Ethnic studies / Ethnicity Books

Book SynopsisTrade Review“Alvin Hall’s Driving the Green Book is a tour-de-force blending exhaustive research, exquisite writing, and emotionally resonant visuals. The book is also a testament to Black resilience during the Jim Crow era, the strategic thinking that helped Black families not only endure but to prevail over tyrannical anti-Black laws, and the ingenuity that held Black communities together from east to west, north to south. This is a must-read.” — Bakari Sellers, New York Times bestselling author of My Vanishing Country “Alvin Hall’s thrilling, deeply researched and illuminating exploration of the world of the Green Book – revealing, enraging and inspiring in equal measure – is a journey all Americans must take. Nothing tells us more about the country we have been, the country we remain in so many ways, and the country we should aspire to be.” — Ric Burns, filmmaker “A historical examination of a sublime act of Black resistance. . . . Driving the Green Book paints a painful picture of one aspect of the oppression Blacks endured during Jim Crow, while also illustrating the power of the human spirit to subvert an unconscionable system and still experience joy.” — Atlanta Journal-Constitution “This smart, lively, and timely book is a testament to friendship and self-discovery and a reminder that the road to racial progress has been marked by dead ends and wrong turns. And yet there are so many beautiful and brilliant stories in these pages of family joy, courage, defiance, and triumph over the many racist indignities along the North/South highways of Jim Crow America, I couldn’t put the book down. Driving the Green Book is a terrific place to start your own journey to understanding the nation’s recent past and to chart a course for a better future.” — Khalil Gibran Muhammad, former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. "Illuminating. . . . Hall pays moving tribute to the ingenuity and resourcefulness of Black Americans who hit the road, despite the dangers. This historical travelogue inspires and educates.” — Publishers Weekly “Driving The Green Book is an extraordinary journey through history exploring Black Americans’ 400 year tradition of providing safety, shelter, survival, and sanctuary for our community in our quest to live the American dream. The book is beautifully written, educational and inspiring.” — Emil Wilbekin, Founder of Native Son “Revisiting a vital resistance and survival tool for Black Americans….A hard-charging resurrection of Black lives in Jim Crow America.” — Kirkus Reviews “This book provides a window into an overlooked position that discrimination forced Blacks into. . . . This well-written account will appeal to readers interested in civil rights, Black history, and travel literature.” — Library Journal (starred review) “Compelling . . . a book that brings history to life, while also reminding us that history is not so far in the past.” — Book Riot “Required Reading: 10 Black Authors to Get into in January 2023.” — Ebony “Readers who love to travel will want to tuck this in their carry-on or console. If there’s a bit of quiet activism inside you, “Driving The Green Book” will fuel it.” — Terri Schlichenmeyer, The Bookworm Sez, syndicated column

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Book SynopsisSelected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all timeIn Up from Slavery, Washington recounts the story of his life—from slave to educator. The early sections deal with his upbringing as a slave and his efforts to get an education. Washington details his transition from student to teacher, and outlines his own development as an educator and founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In the final chapters of Up From Slavery, Washington describes his career as a public speaker and civil rights activist.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary author

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Book SynopsisThe extraordinary writings of Phillis Wheatley, a formerly enslaved woman turned published poetIn 1761, a young girl arrived in Boston on a ship of enslaved people, was sold to the Wheatley family, and given the name Phillis Wheatley. After studying English and classical literature, geography, the Bible, and Latin, Phillis published her first poem in 1767 at the age of 14, winning much public attention and considerable fame. When Boston publishers who doubted its authenticity rejected an initial collection of her poetry, Wheatley sailed to London in 1773 and found a publisher there for Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.This volume collects both Wheatley's letters and her poetry: hymns, elegies, translations, philosophical poems, tales, and epyllions--including a poignant plea to the Earl of Dartmouth urging freedom for America and comparing the country's condition to her own. With her contemplative elegies and her use of the poetic imagination

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Book SynopsisEx-slave Frederick Douglass's second autobiography-written after ten years of reflection following his legal emancipation in 1846 and his break with his mentor William Lloyd Garrison-catapulted Douglass into the international spotlight as the foremost spokesman for American blacks, both freed and slave. Written during his celebrated career as a speaker and newspaper editor, My Bondage and My Freedom reveals the author of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) grown more mature, forceful, analytical, and complex with a deepened commitment to the fight for equal rights and liberties. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by John David SmithTrade Review“My Bondage and My Freedom, besides giving a fresh impulse to antislavery literature, [shows] upon its pages the untiring industry of the ripe scholar.”—William Wells Brown

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Book SynopsisOver a lifetime of studying Cuban Santeria and other religions related to Orisha worship - a practice also found among the Yoruba in West Africa. This title provides an analysis of these assumptions, in the process offering an incisive critique both of the anthropology of religion and of scholarship on the cultural history of Afro-Atlantic World.Trade Review"The Cooking of History is an extraordinary contribution to the study of Africa and its New World diaspora, the most important book published in this field during recent decades. Stephan Palmie shows the possibilities of a historical anthropology not derived from or contingent on the originary program of Melville Herskovits. The work accounts for the increasing complexity of the African diaspora and its increasing pertinence - or perhaps I should say impertinence - in the ways anthropologists and historians study and represent the world." (David William Cohen, University of Michigan)"

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Book SynopsisHow can we account for the power of ritual? This is the guiding question of Black Critics and Kings, which examines how Yoruba forms of ritual and knowledge shape politics, history, and resistance against the state. Focusing on deep knowledge in Yoruba cosmology as an interpretive space for configuring difference, Andrew Apter analyzes ritual empowerment as an essentially critical practice, one that revises authoritative discourses of space, time, gender, and sovereignty to promote political-and even violent-change. Documenting the development of a Yoruba kingdom from its nineteenth-century genesis to Nigeria's 1983 elections and subsequent military coup, Apter identifies the central role of ritual in reconfiguring power relations both internally and in relation to wider political arenas. What emerges is an ethnography of an interpretive vision that has broadened the horizons of local knowledge to embrace Christianity, colonialism, class formation, and the contemporary Nigerian state. In this capacity, Yoruba òrìsà worship remains a critical site of response to hegemonic interventions. With sustained theoretical argument and empirical rigor, Apter answers critical anthropologists who interrogate the possibility of ethnography. He reveals how an indigenous hermeneutics of power is put into ritual practice-with multiple voices, self-reflexive awareness, and concrete political results. Black Critics and Kings eloquently illustrates the ethnographic value of listening to the voice of the other, with implications extending beyond anthropology to engage leading debates in black critical theory.

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Book SynopsisThis title confronts questions of racial and gender discrimination. In a series of studies, Ian Ayres finds overwhelming evidence that in a variety of markets - retail car sales, bail bonding, kidney transplantation, and FCC licensing - blacks and females are consistently at a disadvantage.

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Book SynopsisExplores African American women's sex work in Chicago during the decades of some of the city's most explosive growth, expanding not just our view of prostitution, but also of black women's labor, the Great Migration, black and white reform movements, and the emergence of modern sexuality.Trade Review"I've Got to Make My Livin' is a splendid study of the historical interplay of city space, race, class, gender, and sexual politics during the industrial era. In this engaging work, Cynthia Blair creates a compelling portrait and persuasive argument for black women's participation in the underground sexual economy." - Elizabeth Clement, University of Utah.

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Book SynopsisFrom debates on Capitol Hill to the popular media, Mexican immigrants are the subject of widespread controversy. This volume provides a historical context for Mexican immigration to the United States and reports findings on an immigrant influx. It is intended for those concerned about social conditions and economic opportunities in both countries.

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Book SynopsisTells the story of two young men, Jermaine and Ray, following them through their high school years and chronicling their breakthroughs and frustrations on the basketball court as well as their troubles at home.Trade Review"In this vivid depiction of the urban reality of grassroots basketball, Scott Brooks exhibits an insider's passion for the game, broad and deep knowledge of the local history, and a real feel for the significance of basketball in Philly's black community. Along with offering important ideas about the relationship between race and sports, Black Men Can't Shoot is packed with genuine drama and intrigue, making it one of those rare books that are both insightful and truly engaging." - Douglas Hartmann, author of Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath"

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Book SynopsisHighlights how racial divides limited the life chances of blacks while providing opportunities for whites, and offers an insider's perspective on the social practices that doled out benefits and penalties based on race-despite attempts to integrate.Trade Review"Barr's gripping exploration of the divergent paths friends took away from a childhood snapshot combines the rigor of scholarship with the personal touch of memoir. I have rarely read a book that so effectively illustrates the persistence of racial disparities in the United States with unforgettable, wrenching life stories." (Amanda Seligman, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)"

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Book SynopsisIn this volume, distinguished Chinese and Western scholars provide a detailed examination of the problems associated with China's transition to a market-oriented system. A variety of reform proposals, aimed at resolving the contradictions inherent in piecemeal reform, are discussed along with the chances for future liberalization. These clearly written and insightful essays address the roots of China's crisis. The authors focus on institutional changes necessary for a spontaneous market order and point to the close relation between economic reform and political-constitutional reform. Topics include the speed and degree of the transition, whether ownership reform must precede price reform, how inflation can be avoided, steps to depoliticize economic life, how to create an environment conducive to foreign trade and investment, and how to institute basic constitutional change and open China to the outside world. The revolutionary changes now shaking the foundations of socialism and centra

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Book SynopsisRunaway slave Sojourner Truth gained fame in the nineteenth century as an abolitionist, feminist, and orator and earned a living partly by selling cartes de visite of herself at lectures and by mail. This book explores how she used her image, the press, the postal service, and copyright laws to support her activism and herself.

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Book SynopsisThis is a synthesis of Japanese history, religion, culture and social organization. The book explores the Japanese historical legacy and its impact on the Japanese experience of modernity, eschewing the polemicism of structuralist or culturalist approaches in favour of a comparative analysis.

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Book SynopsisThis work gathers classic essays on the Black Power movement and its legacy by renowned thinkers, who deal rigorously and unsentimentally with such issues as the commodification of blackness, the piety of cultural recovery, and class tensions within the movement.

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Book SynopsisThere is no female religious figure so widely known and revered as the Virgin Mary. Throughout history, Mary has inspired in a multitude of cultures around the world a deep affection, a desire to emulate her virtue, and a strong belief in the power of her apparitions and miracles. Perhaps no population has been so deeply affected by this maternal figure as Filipino Catholics, whose apparitions of Mary have increasingly emerged and responded to recent events, drawing from a broad repertoire of the Catholic supernatural as they draw media attention to the global south. In Mother Figured, historical anthropologist Deirdre de la Cruz offers a detailed examination of several appearances and miracles of the Virgin Mary in the Philippines from materials and sites ranging from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. By analyzing the effects of the mass media on the perception and proliferation of apparition phenomena, de la Cruz charts the intriguing emergence of new voices in the Philippin

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Book SynopsisIn mid-1990s South Africa, apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela was elected president, and the country's urban black youth developed kwaitoa form of electronic music (redolent of North American house) that came to represent the post-struggle generation. In this book, Gavin Steingo examines kwaito as it has developed alongside the democratization of South Africa over the past two decades. Tracking the fall of South African hope into the disenchantment that often characterizes the outlook of its youth todaywho face high unemployment, extreme inequality, and widespread crimeSteingo looks to kwaito as a powerful tool that paradoxically engages South Africa's crucial social and political problems by, in fact, seeming to ignore them. Politicians and cultural critics have long criticized kwaito for failing to provide any meaningful contribution to a society that desperately needs direction. As Steingo shows, however, these criticisms are built on problematic assumptions about the political fun

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Book SynopsisThe massive scale and complexity of international migration today tends to obscure the nuanced ways migrant families seek a sense of belonging. In this book, Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg takes readers back and forth between Cameroon and Germany to explore how migrant mothers through the careful and at times difficult management of relationships juggle belonging in multiple places at once: their new country, their old country, and the diasporic community that bridges them. Feldman-Savelsberg introduces readers to several Cameroonian mothers, each with her own unique history, concerns, and voice. Through scenes of their lives at a hometown association's year-end party, a celebration for a new baby, a visit to the Foreigners' Office, and many others as well as the stories they tell one another, Feldman-Savelsberg enlivens our thinking about migrants' lives and the networks and repertoires that they draw on to find stability and, ultimately, belonging. Placing women's individual voices with

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Book SynopsisFocuses on black migration and Latino immigration, examining tensions and alliances that emerged between African Americans and other groups. Exploring the challenges of residential segregation and deindustrialization, this book also tackles such topics as the real estate industry's discriminatory practices.Trade Review"Taken together, the essays in this volume are transformative - and excellent across the board. They collectively prople the historiography of the postwar era in profitable directions. They push against the most staid boundaries of urban history, they break out of the black-white binary that ensnares so much of African American history, and they juxtapose different objects of study in a way that establishes this book as a wonderfully realized interdisciplinary examination of the past." - Jonathan Holloway, Yale University"

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Book SynopsisInterweaves analysis of the process of apprenticeship among the Vai and Gola tailors of Liberia with reflections on the evolution of the author's research on those tailors in the late 1970s. This title shows how the critical questions raised by ethnographic research erode conventional assumptions, altering the direction of the work that follows.Trade Review"This is a fascinating and brilliant book that chronicles Lave's career-long effort to escape the dualistic logics that constrain social analysis and to come to terms with what it means to recognize that context is everything. As Lave compels and challenges us to rethink and redo pretty much everything we have been doing as social analysts so far, we find that we have to dispense with more than a few of our tried and true concepts." (Bill Maurer, University of California, Irvine)"

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Book SynopsisThis text explores how African literature written in French can change the way one thinks about nationalism, colonialism and postcolonialism. Arguing against blanket advocacy of any one model, the author seeks a form of thought that can read and recognize the realities of identity and difference.

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Book SynopsisThe Closing Door is the first major critique of the effect of conservative policies on urban race and poverty in the 1980s. Atlanta, with its booming economy, strong elected black leadership, and many highly educated blacks, seemed to be the perfect site for those policies and market solutions to prove themselves. Unfortunately, not only did expected economic opportunity fail to materialize but many of the hard-won gains of the civil rights movement were lost. Orfield and Ashkinaze painstakingly analyze the evidence from Atlanta to show why black opportunity deteriorated over the 1980s and outline possible remedies for the damage inflicted by the Reagan and Bush administrations. The Closing Door is a crucial breath of fresh air ...an important and timely text which will help to alter the 'underclass' debate in favor of reconsidering race-specific policies. Orfield and Ashkinaze construct a convincing argument with which those who favor 'race-neutrality' will have to contend. In readable prose they make a compelling case that economic growth is not enough.--Preston H. Smith II, Transition

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"In Empire of Defense, Darda shows how the idea of 'defense' became a logic for ongoing American war. This idea also fueled a racial ordering by defining who was, and who was not, worthy of defense. A fascinating account of the culture of war without end."--Mary L. Dudziak, author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences "Empire of Defense is an important and original contribution to studies of US warfare, empire-building, and racial modes of governance. This well-researched and meticulously written book suggests that permanent war is not antithetical to liberal governance--it is, in fact, part and parcel of it. As Darda powerfully reveals, the empire of defense hides its own violence in plain sight. His book is a cogent and much-needed critique of the machinations of US empire and how it justifies and authorizes its violence in racial and ethical terms."--Neda Atanasoski, author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity

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Book SynopsisRacial progress in the United States has hit a wall, and the rise of white nationalism is but one manifestation of this. Most Americans continue to hope that the younger generation, which many believe manifests less racism and more acceptance of a multiracial society, will lead to more moderate racial politicsbut this may not be happening. Overtly racist attitudes have declined, but anti-black stereotypes and racial resentment remain prevalent among white Americans. To add, the shape of racial attitudes has continued to evolve, but our existing measures have not evolved in step and cannot fully illuminate the challenge at hand. With Racial Stasis, Christopher D. DeSante and Candis Watts Smith argue persuasively that this is because millennials, a generational cohort far removed from Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era, lack sufficient understanding of the structural nature of racial inequalities in the United States and therefore also the contextual and historical knowledge to be actively anti-racist. While these younger whites may be open to the idea of interracial marriage or living next to a family of a different race, they often do not understand why policies like affirmative action still need to exist and are weary about supporting these kinds of policies. In short, although millennials' language and rationale around race, racism, and racial inequalities are different from previous generations', the end result is the same.

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Book SynopsisAlmost fifty years after Brown v Board of Education, a wealth of research shows that minority students continue to receive an unequal education. This title examines a complex relationship between teachers and civil rights activists, which traces the tensions between the two groups in New York City from the Great Depression to the present.Trade Review"Uncivil Rights makes a major contribution to our understanding of the often fraught relationship between (mostly white) teachers and (mostly non-white) students in the nation's largest school system. Skillfully framed around changing conceptions of teachers' and students' 'rights' in public schools, this book explains - better than any other - how teachers in New York City first won and then lost recognition of their status as 'professionals' in the classrooms and communities where they work." (Adam Nelson, University of Wisconsin - Madison)"

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Book SynopsisBlending ethnographic description with social analysis, Stoller shows how West African entrepreneurs have built cohesive and effective multinational trading networks in New York. Their stories illuminate ongoing debates about globalisation.Trade Review"Through this extraordinary study, Stoller succeeds in showing us how globalization is changing today's urban worlds. To do this he has to negotiate multiple levels of analysis, from the ethnographic detail of a vendor's sidewalk spot to that of the trading networks that connect across the Atlantic. This is a major contribution to the scholarship on immigration, the informal economy, and global cities." - Saskia Sassen, author of Guests and Aliens

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Book SynopsisIn a major contribution to the study of race in American literature, Kenneth W. Warren argues that late-nineteenth-century literary realism was shaped by and in turn helped to shape post-Civil War racial politics. Taking up a variety of novelists, including Henry James and William Dean Howells, he shows that even works not directly concerned with race were instrumental in the return after reconstruction to a racially segregated society.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1: Reading Henry James 2: Aesthetics, Race, and "Warrants of Decency" 3: The Persistence of Uncle Tom and the Problem of Critical Distinction 4: Black and White Strangers Conclusion Notes Index

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