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Academic Profiling: Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Achievement Gap

Gilda L. Ochoa

Academic Profiling focuses on the schooling experiences and relationships between the two fastest growing groups in the United States—Asian Americans and Latinas/os. At a time when politicians and ... More

Academic Profiling focuses on the schooling experiences and relationships between the two fastest growing groups in the United States—Asian Americans and Latinas/os. At a time when politicians and pundits debate the sources of an achievement gap, Academic Profiling turns our attention to students, teachers, and parents to learn about the opportunity and social gaps within schools. In candid and at times heart-wrenching detail, students in a California public high school share stories of support and neglect on their paths to graduation. Separated by unequal middle schools and curriculum tracking, students are divided by race/ethnicity, class, and gender. While those in an International Baccalaureate Program boast about socratic classes and stress release-sessions, students outside of such programs bemoan unengaged teaching and inaccessible counselors. Labeled “the elite,” “regular,” “smart,” or “stupid,” students encounter differential policing and assumptions based on their abilities. These disparities are compounded by the growth in the private tutoring industry where wealthier families can afford to spend thousands of dollars to enhance their children’s opportunities, furthering an accumulation of privileges. However, in spite of the entrenchment of inequality in today’s schools, Academic Profiling uncovers multiple forms of resilience and the ways that students and teachers are affirming identities, creating alternative spaces, and fostering critical consciousness. As the story of this California high school unfolds, we also learn about the possibilities and limits of change when Gilda L. Ochoa shares the research findings with the high school.Less

Airport Urbanism: Infrastructure and Mobility in Asia

Max Hirsh

Airport Urbanism studies the exponential leap of global air traffic since the 1980s and its implications for the planning and designing of five East and Southeast Asian cities. Focusing on the ... More

Airport Urbanism studies the exponential leap of global air traffic since the 1980s and its implications for the planning and designing of five East and Southeast Asian cities. Focusing on the low-cost, informal, and “transborder” transportation networks used by newer members of the flying public, the book uncovers the architecture of an emerging global mobility that has been inconspicuously inserted into buildings and places that are not typically associated with the infrastructure of international air travel. The primary focus is in Asia, with research conducted in five different locations: China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Unique security clearance has allowed for access to the restricted zones of airports, unpublished maps, and photographs. In all, the book combines research tools from the humanities and design professions in order to advance an innovative approach to the study of rapidly developing Asian cities in relation to the increase of air travel.Less

American by Paper: How Documents Matter in Immigrant Literacy

Kate Vieira

American by Paper is a book about the consequences of papers—visas, green cards, and passports—for immigrant literacy. For immigrants, papers can mean the difference between family reunification and ... More

American by Paper is a book about the consequences of papers—visas, green cards, and passports—for immigrant literacy. For immigrants, papers can mean the difference between family reunification and separation, a living wage and poverty, and sometimes life and death. Documented and undocumented, all 40 million migrants currently living in the U.S. must deal with papers. They often do so through everyday acts of writing. An ethnographic study, American by Papertells the story of how migrants write to attain papers, how they write when they cannot attain papers, and how their writing can function as papers. It describes how migrants in two communities—one from the Azores, largely documented, and one from Brazil, largely undocumented—come to experience literacy not as a means of assimilation, as educational policy makers often believe, nor as a means of empowerment, as literacy scholars often hope, but instead as enmeshed in papers, those authoritative bureaucratic objects that are the currency of highly literate societies and that powerfully regulate transnational lives.Less

The American Dream in Vietnamese

Nhi T. Lieu

Using research on popular culture of the Vietnamese diaspora, this book explores how people displaced by war reconstruct cultural identity in the aftermath of migration. Embracing American democratic ... More

Using research on popular culture of the Vietnamese diaspora, this book explores how people displaced by war reconstruct cultural identity in the aftermath of migration. Embracing American democratic ideals and consumer capitalism prior to arriving in the United States, postwar Vietnamese refugees endeavored to assimilate and live the American Dream. The text claims that nowhere are these fantasies played out more vividly than in the Vietnamese American entertainment industry. The book examines how live music variety shows and videos, beauty pageants, and websites created by and for Vietnamese Americans contributed to the shaping of their cultural identity. It shows how popular culture forms repositories for conflicting expectations of assimilation, cultural preservation, and invention, alongside gendered and classed dimensions of ethnic and diasporic identity. This text demonstrates how the circulation of images manufactured by both Americans and Vietnamese immigrants serves to produce these immigrants’ paradoxical desires. Within these desires and their representations, the book finds the dramatization of the community’s struggle to define itself against the legacy of the refugee label, a classification that continues to pathologize their experiences in American society.Less

American Pietàs: Visions of Race, Death, and the Maternal

Ruby C. Tapia

This book reveals how visual representations of racialized motherhood shape and reflect national citizenship. By means of a sustained engagement with Roland Barthes’s suturing of race, death, and the ... More

This book reveals how visual representations of racialized motherhood shape and reflect national citizenship. By means of a sustained engagement with Roland Barthes’s suturing of race, death, and the maternal in Camera Lucida, the book contends that the contradictory essence of the photograph is both a signifier of death and a guarantor of resurrection. The book explores the implications of this argument for racialized productions of death and the maternal in the context of specific cultural moments: the commemoration of Princess Diana in U.S. magazines; the intertext of Toni Morrison’s and Hollywood’s Beloved; the social and cultural death in teen pregnancy, imaged and regulated in California’s Partnership for Responsible Parenting campaigns; and popular constructions of the “Widows of 9/11” in print and televisual journalism. Taken together, these various visual media texts function in American Pietàs as cultural artifacts and as visual nodes in a larger network of racialized productions of maternal bodies in contexts of national death and remembering. To engage this network is to ask how and toward what end the racial project of the nation imbues some maternal bodies with resurrecting power and leaves others for dead. In the spaces between these different maternities, states this book, U.S. citizen-subjects are born—and reborn.Less

The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation

Simon Springer

The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation sets the stage for the radical politics of possibility and freedom through a discussion of the insurrectionary geographies that suffuse ... More

The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation sets the stage for the radical politics of possibility and freedom through a discussion of the insurrectionary geographies that suffuse our daily experiences. This book is the first major study of the concept of anarchist geographies. It realigns radical geography away from Marxism and back to its original trajectory of anarchism. It ultimately encourages a relational understanding of space, wherein anarchism is recognized as a holistic and everyday form of emancipationfrom statistic, capitalistic, homophobic, racist, sexist, and imperialistic ideas.Less

Answer the Call: Virtual Migration in Indian Call Centers

Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Sheena Malhotra, and Kimberlee Pérez

Answer the Call explores the daily, psychic journeys Indian call center agents undergo as they virtually migrate between India and the U.S. The new time-space relations generated by this virtual ... More

Answer the Call explores the daily, psychic journeys Indian call center agents undergo as they virtually migrate between India and the U.S. The new time-space relations generated by this virtual contact create conditions for these workers to undergo a global “migration” from India and to America, even as their bodies remain bounded within the national homeland. This temporal arrangement displaces them from the daily rhythms of Indian life, generating a sense of loss, longing, and nostalgia for “India.” Further, while agents experience a sense of distance from India, they also experience a movement toward “America.” Agents’ accounts suggest a feeling of living between worlds, yet their movement is decoupled from physical migration. Call center agents migrate not through space, but through time. While virtual migration has no geographically distant point of arrival, the experience of moving between India and America is not merely imagined. Something is happening to agents’ sense of place and time, and yet this something falls somewhere, as agents explain, in-between: between India and America, migrating and remaining within the homeland, diasporic subject and Indian citizen; between experience and imagination; between class mobility and consumption; between here and there, then and now, past and future, tradition and modernity. Call center agents live and work between these multiple cracks of material culture. Our detailed investigation of their stories unpacks the dense cultural lives agents live as they dwell in the potentiality of virtual migration that affords them spatio-temporal, class, and citizenship mobility.Less

Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit As America's Postindustrial Frontier

Rebecca J. Kinney

Beautiful Wasteland critically examines the racial logics embedded in the contemporary stories of Detroit that flow through popular culture, from Internet forums, photography, films, advertising, to ... More

Beautiful Wasteland critically examines the racial logics embedded in the contemporary stories of Detroit that flow through popular culture, from Internet forums, photography, films, advertising, to news medias, in order to map the extension of the mythology of the frontier in American culture. Through analysing the cross-sections of these cultural locations, the book reveals the continued process of racialization in stories told about the rise, fall, and potential rise again of the city of Detroit. Detroit is indeed a ‘beautiful wasteland’, desirable and distressed in its narrative of ruin. The book is primarily a humanities-based audience. However, it is also interdisciplinary in focus in terms of theoretical and methodological intervention, as the study of the circulation of narratives is always in conversation with other ideas and discourses.Less

Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco

Zakia Salime

There are two major women’s movements in Morocco: the Islamists who hold sharia as the platform for building a culture of women’s rights, and the feminists who use the United Nations’ framework to ... More

There are two major women’s movements in Morocco: the Islamists who hold sharia as the platform for building a culture of women’s rights, and the feminists who use the United Nations’ framework to amend sharia law. This book shows how the interactions of these movements over the past two decades have transformed the debates, the organization, and the strategies of each other. This book looks at three key movement moments: the 1992 feminist One Million Signature Campaign, the 2000 Islamist mass rally opposing the reform of family law, and the 2003 Casablanca attacks by a group of Islamist radicals. At the core of these moments are disputes over legitimacy, national identity, gender representations, and political negotiations for shaping state gender policies. Located at the intersection of feminism and Islam, these conflicts have led to the Islamization of feminists on the one hand and the feminization of Islamists on the other. Documenting the synergistic relationship between these movements, this text reveals how the boundaries of feminism and Islamism have been radically reconfigured. It offers a conceptual framework for studying social movements, one that allows us to understand how Islamic feminism is influencing global debates on human rights.Less

A Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle: The Life of Harry Haywood

Harry Haywood

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (ed.)

Mustering out of the U.S. army in 1919, Harry Haywood stepped into a battle that was to last the rest of his life. Within months, he found himself in the middle of one of the bloodiest race riots in ... More

Mustering out of the U.S. army in 1919, Harry Haywood stepped into a battle that was to last the rest of his life. Within months, he found himself in the middle of one of the bloodiest race riots in U.S. history and realized that he’d been fighting the wrong war—the real enemy was right here at home. This book is an eloquent account of coming of age as a black man in twentieth-century America and of his political awakening in the Communist Party. For all its cultural and historical interest, this story is also noteworthy for its considerable narrative drama. The son of parents born into slavery, the text tells of how Haywood grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, found his first job as a shoeshine boy in Minneapolis, then went on to work as a waiter on trains and in restaurants in Chicago. After fighting in France during the war, he studied how to make revolutions in Moscow during the 1920s, led the Communist Party’s move into the Deep South in 1931, helped to organize the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys, worked with the Sharecroppers Union, supported protests in Chicago against Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, fought with the International Brigades in Spain, served in the Merchant Marines during World War II, and continued to fight for the right of self-determination for the Afro-American nation in the United States until his death in 1985.Less

Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity

C. Riley Snorton

In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and ... More

In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials, Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable.Less

Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America

Anthony Ryan Hatch

The Politics of Metabolism analyses the racial ideas that underpin the metabolic syndrome as a new biomedical construction that aims to transform how contemporary medicine understands and treats ... More

The Politics of Metabolism analyses the racial ideas that underpin the metabolic syndrome as a new biomedical construction that aims to transform how contemporary medicine understands and treats metabolic health problems. It explains how metabolism serves as a site for the kind of society that simultaneously manufactures health problems and their remedies, deploys race as a way of concealing inequality, and constructs powerful ideas like metabolic syndrome to sever the relationship between body and society.Less

Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination

Alondra Nelson

Between its founding in 1966 and its formal end in 1980, the Black Panther Party blazed a distinctive trail in American political culture. The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their ... More

Between its founding in 1966 and its formal end in 1980, the Black Panther Party blazed a distinctive trail in American political culture. The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. This book recovers an indispensable but lesser-known aspect of the organization’s broader struggle for social justice: health care. The Black Panther Party’s health activism—its network of free health clinics, its campaign to raise awareness about genetic disease, and its challenges to medical discrimination—was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms. Drawing on extensive historical research as well as interviews with former members of the Black Panther Party, the book argues that the Party’s focus on health care was both practical and ideological. Building on a long tradition of medical self-sufficiency among African Americans, the Panthers’ People’s Free Medical Clinics administered basic preventive care, tested for lead poisoning and hypertension, and helped with housing, employment, and social services. In 1971, the party launched a campaign to address sickle-cell anemia. In addition to establishing screening programs and educational outreach efforts, it exposed the racial biases of the medical system that had largely ignored sickle-cell anemia, a disease that predominantly affected people of African descent.Less

Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State

Kumarini Silva

Brown Threat makes a critical intervention in U.S based race studies. The book positions a category of ‘brown’ identification (along side identity) as a form of organizing race and racialized ... More

Brown Threat makes a critical intervention in U.S based race studies. The book positions a category of ‘brown’ identification (along side identity) as a form of organizing race and racialized hierarchies in contemporary culture, especially in the wake of September 11. Here, brown is seen as both a product of historical xenophobia and slavery in the United States, and as a newer form of ongoing racism tied to notions of security and securitization. In order to illustrate this process, each chapter maps various junctures where the ideological, political and mediated terrain intersect, resulting in both an appetite for all things ‘brown’ by U.S. consumers, while at the same time various political and nationalist discourses and legal structures conspire to control brown bodies (immigration, emigration, migration, outsourcing, incarceration) both within and outside the United States. The book explores this contradictory relationship between representation and reality, arguing that the representation acts as a way to mediate and manage the anxieties that come from contemporary global realties, where brown spaces, like India, Pakistan, and the amalgamated Middle East, pose significant economic, security, and political challenges to the United States.Less

Building Dignified Worlds: Geographies of Collective Action

Gerda Roelvink

This book explores the question of how contemporary collectives are creating diverse, new forms of creative economies that arrange diverse peoples, animals, natural environments, technologies and ... More

This book explores the question of how contemporary collectives are creating diverse, new forms of creative economies that arrange diverse peoples, animals, natural environments, technologies and others around economic concerns. Like older forms of left association, these collectives seek to bring about change. They do so, however, not by working to overthrow and replace an underlying capitalist ‘system’ with an equally totalising alternative like socialism, but by experimenting with and inventing diverse new forms of economic life in the present. This book examines how economic concerns are formed and the techniques through which concerned groups are gathered and come to create alternative economies. In doing so it maps out a geography of collective action. It takes actor network theories of action as a starting point for thinking about how collective action brings the new into being, and argues that contemporary collectives are best theorised as hybrid collectives. This approach enables an understanding of how collectives initiate change and provides a view to the diverse forces through which they do so, including through the generation of non-discursive bodily experiences such as affects and emotions. In particular, this book argues that the relational and geographical nature of performative action is central to understanding the way in which hybrid collectives create alternative economies.Less

Cape Town after Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City

Tony Roshan Samara

Nearly two decades after the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, how different does the nation look? In Cape Town, is hardening inequality under conditions of neoliberal globalization actually ... More

Nearly two decades after the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, how different does the nation look? In Cape Town, is hardening inequality under conditions of neoliberal globalization actually reproducing the repressive governance of the apartheid era? By exploring issues of urban security and development, this book brings to light the features of urban apartheid that increasingly mark not only Cape Town but also the global cities of our day—cities as diverse as Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and Beijing. The text focuses on urban renewal and urban security policies and practices in the city center and townships as this aspiring world-class city actively pursues a neoliberal approach to development. The city’s attempt to escape its past is, however, constrained by crippling inequalities, racial and ethnic tensions, political turmoil, and persistent insecurity. He book shows how governance in Cape Town remains rooted in the perceived need to control dangerous populations and protect a somewhat fragile and unpopular economic system. In urban areas around the world, where the affluent minority and poor majority live in relative proximity to each other, aggressive security practices and strict governance reflect and reproduce the divided city.Less

Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Biodiversity

John Hartigan Jr.

Care of the Species contributes to debates about the concept of species through vivid ethnography, examining infrastructures of care—labs and gardens in Spain and Mexico—where plant scientists ... More

Care of the Species contributes to debates about the concept of species through vivid ethnography, examining infrastructures of care—labs and gardens in Spain and Mexico—where plant scientists grapple with the complexities of evolution and domestication. In tackling the racial dimension of efforts to go “beyond the human,” this book reveals a far greater stratum of sameness than commonly assumed.Less

The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California

Wendy Cheng

The book examines how the everyday experiences of residents of a multiracial, “majority-minority,” suburban area in Southern California shape distinctive notions of race, privilege, and belonging. At ... More

The book examines how the everyday experiences of residents of a multiracial, “majority-minority,” suburban area in Southern California shape distinctive notions of race, privilege, and belonging. At a moment in which Asian Americans and Latinas/os are becoming a significant presence in American suburbs, such dynamics illustrate the increasingly relevant role of middle-income, majority-nonwhite spaces to understanding racial formation in the twenty-first century. In particular, the development and assertion of an emergent multiracial, nonwhite identity points to the social, cultural, and political possibilities we might find in the rapidly increasing number of “majority-minority” suburbs in the United States to challenge the reproduction of white privilege and racially exclusive notions of belonging. In its conceptualization of regional racial formation, this is the first work to explicitly link the importance of place and place-making to Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s influential concept of racial formation. The main audience for this book will be scholars and students in ethnic studies, American studies, urban and suburban studies, geography, sociology, California and Los Angeles studies.Less

Chicago Hustle and Flow: Gangs, Gangsta Rap, and Social Class

Geoff Harkness

On September 4, 2012, Joseph Coleman, an eighteen-year-old aspiring gangsta rapper, was gunned down in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. Police immediately began investigating the connections ... More

On September 4, 2012, Joseph Coleman, an eighteen-year-old aspiring gangsta rapper, was gunned down in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. Police immediately began investigating the connections between Coleman’s murder and an online war of words and music he was having with another Chicago rapper in a rival gang. This book points out how common this type of incident can be when rap groups form as extensions of gangs. Gangs and rap music, it argues, can be a deadly combination. Set in one of the largest underground music scenes in the nation, this book takes readers into the heart of gangsta rap culture in Chicago. From the electric buzz of nightclubs to the sights and sounds of bedroom recording studios, the book presents gripping accounts of the lives, beliefs, and ambitions of the gang members and rappers with whom the author spent six years. A music genre obsessed with authenticity, gangsta rap promised those from crime-infested neighborhoods a ticket out of poverty. But while firsthand experiences with gangs and crime gave rappers a leg up, it also meant carrying weapons and traveling collectively for protection. Street gangs serve as a fan base and provide protection to rappers who bring in income and help to recruit for the gang.Less

Choices Women Make: Agency in Domestic Violence, Assisted Reproduction, and Sex Work

Carisa R. Showden

Women’s agency: Is it a matter of an individual’s capacity for autonomy? Or of the social conditions that facilitate freedom? Combining theoretical and empirical perspectives, this book investigates ... More

Women’s agency: Is it a matter of an individual’s capacity for autonomy? Or of the social conditions that facilitate freedom? Combining theoretical and empirical perspectives, this book investigates what exactly makes an agent and how that agency influences the ways women make inherently sensitive and difficult choices—specifically in instances of domestic violence, assisted reproduction, and sex work. In this book’s analysis, women’s agency emerges as an individual and social construct, rooted in concrete experience, complex and changing over time. It traces the development and deployment of agency, illustrating how it plays out in the messy workings of imperfect lives. In a series of case studies, it considers women within situations of intimate partner violence, reproductive decision making, and sex work such as prostitution and pornography. Each narrative offers insight into how women articulate their self-understanding and political needs in relation to the pressures they confront.Less