Ethnic studies / Ethnicity Books

Book SynopsisIn Anteaesthetics, Rizvana Bradley begins from the proposition that blackness cannot be represented in modernity's aesthetic regime, but is nevertheless foundational to every representation. Troubling the idea that the aesthetic is sheltered from the antiblack terror that lies just beyond its sanctuary, Bradley insists that blackness cannot make a home within the aesthetic, yet is held as its threshold and aporia. The book problematizes the phenomenological and ontological conceits that underwrite the visual, sensual, and abstract logics of modernity. Moving across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms, from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to the contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art of Glenn Ligon, Mickalene Thomas, and Sondra Perry, Bradley inaugurates a new method for interpretation—an ante-formalism which demonstrates how black art engages in the recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity. Foregrounding the negativity of black art, Bradley shows how each of these artists disclose the racialized contours of the body, form, and medium, even interrogating the form that is the world itself. Drawing from black critical theory, Continental philosophy, film and media studies, art history, and black feminist thought, Bradley explores artistic practices that inhabit the negative underside of form. Ultimately, Anteaesthetics asks us to think philosophically with black art, and with the philosophical invention black art necessarily undertakes.Trade Review"Anteaesthetics is the study of black aesthetics I didn't know I sorely needed. Bradley offers a razor-sharp and sumptuous meditation on black aesthetics in, through, and vestibular to an anti-black world."—Alexander Ghedi Weheliye, Brown University"Rizvana Bradley's searching theory of black aesthesis traces black art's recursions through the violent origins of the aesthetic. Anteaesthetics opens a mode of reading for black art's non-instrumental exploration of abyssal descent. An incisive and energizing book through and through."—Rei Terada, University of California, Irvine"In this brilliantly conceived and exquisitely rendered study, Bradley offers a path-breaking analysis that will revolutionize how we approach, contest, and undo the Western visual field. Anteaesthetics offers an indispensable and undisciplined new frame for black feminist theorizing."—Huey Copeland, University of Pennsylvania"Incisive and compelling, Bradley's Anteaesthetics restores to thought and feeling a capacious sense of the aesthetic, revealing its tremendous and violent power as nothing less than foundational to a racially typified modern world."—Shane Denson, Stanford University"Anteaesthetics limns the depths of aesthetic and semiotic violence, refocusing our theoretical vision. This is an indispensable text—a tour de force."—Calvin Warren, Emory UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Toward a Theory of Anteaesthetics 2. The Corporeal Division of the World, or Aesthetic Ruination 3. Before the Nude, or Exorbitant Figuration 4. The Black Residuum, or That Which Remains 5. Unworlding, or the Involution of Value

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Book SynopsisUpon their independence, Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian governments turned to the Global South and offered military and financial aid to Black liberation struggles. Tangier and Algiers attracted Black American and Caribbean artists eager to escape American white supremacy; Tunis hosted African filmmakers for the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage; and young freedom fighters from across the African continent established military training camps in Morocco. North Africa became a haven for militant-artists, and the region reshaped postcolonial cultural discourse through the 1960s and 1970s. Maghreb Noir dives into the personal and political lives of these militant-artists, who collectively challenged the neo-colonialist structures and the authoritarianism of African states. Drawing on Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English sources, as well as interviews with the artists themselves, Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik expands our understanding of Pan-Africanism geographically, linguistically, and temporally. This network of militant-artists departed from the racial solidarity extolled by many of their nationalist forefathers, instead following in the footsteps of their intellectual mentor, Frantz Fanon. They argued for the creation of a new ideology of continued revolution—one that was transnational, trans-racial, and in defiance of the emerging nation-states. Maghreb Noir establishes the importance of North Africa in nurturing these global connections—and uncovers a lost history of grassroots collaboration among militant-artists from across the globe.Trade Review"Maghreb Noir takes us from Rabat to Algiers to Tunis to demonstrate how 1960s North Africa was an epicenter of pan-African thought and Black radicalism. Showcasing a region too long left out of histories of pan-Africanism and Black internationalism, Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik has written a meticulously researched, effortlessly transnational work."—Hisham Aidi, Columbia University, author of Rebel Music"Maghreb Noir is a much-needed addition to North African studies. Rich, archivally informed and subtly argued, it captures the voices and footsteps of a generation of Pan-African militants and artists who chose the Maghreb as their stage of contestation. An essential read for anyone interested in Pan-African revolutionary politics."—Aomar Boum, UCLA, author of Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey to North Africa"Stimulating and convincing, Maghreb Noir renews our perspectives on both the Africanity of the Maghreb and its wider history."—Jocelyne Dakhlia, École des hautes études en sciences sociales"Tolan-Szkilnik's command of her sources and analytical approach has provided readers with aninsightful work that allows them to better understand the Maghreb and the nature of its cultural production between the 1950s and the 1970s."—Tugrul Mende, The Markaz Review"Drawing on interviews, personal papers, and the archives of many of the surviving protagonists, this lively book revisits the heady age of anticolonial revolution and political ferment in North Africa in the middle decades of the twentieth century, when liberation was in the air and solidarity was glamorous."—Lisa Anderson, Foreign AffairsTable of ContentsIntroduction: Introduction Chapter 1: Revolt Respects No Borders: Luso-African Revolutionaries in Rabat Chapter 2: A Continent in Its Totality: Moroccan Literary Journal Souffles Turns to Angola Chapter 3: Poetry on All Fronts: Jean Sénac's Fight for Algeria's Airwaves Chapter 4: Nothing to Fear from the Poet: Hooking up at the Pan-African Festival of Algiers Chapter 5: The Red in Red-Carpet: The Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage Conclusion: Conclusion

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Book SynopsisThe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the turbulent end of China's imperial system, violent revolutionary movements, and the fraught establishment of a republican government. During these decades of reform and revolution, millions of far-flung "overseas Chinese" remained connected to Chinese domestic movements. This book uses rich archival sources and a new network approach to examine how reform and revolution in North American Chinatowns influenced political change in China and the transpacific Chinese diaspora from 1898 to 1918. Historian Zhongping Chen focuses on the transnational activities of Kang Youwei, Sun Yat-sen, and other politicians, especially their mobilization of the Chinese in North America to join reformist or revolutionary parties in patriotic fights for a Western-style constitutional monarchy or republic in China. These new reformist and revolutionary parties, including the first Chinese women's political organization, led transpacific movements against American anti-Chinese racism in 1905 and supported constitutional reform and the Republican Revolution in China around 1911, achieving transpacific expansion through innovative use of cross-cultural political ideologies and intertwined institutional and interpersonal networks. Through network analysis of the origins, interrelations, and influences of Chinese reform and revolution in North America, this book makes a significant contribution to modern Chinese history, Asian American and Asian Canadian history, and Chinese diasporic scholarship.Trade Review"Zhongping Chen has written the most authoritative and excellent work in English on the dynamics of the radical transpacific movements led by Kang Youwei and Sun Yat-sen, challenging misperceptions and misinformation about this period."—Sue Fawn Chung, University of Nevada, Las Vegas"Long overdue, this deeply researched book embeds Kang Youwei and Sun Yatsen's North American journeys in the dynamic networks of overseas Chinese who mobilized amid the fall of the Qing dynasty. Using an authoritative array of Chinese-language records, Zhongping Chen adeptly corrects longstanding myths and recovers into historical visibility the patriotic activists who campaigned to save their homeland."—Madeline Y. Hsu, University of Texas at Austin"Zhongping Chen uses network analysis to shed dramatic new light on how the North American Chinese diaspora interacted with the republican movement in China to help topple the fading Qing dynasty. A new landmark of history and methods in the understanding of the critical post-1911 period in Chinese political life."—Mark Granovetter, Stanford University

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Book SynopsisWith over twenty years of experience in obstetrics, Dr. Monique Rainford offers a primer on how to better care for Black pregnancies. Passionately identifying why Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy than their white counterparts, this book carries the hopes and dreams of a generation looking to effect change.

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Book SynopsisPhilosophers have long struggled to reconcile Martin Heidegger's involvement in Nazism with his status as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. The recent publication of his Black Notebooks has reignited fierce debate on the subject. These thousand-odd pages of jotted observations profoundly challenge our image of the quiet philosopher's exile in the Black Forest, revealing the shocking extent of his anti-Semitism for the first time.For much of the philosophical community, the Black Notebooks have been either used to discredit Heidegger or seen as a bibliographical detail irrelevant to his thought. Yet, in this new book, renowned philosopher Donatella Di Cesare argues that Heidegger's "metaphysical anti-Semitism" was a central part of his philosophical project. Within the context of the Nuremberg race laws, Heidegger felt compelled to define Jewishness and its relationship to his concept of Being. Di Cesare shows that Heidegger saw the Jews as the agents of a modernity that had disfigured the spirit of the West. In a deeply disturbing extrapolation, he presented the Holocaust as both a means for the purification of Being and the Jews' own "self-destruction": a process of death on an industrialized scale that was the logical conclusion of the acceleration in technology they themselves had brought about. Situating Heidegger's anti-Semitism firmly within the context of his thought, this groundbreaking work will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and history as well as the many readers interested in Heidegger's life, work, and legacy.Trade Review"Donatella Di Cesare's book restores philosophical balance to the debate on Heidegger and the Jews. It is a tour de force combining intellectual history and philosophical reflection on both the man and the thinker that goes well beyond the all-too-routine alternative of rabid condemnation or doggedly blinkered defense."Babette Babich, Fordham University "... a fastidious forensic investigation."Review 31Table of ContentsForeword page vii I Between Politics and Philosophy 1 1. A Media Affair 1 2. A Nazi by Chance . . . 3 3. Biographical Detail, or Philosophical Nexus? 4 4. Heidegger, an Anti-Semite? 6 5. What Has Been Left Unsaid about the Jewish Question 8 6. The Black Notebooks 9 7. Reductio ad Hitlerum: On the Posthumous Trial of Heidegger 11 8. A Calling to Account? 13 9. From Derrida to Schürmann: Toward an Anarchic Reading 14 10. Taming Heidegger 18 11. The Exclusion of Nazism from Philosophy 19 12. Philosophical Commitment and Political Decision 20 II Philosophy and Hatred of the Jews 22 1. Luther, Augustine, and “the Jews and Their Lies” 22 2. The “Jewish Question” in Philosophy 26 3. Kant and the “Euthanasia of Judaism” 32 4. Hegel and the Jew without Property 36 5. “Anti-anti-Semite?” Nietzsche, the Antichrist, and the Falsification of Values 46 6. Lies and Fakery: The Non-being of the Jew in Mein Kampf 59 III The Question of Being and the Jewish Question 65 1. The Night of Being 65 2. In An Esoteric Tone . . . 68 3. Anti-Semitism and Never-dispelled Doubts 69 4. Metaphors of an Absence 75 5. The Jew and the Oblivion of Being 77 6. The Greeks, the Germans – and the Jews 80 7. The Rootless Agents of Acceleration 84 8. Against the Jewish Intellectuals 88 9. Geist and ruach: The “Original Fire” and the Spectral Breath 93 10. Machination and Power 96 11. The Desertification of the Earth 99 12. The Apocalyptic and the “Prince of This World” 101 13. The Deracification of Peoples 103 14. Race or Rank? 106 15. The Metaphysics of Blood 110 16. “My ‘Attack’ on Husserl” 115 17. Heidegger, Jünger, and the Topology of the Jew 123 18. The Enemy: Heidegger versus Schmitt 129 19. Polemos and Total War 142 20. Weltjudentum: The Jewish World Conspiracy 148 21. Judeo-Bolshevism 154 22. Weltlos – Without World: The Jew and the Stone 161 23. Metaphysical Anti-Semitism 164 24. The Jew and the “Purification” of Being 169 25. “What Is It about No-thing?” 172 IV After Auschwitz 175 1. Bellum judaicum 175 2. To Abdicate to Silence? 178 3. “The Production of Corpses” and Ontic Indifference 184 4. The Ontological Massacre: Parmenides and Auschwitz 188 5. “Do They Die? They Do Not Die, They Are Liquidated. . .” 191 6. Positionality, Technology, Crime 193 7. The Northeast Wind: Heading Toward Defeat 196 8. Selbstvernichtung: The Shoah and the “Self-Annihilation” of the Jews 199 9. The Betrayal of the “German Essence” 202 10. If Germany is a Lager, Then Who Is the Victim? 206 11. The “Question of Guilt” and the Crime Against the Germans 211 12. The “Note for Jackasses”: Against the Jewish Prophecy 212 13. World Democracy and the Dictatorship of Monotheism 218 14. “An Old Spirit of Revenge Makes its Way upon the Earth” 220 15. Whether It Is Possible to Forgive a Rabbi 223 16. Cousin Gross and Cousin Klein: Jews and Family Resemblances 224 17. The Oblivion of the Jew: The Hidden Debt 229 18. Where Paul is Hidden 233 19. The Future of Being and the Hebrew Name 238 20. A Pagan Landscape 240 21. The Other Beginning, the Beginning of the Other: Anarchy, Birth 241 22. An Angel in the Black Forest: Apocalypse and Revolution 243 Notes 248 Index 303

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Book SynopsisWho are Latinos? What’s the difference between Hispanic and Latino – or indeed Latina, Latina/o, Latin@, Latinx? Beyond the political rhetoric and popular culture representations, how can we explore what it means to be part of the largest minority group in the United States? This compelling book acts as an illuminating primer introducing the multidisciplinary field of Latina/o Studies. Bringing together insights from a wide variety of communities, the book covers topics such as the history of Latinos in the United States, gender and sexuality, popular culture, immigration patterns, and social movements. Mize traces the origins of the field from the history of Latin American revolutionary thought, through the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements, and key disruptions from Latina feminisms, queer studies, and critical race theory, right up to the latest developments and interventions. Combining analysis and advocacy, Latina/o Studies is an accessible yet theoretically sophisticated introduction to the communities charting the future of the United States of America and the Américas writ large.Trade Review“This book serves as an engaging, concise introduction to Latino Studies, laying out the genesis of the field and presenting current themes. The discussion of the scholarship successfully balances comprehensiveness and depth, and the quality of the material is excellent.”Lourdes Torres, DePaul University “An inspiring story of resistance and solidarity.”Richard Delgado, University of Alabama “[A] comprehensive guide to both students and scholars who are interested in the growth of the discipline, as well as the historical foundations that inform ongoing debates.”Chiricú Journal“This readable and well-organised handbook serves as an engaging overview of a growing and vitally important scholarly field.”Bulletin of Latin American ResearchTable of Contents1 What’s in a Name? Hispanic, Latino | Labels, Identities 2 Historical Groundings, The Origins of Latina/o Thought 3 Origins of Latina/o Studies: Puerto Rican and Chicano Studies 4 The Arrival of Latina/o Studies: Bringing in Central American, Cuban, and Dominican Studies 5 Latina Feminism, Intersectionalities, and Queer Latinidades 6 Latina/o Cultural Studies: From Invisible to Hypervisible 7 New Approaches: The Logic of Comparisons, Connections, Bridges, and Borders 8 New Perspectives: Theorizing (Post-)Coloniality and Racializations 9 Conclusion: The Future of Latina/o Studies Field

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Book SynopsisWho are Latinos? What’s the difference between Hispanic and Latino – or indeed Latina, Latina/o, Latin@, Latinx? Beyond the political rhetoric and popular culture representations, how can we explore what it means to be part of the largest minority group in the United States? This compelling book acts as an illuminating primer introducing the multidisciplinary field of Latina/o Studies. Bringing together insights from a wide variety of communities, the book covers topics such as the history of Latinos in the United States, gender and sexuality, popular culture, immigration patterns, and social movements. Mize traces the origins of the field from the history of Latin American revolutionary thought, through the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements, and key disruptions from Latina feminisms, queer studies, and critical race theory, right up to the latest developments and interventions. Combining analysis and advocacy, Latina/o Studies is an accessible yet theoretically sophisticated introduction to the communities charting the future of the United States of America and the Américas writ large.Trade Review“This book serves as an engaging, concise introduction to Latino Studies, laying out the genesis of the field and presenting current themes. The discussion of the scholarship successfully balances comprehensiveness and depth, and the quality of the material is excellent.”Lourdes Torres, DePaul University “An inspiring story of resistance and solidarity.”Richard Delgado, University of Alabama “[A] comprehensive guide to both students and scholars who are interested in the growth of the discipline, as well as the historical foundations that inform ongoing debates.”Chiricú Journal“This readable and well-organised handbook serves as an engaging overview of a growing and vitally important scholarly field.”Bulletin of Latin American ResearchTable of Contents1 What’s in a Name? Hispanic, Latino | Labels, Identities 2 Historical Groundings, The Origins of Latina/o Thought 3 Origins of Latina/o Studies: Puerto Rican and Chicano Studies 4 The Arrival of Latina/o Studies: Bringing in Central American, Cuban, and Dominican Studies 5 Latina Feminism, Intersectionalities, and Queer Latinidades 6 Latina/o Cultural Studies: From Invisible to Hypervisible 7 New Approaches: The Logic of Comparisons, Connections, Bridges, and Borders 8 New Perspectives: Theorizing (Post-)Coloniality and Racializations 9 Conclusion: The Future of Latina/o Studies Field

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Book SynopsisThe connections between race and sexuality are constant in our lives, yet they are not often linked together in productive, analytical ways.This illuminating book delves into the interrelation of race and sexuality as inseparable elements of our identities and social lives. The authors approach the topic through an interdisciplinary lens, focusing on power, social arrangements and hierarchies, and the production of social difference. Their analysis maps the historical, discursive, and structural manifestations of race and sexuality, noting the everyday effects that the intersections of these categories have on people’s lived experiences. Considering both US-based and transnational cases, this book presents an empirical grounding for understanding how race and sexuality are mutually constitutive categories.Providing a comprehensive overview of racialized sexualities, this book is an essential text for any advanced course on race, sexuality, and intersectionality.Trade Review"Race and Sexuality shows how the connections between these forms of difference emerge in the stereotypes that inform how one group thinks of another, in political agendas that foster inequalities, in media representations of domestic minorities and transnational migrants, and in the justifications of contemporary wars. In doing so, the book posits the still novel idea that to study the intersections of race and sexuality is nothing less than a confrontation with everyday life."Roderick Ferguson, University of Illinois at Chicago "This book is a wonderful primer on the intersections of race and sexuality. Accessible and lucid, it leads uninitiated and sophisticated students through the complexities of racialized sexualities, addressing timely issues and concerns across the global North and global South."Jyoti Puri, Simmons College, Boston "[The] challenge of thinking through the efficiency of available concepts to comprehensively engage with individuals' and groups' shifting social positionings is the major contribution of Race and Sexuality."The Sociological Review“The book should be commended for its substantial contributions and spirited engagement making visible inequalities which might otherwise have remained under the radar.”Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Ethnic and Racial StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction PART I: DISCOURSES OF RACE/SEXUALITY Chapter 1: Two Systems Operating Synchronously Chapter 2: Race and Sexualities in Everyday Life Spolight 2.1 Racialized Sexualities and the "Down Low" PART II: TRANSNATIONAL, LOCAL AND GLOBAL SEXUAL/RACED MESSAGES Chapter 3: Racialized Sexualization in Transnational Human Rights Spotlight 3.1 Contradictions and Advancements in Colombia: Some Context Chapter 4: Racing Sex Work Spotlight 4.1 Racialized Embodiments, Differential Treatment Chapter 5: Sexualizing Immigration Spotlight 5.1 - Clare Sears’ Arresting Dress: Stereotypes Influencing Policy Conclusion: Racialized Sexualities - On Experience, Policy, and Scholarship Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe connections between race and sexuality are constant in our lives, yet they are not often linked together in productive, analytical ways.This illuminating book delves into the interrelation of race and sexuality as inseparable elements of our identities and social lives. The authors approach the topic through an interdisciplinary lens, focusing on power, social arrangements and hierarchies, and the production of social difference. Their analysis maps the historical, discursive, and structural manifestations of race and sexuality, noting the everyday effects that the intersections of these categories have on people’s lived experiences. Considering both US-based and transnational cases, this book presents an empirical grounding for understanding how race and sexuality are mutually constitutive categories.Providing a comprehensive overview of racialized sexualities, this book is an essential text for any advanced course on race, sexuality, and intersectionality.Trade Review"Race and Sexuality shows how the connections between these forms of difference emerge in the stereotypes that inform how one group thinks of another, in political agendas that foster inequalities, in media representations of domestic minorities and transnational migrants, and in the justifications of contemporary wars. In doing so, the book posits the still novel idea that to study the intersections of race and sexuality is nothing less than a confrontation with everyday life."Roderick Ferguson, University of Illinois at Chicago "This book is a wonderful primer on the intersections of race and sexuality. Accessible and lucid, it leads uninitiated and sophisticated students through the complexities of racialized sexualities, addressing timely issues and concerns across the global North and global South."Jyoti Puri, Simmons College, Boston "[The] challenge of thinking through the efficiency of available concepts to comprehensively engage with individuals' and groups' shifting social positionings is the major contribution of Race and Sexuality."The Sociological Review“The book should be commended for its substantial contributions and spirited engagement making visible inequalities which might otherwise have remained under the radar.”Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Ethnic and Racial StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction PART I: DISCOURSES OF RACE/SEXUALITY Chapter 1: Two Systems Operating Synchronously Chapter 2: Race and Sexualities in Everyday Life Spolight 2.1 Racialized Sexualities and the "Down Low" PART II: TRANSNATIONAL, LOCAL AND GLOBAL SEXUAL/RACED MESSAGES Chapter 3: Racialized Sexualization in Transnational Human Rights Spotlight 3.1 Contradictions and Advancements in Colombia: Some Context Chapter 4: Racing Sex Work Spotlight 4.1 Racialized Embodiments, Differential Treatment Chapter 5: Sexualizing Immigration Spotlight 5.1 - Clare Sears’ Arresting Dress: Stereotypes Influencing Policy Conclusion: Racialized Sexualities - On Experience, Policy, and Scholarship Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisIt is impossible to understand capitalism without analyzing slavery, an institution that tied together three world regions: Europe, the Americas, and Africa. The exploitation of slave labor led to a form of proto-globalization in which violence was indispensable to the production of wealth. Against the background of this expanding circulation of capital and slave labor, the first revolution in Latin America took place: the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791 and culminated with Haiti’s declaration of independence in 1804. Taking the Haitian Revolution as a paradigmatic case, Grüner shows that modernity is not a linear evolution from the center to the periphery but, rather, a co-production developed in the context of highly unequal power relations, where extreme forms of conquest and exploitation were an indispensable part of capital accumulation. He also shows that the Haitian Revolution opened up a path to a different kind of modernity, or “counter-modernity,” a path along which Latin America and the Caribbean have traveled ever since. A key work of critical theory from a Latin American perspective, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical and cultural theory and of Latin America, as well as anyone concerned with the global impact of capitalism, colonialism, and race.Trade Review“Eduardo Grüner’s remarkable book is not only a brilliant discussion of slavery and the Haitian Revolution; it is also a profound philosophical and critical reflection, from the viewpoint of the slaves’ rebellion, on the contradictions of Eurocentric Enlightenment and of Western (capitalist) modernity.”Michael Löwy, author of The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx “What is revolutionary today about the Haitian Revolution, in which African slaves brought Napoleon's army to ignominious defeat? How does it fundamentally challenge ways of thinking not just about modern history, but about thinking itself? Read Grüner’s book to find the answers to these pertinent questions.”Michael Taussig, Professor, Columbia University, Class of 1933Table of ContentsPreface by Gisela Catanzaro Prologue Chapter 1: The Category of Slavery and Modern Racism Elements for an Ethno-Historical Sociology of Ancient and Modern Slavery The Question of Racism Racism in “Early Modernity” The Traces of Time A Better World? Chapter 2: The Rebellion of the (Slave) Masses and the Haitian Revolution On the Combined and Uneven From Particularism to (False) Universalism: A “Philosophical Revolution” The (Uncertain) Logic of Slave Rebellions The Rest of the Americas Enter Saint-Domingue/Haiti A Portrait of Saint-Domingue/Haiti in 1791 An Excursus on Vodou and its Revolutionary Character The Social Complexities of Saint-Domingue The Confused Dynamic of the Revolution The Meaning(s) of the Haitian Revolution On “Creative” Violence Chapter 3: The Disavowed “Philosophical Revolution”: From Enlightenment Thought to the Crisis of Abstract Universalism Shadows in the Enlightenment: Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Slavery Slavery without Scare Quotes: Between Hegel and Marx The Black Enlightenment: The Haitian “Constitutional Revolution” The Difficulties of Theorizing (Haitian) Revolution Literature and Art Have Their Say Epilogue

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Book SynopsisIt is impossible to understand capitalism without analyzing slavery, an institution that tied together three world regions: Europe, the Americas, and Africa. The exploitation of slave labor led to a form of proto-globalization in which violence was indispensable to the production of wealth. Against the background of this expanding circulation of capital and slave labor, the first revolution in Latin America took place: the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791 and culminated with Haiti’s declaration of independence in 1804. Taking the Haitian Revolution as a paradigmatic case, Grüner shows that modernity is not a linear evolution from the center to the periphery but, rather, a co-production developed in the context of highly unequal power relations, where extreme forms of conquest and exploitation were an indispensable part of capital accumulation. He also shows that the Haitian Revolution opened up a path to a different kind of modernity, or “counter-modernity,” a path along which Latin America and the Caribbean have traveled ever since. A key work of critical theory from a Latin American perspective, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical and cultural theory and of Latin America, as well as anyone concerned with the global impact of capitalism, colonialism, and race.Trade Review“Eduardo Grüner’s remarkable book is not only a brilliant discussion of slavery and the Haitian Revolution; it is also a profound philosophical and critical reflection, from the viewpoint of the slaves’ rebellion, on the contradictions of Eurocentric Enlightenment and of Western (capitalist) modernity.”Michael Löwy, author of The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx “What is revolutionary today about the Haitian Revolution, in which African slaves brought Napoleon's army to ignominious defeat? How does it fundamentally challenge ways of thinking not just about modern history, but about thinking itself? Read Grüner’s book to find the answers to these pertinent questions.”Michael Taussig, Professor, Columbia University, Class of 1933Table of ContentsPreface by Gisela CatanzaroPrologueChapter 1: The Category of Slavery and Modern Racism Elements for an Ethno-Historical Sociology of Ancient and Modern SlaveryThe Question of RacismRacism in “Early Modernity” The Traces of Time A Better World? Chapter 2: The Rebellion of the (Slave) Masses and the Haitian Revolution On the Combined and UnevenFrom Particularism to (False) Universalism: A “Philosophical Revolution”The (Uncertain) Logic of Slave RebellionsThe Rest of the Americas Enter Saint-Domingue/Haiti A Portrait of Saint-Domingue/Haiti in 1791An Excursus on Vodou and its Revolutionary CharacterThe Social Complexities of Saint-DomingueThe Confused Dynamic of the RevolutionThe Meaning(s) of the Haitian RevolutionOn “Creative” ViolenceChapter 3: The Disavowed “Philosophical Revolution”: From Enlightenment Thought to the Crisis of Abstract Universalism Shadows in the Enlightenment: Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Slavery Slavery without Scare Quotes: Between Hegel and MarxThe Black Enlightenment: The Haitian “Constitutional Revolution” The Difficulties of Theorizing (Haitian) RevolutionLiterature and Art Have Their SayEpilogue

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Book SynopsisW.E.B. Du Bois spent many decades fighting to ensure that African Americans could claim their place as full citizens and thereby fulfill the deeply compromised ideals of American democracy. Yet he died in Africa, having apparently given up on the United States. In this tour-de-force, Elvira Basevich examines this paradox by tracing the development of his life and thought and the relevance of his legacy to our troubled age. She adroitly analyses the main concepts that inform Du Bois’s critique of American democracy, such as the color line and double consciousness, before examining how these concepts might inform our understanding of contemporary struggles, from Black Lives Matter to the campaign for reparations for slavery. She stresses the continuity in Du Bois’s thought, from his early writings to his later embrace of self-segregation and Pan-Africanism, while not shying away from assessing the challenging implications of his later work. This wonderful book vindicates the power of Du Bois’s thought to help transform a stubbornly unjust world. It is essential reading for racial justice activists as well as students of African American philosophy and political thought.Trade Review�With the breadth of a biographer, the depth of a philosopher, and the vision of a poet, Elvira Basevich gives us a compelling elucidation of W.E.B. Du Bois� radical liberalism. This is essential reading for understanding why Du Bois still matters!�Melvin Rogers, Brown University �In a direct and accessible prose, linking philosophical abstraction with grassroots activism, Elvira Basevich brings us a Du Bois by no means merely a figure of historical importance but very much a thinker relevant for the social justice struggles of today.�Charles Mills, City University of New York

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Book Synopsis“Black women are dope because they rise and are yet rising. This dopeness is not hyperbolic or symbolic—rather, it is borne of persecution that has failed to frustrate a perseverant persistence to prevail.”Before sea to shining sea. Before spacious skies were pierced by purple mountains. Before the uniting of one nation. Black women learned to rise. In POWER: THE RISE OF BLACK WOMEN IN AMERICA, award-winning journalist and digital media executive Charity C. Elder posits that there has never been a better time to be a Black woman in the United States.POWER is an incisive disquisition on Black womanhood weaving theoretical frameworks of history and sociology with poignant interviews, ethnographic observation, and anecdotes gleaned from history, social media, pop culture, and the author’s lived experiences.Using data, the author substantiates the triumph of Black women. Original analysis of eighty years of US census data, prepared by the University of Minnesota and analyzed by Dr. Constance F. Citro, documents the remarkable ascension of Black women since the early twentieth century. An exclusive national survey conducted in partnership with the Marist Poll in 2021 not only reveals that 70 percent of Black women say they have been successful in life, but also that most believe they have the power to succeed.POWER does not shy away from the realities of structural oppression identified by the late Black feminist scholar bell hooks; rather it illuminates how Black women exercise agency to create meaningful lives. Success is not an anomaly, but a defining characteristic. Black women have amassed power—now, Elder posits, they need to acknowledge it and then wield the hell out of it.

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Book SynopsisHow Native Americans and African Americans redefined nativity and shaped eighteenth- and nineteenth-century perceptions of rights, freedom, and belonging

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Book SynopsisBad Blood explores representations of race in early modern English and Spanish literature, especially drama. It addresses two different forms of racial ideology: one concerned with racialized religious difference—that is, the notion of having Jewish or Muslim “blood”—and one concerned with Blackness and whiteness. Shakespeare’s Othello tells us that he was “sold to slavery” in his youth, a phrase that evokes the Atlantic triangle trade for readers today. For many years, however, scholars have asserted that racialized slavery was not yet widely understood in early modern England, and that the kind of enslavement that Othello describes is related to Christian-Muslim conflict in the Mediterranean rather than the rise of the racialized enslavement of Afro-diasporic subjects. Bad Blood offers a new account of early modern race by tracing the development of European racial vocabularies from Spain to England. Dispelling assumptions, stemming from Spain’s historical exclusion of Jews and Muslims, that premodern racial ideology focused on religious difference and purity of blood more than color, Emily Weissbourd argues that the context of the Atlantic slave trade is indispensable to understanding race in early modern Spanish and English literature alike. Through readings of plays by Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and their contemporaries, as well as Spanish picaresque fiction and its English translations, Weissbourd reveals how ideologies of racialized slavery as well as religious difference come to England via Spain, and how both notions of race operate in conjunction to shore up fantasies of Blackness, whiteness, and “pure blood.” The enslavement of Black Africans, Weissbourd shows, is inextricable from the staging of race in early modern literature.Trade Review"Essential, bracing, inspiring reading, brimming with fresh and surprising insights and groundbreaking discoveries, many hiding in plain sight but—like whiteness itself—long rendered invisible, requiring a comparative, transnational approach to race studies and the rigor, shrewdness, measure, and skepticism of Emily Weissbourd to reveal them." * Robert B. Hornback, Oglethorpe University *"Bad Blood provides the first meaningful analysis of how literary presentations of blood purity and blackness in Spain were mistranslated in an English context. Emily Weissbourd exhibits an impressive breadth and depth in her engagement with primary and secondary sources." * Christina H. Lee, Princeton University *

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Book SynopsisThe construction of the Panama Canal is typically viewed as a marvel of American ingenuity. What is less visible, and less understood, is the project’s dependence on the labor of Black migrant women. The Silver Women shifts the focus of this monumental endeavor to the West Indian women who travelled to Panama, inviting readers to place women’s intimate lives, choices, grief, and ambition at the center of the economic and geopolitical transformation created by the construction of the Panama Canal and U.S. imperial expansion. Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West Indian women made the canal construction possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. West Indian women built a provisioning economy that fed, housed, and cared for the segregated Black West Indian labor force, in effect subsidizing the construction effort and the racial calculus that separated pay in silver for Black workers and gold for white Americans. But while also subject to racial discrimination and segregation, West Indian women mostly worked outside the umbrella of U.S. canal authorities. They did not hold contracts, had little access to official services and wages, and received pay in both silver and gold. From this position, they found ways to skirt, and at times subvert, the legal, moral, and economic parameters imperial authorities sought to impose on the migrant workforce. West Indian women developed important strategies of claims-making, kinship, community building, and market adaptation that helped them navigate the contradictions and violence of U.S. empire. In the meantime, these strategies of social reproduction nurtured further West Indian migrations, linking Panama to places like Harlem and Santiago de Cuba. The Silver Women is thus a history of Black women’s labor of social reproduction as integral to U.S. imperial infrastructure, the global Caribbean diaspora, and women’s own survival.Trade Review"In this beautifully written book, Joan Flores-Villalobos places West Indian women at the very heart of the Panama Canal’s construction. They navigated tremendous contradictions, seen as essential to the project yet facing racist exclusion and marginalization by government officials. Their determination to secure moral and economic independence, Flores-Villalobos shows, profoundly shaped Panama, the Caribbean, and more broadly the history of the Americas. Along the way, The Silver Women illuminates in rich detail the critical role Caribbean women played in creating and sustaining the practices of diaspora." * Julie Greene, author of The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal *"Flores-Villalobos shakes up the traditionally told history of the construction of the Panama Canal in this explorative historical analysis. The author contends that the creation of the Panama Canal would not have been possible without the labor of West Indian Black migrant women....Flores-Villalobos beautifully tells the story of these women and brings this important history to life using a vast array of archival sources." * Library Journal *"The Silver Women is utterly original in its research and analysis. With enormous skill and sensitivity, Joan Flores-Villalobos invites us to understand the West Indian women who travelled to Panama as part of a much broader story: to place their intimate lives, choices, losses, grief, anger, and ambition at the center of the story of a region-wide economic and geopolitical transformation that kicked off ‘the American Century.’ Here we meet a diverse array of women and come to understand that history was made by them." * Lara Putnam, author of Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age *"Joan Flores-Villalobos moves deftly across a rich set of archival sources to uncover the complexities of West Indian women’s social reproduction in the Panama Canal Zone. The Silver Women exposes how Black women negotiated suspicion, hostility, and even criminalization, in the process of migrating to make a life for themselves and their kin. A necessary perspective on West Indian women’s efforts to sustain their communities while also resisting American imperialist control over their labor and personal lives." * Laurie R. Lambert, author of Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution *"The Silver Women unsettles the triumphalist story of the Panama Canal as a white, male feat, instead showing the essential role of Black migrant women in the success of the project. Like Flores-Villalobos’s analysis, the women she studies similarly disrupted the world they lived in...Even as The Silver Women offers a thorough exploration of race and gender in Panama, the book is not about Panama alone. Instead, it crafts an essential revisionist account of the overlooked but indispensable role that West Indian women played in forging their diaspora across the Americas." * Los Angeles Review of Books *

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Book SynopsisThe "Latino vote" has become a mantra in political media, as journalists, pundits, and social scientists regularly weigh in on Latinos' loyalty to the Democratic Party and the significance of their electoral participation. But how and why did Latinos' liberal orientation take hold? What has this political inclination meant—and how has it unfolded—over time? In Latinos and the Liberal City, Eduardo Contreras addresses these questions, offering a bold, textured, and inclusive interpretation of the nature and character of Latino politics in America's shifting social and cultural landscape. Contreras argues that Latinos' political life and aspirations have been marked by diversity and contestation yet consistently influenced by the ideologies of liberalism and latinidad: while the principles of activist government, social reform, freedom, and progress sustained liberalism, latinidad came to rest on promoting unity and commonality among Latinos. Contreras centers this compelling narrative on San Francisco—America's liberal city par excellence—examining the role of its Latino communities in local politics from the 1930s to the 1970s. By the early twentieth century, San Francisco's residents of Latin American ancestry traced their heritage to nations including Mexico, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, and Peru. These communities formed part of the New Deal coalition, defended workers' rights with gusto, and joined the crusade for racial equality decades before the 1960s. In the mid- to late postwar era, Latinos expanded claims for recognition and inclusion while participating in movements and campaigns for socioeconomic advancement, female autonomy, gay liberation, and rent control. Latinos and the Liberal City makes clear that the local public sphere nurtured Latinos' political subjectivities and that their politicization contributed to the vibrancy of San Francisco's political culture.Trade ReviewLatinos and the Liberal City is an excellent book, exceedingly well written, persuasively argued, and exhaustively researched. It is a welcome addition to Latino/a history, western history, the history of labor activism, urban history, and other fields...By focusing on trade unionism, feminism, gay rights, and other subjects, [Contreras] has gone far in explaining the liberality of San Francisco as something that Latino/as helped construct. And by bringing all these things together, he has produced a unique and important work. * American Historical Review *Latinos and the Liberal City is a richly textured history of Latino labor and community organizing in San Francisco from the 1930s to the 1970s. On the cutting edge of the rapidly expanding field of Latino urban history, Eduardo Contreras reveals decades of activism and protest that the historiography barely suggests. By placing Latinos at the center of the city's political history, Contreras allows us to see how generations of Latinos understood and attempted to shape the economic, social, and political systems around them...Latinos and the Liberal City is essential reading for scholars of urban history, political history, and Latinx studies. * Journal of American History *Latinos and the Liberal City by Eduardo Contreras is a well-researched, thoughtful, and ambitious exploration of twentieth-century grassroots Latino activism in San Francisco...Contreras successfully argues that Latinos' engagement with liberalism in its different forms (New Deal, Great Society, civil rights and cultural) over the course of the twentieth century led to the construction of latinidad. * Pacific Historical Review *Contreras’s work has great importance in the fields of labor history, urban history, gender history, Latinx history, and many other subareas. His work refines our understanding of the roles of varying notions of liberalism and latinidad in motivating Latino political engagement from the 1930s through the 1980s. Without a doubt, Contreras demonstrates that San Francisco Latinos were politically active and helped shape this bastion of liberalism throughout the twentieth century through advocacy in arenas of labor, civil rights, government aid, and cultural politics. * Journal of Arizona History *Eduardo Contreras tells an analytically sophisticated and archivally rich story of San Francisco and its Latino populations and traces in novel ways their engagement with the ideals and failures of twentieth-century democratic liberalism. This book will quickly become a standard bearer in the growing canon of Latino history. * Lorrin Thomas, Rutgers University-Camden *Latinos and the Liberal City makes an original contribution to urban history, labor history, civil rights history, political history, and ethnic studies by successfully addressing the question of how the men and women of a diverse Latino population engaged with American liberalism as they encountered it in the San Francisco Bay area from the early 1930s to the late 1970s. This pathbreaking study is the first book to detail the distinctive ways in which Latino San Franciscans made themselves part of the liberal project in California during this important era in American political culture. * William Issel, San Francisco State University *

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Book SynopsisThe history of the Black Sea as a source of Mediterranean slaves stretches from ancient Greek colonies to human trafficking networks in the present day. At its height during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the Black Sea slave trade was not the sole source of Mediterranean slaves; Genoese, Venetian, and Egyptian merchants bought captives taken in conflicts throughout the region, from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, and the Aegean Sea. Yet the trade in Black Sea slaves provided merchants with profit and prestige; states with military recruits, tax revenue, and diplomatic influence; and households with the service of women, men, and children. Even though Genoa, Venice, and the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Greater Syria were the three most important strands in the web of the Black Sea slave trade, they have rarely been studied together. Examining Latin and Arabic sources in tandem, Hannah Barker shows that Christian and Muslim inhabitants of the Mediterranean shared a set of assumptions and practices that amounted to a common culture of slavery. Indeed, the Genoese, Venetian, and Mamluk slave trades were thoroughly entangled, with wide-ranging effects. Genoese and Venetian disruption of the Mamluk trade led to reprisals against Italian merchants living in Mamluk cities, while their participation in the trade led to scathing criticism by supporters of the crusade movement who demanded commercial powers use their leverage to weaken the force of Islam. Reading notarial registers, tax records, law, merchants' accounts, travelers' tales and letters, sermons, slave-buying manuals, and literary works as well as treaties governing the slave trade and crusade propaganda, Barker gives a rich picture of the context in which merchants traded and enslaved people met their fate.Trade ReviewThis is a significant, interesting, and well-written book about an important topic in the late medieval history of the Mediterranean region and neighboring countries. Hannah Barker describes in detail and convincingly analyzes the robust trade of slaves who passed first through the Black Sea and then spread over much of the Mediterranean basin, as well as the experience of these slaves. * Speculum *Undoubtably a significant and detailed contribution to our understanding of medieval slavery and of medieval economies . . . Hannah Barker's book is a thorough and engaging evaluation of late medieval slave trading practices in the Mediterranean . . . an impressive survey of slavery in the eastern Mediterranean from the initial grant of Black Sea trading privileges to these groups in the second half of the 13th century to the commercial shifts caused by Ottoman conquest in the late-15th century. * Reviews in History *[T]his excellent book is now the starting point for any discussion of the Black Sea and Mediterranean slave trade in the later Middle Ages . . . It has brilliantly synthesised the Arabic and Latin-Italian documentary and scholarly traditions, and offers a robust empirical contribution in its deployment of archival material hitherto either unpublished or merely summarised. Its seminal discussion of race and colour in the Middle Ages deserves the attention of all historians of slavery, while its positing of religious difference as the framework in which Mediterranean slavery was conceptualised is likely to be a touchstone for any future scholarship. * Al-Masāq *Hannah Barker’s That Most Precious Merchandise is one of the most important contributions to the historiography on the medieval slave trade. In particular, it provides a much-needed focus on the trade system that carried slaves from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean during the later Middle Ages. The strength of the book lies in the author’s analysis of the three main importers of these slaves—Genoa, Venice, and the Mamluk sultanate—making it one of the few studies to successfully examine source material in Latin, Italian, and Arabic from these three perspectives… [A]n impeccably researched and incredibly detailed study that brings together a wealth of published and unpublished source material from an impressive range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds. It is an excellent book and Barker should be congratulated on writing what should become regarded as one of the most important works on the medieval slave trade. * International Journal of Middle East Studies *Barker has suggested that a common slave culture encompassed the Black Sea, Genoa, Venice, and the Mamluk Sultanate and that this commonality is a key to the study of slavery in this period. From now on, this book will be the fundamental place to begin for students of this sorry trade and its sequels. * The Mediterranean Seminar Review *The Most Precious Merchandise succeeds in painting a compelling picture of the Mediterranean trade in Black Sea slaves and the interdependencies between the various parties . . . It is a successful example of looking at the Mediterranean as one large, coherent area of study, * H-DIPLO *This is an exciting and remarkable piece of historical research. It will provide useful stimulus to contemporary scholarship, a model for how to do rigorous thinking about shared Mediterranean cultures, as well as a valuable introduction for undergraduates to how medieval Mediterranean slavery functioned generally...Barker has produced a book that is empirically rich, precise in its thinking, and clear in its writing. It is rich and thought-provoking, and ought to be read by students and specialists alike. * Thee Medieval Review *Exhaustively researched, meticulously argued, and beautifully written, That Most Precious Merchandise engages questions hotly debated among historians about how 'premoderns' conceptualized and understood differences between peoples. At the same time, it conclusively demonstrates how the slave markets of medieval Italy and Mamluk Egypt were two branches of a single system. * Debra Blumenthal, University of California, Santa Barbara *

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Book SynopsisIn 1897 the promising young sociologist William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) was given a temporary post as Assistant in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in order to conduct a systematic investigation of social conditions in the seventh ward of Philadelphia. The product of those studies was the first great empirical book on the Negro in American society. More than one hundred years after its original publication by the University of Pennsylvania Press, The Philadelphia Negro remains a classic work. It is the first, and perhaps still the finest, example of engaged sociological scholarship—the kind of work that, in contemplating social reality, helps to change it. In his introduction, Elijah Anderson examines how the neighborhood studied by Du Bois has changed over the years and compares the status of blacks today with their status when the book was initially published.Trade Review"A century ago, Du Bois published The Philadelphia Negro, a work now recognized as a sociological classic. He developed a highly detailed portrait of black social life in Philadelphia. Part of the legacy of his analysis has lost the theoretical holism which linked structural issues of the economy and labor market dynamics to more social psychological and microsocial issues of prejudice and interpersonal discrimination. Sociology would do well to revisit the model Du Bois established." * Lawrence D. Bobo, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (March 2000) *"What made Du Bois's study remarkable in its day was its rejection of prevailing assumptions of inherent racial differences, thus bearing on issues much wider than those indicated by its title. It is also notable as a thoroughly modern piece of social research. The problems faced by Philadelphia's blacks, he argued, had nothing to do with their supposed racial proclivities, but derived from the way they had been treated in the past and their relegation in the present to the most menial and lowest-paying jobs." * Times Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisIn the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship. Grounded in political participation, mutual aid, critique and revolution, and the myriad daily interactions between people living in the same spaces, citizenship, they argued, is not defined by who one is but, rather, by what one does. In The Practice of Citizenship, Derrick R. Spires examines the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship, beginning in 1787, with the framing of the federal Constitution and the founding of the Free African Society by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and ending in 1861, with the onset of the Civil War. Between these two points he recovers understudied figures such as William J. Wilson, whose 1859 "Afric-American Picture Gallery" appeared in seven installments in The Anglo-African Magazine, and the physician, abolitionist, and essayist James McCune Smith. He places texts such as the proceedings of black state conventions alongside considerations of canonical figures such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Frederick Douglass. Reading black print culture as a space where citizenship was both theorized and practiced, Spires reveals the degree to which concepts of black citizenship emerged through a highly creative and diverse community of letters, not easily reducible to representative figures or genres. From petitions to Congress to Frances Harper's parlor fiction, black writers framed citizenship both explicitly and implicitly, the book demonstrates, not simply as a response to white supremacy but as a matter of course in the shaping of their own communities and in meeting their own political, social, and cultural needs.Trade Review"n The Practice of Citizenship, Derrick R. Spires analyzes how early Black newspapers, pamphlets, and the published proceedings of the Black conventions gave birth to new theories and practices of citizenship...Spires’s recovery of independent Black theories of citizenship is intellectually sophisticated and highly original. Spires offers a “reparative reading” of African American ideas about citizenship that go beyond the country’s founding ideals of civic republicanism." * The New York Review of Books *""[E]ngaging, powerful, and absolutely necessary . . . In The Practice of Citizenship, Spires theorizes alongside some of the most brilliant and challenging writers of the nineteenth century. But with an ease made all the more impressive because of its seeming effortlessness, Spires has written a detailed and elegant book that offers his readers a well cleared pathway into the world of black theorizing in the nineteenth century, and thus provided us with an opportunity to learn from activist-writers who developed and enacted practices of citizenship that engaged with but refused to be bound by the rules and regulations of a white supremacist state. And as an interpreter of and guide through these practices, Spires models for us black theorizing in the twenty-first century, an approach that is at once scholarly method and ethical imperative. An inspired and inspiring work filled with theories and practices that are as necessary now as they were then, The Practice of Citizenship is, in short, essential reading." * Reviews in American History *"[A]n intelligent and well-researched analysis of how writers of African descent in the New World understood and demonstrated citizenship from the late eighteenth century until the dawn of the Civil War. The Practice of Citizenship offers a robust foundation on which future generations of teachers, students, and researchers could learn more about the creativity and resolve of the African diaspora in its long quest for a citizenship they deserve rightfully and unquestionably to call their own." * Early American Literature *"The Practice of Citizenship is a rare and important book . . . In this beautifully written and theoretically sophisticated study, the author chronicles how Black people conceived and practiced citizenship in spaces including-and perhaps especially-beyond the nation-state form . . . It is as much a theory of contested spaces as it is a philosophy of community." * Modern Philology *"Derrick Spires’ The Practice of Citizenship is a beautifully written and brilliantly evocative work that centres print culture in the early United States as a site for the theorization and practice of citizenship for Black people…Reflecting on this book in the modern era, it is evident that there are historical carryovers as regards the theory and practice of Black citizenship which mark Spires’ work as urgent and necessary in the current moment. It would do well to recall that citizenship ideals and practices advocated by Black thinkers in the early United States, such as collective power, networks and neighborhoods, and critical citizenship, still remain vital in the ongoing twenty-first-century movement for recognition of Black citizenship in the United States, both in theory and in practice." * American Nineteenth Century History *"Derrick Spires’s comprehensive, wide-ranging analysis of citizenship in early African American print culture is a magnificent study in the field. It will stand among the milestone studies of early African American literature and print culture among this generation of scholars. His book positions African American ideas of citizenship between the American Revolution and Civil War as nuanced, protean, and evolving. He proposes the theory—brilliant, generative, carefully elaborated, and conversation-shifting—that African Americans claimed and constructed the role of citizenship as one entwined in action, in the process of doing everyday civil, political, familial, and commercial work in their communities." * American Periodicals *"Offering a richly immersive experience, The Practice of Citizenship displaces well-known representative figures, foregrounds a diverse community of letters, and significantly increases our understanding of African American discourses of citizenship." * Jeannine DeLombard, University of California, Santa Barbara *"Derrick R. Spires orchestrates insightful readings of both the most important and underutilized touchstones in early Black print studies like a master conductor. By having an array of early Black authors, events, and exchanges in play together and by amplifying how early Black writers and communities created, enlivened, and sustained collective advocacy, Spires's work is poised to significantly expand the canon of nineteenth-century texts scholars write about and teach. The Practice of Citizenship is a considerable achievement." * P. Gabrielle Foreman, University of Delaware *Table of ContentsIntroduction. Black Theorizing: Reimagining a "Beautiful but Baneful Object" Chapter 1. Neighborly Citizenship in Absalom Jones and Richard Allen's A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late and Awful Calamity in Philadelphia in the Year 1793 Chapter 2. Circulating Citizenship in the Black State Conventions of the 1840s Chapter 3. Economic Citizenship in Ethiop and Communipaw's New York Chapter 4. Critical Citizenship in the Anglo-African Magazine, 1859-1860 Chapter 5. Pedagogies of Revolutionary Citizenship Conclusion. "To Praise Our Bridges" Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisA Home Away from Home examines the significance of Caribbean American mutual aid societies and benevolent associations to the immigrant experience, particularly their implications for the formation of a Pan-Caribbean American identity and Black diasporic politics. At the turn of the twentieth century, New York City exploded with the establishment of mutual aid societies and benevolent associations. Caribbean immigrants, especially women, eager to find their place in a bustling new world, created these organizations, including the West Indian Benevolent Association of New York City, founded in 1884. They served as forums for discussions on Caribbean American affairs, hosted cultural activities, and provided newly arrived immigrants with various forms of support, including job and housing assistance, rotating lines of credit, help in the naturalization process, and its most popular function—sickness and burial assistance. In examining the number of these organizations, their membership, and the functions they served, Tyesha Maddox argues that mutual aid societies not only fostered a collective West Indian ethnic identity among immigrants from specific islands, but also strengthened kinship networks with those back home in the Caribbean. Especially important to these processes were Caribbean women such as Elizabeth Hendrickson, co-founder of the American West Indian Ladies’ Aid Society in 1915 and the Harlem Tenants’ League in 1928. Immigrant involvement in mutual aid societies also strengthened the belief that their own fate was closely intertwined with the social, economic, and political welfare of the Black international community. A Home Away from Home demonstrates how Caribbean American mutual aid societies and benevolent associations in many ways became proto-Pan-Africanist organizations.Trade Review"In A Home Away from Home, historian Tyesha Maddox reconfigures our understanding of Black New York by centering the multiple roles that Caribbean immigrants’ institutional life played in recreating a political community in the city and abroad. Instead of Marcus Garvey we learn about Black Caribbean women like Elizabeth Hendrickson from Saint Croix, who was a leader in multiple Virgin Islands organizations and in the Harlem Tenants League. The political and organizational history that established the link between these island-specific organizations and community politics makes this book a must read." * Shannon King, author of Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism during the New Negro Era *

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Book SynopsisDesert Dreams chronicles seventy-five years of Mexican American efforts to attain educational equality in Arizona, from its territorial period in the nineteenth century to the post–World War II era. Laura K. Muñoz reveals how Arizona Mexicans, or Arizonenses, embraced the United States expecting that they would be treated as American citizens. Instead, Anglo Arizonans wrote laws and designed schools to transform Mexicans from “unassimilable immigrants” into “American workers” by restricting their education to the acquisition of fluency in English and mastery of basic domestic and industrial skills. Arizonenses confronted these anti-Mexican attitudes by developing their own politics of educational equality. They founded public schools, served as school leaders, promoted Spanish and English bilingualism, and encouraged their children to pursue high school and college. From these efforts, a small cadre of Arizonenses obtained enough education to sustain a successful middle class, comprised of students, teachers, lawyers, and politicians who fought for Arizonense civil rights, especially the right to a good education. These efforts culminated in Romo v. Laird (1925), the earliest known school desegregation case filed in the state. Arizonenses also developed regional networks that brought them into conversation with Mexican Americans and allies in Southern California and across the borderlands. As the first comprehensive social history of Mexican Americans in Arizona before 1960, Desert Dreams demonstrates that Arizonenses across generations engaged in vital political, legal, and educational debates about civil rights and subsequently gave rise to a national Mexican American political consciousness.Trade Review"An elegant, deeply researched narrative that places Mexican American educators, families, and local leaders at the forefront of efforts challenging segregated schooling. Across generations, they sought civic integration through education, not just as individuals, but as Arizonenses. Desert Dreams is the first monograph to address the lives and legacies of Mexican American teachers whose classrooms ranged from one-room shacks to imposing brick structures. With nuance, respect, y corazón, Laura K. Muñoz has crafted a milestone contribution in the history of education, Chicano/a history, and the borderlands." * Vicki L. Ruiz, author of From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America *

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Book SynopsisExamining how undocumented migrants are using film, video, and other documentary media to challenge surveillance, detention, and deportation As debates over immigration increasingly become flashpoints of political contention in the United States, a variety of advocacy groups, social service organizations, filmmakers, and artists have provided undocumented migrants with the tools and training to document their experiences.In The Undocumented Everyday, Rebecca M. Schreiber examines the significance of self-representation by undocumented Mexican and Central American migrants, arguing that by centering their own subjectivity and presence through their use of documentary media, these migrants are effectively challenging intensified regimes of state surveillance and liberal strategies that emphasize visibility as a form of empowerment and inclusion. Schreiber explores documentation as both an aesthetic practice based on the visual conventions of social realism and a state-administered means of identification and control. As Schreiber shows, by visualizing new ways of belonging not necessarily defined by citizenship, these migrants are remaking documentary media, combining formal visual strategies with those of amateur photography and performative elements to create a mixed-genre aesthetic. In doing so, they make political claims and create new forms of protection for migrant communities experiencing increased surveillance, detention, and deportation.Trade Review"The Undocumented Everyday is a powerful and compelling account of the creative and critical documentary media strategies deployed to intervene in the representational politics of Mexican and Central American migration to the United States. This book is a nuanced aesthetic and cultural analysis of an important understudied media archive and an urgent political debate."—Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Northwestern University"In a perilous political moment when nativists depict migrants as a problem, Rebecca M. Schreiber foregrounds migrant self-representations. Focusing on post-9/11 photo, film, and video projects by and about Mexican and Central American migrants, The Undocumented Everyday brilliantly examines the dialectic between visibility and invisibility. Schreiber analyzes an ‘aesthetics of disappearance’ in which the absence of visual representations of the migrants themselves shifts the focus to the tactics of state police power. At the same time migrants revise and combine documentary conventions with an aesthetics associated with ‘amateur’ media in order to center their views and criticize the state. After reading The Undocumented Everyday, scholars and students alike will see migration through critically different eyes."—Curtis Marez, author of Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance"A significant scholarly achievement amid growing anti-immigrant practices and populist, xenophobic politics . . . Schreiber provides the reader with ample material to consider the contingent, localized, and strategic ways in which the undocumented—as well as their allies—use visibility and invisibility in their struggles for self-representation and belonging in a climate of increased criminalization, detainment, and deportation. Arguably, this is the central contribution of this deeply researched and well-executed book."—Surveillance & Society"Schreiber makes an important contribution in arguing that undocumented Central American and Mexican migrants rely on and revise traditional documentary aesthetics of self-representation to establish alternative forms of belonging."—Latino StudiesTable of ContentsPrefaceIntroduction: Migrant Lives and the Promise of DocumentationPart I. Ordinary Identifications and Unseen America1. “We See What We Know”: Migrant Labor and the Place of Pictures2. The Border’s Frame: Between Poughkeepsie and La Ciénega Part II. Documentary, Self-Representation, and “Collaborations” in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands3. Visible Frictions: The Border Film Project and the “Spectacle of Surveillance”4. Refusing Disposability: Representational Strategies in Maquilápolis: City of FactoriesPart III. Counter-Optics: Disruptions in the Field of the Visible5. Disappearance and Counter-Spectacle in Sanctuary City / Ciudad Santuario, 1989–20096. Reconfiguring Documentation: Mobility, Counter-Visibility, and (Un)Documented ActivismConclusion: Counter-Representational ActsAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisAn incisive new look at the black diaspora, examining the true roots of antiblackness and its destructive effects on all of society Thanks to movements like Black Lives Matter, Western society’s chronic discrimination against black individuals has become front-page news. Yet, there is little awareness of the systemic factors that make such a distinct form of dehumanization possible. In both the United States and Brazil—two leading nations of the black diaspora—a very necessary acknowledgment of black suffering is nonetheless undercut by denial of the pervasive antiblackness that still exists throughout these societies.In The Denial of Antiblackness, João H. Costa Vargas examines how antiblackness affects society as a whole through analyses of recent protests against police killings of black individuals in both the United States and Brazil, as well as the everyday dynamics of incarceration, residential segregation, and poverty. With multisite ethnography ranging from a juvenile prison in Austin, Texas, to grassroots organizing in Los Angeles and Black social movements in Brazil, Vargas finds the common factors that have perpetuated antiblackness, regardless of context. Ultimately, he asks why the denial of antiblackness persists, whom this narrative serves, and what political realities it makes possible.Trade Review"The Denial of Antiblackness marks nothing less than a landmark moment in the radical trajectories of Black Studies, African Diaspora Studies, and Black radical social thought. This book—this radical project—is an invitation to engage with the very same Black radical experimentation and generosity of which it writes, while constantly punctuating this invitation with a demand for accountability on the part of Black and nonblack peoples to struggle with the specificity and structural immovability and determinacy of anti-Black terror and violence."—Dylan Rodríguez, University of California at Riverside"The Denial of Antiblackness brings a bold new way to approach the scandalous levels of antiblack violence, as well as the denial of the very fact of blackness as structuring dimension of the social process and state-formation in both Brazil and the United States. João H. Costa Vargas builds a brand new analytical bridge between the two countries, so different in many ways yet sharing the same fundamental racial contradictions."—Osmundo Pinho, Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da BahiaTable of ContentsContentsPreface: The Challenges of Black AutonomyIntroduction: Our Lives Are Our Deaths: Antiblackness and Oblique IdentificationPart I. Austin, U.S.A.: The Gendered Dynamics of Youth Incarceration1. Does Heaven Have a Ghetto?: Growing Up in Prisons2. Stanzas of Oppression and Hope: Voices of Incarcerated Black and Latino Boys3. Negotiating Quotidian Violence and Uncertain Futures: Narratives from Black and Latina GirlsPart II. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: State Terror and Apartheid4. Reclaiming Public Space: Rolezinhos as Protest5. The Pacifying Police: Security through BrutalityPart III. The Denial of Antiblackness6. Michael Zinzun: The Fall and Rise of the Black Cyborg7. Black Suffering as Catalyst: Multiracial Blocs in DiasporaConclusion: The Slave against the CyborgAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisExploring the forces that keep black people vulnerable even amid economically privileged lives At a moment in U.S. history with repeated reminders of the vulnerability of African Americans to state and extralegal violence, Black Bourgeois is the first book to consider the contradiction of privileged, presumably protected black bodies that nonetheless remain racially vulnerable. Examining disruptions around race and class status in literary texts, Candice M. Jenkins reminds us that the conflicted relation of the black subject to privilege is not, solely, a recent phenomenon.Focusing on works by Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, Danzy Senna, Rebecca Walker, Reginald McKnight, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, and Michael Thomas, Jenkins shows that the seemingly abrupt discursive shift from post–Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter, from an emphasis on privilege and progress to an emphasis on vulnerability and precariousness, suggests a pendulum swing between two interrelated positions still in tension. By analyzing how these narratives stage the fraught interaction between the black and the bourgeois, Jenkins offers renewed attention to class as a framework for the study of black life—a necessary shift in an age of rapidly increasing income inequality and societal stratification.Black Bourgeois thus challenges the assumed link between blackness and poverty that has become so ingrained in the United States, reminding us that privileged subjects, too, are “classed.” This book offers, finally, a rigorous and nuanced grasp of how African Americans live within complex, intersecting identities.Trade Review"Black Bourgeois will be the definitive study of literary images of the black middle class from the 1980s to our present moment. With stunning new insight, Candice M. Jenkins focuses on the vulnerability tied to black middle-class embodiment. This book adds new dimensions to the study of blackness and class by foregrounding the tension between the vulnerability of the black body and the ‘cover’ of material privilege. Jenkins exposes the forces that make black subjects remain vulnerable, socially and bodily, as they live ‘bourgeois’ lives."—Margo Natalie Crawford, author of Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics "Black Bourgeois brilliantly highlights how contemporary African American cultural producers render the conundrum faced by the black middle class as they negotiate the limits of class privilege and their own vulnerability within the U.S. racial hierarchy. In texts such as School Daze, Black Girl in Paris, and Queen Sugar, Candice M. Jenkins astutely tracks the ways that the black middle class figure, as an embodiment of a specific intersection of race and class, represents both the precarity and the promise of black life."—Lisa B. Thompson, author of Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class

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Book SynopsisExploring the forces that keep black people vulnerable even amid economically privileged lives At a moment in U.S. history with repeated reminders of the vulnerability of African Americans to state and extralegal violence, Black Bourgeois is the first book to consider the contradiction of privileged, presumably protected black bodies that nonetheless remain racially vulnerable. Examining disruptions around race and class status in literary texts, Candice M. Jenkins reminds us that the conflicted relation of the black subject to privilege is not, solely, a recent phenomenon.Focusing on works by Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, Danzy Senna, Rebecca Walker, Reginald McKnight, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, and Michael Thomas, Jenkins shows that the seemingly abrupt discursive shift from post–Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter, from an emphasis on privilege and progress to an emphasis on vulnerability and precariousness, suggests a pendulum swing between two interrelated positions still in tension. By analyzing how these narratives stage the fraught interaction between the black and the bourgeois, Jenkins offers renewed attention to class as a framework for the study of black life—a necessary shift in an age of rapidly increasing income inequality and societal stratification.Black Bourgeois thus challenges the assumed link between blackness and poverty that has become so ingrained in the United States, reminding us that privileged subjects, too, are “classed.” This book offers, finally, a rigorous and nuanced grasp of how African Americans live within complex, intersecting identities.Trade Review"Black Bourgeois will be the definitive study of literary images of the black middle class from the 1980s to our present moment. With stunning new insight, Candice M. Jenkins focuses on the vulnerability tied to black middle-class embodiment. This book adds new dimensions to the study of blackness and class by foregrounding the tension between the vulnerability of the black body and the ‘cover’ of material privilege. Jenkins exposes the forces that make black subjects remain vulnerable, socially and bodily, as they live ‘bourgeois’ lives."—Margo Natalie Crawford, author of Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics "Black Bourgeois brilliantly highlights how contemporary African American cultural producers render the conundrum faced by the black middle class as they negotiate the limits of class privilege and their own vulnerability within the U.S. racial hierarchy. In texts such as School Daze, Black Girl in Paris, and Queen Sugar, Candice M. Jenkins astutely tracks the ways that the black middle class figure, as an embodiment of a specific intersection of race and class, represents both the precarity and the promise of black life."—Lisa B. Thompson, author of Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class

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Book SynopsisRich accounts of how Latinx migrant youth experience belonging across borders As anti-immigrant nationalist discourses escalate globally, Border Thinking offers critical insights into how young people in the Latinx diaspora experience belonging, make sense of racism, and long for change. Every year thousands of youth leave Latin America for the United States and Europe, and often the young migrants are portrayed as invaders and, if able to stay, told to integrate into their new society. Border Thinking asks not how to help the diaspora youth assimilate but what the United States and Europe can learn about citizenship from these diasporic youth. Working in the United States, Spain, and El Salvador, Andrea Dyrness and Enrique Sepúlveda III use participatory action research to collaborate with these young people to analyze how they make sense of their experiences in the borderlands. Dyrness and Sepúlveda engage them in reflecting on their feelings of belonging in multiple places—including some places that treat them as outsiders and criminals. Because of their transnational existence and connections to both home and host countries, diaspora youth have a critical perspective on national citizenship and yearn for new forms of belonging not restricted to national borders. The authors demonstrate how acompañamiento—spaces for solidarity and community-building among migrants—allow youth to critically reflect on their experiences and create support among one another.Even as national borders grow more restricted and the subject of immigration becomes ever more politically fraught, young people’s identities are increasingly diasporic. As the so-called migrant crisis continues, change in how citizenship and belonging are constructed is necessary, and urgent, to create inclusive and sustainable futures. In Border Thinking, Dyrness and Sepúlveda decouple citizenship from the nation-state, calling for new understandings of civic engagement and belonging. Trade Review"Border Thinking offers critical insights into how Latinx youth speak back to racializing, colonial discourses that frame them as outsiders. It is theoretically sophisticated, engaging, and methodologically innovative, offering new insights into participatory methodologies—but its true contribution lies in how it reveals young people’s creative imaginings of transnational forms of citizenship and belonging that are too often silenced by integration initiatives focused on national assimilation."—Reva Jaffe-Walter, author of Coercive Concern: Nationalism, Liberalism, and the Schooling of Muslim Youth"A notable title in an age when border restrictions have become near-absolute."—The Know, Denver Post"Dyrness and Sepúlveda engage in critical methodologies, such as participatory action research and the use of testimonio, to uncover an array of unique but often overlooked perspectives."—Anthropology & Education Quarterly "Scholars interested in action research, transborder, migration, and citizenship studies will find these contributions very helpful."—Gender, Place & Culture "On its face, the book appears to be an excellently written contribution to a specific literature focused on immigration and Latinx youth. But the book is also a contribution to the broader discussion of how societies and communities incorporate—or do not—people from places different than the home context and the crater-sized impacts these seemingly everyday minute choices can have."—Great Plains ResearchTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Rethinking Youth Citizenship in the Diaspora1. Acompañamiento in the Borderlands: Toward a Communal, Relational, and Humanizing Pedagogy Enrique Sepúlveda2. In the Shadow of U.S. Empire: Diasporic Citizenship in El Salvador3. Negotiating Race and the Politics of Integration: Latinx and Caribbean Youth in Madrid4. Transnational Belongings: The Cultural Knowledge of Lives in Between5. Feminists in Transition: Transnational Latina Activists in Madrid Andrea DyrnessConclusion: Reflections on Acompañamiento in the BorderlandsAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisRich accounts of how Latinx migrant youth experience belonging across borders As anti-immigrant nationalist discourses escalate globally, Border Thinking offers critical insights into how young people in the Latinx diaspora experience belonging, make sense of racism, and long for change. Every year thousands of youth leave Latin America for the United States and Europe, and often the young migrants are portrayed as invaders and, if able to stay, told to integrate into their new society. Border Thinking asks not how to help the diaspora youth assimilate but what the United States and Europe can learn about citizenship from these diasporic youth. Working in the United States, Spain, and El Salvador, Andrea Dyrness and Enrique Sepúlveda III use participatory action research to collaborate with these young people to analyze how they make sense of their experiences in the borderlands. Dyrness and Sepúlveda engage them in reflecting on their feelings of belonging in multiple places—including some places that treat them as outsiders and criminals. Because of their transnational existence and connections to both home and host countries, diaspora youth have a critical perspective on national citizenship and yearn for new forms of belonging not restricted to national borders. The authors demonstrate how acompañamiento—spaces for solidarity and community-building among migrants—allow youth to critically reflect on their experiences and create support among one another.Even as national borders grow more restricted and the subject of immigration becomes ever more politically fraught, young people’s identities are increasingly diasporic. As the so-called migrant crisis continues, change in how citizenship and belonging are constructed is necessary, and urgent, to create inclusive and sustainable futures. In Border Thinking, Dyrness and Sepúlveda decouple citizenship from the nation-state, calling for new understandings of civic engagement and belonging. Trade Review"Border Thinking offers critical insights into how Latinx youth speak back to racializing, colonial discourses that frame them as outsiders. It is theoretically sophisticated, engaging, and methodologically innovative, offering new insights into participatory methodologies—but its true contribution lies in how it reveals young people’s creative imaginings of transnational forms of citizenship and belonging that are too often silenced by integration initiatives focused on national assimilation."—Reva Jaffe-Walter, author of Coercive Concern: Nationalism, Liberalism, and the Schooling of Muslim Youth"A notable title in an age when border restrictions have become near-absolute."—The Know, Denver Post"Dyrness and Sepúlveda engage in critical methodologies, such as participatory action research and the use of testimonio, to uncover an array of unique but often overlooked perspectives."—Anthropology & Education Quarterly "Scholars interested in action research, transborder, migration, and citizenship studies will find these contributions very helpful."—Gender, Place & Culture "On its face, the book appears to be an excellently written contribution to a specific literature focused on immigration and Latinx youth. But the book is also a contribution to the broader discussion of how societies and communities incorporate—or do not—people from places different than the home context and the crater-sized impacts these seemingly everyday minute choices can have."—Great Plains ResearchTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Rethinking Youth Citizenship in the Diaspora1. Acompañamiento in the Borderlands: Toward a Communal, Relational, and Humanizing Pedagogy Enrique Sepúlveda2. In the Shadow of U.S. Empire: Diasporic Citizenship in El Salvador3. Negotiating Race and the Politics of Integration: Latinx and Caribbean Youth in Madrid4. Transnational Belongings: The Cultural Knowledge of Lives in Between5. Feminists in Transition: Transnational Latina Activists in Madrid Andrea DyrnessConclusion: Reflections on Acompañamiento in the BorderlandsAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisAn in-depth look at Black food and the challenges it faces today For Black Americans, the food system is broken. When it comes to nutrition, Black consumers experience an unjust and inequitable distribution of resources. Black Food Matters examines these issues through in-depth essays that analyze how Blackness is contested through food, differing ideas of what makes our sustenance “healthy,” and Black individuals’ own beliefs about what their cuisine should be. Primarily written by nonwhite scholars, and framed through a focus on Black agency instead of deprivation, the essays here showcase Black communities fighting for the survival of their food culture. The book takes readers into the real world of Black sustenance, examining animal husbandry practices in South Carolina, the work done by the Black Panthers to ensure food equality, and Black women who are pioneering urban agriculture. These essays also explore individual and community values, the influence of history, and the ongoing struggle to meet needs and affirm Black life. A comprehensive look at Black food culture and the various forms of violence that threaten the future of this cuisine, Black Food Matters centers Blackness in a field that has too often framed Black issues through a white-centric lens, offering new ways to think about access, privilege, equity, and justice. Contributors: Adam Bledsoe, U of Minnesota; Billy Hall; Analena Hope Hassberg, California State Polytechnic U, Pomona; Yuson Jung, Wayne State U; Kimberly Kasper, Rhodes College; Tyler McCreary, Florida State U; Andrew Newman, Wayne State U; Gillian Richards-Greaves, Coastal Carolina U; Monica M. White, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Brian Williams, Mississippi State U; Judith Williams, Florida International U; Psyche Williams-Forson, U of Maryland, College Park; Willie J. Wright, Rutgers U.Trade Review"Strongly recommend this volume as essential reading for courses in American Studies, Anthropology, Geography, African and African Diaspora Studies, Feminist Studies, and Food Studies and Systems, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels."—Current Anthropology "Framed by a clear and well-documented introduction by the editors, the books contains 10 chapters written by scholars in the fields of geography, environmental studies, anthropology, ethnic and women’s studies, African and African diaspora studies, and American studies."—CHOICE"A thought provoking and often mouthwatering discussion of food values that have endured in spite of the discontinuities that have persisted since slavery."—Ethnic and Racial Studies "This innovative edited volume offers an incisive contribution that destabilizes dominant assumptions about the food justice movement."—Medical Anthropology Quarterly "Mediating between the thread to Black food culture and a celebration of it, Black Food Matters centers Blackness in a field that has too often framed Black issues through a white-centric lens, offering new ways to think about access, privilege, equity, and justice."—Antipode"Black Food Matters is here to teach us all how not to just ask the right questions but to stand alongside those who have always done so."—City & Society"Black Food Matters is an excellent read, illustrating the intersection between Black food studies, urban political economy, and equitable development. "—Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development

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Book SynopsisNationality is not enough to understand “Latin”-descended populations in the United States LatinX has neither country nor fixed geography. LatinX, according to Claudia Milian, is the most powerful conceptual tool of the Latino/a present, an itinerary whose analytic routes incorporate the Global South and ecological devastation. Milian’s trailblazing study deploys the indeterminate but thunderous “X” as intellectual armor, a speculative springboard, and a question for our times that never stops being asked. LatinX sorts out and addresses issues about the unknowability of social realities that exceed our present knowledge.Forerunners: Ideas FirstShort books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

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Book SynopsisThe true story, and the black citizens, behind the evolution of racial equality in Minnesota He had just given a rousing speech to a packed assembly in St. Paul, but Frederick Douglass, confidant to the Great Emancipator and conscience of the Republican Party, was denied a hotel room because he was black. This was Minnesota in 1873, four years after the state had approved black suffrage—a state where “freedom” meant being unshackled from slavery but not social restrictions, where “equality” meant access to the ballot but not to a restaurant downtown. Spanning the half-century after the Civil War, Degrees of Freedom draws a rare picture of black experience in a northern state and of the nature of black discontent and action within a predominantly white, ostensibly progressive society. William D. Green reveals little-known historical characters among the black men and women who moved to Minnesota following the Fifteenth Amendment; worked as farmhands and laborers; built communities (such as Pig’s Eye Landing, later renamed St. Paul), businesses, and a newspaper (the Western Appeal); and embodied the slow but inexorable advancement of race relations in the state over time. Within this absorbing, often surprising, narrative we meet “ordinary” citizens, like former slave and early settler Jim Thompson and black barbers catering to a white clientele, but also personages of national stature, such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois, all of whom championed civil rights in Minnesota. And we see how, in a state where racial prejudice and oppression wore a liberal mask, black settlers and entrepreneurs, politicians, and activists maneuvered within a restricted political arena to bring about real and lasting change.Trade Review"Degrees of Freedom is a thoroughly researched exploration of black Minnesota and how the idea of ‘Minnesota Nice’ can be understood in terms of race relations and our state’s contribution to the civil rights movement. William D. Green offers us a meaningful look into how Minnesota managed to set precedents in antidiscrimination laws and provide progressive black and white leadership despite having a relatively small black population. He delves into the delicate balance of power between black activists and our progressive white society. This book will provide a deeper understanding of the challenges our community has faced and currently faces as we strive to close the achievement gap and move forward in creating true equal opportunity for all."—Archie Givens, president of the Givens Foundation for African American Literature"This is a deeply researched and beautifully written account of a small, yet influential and unexamined, community of African American political activists. In addition to telling their story, it places their lives in the context of important changes in race relations, nation building, and party politics in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century."—William P. Jones, author of The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights"Accessible and illuminating, Green’s work is an indispensable tool for understanding the long-view perspective on where we have been, and how we might get to where we want to be."—Minnesota Monthly"A meticulously researched examination of the involvement of African American men in Minnesota politics from the mid- nineteenth century until the early twentieth... Impressively detailed."—Middle West Review 2.2"Degrees of Freedom provides a deeply probing and elegantly written reexamination of black and white lives intertwining through race and region."—Minnesota HistoryTable of ContentsContentsPreface Part I. The Barbers 1. When America Came to St. Paul 2. Maurice Jernigan Takes a Stand3. On Becoming a Good Republican4. The Sons of FreedomPart II. The Entrepreneurs5. Mr. Douglass and the Civilizable Characteristics of the Colored Race6. Senate Bill No. 1817. A Certain Class of Citizens8. Professor Washington, Leader of the Race9. The Renaissance of the Cake WalkPart III. The Radicals10. Wheaton and McGhee: A Tale of Two Leaders11. The Election of J. Frank Wheaton12. A Call to Action13. A Defining Moment for McGhee14. After St. Paul, Niagara15. The LegacyEpilogue: Time for a Different Tone of AdvocacyNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA groundbreaking study of Blackness in Morocco through the lens of visual representation For more than thirteen centuries, caravans transported millions of enslaved people from Africa south of the Sahara into what is now the Kingdom of Morocco. Today there are no museums, plaques, or monuments that recognize this history of enslavement, but enslaved people and their descendants created the Gnawa identity that preserves this largely suppressed heritage. This pioneering book describes how Gnawa emerged as a practice associated with Blackness and enslavement by reviewing visual representation and musical traditions from the late nineteenth century to the present. Cynthia J. Becker addresses the historical consciousness of subaltern groups and how they give Blackness material form through modes of dress, visual art, religious ceremonies, and musical instruments in performance. She examines what it means to self-identify as Black in Morocco (a country typically associated with the Middle East and the Arab world), especially during this time of increased contemporary African migration, which has made Blackness even more visible. Her case studies draw on archival material and on her extended research in the city of Essaouira, site of the wildly popular Gnawa World Music Festival. Becker shows that Gnawa spirit possession ceremonies express the marginalization associated with enslavement and allow these unique communities to move toward healing, even as the mass-marketing of Gnawa music has resulted in some Gnawa practitioners engaging Blackness to claim legitimacy and spiritual power. This book challenges the framing of Africa’s cultural history into “sub-Saharan” versus “North African” or Islamic versus non-Islamic categories. Blackness in Morocco complicates how we think about the institution of slavery and its impact on North African religious and social institutions, and readers will better understand and appreciate the role of Africans in shaping global forces, including religious institutions such as Islam.Trade Review"Absolutely groundbreaking, Blackness in Morocco is the work of a trailblazing intellect. Showing that 'blackness' is constructed in Africa as elsewhere in the world, Cynthia J. Becker demonstrates a deep commitment to Gnawa lived experience, forever changing how we understand the religions and aesthetics of Africa."—Prita Meier, author of Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere"Cynthia Becker's anthropological and artistic approaches fill many gaps in the history of Gnawa music and culture in Moroccan society. She explains lucidly how Gnawa music has been appropriated by mainstream culture and how it fits the global logic of race-making and the historical anti-blackness ideology. The most important part of this book is the epistemic agency of the Gnawa people through the narrative of songs, dance, and trance. In this regard it contributes to the epistemology of resistance."—Chouki El Hamel, author of Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam"A critical reading."— Ethnic and Racial Studies Table of ContentsContentsPreface and AcknowledgmentsNote on Transcription and TransliterationIntroduction: Becoming Gnawa1. From Enslavement to Gnawa: Historical Postcards and the Construction of Gnawa Identity2. Black Women, Photographic Representation, and Female Agency3. Fraja Performances: Geo-Locating Gnawa Ceremonies in the Sudan4. Spirits in the Night: Blackness, Authenticity, and Potency in a Gnawa Lila5. Marketing Gnawa Authenticity: The Shrine of Bilal and Hats of the Bambara6. The Gnawa Guinbri: From Concealment to ExhibitionConclusion: Utopian Visions and Trans-Saharan RealitiesAppendix: Gnawa Spiritual RepertoireNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisExploring the intersections of digital humanities and African diaspora studies How can scholars use digital tools to better understand the African diaspora across time, space, and disciplines? And how can African diaspora studies inform the practices of digital humanities? These questions are at the heart of this timely collection of essays about the relationship between digital humanities and Black Atlantic studies, offering critical insights into race, migration, media, and scholarly knowledge production.The Digital Black Atlantic spans the African diaspora’s range—from Africa to North America, Europe, and the Caribbean—while its essayists span academic fields—from history and literary studies to musicology, game studies, and library and information studies. This transnational and interdisciplinary breadth is complemented by essays that focus on specific sites and digital humanities projects throughout the Black Atlantic. Covering key debates, The Digital Black Atlantic asks theoretical and practical questions about the ways that researchers and teachers of the African diaspora negotiate digital methods to explore a broad range of cultural forms including social media, open access libraries, digital music production, and video games. The volume further highlights contributions of African diaspora studies to digital humanities, such as politics and representation, power and authorship, the ephemerality of memory, and the vestiges of colonialist ideologies. Grounded in contemporary theory and praxis, The Digital Black Atlantic puts the digital humanities into conversation with African diaspora studies in crucial ways that advance both. Contributors: Alexandrina Agloro, Arizona State U; Abdul Alkalimat; Suzan Alteri, U of Florida; Paul Barrett, U of Guelph; Sayan Bhattacharyya, Singapore U of Technology and Design; Agata Błoch, Institute of History of Polish Academy of Sciences; Michał Bojanowski, Kozminski U; Sonya Donaldson, New Jersey City U; Anne Donlon; Laurent Dubois, Duke U; Amy E. Earhart, Texas A&M U; Schuyler Esprit, U of the West Indies; Demival Vasques Filho, U of Auckland, New Zealand; David Kirkland Garner; Alex Gil, Columbia U; Kaiama L. Glover, Barnard College, Columbia U; D. Fox Harrell, MIT; Hélène Huet, U of Florida; Mary Caton Lingold, Virginia Commonwealth U; Angel David Nieves, San Diego State U; Danielle Olson, MIT; Tunde Opeibi (Ope-Davies), U of Lagos, Nigeria; Jamila Moore Pewu, California State U, Fullerton; Anne Rice, Lehman College, CUNY; Sercan Şengün, Northeastern U; Janneken Smucker, West Chester U; Laurie N.Taylor, U of Florida; Toniesha L. Taylor, Texas Southern U.Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: The Digital Black AtlanticKelly Baker Josephs and Roopika RisamPart I. Memory1. The Sankofa Principle: From the Drum to the Digital Abdul Alkalimat2. The Ephemeral Archive: Unstable Terrain in Times and Sites of DiscordSonya Donaldson3. An Editorial Turn: Reviving Print and Digital Editing of Black-Authored Literary TextsAmy E. Earhart4. Access and Empowerment: Rediscovering Moments in the Lives of African American Migrant WomenJanneken Smucker5. Digital Queer Witnessing: Testimony, Contested Virtual Heritage, and the Apartheid Archive in Soweto, JohannesburgAngel David NievesPart II. Crossings6. Digital Ubuntu: Sharing Township Music with the World Alexandrina Agloro7. Text Analysis for Thought in the Black Atlantic Sayan Bhattacharyya8. Austin Clarke’s Digital Crossings Paul Barrett9. Radical Collaboration to Improve Library CollectionsHélène Huet, Suzan Alteri, and Laurie N. Taylor10. Digital Reconnaissance: Re(Locating) Dark Spots on a MapJamila Moore PewuPart III. Relations11. Heterotopias of Resistance: Reframing Caribbean Narratives in Digital Spaces Schuyler Esprit12. Signifying Shade as We #RaceTogether Drinking Our #NewStarbucksDrink “White Privilege Americana Extra Whip”Toniesha L. Taylor13. Slaves, Freedmen, Mulattos, Pardos, and Indigenous Peoples: The Early Modern Social Networks of the Population of Color in the Atlantic Portuguese EmpireAgata Błoch, Demival Vasques Filho, and Michał Bojanowski 14. Digitizing the Humanities in an Emerging Space: An Exploratory Study of Digital Humanities Initiatives in NigeriaTunde Opeibi15. Black Atlantic Networks in the Archives and the Limits of Finding Aids as DataAnne DonlonPart IV. Becomings16. Africa and the Avatar Dream: Mapping the Impacts of Videogame Representations of AfricaD. Fox Harrell, Sercan Şengün, and Danielle Olson17. Musical Passage: Sound, Text, and the Promise of the Digital Black Atlantic Laurent Dubois, David Kirkland Garner, and Mary Caton Lingold18. What Price Freedom? The Implications and Challenges of OER for Africana Studies Anne Rice19. On the Interpretation of Digital Caribbean DreamsKaiama L. Glover and Alex GilAcknowledgmentsContributors

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Book SynopsisA deep dive into mid-century African American newspapers, exploring how Black pulp fiction reassembled genre formulas in the service of racial justice In recent years, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Marvel’s Black Panther, and HBO’s Watchmen have been lauded for the innovative ways they repurpose genre conventions to criticize white supremacy, celebrate Black resistance, and imagine a more racially just world—important progressive messages widely spread precisely because they are packaged in popular genres. But it turns out, such generic retooling for antiracist purposes is nothing new. As Brooks E. Hefner’s Black Pulp shows, this tradition of antiracist genre revision begins even earlier than recent studies of Black superhero comics of the 1960s have revealed. Hefner traces it back to a phenomenon that began in the 1920s, to serialized (and sometimes syndicated) genre stories written by Black authors in Black newspapers with large circulations among middle- and working-class Black readers. From the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier and the Baltimore Afro-American, Hefner recovers a rich archive of African American genre fiction from the 1920s through the mid-1950s—spanning everything from romance, hero-adventure, and crime stories to westerns and science fiction. Reading these stories, Hefner explores how their authors deployed, critiqued, and reassembled genre formulas—and the pleasures they offer to readers—in the service of racial justice: to criticize Jim Crow segregation, racial capitalism, and the sexual exploitation of Black women; to imagine successful interracial romance and collective sociopolitical progress; and to cheer Black agency, even retributive violence in the face of white supremacy. These popular stories differ significantly from contemporaneous, now-canonized African American protest novels that tend to represent Jim Crow America as a deterministic machine and its Black inhabitants as doomed victims. Widely consumed but since forgotten, these genre stories—and Hefner’s incisive analysis of them—offer a more vibrant understanding of African American literary history. Trade Review "Brooks Hefner’s compelling and insightful book asks us to reconsider not only what counts as Black imaginative writing but what it means to read Black literature at all. Attending to a vast yet overlooked archive of serial genre fiction, Hefner highlights the pleasures afforded by African Americans’ engagement with popular formulas in the Black press. The result is an eye-opening account of modern literary production that centers the tastes and experiences of Black readers themselves. Beyond the predominance of the protest novel in the white imagination, Hefner reveals the narrative forms and medial formats out of which Black America’s imagined communities were built."—Kinohi Nishikawa, author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground "Black Pulp tells a much needed and long overdue literary history of the short fiction and serial narratives featured in the African American periodical press of the mid-twentieth century. As Brooks E. Hefner’s deft and compelling close readings and contextual accounts of the pulp fiction industry’s developments demonstrate, Black popular fiction’s fresh formulas offered Black readers utopian (not nihilist) visions of the justice they deserved—but were denied—in Jim Crow America. Thoroughly researched, shrewdly argued, wonderfully illustrated, and bracingly written, Black Pulp is as thrilling to read as the literature it surveys. This is a work that anyone interested in mid-century African American and American popular literature, genre criticism, and US periodical history must read."—Jacqueline Goldsby, Yale University "Beyond the invaluable historical work it performs, Black Pulp offers numerous and exciting theoretical suggestions regarding the politics of reading, the innovations of popular fiction and the huge gulf between the historical experience of readers in a given period and the retrospective constructions of literary history. It constitutes essential reading for whoever is interested in Black studies, pulp fiction or the sociology of reading, probing the limits of these intersecting fields and helping to recover the forgotten hinterlands that lie beyond them."—Journal of Social History "Hefner stitches together the seams of genre and race... Black Pulp challenges us to reimagine and expand our conceptualization of African American literary culture by adopting Black bibliographic practice that simultaneously recovers relationships between lost texts and a larger network of literary practice, even as it might redefine what we mean as Black bibliography."—Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America "A fascinating glimpse into a part of Black history that isn’t well known."—Real Change News "Black Pulp is important and valuable because of the stories Hefner chronicles and the convincing argument he makes that they are worthy of careful investigation, and that in transforming white pulp to create new imaginative worlds, they fulfill an important role by offering new possibilities for readers who have often been deprived of them even in the realm of imagination."—Los Angeles Review of Books "Hefner’s study is—from beginning to end—an absolute pleasure to read, just as it is a convincing case for the political importance of Black pleasure in reading."—Modernism/modernity "Hefner reveals the dauntless envisioning of emancipatory futures by Black writers and illustrators. "—Colors of Influence "For Hefner, recovering African American newspaper fiction is significant because it provides archival evidence of fertile genre experimentation among Black writers in the pulp era... a major achievement. Black Pulp should make it impossible for scholars of popular genre fiction to suggest that Black creators entered the field late or that antiracist approaches to genre are a new development. "—American Periodicals "Breathtakingly researched and astutely argued, Hefner shines a light on a hidden corner of Black cultural production that has remained mostly out of sight." —Modern Fiction Studies Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Signifying Genre, Articulating Race1. Beneath the Harlem Renaissance: The Rise of Black Popular Fiction2. Romancing the Race: The Politics of Black Love Stories3. News from Elsewhere: Speculative Fiction in the Black Press4. Battling White Supremacy: A Prehistory of the Black SuperheroConclusion: Writing New HistoriesNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA deep dive into mid-century African American newspapers, exploring how Black pulp fiction reassembled genre formulas in the service of racial justice In recent years, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Marvel’s Black Panther, and HBO’s Watchmen have been lauded for the innovative ways they repurpose genre conventions to criticize white supremacy, celebrate Black resistance, and imagine a more racially just world—important progressive messages widely spread precisely because they are packaged in popular genres. But it turns out, such generic retooling for antiracist purposes is nothing new. As Brooks E. Hefner’s Black Pulp shows, this tradition of antiracist genre revision begins even earlier than recent studies of Black superhero comics of the 1960s have revealed. Hefner traces it back to a phenomenon that began in the 1920s, to serialized (and sometimes syndicated) genre stories written by Black authors in Black newspapers with large circulations among middle- and working-class Black readers. From the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier and the Baltimore Afro-American, Hefner recovers a rich archive of African American genre fiction from the 1920s through the mid-1950s—spanning everything from romance, hero-adventure, and crime stories to westerns and science fiction. Reading these stories, Hefner explores how their authors deployed, critiqued, and reassembled genre formulas—and the pleasures they offer to readers—in the service of racial justice: to criticize Jim Crow segregation, racial capitalism, and the sexual exploitation of Black women; to imagine successful interracial romance and collective sociopolitical progress; and to cheer Black agency, even retributive violence in the face of white supremacy. These popular stories differ significantly from contemporaneous, now-canonized African American protest novels that tend to represent Jim Crow America as a deterministic machine and its Black inhabitants as doomed victims. Widely consumed but since forgotten, these genre stories—and Hefner’s incisive analysis of them—offer a more vibrant understanding of African American literary history. Trade Review "Brooks Hefner’s compelling and insightful book asks us to reconsider not only what counts as Black imaginative writing but what it means to read Black literature at all. Attending to a vast yet overlooked archive of serial genre fiction, Hefner highlights the pleasures afforded by African Americans’ engagement with popular formulas in the Black press. The result is an eye-opening account of modern literary production that centers the tastes and experiences of Black readers themselves. Beyond the predominance of the protest novel in the white imagination, Hefner reveals the narrative forms and medial formats out of which Black America’s imagined communities were built."—Kinohi Nishikawa, author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground "Black Pulp tells a much needed and long overdue literary history of the short fiction and serial narratives featured in the African American periodical press of the mid-twentieth century. As Brooks E. Hefner’s deft and compelling close readings and contextual accounts of the pulp fiction industry’s developments demonstrate, Black popular fiction’s fresh formulas offered Black readers utopian (not nihilist) visions of the justice they deserved—but were denied—in Jim Crow America. Thoroughly researched, shrewdly argued, wonderfully illustrated, and bracingly written, Black Pulp is as thrilling to read as the literature it surveys. This is a work that anyone interested in mid-century African American and American popular literature, genre criticism, and US periodical history must read."—Jacqueline Goldsby, Yale University "Beyond the invaluable historical work it performs, Black Pulp offers numerous and exciting theoretical suggestions regarding the politics of reading, the innovations of popular fiction and the huge gulf between the historical experience of readers in a given period and the retrospective constructions of literary history. It constitutes essential reading for whoever is interested in Black studies, pulp fiction or the sociology of reading, probing the limits of these intersecting fields and helping to recover the forgotten hinterlands that lie beyond them."—Journal of Social History "Hefner stitches together the seams of genre and race... Black Pulp challenges us to reimagine and expand our conceptualization of African American literary culture by adopting Black bibliographic practice that simultaneously recovers relationships between lost texts and a larger network of literary practice, even as it might redefine what we mean as Black bibliography."—Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America "A fascinating glimpse into a part of Black history that isn’t well known."—Real Change News "Black Pulp is important and valuable because of the stories Hefner chronicles and the convincing argument he makes that they are worthy of careful investigation, and that in transforming white pulp to create new imaginative worlds, they fulfill an important role by offering new possibilities for readers who have often been deprived of them even in the realm of imagination."—Los Angeles Review of Books "Hefner’s study is—from beginning to end—an absolute pleasure to read, just as it is a convincing case for the political importance of Black pleasure in reading."—Modernism/modernity "Hefner reveals the dauntless envisioning of emancipatory futures by Black writers and illustrators. "—Colors of Influence "For Hefner, recovering African American newspaper fiction is significant because it provides archival evidence of fertile genre experimentation among Black writers in the pulp era... a major achievement. Black Pulp should make it impossible for scholars of popular genre fiction to suggest that Black creators entered the field late or that antiracist approaches to genre are a new development. "—American Periodicals "Breathtakingly researched and astutely argued, Hefner shines a light on a hidden corner of Black cultural production that has remained mostly out of sight." —Modern Fiction Studies Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Signifying Genre, Articulating Race1. Beneath the Harlem Renaissance: The Rise of Black Popular Fiction2. Romancing the Race: The Politics of Black Love Stories3. News from Elsewhere: Speculative Fiction in the Black Press4. Battling White Supremacy: A Prehistory of the Black SuperheroConclusion: Writing New HistoriesNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA complex articulation of the ways blackness and nonnormative gender intersect—and a deeper understanding of how subjectivities are formed A deep meditation on and expansion of the figure of the Negro and insurrectionary effects of the “X” as theorized by Nahum Chandler, The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender thinks through the problematizing effects of blackness as, too, a problematizing of gender. Through the paraontological, the between, and the figure of the “X” (with its explicit contemporary link to nonbinary and trans genders) Marquis Bey presents a meditation on black feminism and gender nonnormativity. Chandler’s text serves as both an argumentative tool for rendering the “radical alternative” in and as blackness as well as demonstrating the necessarily trans/gendered valences of that radical alternative. Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

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Book SynopsisA brilliant and rich gathering of voices on the American experience of this past year and beyond, from Indigenous writers and writers of color from Minnesota In this significant collection, Indigenous writers and writers of color bear witness to one of the most unsettling years in the history of the United States. Essays and poems vividly reflect and comment on the traumas we endured in 2020, beginning with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, deepened by the blatant murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers and the uprisings that immersed our city into the epicenter of passionate, worldwide demands for justice. In inspired and incisive writing these contributors speak unvarnished truths not only to the original and pernicious racism threaded through the American experience but also to the deeply personal, in essays about family, loss, food culture, economic security, and mental health. Their call and response is united here to rise and be heard. We Are Meant to Rise lifts up the astonishing variety of BIPOC writers in Minnesota. From authors with international reputations to newly emerging voices, it features people from many cultures, including Indigenous Dakota and Anishinaabe, African American, Hmong, Somali, Afghani, Lebanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, Puerto Rican, Colombian, Mexican, transracial adoptees, mixed race, and LGBTQ+ perspectives. Most of the contributors have participated in More Than a Single Story, a popular and insightful conversation series in Minneapolis that features Indigenous and people of color speaking on what most concerns their communities. We Are Meant to Rise meets the events of the day, the year, the centuries before, again and again, with powerful testament to the intrinsic and unique value of the human voice.Contributors: Suleiman Adan, Mary Moore Easter, Louise Erdrich, Anika Fajardo, Safy-Hallan Farah, Said Farah, Sherrie Fernandez-Williams, Pamela R. Fletcher Bush, Shannon Gibney, Kathryn Haddad, Tish Jones, Ezekiel Joubert III, Douglas Kearney, Ed Bok Lee, Ricardo Levins Morales, Arleta Little, Resmaa Menakem, Tess Montgomery, Ahmad Qais Munhazim, Melissa Olson, Alexs Pate, Bao Phi, Mona Susan Power, Samantha Sencer-Mura, Said Shaiye, Erin Sharkey, Sun Yung Shin, Michael Torres, Diane Wilson, Kao Kalia Yang, and Kevin Yang.Trade Review"Diversity is our strength. Each new voice who becomes part of America is our strength. The writers in this anthology provide us with individualized portraits of who we are, and in doing so they can help us to know each other, our neighbors, our fellow citizens. These writers prove we are indeed more than a single story."—David Mura, from the Introduction "A powerful and passionate take on a fraught moment."—Publishers Weekly"This collection is diverse, enraging, heartbreaking, impassioned and this month’s #RequiredReading."—Ms. Magazine"The book acts as a time capsule of reflections of being Black, brown, indigenous & immigrant in a city that resembles much of American. There are poignant stories of immigration from the points of view of various communities, including Hmong, Somali, Korean, Lebanese, among others. Many stories share the narrative of survival, of healing from trauma, and emerging intact from the crushing weight of generational wounds. "—Colors of Influence"We Are Meant to Rise offers a different vision of past and present, unflinching in its gaze on our national and local sins but ultimately affirming hope and possibility."—Minnesota Spokesman Recorder Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Call and ResponseDavid MuraAbout More Than a Single StoryCarolyn HolbrookPandemic LoveEd Bok LeeJuiceAlexs PateGeorge Floyd Was Killed in My NeighborhoodSafy-Hallan Farahإِنَّا لِلّهِ وَإِنَّـا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعونَ Queer Death in ExileAhmad Qais MunhazimWith Birthday Girl Blindfolded, Star Piñata Considers His Regrets and Offers a Last RequestMichael TorresBattlegrounds and Building GroundsKao Kalia YangSummer 1964Pamela R. Fletcher BushThe Courage to Hold Together, the Courage to Fall Apart Mona Susan PowerLong Live the Fatherless ChildrenAnika FajardoLand Acknowledgement Statement of a Native VirginianMary Moore EasterFinancial TraumaTess MontgomeryCross PollinationKathryn HaddadBreath: A Meditation in UprisingErin SharkeyDear EditorDouglas KearneyWhat Does it All MeanTish JonesThe Trauma VirusResmaa MenakemHow Will They Take Us Away/How Will We StandBao PhiHealers Are Protectors/Protectors Are HealersMarcie RendonThe Pachuco Himself Considers the Audacity of LanguageMichael TorresLittle Brown BriefcaseSuleiman AdanWe Are All SummonedDiane WilsonA Tangent to a Story about the Smith & Wesson .38, or, Attempts to Be Fully Assimilated into the White American Project Have Failed Miserably, in the Form of a Self-Questionnaire신 선 영 辛善英 Sun Yung ShinToday in MinneapolisSamantha Sencer-MuraLet Me Tell You a StoryMelissa OlsonHere BeforeSherrie Fernandez-WilliamsTruth, Reconciliation, and Four More Meditations on Human FreedomArleta LittleDidion DreamsSaid ShaiyeSpeaking Into ExistenceKevin YangThe WeightEzekiel JoubertFour GeniesRicardo Levins MoralesAll the Stars AflameShannon GibneyHumility, Sincerity, Banana OilLouise ErdrichAcknowledgmentsContributors

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Book SynopsisA compelling examination of Sweden’s African and Black diasporaContemporary Sweden is a country with a worldwide progressive reputation, despite an undeniable tradition of racism within its borders. In the face of this contradiction of culture and history, Afro-Swedes have emerged as a vibrant demographic presence, from generations of diasporic movement, migration, and homemaking. In Afro-Sweden, Ryan Thomas Skinner uses oral histories, archival research, ethnography, and textual analysis to explore the history and culture of this diverse and growing Afro-European community.Skinner employs the conceptual themes of “remembering” and “renaissance” to illuminate the history and culture of the Afro-Swedish community, drawing on the rich theoretical traditions of the African and Black diaspora. Remembering fosters a sustained meditation on Afro-Swedish social history, while Renaissance indexes a thriving Afro-Swedish public culture. Together, these concepts illuminate significant existential modes of Afro-Swedish being and becoming, invested in and contributing to the work of global Black studies.The first scholarly monograph in English to focus specifically on the African and Black diaspora in Sweden, Afro-Sweden emphasizes the voices, experiences, practices, knowledge, and ideas of these communities. Its rigorously interdisciplinary approach to understanding diasporic communities is essential to contemporary conversations around such issues as the status and identity of racialized populations in Europe and the international impact of Black Lives Matter.Trade Review "A remarkable work in both its content and style, Afro-Sweden compels us to reconsider our understandings of race, place, and identity, all while highlighting the presence of a population whose cultural vitality and roots are too often overlooked."—Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, author of War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right "Ryan Skinner’s research and writing are among those rare artifacts bringing the Afro-Swedish community to life, informing our own children, even ourselves, of that vital reminder, that we are here, that we have been here for quite some time, that we belong to the global African diaspora, that our lives matter."—Jason Timbuktu Diakité, from the Foreword "[Afro-Sweden] is such a truthful explanation of the dilemma African descendants have here in Sweden… It is such a valuable contribution to efforts to racial integration here in Sweden."—Madubuko Diakité, author of Not Even in Your Dreams: A Story about Children, Parents, and Dreams "In Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country, Ryan Skinner explores the diverse voices and experiences of the American and Black diaspora in Sweden. The book not only shows the pervasive nature of white supremacy in Swedish society but also pays testimony to the richness of Afro-Swedish life. "—LSE Review of Books "Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country is convincing in its presentation of how ‘Afro Swedes resist politics of erasure that normative color-blindness prescribes, by affirming a doubly conscious Afro-diasporic and Swedish being-in-the world’ (233). Therefore, the book is informative to those both familiar or not with the burgeoning field of racial studies in Sweden."—Ethnic and Racial Studies Table of ContentsForewordJason Timbuktu DiakitéA Note on OrthographyIntroduction: Race, Culture, and Diaspora in Afro-SwedenPart I. Remembering1. Invisible People2. A Colder Congo3. Walking While BlackPart II. Renaissance4. Articulating Afro-Sweden5. The Politics of Race and Diaspora6. The Art of RenaissanceEpilogueAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA compelling examination of Sweden’s African and Black diasporaContemporary Sweden is a country with a worldwide progressive reputation, despite an undeniable tradition of racism within its borders. In the face of this contradiction of culture and history, Afro-Swedes have emerged as a vibrant demographic presence, from generations of diasporic movement, migration, and homemaking. In Afro-Sweden, Ryan Thomas Skinner uses oral histories, archival research, ethnography, and textual analysis to explore the history and culture of this diverse and growing Afro-European community.Skinner employs the conceptual themes of “remembering” and “renaissance” to illuminate the history and culture of the Afro-Swedish community, drawing on the rich theoretical traditions of the African and Black diaspora. Remembering fosters a sustained meditation on Afro-Swedish social history, while Renaissance indexes a thriving Afro-Swedish public culture. Together, these concepts illuminate significant existential modes of Afro-Swedish being and becoming, invested in and contributing to the work of global Black studies.The first scholarly monograph in English to focus specifically on the African and Black diaspora in Sweden, Afro-Sweden emphasizes the voices, experiences, practices, knowledge, and ideas of these communities. Its rigorously interdisciplinary approach to understanding diasporic communities is essential to contemporary conversations around such issues as the status and identity of racialized populations in Europe and the international impact of Black Lives Matter.Trade Review "A remarkable work in both its content and style, Afro-Sweden compels us to reconsider our understandings of race, place, and identity, all while highlighting the presence of a population whose cultural vitality and roots are too often overlooked."—Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, author of War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right "Ryan Skinner’s research and writing are among those rare artifacts bringing the Afro-Swedish community to life, informing our own children, even ourselves, of that vital reminder, that we are here, that we have been here for quite some time, that we belong to the global African diaspora, that our lives matter."—Jason Timbuktu Diakité, from the Foreword "[Afro-Sweden] is such a truthful explanation of the dilemma African descendants have here in Sweden… It is such a valuable contribution to efforts to racial integration here in Sweden."—Madubuko Diakité, author of Not Even in Your Dreams: A Story about Children, Parents, and Dreams "In Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country, Ryan Skinner explores the diverse voices and experiences of the American and Black diaspora in Sweden. The book not only shows the pervasive nature of white supremacy in Swedish society but also pays testimony to the richness of Afro-Swedish life. "—LSE Review of Books "Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country is convincing in its presentation of how ‘Afro Swedes resist politics of erasure that normative color-blindness prescribes, by affirming a doubly conscious Afro-diasporic and Swedish being-in-the world’ (233). Therefore, the book is informative to those both familiar or not with the burgeoning field of racial studies in Sweden."—Ethnic and Racial Studies Table of ContentsForewordJason Timbuktu DiakitéA Note on OrthographyIntroduction: Race, Culture, and Diaspora in Afro-SwedenPart I. Remembering1. Invisible People2. A Colder Congo3. Walking While BlackPart II. Renaissance4. Articulating Afro-Sweden5. The Politics of Race and Diaspora6. The Art of RenaissanceEpilogueAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThe son of a Black mother and white father overcomes family trauma to find the courage of compassion in veterinary practice Rising to accept a prestigious award, Jody Lulich wondered what to say. Explain how he’d been attracted to veterinary medicine? Describe how caring for helpless, voiceless animals in his own shame and pain provided a lifeline, a chance to heal himself as well? Lulich tells his story in In the Company of Grace, a memoir about finding courage in compassion and strength in healing—and power in finally confronting the darkness of his youth.Lulich’s white father and Black mother met at a civil rights rally, but love was no defense against their personal demons. His mother’s suicide, in his presence when he was nine years old, and his sometimes brutal father’s subsequent withdrawal set Lulich on a course from the South Side of Chicago to the Tuskegee School of Veterinary Medicine in Alabama to an endowed chair at the University of Minnesota, forever searching for the approval and affection that success could not deliver. Though shadowed by troubling secrets, his memoir also features scenes of surprising light and promise—of the neighbors who take him in, a brother’s unlikely effort to save Christmas, his mother’s memories of the family’s charmed early days, bright moments (and many curious details) of veterinary practice. Most consequentially, at Tuskegee Lulich rents a room in the home of a seventy-five-year-old Black woman named Grace, whose wholehearted adoption of him—and her own stories of the Jim Crow era—finally gives him a sense of belonging and possibility.Completing his book amid the furor over George Floyd’s murder, Lulich reflects on all the ways that race has shaped his life. In the Company of Grace is a moving testament to the power of compassion in the face of seemingly overwhelming circumstances.Trade Review "In the Company of Grace is haunting and powerful. Jody Lulich has written an absorbing meditation on his lifelong journey from a helpless child who witnesses his beloved mother take her own life, to finding acceptance through the unconditional love of an elderly woman and redemption in caring for animals. An unforgettable and inspiring memoir."—Carolyn Holbrook, author of Tell Me Your Names and I Will Testify "Despite suffering true tragedies as a child, Jody Lulich grew up to be a veterinarian who shows deep compassion to both people and animals. His devotion to his mentor and mother figure, Grace Hooks, inspires admiration and an understanding of a true loving relationship. Don't miss this remarkable book."—Laura Shaine Cunningham, author of Sleeping Arrangements "Lulich's memoir is raw, introspective, and honest."—Insight News

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Book SynopsisRethinking the history of African enslavement in the western Indian Ocean through the lens of Iranian cinema From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding regions with African slave labor from antiquity to the nineteenth century. This book reveals how Iranian cinema preserves the legacy of this vast and yet long-overlooked history that has come to be known as Indian Ocean slavery. How does a focus on blackness complicate traditional understandings of history and culture? Parisa Vaziri addresses this question by looking at residues of the Indian Ocean slave trade in Iranian films from the second half of the twentieth century. Revealing the politicized clash between commercial cinema (fīlmfārsī) and alternative filmmaking (the Iranian New Wave), she pays particular attention to the healing ritual zār, which is both an African slave descendent practice and a constitutive element of Iranian culture, as well as to cinematic sīyāh bāzī (Persian black play). Moving beyond other studies on Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slavery, Vaziri highlights the crystallization of a singular mode of historicity within these cinematic examples—one of “absence” that reflects the relative dearth of archival information on the facts surrounding Indian Ocean slavery. Bringing together cinema studies, Middle East studies, Black studies, and postcolonial theory, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery explores African enslavement in the Indian Ocean through the revelatory and little-known history of Iranian cinema. It shows that Iranian film reveals a resistance to facticity representative of the history of African enslavement in the Indian Ocean and preserves the legacy of African slavery’s longue durée in ways that resist its overpowering erasure in the popular and historical imagination. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.Trade Review "Parisa Vaziri’s care for Iranian cinema reveals a complex archive—a curriculum, a vigor—that exceeds local abstraction. Its new waves and new particularities are ‘symptoms of the global.’ Her deep analytic concern with racial blackness shows that the absence that makes possible the local and the global is also the presence that disrupts the givenness of self and world. Rigorously, beautifully, Vaziri transforms the history of the Indian Ocean and the history of cinema."—Fred Moten, New York University "Parisa Vaziri’s Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery is a truly groundbreaking work that asks us to seriously take up the question: What is blackness in Iranian culture? She critically interrogates the claim that Indian Ocean slavery has largely been forgotten in popular Iranian memory with her illuminating exposition and insightful analysis. Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery prompts us to do a far better job of exploring the lived experience of blackness in modernity beyond the structures of the Atlantic sphere and to reconsider our thinking about the relationship between slavery, Africa, blackness, and the globalization of the nation state."—R. A. Judy, author of Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black "Incisive, theoretically rich, and deeply researched, Parisa Vaziri’s Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery challenges us to see the cinematic material she analyzes in new and striking ways. Crossing conventional disciplinary and area-studies boundaries, Vaziri’s book demands that we rethink the premises of our assumptions about blackness and histories of enslavement in West Asia, especially in Iran."—Amy Motlagh, author of Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran

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Book SynopsisRethinking the history of African enslavement in the western Indian Ocean through the lens of Iranian cinema From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding regions with African slave labor from antiquity to the nineteenth century. This book reveals how Iranian cinema preserves the legacy of this vast and yet long-overlooked history that has come to be known as Indian Ocean slavery. How does a focus on blackness complicate traditional understandings of history and culture? Parisa Vaziri addresses this question by looking at residues of the Indian Ocean slave trade in Iranian films from the second half of the twentieth century. Revealing the politicized clash between commercial cinema (fīlmfārsī) and alternative filmmaking (the Iranian New Wave), she pays particular attention to the healing ritual zār, which is both an African slave descendent practice and a constitutive element of Iranian culture, as well as to cinematic sīyāh bāzī (Persian black play). Moving beyond other studies on Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slavery, Vaziri highlights the crystallization of a singular mode of historicity within these cinematic examples—one of “absence” that reflects the relative dearth of archival information on the facts surrounding Indian Ocean slavery. Bringing together cinema studies, Middle East studies, Black studies, and postcolonial theory, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery explores African enslavement in the Indian Ocean through the revelatory and little-known history of Iranian cinema. It shows that Iranian film reveals a resistance to facticity representative of the history of African enslavement in the Indian Ocean and preserves the legacy of African slavery’s longue durée in ways that resist its overpowering erasure in the popular and historical imagination. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.Trade Review "Parisa Vaziri’s care for Iranian cinema reveals a complex archive—a curriculum, a vigor—that exceeds local abstraction. Its new waves and new particularities are ‘symptoms of the global.’ Her deep analytic concern with racial blackness shows that the absence that makes possible the local and the global is also the presence that disrupts the givenness of self and world. Rigorously, beautifully, Vaziri transforms the history of the Indian Ocean and the history of cinema."—Fred Moten, New York University "Parisa Vaziri’s Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery is a truly groundbreaking work that asks us to seriously take up the question: What is blackness in Iranian culture? She critically interrogates the claim that Indian Ocean slavery has largely been forgotten in popular Iranian memory with her illuminating exposition and insightful analysis. Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery prompts us to do a far better job of exploring the lived experience of blackness in modernity beyond the structures of the Atlantic sphere and to reconsider our thinking about the relationship between slavery, Africa, blackness, and the globalization of the nation state."—R. A. Judy, author of Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black "Incisive, theoretically rich, and deeply researched, Parisa Vaziri’s Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery challenges us to see the cinematic material she analyzes in new and striking ways. Crossing conventional disciplinary and area-studies boundaries, Vaziri’s book demands that we rethink the premises of our assumptions about blackness and histories of enslavement in West Asia, especially in Iran."—Amy Motlagh, author of Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran

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Book SynopsisThere is an enduring belief amongst some that segregation is worsening and undermining social cohesion, and that this is especially visible in the growing divides between the schools in which our children are educated. This book uses up-to-date evidence to interrogate some of the controversial claims made by the 2016 Casey Review, providing an analysis of contemporary patterns of ethnic, residential and social segregation, and looking at the ways that these changing geographies interact with each other.Table of ContentsEthnic Segregation in England: Discourse and Debate The Changing Ethnic Composition of the School- Age Population Measures of Segregation and Diversity Across Local Authorities How Concentrated Are Ethnic Groups in Schools? Does School Choice Add to Residential Ethnic Segregation? Do Socio- Economic Separations Add to Ethnic Segregation? Conclusion: Ethnic Segregation Is Not Increasing

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Book Synopsis‘On-road’ is a complex term used by young people to describe street-based subculture and a general way of being. Featuring the voices of young people, this collection explores how race, class and gender dynamics shape this aspect of youth culture. With young people on-road often becoming criminalised due to interlocking structural inequalities, this book looks beyond concerns about gangs and presents empirical research from scholars and activists who work with and study the social lives of young people. It addresses the concerns of practitioners, policy makers and scholars by analysing aspects and misinterpretations of the shifting realities of young people’s urban life.Table of ContentsForeword by Claudia Bernard 1. Introduction: Youth and On-Road – Making Gender and Race Matter - Jade Levell, Tara Young and Rod Earle 2. Black, British Young Women On-Road: Intersections of Gender, Race and Youth in British Interwar Youth Penal Reform - Esmorie Miller 3. Tainted Love: Intimate Relationships and Gendered Violence On-Road - Yusef Bakkali and Ezimma Chigbo 4. (The) Trouble with Friends: Narrative Stories of Friendship and Violence On-Road - Tara Young 5. The Sexual Politics of Masculinity and Vulnerability On-Road: Gender, Race and Male Victimisation - Jade Levell 6. The Road, in Court: How UK Drill Music Became a Criminal Offence - Lambros Fatsis 7. On-Road Inside: Music as a Site of Carceral Convergence - Chris Waller 8. Jeta e Rrugës: Translocal On-Road Hustle, Within and from Albania - Jade Levell and Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers 9. ‘He’s shown me the road’: Role Model and Roadman - Peter Harris 10. Diary of an On-Road Criminologist: An Auto-Ethnographic Reflection - Martin Glynn 11. Conclusions, Compromises and Continuing Conversations - Jade Levell, Tara Young and Rod Earle

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Book SynopsisWith humor and grace, the memoir of a first-generation Chinese American in New York City. Our Laundry, Our Town is a memoir that decodes and processes the fractured urban oracle bones of Alvin Eng’s upbringing in Flushing, Queens, in the 1970s. Back then, his family was one of the few immigrant Chinese families in a far-flung neighborhood in New York City. His parents had an arranged marriage and ran a Chinese hand laundry. From behind the counter of his parents’ laundry and within the confines of a household that was rooted in a different century and culture, he sought to reconcile this insular home life with the turbulent yet inspiring street life that was all around them––from the faux martial arts of TV’s Kung Fu to the burgeoning underworld of the punk rock scene. In the 1970s, NYC, like most of the world, was in the throes of regenerating itself in the wake of major social and cultural changes resulting from the counterculture and civil rights movements. And by the 1980s, Flushing had become NYC’s second Chinatown. But Eng remained one of the neighborhood’s few Chinese citizens who did not speak fluent Chinese. Finding his way in the downtown theater and performance world of Manhattan, he discovered the under-chronicled Chinese influence on Thornton Wilder’s foundational Americana drama, Our Town. This discovery became the unlikely catalyst for a psyche-healing pilgrimage to Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China—his ancestral home in southern China—that led to writing and performing his successful autobiographical monologue, The Last Emperor of Flushing. Learning to tell his own story on stages around the world was what proudly made him whole. As cities, classrooms, cultures, and communities the world over continue to re-examine the parameters of diversity, equity, and inclusion, Our Laundry, Our Town will reverberate with a broad readership.Table of Contents1 The Urban Oracle Bones of Our Laundry: Channeling China’s Last Emperor and Rock ’n’ Roll’s First Opera 2 Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting . . . or Faking It 3 Our Laundry’s Roots in Resistance: Family Reunification Along Flushing’s Fault Line 4 It’s Only a Paper Son: The Chinatown Bachelor Society 5 Addressees 6 Disappearing Acts: That Old-Time Religion 7 Chinese Rocks: Opium, the Chinese Diaspora and Soul . . . and Punk Rock 8 A Sort of Homecoming: But Where Are You Really From? 9 The Bigger Picture, On Screen and Off 10 Trip the Light, Gorgeous Mosaic: Double Happiness, Discovering Playwriting and Activism 11 Commencement Ceremonies: Leaving Flushing 12 Village Pilgrimage for a Marriage Blessing 13 Life Dances On: Our Town in China Epilogue Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisAgainst the Carceral Archive is a meditation upon what author Damien M. Sojoyner calls the “carceral archival project,” offering a distillation of critical, theoretical, and activist work of prison abolitionists over the past three decades. Working from collections at the Southern California Library (Black Panthers, LA Chapter; the Coalition Against Police Abuse; Urban Policy Research Institute; Mothers Reclaiming Our Children; and the collection of geographer Clyde Woods), it builds upon theories of the archive to examine carcerality as the dominant mode of state governance over Black populations in the United States since the 1960s. Each chapter takes up an element of the carceral archive and its destabilization, destruction, and containment of Black life: its notion of the human and the production of “pejorative blackness,” the intimate connection between police and military in the protection of racial capitalism and its fossil fuel–based economy, the role of technology in counterintelligence, and counterinsurgency logics. Importantly, each chapter also emphasizes the carceral archive’s fundamental failure to destroy “Black communal logics” and radical Black forms of knowledge production, both of which contest the carceral archive and create other forms of life in its midst. Concluding with a statement on the reckoning with the radical traditions of thought and being which liberation requires, Sojoyner offers a compelling argument for how the centering of Blackness enables a structuring of the mind that refuses the violent exploitative tendencies of Western epistemological traditions as viable life-affirming practices.Table of ContentsIntroduction | 1 1 The Human and the Carceral Archival Project | 17 2 Police and the Carceral Archival Project | 32 3 Technology and the Social Sciences as Synergistic Violence | 42 4 Environmental Instability | 59 5 Policing Health and Safety | 72 6 Liberation | 81 Conclusion | 93 Acknowledgments | 103 References | 107

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Book SynopsisNEW IN PAPERBACK! BOOKS ARE MAGIC 2023 HOLIDAY GIFT BOOK With humor and grace, the memoir of a first-generation Chinese American in New York City. Our Laundry, Our Town is a memoir that decodes and processes the fractured urban oracle bones of Alvin Eng’s upbringing in Flushing, Queens, in the 1970s. Back then, his family was one of the few immigrant Chinese families in a far-flung neighborhood in New York City. His parents had an arranged marriage and ran a Chinese hand laundry. From behind the counter of his parents’ laundry and within the confines of a household that was rooted in a different century and culture, he sought to reconcile this insular home life with the turbulent yet inspiring street life that was all around them––from the faux martial arts of TV’s Kung Fu to the burgeoning underworld of the punk rock scene. In the 1970s, NYC, like most of the world, was in the throes of regenerating itself in the wake of major social and cultural changes resulting from the counterculture and civil rights movements. And by the 1980s, Flushing had become NYC’s second Chinatown. But Eng remained one of the neighborhood’s few Chinese citizens who did not speak fluent Chinese. Finding his way in the downtown theater and performance world of Manhattan, he discovered the under-chronicled Chinese influence on Thornton Wilder’s foundational Americana drama, Our Town. This discovery became the unlikely catalyst for a psyche-healing pilgrimage to Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China—his ancestral home in southern China—that led to writing and performing his successful autobiographical monologue, The Last Emperor of Flushing. Learning to tell his own story on stages around the world was what proudly made him whole. As cities, classrooms, cultures, and communities the world over continue to re-examine the parameters of diversity, equity, and inclusion, Our Laundry, Our Town will reverberate with a broad readership.Table of Contents1 The Urban Oracle Bones of Our Laundry: Channeling China’s Last Emperor and Rock ’n’ Roll’s First Opera 2 Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting . . . or Faking It 3 Our Laundry’s Roots in Resistance: Family Reunification Along Flushing’s Fault Line 4 It’s Only a Paper Son: The Chinatown Bachelor Society 5 Addressees 6 Disappearing Acts: That Old-Time Religion 7 Chinese Rocks: Opium, the Chinese Diaspora and Soul . . . and Punk Rock 8 A Sort of Homecoming: But Where Are You Really From? 9 The Bigger Picture, On Screen and Off 10 Trip the Light, Gorgeous Mosaic: Double Happiness, Discovering Playwriting and Activism 11 Commencement Ceremonies: Leaving Flushing 12 Village Pilgrimage for a Marriage Blessing 13 Life Dances On: Our Town in China Epilogue Acknowledgments

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Book Synopsis

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