A sixty-year history of Afro–South Asian musical collaborations

From Beyoncé’s South Asian music–inspired Super Bowl Halftime performance, to jazz artists like John and Alice Coltrane’s use of Indian song structures and spirituality in their work, to Jay-Z and Missy Elliott’s high-profile collaborations with diasporic South Asian artists such as the Panjabi MC and MIA, African American musicians have frequently engaged South Asian cultural productions in the development of Black music culture. Sounds from the Other Side traces such engagements through an interdisciplinary analysis of the political implications of African American musicians’ South Asian influence since the 1960s.

Elliott H. Powell asks, what happens when we consider Black musicians’ South Asian sonic explorations as distinct from those of their white counterparts? He looks to Black musical genres of jazz, funk, and hip hop and examines the work of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Rick James, OutKast, Timbaland, Beyoncé, and others, showing how Afro–South Asian music in the United States is a dynamic, complex, and contradictory cultural site where comparative racialization, transformative gender and queer politics, and coalition politics intertwine. Powell situates this cultural history within larger global and domestic sociohistorical junctures that link African American and South Asian diasporic communities in the United States.

The long historical arc of Afro–South Asian music in Sounds from the Other Side interprets such music-making activities as highly political endeavors, offering an essential conversation about cross-cultural musical exchanges between racially marginalized musicians.

New edition available: Sounds Like Home: Growing Up Black and Deaf in the South, 20th Anniversary Edition, ISBN 978-1-944838-58-4
Features a new introduction by scholars Joseph Hill and Carolyn McCaskill

Mary Herring Wright’s memoir adds an important dimension to the current literature in that it is a story by and about an African American deaf child. The author recounts her experiences growing up as a deaf person in Iron Mine, North Carolina, from the 1920s through the 1940s. Her story is unique and historically significant because it provides valuable descriptive information about the faculty and staff of the North Carolina school for Black deaf and blind students from the perspective of a student as well as a student teacher. In addition, this engrossing narrative contains details about the curriculum, which included a week-long Black History celebration where students learned about important Blacks such as Madame Walker, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and George Washington Carver. It also describes the physical facilities as well as the changes in those facilities over the years. In addition, Sounds Like Home occurs over a period of time that covers two major events in American history, the Depression and World War II.

Wright’s account is one of enduring faith, perseverance, and optimism. Her keen observations will serve as a source of inspiration for others who are challenged in their own ways by life’s obstacles.

Four decades have passed since reports of a mysterious “gay cancer” first appeared in US newspapers. In the ensuing years, the pandemic that would come to be called AIDS changed the world in innumerable ways. It also gave rise to one of the late twentieth century’s largest health-based empowerment movements. Scholars across diverse traditions have documented the rise of the AIDS activist movement, chronicling the impassioned echoes of protestors who took to the streets to demand “drugs into bodies.”

And yet not all activism creates echoes. Included among the ranks of 1980s and 1990s-era AIDS activists were individuals whose expressions of empowerment differed markedly from those demanding open access to mainstream pharmaceutical agents. Largely forgotten today, this activist tradition was comprised of individuals who embraced unorthodox approaches for conceptualizing and treating their condition. Rejecting biomedical expertise, they shared alternative clinical paradigms, created underground networks for distributing unorthodox nostrums, and endorsed etiological models that challenged the association between HIV and AIDS. The theatre of their protests was not the streets of New York City’s Greenwich Village but rather their bodies. And their language was not the riotous chants of public demonstration but the often-invisible embrace of contrarian systems for defining and treating their disease.

Contributors. Flavia Agnes, Anjali Arondekar, Firdous Azim, Anannya Bhattacharjee, Laura Brueck, Angana P. Chatterji, Malathi de Alwis, Toorjo Ghose, Amina Jamal, Ratna Kapur, Lamia Karim, Ania Loomba, Ritty A. Lukose, Vasuki Nesiah, Sonali Perera, Atreyee Sen, Mrinalini Sinha, Ashwini Sukthankar

Drawing on her experience during the crisis as an employee in a public works program in Seoul, Song provides an ethnographic assessment of the efforts of the state and civilians to regulate social insecurity, instability, and inequality through assistance programs. She focuses specifically on efforts to help two populations deemed worthy of state subsidies: the “IMF homeless,” people temporarily homeless but considered employable, and the “new intellectuals,” young adults who had become professionally redundant during the crisis but had the high-tech skills necessary to lead a transformed post-crisis South Korea.

The contributors represent a new generation of scholars, some of whom are themselves migrants and refugees, who seek to reinvent the study of displaced populations and their diasporas. One essay considers the historical production of the refugee soldier during the “secret wars” of Laos. An ethnography of Southeast Asian American youth protests post-9/11 reveals how neoliberal rationalization of “personal responsibility” created a context for both deportation and the youth movement against it. Several contributions explore concepts of exile, belonging, and the nation-state via media representations of masculinity and the erotic, including the Hmong actors who appear in Clint Eastwood’s film Gran Torino, campy pan-Asian boy bands, and Vietnam Idol, a reality show that, like its British and American counterparts, illustrates specific cultural imagination and national ambitions.

Fiona I. B. Ngô and Mimi Thi Nguyen are both assistant professors of gender and women’s studies and Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Nguyen is the author of The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages and a co-editor of Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America, both also published by Duke University Press.

Contributors: Diem-My T. Bui, Long Bui, Thang Dao, Ly Chong Thong Jalao, Soo Ah Kwon, Mariam B. Lam, Viet Le, Fiona I.B. Ngô, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Viet Thanh Nguyen,
Louisa Schein, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Va-Megn Thoj, Khatharya Um, Julie Thi Underhill, Bee Vang, Ma Vang

An incomparably rich source of period information, the second volume of The Southern Debate over Slavery offers a representative and extraordinary sampling of the thousands of petitions about issues of race and slavery that southerners submitted to county courts between the American Revolution and Civil War. These petitions, filed by slaveholders and nonslaveholders, slaves and free blacks, women and men, abolitionists and staunch defenders of slavery, constitute a uniquely important primary source. The collection records with great immediacy and minute detail the dynamics and legal restrictions that shaped southern society.

This pioneering book, first published to wide acclaim in 1986, traces the way the Ethiopian center and the peripheral regions of the country affected each other. It looks specifically at the expansion of the highland Ethiopian state into the western and southern lowlands from the 1890s up to 1974.

Now little recognized by their neighbors, Southern Paiutes once had homelands that included much of the vast Colorado Plateau, Great Basin, and Mojave Desert. From the Four Corners’ San Juan River to California’s lower Colorado, from Death Valley to Canyonlands, from Capitol Reef to the Grand Canyon, Paiutes lived in many small, widespread communities. They still do, but the communities are fewer, smaller, and mostly deprived of the lands and resources that sustained traditional lives.

To portray a people and the individuals who comprise it, William Logan Hebner and Michael L. Plyler relay Paiute voices and reveal Paiute faces, creating a space for them to tell their stories and stake claim to who they once were and now are.

Southern Womanhood and Slavery is the first full-length biography of Louisa S. McCord, one of the most intriguing intellectuals in antebellum America. The daughter of South Carolina planter and politician Langdon Cheves, and an essayist in her own right, McCord supported unregulated free trade and the perpetuation of slavery and opposed the advancement of women’s rights. This study examines the origins of her ideas.

Leigh Fought constructs an exciting narrative that follows McCord from her childhood as the daughter of a state representative and president of the Bank of the United States through her efforts to accept her position as wife and mother, her career as an author and plantation mistress, and the Union invasion of South Carolina during the Civil War, to the end of her life in the emerging New South. Fought analyzes McCord’s poetry, letters, and essays in an effort to comprehend her acceptance of slavery and the submission of women. Fought concludes that McCord came to a defense of slavery through her experience with free labor in the North, which also reinforced her faith in the paternalist model for preserving social order.

McCord’s life as a writer on “unfeminine” subjects, her reputation as strong-minded and masculine, her late marriage, her continued ownership of her plantation after marriage, and her position as the matron of a Civil War hospital contradicted her own philosophy that women should remain the quiet force behind their husbands. She lived during a time of social flux in which free labor, slavery, and the role of women underwent dramatic changes, as well as a time that enabled her to discover and pursue her intellectual ambitions. Fought examines the conflict that resulted when those ambitions clashed with McCord’s role as a woman in the society of the South.

McCord’s voice was an interesting, articulate, and necessary feminine addition to antebellum white ideology. Moreover, her story demonstrates the ways in which southern women negotiated through patriarchy without surrendering their sense of self or disrupting the social order. Engaging and very readable, Southern Womanhood and Slavery will be of special interest to students of southern history and women’s studies, as well as to the general reader.

In the early twenty-first century Bolivian social movements made streets, plazas, and highways into the decisively important spaces for acting politically, rivaling and at times exceeding voting booths and halls of government. The Sovereign Street documents this important period, showing how indigenous-led mass movements reconfigured the politics and racial order of Bolivia from 1999 to 2011.

Drawing on interviews with protest participants, on-the-ground observation, and documentary research, activist and scholar Carwil Bjork-James provides an up-close history of the indigenous-led protests that changed Bolivia. At the heart of the study is a new approach to the interaction between protest actions and the parts of the urban landscape they claim. These “space-claiming protests” both communicate a message and exercise practical control over the city. Bjork-James interrogates both protest tactics—as experiences and as tools—and meaning-laden spaces, where meaning is part of the racial and political geography of the city.

Taking the streets of Cochabamba, Sucre, and La Paz as its vantage point, The Sovereign Streetoffers a rare look at political revolution as it happens. It documents a critical period in Latin American history, when protests made headlines worldwide, where a generation of pro-globalization policies were called into question, and where the indigenous majority stepped into government power for the first time in five centuries.

This wide-ranging collection addresses the political possibilities of Western law and the international meanings of sovereignty and Indigeneity. One essay analyzes the autonomous government through which local citizens in Indigenous Zapatista communities in Mexico hope to dissolve systems of top-down sovereignty altogether. Another explores narratives of Native American law and the treatment of sovereignty in contemporary Mohawk visual culture. Several essays discuss the legal and political implications of the field’s pivotal public documents, including the 2007 U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Eric Cheyfitz is the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters in the Department of English at Cornell University. N. Bruce Duthu is the Samson Occom Professor of Native American Studies and Chair of the Native American Studies Program at Dartmouth College. Shari M. Huhndorf is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon.

Contributors: Christine Black, Eric Cheyfitz, Gordon Christie, Chris Cunneen, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, Lorie M. Graham, Roy M. Huhndorf, Shari M. Huhndorf, Forrest Hylton, Mara Kaufman, Alvaro Reyes, Jolene Rickard, Carlos Salinas, Noenoe K. Silva, Cheryl Suzack, Siegfried Wiessner

From 1840 to 1900, midwestern Americans experienced firsthand the profound economic, cultural, and structural changes that transformed the nation from a premodern, agrarian state to one that was urban, industrial, and economically interdependent. Midwestern commercial farmers found themselves at the heart of these changes. Their actions and reactions led to the formation of a distinctive and particularly democratic consumer ethos, which is still being played out today.

By focusing on the consumer behavior of midwestern farmers, Sowing the American Dream provides illustrative examples of how Americans came to terms with the economic and ideological changes that swirled around them. From the formation of the Grange to the advent of mail-order catalogs, the buying patterns of rural midwesterners set the stage for the coming century.

Carefully documenting the rise and fall of the powerful purchasing cooperatives, David Blanke explains the shifting trends in collective consumerism, which ultimately resulted in a significant change in the way that midwestern consumers pursued their own regional identity, community, and independence.

An exploration of women’s public expression--in China and beyond.

How are the public and political lives of Chinese women constrained by states and economies? And how have pockets of women’s consciousness come to be produced in and disseminated from this traditionally masculine milieu? The essays in this volume examine the possibilities for a public sphere for Chinese women, one that would emerge from concrete historical situations and local contexts and also cut across the political boundaries separating the Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the West.

Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua looks at the encounters between existing populations and newcomers from successive waves of colonization, from indigenous expansion states (Wari, Tiwanaku, and Inka) to the foreign Spaniards, and the way each group “re-spatialized” the landscape according to its own political and economic ends. Viewing these spatializations from political, economic, and religious perspectives, Rice considers both the ideological and material occurrences.

Concluding with a special focus on the multiple space-time considerations involved in Spanish-inspired ceramics from the region, Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua integrates the local and rural with the global and urban in analyzing the events and processes of colonialism. It is a vital contribution to the literature of Andean studies and will appeal to students and scholars of archaeology, historical archaeology, history, ethnohistory, and globalization.