, and detailed reconstruction of Frederick Douglass as political philosopher, and should immediately become a major reference text not just for Douglass scholarship but also for the broader project of retrieving and theorizing a distinct African American political tradition. Nick Bromell's book distinguishes itself by his impressive interdisciplinary ambition to bring together philosophy, literary studies, political theory, cognitive science, and new materialism. This is an exciting reconceptualization of the political cartography.” -- Charles W. Mills, author of * Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism *“Nick Bromell writes beautifully, and he has an illuminating story to tell about Frederick Douglass's political imagination from the 1840s to the 1890s. As Bromell shows, Douglass's political thinking about race and democracy was constantly in flux, mediated by his experience in slavery and his commitment to the Black freedom struggle. This is an exemplary contribution to our understanding of one of the most important figures in American history.” -- Robert S. Levine, author of * The Lives of Frederick Douglass *"This is an important study at a time when critical race theory is being banned in states like Oklahoma and Texas. Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty." -- R. T. Prus * Choice *“The Powers of Dignity is exactly the kind of book our nation and era needs.... [It] is both an exciting contribution to the literature on Frederick Douglass and a sobering reminder that the roots of our democracy and the theorizing that accompanies it are ‘a site of endless struggle.’” -- Ange-Marie Hancock * Perspectives on Politics *“[The Powers of Dignity]—gracefully written, wide-ranging, and compelling—makes a laudable contribution to Douglass scholarship. Scholars in political theory, literature, African American studies, and related fields will benefit from Nick Bromell’s excellent monograph.” -- Nathan Pippenger * Review of Politics *“The Powers of Dignity is an ingenious, determined, and stimulating interpretation of a part of Frederick Douglass’s political philosophy. . . . I greatly admire Bromell’s book, particularly for its subtlety and originality.” -- Bernard R. Boxill * American Political Thought *“At once dialectical and venturesome, it reimagines the mind of Frederick Douglass on Douglass’s own exceptional terms. One hopes academic philosophy and US political thought take notice.” -- Maurice Wallace * American Literary History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction. "The Thing Looked Absurd": The Black in Douglass's Political Philosophy 1 1. "To Become a Colored Man": Proposing Black Powers to the Black Public Sphere 17 2. "A Chapter of Political Philosophy Applicable to the American People": Human Nature, Human Dignity, Human Rights 38 3. "One Method for Expressing Opposite Emotions": Douglass's Fugitive Rhetoric 55 4. "Assault Compels Defense": Douglass on Black Emigration and Violence 82 5. "A Living Root, Not a Twig Broken Off": Douglass's Constitutionalism and the Paradox of Democracy's Foundations 101 6. "Somebody's Child": Awakening, Resistance, and Vulnerability in My Bondage and My Freedom 124 7. "Nothing Less Than a Radical Revolution": Douglass's Struggle for a Democracy without Race 159 8. "That Strange, Mysterious, and Indescribable": The Fugitive Legacy of Douglass's Political Thought 188 Notes 207 Bibliography 243 Index 263

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Book SynopsisBrandi Clay Brimmer analyzes the US pension system from the perspective of poor black women in the period before, during, and after the Civil War outlines the struggles of mothers, wives, and widows of black Union soldiers to claim rights in the face of unjust legislation.Trade Review“Brandi Clay Brimmer has written an amazing social history that transforms the study of poor black women’s quest for citizenship and recognition. Through finely grained research she revises our understanding of the racialized gendered state from the standpoint of poor women themselves. She advances how we think about the agency of newly emancipated women from after the Civil War into the late nineteenth century, in the process challenging existing interpretations about the origins of social assistance in the modern United States. This is historical research at its best.” -- Eileen Boris, author of * Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2019 *“This compelling study of eastern North Carolina black women’s claims for Union widows’ pensions marshals methodologically complex evidence to make striking arguments on questions of racialized motherhood, the origins of the welfare state, class formation, and Reconstruction’s failures. Brandi Clay Brimmer recaptures in rich detail the lives of heretofore unknown women who tried and often failed to secure their full Fourteenth Amendment rights. This book is a timely contribution to current debates on the nation’s history of racial injustice and a poignant saga of promises made and promises broken.” -- Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor Emerita, Yale University“Claiming Union Widowhood is a valuable addition to African American and legal historiography. It would teach well in courses on women’s history, labor history classes, and any course concerning emancipation.” -- Gretchen Long * Journal of Southern History *“Claiming Union Widowhood is an important contribution that speaks to several significant historiographical conversations. Historians interested in the long history of emancipation, the African American family, the Black military experience, and Civil War veterans would benefit from reading this excellent study. It sheds new light on the relationship between race, gender, and poverty in Reconstruction and afterward that should inspire future research.” -- David Silkenat * Labor *“Historians interested in how to think more expansively about where political thought happens and who produces it will find much value in Claiming Union Widowhood. . . . Brimmer’s deeply researched book offers readers a rich portrait of Black Union widowhood that will spark new questions for the broad read­ership it is sure to find.” -- Catherine A. Jones * Journal of the Civil War Era *“Claiming Union Widowhood makes an important contribution to understanding how working-class African American women leveraged local networks and an understanding of institutional processes as they interacted with government institutions in the post-Civil War nation. It powerfully shows, too, the limitations that black women met as they worked within the pension system and were forced to justify their relationships using definitions that had little relevance to their lives.” -- Melissa Milewski * Journal of Social History *“Tracing Black women’s fight to prove their status and wor­thiness as war widows, Brimmer’s study dem­onstrates the racial origins of the welfare state in the nineteenth century. . . . Brimmer’s impressive research illuminates the extent and significance of the pension network to New Bern’s Black community.” -- Carol Faulkner * Journal of American History *Table of ContentsCast of Principal Characters ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Part I. A People and a Place 1. Black Life and Labor in New Bern, North Carolina, 1850–1865 23 2. The Black Community in New Bern, 1865–1920 46 Part II. Encountering the State 3. Her Claim is Lawful and Just: Black Women's Petitions for Survivors' Benefits 77 4. Black Women, Claims Agents, and the Pension Network 101 5. Encounters with the State: Black Women and Special Examiners 123 6. Marriage and the Expansion of the Pension System in 1890 144 7. Black Women and Suspensions for "Open and Notorious Cohabitation" 163 8. The Personal Consequences of Union Widowhood 184 Conclusion 205 Notes 217 Bibliography 277 Index 299

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Book SynopsisSamantha A. Noël investigates how Black Caribbean and American artists of the early twentieth century responded to and challenged colonial and other hegemonic regimes through tropicalist representation.Trade Review“From Alexander von Humboldt to Wangechi Mutu, art historian Samantha A. Noël has tracked the allure of ‘tropical aesthetics’: landscapes, regalia, and choreographies that betray modernism's debt to the equatorial realm and its treasures. Black artists especially have had to contend with these sensibilities, responding to their appeals for diaspora camaraderie and struggling with the challenges they pose to a postfolkloric contemporaneity. This tension—along with Professor Noël's deft, critical purview—commends this important study.” -- Richard J. Powell, author of * Going There: Black Visual Satire *“Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism impressively explores how artists and performers throughout the twentieth century used visual tropes of the tropics to advance different ways of knowing and imagining modernity, modernism, primitivism, imperialism, nature, the environment, decolonization, and the ‘Black speculative.’ From the artwork of Aaron Douglas, Wifredo Lam, Wangechi Mutu, and Edouard Duval-Carrié to the performances of Maya Angelou, Josephine Baker, and the jamette women of Trinidad Carnival, the book newly calls attention to the centrality of tropical aesthetics in the practice of Black internationalization.” -- Krista Thompson, author of * Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction. Tropicality, Modernity, and the African Diaspora 1 1. American Tropical Modernism: The African Diasporic Reaches of Aaron Douglas's Landscapes 23 2. Brazenly Avant-Garde: Wifredo Lam's Transformation of Cuba's Tropical Terrain 60 3. Early Twentieth-Century Trinidad Carnival: Tropicality and Strategies of Space-Making 96 4. Pan-African Geographies in Motion: The Tropical Performances of Maya Angelou and Josephine Baker 142 Conclusion. The Black Body, Tropicality, and the Black Speculative 177 Notes 195 Bibliography 221 Index 237

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Book SynopsisVi?t Lê examines contemporary art in Cambodia and Vi?t Nam to trace the entwinement of militarization, trauma, diaspora, and modernity in Southeast Asian art.Trade Review“Việt Lê writes with flair and passion of difficult subjects: war, trauma, the art and visual culture of the Vietnamese and Cambodian diasporas. With a critic's nuanced eye and a practitioner's sensitivity, his framings and readings of provocative, complicated work evoke the beauty of the artists' visions and yet always return us to the history and the present of the artists' lives, careers, and countries. Return Engagements is a brilliant work to which I will return.” -- Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of * The Sympathizer *“Việt Lê moves the scholarly conversation about displacement away from the traditional state boundaries toward a much-needed examination of diaspora, (un)settlement, and return while offering a capacious rethinking of refugee-ness, displaced personhood, and diasporic selfhood. Return Engagements is a provocative and compelling work of curatorially driven art criticism.” -- Cathy Schlund-Vials, author of * War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work *"In this elegantly produced study of contemporary art in Cambodia and Vietnam, Việt Lê explores the multiple valences of return—as a yield that is more than financial, a journey that is deeply personal and a recurrence of history that is multi-temporal." -- Penny Edwards * Sojourn *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xxi Introduction. Risky Returns, Restagings, and Revolution 1 1. What Remains: Silence, Confrontation, and Traumatic Memory 57 2. The Art Part: Việtt Kiều Artists, Divides and Desires in Sài Gòn 105 3. Personal and Public Archives: Fragments and (Post)Colonial Memory 150 4. Town and Country: Sopheap Pich's and Phan Quang's Urban-Rural Developments 189 Epilogue. Leaving and Returns 239 Notes 245 Bibliography 301 Index 315

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Book SynopsisChristopher Freeburg challenges the imperative to study black social life and slavery and its aftereffects through the lenses of freedom, agency, and domination and instead examines how enslaved Africans created meaning through spirituality, thought, and artistic creativity separate and alongside concerns about freedom.Trade Review“The boldness and ambition of Christopher Freeburg's Counterlife are apparent on every page. Freeburg challenges decades of work on U.S. slavery that highlights either slave resistance or white dominance, but often not more than that. As an alternative, Freeburg insists that we consider the many possibilities of both Black life during slavery and the ways that we now dare to imagine and reference that life.” -- Robert F. Reid-Pharr, author of * Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique *“Christopher Freeburg's theory of counterlife is the refreshing new grammar that breaks out of slavery studies' conscious and unconscious lapses into the binary of social death or social life. Counterlife adds crucial new dimensions to the study of the artistic representation of enslaved Africans. This bold, brilliant study teaches us how to stumble, with uncertainty and vulnerability, into the ever-expanding archive of slavery.” -- Margo Natalie Crawford, author of * Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics *“Counterlife is somewhat loosely defined. . . . The virtue of this more speculative approach is that it brings widely ranging works into dialogue with each other and takes seriously the ways in which writers might wish to write against moral and political expectations—not so much resisting slavery as resisting its dominant modes of representation.” -- Colin Harrison * Modern Language Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Slavery's Hereafter 1. Sambo's Cloak 2. Kaleidoscope Views 3. Sounds of Blackness 4. The Last Black Hero Coda: Chasing Ghosts Notes Bibliography

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Book SynopsisEngaging with the work of Black musicians, writers, and women mystics, Jayna Brown takes up the concept of utopia as an occasion to explore new states of being, doing, and imagining in Black culture.Trade Review“Black Utopias is replete with flashes of insight, important provocations, and an urgent ethical and political thrust. Jayna Brown models a patient search for intellectual kin adequate to the nightmare world of the present and its dead and deadening ideologies. She reminds us of the extent to which so much Black political thinking begins from a profound negation of the fundamental tenets of Western models of subjectivity. Ambitious, bold, and bracing, Black Utopias forcefully reorients conversations around utopia and Afrofuturism. A field-defining work.” -- Anthony Reed, author of * Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production *“What does Black speculative practice feel like under the skin? What does it sound like? Where does it take us? Jayna Brown studies centuries of strange Black diviners and offers a map over the universe that is not about the stars but about a Blackness that births and rebirths life in contradicting quantum multiplicity. Where does it get at you (under the skin)? How do you hear it calling you? Let's go.” -- Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of * Dub: Finding Ceremony *"As the book unfolds, the pleasure Brown finds in her archival encounters with Sojourner Truth and musicians Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane is as palpable as the book’s pressed pages." -- K. Avvirin Gray * Women's Review of Books *“Among texts that examine Black embodiment—that examine our existence beyond and transcendence from the horrific bounds of State-sanctioned supremacies—Black Utopias stands out.... Regardless of your field, this is a must-read about Black existence and alternate states of freedom.” -- Jennifer Brown * College & Research Libraries *“Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias is an innovative interdisciplinary text that brilliantly uncovers a rich current of radical otherworldly utopianism within Black life, thought, and expressive culture.... It is absolutely essential reading for students and scholars of sf, utopia, critical humanisms, and posthumanism.” -- Jalondra A. Davis * Science Fiction Studies *“There are books that captivate you fully, that illuminate you, challenge you, that pierce through you with such clarity and imaginative force, opening mind and soul beyond the definable, the settled.... Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias is such a book.” -- Kristina J. Kolbe * Ethnic and Racial Studies *“Throughout Black Utopias, Brown commits to multiplicity and contradiction. We see this in her non-hagiographic approaches to preachers, musicians, writers, and literary figures. . . . It is in this politicization of the vibrational and sonic that we experience the depth of Blackness’s radical potential.” -- Amber Jamilla Musser * Journal of Popular Music Studies *“Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias . . . is personal and universal, critical and charitable, and continuously creative. . . . Brown succeeds in inviting readers to an imaginal realm of a less constrained ‘reality’ than what many people—and especially academics—presuppose.” -- Daniel Boscaljon * Literature and Theology *"The project of Black Utopias 'is a way of residing in spaces of ambiguity' where the line between madness and prophetic vision cannot be confidently drawn. It is very worthwhile to follow her lead into exploring that uncanny space in this innovative, well-researched piece of scholarship." -- John Rieder * SFRA Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Part I: Ecstasy 1. Along the Psychic Highway: Black Women Mystics and Utopias of the Ecstatic 23 2. Lovely Sky Boat: Alice Coltrane and the Metaphysics of Sound 59 Part II: Evolution 3. Our Place is Among the Stars: Octavia E. Butler and the Preservation of Species 83 4. Speculative Life: Utopia Without the Human 111 Part III: Sense and Matter 5. In the Realm of the Senses: Heterotopias of Subjectivity, Desire, and Discourse 137 6. The Freedom Not to Be: Sun Ra's Alternative Ontology 155 Conclusion 177 Notes 179 Bibliography 195 Index 205

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Book SynopsisThuy Linh Nguyen Tu examines the legacies of the Vietnam War on contemporary ideas about race and beauty, showing how US wartime efforts to alleviate the environmental and chemical risks to soldiers' skin has impacted how contemporary Vietnamese women use pharmaceutical cosmetics to repair the damage from the war's lingering toxicity.Trade Review“Experiments in Skin is a fully dazzling treatment of the aftermaths of the Vietnam War. Working expertly at the intersection of military history, chemical warfare, modern medical research, race, dermatology, beauty, and skin, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu tells a fascinating and important story about how contemporary Vietnamese beauty culture has arisen from an ugly history of US militarism—the afterlife of warfare in its enduring marks on Vietnamese skin as well as military efforts to heal and even perfect soldiers' skin. Tu renders extraordinary insight into the tightly entwined histories of militarized technology and a rising beauty culture, giving name to whole new territories for analysis.” -- Matthew Frye Jacobson, William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History, Yale University“Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu advances a theory of aesthetics and politics that is urgently relevant to contemporary postcolonial theorizations of colonial modernity and the resistance to it. By historicizing the emergence of dermatology in the context of American empire and war, Experiments in Skin embodies the best of cultural studies methodology and analysis.” -- Jennifer Terry, author of * Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America *"Experiments in Skin has extensive, detailed notes, and the depth of Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu’s analysis is evident as she cites military archives, newspaper articles and her own on-site research. . . . It is written in a journalistic style, which makes it accessible to a wide audience who might wish to learn about the heavy topics presented." -- Bella Dalton-Fenkl * International Examiner *"Experiments in Skin is an ambitious and multifaceted account of the social afterlife of militarized medical science; its interdisciplinarity permits its author to draw insight from revealing juxtapositions. . . . Drawing together critical science studies with ethnography, Experiments in Skin contributes not only to medical anthropology and the history of medicine but also to a nascent critical research literature on beauty products and industries. Its chapters would make thought-provoking contributions to advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars in critical environmental studies, cultural studies, feminist studies, medical anthropology, postcolonial studies, science and technology studies, and Southeast Asian studies." -- Martha Lincoln * Medical Anthropology Quarterly *"Experiments in Skin is a superb gift: beautifully written, intellectually expansive, accessible and engaging. One of the most admirable aspects of Experiments in Skin is its ambitious capacity: it covers a lot of intellectual ground, but does so in such a way that still maintains analytical depth and thoroughness. Tu’s capacity to balance both is enviable, and is a quality that makes this book such an engaging and enjoyable read." -- John Paul (JP) Catungal * Society and Space *"It is well beyond the scope of a short book review to do justice to Dr. Tu’s exacting empirical research, or her powerful and affecting prose. But what I want to emphasize in my comments here is how Experiments in Skin is a fundamentally geographical book. It is, at its core, a book about places, the people who inhabit them, and the connections between them." -- Wesley Attewell * Society and Space *"In this insightful—and indeed beautiful—book, Tu offers us a model of scholarly work that not only undertakes a rigorous examination of the archives of militarism and science, but also a theorization of the forms of life remaindered by war." -- Linda Luu * Society and Space *"Readers of all stripes will find much to appreciate and admire in this interdisciplinary historical project, as Tu provides the probing critical analysis and somatic language needed to tackle the deep entanglements of military racism, prison torture, and chemical warfare. Experiments in Skin is a book for anyone interested in what stories our skin have to tell, despite the endless technologies of maiming and the politics of denial. If our history is embodied, then our skin remembers well that living history, and it never lies about what cannot be denied or covered up." -- Long T. Bui * American Historical Review *"By conjoining the United States and Vietnam through their similar relationships with skin, Tu offers new ways to understand how military, medical, and commercial interests have shaped and influenced the ways Vietnamese women have sought to cure and relieve skin disorders. . . . In tracing the history of experiments in the skin, Tu powerfully articulates how Vietnamese women do not hold the same desires as the US military holds. . . ." -- Shani Tra & Sunshine Blanco * Journal of Asian American Studies *"In pursuing the ghostly traces of latent histories, Tu’s book theorizes the connections between surfaces of racialized, gendered, commercialized, militarized, and medicalized skin on multiple scales across the US and Vietnam, while being attentive to alternate logics of relationality and responsibility." -- Elizabeth Wijaya * Pacific Affairs *"By considering the scientific contributions and innovations of the Global South, Nguyen Tu disentangles social and medical theory from its purportedly Western origins and places it in a global context. Perhaps the question at hand is not just how dermatology’s beginnings concern women in contemporary Vietnam but also how this line of inquiry can be furthered in Vietnam studies." -- Allen L. Tran * Journal of Vietnamese Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction. Mysteries of the Visible 1 1. Skin Stories: Making Beauty in the Culture of Renovation 23 2. The Beautiful Life of Agent Orange 49 3. An Armor of Skin: Pacific Threats and the Dreams of Infinite Security 76 4. A Laboratory of Skin: Making Race in the Mekong Delta 104 5. Weak Skin, Strong Skin: The Work of Making Livable 134 Epilogue 161 Notes 165 Bibliography 201 Index 219

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Book SynopsisDrawing on Black feminism, Afro-pessimism, and critical race theory, the contributors to Antiblackness trace the forms of antiblackness across time and space, showing how the dehumanization of Black people has been foundational to the establishment of modernity.Trade Review“These essays arrive right on time, and with no apparent expiration date. Moon-Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas have assembled a collection that forcefully unravels, analyzes, and exposes how slavery and global antiblackness structure and produce meaning in the modern world. The essays theorize, analyze, and provide us field notes for understanding how and why antiblackness does not just underwrite the modern world but actively produces it in multiple modalities. After encountering these essays, any analysis that does not contend with antiblackness as central to modern life is an analysis blind to what exactly the modern means.” -- Rinaldo Walcott, author of * The Long Emancipation: Moving toward Black Freedom *“Moon-Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas have assembled an impressive cross section of thinkers who write from a host of methodological and philosophical positions and approaches and who work toward a necessary language to situate antiblackness in and beyond Black studies. The need for this project could not be more urgent.” -- Shana L. Redmond, author of * Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson *"This book could be used in courses on Black studies, sociology, history, political science, and social justice studies. Alongside the text, which is incredibly relevant to the current sociopolitical moment, instructors might also have students view the film 13th (2016), which resonates most strongly with the theme of intentionally scaffolded racial injustice in the American criminal justice system in part 3 of Antiblackness. Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals." -- C. L. Lalonde * Choice *“Every educator, scholar, and researcher of antiblack violence and racism is encouraged to engage with Antiblackness. . . . Recognizing the framework of antiblackness can heighten awareness in understanding how the afterlife of global enslavement functions in our interconnected realities every single day.” -- Tiffany N. Peacock * Transforming Anthropology *“[Antiblackness] is an important tool that will allow readers to articulate the travesties done to Black people all over the world and combat the narrative that race has nothing to do with how our world has been structured. . . . Knowledge is power and this book will certainly educate anyone who is interested in portions of history that are often untold in the media and in educational institutions.” -- Jordannah Elizabeth * Amsterdam News *“Antiblackness . . . is highly recommended to students of African Studies, History, Religious Studies, Sociology, and Political Science. . . . Significantly, the book will be useful to teach students in high schools and universities to understand the long history of Anti-Blackness and how to combat such problems in our societies.” -- Kofi Johnson * International Social Science Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction. Antiblackness of the Social and the Human / João H. Costa Vargas and Moon-Kie Jung 1 Part I. Openings 1. The Illumination of Blackness / Charles W. Mills 17 2. Afropessimism and the Ruse of Analogy: Violence, Freedom Struggles, and the Death of Black Desire / Frank B. Wilderson III 37 3. Afro-feminism before Afropessimism: Meditations on Gender and Ontology / Iyko Day 60 4. Toward a General Theory of Antiblackness / Anthony Paul Farley 82 Part II. Groundings 5. Limited Growth: U.S. Settler Slavery, Colonial India, and Global Rice Markets in the Mid-Nineteenth Century / Zach Sell 107 6. Flesh Work and the Reproduction of Black Culpability / Sarah Haley 131 7. "Not to Be Slaves of Others": Antiblackness in Precolonial Korea / Jae Kyun Kim and Moon-Kie Jung 143 Part III. Captivities 8. "Mass Incarceration" as Misnomer: Chattel/Domestic War and the Problem of Narrativity / Dylan Rodríguez 171 9. Gendered Antiblackness and Police Violence in the Formations of British Political Liberalism / Mohan Ambikaipaker 198 10. Schools as Sites of Antiblack Violence: Black Girls and Policing in the Afterlife of Slavery / Connie Wun 224 11. Presidential Powers in the Captive Maternal Lives of Sally, Michelle, and Deborah / Joy James 244 Part IV. Unsettlings 12. On the Illegibility of French Antiblackness: Notes from an African American Critic / Crystal M. Fleming 263 13. Latino Antiblack Bias and the Census Categorization of Latinos: Race, Ethnicity, or Other? / Tanya Katerí Hernández 283 14. Born Palestinian, Born Black: Antiblackness and the Womb of Zionist Settler Colonialism / Sarah Ihmoud 297 15. Not Yet: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Anticolonial Liberation / Jodi A. Byrd 309 References 325 Contributors 369 Index 373

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Book SynopsisViệt Lê examines contemporary art in Cambodia and Việt Nam to trace the entwinement of militarization, trauma, diaspora, and modernity in Southeast Asian art.Trade Review“Việt Lê writes with flair and passion of difficult subjects: war, trauma, the art and visual culture of the Vietnamese and Cambodian diasporas. With a critic's nuanced eye and a practitioner's sensitivity, his framings and readings of provocative, complicated work evoke the beauty of the artists' visions and yet always return us to the history and the present of the artists' lives, careers, and countries. Return Engagements is a brilliant work to which I will return.” -- Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of * The Sympathizer *“Việt Lê moves the scholarly conversation about displacement away from the traditional state boundaries toward a much-needed examination of diaspora, (un)settlement, and return while offering a capacious rethinking of refugee-ness, displaced personhood, and diasporic selfhood. Return Engagements is a provocative and compelling work of curatorially driven art criticism.” -- Cathy Schlund-Vials, author of * War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work *"In this elegantly produced study of contemporary art in Cambodia and Vietnam, Việt Lê explores the multiple valences of return—as a yield that is more than financial, a journey that is deeply personal and a recurrence of history that is multi-temporal." -- Penny Edwards * Sojourn *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xxi Introduction. Risky Returns, Restagings, and Revolution 1 1. What Remains: Silence, Confrontation, and Traumatic Memory 57 2. The Art Part: Việtt Kiều Artists, Divides and Desires in Sài Gòn 105 3. Personal and Public Archives: Fragments and (Post)Colonial Memory 150 4. Town and Country: Sopheap Pich's and Phan Quang's Urban-Rural Developments 189 Epilogue. Leaving and Returns 239 Notes 245 Bibliography 301 Index 315

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Book SynopsisIn Unseeing Empire Bakirathi Mani examines how empire continues to haunt South Asian American visual cultures. Weaving close readings of fine art together with archival research and ethnographic fieldwork at museums and galleries across South Asia and North America, Mani outlines the visual and affective relationships between South Asian diasporic artists, their photographic work, and their viewers. She notes that the desire for South Asian Americans to see visual representations of themselves is rooted in the use of photography as a form of colonial documentation and surveillance. She examines fine art photography by South Asian diasporic artists who employ aesthetic strategies such as duplication and alteration that run counter to viewers'' demands for greater visibility. These works fail to deliver on viewers'' desires to see themselves, producing instead feelings of alienation, estrangement, and loss. These feelings, Mani contends, allow viewers to question their own visibilTrade Review“Bakirathi Mani demands that we expand the geographic and temporal frame through which to grasp South Asian American representation so that we can engage with the processes of U.S. settler colonialism and racialization. Unseeing Empire makes an outstanding contribution to Asian American and South Asian diaspora and visual culture studies.” -- Gayatri Gopinath, author of * Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora *“Beautifully written, meticulously crafted, and combining powerful personal reflection with rigorous scholarship, Unseeing Empire brings various sets of photographic archives and practices of the early twenty-first century into conversation, from fine art photography and vernacular images to ethnographic pictures. This impressive book makes a vital contribution to several fields, including contemporary art and visual culture studies, museum and curatorial studies, postcolonial theory, and Asian American and American studies.” -- Nicole R. Fleetwood, author of * Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration *“Unseeing Empire joins an exciting body of scholarship that examines the intersections of visual culture, racial formation, and affect.... [It] implores us to remember the colonial legacies of documentation, surveillance, and display that continue to haunt the images we hope to see.” -- Manan Desai * Journal of American Studies *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction. The Work of Seeing: Photography and Representation in Diaspora 1 1. Uncanny Feelings: Diasporic Mimesis in Seher Shah's Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force 33 2. Representation in the Colonial Archive: Annu Palakunnathu Matthew's An Indian from India 70 3. Exhibiting Immigrants: Visuality, Visibility, and Representation at Beyond Bollywood 119 4. Archives of Diaspora: Gauri Gill's The Americans 159 Epilogue. Curating Photography Seeing Community Notes 215 Bibliography 245 Index 261

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Book SynopsisRiché Richardson examines how five iconic black womenMary McLeod Bethune, Rosa Parks, Condoleezza Rice, Michelle Obama, and Beyoncédefy racial stereotypes and construct new national narratives of black womanhood in the United States.Trade Review“The women Riché Richardson examines broaden notions of black womanhood in opposition to the dominant imagery perpetuated by filmmakers, advertisers, and other cultural producers in the United States. This broad spectrum of black womanhood from the early twentieth century to the present allows Richardson to make an expansive argument about the role of these women in the broader American imaginary. The idea of black women as mothers of the nation outside of the mammy role is a powerful one that has not been framed in the way Richardson does here. Emancipation's Daughters is an engaging and important book.” -- Lisa B. Thompson, author of * Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class *“Riché Richardson has given our tumultuous American moment a brilliant gift. Emancipation’s Daughters is an impeccably crafted guide to the struggles, creativity, and iconic labors of African American mothers and their emancipated daughters.” -- Houston A. Baker, Distinguished University Professor, Vanderbilt University"Richardson employs a diversity of resources throughout, including political speeches, artistic images and photos, memorials and monuments, biographies and autobiographies, and literary works to consider how Black women leaders have redefined or advanced a notion of American selfhood that is different from the national story of the 'founding fathers.' . . . Throughout the book, Richardson nicely complements the text with images to illustrate her case studies and overall thesis. Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty." * Choice *"Emancipation’s Daughters significantly intervenes in how we understand Black women leaders in ways that resist the mama-fication (and even aunt-ification) that most Black women leaders experience in the public sphere. This is most powerfully exemplified in the way Richardson evokes the term 'daughters' as opposed to the familiar framing of Black women leaders as mothers. This strategic choice is quite compelling." -- Stacie McCormick * American Literary History *Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xxi Introduction: An Exemplary American Woman 1 1. Mary McLeod Bethune's "My Last Will and Testament" and Her National Legacy 39 2. From Rosa Parks's Quiet Strength to Memorializing a National Mother 87 3. America's Chief Diplomat: The Politics of Condoleezza Rice from Autobiography to Art and Fashion 128 4. First Lady and "Mom-in-Chief": The Voice and Vision of Michelle Obama in the Video South Side Girl and in American Grown 178 Conclusion: Beyoncé's South and the Birth of a "Formation" Nation 220 Notes 235 Bibliography 257 Index 281

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Book SynopsisIn Sentient Flesh R. A. Judy takes up freedman Tom Windham’s 1937 remark “we should have our liberty ''cause . . . us is human flesh' as a point of departure for an extended meditation on questions of the human, epistemology, and the historical ways in which the black being is understood. Drawing on numerous fields, from literary theory and musicology, to political theory and phenomenology, as well as Greek and Arabic philosophy, Judy engages literary texts and performative practices such as music and dance that express knowledge and conceptions of humanity appositional to those grounding modern racialized capitalism. Operating as critiques of Western humanism, these practices and modes of being-in-the-world—which he theorizes as “thinking in disorder,” or “poiesis in black”—foreground the irreducible concomitance offlesh, thinking, and personhood. As Judy demonstrates, recognizing this concomitance is central to finding a way pastTrade Review“Sentient Flesh constitutes a unique and emphatic announcement of what a certain fundamental strain of black studies has long been—the disruptive turning and overturning of the ontological, metaphysical, and epistemological foundations of the modern world. Its extreme and profound generativity is bracing and invigorating, and it forces and allows its readers to do more, confront more, read more, and think more. I love this book, I feel this book, I am pleased by this book because I am undone and disturbed and disrupted and transported by this book.” -- Fred Moten, author of * Black and Blur *“Weaving a clear and critical story about the making of the so-called Negro and how this making is deeply connected to questions of the flesh not the body, R. A. Judy makes one of the most critical arguments in contemporary humanities. Sentient Flesh is well placed to make a major intervention.” -- Anthony Bogues, author of * Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom *“This text is nothing if not a call for communal forms of thinking.... R.A. Judy has presented us with an opening to consider and reconsider what it means to be Black in this world and I hope it is a challenge that is taken up and serves to enrich the archive of Black Radical Thought.” -- Michael E. Sawyer * New Formations *"R. A. Judy’s Sentient Flesh, in its 600 or so pages, stands as a monumental contribution to this literature, leading us through, sometimes in dazzling detail, a teeming array of figures, themes, disciplinary scenes, and texts in order to arrive at a full account of its main conceptual contributions." -- Emanuela Bianchi * Cultural Critique *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Notes on Translation and Transliteration xi Preface: Preliminary Signposts xiii Acknowledgments xxi Introduction: Body and Flesh 1 [1st Set] On Lohengrin's Swan 25 Sentient Flesh 150 [2nd Set] Sentient Flesh Dancing 215 Poiēsis in Black 252 Para-Semiosis 319 Coda: Gifting Blues Love-Improper 418 Notes 457 Bibliography 543 Index 573

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Book SynopsisThe Sense of Brownis José Esteban Muñoz''s treatise on brownness and being as well as his most direct address to queer Latinx studies. In this book, which he was completing at the time of his death, Muñoz examines the work of playwrights Ricardo Bracho and Nilo Cruz, artists Nao Bustamante, Isaac Julien, and Tania Bruguera, and singer José Feliciano, among others, arguing for a sense of brownness that is not fixed within the racial and national contours of Latinidad. This sense of brown is not about the individualized brown subject; rather, it demonstrates that for brown peoples, being exists within what Muñoz calls the brown commons—a lifeworld, queer ecology, and form of collectivity. In analyzing minoritarian affect, ethnicity as a structure of feeling, and brown feelings as they emerge in, through, and beside art and performance, Muñoz illustrates how the sense of brown serves as the basis for other ways of knowing and being inTrade Review“The final work of José Esteban Muñoz—scholar, mentor, and precious node in an intergenerational and transnational web of intellectual and social relations—will be received with eager enthusiasm and a box of tissues.” -- Juana María Rodríguez, author of * Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings *“In The Sense of Brown, José Esteban Muñoz maps and grapples with an evolving theory and method of feeling and being in the world that he names brown. In this work, brownness 'is already here, . . . vast, present, and vital.’ Muñoz gives his theory ‘historically specific affective particularity,’ rejecting the abjective. Read on their own and in tandem with Muñoz's earlier works, these thirteen essays written with care and a sense of urgency outlive his too-soon passing. Lovingly edited, they are a gift.” -- Christina Sharpe, author of * In the Wake: On Blackness and Being *"Conceptualizing Latinx studies within the terms Muñoz offers, those of affect, aesthetics, and performance, gives way for more room in which to construct a Latinx studies that seeks to counter anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity, assimilationism, settler nation-state borders and boundaries, language essentialisms, and other settler colonial logics which merely reify the power structures perpetuating global precarity, exploitation, violence, and death." -- Marcos Gonsalez * ASAP/Journal *"The Sense of Brown is a classic academic work, so it has a density that requires effort to parse through, but it’s well worth the read. In this book, Muñoz examines how brownness, particularly for queer Latinx people, becomes a 'lifeworld' that reveals itself through performance of all kinds, including plays, films, and albums. If you loved his prior work, then The Sense of Brown serves as a perfect ending—both putting a bow on his scholarship and creating pathways for those who want to further it." -- Evette Dionne * Bitch Magazine *"The book is his most pointed intervention into Latinx studies and the contradictions of Latinx racializations, and it represents the work of nearly two decades, done alongside and around two books and over a dozen essays and lectures. . . . As students, friends, and readers, we meet The Sense of Brown, finally, as a consolation in the midst of a global crisis that’s paradoxically lonely and chaotically social." -- Roy Pérez * Los Angeles Review of Books *"Offers ... startling moments of insight and ... profound intellectual generosity." -- Jane Hu * Bookforum *"Expertly edited after his passing by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o, The Sense of Brown is Muñoz’s final work, and it’s a true testament to an intersectional project that suggests that 'queerness is in the horizon, forward dawning and not-yet-here. Brownness diverges from my definition of queerness. Brownness is already here.'” -- Maximilíano Durón * ARTnews *"With The Sense of Brown, José Esteban Muñoz left a love-letter to brownness that acts as a dream for its desire. Extending to the minerals of the soil, to the animals, and to the people who bare its shade, it is an ode to a brown of rapturous multiplicity. . . [T]his book and Muñoz’s thoughts remain an arsenal full for any minoritarian subject who desires to understand and even love themselves, and their sense of being, more–a radical proposition." -- Jess Saldaña * Lambda Literary Review *"The Sense of Brown is more than a sketch of brownness as an ontology of relations; it is an opportunity to sit inside Muñoz’s writing and thinking space, an almost wistful feeling of being in his thoughts as they formed, as they firmed. Reading Muñoz’s essays invokes a meditative feeling; one gets a sense that Muñoz was reflecting on his ideas, the drafty in/coherence of this ensemble reveal the essay as process. The essays are inviting, soft and melancholic." -- Moon Charania * Society and Space *"The Sense of Brown . . . provides theoretical concepts in performance studies, Latinx studies, queer theory, and other studies of race, gender, and sexuality that are invaluable to expanding our notions of performance and racial hegemony." -- kt shorb * E3W Review of Books *"Chambers-Letson and Nyong’o provide a beautiful genealogy of Muñoz’s scholarship in queer studies, Latinx studies, and performance studies. . . . [T]he book provides readers with myriad understandings of brownness, feeling/sensing brown, and the brown commons." -- James Huynh * GLQ *"Muñoz offers a different way of being found in art and world making." -- Patricia Ybarra * Performance Research *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Editors' Introduction. The Aesthetic Resonance of Brown / Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong'o ix 1. The Browns Commons 1 2. Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho's The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs) 8 3. The Onus of Seeing Cuba: Nilo Cruz's Cubanía 24 4. Meandering South: Isaac Julien and The Long Road to Mazatlán 29 5. "Chico, What Does It Feel Like to Be a Problem?": The Transmission of Brownness 36 6. The Vulnerability Artist: Nao Bustamante and the Sad Beauty of Reparation 47 7. Queer Theater, Queer Theory: Luis Alfaro's Cuerpo Polizado 59 8. Performing the Bestiary: Carmelita Tropicana's With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit?/ Con Que Culo se Sienta la Cucaracha? 78 9. Performing Greater Cuba: Tania Bruguera and the Burden of Guilt 86 10. Wise Latinas 100 11. Brown Worldings: José Rodríguez-Soltero, Tania Bruguera, and María Irene Fornés 118 12. The Sense of Wildness: The Brown Commons after Paris Burned 128 13. Vitalism's Afterburn: The Sense of Ana Mendieta 141 Notes 151 Bibliography 167 Index 175

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Book SynopsisBrigitte Fielder presents an alternative theory of how race is constructed with readings of nineteenth-century personal narratives, novels, plays, stories, poems, and images to illustrate how interracial kinship follows non-heteronormative, non-biological, and non-patrilineal models of inheritance in nineteenth-century literary culture.Trade Review“In Relative Races, Brigitte Fielder enriches our understanding of the cultural landscape of the long nineteenth century. Demonstrating boldness, analytical clarity, and scholarly creativity, Fielder gives us language for the processes of racialization that clearly shape American realities but that we have often failed to name because we lacked a theoretical framework.” -- Koritha Mitchell, author of * From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture *“Brigitte Fielder makes the bold claim that racialization entails neither the annihilation of kin ties nor the simple linearity of descent. Instead, ‘race,’ and blackness in particular, travels unpredictably, transferred from skin to skin, from child to mother, across literary genres, through adoption, via residency, and through sibling relations. In essence, Fielder retheorizes race as the making and breaking of kin ties. After Relative Races, we will not be able to think about race and racialization, kinship, and queer theories of temporality separately again.” -- Elizabeth Freeman, author of * Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century *“Brigitte Fielder’s Relative Races is a sophisticated addition to ongoing discussions of race, kinship, and community.... Fielder’s rereadings of historical episodes of kinship in domestic spaces in the 19th century urge us to revisit the archives, and shed light on stories that have been erased and ignored." -- Mary Rambaran-Olm * Public Books *“Brigitte Fielder’s Relative Races expertly navigates new discussions centering on nineteenth-century representations of racialization in the United States. . . . Fielder’s work has broad-reaching effects and implications for the twenty-first century and beyond.” -- Tabitha Lowery * Early American Literature *“In her reconsiderations of kinship and racialization, Fielder brilliantly constellates important critical emphases central to recent interventions in queer theory . . . and Native studies. . . . Fielder’s work is both a call and an itinerary––a praxis and a map––for productively unsettling normative relations in the U.S.” -- Shelby Johnson * ABO *“[Relative Races] is a text that embodies its arguments about excessive and attenuated kindship ties under slavery, the circulation of ideas about racialization, and the many paths of racialized kinship. . . . This important new book of literary history illustrates alternative genealogies and possible futures to combat anti-Black racism. -- Jolie A. Sheffer * American Literary History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Genealogies of Interracial Kinship 1 Part I. Romance. Sexual Kinship 1. Blackface Desdemona, or, the White Woman "Begrimed" 29 2. "Almost Eliza": Reading and Racialization 55 Part II. Reproduction. Genealogies of (Re)racialization 3. Mothers and Mammies: Racial Maternity and Matriliny 85 4. Kinfullness: Mama's Baby, Racial Futures 119 Part III. Residency Domestic. Racial Relations 5. Mary Jemison's Cabin: Domestic Spaces of Racialization 161 6. Racial (Re)Construction: Interracial Kinship and the Interracial Nation 195 Conclusion. "Minus Bloodlines": White Womanhood and Failures of Interracial Kinship 229 Notes 245 Bibliography 283 Index

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Book SynopsisIn The Cry of the Senses, Ren Ellis Neyra examines the imaginative possibility for sound and poetics to foster new modes of sensorial solidarity in the Caribbean Americas. Weaving together the black radical tradition with Caribbean and Latinx performance, cinema, music, and literature, Ellis Neyra highlights the ways Latinx and Caribbean sonic practices challenge antiblack, colonial, post-Enlightenment, and humanist epistemologies. They locate and address the sonic in its myriad manifestations—across genres and forms, in a legal trial, and in the art and writing of Xandra Ibarra, the Fania All-Stars, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Édouard Glissant, and Eduardo Corral—while demonstrating how it operates as a raucous form of diasporic dissent and connectivity. Throughout, Ellis Neyra emphasizes Caribbean and Latinx sensorial practices while attuning readers to the many forms of blackness and queerness. Tracking the sonic through their method of multisensorial, pTrade Review“In this insightful and creative work, Ren Ellis Neyra centers affect against mandates to perform Latinidad as positivist, representational, and recuperative. Offering substantive methodological, theoretical, and analytical contributions, The Cry of the Senses is primed to reorient the direction of Latinx studies.” -- Leticia Alvarado, author of * Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production *“The Cry of the Senses is at once a poetic, disruptive, and critically demanding work. Ren Ellis Neyra theorizes the ways in which sensorial and material inventiveness, improvisation, and experimental ruptures are primary forms of thought and resistance in the Caribbean. It is a rare and profoundly pleasurable event when a critical work is exemplary of the material practices it explores, itself an eruption, a detour and a break. The work's poetic, expansive theorizing is promiscuous, high-low, feral, committed, and sly. It is a marvelous rearrangement of anticolonial frequencies and geologies, and a delight.” -- Beatriz Santiago Muñoz“This is a poetic and thought-provoking study.... The Cry of the Senses represents an important contribution to Caribbean and Latinx studies.” -- Michael Niblett * Journal of American Studies *“The Cry of the Senses shows—and, to some extent, argues—that the tools of poetics can be deployed to different ends, in non-totalizing ways. . . . Ellis Neyra demonstrates the creative potential and the conceptual excitement enabled by a more situated, more embodied response to, and examination of, literary and other texts.” -- Sarah Dowling * Poetics *“The Cry of the Senses offers a compelling elaboration of poetics through a Latinx, Caribbean, and African diasporic archive. . . . This is also a beautiful book in its own right that performs what it theorizes: poetic listening to a multifaceted archive that articulates worlds until now only imagined.” -- Pamela Zamora Quesada * Chiricú Journal *“Rejecting the white, Western focus on reason and the individual, the author foregrounds brownness, Afro-Latinidad, and Blackness to undermine racist and colonialist world views. . . . [The Cry of the Senses] is a rich and relevant text. Recommended.” * Choice *Table of ContentsPreface: The Ground? xi Acknowledgments xix Introduction: Cry Bomba 1 1. "¡Anormales!": Unruly Audition in Performances of 1970s Salsa 27 2. "I have been forced to hear a lot": The FALN, The Masses Are Asses, and the Sounds, Shapes, and Speeds of Puerto Rican Defiance 55 3. Sensorial Errancy in Beatriz Santiago Munoz's Cinema 91 4. Slow Lighting, Ecstatic Mourning, and Migratory Refuge 129 Coda, in Three: "fifty-two plastic bombs exploding as one, thundered against the sky" 163 Notes 171 Bibliography 203 Index 217

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Book SynopsisAfrican American women have played a pivotal part in rock and roll—from laying its foundations and singing chart-topping hits to influencing some of the genre''s most iconic acts. Despite this, black women''s importance to the music''s history has been diminished by narratives of rock as a mostly white male enterprise. In Black Diamond Queens, Maureen Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history of African American women in rock and roll between the 1950s and the 1980s. Mahon details the musical contributions and cultural impact of Big Mama Thornton, LaVern Baker, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, Merry Clayton, Labelle, the Shirelles, and others, demonstrating how dominant views of gender, race, sexuality, and genre affected their careers. By uncovering this hidden history of black women in rock and roll, Mahon reveals a powerful sonic legacy that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century.Trade Review“We've got to know where we came from in order to get where we want to go, and there's no doubt that Maureen knows where she is headed! You can absolutely feel the passion in every word she speaks, whether in person or on paper, and Black Diamond Queens is no exception.” -- Quincy Jones“I thought I knew the stories of the women who populate this stellar revisioning of rock and roll history. Now I realize how much I had to learn. A revolutionary read that should chasten rock historians and will delight anyone who wants the full picture of how black women shaped a culture that pushed them to the side and how they survived.” -- Ann Powers, author of * Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music *"... Mahon has done plenty to expose how Black women rockers have been marginalized by musicians, audiences, historians, and critics. A well-researched, sociologically savvy effort to expand the rock canon." * Kirkus Reviews *“The book that's poised to set rock history free. Maureen Mahon's Black Diamond Queens sets the record straight by offering a meticulously detailed study of the ways in which Black women musicians and entertainers played pivotal roles in the birth of the genre and fearlessly revolutionized the form. Essential reading for anyone who cares about popular music culture.” -- Daphne A. Brooks, author of * Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 *Starred Review. "With depth and breadth, Mahon’s work centers the many African American women who heavily influence rock and roll, from LaVern Baker to Tina Turner. Rock and roll emerged neither from a vacuum nor from the minds of white, male performers alone. Mahon’s comprehensive research and intelligent thinking are captured in her compelling writing." -- Emily Dziuban * Booklist *"If you are curious about music and its development across genres or would like more examples of Black women’s exquisite impact on every aspect of life, Black Diamond Queens is for you. You won’t find many of these queens on the walls of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or in canonical texts discussing the origins of rock and roll. Still, crucially and inspiringly, you might see yourself in this group of Black women whose manicured fingers are all over rock and roll. At the very least, you will be exposed to some incredible new songs." -- Briana Spivey * Women's Review of Books *"A rare gem. . . . this meticulously researched book is a key entry in the ongoing record-correction of 20th-century popular music history, one that recenters women, and most crucially, women of color. . . . The collective telling of their complex stories, within an intersectional feminist framework, is the kind of illuminating scholarship that rock really needs." -- Jillian Mapes * Pitchfork *"As I read each page of Black Diamond Queens, learning about the Black women who contributed to not only the sound but the ethos of rock and roll, I felt like I was also learning about myself. In the end, the stories felt less like a permission slip to feel at home in a genre I most resonate with, but a reminder that, like these women, I should never feel the need to ask for permission at all." -- Erica Campbell * UPROXX *"Black Diamond Queens does what the best music books do: It urges us to play this music again — or for the first time — and to listen to it. Mahon’s brilliant book repays careful reading and challenges us to think anew about the history of rock and roll and the ways we might have traditionally understood it." -- Henry Carrigan * No Depression *"[H]ighly recommended for anyone who is interested in deepening their knowledge of the legacies and profoundness of Black women in music.' -- Jordannah Elizabeth * Amsterdam News *"This monograph is not only a welcome addition to works on genre, gender, and race but contributes a unique insight into Black-middle-class respectability politics in twentieth-century America. Black Diamond Queens is a great jumping-off point for contemporary Black feminist theorists, musicologically trained or not. Mahon has gifted scholars with a mantle, leaving room for others to take it up and continue the work of re-storing music history through the investigation of race, gender, and genre." -- Larissa A. Irizarry * Notes *"Mahon’s use of contemporaneous accounts, interviews, and illustrations contributes immensely to 'setting the record straight' regarding the impact, role, and significance of a group of historic figures often subverted by a male-dominated record industry and largely overlooked in the standard literature on the evolution of rock 'n' roll. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers." -- D. V. Moskowitz * Choice *"Rich, engrossing, and profoundly important. . . . Black Diamond Queens offers a long-overdue correction of the rock and roll historical record. And the final verdict? Black women rock." -- Kimberly Mack * Journal of Popular Music Studies *Table of ContentsIllustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1. Rocking and Rolling with Big Mama Thornton 29 2. LaVern Baker, the Incredible Disappearing Queen of Rock and Roll 52 3. Remembering the Shirelles 76 4. Call and Response 105 5. Negotiating "Brown Sugar" 141 6. The Revolutionary Sisterhood of Labelle 182 7. The Fearless Funk of Betty Davis 213 8. Tina Turner's Turn to Rock 240 Epilogue 273 Notes 285 Bibliography 349 Index 375

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Book SynopsisBrandi Clay Brimmer analyzes the US pension system from the perspective of poor black women in the period before, during, and after the Civil War outlines the struggles of mothers, wives, and widows of black Union soldiers to claim rights in the face of unjust legislation.Trade Review“Brandi Clay Brimmer has written an amazing social history that transforms the study of poor black women’s quest for citizenship and recognition. Through finely grained research she revises our understanding of the racialized gendered state from the standpoint of poor women themselves. She advances how we think about the agency of newly emancipated women from after the Civil War into the late nineteenth century, in the process challenging existing interpretations about the origins of social assistance in the modern United States. This is historical research at its best.” -- Eileen Boris, author of * Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2019 *“This compelling study of eastern North Carolina black women’s claims for Union widows’ pensions marshals methodologically complex evidence to make striking arguments on questions of racialized motherhood, the origins of the welfare state, class formation, and Reconstruction’s failures. Brandi Clay Brimmer recaptures in rich detail the lives of heretofore unknown women who tried and often failed to secure their full Fourteenth Amendment rights. This book is a timely contribution to current debates on the nation’s history of racial injustice and a poignant saga of promises made and promises broken.” -- Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor Emerita, Yale University“Claiming Union Widowhood is a valuable addition to African American and legal historiography. It would teach well in courses on women’s history, labor history classes, and any course concerning emancipation.” -- Gretchen Long * Journal of Southern History *“Claiming Union Widowhood is an important contribution that speaks to several significant historiographical conversations. Historians interested in the long history of emancipation, the African American family, the Black military experience, and Civil War veterans would benefit from reading this excellent study. It sheds new light on the relationship between race, gender, and poverty in Reconstruction and afterward that should inspire future research.” -- David Silkenat * Labor *“Historians interested in how to think more expansively about where political thought happens and who produces it will find much value in Claiming Union Widowhood. . . . Brimmer’s deeply researched book offers readers a rich portrait of Black Union widowhood that will spark new questions for the broad read­ership it is sure to find.” -- Catherine A. Jones * Journal of the Civil War Era *“Claiming Union Widowhood makes an important contribution to understanding how working-class African American women leveraged local networks and an understanding of institutional processes as they interacted with government institutions in the post-Civil War nation. It powerfully shows, too, the limitations that black women met as they worked within the pension system and were forced to justify their relationships using definitions that had little relevance to their lives.” -- Melissa Milewski * Journal of Social History *“Tracing Black women’s fight to prove their status and wor­thiness as war widows, Brimmer’s study dem­onstrates the racial origins of the welfare state in the nineteenth century. . . . Brimmer’s impressive research illuminates the extent and significance of the pension network to New Bern’s Black community.” -- Carol Faulkner * Journal of American History *Table of ContentsCast of Principal Characters ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Part I. A People and a Place 1. Black Life and Labor in New Bern, North Carolina, 1850–1865 23 2. The Black Community in New Bern, 1865–1920 46 Part II. Encountering the State 3. Her Claim is Lawful and Just: Black Women's Petitions for Survivors' Benefits 77 4. Black Women, Claims Agents, and the Pension Network 101 5. Encounters with the State: Black Women and Special Examiners 123 6. Marriage and the Expansion of the Pension System in 1890 144 7. Black Women and Suspensions for "Open and Notorious Cohabitation" 163 8. The Personal Consequences of Union Widowhood 184 Conclusion 205 Notes 217 Bibliography 277 Index 299

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Book SynopsisIn Experiments in Skin Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu examines the ongoing influence of the Vietnam War on contemporary ideas about race and beauty. Framing skin as the site around which these ideas have been formed, Tu foregrounds the histories of militarism in the production of US biomedical knowledge and commercial cosmetics. She uncovers the efforts of wartime scientists in the US Military Dermatology Research Program to alleviate the environmental and chemical risks to soldiers'' skin. These dermatologists sought relief for white soldiers while denying that African American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians were also vulnerable to harm. Their experiments led to the development of pharmaceutical cosmetics, now used by women in Ho Chi Minh City to tend to their skin, and to grapple with the damage caused by the war''s lingering toxicity. In showing how the US military laid the foundations for contemporary Vietnamese consumption of cosmetics and practices of beauty, Tu shows how the inteTrade Review“Experiments in Skin is a fully dazzling treatment of the aftermaths of the Vietnam War. Working expertly at the intersection of military history, chemical warfare, modern medical research, race, dermatology, beauty, and skin, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu tells a fascinating and important story about how contemporary Vietnamese beauty culture has arisen from an ugly history of US militarism—the afterlife of warfare in its enduring marks on Vietnamese skin as well as military efforts to heal and even perfect soldiers' skin. Tu renders extraordinary insight into the tightly entwined histories of militarized technology and a rising beauty culture, giving name to whole new territories for analysis.” -- Matthew Frye Jacobson, William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History, Yale University“Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu advances a theory of aesthetics and politics that is urgently relevant to contemporary postcolonial theorizations of colonial modernity and the resistance to it. By historicizing the emergence of dermatology in the context of American empire and war, Experiments in Skin embodies the best of cultural studies methodology and analysis.” -- Jennifer Terry, author of * Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America *"Experiments in Skin has extensive, detailed notes, and the depth of Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu’s analysis is evident as she cites military archives, newspaper articles and her own on-site research. . . . It is written in a journalistic style, which makes it accessible to a wide audience who might wish to learn about the heavy topics presented." -- Bella Dalton-Fenkl * International Examiner *"Experiments in Skin is an ambitious and multifaceted account of the social afterlife of militarized medical science; its interdisciplinarity permits its author to draw insight from revealing juxtapositions. . . . Drawing together critical science studies with ethnography, Experiments in Skin contributes not only to medical anthropology and the history of medicine but also to a nascent critical research literature on beauty products and industries. Its chapters would make thought-provoking contributions to advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars in critical environmental studies, cultural studies, feminist studies, medical anthropology, postcolonial studies, science and technology studies, and Southeast Asian studies." -- Martha Lincoln * Medical Anthropology Quarterly *"Experiments in Skin is a superb gift: beautifully written, intellectually expansive, accessible and engaging. One of the most admirable aspects of Experiments in Skin is its ambitious capacity: it covers a lot of intellectual ground, but does so in such a way that still maintains analytical depth and thoroughness. Tu’s capacity to balance both is enviable, and is a quality that makes this book such an engaging and enjoyable read." -- John Paul (JP) Catungal * Society and Space *"It is well beyond the scope of a short book review to do justice to Dr. Tu’s exacting empirical research, or her powerful and affecting prose. But what I want to emphasize in my comments here is how Experiments in Skin is a fundamentally geographical book. It is, at its core, a book about places, the people who inhabit them, and the connections between them." -- Wesley Attewell * Society and Space *"In this insightful—and indeed beautiful—book, Tu offers us a model of scholarly work that not only undertakes a rigorous examination of the archives of militarism and science, but also a theorization of the forms of life remaindered by war." -- Linda Luu * Society and Space *"Readers of all stripes will find much to appreciate and admire in this interdisciplinary historical project, as Tu provides the probing critical analysis and somatic language needed to tackle the deep entanglements of military racism, prison torture, and chemical warfare. Experiments in Skin is a book for anyone interested in what stories our skin have to tell, despite the endless technologies of maiming and the politics of denial. If our history is embodied, then our skin remembers well that living history, and it never lies about what cannot be denied or covered up." -- Long T. Bui * American Historical Review *"By conjoining the United States and Vietnam through their similar relationships with skin, Tu offers new ways to understand how military, medical, and commercial interests have shaped and influenced the ways Vietnamese women have sought to cure and relieve skin disorders. . . . In tracing the history of experiments in the skin, Tu powerfully articulates how Vietnamese women do not hold the same desires as the US military holds. . . ." -- Shani Tra & Sunshine Blanco * Journal of Asian American Studies *"In pursuing the ghostly traces of latent histories, Tu’s book theorizes the connections between surfaces of racialized, gendered, commercialized, militarized, and medicalized skin on multiple scales across the US and Vietnam, while being attentive to alternate logics of relationality and responsibility." -- Elizabeth Wijaya * Pacific Affairs *"By considering the scientific contributions and innovations of the Global South, Nguyen Tu disentangles social and medical theory from its purportedly Western origins and places it in a global context. Perhaps the question at hand is not just how dermatology’s beginnings concern women in contemporary Vietnam but also how this line of inquiry can be furthered in Vietnam studies." -- Allen L. Tran * Journal of Vietnamese Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction. Mysteries of the Visible 1 1. Skin Stories: Making Beauty in the Culture of Renovation 23 2. The Beautiful Life of Agent Orange 49 3. An Armor of Skin: Pacific Threats and the Dreams of Infinite Security 76 4. A Laboratory of Skin: Making Race in the Mekong Delta 104 5. Weak Skin, Strong Skin: The Work of Making Livable 134 Epilogue 161 Notes 165 Bibliography 201 Index 219

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Book SynopsisVernadette Vicuña Gonzalez follows the life of Filipina vaudeville and film actress Isabel Rosario Cooper, who was the mistress of General Douglas MacArthur to explore the contours of empire as experienced on the scale of personal relationships.Trade Review“Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez crafts a gorgeous and meticulous portrait of one of the most intriguing women of the twentieth century, Isabel Rosario Cooper. Woven out of ghosts of texts and archival fractures and gaps, Empire's Mistress is a replete mystery tale, a feminist biography, a Hollywood story, an intimate study of Philippine-U.S. relations, and a masterful work of postcolonial noir. Above all, Empire's Mistress is a haunting, by which afterlives of empire address our contemporary dilemmas about how to articulate, frame, and center unspoken lives to tell history accurately. A deeply satisfying work of exhumation, Empire's Mistress makes complex history live, and I'm grateful for Gonzalez's unflinching, refractive, and always revelatory gaze on that history.” -- Gina Apostol, author of * Insurrecto *“Imaginatively tracing the life of Isabel Rosario Cooper in and through the elisions and silences of the archives, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez makes a significant contribution to rethinking the process of archival research when it involves marginalized subjects whose existence appears sporadically in the historical accounts of others. A compelling read.” -- Vicente L. Rafael, author of * Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation *"Gonzalez’s book is part- excavation, part-celebration of Cooper, that puts the story of MacArthur and his mistress into a new context, and not necessarily in a sordid way. Gonzalez is mindful at all times that Cooper was a daughter of colonization. That is why you read this book, to see another small-scale, personal perspective of the U.S. Philippines relationship where colonial mentality is more than a massive headache." -- Emil Guillermo * Philippine Inquirer *“Empire’s Mistress is a dynamic text at the cutting edge of transdisciplinary research and will appeal to lay readers looking for a juicy noir tale and to scholars of women’s history, twentieth century US–Philippines political relations, and postcolonial and cultural studies. Gonzalez’s writing against the archival grain is a pleasure to read.” -- Thea Quiray Tagle * Philippine Studies *“Empire’s Mistress is a clever reflection of both the disjointed American imperial archive and the non-linear life Cooper had invented for herself. . . . Gonzalez not only engages in interdisciplinary analyses and methodologies to study the archive, but beautifully interweaves multiple genres—academic prose, poetry, playwriting, and art—to speculate a historical narrative that dances on the fine line between fiction and non-fiction.” -- Kristin Oberiano * Western Historical Quarterly *“[Gonzalez] insists on a speculative archival reading that allows Cooper to move from being the object of the possessive to a framing that makes her a different kind of subject . . . ultimately centering and valuing the intimate knowledges formed and passed between women who experience the violence of empire.” -- Rachel Yim * Women & Performance *“Gonzalez is . . . especially lively when she is highlighting her personal discovery of archival documents. . . . Her glimpses into early Manila and the colonial life of American soldiers who married Filipina women was fascinating, and the best-researched part of this tale.” -- Kirby Pringle * Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television *“Empire’s Mistress is a work of art—figuratively and literally—that unearths the engrossing life of Isabel Rosario Cooper. . . . It is an archetype of how archival research should be repurposed.” -- Luis Zuriel P. Domingo * Sojourn *“Vernadette Gonzalez’s Empire’s Mistress offers a welcome correction to the common practice of colonial subjects being written out of history. . . . It constitutes a fascinating account of a minor biography intersecting with a major biography and historical events as seen from the colonized periphery.” -- Delia Malia Konzett * Pacific Affairs *Table of ContentsArchival Detritus, Fabrications, Second Takes, and Other Provocations 1. This Is Not a Love Story 1 2. Death Certificate, Partial 13 3. A General and Unruly Wards 15 4. The Flower of Cathay, Excerpts 28 5. Misapprehensions 30 6. The Farm Boy and the Unbiddable Wife 32 7. The Delicate Moonbeam 48 8. "Dimples": Innocence (Colonial Kink) 49 9. Stage Presence 67 10. Letters Lost at Sea, Imagined, Excerpts 69 11. The New Filipina, Kissing 72 12. Gossip: Fiction and Nonfiction 86 13. "It Girl" Meets General 89 14. Recipe for the Douglas 93 15. The Washington Housewife, the Hollywood Hula Girl, and the Two Husbands: Reinventions 94 16. Out of Place 111 17. 1st Filipina Nurse, Geisha, Little Sergeant, Javanese Nurse, Uncredited 112 18. Lolita's Lines 127 19. Bit Parts: Racial Types, Ensemble 128 20. Caged Birds 149 21. For Future Archives, Apocrypha, and Fictions 160 22. Death Certificate, Entire 165 23. The Suicide 167 24. Last Review 170 Acknowledgments 173 Notes 177 Filmography (with Roles) 199 Bibliography 203 Index 215

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Book SynopsisIn Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashie imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in the face of the persistence of death in Black life and Black study. Centrally, Quashie theorizes aliveness through the aesthetics of poetry, reading poetic inhabitance in Black feminist literary texts by Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Evie Shockley, among others, showing how their philosophical and creative thinking constitutes worldmaking. This worldmaking conceptualizes Blackness as capacious, relational beyond the normative terms of recognition—Blackness as a condition of oneness. Reading for poetic aliveness, then, becomes a means of exploring Black being rather than nonbeing and animates the ethical question “how to be.” In this way, Quashie offers a Black feminist philosophy oTrade Review“Black studies is a spiritual discipline, one devoted to that dispersed and disseminated gathering of a nonexclusionary black world. Kevin Quashie has helped me think about this and has given me intellectual and theoretical tools and language for this. Black Aliveness is one of the most intellectually stimulating, illuminating, and spiritually moving books I’ve read in a very long time. Its impact will be immediate.” -- J. Kameron Carter, author of * Race: A Theological Account *“Decentering the focus on ‘social death’ in current black studies, Black Aliveness is the first book to push us to the next step when we start with the feeling of aliveness rather than with black death as a way of understanding black life. There is magical thinking and writing in this paradigm-shifting book.” -- Margo Natalie Crawford, author of * Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics *"I found great relief in Quashie's formulation of the concept of 'oneness,' which he insists is 'not akin to individualism.'… Quashie's book has shifted decades of denial, distancing, and suppression for me, not by rescuing the I, but by giving me one, the becoming, the relational.… In dealing with my ontological anxieties, I have dreamed of dissolution, a release into the elements of the universe of which we are all made. But even if we mingle with the stars we are still left with particles and forms of relation between these particles. What an aha! moment for me, reading Quashie…. How freeing and wonderful. To relate, to mingle, is not a dissolve, but a proliferation." -- Jayna Brown * Critical Inquiry *"This deeply poetic, rich book may be paradigm shifting. Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers." -- J. A. Kegley * Choice *"Kevin Quashie's book provides a blueprint for alternative methods of reading and studying Black life, Black worldmaking, and Black relationality." -- Daisy Guzman * E3W Review of Books *"Quashie's efforts are triumphant. . . . This work and its tender attention to that which constitutes humanity within these texts of aliveness would retain its magic regardless of the world, 'the episteme,' in which one finds it." -- Erin Tatz * Theory & Event *"One of the most significant contributions of the book as a whole is the quiet but insistent contention that poetry and poetics can do the work of social analysis. It is here, in Quashie’s attention to aesthetic choices and form, that we appreciate the value of Black Aliveness. . . . Quashie has written a field-shifting book that centers aesthetic paths to life in place of restraint in its treatment of Black being." -- Gershun Avilez * Genre *"Quashie’s Black Aliveness is not a blueprint or a definitive answer to his opening question. Rather, the book is more like a gesture and an invitation; it offers a path for studying Black life and world-making through aesthetics. Throughout, Quashie’s prose emulates the beauty, splendor, and energy of the writings that constitute the matrix for his reflections. The reader will appreciate how the author frequently pauses to consider the grandeur of an essay or the rhythm of a poem. Students of Black literature and aesthetics should also praise Quashie’s practice of sitting with Black texts as primary sources for critical thought and ethics." -- Joseph Winters * American Literary History *"Black Aliveness is an important intervention in a conversation that has come to dominate black studies in recent years, under a variety of different names: the question of the human, black ontology, the(im)possibility of black subjectivity, and afropessimism. . . . Quashie’s book offers a loving response to and reorientation of a field that has come to read blackness as synonymous with death, and antiblackness as constitutive of black life." -- Jennifer C. Nash * Cultural Critique *Table of ContentsIntroduction. Aliveness 1 1. Aliveness and Relation 15 2. Aliveness and Oneness 31 3. Aliveness and Aesthetics 57 4. Aliveness in Two Essays 83 5. Aliveness and Ethics 107 Conclusion. Again, Aliveness 141 Acknowledgments 155 Notes 157 Bibliography 219 Permissions 227 Index 229

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Book SynopsisThe Inheritance is anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli's graphic memoir in which she explores her family's history and the events, traumas, and social structures that define our individual and collective pasts and futures.Trade Review“With the understanding of a scholar and the storytelling instincts of a novelist, Elizabeth A. Povinelli has brought a rare degree of scope and insight to the graphic memoir form. Relatively few illustrated works are so complex and insightful, so intricately concerned with families, nationalities, and politics. An extraordinary book.” -- Michael Cunningham, author of * The Hours *“A melancholy yet often darkly funny reflection on the intersections of biography, geography, kinship, and history, The Inheritance is a genuinely original work that made an impact on this reader and will leave a lasting mark on the field.” -- Naisargi N. Dave, author of * Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics *"An inspired use of the graphic format to weave a narrative with a power beyond words alone." (Starred Review) * Kirkus Reviews *"This book is memoir, art, and anthropology, as it cleverly addresses the interplay between individual lives and collective experiences, thus inviting a more open and associative mode of interpretation than most academic monographs.… This text handles complex and contested social themes through sparing text and provocative imagery and as such is a unique contribution to the conversation on the legacies of European immigration to the United States." -- Caroline DeVane * Europe Now *"This is a fascinating study of family persona and their changing relationships, but it is not just an engaging family history. The book is also an analysis of the historical context, 'the patterns of violence, dislocation, racism and structural inequality' (p. xi) that shape US society." -- Louise Lamphere * Journal of Anthropological Research *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Preface xi Act I 1 Act II Papa The Vorburgers Gramma Act III Reading List

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Book SynopsisRight Here, Right Now collects the powerful first-person stories of dozens of men who are living on death row in the United States, offering a glimpse into the lives of some of the most marginalized people in America.Trade Review"Everyone must read this book. To read the compelling stories in these pages is to feel the birth pangs of the fundamental changes that must come. These voices bear witness that criminal justice in America has become a nation's crime unto itself. We must measure our national stature and moral standing not by stock markets or church steeples but by the grace and humanity of the institutions that rebuild broken lives. Right Here, Right Now is the place to start." -- Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and author of * The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement *“Revelatory. Having spent twenty-five years advocating for comprehensive criminal justice reform and having spent time with many innocent people in maximum security prisons, I have often found more decency and compassion amongst the people inside the prison walls than without. These first-person stories serve to remind us of the humanity and common decency that we as a society all too often push aside in our rush to judgment and punishment.” -- Jason Flom, host of the podcast * Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom *"This powerful collection contains true stories from the dozens of men living on death row across the country. Some remembrances stretch back to childhood experiences of poverty and police misconduct, while other accounts pertain to life inside the carceral system, as the writers fight to hold on to their connections to the outside world. The events of 2020 underscored systematic inequality and the injustices of the justice system; here, these firsthand accounts form a moving, personal call to action." -- Sarah Edwards * IndyWeek *"Right Here, Right Now contains moving, first-person, anonymous accounts of men living on death row. . . . With the common refrain of death row being reserved for the worst of America’s criminals, Right Here, Right Now provokes uncomfortable questions about a judicial system that disproportionately incarcerates those who are 'descendants of enslaved peoples and other people of color, the vast majority poor, and too many mentally ill,' as articulated by acclaimed death row attorney Henderson Hill in the book’s foreword." -- Thomasi McDonald * Indy Week *"What is the worst thing you ever did? What drove you to do it? What would your life be like if you were defined only by that one thing? Those are some of the questions that came to mind as I read Right Here, Right Now: Life Stories from America’s Death Row, a collection of powerful and often wrenching first-person stories of more than 100 men sentenced to death. It’s an emotionally difficult read, but it’s more than worth the investment of time and heart." -- Steven Petrow * Washington Post *"Right Here, Right Now is much more than a death penalty critique. At its heart, the book is about the challenge that has always faced us humans: to see the beauty, dignity, and value in every single person, and to create a society around that. What would it mean to live in a culture that looks at convicted murderers and determinedly sees the humanity there? What would it take to become a society that genuinely serves the least among us before celebrating the achievers?" -- Amanda Abrams * Plough *"Poignant. . . . This volume packs a punch and gives a voice to those whose stories need to be fully heard. Libraries, especially those seeking to expand collections related to criminal justice and the politics surrounding issues of race and class, should purchase this title." -- Mattie Cook * Library Journal *“While there are different authors voicing their tales throughout, [Right Here, Right Now] reads as one strong voice. . . . This piece furthers our understanding of not only experiences when sentenced to death, but also the tenacity that a human can hold to still be able to grow, learn, and think deeply despite the conditions that they are living under." -- AM Purdy * Criminal Law and Criminal Justice *Table of ContentsForeword / Henderson Hill ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 About the Stories 9 I. The Part That Was Innocent (Early Childhood, Birth to Five Years Old) 1. Playing Solitary 17 2. Grandma Shot Bob 18 3. Ajar 19 4. Now Questions Asked 21 5. Downpour 22 6. Nigger Lover 24 7. Shelf Life 25 8. Not the Worst Fate 27 9. Car Ride 30 10. Momma's Boy 32 11. Good Habits 34 II. Boot Camp (Elementary School, Six to Ten Years Old) 12. It Was Reefer 39 13. Blistered 41 14. Ode to a Pretty Girl 43 15. U-Turn 45 16. The Monster 46 17. Don't Bring a Gun to a Knife Fight 47 18. Red, Half-White, and Blue 49 19. Badge of Honor 51 20. Boot Camp 52 21. Lesson Learned 54 22. Better Off Dead 56 23. Shake It Off 58 III. The Drama Was Live (Middle School, Eleven to Thirteen Years Old) 24. You Can Be Anything 63 25. Bootleg 65 26. Luxury 67 27. Cop 68 28. Man of the House 69 29. Trance 71 30. Tar Pit 73 31. Point Blank 75 32. Role Model 77 33. Elliot MF Jones 79 34. Suspension of Disbelief 81 IV. From Bad to Worse (Fourteen Years Old to Arrest) 35. A Wrap 85 36. JD 86 37. When We Were Young 88 38. Stinging Bee 90 39. Hands On 92 40. On My Own 94 41. Ain't Got No Name 96 42. Slap in the Face 98 43. Doing My Job 100 44. White Devil 102 45. Voices in the Dark 103 46. Finally 105 47. Crossing Over 107 V. Given the Circumstances 48. A Kind of Peace 113 49. Seeing the Light 116 50. Boy 119 51. The Quiet Room 122 52. Helpless 124 53. Just Like a Frog 127 54. The Source 129 55. I Heard You 131 56. Mercy on My Soul 133 57. Butterflies 135 58. After the Storm 137 VI. Worst of the Worst (Entering Death Row and Solitary) 59. What You Got? 141 60. Worst of the Worst 142 61. Nursing Home 144 62. Combat Readiness 143 63. The Hole 148 64. Peanut 150 65. Motel 6 152 66. All These Guys 155 67. Word is Bond 157 VII. You Are Not Here to Be Rehabilitated 68. The Raw 163 69. Firstborn 165 70. Valentine's Day 166 71. Time Lost 169 72. Hugs 171 73. I Knew What Was Coming 173 74. The Real Question 175 75. For My Heart Only 177 76. Guilty by Association 179 77. Pumping Iron 181 78. I Became Him 183 79. Definitely Christmas 185 80. Sidekick for Life 187 81. The Huggy Boys 190 82. Cellar Dwellers 192 83. Your Neighbor 195 84. Beyond the Wall 198 85. Ten Cents a Minute 201 86. You Can Do It 204 87. The Kind that Never Go Away 206 88. Making It Home 208 89. Someone Was Going to Die 211 90. Sugar Rush 214 VIII. Every Day's Worth Celebrating (Facing Execution) 91. Deal the Cards 219 92. Weighing the Cost 221 93. The Envelope 223 94. Final Hours 226 95. Cruel and Unusual 228 96. Black and Mild 229 97. Something Wasn't Right 231 98. Holy Week 234 99. Dawn 235 Afterword / Timothy B. Tyson 237 Resources for Deeper Connection 249

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Book SynopsisJennifer L. Morgan draws on the lived experiences of enslaved African women in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries to reveal the contours of early modern notions of trade, race, and commodification in the Black Atlantic.Trade Review“Jennifer L. Morgan examines the transition to racialized slavery in the early modern Atlantic world with innovative research methods and original analysis. She brilliantly accounts for the emergence of an unholy alliance between a novel proficiency with numbers and the hierarchical classification of human difference, which helped to make kinship into a commodity. This is essential reading for anyone who wonders how Black humanity ceased to matter to some, and why centuries later we must still proclaim the worth of Black lives.” -- Vincent Brown, author of * Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War *“Jennifer L. Morgan makes an original, innovative, and creative intervention in the study of race and gender that establishes the groundwork necessary for revising our knowledge of the systems of trade and the commodification of peoples in the nineteenth century. Reckoning with Slavery is essential reading for anyone in the social sciences and the humanities who wants to understand the formation of the modern world. A major work.” -- Hazel V. Carby, author of * Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands *"Reckoning with Slavery challenges historians who have reckoned with slavery in the numerical sense without reckoning in the intellectual and moral sense with the subjectivity and intellectual work of enslaved people. . . . The threads of this rich and powerful work will generate new scholarship for years to come." -- Diana Paton * Black Perspectives *"There is much about this book that's deeply impressive. The depth and breadth of the research give a solidity to the argument that belies the difficult and fragmentary sources." -- Tim Lockley * Ethnic and Racial Studies *"One of the most illuminating aspects of Morgan’s work is how it invites us to reconsider the data we have about the slave trade. . . . Many of the stories of enslaved women might never be recovered, but Reckoning with Slavery shows how their stories might still be told by reading their silences creatively. The absence of women from the history of slave revolts, for instance, might not necessarily mean that they failed to participate in these uprisings or that they only participated in tiny, quotidian ways. It might also mean that their deeds were erased because women were so foundational to these uprisings that they inspired unease. Such a creative methodology paves the way for new, provocative historical narratives to be written." -- Li Qi Peh * Critical Inquiry *"As Black women lead worldwide movements to affirm the worth of Black lives in the face of white-supremacist violence today, Reckoning with Slavery illuminates some of the roots of this radical tradition of imagining Black futurity and making the world anew against the seemingly all-powerful forces of the state and the market." -- Eduarda Lira Araujo * E3W Review of Books *"Jennifer L. Morgan’s second book is one that will change the way scholars of slavery and the Black Atlantic think about the archives, enslaved women, and Black women’s theoretical and methodological offerings then and now. . . . It should become essential reading for academic audiences, college students, and any organization interested in reparations." -- Deirdre Cooper Owens * Studies in Romanticism *"[Reckoning with Slavery] sets a new bar for historians of the early modern era and of Western modernity. Morgan helps us see capitalism as racial capitalism, the radicalism of the Enlightenment as Black radicalism, and African women as central to both – and now that we see, there is no unseeing." -- Mariana L. R. Dantas * Journal of Early American History *"Morgan’s book will be welcomed by scholars who study the history of slavery and women’s history. She concentrates on women, their bodies, their experiences, their feelings, and their decisions. The book should be required reading in graduate courses on the history of slavery, economic history, the history of the body, and women’s history. Finally, it should be included in historical methodology classes due to its excellent incorporation of theory and its outstanding analysis of primary sources." -- Karol K. Weaver * H-Slavery, H-Net Reviews *"Reckoning with Slavery is a valuable addition to the studies of enslaved women, slavery, slavery and capitalism, and the violence of the archive. It is a wonderful example of the importance of centering the lives and experiences of enslaved women and their own understanding of the connections between kinship, slavery, and capitalism." -- Allison Madar * H-Early-America, H-Net Reviews *"For slavery’s early history, especially the role that gender, kinship, and capitalism played in the rise and perpetuation of human bondage throughout the Atlantic World, this is a book to be reckoned with, one that is sure to be required reading. I predict that it will remain that way for a long time to come." -- Eliga Gould * The Americas *"Through her whole career, Jennifer Morgan has blazed the trail for scholars seeking to understand the foundational dynamics of reproduction in the Atlantic World. In Reckoning with Slavery, she has crafted yet more theoretical considerations by which to comprehend the intersection of gender and capitalism, and this book will undoubtedly stimulate yet more rounds of discussion and debate. It is a text that will reach and impact many scholarly communities: those studying slavery, gender, family, the economy, and relations of power. It will also serve as a critical guide to face the new reality of reproduction in the United States going forward." -- Daniel Livesay * Journal of Family History *"Reckoning with Slavery is, simply put, a brilliant and important work. I am in awe of Morgan’s achievement." -- Carla Gardina Pestana * New West Indian Guide/Niewe West-Indische Gids *Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction. Refusing Demography 1 1. Producing Numbers: Reckoning with the Sex Ratio in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1500–1700 29 2. "Unfit Subjects of Trade": Demographic Logics and Colonial Encounters 55 3. "To Their Great Commoditie": Numeracy and the Production of African Difference 110 4. Accounting for the "Most Excruciating Torment": Transatlantic Passages 141 5. "The Division of the Captives": Commerce and Kinship in the English Americas 170 6. "Treacherous Rogues": Locating Women in Resistance and Revolt 207 Conclusion. Madness 245 Bibliography 257 Index 283

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Book SynopsisNicole M. Guidotti-Hernández challenges the stereotypes of machismo with nuanced portraits of Mexican men and masculinities along and across the US-Mexico border.Trade Review“Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora makes a critical contribution to our collective sense of gender dynamics in twentieth-century migration studies. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández delivers a nuanced treatment of the masculinity of Mexican migrants over the first half of the twentieth century. Through myriad lenses, we see Mexican nationals as partners and lovers, as fathers and sons, as machos and domestic beings, and in homosocial and heteronormative positions.” -- George J. Sánchez, * Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 *“Guidotti-Hernández is an elegant writer, and this book’s compelling and deeply human arguments resonate through the lucid prose. . . . This is a book to be read slowly, to be scrutinized and experienced.” -- Lydia R. Cooper * Western American Literature *"This incredibly thought-provoking book is meant to be read closely; Guidotti-Hernández’s forceful analysis, along with the more than fifty accompanying illustrations, deserves careful attention." -- Juan Ignacio Mora * Latino Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Part I. Enrique Flores Magón's Exile: Revolutionary Desire and Familial Entanglements 1. Greeting Cards, Love Notes, Love Letters 35 2. PLM Intimate Betrayals: Enrique Flores Magón, Paula Carmona, and the Gendered History of Denunciation 43 3. Out of Betrayal and into Anarchist Love and Family 83 4. Bodily Harm 107 5. De la Familia Liberal 127 6. The Split 139 7. The Emotional Labor of Being in Leavenworth 147 8. Deportation to a Home That Doesn't Exist, or "He Has Interpreted the Alien's Mind" 157 Part I: Conclusion 171 Part II: The Homoerotics of Abjection: The Gaze and Leonard Nadel's Salinas Valley Bracero Photographs 9. Making Braceros Out of Place and Outside of Time 185 10. The Salinas Valley and Hidden Affective Histories 197 11. Hip Forward into Domestic Labor and Other Intimacies 215 12. Queer Precious Lives 233 13. Wanting to Be Looked At 251 14. Passionate Violence and Thefts 275 Part II: Conclusion 283 Conclusion 285 Notes 291 Bibliography 321 Index 329

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Book SynopsisIn Magical Habits Monica Huerta draws on her experiences growing up in her family''s Mexican restaurants and her life as a scholar of literature and culture to meditate on how relationships among self, place, race, and storytelling contend with both the afterlives of history and racial capitalism. Whether dwelling on mundane aspects of everyday life, such as the smell of old kitchen grease, or grappling with the thorny, unsatisfying question of authenticity, Huerta stages a dynamic conversation among genres, voices, and archives: personal and critical essays exist alongside a fairy tale; photographs and restaurant menus complement fictional monologues based on her family''s history. Developing a new mode of criticism through storytelling, Huerta takes readers through Cook County courtrooms, the Cristero Rebellion (in which her great-grandfather was martyred by the Mexican government), Japanese baths in San Francisco—and a little bit about Chaucer too. Ultimately, Huerta skTrade Review“Monica Huerta moves readers toward a habit of being captured by objects that mesh one's own singular and collective histories. We learn to breathe with them and to be dispossessed by them. This fantastic book enchanted me and taught me so much.” -- Lauren Berlant, author of * Cruel Optimism *“Magical Habits is as much a treasure trove as it is a book—full of surprises, glittering insights, lyrical vignettes, personal archives, political history, family lore, and brilliant literary critique. The writing is exquisite, for the book is both polyphonic and constantly---effortlessly---changing tack. I would turn the page without any sense of where Monica Huerta might take me next, only knowing that I wanted to follow, that I did not want to come out from under this spell.” -- Justin Torres, author of * We the Animals *"Thoughtful, wry, and intimate, Magical Habits is a memoir that’s rich with questions about identity, heritage, authenticity, and the true American dream." -- Meg Nola * Foreword *"This striking debut blends personal and political essays with U.S. and Mexican histories, photos, menus and a fable to indulge 'multiple habits of thought rather than proposing there is one way of knowing.'" * New York Times Book Review *"Huerta weaves into each chapter powerful stories of her upbringing and family and the narrative of her own winding path in academia. She cleverly uses a variety of documents and historical archival material, sourced from her family and their businesses in Chicago and Mexico, to explore wide-ranging themes of migration and displacement and the results of what she calls racial capitalism. . . . It is a fascinating read. . . ." -- Amy Lewontin * Library Journal *"Magical Habits’s blend of personal archive and theory prompts the reader to question their assumptions around what constitutes accepted archives and heralded academic discourse. . . . Within a relatively slim text, Huerta performs a rich kind of self-ekphrasis, looking at material from her own life and family for clues about how to live alongside scholarship: television, family lore, tales from her love life that read like movie reels." -- Rosa Boshier * Los Angeles Review of Books *"When I tweeted a joke ('joke') about timing my book proposal to a certain full moon, someone recommended I read Monica Huerta’s Magical Habits, an intimate, academic, genre-bending study of race, history, and heritage grounded in Huerta’s experience growing up in her family’s Mexican restaurants. I’m glad I listened, and not only because Huerta validates moon-based writing timelines—it was a much-needed reminder that there are countless ways to tell a story, and that a book can be whatever you want it to be." -- Arianna Rebolini * The Millions *"Delightfully heterogenous and perfectly unblended, Huerta’s mixture of creative and critical writing spans from history to monologues, to tales and family documents, including a variety of media—photographs, restaurant menus, advertisements—which comprise her personal ‘archive’ (xix). . . . As a book which ‘seeks to enact as much as describe,’ Magical Habits is a love story between the reader and the writing, one to be read with generosity and eagerness (ix)." -- Adriana Murad Konings * ASAP/Journal *“Monica Huerta’s first book, Magical Habits, is unlike many other contemporary Latinx studies monographs. It breaks with generic conventions of literary criticism and stuns with Huerta’s reflections on everyday encounters with history and capitalism via family, place, race, self, and the stories they intertwine.” -- Jennifer M. Lozano * MELUS *“Monica Huerta’s intricate and deeply intimate Magical Habits takes the reader on an inventive study of the links between stories, race, place, and archive. . . . This book will definitely benefit students and researchers in the fields of feminism and gender studies, critical race theory, Chicanx studies, and Latinx literature. It could also enlighten students wishing for more creative liberty in academia.” -- Anaïs Ornelas Ramirez * Lateral *“Monica Huerta’s Magical Habits takes us deep into the possibilities of everyday objects, feelings, and questions. . . . I love this book because I, like Huerta, am committed ‘to take on scholarly rituals that lead to elsewhere.’ This memoir that is also a collage and a performance does just this.” -- Suzanne Bost * Prose Studies *Table of ContentsAuthor's Note ix Preface: A Patron Saint xi 1. The Synthesis Problem 1 2. Fabulation 22 1988 31 3. Disciplines and Disciples 33 4. Aphorism as a Promise 42 2002 48 5. Heartbreak as Praxis 51 6. Whether Wisdom 68 2004 73 The Quene. A Mervilos and Magiquall Tale of epistemological Mischief, Wherein there are revealed no secretes 77 7. Before and After 85 2006 98 8. When Courts of Love Have Cash Registers 103 1976 107 9. Auctions 111 10. Uncertainty and Bathing 118 2010 124 2013 128 11. After Hypervigilance 132 2017 142 12. Choreography 143 Acknowledgments 153 Notes 157 Selected Bibliography 167

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Book SynopsisIn Maroon Choreographyfahima ife speculates on the long (im)material, ecological, and aesthetic afterlives of black fugitivity. In three long-form poems and a lyrical essay, they examine black fugitivity as an ongoing phenomenon we know little about beyond what history tells us. As both poet and scholar, ife unsettles the history and idea of black fugitivity, troubling senses of historic knowing while moving inside the continuing afterlives of those people who disappeared themselves into rural spaces beyond the reach of slavery. At the same time, they interrogate how writing itself can be a fugitive practice and a means to find a way out of ongoing containment, indebtedness, surveillance, and ecological ruin. Offering a philosophical performance in black study, ife prompts us to consider how we—in our study, in our mutual refusal, in our belatedness, in our habitual assemblage—linger beside the unknown. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book ATrade Review“Maroon Choreography reads like liner notes for a dance unwitnessed except by sound, or a dramaturgy for a dance recorded by the mud and roots of trees who would have been the only audience. It is obscure but everywhere. More unknowable than little known. It participates in the important recent critical practice that goes beyond applying or extending theory and instead insists there is something else to perceive and another way to perceive it.” -- Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of * Dub: Finding Ceremony *“With great erudition and deep musicality, fahima ife has written a funky, rigorous, and lyrical investigation of what it is to have been made to have and not have a body. An incredible tempest of a book.” -- Fred Moten, author of * Black and Blur *“ife invokes recent thinkers for whom the inherited rules and categories of what we have learned to call civilization look like acts of Western oppression. Against those categories, with sublimity and verve, ife’s verse raises up a defiant ‘queeribbeanness,’ celebrating ‘unruly contemporary dancers’ and other ‘black bodies” that ‘struggle to name our lives as sovereign, on our own terms.’ Spectacularly allusive in its canny, concise segments, sometimes programmatic but more often simply learned, Ife’s ‘tremulous / antegrammatical’ work invokes ‘the black morning of baldwin / across the river in another country.’” -- Stephanie Burt * New York Times Book Review *"Reading this text is an exercise in letting go of the familiar to practice otherwise. Through breathing, sitting, humming, and pausing with this text I am consistently reminded (as if one could forget) that our compulsory education systems are colonially choreographed. . . . To engage with this book in the field of comparative and international education is to practice asking more of ourselves and our work while making another world possible." -- Cee Carter * Comparative Education Review *“It is not often that an academic text takes you on a journey. fahima ife’s book of essays and poetry, Maroon Choreography, invites us to theorize not by defining and analyzing but rather by inhabiting an undocumented past of escape from slavery that links to present-day escapes from slavery’s afterlife. In this process of imagining, the text engages with an important conversation within Black studies, critical theory, and performance studies.” -- Omar Ricks * Dance Chronicle *"Maroon Choreography . . . inspires as possibility for what poetry might be, how it might bring forth homage and critical theory about Blackness in new forms and fresh ways of thought. It disassembles. I’m drawn to books of all sorts that unravel dominant discourses that plague our imaginations, and ife does that." -- Dawn Lundy Martin * Brooklyn Poets *"Maroon Choreography . . . . [is] a radical work that emerges from centuries of the informal, from the pneumatic symphony of all of us, but specifically of Blackness, 'in the slickness of joy,' and takes to the snake with great force. ife proposes questions that are rarely asked, perspectives refusing popular thought. They invite us to sit with them, to float, ascend, transcend, practice, to move through something not written by the choreography of coloniality — and to breathe 'in the upper air unseen.'" -- Cameron Lovejoy * Fugue *Table of ContentsA Prefatory Note ix Recrudescence 1 Porous Aftermath 15 Nocturnal Work 51 Maroon Choreography 79 Coda 93 Anindex 117

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Book SynopsisPriya Kandaswamy brings together two crucial moments in welfare history—the advent of the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996—to show how they each targeted Black women through negative stereotyping and normative assumptions about gender, race, and citizenship.Trade Review“Priya Kandaswamy brings to light the struggles of African American women to navigate the competing and contradictory demands placed upon them after emancipation. By linking the question of state assistance in the aftermath of the Civil War to the contemporary welfare debate, Kandaswamy enables readers to see the endurance of anti-Black racism and heteronormativity as well as how state power operates to enforce labor discipline and maintain social stratification. The parallels between these two time periods are eye-opening.” -- Premilla Nadasen, author of * Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement *“Domestic Contradictions is remarkably original in its historiographic perspective and structure. Rather than offering a ‘long history’ of race, gender, and welfare, Priya Kandaswamy boldly juxtaposes two key moments in welfare-state history and, in so doing, is able to successfully demonstrate the haunting of Reconstruction's violent limitations in the late twentieth century. Sharp and innovative, this will be an influential work in gender theory and gender history. Indeed, Kandaswamy's impact on feminist scholarship and public debates will be very significant.” -- Sarah Haley, author of * No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity *“In Domestic Contradictions, Kandaswamy offers an important perspective on the well-established idea that welfare policies are deeply classist, racist, and sexist.... I strongly recommend this book to welfare scholars and students of social policy who want to understand more deeply our uniquely American social safety net.” -- Leah Hamilton * Affilia *“Domestic Contradictions makes an important contribution to both intersectional thought and feminist analyses of the American welfare system. . . . The author compellingly argues that today’s welfare system reforms aim at producing a class of lower wage workers whose identities mirror the racial discriminatory ideological presuppositions that have persisted since the Reconstruction Era.” -- Giada Mangiameli * Feminist Encounters *"Domestic Contradictions is remarkably original and vitally important. ... Kandaswamy’s scholarship joins the best work in the history of gender and sexuality by demonstrating how patterns of social life that often get framed as preordained have, in fact, been shaped through concerted state action." -- Brooke Depenbusch * American Historical Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii 1. Welfare Reform and the Afterlife of Slavery 1 2. Making State, Making Family 29 3. Marriage and the Making of Gendered Citizenship 59 4. Domestic Labor and the Politics of Reform 105 5. The Chains of Welfare 151 Conclusion 193 Notes 197 Bibliography 215 Index 227

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Book SynopsisJennifer C. Nash examines how the figure of the Black mother has become a powerful political category synonymous with crisis, showing how they are often rendered into one-dimensional symbols of tragic heroism and the ground zero of Black life.Trade Review“Viewing Black motherhood as a trending political site, Jennifer C. Nash boldly pushes Black feminists to reflect critically on their own embrace of crisis rhetoric that casts Black maternal bodies as mere symbols of state violence marked by suffering, trauma, and grief. While powerfully arguing we risk reproducing Black mothers as problems in need of intervention and relying on low-wage Black birthworkers to save them, Nash points to ways we can theorize new forms of Black maternal freedom that refuse confinement to a marketed crisis frame.” -- Dorothy Roberts, author of * Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty *“Investigating the fraught position in which Black mothers find themselves and the complex ways they engage with the discourse of crisis that is attached to them, Birthing Black Mothers will generate a wonderfully complex debate in Black feminism. The difficult conversations that Jennifer C. Nash’s arguments will incite are well worth the discomfort. This brilliant book is the most exciting piece of scholarship I have read this year.” -- Khiara M. Bridges, author of * The Poverty of Privacy Rights *"[An] essential examination of Black motherhood and its layered complexities of representation, performance, gaze, critique, precarity and politics." -- Karla Strand * Ms. *"Birthing Black Mothers is a highly relevant and accessible work that will appeal to students interested in various aspects of Black motherhood, as well as to a broader audience outside academia. Jennifer Nash's depiction of the contemporary crisis enriches ongoing debates around Black motherhood." -- Etyelle Pinheiro de Araujo * E3W Review of Books *"Birthing Black Mothers is an insightful and important analysis of black motherhood in the contemporary moment. . . . Nash’s most significant contribution lies in the questions she asks of black feminists; what happens when 'Black feminist innovations' are absorbed by the very institutions they are meant to challenge? What are the consequences of getting a rickety seat at an intrinsically unjust table?" -- Patricia Hamilton * Ethnic and Racial Studies *"Birthing Black Women is essential reading for those interested in reproductive justice, Black feminism, public health, and media studies." -- Jennifer Musial * Resources for Gender and Women's Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. The Afterlives of Malaysia Goodson, or Black Mothering in Crisis 1 1. Black Gold: Remaking Black Breasts in an Era of Crisis 31 2. In the Room: Birthwork by Women of Color in a State of Emergency 69 3. Black Maternal Aesthetics: The Making of a Noncrisis Style 103 4. Writing Black Motherhood: Black Maternal Memoirs and Economies of Grief 133 Conclusion. The Afterlives of Jazmine Headley 173 Coda. "All Mothers Were Summoned when George Floyd Called Out for His Mama" 179 Notes 187 Bibliography 209 Index 235

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Book SynopsisIn Black Gathering Sarah Jane Cervenak engages with Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from interruption or regulation. Drawing together Black feminist theory, critical theories of ecology and ecoaesthetics, and Black aesthetics, Cervenak shows how novelists, poets, and visual artists such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Clementine Hunter, Samiya Bashir, and Leonardo Drew advance an ecological imagination that unsettles Western philosophical ideas of the earth as given to humans. In their aestheticization and conceptualization of gathering, these artists investigate the relationships among art, the environment, home, and forms of Black togetherness. Cervenak argues that by offering a formal and conceptual praxis of gathering, Black artists imagine liberation and alternative ways of being in the world that exist beyond those Enlightenment philosophies that presume Black people and earth as given to enclosure and ownership.Trade Review“Extending her rich study of philosophical praxis and the racial politics of wandering, Sarah Jane Cervenak explores daily practices and real-life social happenings as frames for navigating the discourses of death, subjection, and, most vitally, life. Surely this is a gathering; surely this is a beautiful work in Black aesthetics.” -- Kevin Quashie, author of * Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being *“Foregrounding fugitive existence in the reading of key literary texts and artworks, Black Gathering offers a powerful account of how Blackness (as it signals the without of modern representation) releases humans and nonhumans from their modern aesthetic enclosure (as subject and object of uncommitted contemplation) and juridic-economic misfortune (as subject and object of expropriation and extraction).” -- Denise Ferreira da Silva, author of * Toward a Global Idea of Race *“[Black Gathering], laid out in a captivating manner, moves from engagement with the concept of an earthly home and expands into works which explore the cosmos as well as parallel worlds. . . . This book will be of interest to advanced scholars studying the theory of African American artistic contributions.” -- Laura Christine Haynes * ARLIS/NA *“One of the key strengths of the book is its own ‘gathering’: that is, Cervenak takes up artists and works that either have been understudied or are not typically considered in the same context. . . . [Black Gathering] rewards readers interested in Black women’s (literary and visual) art, questions of form, and Black abstraction.” -- Evie Shockley * ISLE *“Black Gathering’s utopianism bespeaks an investment, inherited from performance studies, in what artworks are as well as what they do. Cervenak approaches Black ecologies not from the perspective of animality but from that of property. . . . Art, for Cervenak, generates a commons of sorts: it holds space for Black life, unenclosed.” -- Jean-Thomas Tremblay * GLQ *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Another Beginning Part I. Gathering's Art 1. "For a While at Least": Toni Morrison, Nikki Wallschlaeger, and the Ecoaesthetic Shapes of Home 2. The Art of the Matter: Samiya Bashir and Gabrielle Ralambo-Rajerison's Cosmopoetics Part II. The Art of Gathering 3. Arrangements Against the Sentence: Gayl Jones's Early Literature 4. "A Project From Outside": Leonardo Drew's Sculpture Conclusion: Clementine Hunter's Unscalable Field Notes References Index

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Book SynopsisRana M. Jaleel links international law's redefinition of mass rape as a crime against humanity to the expansion of US imperialism and its effacement of racialized violence and dispossession.Trade Review“Imaginative and deeply ambitious, The Work of Rape upends conventional thinking. Traversing a vast terrain, Rana M. Jaleel insists we turn from how rape has been problematically framed through various feminist legal efforts so we may reconceptualize its relation to racial and colonial world orderings of life. A brilliant and convincing book.” -- Leti Volpp, Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley“Rana M. Jaleel presents an eye-opening and mesmerizing global account of the contexts, significations, and meanings that rape as a juridical offense and cultural term has undergone from the 1990s to the present. She boldly intervenes into current discussions about rectifying the pervasiveness of societal sexual violence that has been reignited by movements like #TimesUp and #MeToo. One walks away from this book with new clarity about the substantive differences and stakes among women of color, Indigenous, queer, and radical feminist frameworks for understanding sexual violence and for acting against it. This is the book I’ve wanted for these times.” -- Chandan Reddy, author of * Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State *"The Work of Rape is a challenging text, but one that asks us to think deeply and seriously about feminist and queer theory, sexual violence, racialization, and the politics of rape." -- Sameena Mulla * GLQ *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction. The Work of Rape 1 1. The US Sex Wars Meet the Ethnic Wars 49 2. States of War, Men as State: The Tortured Americas, Genocidal Balkans, and the Sexual State Form 88 3. My Own Private Genocide: From Ethnic War to the War on Terror 110 4. Two Title IXs: Empire and the Transnational Production of "Welcomeness" on Campus 142 Epilogue. Decolonial and Abolitionist Feminisms and the Work of Rape 174 Notes 187 Bibliography 229 Index 255

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Book SynopsisIn Moving Home, Sandra Gunning examines nineteenth-century African diasporic travel writing to expand and complicate understandings of the Black Atlantic. Gunning draws on the writing of missionaries, abolitionists, entrepreneurs, and explorers whose work challenges the assumptions that travel writing is primarily associated with leisure or scientific research. For instance, Yoruba ex-slave turned Anglican bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther played a role in the Christianization of colonial Nigeria. Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a formerly enslaved girl 'gifted' to Queen Victoria, traveled the African colonies as the wife of a prominent colonial figure and under the protection of her benefactress. Alongside Nancy Gardiner Prince, Martin R. Delany, Robert Campbell, and others, these writers used their mobility as African diasporic and colonial subjects to explore the Atlantic world and beyond while they negotiated the complex intersections between nation and empire. Rather than categorizing theTrade Review“Sandra Gunning’s clear-sighted treatment of the complex political and social worlds in which her subjects found themselves and the multiple strategies through which they negotiated those worlds offers an especially important corrective to universalizing, homogenizing tendencies in much contemporary diasporic scholarship. Gunning argues for a new look at diaspora, particularly as a lens into the process of cultural change. Moving Home offers, in other words, provides a broad theory of the relationship of literature and literary criticism to profound social transformation.” -- Priscilla Wald, author of * Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative *“Moving Home takes a nuanced, intersectional approach to travel writers' construction of gendered identities. . . . Throughout her book, Gunning eschews generalization and accentuates instead the specific politics surrounding each text she discusses." -- Elizabeth A. Bohls * Review 19 *"An important corrective to dominant views of 19th-century Black identities and writings, as well as of travel writing, Gunning’s book will interest all scholars of literature and Black studies. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." -- D. E. Magill * Choice *Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xvii Introduction 1 1. Mary Seacole's West Indian Hospitality 23 2. Home and Belonging for Nancy Prince 55 3. The Repatriation of Samuel Ajayi Crowther 86 4. Martin R. Delany and Robert Campbell in West Africa 120 5. Sarah Forbes Bonetta and Travel as Social Capital 160 Coda 197 Notes 205 Bibliography 227 Index 251

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Book SynopsisJafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of Black queer politics, culture, and history in the 1980s as they emerged out of radical Black lesbian activism and writing.Trade Review“A genre-transcending meditation on one of the most undertheorized periods in Black queer history, There’s a Disco Ball Between Us is a timely and necessary account of what the period leading up to, during, and after the long shadow of the 1980s means for the current moment in Black queer world-making. At once poetic and playful, it pushes the boundaries of traditional scholarship, providing a methodology for analyzing Black queer culture. To use the vernacular of the ballroom children, folks are going to gag at its deft reads, melodic writing, and creative rendering of Black queer history.” -- E. Patrick Johnson, author of * Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women *“In this innovative and generously envisioned book, Jafari S. Allen presents an unprecedented consideration of Black queerness as he weaves together a loving tapestry of Black feminist and Black queer theorists that spans half a century of critical work. Suffused with the ‘Blackfullness’ of queer love, loss, and world-making, There’s a Disco Ball Between Us is a lyrical, incisive, history-making, and paradigm-shifting work.” -- Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, author of * Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders *"A book to re-read in order to reach new depths, to see the reflections from the disco ball from yet another angle. . . . I strongly recommend this book to scholars and student within academia, across disciplines, to artists, writers, and activists outside of academia – to anyone seeking to explore and become more intimate with Black gay (and queer) habits of mind." -- Rebecka Rehnström * Anthropology Book Forum *"There’s a Disco Ball Between Us anthologizes desire as a glittering communal practice of Black/gay habit: as a moment of recognition between kith if not kin, as acknowledgement even if in quarrel, shifting lives in and out of time, dancing freedom." -- Sharanya * Full Stop *"This text does not shy away from the intellectual tradition of Black feminist affect in which it exists. Instead, Allen invites the reader into an experience that can work, if they choose to work it. Allen’s register is sharp, to the bone, and it shines. At times, I wondered if I was grown enough to know these things, or well read enough to show up to this conversation and hang. . . . For Allen, Black gay life is a refraction of fantasy and action. His critical ethnography builds upon a Black feminist drive to create embodied narratives. . . . His prose and rigorous engagement with the long 1980s invite the reader into conversation with a litany of elder co-conspirators." -- Charlene A. Carruthers * Public Books *"Jafari Allen’s There’s a Disco Ball Between Us has been so helpful and clarifying for me. . . ." -- Ashon Crawley * Public Books *"At once an intellectual history, a manifesto, a self-reflexive ethnography, and a memoir, Allen’s book is a genre-defying text that revises our understanding of the Black experience." -- Frank Andrew Guridy * Public Books *“Allen has skillfully woven together the experiences of an ‘anthologized generation’ without falling into the trap of eliding them. Rather, like a disco ball, the many reflections and refractions come together to form a theory of Black gay life that is at once coherent and infinitely diverse.” -- Baird Campbell * American Anthropologist *"Truly expansive. . . a call to read, think, and act differently." -- Emily R. Bock * Black Perspectives *"A stunning and ambitious model. . . . There’s a Disco Ball Between Us advances a vision for Black Queer historical inquiries, inquiries that utilize interdisciplinary methods, trouble conventional historical periodization, (re)constitute expansive archives and centers the Diaspora. This book stands as a comprehensive intellectual, social, and political history of Black queer life globally during the last five decades." -- Jennifer Dominique Jones * Black Perspectives *Table of ContentsAn Invitation ix Introduction. Pastness Is a Position 1 I. A Stitch in Space Time. The Long 1980s 25 1. The Anthological Generation 27 2. "What It Is I Think They Were Doing, Anyhow" 61 3. Other Countries 76 4. Disco 118 5. Black Nations Queer Nations? 139 II. Black/Queerpolis 165 6. Bonds and Disciplines 167 7. Archiving the Anthological at the Current Conjuncture 192 8. Come 221 9. "Black/Queer Mess" as Methodological Case Study 245 10. Unfinished Work 261 III. Conclusion. Lush Life (in Exile) 295 Acknowledgments 313 Notes 325 Bibliography 379 Index 403

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Book SynopsisMarcus Bell presents a revealing portrait of white teachers in a majority Black schools to outline how white racial identity is constructed based on localized interactions and the ways whiteness takes a different form in predominantly Black spaces.Trade Review“A rich and insightful book, Whiteness Interrupted is an original contribution that will impact numerous disciplines—sociology, black studies, ethnic studies, whiteness studies, and education—while also appealing to a broader readership interested in the formation of racial identity.” -- Victor M. Rios, author of * Human Targets: Schools, Police, and the Criminalization of Latino Youth *“Whiteness Interrupted makes a crucial intervention by showing how whites are racialized when they are the minority. Marcus Bell's examination of white teachers in black schools raises important questions about racial asymmetry in all its forms. Framing the construction of race around spatial negotiation interrupts the theorizing of whiteness in much-needed ways.” -- Freeden Blume Oeur, author of * Black Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Public Schools *“Whiteness Interrupted is an important investigation on the contemporary ways in which White identity forms and reforms. Bell lays out a persuasive call for sociologists of race and ethnicity to pay more attention to locality.” -- Matthew W. Hughey * Social Forces *“Whiteness Interrupted tackles the complex subject of racial identity among white educators and makes it understandable for many Americans. . . . This is definitely a must-read for all, particularly as the US becomes a majority-minority society. Essential.” -- K. H. Jones * Choice *“Individuals who are interested in racial inequality within select institutions (education, government, the economy, etc.) will find this research stimulating, although graduate students, undergraduates, teachers, and professors should be particularly interested in [Whiteness Interrupted].” -- Michael Parrish * Ethnic and Racial Studies *Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Whiteness in America 1 1. White Racelessness 17 2. The Color Line and the Classroom 38 3. Becoming White Teachers 63 4. The White Race Card 85 5. Colorblind 117 Conclusion: White Identity Politics and the Coming Crisis of Place 153 Appendix: Methodology and Research Design 166 Notes 179 Bibliography 219 Index 241

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Book SynopsisWritings on Media collects Stuart Hall's most important work on the media, reaffirming his stature as an innovative media theorist while demonstrating the continuing relevance of his methods of analysis.Trade Review“How refreshing and urgent to revisit Stuart Hall’s formative ideas about racism, identity, ideology, and media at the very moment that media has become such a contested site and source of ideological work. Hall’s searing and critical insights about what media does, how it works, and why it matters have never been as pressing as they are today. In our global and national media ecologies where disputes over facts, epistemological turmoil, fake news, and ideological rigidities are routine, Charlotte Brunsdon’s curated collection of Hall’s essays on the media is a remarkable and indispensable gift.” -- Herman Gray, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz“Stuart Hall revolutionized the critical study of media, positioning them—newspapers, photographs, television—as key sites of struggle over cultural meaning and power, and thus as central to the project of cultural studies. Above all, however, Hall did not just write about media but used them prolifically as outlets for critical intervention in the world. This superb set of essays testifies to the uniquely powerful voice of one of the most important public intellectuals in postimperial Britain.” -- Ien Ang, Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies, Western Sydney University"Brunsdon . . . gifts us with the evolution and contours of Hall’s thought(s) about media more broadly in work he produced mostly in the decade of the 1970s or thereabouts: about photography and the visual arts, about the press, about radio and broadcasting, and finally about television. . . What the American reader learns from this collection is this: Hall was a prescient, energetic thinker of specificity and generality at the same time. . . ." -- Amy Villarejo * Critical Studies in Television *"This is the true magic here: what Hall furnished for us during the course of his life, and what Brunsdon has collected and contextualized in Writings on Media, is an invitation into Hall’s world—to see the world as he did. This vision is bright eyed, and delighted, and serious, and humble. . . . In all of his prose, it is unmistakable just how much Hall absolutely wants you in it with him, and to share his questions, and to identify possible answers, and to figure it out with you. And, that is a very precious gift indeed." -- Max Wiggins * College & Research Libraries *"This series is a veritable motherlode for Hall devotees and neophytes alike. . . . As Brunsdon points out, ensures that even the older or more micro-focused pieces in this volume still have ample value for current scholarship in media, film and cultural studies, and for the broader intersections around the analysis of politics, race, identity and ideological formation." -- Bill Yousman * Screen *Table of ContentsEditor's Note on the Text vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: A History of the Present / Charlotte Brunsdon 1 Part I. The Photograph in Context Introduction to Part I 15 1. Preface to Black Britain: A Photographic History 23 2. Media and Message: The Life and Death of Picture Post 26 3. The Social Eye of Picture Post 34 4. The Determinations of New Photographs 54 5. Reconstruction Work: Images of Post-war Black Settlement 78 6. Vanley Burke and the "Desire for Blackness" 95 Part II. Media Studies and Cultural Studies Introduction to Part II 101 7. Film Teaching: Liberal Studies 111 8. The World of the Gossip Column 122 9. A World at One with Itself 131 10. Introduction to Paper Voices 141 11. Down with the Little Woman 155 12. Mugging: A Case Study in the Media 162 13. Introduction to Media Studies at the Centre 169 14. The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media 177 Part III. Television Introduction to Part III 201 15. Television as a Medium and Its Relation to Culture 209 16. Watching the Box 237 17. Gogglebox Gigolos 242 18. TV Types 245 19. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse 247 20. Media Power: The Double Bind 267 21. Will Annan Open the Box? 276 22. Which Public, Whose Service? 281 23. Black and White in Television 297 Coda 315 24. Stuart Hall's Desert Island Discs 317 Index 331 Place of First Publication 343

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Book SynopsisNahum Dimitri Chandler examines W. E. B. Du Bois's early thought and its continued relevance, demonstrating that Dub Bois must be re-read, appreciated, and studied anew as a philosophical writer and thinker contemporary to our time.Trade Review“Nahum Dimitri Chandler's "Beyond This Narrow Now" gives the reader the marvelous benefit of Chandler's exquisite knowledge of the DuBoisian oeuvre and his singular unrelenting commitment to tarrying with it. As one of our master teachers, Chandler is at his best here in leading us systematically, virtually line by line, through early Du Bois in his critical conceptual formation.” -- Hortense J. Spillers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor, Vanderbilt University“‘Beyond This Narrow Now’ is a seminal contribution to foregrounding Du Bois’ epistemological roots and its implication for the future.” -- Mosa M. Phadi * Ethnic and Racial Studies *"Chandler is a meticulous scholar and a brilliant thinker with much to say about Du Bois as an intellectual problem. Parts of the book will be accessible to many readers, and Chandler’s approach to analysis serves as a master class in close reading. However, because of the occasionally esoteric nature of Chandler's approach, readers with a background in critical theory or philosophy have the most to gain. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, researchers/faculty, professionals/practitioners." -- J. W. Miller * Choice *“Chandler’s work is a definitive contribution towards a re-assessment of contemporary orientations of Du Boisian scholarship. His original thoughts and perspectives on Du Bois . . . provide new, innovative approaches to the work of such an iconic thinker and writer.” -- Lena Dallywater * Connections *"Insofar as he remains a critical resource in the present, perhaps one of the things that is most useful about Du Bois today is his ability to interpret historical possibility as the other side of historical limit, and to convince us that the future can still be altogether otherwise than the past that has been given to us, even now. There is no better guide to these aspects of Du Bois’s thought than Nahum Chandler’s 'Beyond This Narrow Now.'. . . Chandler is a poetic and evocative stylist, as well as a profound thinker, who offers the reader aesthetic and intellectual pleasures that help compensate for whatever syntactic or semantic hurdles pop up along the way." -- Ian Litwin * Georgia Review *"Chandler provides a patiently elaborated study of Du Bois’s early thought—a 'delimitation' of this thought that argues for the openness of its investigations and thus our perennial return to its hermeneutics." -- Rebecka Rutledge Fisher * American Literary History *"The merit of Chandler's work is that he stretches Du Bois's reflections along the arc drawn by contemporaneity and brings them into conversation with a constellation of critical theories from post-structuralism to post-colonialism, highlighting the specificity and contemporary importance of Du Bois's thought." -- Vincenzo Di Mino * Journal of Critical Race Inquiry *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Note on Citations xiii An Opening—At the Limit of Thought, a Preface xvii A Notation: The Practice of W.E.B. Du Bois as a Problem for Thought—Amidst the Turn of the Centuries 1 Part I. "Beyond This Narrow Now": Elaborations of the Example in the Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois—At the Limit of the World 25 Part II. The Problem of the Centuries: A Contemporary Elaboration of "The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind," circa the 27th of December, 1899—Or, At the Turn of the Twentieth Century 145 Another Coda, the Explicit—Revisited 221 Notes 231 References 269 Index 291

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Book SynopsisIn Disaffected Xine Yao explores the racial and sexual politics of unfeeling—affects that are not recognized as feeling—as a means of survival and refusal in nineteenth-century America. She positions unfeeling beyond sentimentalism''s paradigm of universal feeling. Yao traces how works by Herman Melville, Martin R. Delany, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Sui Sin Far engaged major sociopolitical issues in ways that resisted the weaponization of white sentimentalism against the lives of people of color. Exploring variously pathologized, racialized, queer, and gendered affective modes like unsympathetic Blackness, queer female frigidity, and Oriental inscrutability, these authors departed from the values that undergird the politics of recognition and the liberal project of inclusion. By theorizing feeling otherwise as an antisocial affect, form of dissent, and mode of care, Yao suggests that unfeeling can serve as a contemporary political straTrade Review“Just when it seemed there could be nothing more to say about nineteenth-century sentimentalism, Xine Yao comes along with this powerhouse of a book. She exposes sentimentalism’s sly trick: a white supremacy exerted through an appearance of empathy that is actually the policing of feeling itself. Stunningly argued and refreshingly contrarian, Disaffected showcases what is most exciting about nineteenth-century American literary studies today while making important connections to emerging conversations in studies of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.” -- Britt Rusert, author of * Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture *“Against the affective economy in which white pain demands racialized consolation and white sympathy extorts racialized gratitude and emotional labor, Xine Yao’s original study examines ‘disaffection’ as a powerful practice that refuses the affective obligations of the nineteenth-century liberal social order. To be ‘disaffected’ is more than the absence of feeling—it is rather to feel otherwise, to refuse affective coercion, to stay with the negativity of unfeeling and to interrupt its rehabilitation, and more importantly, to invent counterpractices of sociality and care from below.” -- Lisa Lowe, author of * The Intimacies of Four Continents *"Disaffected is a remarkable achievement that asks readers for 'reciprocity' in the 'mutual, uneven process of knowledge-making, meaning-making, community-building' that emerges from the withholdings and disclosures of unfeeling." -- Benjamin Hulett * Synapsis *"The history of emotions has not seen the likes of this book before and its importance cannot be overstated. At the very least, the introductory chapter should make it on to every syllabus." -- Rob Boddice * Emotions *"One of the marvels of this book is how Yao allows ideas and images to resonate and return across her readings, even as she approaches each text on its own terms. . . . Yao’s broader achievement in Disaffected is to theorize and exemplify a disaffected reading practice that unsettles the assumptions inherited from the tradition of sentimentalism." -- Nicholas Spengler * Leviathan *"This is an excellent, thought-provoking monograph, which is sure to leave its mark on a wide range of disciplines and fields." -- Jonathan D. S. Schroeder * American Literary History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction. Disaffected from the Culture of Sentiment 1 1. The Babo Problem: White Sentimentalism and Unsympathetic Blackness in Herman Melville's Benito Cereno 29 2. Feeling Otherwise: Martin R. Delany, Black-Indigenous Counterintimacies, and the Possibility of a New World 70 3. The Queer Frigidity of Professionalism: White Women Doctors, the Struggle for Rights, and the Marriage Plot 107 4. Objective Passionless: Black Women Doctors and Dispassionate Strategies of Uplifting Love 138 5. Oriental Inscrutability: Sui Sin Far, Chinese Faces, and the Modern Apparatuses of U.S. Immigration 171 Coda. Notes toward a Disaffected Manifesto beyond Survival 208 Notes 211 Bibliography 243 Index

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Book SynopsisVernadette Vicuña Gonzalez follows the life of Filipina vaudeville and film actress Isabel Rosario Cooper, who was the mistress of General Douglas MacArthur to explore the contours of empire as experienced on the scale of personal relationships.Trade Review“Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez crafts a gorgeous and meticulous portrait of one of the most intriguing women of the twentieth century, Isabel Rosario Cooper. Woven out of ghosts of texts and archival fractures and gaps, Empire's Mistress is a replete mystery tale, a feminist biography, a Hollywood story, an intimate study of Philippine-U.S. relations, and a masterful work of postcolonial noir. Above all, Empire's Mistress is a haunting, by which afterlives of empire address our contemporary dilemmas about how to articulate, frame, and center unspoken lives to tell history accurately. A deeply satisfying work of exhumation, Empire's Mistress makes complex history live, and I'm grateful for Gonzalez's unflinching, refractive, and always revelatory gaze on that history.” -- Gina Apostol, author of * Insurrecto *“Imaginatively tracing the life of Isabel Rosario Cooper in and through the elisions and silences of the archives, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez makes a significant contribution to rethinking the process of archival research when it involves marginalized subjects whose existence appears sporadically in the historical accounts of others. A compelling read.” -- Vicente L. Rafael, author of * Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation *"Gonzalez’s book is part- excavation, part-celebration of Cooper, that puts the story of MacArthur and his mistress into a new context, and not necessarily in a sordid way. Gonzalez is mindful at all times that Cooper was a daughter of colonization. That is why you read this book, to see another small-scale, personal perspective of the U.S. Philippines relationship where colonial mentality is more than a massive headache." -- Emil Guillermo * Philippine Inquirer *“Empire’s Mistress is a dynamic text at the cutting edge of transdisciplinary research and will appeal to lay readers looking for a juicy noir tale and to scholars of women’s history, twentieth century US–Philippines political relations, and postcolonial and cultural studies. Gonzalez’s writing against the archival grain is a pleasure to read.” -- Thea Quiray Tagle * Philippine Studies *“Empire’s Mistress is a clever reflection of both the disjointed American imperial archive and the non-linear life Cooper had invented for herself. . . . Gonzalez not only engages in interdisciplinary analyses and methodologies to study the archive, but beautifully interweaves multiple genres—academic prose, poetry, playwriting, and art—to speculate a historical narrative that dances on the fine line between fiction and non-fiction.” -- Kristin Oberiano * Western Historical Quarterly *“[Gonzalez] insists on a speculative archival reading that allows Cooper to move from being the object of the possessive to a framing that makes her a different kind of subject . . . ultimately centering and valuing the intimate knowledges formed and passed between women who experience the violence of empire.” -- Rachel Yim * Women & Performance *“Gonzalez is . . . especially lively when she is highlighting her personal discovery of archival documents. . . . Her glimpses into early Manila and the colonial life of American soldiers who married Filipina women was fascinating, and the best-researched part of this tale.” -- Kirby Pringle * Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television *“Empire’s Mistress is a work of art—figuratively and literally—that unearths the engrossing life of Isabel Rosario Cooper. . . . It is an archetype of how archival research should be repurposed.” -- Luis Zuriel P. Domingo * Sojourn *“Vernadette Gonzalez’s Empire’s Mistress offers a welcome correction to the common practice of colonial subjects being written out of history. . . . It constitutes a fascinating account of a minor biography intersecting with a major biography and historical events as seen from the colonized periphery.” -- Delia Malia Konzett * Pacific Affairs *Table of ContentsArchival Detritus, Fabrications, Second Takes, and Other Provocations 1. This Is Not a Love Story 1 2. Death Certificate, Partial 13 3. A General and Unruly Wards 15 4. The Flower of Cathay, Excerpts 28 5. Misapprehensions 30 6. The Farm Boy and the Unbiddable Wife 32 7. The Delicate Moonbeam 48 8. "Dimples": Innocence (Colonial Kink) 49 9. Stage Presence 67 10. Letters Lost at Sea, Imagined, Excerpts 69 11. The New Filipina, Kissing 72 12. Gossip: Fiction and Nonfiction 86 13. "It Girl" Meets General 89 14. Recipe for the Douglas 93 15. The Washington Housewife, the Hollywood Hula Girl, and the Two Husbands: Reinventions 94 16. Out of Place 111 17. 1st Filipina Nurse, Geisha, Little Sergeant, Javanese Nurse, Uncredited 112 18. Lolita's Lines 127 19. Bit Parts: Racial Types, Ensemble 128 20. Caged Birds 149 21. For Future Archives, Apocrypha, and Fictions 160 22. Death Certificate, Entire 165 23. The Suicide 167 24. Last Review 170 Acknowledgments 173 Notes 177 Filmography (with Roles) 199 Bibliography 203 Index 215

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Book SynopsisRight Here, Right Now collects the powerful first-person stories of dozens of men who are living on death row in the United States, offering a glimpse into the lives of some of the most marginalized people in America.Trade Review"Everyone must read this book. To read the compelling stories in these pages is to feel the birth pangs of the fundamental changes that must come. These voices bear witness that criminal justice in America has become a nation's crime unto itself. We must measure our national stature and moral standing not by stock markets or church steeples but by the grace and humanity of the institutions that rebuild broken lives. Right Here, Right Now is the place to start." -- Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and author of * The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement *“Revelatory. Having spent twenty-five years advocating for comprehensive criminal justice reform and having spent time with many innocent people in maximum security prisons, I have often found more decency and compassion amongst the people inside the prison walls than without. These first-person stories serve to remind us of the humanity and common decency that we as a society all too often push aside in our rush to judgment and punishment.” -- Jason Flom, host of the podcast * Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom *"This powerful collection contains true stories from the dozens of men living on death row across the country. Some remembrances stretch back to childhood experiences of poverty and police misconduct, while other accounts pertain to life inside the carceral system, as the writers fight to hold on to their connections to the outside world. The events of 2020 underscored systematic inequality and the injustices of the justice system; here, these firsthand accounts form a moving, personal call to action." -- Sarah Edwards * IndyWeek *"Right Here, Right Now contains moving, first-person, anonymous accounts of men living on death row. . . . With the common refrain of death row being reserved for the worst of America’s criminals, Right Here, Right Now provokes uncomfortable questions about a judicial system that disproportionately incarcerates those who are 'descendants of enslaved peoples and other people of color, the vast majority poor, and too many mentally ill,' as articulated by acclaimed death row attorney Henderson Hill in the book’s foreword." -- Thomasi McDonald * Indy Week *"What is the worst thing you ever did? What drove you to do it? What would your life be like if you were defined only by that one thing? Those are some of the questions that came to mind as I read Right Here, Right Now: Life Stories from America’s Death Row, a collection of powerful and often wrenching first-person stories of more than 100 men sentenced to death. It’s an emotionally difficult read, but it’s more than worth the investment of time and heart." -- Steven Petrow * Washington Post *"Right Here, Right Now is much more than a death penalty critique. At its heart, the book is about the challenge that has always faced us humans: to see the beauty, dignity, and value in every single person, and to create a society around that. What would it mean to live in a culture that looks at convicted murderers and determinedly sees the humanity there? What would it take to become a society that genuinely serves the least among us before celebrating the achievers?" -- Amanda Abrams * Plough *"Poignant. . . . This volume packs a punch and gives a voice to those whose stories need to be fully heard. Libraries, especially those seeking to expand collections related to criminal justice and the politics surrounding issues of race and class, should purchase this title." -- Mattie Cook * Library Journal *“While there are different authors voicing their tales throughout, [Right Here, Right Now] reads as one strong voice. . . . This piece furthers our understanding of not only experiences when sentenced to death, but also the tenacity that a human can hold to still be able to grow, learn, and think deeply despite the conditions that they are living under." -- AM Purdy * Criminal Law and Criminal Justice *Table of ContentsForeword / Henderson Hill ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 About the Stories 9 I. The Part That Was Innocent (Early Childhood, Birth to Five Years Old) 1. Playing Solitary 17 2. Grandma Shot Bob 18 3. Ajar 19 4. Now Questions Asked 21 5. Downpour 22 6. Nigger Lover 24 7. Shelf Life 25 8. Not the Worst Fate 27 9. Car Ride 30 10. Momma's Boy 32 11. Good Habits 34 II. Boot Camp (Elementary School, Six to Ten Years Old) 12. It Was Reefer 39 13. Blistered 41 14. Ode to a Pretty Girl 43 15. U-Turn 45 16. The Monster 46 17. Don't Bring a Gun to a Knife Fight 47 18. Red, Half-White, and Blue 49 19. Badge of Honor 51 20. Boot Camp 52 21. Lesson Learned 54 22. Better Off Dead 56 23. Shake It Off 58 III. The Drama Was Live (Middle School, Eleven to Thirteen Years Old) 24. You Can Be Anything 63 25. Bootleg 65 26. Luxury 67 27. Cop 68 28. Man of the House 69 29. Trance 71 30. Tar Pit 73 31. Point Blank 75 32. Role Model 77 33. Elliot MF Jones 79 34. Suspension of Disbelief 81 IV. From Bad to Worse (Fourteen Years Old to Arrest) 35. A Wrap 85 36. JD 86 37. When We Were Young 88 38. Stinging Bee 90 39. Hands On 92 40. On My Own 94 41. Ain't Got No Name 96 42. Slap in the Face 98 43. Doing My Job 100 44. White Devil 102 45. Voices in the Dark 103 46. Finally 105 47. Crossing Over 107 V. Given the Circumstances 48. A Kind of Peace 113 49. Seeing the Light 116 50. Boy 119 51. The Quiet Room 122 52. Helpless 124 53. Just Like a Frog 127 54. The Source 129 55. I Heard You 131 56. Mercy on My Soul 133 57. Butterflies 135 58. After the Storm 137 VI. Worst of the Worst (Entering Death Row and Solitary) 59. What You Got? 141 60. Worst of the Worst 142 61. Nursing Home 144 62. Combat Readiness 143 63. The Hole 148 64. Peanut 150 65. Motel 6 152 66. All These Guys 155 67. Word is Bond 157 VII. You Are Not Here to Be Rehabilitated 68. The Raw 163 69. Firstborn 165 70. Valentine's Day 166 71. Time Lost 169 72. Hugs 171 73. I Knew What Was Coming 173 74. The Real Question 175 75. For My Heart Only 177 76. Guilty by Association 179 77. Pumping Iron 181 78. I Became Him 183 79. Definitely Christmas 185 80. Sidekick for Life 187 81. The Huggy Boys 190 82. Cellar Dwellers 192 83. Your Neighbor 195 84. Beyond the Wall 198 85. Ten Cents a Minute 201 86. You Can Do It 204 87. The Kind that Never Go Away 206 88. Making It Home 208 89. Someone Was Going to Die 211 90. Sugar Rush 214 VIII. Every Day's Worth Celebrating (Facing Execution) 91. Deal the Cards 219 92. Weighing the Cost 221 93. The Envelope 223 94. Final Hours 226 95. Cruel and Unusual 228 96. Black and Mild 229 97. Something Wasn't Right 231 98. Holy Week 234 99. Dawn 235 Afterword / Timothy B. Tyson 237 Resources for Deeper Connection 249

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Book SynopsisNicole M. Guidotti-Hernández challenges the stereotypes of machismo with nuanced portraits of Mexican men and masculinities along and across the US-Mexico border.Trade Review“Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora makes a critical contribution to our collective sense of gender dynamics in twentieth-century migration studies. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández delivers a nuanced treatment of the masculinity of Mexican migrants over the first half of the twentieth century. Through myriad lenses, we see Mexican nationals as partners and lovers, as fathers and sons, as machos and domestic beings, and in homosocial and heteronormative positions.” -- George J. Sánchez, * Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 *“Guidotti-Hernández is an elegant writer, and this book’s compelling and deeply human arguments resonate through the lucid prose. . . . This is a book to be read slowly, to be scrutinized and experienced.” -- Lydia R. Cooper * Western American Literature *"This incredibly thought-provoking book is meant to be read closely; Guidotti-Hernández’s forceful analysis, along with the more than fifty accompanying illustrations, deserves careful attention." -- Juan Ignacio Mora * Latino Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Part I. Enrique Flores Magón's Exile: Revolutionary Desire and Familial Entanglements 1. Greeting Cards, Love Notes, Love Letters 35 2. PLM Intimate Betrayals: Enrique Flores Magón, Paula Carmona, and the Gendered History of Denunciation 43 3. Out of Betrayal and into Anarchist Love and Family 83 4. Bodily Harm 107 5. De la Familia Liberal 127 6. The Split 139 7. The Emotional Labor of Being in Leavenworth 147 8. Deportation to a Home That Doesn't Exist, or "He Has Interpreted the Alien's Mind" 157 Part I: Conclusion 171 Part II: The Homoerotics of Abjection: The Gaze and Leonard Nadel's Salinas Valley Bracero Photographs 9. Making Braceros Out of Place and Outside of Time 185 10. The Salinas Valley and Hidden Affective Histories 197 11. Hip Forward into Domestic Labor and Other Intimacies 215 12. Queer Precious Lives 233 13. Wanting to Be Looked At 251 14. Passionate Violence and Thefts 275 Part II: Conclusion 283 Conclusion 285 Notes 291 Bibliography 321 Index 329

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Book SynopsisPriya Kandaswamy brings together two crucial moments in welfare historythe advent of the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996to show how they each targeted Black women through negative stereotyping and normative assumptions about gender, race, and citizenship.Trade Review“Priya Kandaswamy brings to light the struggles of African American women to navigate the competing and contradictory demands placed upon them after emancipation. By linking the question of state assistance in the aftermath of the Civil War to the contemporary welfare debate, Kandaswamy enables readers to see the endurance of anti-Black racism and heteronormativity as well as how state power operates to enforce labor discipline and maintain social stratification. The parallels between these two time periods are eye-opening.” -- Premilla Nadasen, author of * Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement *“Domestic Contradictions is remarkably original in its historiographic perspective and structure. Rather than offering a ‘long history’ of race, gender, and welfare, Priya Kandaswamy boldly juxtaposes two key moments in welfare-state history and, in so doing, is able to successfully demonstrate the haunting of Reconstruction's violent limitations in the late twentieth century. Sharp and innovative, this will be an influential work in gender theory and gender history. Indeed, Kandaswamy's impact on feminist scholarship and public debates will be very significant.” -- Sarah Haley, author of * No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity *“In Domestic Contradictions, Kandaswamy offers an important perspective on the well-established idea that welfare policies are deeply classist, racist, and sexist.... I strongly recommend this book to welfare scholars and students of social policy who want to understand more deeply our uniquely American social safety net.” -- Leah Hamilton * Affilia *“Domestic Contradictions makes an important contribution to both intersectional thought and feminist analyses of the American welfare system. . . . The author compellingly argues that today’s welfare system reforms aim at producing a class of lower wage workers whose identities mirror the racial discriminatory ideological presuppositions that have persisted since the Reconstruction Era.” -- Giada Mangiameli * Feminist Encounters *"Domestic Contradictions is remarkably original and vitally important. ... Kandaswamy’s scholarship joins the best work in the history of gender and sexuality by demonstrating how patterns of social life that often get framed as preordained have, in fact, been shaped through concerted state action." -- Brooke Depenbusch * American Historical Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii 1. Welfare Reform and the Afterlife of Slavery 1 2. Making State, Making Family 29 3. Marriage and the Making of Gendered Citizenship 59 4. Domestic Labor and the Politics of Reform 105 5. The Chains of Welfare 151 Conclusion 193 Notes 197 Bibliography 215 Index 227

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Book SynopsisRana M. Jaleel links international law's redefinition of mass rape as a crime against humanity to the expansion of US imperialism and its effacement of racialized violence and dispossession.Trade Review“Imaginative and deeply ambitious, The Work of Rape upends conventional thinking. Traversing a vast terrain, Rana M. Jaleel insists we turn from how rape has been problematically framed through various feminist legal efforts so we may reconceptualize its relation to racial and colonial world orderings of life. A brilliant and convincing book.” -- Leti Volpp, Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley“Rana M. Jaleel presents an eye-opening and mesmerizing global account of the contexts, significations, and meanings that rape as a juridical offense and cultural term has undergone from the 1990s to the present. She boldly intervenes into current discussions about rectifying the pervasiveness of societal sexual violence that has been reignited by movements like #TimesUp and #MeToo. One walks away from this book with new clarity about the substantive differences and stakes among women of color, Indigenous, queer, and radical feminist frameworks for understanding sexual violence and for acting against it. This is the book I’ve wanted for these times.” -- Chandan Reddy, author of * Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State *"The Work of Rape is a challenging text, but one that asks us to think deeply and seriously about feminist and queer theory, sexual violence, racialization, and the politics of rape." -- Sameena Mulla * GLQ *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction. The Work of Rape 1 1. The US Sex Wars Meet the Ethnic Wars 49 2. States of War, Men as State: The Tortured Americas, Genocidal Balkans, and the Sexual State Form 88 3. My Own Private Genocide: From Ethnic War to the War on Terror 110 4. Two Title IXs: Empire and the Transnational Production of "Welcomeness" on Campus 142 Epilogue. Decolonial and Abolitionist Feminisms and the Work of Rape 174 Notes 187 Bibliography 229 Index 255

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Book SynopsisSandra Gunning draws on nineteenth-century African diasporic travel writing to explore the conditions and possibilities of race, gender, sex, and class that early black Atlantic travel enabled.Trade Review“Sandra Gunning’s clear-sighted treatment of the complex political and social worlds in which her subjects found themselves and the multiple strategies through which they negotiated those worlds offers an especially important corrective to universalizing, homogenizing tendencies in much contemporary diasporic scholarship. Gunning argues for a new look at diaspora, particularly as a lens into the process of cultural change. Moving Home offers, in other words, provides a broad theory of the relationship of literature and literary criticism to profound social transformation.” -- Priscilla Wald, author of * Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative *“Moving Home takes a nuanced, intersectional approach to travel writers' construction of gendered identities. . . . Throughout her book, Gunning eschews generalization and accentuates instead the specific politics surrounding each text she discusses." -- Elizabeth A. Bohls * Review 19 *"An important corrective to dominant views of 19th-century Black identities and writings, as well as of travel writing, Gunning’s book will interest all scholars of literature and Black studies. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." -- D. E. Magill * Choice *Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xvii Introduction 1 1. Mary Seacole's West Indian Hospitality 23 2. Home and Belonging for Nancy Prince 55 3. The Repatriation of Samuel Ajayi Crowther 86 4. Martin R. Delany and Robert Campbell in West Africa 120 5. Sarah Forbes Bonetta and Travel as Social Capital 160 Coda 197 Notes 205 Bibliography 227 Index 251

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Book SynopsisThis special issue advances transnational feminist approaches to the globally proliferating phenomenon of anti-Muslim racism. The contributors trace the global circuits and formations of power through which anti-Muslim racism travels, operates, and shapes local contexts. The essays center attention on and explore the gendered, sexualized, and racialized forms of anti-Muslim oppression and resistance in modern social theory, law, protest cultures, social media, art, and everyday life in the United States and transnationally. The contributors illuminate the complex nature of global anti-Muslim racism through various topics including Islamophobia in the context of race, gender, and religion; hate crimes; the sexualization of Islam in social media; queer Muslim futurism; the connection between secularism and feminism in Pakistan; the racialization of Muslims in the early Cold War period; and anti-Muslim racism in Russia. Together the essays provide a complex picture of the multifaceted nat

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