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Adopting for God focuses on the role of adoption evangelists in the transnational adoption movement between the United States and East Asia. It argues that both evangelical and ecumenical Christians challenged Americans to redefine traditional familial values and rethink race matters. Evangelical social awareness, ecumenical missionaries’ active anti-racist propaganda, and the latter’s increasing interest in global friendship all contributed to the inauguration and spread of transnational adoptions from East Asia. By challenging the perspective that equates missionary humanitarianism with unmitigated cultural imperialism, this book offers a more complete and nuanced picture of the rise of an important twentieth-century movement. Adopting for God adds to the growing body of literature about how missionary cosmopolitanism changed America by underlining the ways adoption evangelists’ campaign for the adoption of mixed-race children challenged American perceptions of race and family.

In the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, an observation saliently circulated in public: Black children are not seen as children. Yet when and how is black embodiment of any age accurately seen? Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life argues that age for people of the black diaspora has been historically constituted as “untimely.” Over various phases of the transatlantic slave trade, the black body had been separated from hegemonic relations to human time. Black age became contingent, malleable, and suited for the needs of enslavement. As a result, black embodiment became figural of any age at all, and age itself came to signify the inhumanness of blackness. Black Age posits that age is an analytical category that reveals where alternative humanisms exist, and is a figure of a counter-historical temporality of modernity. By building on Hortense Spillers’s influential theorization of blackness as having been “ungendered” during transport across the Atlantic Ocean, this book argues that blackness is concomitantly “unaged,” a process thought of as “Oceanic lifespans.” This book uncovers how critical observations of black age’s untimeliness arise from black feminist critiques of liberal humanism from the 1970s onward. By focusing on black literary culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this book examines how the history of transatlantic slavery and the constitution of modern blackness has been reimagined through the embodiment of age. Black Age tracks the struggle between the abuses of black exclusion from western humanism and the reclamation of non-normative black life.

This book draws on ethnographic research in Milwaukee’s courts to show that contemporary sexual assault adjudication relies on new technologies and science to tell old stories about sexual violence, race, crime, and gender. The book shows how forensic technology and forensic science fail to resolve questions of guilt and innocence. Instead, science interweaves with cultural narratives about sexual violence and race. Attorneys included forensic evidence in their cases, such as expert testimony and corroborating material evidence, including DNA, simply because jurors expected it. The copious time and energy spent on explaining the presence or absence of forensics to the jury effectively reproduced localized cultural narratives about rape, race, sexuality, and respectability. Courtroom adjudication and its reliance on science and expertise are thus crucial sites of legal storytelling, cultural reproduction, and historical artifact that disproportionately sexualize and criminalize Black and brown communities.

The Irish Land War (1879–82) represented a turning point in modern Irish history, a social revolution that was part of a broader ideological moment when established ideas of property and land ownership were fundamentally challenged. A striking aspect of the Land War was its internationalism, spurred by links between different emigrant locations and an awareness of how the Land League’s demands to lower rents, end evictions, and abolish “landlordism” in Ireland connected with wider radical and reform causes. Changing Land provides a detailed investigation of Irish emigrants’ multifaceted activism in Argentina, Scotland, England, the United States, and Ireland itself. It brings unfamiliar figures to the surface and recovers the voices of women and men who have long been on the margins of—or entirely missing from—existing accounts. Retracing these transnational lives reveals new layers of radical circuitry between Ireland and disparate international locations and demonstrates how the Irish land agitation intersected with a range of oppositional movements in the nineteenth century.

It has been a half century since Robert Bellah published “Civil Religion in America,” and in that time much has changed regarding the religious, cultural, social, and political reality of America. This volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars who examine the usefulness of the concept as Bellah articulated it, analyze the ways in which the idea of civil religion has been and can be amended, and apply its perspective to both recently past and current events. The chapters look both back and forward, assessing what can be kept and what is no longer useful to scholars as well as to wider publics.

In the United States, more than seven million people claim to be multiracial, or have racially mixed heritage, parentage, or ancestry. In The Colors of Love, Melinda A. Mills explores how multiracial people navigate their complex—and often misunderstood—identities in romantic relationships. Drawing on sixty interviews with multiracial people in interracial relationships, Mills explores how people define and assert their racial identities both on their own and with their partners. She shows us how similarities and differences in identity, skin color, and racial composition shape how multiracial people choose, experience, and navigate love. Mills highlights the unexpected ways in which multiracial individuals choose to both support and subvert the borders of race as individuals and as romantic partners. The Colors of Love broadens our understanding about race and love in the twenty-first century.

This book analyzes and interrogates the complex ways that race, racial identity, racism, and racial justice are represented, experienced, and addressed in American society, politics, and culture. Drawing from research, narratives, theory, institutional and governmental policies, and media stories, authors illustrate how centuries of racism and white privilege fuel the dynamics of racial inequality today, and created contemporary norms influencing narratives of identity, belonging, racism, and racial justice in rapidly changing contexts. Topics explored include the nature of racial choice, transracial adoption, the connections between the deaths of Black people from police violence and the deaths of economically disadvantaged whites due to despair, the conflation of race and nationality in census policies, white perceptions of wokeness and racial justice, and resistance to applying intersectionality to race and racism. The volume also examines Islamic ideologies in Black oral traditions and Hip Hop, and African cultural change and belonging through Black histories of racial mixture with Native Americans. Intersectionality receives significant attention in chapters centering the lives of GLBTQ People of Color and People of Color who belong to communities of faith marginalized in the United States. Throughout the volume, analyses are grounded in theoretical, historical, and where appropriate legal sources; however, these areas provide the context for the central focus on how race informs contemporary and emerging issues. In addition, authors use multiple specific examples and accessible language to illustrate how the experiences of people marginalized by race can inform new theories, policies, and practices related to identity, community, and social justice.

As media consumption in modern society has expanded, along with the number of outlets by which individuals consume media, there is an ever-growing body of popular television shows that underscore ideas related to criminological theory as well as the criminal justice system. Crime TV provides an examination of criminological theory as well as the criminal justice system as manifested in popular television shows. The contributions to the volume approach these issues from a variety of angles. Some center on classical, positivist, and social structural theories such as techniques of neutralization, labeling theory, and social bonds, using shows including Archer, Criminal Minds, 13 Reasons Why, Breaking Bad, and The Fall. Others highlight critical and cultural criminological frameworks such as radical feminism and conflict theory through shows including The Walking Dead, Mr. Robot, Homeland, The Defenders, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and The Handmaid’s Tale. Finally, several address the criminal justice system and crime through shows including Game of Thrones, American Crime, Westworld, Black Mirror, and Follow the Money. The specific benefits of the current volume are multifaceted. First, it can be used as a pedagogical tool to attract students to criminological theory and the criminal justice system. Second, as a significant proportion of students have access to streaming services, the shows exemplified in the text are generally accessible to them. Third, the volume highlights information pertaining to the criminal justice system and criminological theory commonly misconstrued in pop culture.

Black women are at the forefront of some of this century’s most important discussions about technology: trolling, online harassment, algorithmic bias, and influencer culture. But Black women’s relationship with technology began long before the advent of Twitter or Instagram. To truly “listen to Black women,”Steele points to the history of Black feminist technoculture in the U.S. to decenter white supremacy and patriarchy in the future of technology. Using the virtual beauty shop as a metaphor, Digital Black Feminism walks readers through the technical skill, communicative expertise, and entrepreneurial acumen of Black women’s labor—born of survival strategies and economic necessity—both on- and offline. Digital Black Feminism positions Black women at the center of our discourse about the past, present, and future of technology, offering a through line from the writing of early twentieth-century Black women to the bloggers and social media mavens of the twenty-first century. The blogosphere provided Black feminist writers a unique space to draft principles for a new generation of Black feminist thought, while other online communities offer practical lessons on the praxis of digital Black feminism. Steele makes connections between the letters, news articles, and essays of Black feminist writers of the past and a digital archive of blog posts, tweets, and Instagram stories of some of the most well-known Black feminist writers of our time. As Black feminist writers’ work now reaches its widest audience online, Steele offers hopefulness and caution on Black feminism becoming a product for sale in the digital marketplace.

America’s empire was not made by (or for) adults only. In fact, junior citizens were essential to its creation. Children’s literature during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sought to impart an imperial consciousness among the nation’s youth, while adult authors strived to raise generations of enthusiastic juvenile jingoes. But young people were neither unwitting nor unwilling puppets in the propagation of America’s expansionistic foreign policy. Instead, Empire’s Nursery demonstrates that juvenile readers often played an active part in committing the country to adventurism overseas. The history of the United States in the world must therefore make room for the country’s littlest policymakers. As kids eagerly read dime novels, series fiction, pulp magazines, and comic books that dramatized the virtues of empire, they helped entrench a growing belief in America’s indispensability to the international order. The American Century’s actualization ultimately depended, in part, upon the patient work of writers proselytizing among their nation’s many youthful millions.

Bringing together prominent early contributions from this emergent perspective, the volume traces the origins, theory, and method of ghost criminology. From the powers of exorcism and erasure marshalled by state agents, street-level struggles over memorialization and memory, to the lingering violence of crime scenes and the ghostly traces of outlaw artists, Ghost Criminology is a volume attuned to that which is well-theorized in other disciplines—the spectral, hauntological, apparitional. Each of the writers assembled here shares, as Mark Fisher (2017) put it, a fascination for the outside, “that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience.”  Assembling an arsenal of cutting-edge social and cultural theory, the volume tangles with some of criminology’s most stubborn revenants—the politics of criminalization, the commodification of crime and violence, the haunting power of the image, as well as the unheard and disregarded cries of the dead.

The conceptual proposal of a “government of things” takes up important insights and theoretical achievements of new materialist scholarship. It shares the interest in reconceptualizing matter and the focus on the interplay of epistemological, ontological, and ethical issues, and insists on the limits of anthropocentric modes of thought. However, in synthesizing Foucault’s analytics of government with STS-inspired work, the concept of a “government of things” also goes beyond new materialist scholarship. It puts forward a relational and performative account of materialities that more closely attends to the historical and political dimensions of ontologies. The study proposes that the notion of the dispositive, a comprehensive understanding of technology, and a complex reading of the milieu provide elements for a thoroughly relational account of materialism. The first part of the book (“Varieties of Materialism”) engages with three main streams of new materialist scholarship (object-oriented ontology, vital materialism, and agential realism). The second part (“Elements of a More-than-Human Analytics of Government”) turns to Foucault’s work. It seeks to spell out important conceptual and analytical tools for a non-anthropocentric and relational-materialist analytics of government. The third part of the book (“Toward a Relational Materialism”) argues for an alignment of Foucault’s analytics of government with work in STS to better account for contemporary political trajectories and topologies.

Halfway House draws on three and a half years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork to open a window on the little-known web of organizations governing prisoner reentry at the frontier of mass incarceration. It tells the story of Joe Badillo, along with a small cast of connected characters, following the ups and downs of his unfolding experience as he leaves jail and searches for a place in the world outside while confronting overwhelming obstacles. Joe’s first stop after release is Bridge House, and the author moves into the program as a researcher around the same time he arrives, the beginnings of the long-term collaboration at the heart of the book. This deeply personal account is weaved into a larger analysis of the halfway house as an institution, a site of punishment and carceral control as well as housing and social support. With a national push under way for decarceration and alternatives to imprisonment, it provides an opportunity to rethink the pitfalls and possibilities of using the halfway house to challenge the worst excesses of mass incarceration.

Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics explores how fantasy—especially superhero comics, which are usually derided as naïve and childish—is a catalyst for engaging the black radical imagination. Such engagements prompt “fantasy-acts” against antiblackness, a transgressive way of “reading” beyond the comic-book page to envision and to experience alternate, and potentially more just, realities. Fantasies about superhero characters are not just or even primarily forms of escape, Scott argues, but are active reshapings of readers and their worlds. Keeping It Unreal offers a rich meditation on the relationship between fantasy and reality and between the imagination and being, as it weaves Scott’s personal recollections of his encounters with superhero comics with interpretive readings of figures like the Black Panther, Luke Cage, Nubia, and Blade and theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Eve Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Saidiya Hartman, and Gore Vidal. Keeping It Unreal represents an in-depth theoretical consideration of the intersections of superhero comics, blackness, and queerness, and draws on a variety of fields of inquiry, including African American and African diaspora studies, media studies, comics studies, queer theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and black feminism.

Latina girls and women have often been invisible in the U.S. legal systems of juvenile justice, criminal justice, and immigration as well as in the broader criminological research. Latinas in the Criminal Justice System: Victims, Targets, and Offenders remedies this deficit and investigates the histories, backgrounds, and struggles of system-impacted Latinas. It shares understandings about Latina girls’ and women’s experiences with victimization, law violations, and systems of surveillance and punishment. As a project of social justice, Latinas in the Criminal Justice System addresses how ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, legal status, and/or carceral status shape perceptions, interactions, and system involvement. Employing a variety of methodologies and data, Latinas in the Criminal Justice System examines how Latina “victims” of interpersonal violence view their interactions with police officers and other systems actors, how Latina girls and women navigate the juvenile and criminal justice systems, and how undocumented Latina women experience the U.S. “crimmigration” system. The book concludes with suggestions for effective community-based programming.

This book addresses whether and how to tell the story of the law’s infamy. Who tells that story? And for what purpose? Is it a consoling story of progress and redemption, or a piercing story of law covering the tracks of its complicity with evil? Law’s Infamy examines when and why the word “infamy” should be used to characterize legal decisions or actions taken in the name of the law. It does so while acknowledging that law’s infamy is by no means a familiar locution. More commonly, the stories we tell of law’s failures talk of injustices not infamy. Labelling a legal decision “infamous” suggests a distinctive kind of injustice, one that is particularly evil or wicked. Doing so means that such a decision cannot be redeemed or reformed; it can only be repudiated.

The Myth of Colorblind Christians uncovers the little-known history of black and white evangelical encounters in the second half of the twentieth century. Amid the upheavals of the civil rights movement, black evangelicals insisted there must be no color line in the body of Christ. In an effort to preserve the credibility of their movement, white evangelicals discarded theologies of white supremacy and embraced a new theology of Christian colorblindness. But instead of using this colorblind theology for antiracist purposes, white evangelicals found new ways to invest in whiteness in the name of spreading the gospel. Through their churches, schools, and parachurch ministries, white evangelicals prioritized the interests and identities of the white majority while embracing the rhetoric of Christian unity. When black evangelicals demanded more concrete racial reforms, white evangelicals responded that these race-conscious efforts threatened the unity of the body of Christ. The Myth ofColorblind Christians shows that white evangelicals’ turn to a theology of colorblindness enabled them to create an evangelical brand of whiteness that occupied the center of American evangelicalism and shaped the American racial order from the 1960s to the 1990s. The claims of Christian colorblindness became key drivers of evangelical identity and infused the nation’s colorblind racial order with sacred fervor. At the center of colorblindness’s enduring appeal in American life was the vitality of evangelical religion.

Through a digital ethnography of the lives of young adult Black Christians this book examines hip hop as a deeply spiritual practice. This work argues that digital Black Christians have created a new space in and beyond the Black Church, one that is linguistic and socio-temporal in design. In the process, they are changing physically located Black Churches, modes of church activism, communication practices around evangelism and Christian identity, and the transmission and consumption of Black Church cultural practices in popular culture. Digital Black Christians suggests a new direction in how we study people of faith in all ages and races, and in what constitutes “committed adherents.” The work examines the relationships, identity-formation, valuation, and visibility-seeking that occurs online, as these intimacies are intrinsic to many people’s religious experience. In outlining the intimacies that such technologies mediate and mediatize, this book implores us all—preachers, practitioners, and scholars alike—to catch up.

While pilgrimage often focuses on sacred shrines, it can also occur in apparently mundane places. Indeed, not everyone has the resources or mobility to take part in religiously inspired movement to foreign lands, and some find meaning in religious movement closer to home and outside of officially sanctioned practices. This book argues that we must question the universality of Western assumptions of what religion is and where it should be located, including the notion that pilgrimage needs to be associated with discrete, formally recognized forms of religiosity. The volume makes the case for expanding our ethnographic and analytical gaze in reconsidering the salience, scope, and scale of contemporary forms of pilgrimage and pilgrimage-related activity. It argues for the need to reflect on how pilgrimage sites, journeys, rituals, stories, and metaphors are entangled with each other and with wider aspects of people’s lives, ranging from an action as trivial as a stroll down the street to the magnitude of forced migration to another country or continent. The book offers a new theoretical lexicon and framework for exploring human pilgrimage. It presents a broad overview of how we can understand pilgrimage activity and explores what happens at sites themselves as well as the preparations for, and the aftermath of, going on pilgrimage.

Drawing on the case of Ohio black ministers and their voter-mobilization efforts leading up to President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, this book addresses when, how, and why black ministers engage in broad-based mobilization in the twenty-first-century United States. We learn they can indeed mobilize, and they can do so effectively and efficiently. Black religious leaders across Ohio mobilized the black vote in 2012. Their efforts, it seems, paid off. For the first time, we saw a greater proportion of the black electorate vote than the white electorate. The question begs: If black religious leaders could collectively mobilize on a broad scale for the black vote, why have they not done so for black lives? We propose four factors affecting contemporary black ministers’ engagement in mobilization: post-civil-rights-era racism, changes in the field of organizing, nostalgic reverence for the civil rights movement, and the structure of the black minister network. In many ways, the very thing that sustains the black religious leader community also constrains black ministers’ capacity to mobilize in today’s world.