Search results for ""rutgers university press""

First printed in 1918, Ralph Werther's Autobiography of an Androgyne charts his emerging self-understanding as a member of the "third sex" and documents his explorations of queer underworlds in turn-of-the-century New York City. Werther presents a sensational life narrative that begins with a privileged upper-class birth and a youthful realization of his difference from other boys. He concludes with a decision to undergo castration. Along the way, he recounts intimate stories of adolescent sexual encounters with adult men and women, escapades as a reckless "fairie" who trolled Brooklyn and the Bowery in search of working-class Irish and Italian immigrants, and an immersion into the subculture of male "inverts." This new edition also includes a critical introduction by Scott Herring that situates the text within the scientific, historical, literary, and social contexts of urban American life in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Tracing how this pioneering autobiography engages with conversations on immigration, gender, economics, metropolitan working-class culture, and the invention of homosexuality across class lines, this edition is ideal for courses on topics ranging from Victorian literature to modern American sexuality.

Read more less

Drugs. Sex. Revolutionary violence. From its first pages, Susan Stern's memoir With the Weathermen provides a candid, first-hand look at the radical politics and the social and cultural environment of the New Left during the late 1960s.The Weathermen--a U.S.-based, revolutionary splinter group of Students for a Democratic Society--advocated the overthrow of the government and capitalism, and toward that end, carried out a campaign of bombings, jailbreaks, and riots throughout the United States. In With the Weathermen Stern traces her involvement with this group, and her transformation from a shy, married graduate student into a go-go dancing, street-fighting "macho mama." In vivid and emotional language, she describes the attractions and difficulties of joining a collective radical group and in maintaining a position within it.Stern's memoir offers a rich description of the raw and rough social dynamics of this community, from its strict demands to "smash monogamy," to its sometimes enforced orgies, and to the demeaning character assassination that was led by the group's top members. She provides a distinctly personal and female perspective on the destructive social functionality and frequently contradictory attitudes toward gender roles and women's rights within the New Left.Laura Browder's masterful introduction situates Stern's memoir in its historical context, examines the circumstances of its writing and publication, and describes the book's somewhat controversial reception by the public and critics alike.

Read more less

In this lively account of politics and popular music, Mark Mattern develops the concept of "acting in concert," a metaphor for community-based political action through music. Through three detailed case studies of Chilean, Cajun, and American Indian popular music, Mattern explores the way popular muisicians forge community and lead members of their communities in several distinct kinds of political action that would be difficult or impossible among individuals who are not linked by communal ties. More than just entertainment, Mattern argues that popular music can serve as a social glue for bringing together a multitude of voices that might otherwise remain silent, and that political action through music can increase the potential for relatively marginalized people to choose and determine their own fate.

Read more less

This book was a really informative and insightful collection of essays over cultural appropriation in our society today, mostly focusing on America's appropriation and use of Native American culture specifically more or less. The topics in this book covers a lot of ground from arts, land, and artifacts to ideas, knowledge, and symbols. The book doesn't try and point fingers blaming anyone rather then stating facts of the matter over the gray area of cultural appropriation. Overall a really nice read.

Read more less

It was a surprise to everyone, including director Eric Rohmer, that My Night at Maud's was a success. The film violated almost all the rules of popular filmmaking. It had no crime, no explicit sex, no violence, and no action. As English Showalter points out in his excellent introduction to the volume, half the film was spent on one scene in which three characters seem to talk endlessly about subjects of little interest to a general audience––religion (Catholicism in particular), philosophy, Pascal, morality, even mathematics. The film explores the unexpectedly complex relationships between two men and two women, and seems to end with the affirmation of traditional values such as chastity, piety, and the family. All this at the end of the sixties, when other popular French films by directors such as Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, and Varda were attempting to comment on and were succeeding in reflecting turbulent times and ideas in their work.Showalter discusses the film in the context of Rohmer's conservative film theory and explains its relationship to the other films in the director's series of Six Moral Tales. He shows how Rohmer's sense of place and his techniques of film narration develop the theme of moral choice in a story about love and chance encounters with a delightfully ironic conclusion. The volume also contains a selection of background and critical materials, including interviews with Rohmer and pertinent statements by him, reviews of the film from several countries, and important criticism of the film from the past twenty years. A brief biography, filmography, and selected bibliography are also included. This volume will be indispensable for anyone studying this important film, and will delight those who just want to enjoy it.

Read more less

Writing the Black Diasporic City in the Age of Globalization theorizes the city as a generative, “semicircular” social space, where the changes of globalization are most profoundly experienced. The fictive accounts analyzed here configure cities as spaces where movement is simultaneously restrictive and liberating, and where life prospects are at once promising and daunting. In their depictions of the urban experiences of peoples of African descent, writers and other creative artists offer a complex set of renditions of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black urban citizens’ experience in European or Euro-dominated cities such as Boston, London, New York, and Toronto, as well as Global South cities such as Accra, Kingston, and Lagos—that emerged out of colonial domination, and which have emerged as hubs of current globalization. Writing the Black Diasporic City draws on critical tools of classical postcolonial studies as well as those of globalization studies to read works by Ama Ata Aidoo, Amma Darko, Marlon James, Cecil Foster, Zadie Smith, Michael Thomas, Chika Unigwe, and other contemporary writers. The book also engages the television series Call the Midwife, the Canada carnival celebration Caribana, and the film series Small Axe to show how cities are characterized as open, complicated spaces that are constantly shifting. Cities collapse boundaries, allowing for both haunting and healing, and they can sever the connection from kin and community, or create new connections.

Read more less

From the Holocaust in Europe to the military dictatorships of Latin America to the enduring violence of settler colonialism around the world, genocide has been a defining experience of far too many societies. In many cases, the damaging legacies of genocide lead to continued violence and social divisions for decades. In others, however, creative responses to this identity-based violence emerge from the grassroots, contributing to widespread social and political transformation. Resonant Violence explores both the enduring impacts of genocidal violence and the varied ways in which states and grassroots collectives respond to and transform this violence through memory practices and grassroots activism. By calling upon lessons from Germany, Poland, Argentina, and the Indigenous United States, Resonant Violence demonstrates how ordinary individuals come together to engage with a violent past to pave the way for a less violent future.

Read more less

Higher education hails Asian American students as model minorities who face no educational barriers given their purported cultural values of hard work and political passivity. Described as “over-represented,” Asian Americans have been overlooked in discussions about diversity; however, racial hostility continues to affect Asian American students, and they have actively challenged their invisibility in minority student discussions. This study details the history of Asian American student activism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, as students rejected the university’s definition of minority student needs that relied on a model minority myth, measures of under-representation, and a Black-White racial model, concepts that made them an “unseen unheard minority.” This activism led to the creation on campus of one of the largest Asian American Studies programs and Asian American cultural centers in the Midwest. Their histories reveal the limitations of understanding minority student needs solely along measures of under-representation and the realities of race for Asian American college students.

Read more less

With the rise of digital tools used for media entrepreneurship, media outlets staffed by only one or two individuals and targeted to niche and super-niche audiences are developing across a wide range of platforms. Minority communities such as immigrants and refugees have long been pioneers in this space, operating ethnic media outlets with limited staff and funding to produce content that is relevant and accessible to their specific community. Micro Media Industries explores the specific case of Hmong American media, showing how an extremely small population can maintain a robust and thriving media ecology in spite of resource limitations and an inability to scale up. Based on six years of fieldwork in Hmong American communities in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California, it analyzes the unique opportunities and challenges facing Hmong newspapers, radio, television, podcasts, YouTube, social media, and other emerging platforms. It argues that micro media industries, rather than being dismissed or trivialized, ought to be held up as models of media innovation that can counter the increasing power of mainstream media.

Read more less

Creolized Sexualities: Undoing Heteronormativity in the Literary Imagination of the Anglo-Caribbean draws attention to a wide, and surprising, range of writings that craft inclusive and pluralizing representations of sexual possibilities within the Caribbean imagination. Reading across an eclectic range of writings from V.S. Naipaul to Marlon James, Shani Mootoo to Junot Diaz, Andrew Salkey to Thomas Glave, Curdella Forbes to Colin Robinson, this bold work of literary criticism brings into view fictional worlds where Caribbeanness and queerness correspond and reconcile. Through inspired close readings Donnell gathers evidence and argument for the Caribbean as an exemplary creolized ecology of fluid possibilities that can illuminate the prospect of a non-heteronormalizing future. Indeed, Creolized Sexualities hows how writers have long rendered sexual plasticity, indeterminacy, and pluralism as an integral part of Caribbeanness and as one of the most compelling if unacknowledged ways of resisting the disciplining regimes of colonial and neocolonial power.

Read more less

Before Bemberg: Argentine Women Filmmakers calls into question the historiography of Argentine women filmmakers that has centered on María Luisa Bemberg to the exclusion of her predecessors. Its introductory discussion of the abundant initial participation by women in film production in the 1910s is followed by an account of their exclusion from creative roles in the studio cinema, which was only altered by the opportunities opened by a boom in short filmmaking in the 1960s. The book then discusses in depth the six sound features directed by women before 1980, which, despite their trailblazing explorations of the perspectives of female characters, daring denunciations of authoritarianism and censorship, and modernizing formal invention, have been forgotten by Argentine film history. Looking at the work and roles of Eva Landeck, Vlasta Lah, María Herminia Avellaneda and María Elena Walsh and Maria Bemberg, the book recognizes these filmmakers’ contributions at a significant moment in which movements to eliminate gender-based oppression and violence in Argentina and elsewhere are surging.Watch some of the films discussed in the book with English subtitles (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF_6F4am5024rklIWwExUVA?view_as=subscriber).

Read more less

Acts of Repair explores how ordinary people grapple with decades of political violence and genocide in Argentina—a history that includes the Holocaust, the political repression of the 1976–1983 dictatorship, and the 1994 AMIA bombing. Although the struggle against impunity seems inevitably incomplete, Argentines have created possibilities for repair through cultural memory, yielding spaces for transformation and agency critical to personal and political recovery.

Read more less

“What this remarkable book does . . . is to remind us of that passion, that revolutionary fervor, that camaraderie, that persistence in the face of political defeat and personal despair so needed in our time as in theirs.” —Howard Zinn “Fascinating …With marvelous clarity and depth, Candace Falk illuminates for us an Emma Goldman shaped by her time yet presaging in her life the situation and conflicts of women in our time.” —Tillie Olsen One of the most famous political activists of all time, Emma Goldman was also infamous for her radical anarchist views and her “scandalous” personal life. In public, Goldman was a firebrand, confidently agitating for labor reform, anarchism, birth control, and women’s independence. But behind closed doors she was more vulnerable, especially when it came to the love of her life. Love, Anarchy, & Emma Goldman is an account of Goldman’s legendary career as a political activist. But it is more than that—it is a biography that offers an intimate look at how Goldman’s passion for social reform dovetailed with her passion for one man: Chicago activist, hobo king, and red-light district gynecologist Ben Reitman. Candace Falk takes us into the heart of their tumultuous love affair, finding that even as Goldman lectured on free love, she confronted her own intense jealousy. As director of the Emma Goldman papers, Falk had access to over 40,000 writings by Goldman—including her private letters and notes—and she draws upon these archives to give us a rare insight into this brilliant, complex woman’s thoughts. The result is both a riveting love story and a primer on an exciting, explosive era in American politics and intellectual life.

Read more less

From a grandmother’s inter-generational care to the strategic and slow consensus work of elected tribal leaders, Indigenous community builders perform the daily work of culture and communalism. Indigenous Communalism conveys age-old lessons about culture, communalism, and the universal tension between the individual and the collective. It is also a critical ethnography challenging the moral and cultural assumptions of a hyper-individualist, twenty-first century global society. Told in vibrant detail, the narrative of the book conveys the importance of communalism as a value system present in all human groups and one at the center of Indigenous survival. Carolyn Smith-Morris draws on her work among the Akimel O'odham and the Wiradjuri to show how communal work and culture help these communities form distinctive Indigenous bonds. The results are not only a rich study of Indigenous relational lifeways, but a serious inquiry to the continuing acculturative atmosphere that Indigenous communities struggle to resist. Recognizing both positive and negative sides to the issue, she asks whether there is a global Indigenous communalism. And if so, what lessons does it teach about healthy communities, the universal human need for belonging, and the potential for the collective to do good?

Read more less

To Defend this Sunrise examines how black women on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua engage in regional, national, and transnational modes of activism to remap the nation’s racial order under conditions of increasing economic precarity and autocracy. The book considers how, since the 19th century, black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression. Specifically, it explores how the new Sandinista state under Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has utilized multicultural rhetoric as a mode of political, economic, and territorial dispossession. In the face of the Sandinista state’s co-optation of multicultural discourse and growing authoritarianism, black communities have had to recalibrate their activist strategies and modes of critique to resist these new forms of “multicultural dispossession.” This concept describes the ways that state actors and institutions drain multiculturalism of its radical, transformative potential by espousing the rhetoric of democratic recognition while simultaneously supporting illiberal practices and policies that undermine black political demands and weaken the legal frameworks that provide the basis for the claims of these activists against the state.

Read more less

Although she remains one of the all-time most recognizable Hollywood icons, Marilyn Monroe has seldom been ranked among the greatest actors of her generation. Critics have typically viewed her film roles as mere extensions of her sexpot star persona. Yet this ignores both the subtle variations between these roles and the acting skill that went into the creation of Monroe’s public persona. Some Kind of Mirror offers the first extended scholarly analysis of Marilyn Monroe’s film performances, examining how they united the contradictory discourses about women’s roles in 1950s America. Amanda Konkle suggests that Monroe’s star persona resonated with audiences precisely because it engaged with the era’s critical debates regarding femininity, sexuality, marriage, and political activism. Furthermore, she explores how Monroe drew from the techniques of Method acting and finely calibrated her performances to better mirror her audience’s anxieties and desires. Drawing both from Monroe’s filmography and from 1950s fan magazines, newspaper reports, and archived film studio reports, Some Kind of Mirror considers how her star persona was coauthored by the actress, the Hollywood publicity machine, and the fans who adored her. It is about why 1950s America made Monroe a star, but it is also about how Marilyn defined an era.

Read more less

First place in the 2020 American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award in History and Public Policy​Winner of the 2020 Lavinia L. Dock Award from the American Association for the History of NursingTalking Therapy traces the rise of modern psychiatric nursing in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s. Through an analysis of the relationship between nurses and other mental health professions, with an emphasis on nursing scholarship, this book demonstrates the inherently social construction of ‘mental health’, and highlights the role of nurses in challenging, and complying with, modern approaches to psychiatry. After WWII, heightened cultural and political emphasis on mental health for social stability enabled the development of psychiatric nursing as a distinct knowledge project through which nurses aimed to transform institutional approaches to patient care, and to contribute to health and social science beyond the bedside. Nurses now take for granted the ideas that underpin their relationships with patients, but this book demonstrates that these were ideas not easily won, and that nurses in the past fought hard to make mental health nursing what it is today.

Read more less

Winner of the 2020 Scholarly Contributions to Teaching and Learning Award from the American Sociological Association Many students struggle with the transition from high school to university life. This is especially true of first-generation college students, who are often unfamiliar with the norms and expectations of academia. College professors usually want to help, but many feel overwhelmed by the prospect of making extra time in their already hectic schedules to meet with these struggling students.33 Simple Strategies for Faculty is a guidebook filled with practical solutions to this problem. It gives college faculty concrete exercises and tools they can use both inside and outside of the classroom to effectively bolster the academic success and wellbeing of their students. To devise these strategies, educational sociologist Lisa M. Nunn talked with a variety of first-year college students, learning what they find baffling and frustrating about their classes, as well as what they love about their professors’ teaching. Combining student perspectives with the latest research on bridging the academic achievement gap, she shows how professors can make a difference by spending as little as fifteen minutes a week helping their students acculturate to college life. Whether you are a new faculty member or a tenured professor, you are sure to find 33 Simple Strategies for Faculty to be an invaluable resource.

Read more less

2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title​Transgender Cinema gives readers the big picture of how trans people have been depicted on screen. Beginning with a history of trans tropes in classic Hollywood cinema, from comic drag scenes in Chaplin’s The Masquerader to Garbo’s androgynous Queen Christina, and from psycho killer queers to The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s outrageous queen, it examines a plethora of trans portrayals that subsequently emerged from varied media outlets, including documentary films, television serials, and world cinema. Along the way, it analyzes milestones in trans representation, like The Crying Game, Boys Don’t Cry, Hedwig and the Angry Inch,and A Fantastic Woman. As it traces the evolution of trans people onscreen, Transgender Cinema also considers the ongoing controversies sparked by these movies and series both within LGBTQ communities and beyond. Ultimately it reveals how film and television have shaped not only how the general public sees trans people, but also how trans people see themselves. Selected Filmography: Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, All about My Mother, Anak, Austin Unbound, Becoming Chaz, The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, Boy I Am, Boy Meets Girl, Boys Don’t Cry, The Brandon Teena Story, A Busy Day, Call Me Malcolm, Carlotta, Change over Time, The Crying Game, Dallas Buyers Club, The Danish Gir, The Devil Is a Woman, Drunktown’s Finest, Facing Mirrors, A Fantastic Woman, 52 Tuesdays, Flesh, Girl Inside, A Girl like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, I Was a Male War Bride,Kate Bornstein Is a Queer and Pleasant Danger, Kumu Hina, La Cage aux Folles, Ma Vie en Rose (My Life in Pink) The Masquerader, Myra Breckinridge, Orlando, Paris Is Burning, Playing with Gender, Psycho, Queen Christina, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Saga of Anatahan, She’s a Boy I Knew, Silence of the Lambs, Some Like It Hot, Southern Comfort, Still Black: A Portrait of Black Transmen, Stonewall, The Tenant, Three Generations. Tomboy, Tootsie, Transamerica, Transparent, Trash, Whatever Suits You, A Woman.

Read more less

Toxic Ivory Towers seeks to document the professional work experiences of underrepresented minority (URM) faculty in U.S. higher education, and simultaneously address the social and economic inequalities in their life course trajectory. Ruth Enid Zambrana finds that despite the changing demographics of the nation, the percentages of Black and Hispanic faculty have increased only slightly, while the percentages obtaining tenure and earning promotion to full professor have remained relatively stagnant. Toxic Ivory Towers is the first book to take a look at the institutional factors impacting the ability of URM faculty to be successful at their jobs, and to flourish in academia. The book captures not only how various dimensions of identity inequality are expressed in the academy and how these social statuses influence the health and well-being of URM faculty, but also how institutional policies and practices can be used to transform the culture of an institution to increase rates of retention and promotion so URM faculty can thrive.

Read more less

Nominated for Eisner Award | Winner of the 2018 Ray and Pat Browne Award | Winner of the Charles Hatfield Book Prize from the CSS Histories and criticism of comics note that comic strips published in the Progressive Era were dynamic spaces in which anxieties about race, ethnicity, class, and gender were expressed, perpetuated, and alleviated. The proliferation of comic strip children—white and nonwhite, middle-class and lower class, male and female—suggests that childhood was a subject that fascinated and preoccupied Americans at the turn of the century. Many of these strips, including R.F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley and Buster Brown, Rudolph Dirks’s The Katzenjammer Kids and Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland were headlined by child characters. Yet no major study has explored the significance of these verbal-visual representations of childhood. Incorrigibles and Innocents addresses this gap in scholarship, examining the ways childhood was depicted and theorized in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century comic strips. Drawing from and building on histories and theories of childhood, comics, and Progressive Era conceptualizations of citizenship and nationhood, Lara Saguisag demonstrates that child characters in comic strips expressed and complicated contemporary notions of who had a right to claim membership in a modernizing, expanding nation.

Read more less

In Manhood Impossible, Scott Melzer argues that boys’ and men’s bodies and breadwinner status are the two primary sites for their expression of control. Controlling selves and others, and resisting being dominated and controlled is most connected to men’s bodies and work. However, no man can live up to these culturally ascendant ideals of manhood. The strategies men use to manage unmet expectations often prove toxic, not only for men themselves, but also for other men, women, and society. Melzer strategically explores the lives of four groups of adult men struggling with contemporary body and breadwinner ideals. These case studies uncover men’s struggles to achieve and maintain manhood, and redefine what it means to be a man.

Read more less

Finalist for the 2020 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems Since time before memory, large numbers of salmon have made their way up and down the Klamath River. Indigenous management enabled the ecological abundance that formed the basis of capitalist wealth across North America. These activities on the landscape continue today, although they are often the site of intense political struggle. Not only has the magnitude of Native American genocide been of remarkable little sociological focus, the fact that this genocide has been coupled with a reorganization of the natural world represents a substantial theoretical void. Whereas much attention has (rightfully) focused on the structuring of capitalism, racism and patriarchy, few sociologists have attended to the ongoing process of North American colonialism. Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People draws upon nearly two decades of examples and insight from Karuk experiences on the Klamath River to illustrate how the ecological dynamics of settler-colonialism are essential for theorizing gender, race and social power today.

Read more less

Honorable mention, 2018 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize from the South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies Many Americans still envision India as rigidly caste-bound, locked in traditions that inhibit social mobility. In reality, class mobility has long been an ideal, and today globalization is radically transforming how India’s citizens perceive class. Living Class in Urban India examines a nation in flux, bombarded with media images of middle-class consumers, while navigating the currents of late capitalism and the surges of inequality they can produce. Anthropologist Sara Dickey puts a human face on the issue of class in India, introducing four people who live in the “second-tier” city of Madurai: an auto-rickshaw driver, a graphic designer, a teacher of high-status English, and a domestic worker. Drawing from over thirty years of fieldwork, she considers how class is determined by both subjective perceptions and objective conditions, documenting Madurai residents’ palpable day-to-day experiences of class while also tracking their long-term impacts. By analyzing the intertwined symbolic and economic importance of phenomena like wedding ceremonies, religious practices, philanthropy, and loan arrangements, Dickey’s study reveals the material consequences of local class identities. Simultaneously, this gracefully written book highlights the poignant drive for dignity in the face of moralizing class stereotypes. Through extensive interviews, Dickey scrutinizes the idioms and commonplaces used by residents to justify class inequality and, occasionally, to subvert it. Along the way, Living Class in Urban India reveals the myriad ways that class status is interpreted and performed, embedded in everything from cell phone usage to religious worship.

Read more less

In the past twenty years, we have seen the rise of digital effects cinema in which the human performer is entangled with animation, collaged with other performers, or inserted into perilous or fantastic situations and scenery. Making Believe sheds new light on these developments by historicizing screen performance within the context of visual and special effects cinema and technological change in Hollywood filmmaking, through the silent, early sound, and current digital eras. Making Believe incorporates North American film reviews and editorials, actor and crew interviews, trade and fan magazine commentary, actor training manuals, and film production publicity materials to discuss the shifts in screen acting practice and philosophy around transfiguring makeup, doubles, motion capture, and acting to absent places or characters. Along the way it considers how performers and visual and special effects crew work together, and struggle with the industry, critics, and each other to define the aesthetic value of their work, in an industrial system of technological reproduction. Bode opens our eyes to the performing illusions we love and the tensions we experience in wanting to believe in spite of our knowledge that it is all make believe in the end.

Read more less

Our most modern monster and perhaps our most American, the zombie that is so prevalent in popular culture today has its roots in African soul capture mythologies. The Transatlantic Zombie provides a more complete history of the zombie than has ever been told, explaining how the myth’s migration to the New World was facilitated by the transatlantic slave trade, and reveals the real-world import of storytelling, reminding us of the power of myths and mythmaking, and the high stakes of appropriation and homage. Beginning with an account of a probable ancestor of the zombie found in the Kongolese and Angolan regions of seventeenth-century Africa and ending with a description of the way, in contemporary culture, new media are used to facilitate zombie-themed events, Sarah Juliet Lauro plots the zombie’s cultural significance through Caribbean literature, Haitian folklore, and American literature, film, and the visual arts. The zombie entered US consciousness through the American occupation of Haiti, the site of an eighteenth-century slave rebellion that became a war for independence, thus making the figuration of living death inseparable from its resonances with both slavery and rebellion. Lauro bridges African mythology and US mainstream culture by articulating the ethical complications of the zombie as a cultural conquest that was rebranded for the American cinema. As The Transatlantic Zombie shows, the zombie is not merely a bogeyman representing the ills of modern society, but a battleground over which a cultural war has been fought between the imperial urge to absorb exotic, threatening elements, and the originary, Afro-diasporic culture’s preservation through a strategy of mythic combat.

Read more less

Today there are approximately fifty thousand prisoners in American prisons serving life without parole, having been found guilty of crimes ranging from murder and rape to burglary, carjacking, and drug offences. In The Forgotten Men, criminologist Margaret E. Leigey provides an insightful account of a group of aging inmates imprisoned for at least twenty years, with virtually no chance of release. These men make up one of the most marginalized segments of the contemporary U.S. prison population. Considered too dangerous for rehabilitation, ignored by prison administrators, and overlooked by courts disinclined to review such sentences, these prisoners grow increasingly cut off from family and the outside world. Drawing on in-depth interviews with twenty-five such prisoners, Leigey gives voice to these extremely marginalized inmates and offers a look at how they struggle to cope. She reveals, for instance, that the men believe that permanent incarceration is as inhumane as capital punishment, calling life without parole “the hard death penalty.” Indeed, after serving two decades in prison, some wished that they had received the death penalty instead. Leigey also recounts the ways in which the prisoners attempt to construct meaningful lives inside the bleak environment where they will almost certainly live out their lives. Every state in the union (except Alaska) has the life-without-parole sentencing option, despite its controversial nature and its staggering cost to the taxpayer. The Forgotten Men provides a much-needed analysis of the policies behind life-without-parole sentencing, arguing that such sentences are overused and lead to serious financial and ethical dilemmas.

Read more less

For much of the industrial era, asbestos was a widely acclaimed benchmark material. During its heyday, it was manufactured into nearly three thousand different products, most of which protected life and property from heat, flame, and electricity. It was used in virtually every industry from hotel keeping to military technology to chemical manufacturing, and was integral to building construction from shacks to skyscrapers in every community across the United States. Beginning in the mid-1960s, however, this once popular mineral began a rapid fall from grace as growing attention to the serious health risks associated with it began to overshadow the protections and benefits it provided.In this thought-provoking and controversial book, Rachel Maines challenges the recent vilification of asbestos by providing a historical perspective on Americans’ changing perceptions about risk. She suggests that the very success of asbestos and other fire-prevention technologies in containing deadly blazes has led to a sort of historical amnesia about the very risks they were supposed to reduce. Asbestos and Fire is not only the most thoroughly researched and balanced look at the history of asbestos, it is also an important contribution to a larger debate that considers how the risks of technological solutions should be evaluated. As technology offers us ever-increasing opportunities to protect and prevent, Maines urges that learning to accept and effectively address the unintended consequences of technological innovations is a growing part of our collective responsibility.

Read more less

Shock therapy is making a comeback today in the treatment of serious mental illness. Despite its reemergence as a safe and effective psychiatric tool, however, it continues to be shrouded by a longstanding negative public image, not least due to films such as the classic One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, where the inmate of a psychiatric clinic (played by Jack Nicholson) is subjected to electro-shock to curb his rebellious behavior. Beyond its vilification in popular culture, the stereotype of convulsive therapy as a dangerous and inhumane practice is fuelled by professional posturing and public misinformation. Electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, has in the last thirty years been considered a method of last resort in the treatment of debilitating depression, suicidal ideation, and other forms of mental illness. Yet, ironically, its effectiveness in treating these patients would suggest it as a frontline therapy, bringing relief from acute symptoms and saving lives. In this book, Edward Shorter and David Healy trace the controversial history of ECT and other "shock" therapies. Drawing on case studies, public debates, extensive interviews, and archival research, the authors expose the myths about ECT that have proliferated over the years. By showing ECT's often life-saving results, Shorter and Healy endorse a point of view that is hotly contested in professional circles and in public debates, but for the nearly half of all clinically depressed patients who do not respond to drugs, this book brings much needed hope.

Read more less

Histories of gay and lesbian urban life typically focus on major metropolitan areas like San Francisco and New York, opportunity-filled destinations for LGBTQ migrants from across the country. Yet there are many other queer communities in economically depressed cities with majority Black and Hispanic populations that receive far less attention. Though just a few miles from New York, Newark is one of these cities, and its queer histories have been neglected—until now. Queer Newark charts a history in which working-class people of color are the central actors and in which violence, poverty, and homophobia could never suppress joy, resistance, love, and desire. Drawing from rare archives that range from oral histories to vice squad reports, this collection’s authors uncover the sites and people of Newark’s queer past in bars, discos, ballrooms, and churches. Exploring the intersections of class, race, gender, and sexuality, they offer fresh perspectives on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, community relations with police, Latinx immigration, and gentrification, while considering how to best tell the rich and complex stories of queer urban life. Queer Newark reveals a new side of New Jersey’s largest city while rewriting the history of LGBTQ life in America.

Read more less

The decade from 2000 to 2009 is framed, at one end, by the traumatic catastrophe of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and, at the other, by the election of the first African American president of the United States. In between, the United States and the world witnessed the rapid expansion of new media and the Internet, such natural disasters as Hurricane Katrina, political uprisings around the world, and a massive meltdown of world economies.Amid these crises and revolutions, American films responded in multiple ways, sometimes directly reflecting these turbulent times, and sometimes indirectly couching history in traditional genres and stories. In American Cinema of the 2000s, essays from ten top film scholars examine such popular series as the groundbreaking Matrix films and the gripping adventures of former CIA covert operative Jason Bourne; new, offbeat films like Juno; and the resurgence of documentaries like Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Each essay demonstrates the complex ways in which American culture and American cinema are bound together in subtle and challenging ways.

Read more less

Watching While Black Rebooted: The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences examines what watching while Black means in an expanded U.S. televisual landscape. In this updated edition, media scholars return to television and digital spaces to think anew about what engages and captures Black audiences and users and why it matters. Contributors traverse programs and platforms to wrestle with a changing television industry that has exploded and included Black audiences as a new and central target of its visioning. The book illuminates history, care, monetization, and affect. Within these frames, the chapters run the gamut from transmediation, regional relevance, and superhuman visioning to historical traumas and progress, queer possibilities, and how televisual programming can make viewers feel Black. Mostly, the work tackles what the future looks like now for a changing televisual industry, Black media makers, and Black audiences. Chapters rethink such historically significant programs as Roots and Underground, such seemingly innocuous programs as Soul Food, and such contemporary and culturally complicated programs as Being Mary Jane and Atlanta. The book makes a case for the centrality of these programs while always recognizing the racial dynamics that continue to shape Black representation on the small screen. Painting a decidedly introspective portrait across forty years of Black television, Watching While Black Rebooted sheds much-needed light on under examined demographics, broadens common audience considerations, and gives deference to the preferences of audiences and producers of Black-targeted programming.

Read more less

Colombia’s headline story, about the peace process with guerrilla and its attendant controversies, does not consider the fundamental contradiction of a nation that spans generosity and violence, warmth and hatred—products of its particular pattern of invasion, dispossession, and enslavement. The Persistence of Violence fills that gap in understanding. Colombia is a place that is two countries in one—the ideal and the real—summed up in the idiomatic expression, not unique to Colombia, but particularly popular there, "Hecha la ley, hecha la trampa" (When you pass a law, you create a loophole). Less cynically, and more poetically, the Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez deemed Colombians capable of both the most noble acts and the most abject ones, in a world where it seems anyone might do anything, from the beautiful to the horrendous.The Persistence of Violence draws on those contradictions and paradoxes to look at how violence—and resistance to it—characterize Colombian popular culture, from football to soap opera to journalism to tourism to the environment.

Read more less

2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title With mass migration changing the configuration of societies worldwide, we can look to the Caribbean to reflect on the long-standing, entangled relations between countries and areas as uneven in size and influence as the United States, Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. More so than other world regions, the Caribbean has been characterized as an always already colonial region. It has long been a key area for empires warring over influence spheres in the new world, and where migration waves from Africa, Europe, and Asia accompanied every political transformation over the last five centuries. In Caribbean Migrations, an interdisciplinary group of humanities and social science scholars study migration from a long-term perspective, analyzing the Caribbean's "unincorporated subjects" from a legal, historical, and cultural standpoint, and exploring how despite often fractured public spheres, Caribbean intellectuals, artists, filmmakers, and writers have been resourceful at showcasing migration as the hallmark of our modern age.

Read more less

Bollywood’s New Woman examines Bollywood’s construction and presentation of the Indian Woman since the 1990s. The groundbreaking collection illuminates the contexts and contours of this contemporary figure that has been identified in sociological and historical discourses as the “New Woman.” On the one hand, this figure is a variant of the fin de siècle phenomenon of the “New Woman” in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the Indian context, the New Woman is a distinct articulation resulting from the nation’s tryst with neoliberal reform, consolidation of the middle class, and the ascendency of aggressive Hindu Right politics.

Read more less

Implementing Inequality argues that the international development industry’s internal dynamics—between international and national staff, and among policy makers, administrators, and implementers—shape interventions and their outcomes as much as do the external dynamics of global political economy. Through an ethnographic study in postwar Angola, the book demonstrates how the industry’s internal social pressures guide development’s methods and goals, introducing the innovative concept of the development implementariat: those in-country workers, largely but not exclusively “local” staff members, charged with carrying out development’s policy prescriptions. The implementariat is central to the development endeavor but remains overlooked and under-supported as most of its work is deeply social, interactive, and relational, the kind of work that receives less recognition and support than it deserves at every echelon of the industry. If international development is to meet its larger purpose, it must first address its internal inequalities of work and professional class.

Read more less

College Belonging reveals how colleges’ and universities’ efforts to foster a sense of belonging in their students are misguided. Colleges bombard new students with the message to “get out there!” and “find your place” by joining student organizations, sports teams, clubs and the like. Nunn shows that this reflects a flawed understanding of what belonging is and how it works. Drawing on the sociological theories of Emile Durkheim, College Belonging shows that belonging is something that members of a community offer to each other. It is something that must be given, like a gift. Individuals cannot simply walk up to a group or community and demand belonging. That’s not how it works. The group must extend a sense of belonging to each and every member. It happens by making a person feel welcome, to feel that their presence matters to the group, that they would be missed if they were gone. This critical insight helps us understand why colleges' push for students simply to “get out there!” does not always work.

Read more less

The Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities have typically been associated with strict religious observance, a renunciation of worldly things, and an obedience of women to men. Women’s relationship to media in these communities, however, betrays a more nuanced picture of the boundaries at play and women’s roles in negotiating them. Strictly Observant presents a compelling ethnographic study of the complex dynamic between women in both the Pennsylvanian Old Order Amish and Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities and contemporary media technologies. These women regularly establish valuable social, cultural, and religious capital through the countless decisions for use and nonuse of media that they make in their daily lives, and in ways that challenge the gender hierarchies of each community. By exhibiting a deep awareness of how media can be managed to increase their social and religious reputations, these women prompt us to reconsider our outmoded understanding of the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, the role that women play in these communities as agents of change, and our own relationship to media today.

Read more less

When oil and gas exploration was expanding across Aotearoa New Zealand, Patricia Widener was there interviewing affected residents and environmental and climate activists, and attending community meetings and anti-drilling rallies. Exploration was occurring on an unprecedented scale when oil disasters dwelled in recent memory, socioecological worries were high, campaigns for climate action were becoming global, and transitioning toward a low carbon society seemed possible. Yet unlike other communities who have experienced either an oil spill, or hydraulic fracturing, or offshore exploration, or climate fears, or disputes over unresolved Indigenous claims, New Zealanders were facing each one almost simultaneously. Collectively, these grievances created the foundation for an organized civil society to construct and then magnify a comprehensive critical oil narrative--in dialogue, practice, and aspiration. Community advocates and socioecological activists mobilized for their health and well-being, for their neighborhoods and beaches, for Planet Earth and Planet Ocean, and for terrestrial and aquatic species and ecosystems. They rallied against toxic, climate-altering pollution; the extraction of fossil fuels; a myriad of historic and contemporary inequities; and for local, just, and sustainable communities, ecologies, economies, and/or energy sources. In this allied ethnography, quotes are used extensively to convey the tenor of some of the country’s most passionate and committed people. By analyzing the intersections of a social movement and the political economy of oil, Widener reveals a nuanced story of oil resistance and promotion at a time when many anti-drilling activists believed themselves to be on the front lines of the industry’s inevitable decline.

Read more less

Shortlisted for the 2020 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize​Winner of the 2019 Art Journal Prize from the College Art Association What is the role of pleasure and pain in the politics of art? In Touched Bodies, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra approaches this question as she examines the flourishing of live and intermedial performance in Latin America during times of authoritarianism and its significance during transitions to democracy. Based on original documents and innovative readings, her book brings politics and ethics to the discussion of artistic developments during the “long 1980s”. She describes the rise of performance art in the context of feminism, HIV-activism, and human right movements, taking a close look at the work of Diamela Eltit and Raúl Zurita from Chile, León Ferrari and Liliana Maresca from Argentina, and Marcos Kurtycz, the No Grupo art collective, and Proceso Pentágono from Mexico. The comparative study of the work of these artists attests to a performative turn in Latin American art during the 1980s that, like photography and film before, recast the artistic field as a whole, changing the ways in which we perceive art and understand its role in society.

Read more less

The Devil's Fruit describes the facets of the strawberry industry as a harm industry, and explores author Dvera Saxton’s activist ethnographic work with farmworkers in response to health and environmental injustices. She argues that dealing with devilish—as in deadly, depressing, disabling, and toxic—problems requires intersecting ecosocial, emotional, ethnographic, and activist labors. Through her work as an activist medical anthropologist, she found the caring labors of engaged ethnography take on many forms that go in many different directions. Through chapters that examine farmworkers’ embodiment of toxic pesticides and social and workplace relationships, Saxton critically and reflexively describes and analyzes the ways that engaged and activist ethnographic methods, frameworks, and ethics aligned and conflicted, and in various ways helped support still ongoing struggles for farmworker health and environmental justice in California. These are problems shared by other agricultural communities in the U.S. and throughout the world.

Read more less

Though colleges and universities are arguably paying more attention to diversity and inclusion than ever before, to what extent do their efforts result in more socially just campuses? Intersectionality and Higher Education examines how race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, age, disability, nationality, and other identities connect to produce intersected campus experiences. Contributors look at both the individual and institutional perspectives on issues like campus climate, race, class, and gender disparities, LGBTQ student experiences, undergraduate versus graduate students, faculty and staff from varying socioeconomic backgrounds, students with disabilities, undocumented students, and the intersections of two or more of these topics. Taken together, this volume presents an evidence-backed vision of how the twenty-first century higher education landscape should evolve in order to meaningfully support all participants, reduce marginalization, and reach for equity and equality.

Read more less

Honorable Mention, 2021 Outstanding First Book Award from the Memory Studies Association Today, nearly any group or nation with violence in its past has constructed or is planning a memorial museum as a mechanism for confronting past trauma, often together with truth commissions, trials, and/or other symbolic or material reparations. Exhibiting Atrocity documents the emergence of the memorial museum as a new cultural form of commemoration, and analyzes its use in efforts to come to terms with past political violence and to promote democracy and human rights. Through a global comparative approach, Amy Sodaro uses in-depth case studies of five exemplary memorial museums that commemorate a range of violent pasts and allow for a chronological and global examination of the trend: the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC; the House of Terror in Budapest, Hungary; the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda; the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile; and the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York. Together, these case studies illustrate the historical emergence and global spread of the memorial museum and show how this new cultural form of commemoration is intended to be used in contemporary societies around the world. Download open access ebook.

Read more less

Winner of the 2018 First Book Prize from the Association for the Study of Food and Society For the past four decades, increasing numbers of Americans have started paying greater attention to the food they eat, buying organic vegetables, drinking fine wines, and seeking out exotic cuisines. Yet they are often equally passionate about the items they refuse to eat: processed foods, generic brands, high-carb meals. While they may care deeply about issues like nutrition and sustainable agriculture, these discriminating diners also seek to differentiate themselves from the unrefined eater, the common person who lives on junk food.Discriminating Taste argues that the rise of gourmet, ethnic, diet, and organic foods must be understood in tandem with the ever-widening income inequality gap. Offering an illuminating historical perspective on our current food trends, S. Margot Finn draws numerous parallels with the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, an era infamous for its class divisions, when gourmet dinners, international cuisines, slimming diets, and pure foods first became fads. Examining a diverse set of cultural touchstones ranging from Ratatouille to The Biggest Loser, Finn identifies the key ways that “good food” has become conflated with high status. She also considers how these taste hierarchies serve as a distraction, leading middle-class professionals to focus on small acts of glamorous and virtuous consumption while ignoring their class’s larger economic stagnation. A provocative look at the ideology of contemporary food culture, Discriminating Taste teaches us to question the maxim that you are what you eat.

Read more less

Feminist anthropology emerged in the 1970s as a much-needed corrective to the discipline’s androcentric biases. Far from being a marginalized subfield, it has been at the forefront of developments that have revolutionized not only anthropology, but also a host of other disciplines. This landmark collection of essays provides a contemporary overview of feminist anthropology’s historical and theoretical origins, the transformations it has undergone, and the vital contributions it continues to make to cutting-edge scholarship. Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century brings together a variety of contributors, giving a voice to both younger researchers and pioneering scholars who offer insider perspectives on the field’s foundational moments. Some chapters reveal how the rise of feminist anthropology shaped—and was shaped by—the emergence of fields like women’s studies, black and Latina studies, and LGBTQ studies. Others consider how feminist anthropologists are helping to frame the direction of developing disciplines like masculinity studies, affect theory, and science and technology studies. Spanning the globe—from India to Canada, from Vietnam to Peru—Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century reveals the important role that feminist anthropologists have played in worldwide campaigns against human rights abuses, domestic violence, and environmental degradation. It also celebrates the work they have done closer to home, helping to explode the developed world’s preconceptions about sex, gender, and sexuality.

Read more less

Judaism makes the bold argument that the very concept of a religion of ‘Judaism’ is an invention of the Christian church. The intellectual journey of world-renowned Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin, this book will change the study of “Judaism”—an essential key word in Jewish Studies—as we understand it today. Boyarin argues that although the world treats the word “Judaism” as appropriate for naming an alleged religion of the Jews, it is in fact a Christian theological concept only adopted by Jews with the coming of modernity and the adoption of Christian languages.

Read more less

Since its initial publication, Loft Living has become the classic analysis of the emergence of artists as a force of gentrification and the related rise of “creative city” policies around the world. This 25th anniversary edition, with a new introduction, illustrates how loft living has spread around the world and that artists’ districts—trailing the success of SoHo in New York—have become a global tourist attraction. Sharon Zukin reveals the economic shifts and cultural transformations that brought widespread attention to artists as lifestyle models and agents of urban change, and explains their role in attracting investors and developers to the derelict loft districts where they made their home.Prescient and dramatic, Loft Living shows how a declining downtown Manhattan became a popular “scene,” how loft apartments became hot commodities for the middle class, and how investors, corporations, and rich elites profited from deindustrializing the city’s factory districts and turning them into trendy venues for art galleries, artisanal restaurants, and bars. However, this edition points out that the artists who led the trend are now priced out of the loft market. Even in New York, where the loft living market was born, artists have no legal claim on loft districts, nor do they get any preferential treatment in the harsh real estate market.From the story of SoHo in Lower Manhattan to SoWa in Boston and SoMa in San Francisco, Zukin explains how once-edgy districts are transformed into high-price neighborhoods, and how no city can restrain the juggernaut of rising property values.

Read more less

While the practice of surrogacy has existed for millennia, new fertility technologies have allowed women to act as gestational surrogates, carrying children that are not genetically their own. While some women volunteer to act as gestational surrogates for friends or family members, others get paid for performing this service. The first ethnographic study of gestational surrogacy in the United States, Labor of Love examines the conflicted attitudes that emerge when the ostensibly priceless act of bringing a child into the world becomes a paid occupation. Heather Jacobson interviews not only surrogate mothers, but also their family members, the intended parents who employ surrogates, and the various professionals who work to facilitate the process. Seeking to understand how gestational surrogates perceive their vocation, she discovers that many regard surrogacy as a calling, but are reluctant to describe it as a job. In the process, Jacobson dissects the complex set of social attitudes underlying this resistance toward conceiving of pregnancy as a form of employment. Through her extensive field research, Jacobson gives readers a firsthand look at the many challenges faced by gestational surrogates, who deal with complicated medical procedures, delicate work-family balances, and tricky social dynamics. Yet Labor of Love also demonstrates the extent to which advances in reproductive technology are affecting all Americans, changing how we think about maternity, family, and the labor involved in giving birth. For more, visit http://www.heatherjacobsononline.com/

Read more less