Examines the long-term social conditions that enabled large-scale rebellions in late Spanish colonial Peru
 
The Fabric of Resistance: Textile Workshops and the Rise of Rebellious Landscapes in Colonial Peru documents the impact of Spanish colonial institutions of labor on identity and social cohesion in Peru. Through archaeological and historical lines of evidence, Di Hu examines the long-term social conditions that enabled the large-scale rebellions in the late Spanish colonial period in Peru. Hu argues that ordinary people from different backgrounds pushed back against the top-down identity categories imposed by the Spanish colonial government and in the process created a cosmopolitan social landscape that later facilitated broader rebellion.
 
Hu’s case study is Pomacocha, the site of an important Spanish colonial hacienda (agricultural estate) and obraje (textile workshop). At its height, the latter had more than one hundred working families and sold textiles all over the Andes. Through analysis of this site, Hu explores three main long-term causes of rebellions against Spanish oppression. First, the Spanish colonial economy provided motivation and the social spaces for intercaste (indigenous, African, and mestizo) mixing at textile workshops. Second, new hybrid cultural practices and political solidarity arose there that facilitated the creation of new rebellious identities. Third, the maturation in the eighteenth century of popular folklore that reflected the harsh nature of Spanish labor institutions helped workers from diverse backgrounds gain a systemic understanding of exploitation.
 
This study provides a fresh archaeological and historical perspectives on the largest and most cosmopolitan indigenous-led rebellions of the Americas. Hu interweaves analyses of society at multiple scales including fine-grained perspectives of social networks, demography, and intimate details of material life in the textile workshop. She examines a wide range of data sources including artifacts, food remains, architectural plans, account books, censuses, court documents, contracts, maps, and land title disputes.
 

The freedom of the individual to aim high is a deeply rooted part of the American ethos but we rarely acknowledge its flip side: failure. If people are responsible for their individual successes, is the same true of their failures? The Failed Individual brings together a variety of disciplinary approaches to explore how people fail in the United States and the West at large, whether economically, politically, socially, culturally, or physically. How do we understand individual failure, especially in the context of the zero-sum game of international capitalism? And what new spaces of resistance, or even pleasure, might failure open up for people and society?

Exploring the rise of Shi’i activism in Lebanon and the broader Middle East, in Faith and Resistance Sarah Marusek offers a timely analysis of the social and political evolution of Islamic movements. These movements, she shows, have long existed in opposition to a number of different forces. And while that opposition has often been full of contradictions, the growing popularity of such movements has nonetheless led to increasing economic and political powers. Marusek shows here how resistance groups reconcile the acquisition of power with their larger anti-colonial aspirations.

Sixteen original essays document the extent and variety of citizen resistance and struggle in the Appalachian region since 1960. The contributors-all organizers or activist intellectuals-describe how and why some of the dramatic Appalachian resistance efforts and strategies have arisen.

Contributors: Bill Allen, Mary K. Anglin, Fran Ansley, Alan Banks, Dwight Billings, Mary Beth Bingman, Sherry Cable, Guy and Candie Carawan, Richard A. Couto, Stephen William Foster, John M. Glen, Hal Hamilton, Bennett M. Judkins, Don Manning-Miller, Ellen Ryan, Jim Sessions, Joe Szakos, Karen Tice, Chris Weiss, and the editor.

The changing face of feminist discourse as reflected by the career of one of its preeminent scholars

Figures of Resistance brings together the unpublished lectures and little-seen essays of internationally renowned theorist Teresa de Lauretis, spanning over twenty years of her finest work. Thirty years after the height of feminist theory, this collection invites us to reflect on the history of feminism and take a hard look at where it stands today. Selected essays include "Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation," "The Lure of the Mannish Lesbian," "Eccentric Subjects," "Habit Changes," "The Intractability of Desire," and the unpublished article "Figures of Resistance." An introduction from feminist film scholar Patricia White provides an overview of the development of de Lauretis's thought and of feminist theory over past decades.

In this revisionist study of texts from the mid-Heian period in Japan, H. Richard Okada offers new readings of three well-known tales: The Tale of the Bamboo-cutter, The Tale of Ise, and The Tale of Genji. Okada contends that the cultural and gendered significance of these works has been distorted by previous commentaries and translations belonging to the larger patriarchal and colonialist discourse of Western civilization. He goes on to suggest that this universalist discourse, which silences the feminine aspects of these texts and subsumes their writing in misapplied Western canonical literary terms, is sanctioned and maintained by the discipline of Japanese literature.
Okada develops a highly original and sophisticated reading strategy that demonstrates how readers might understand texts belonging to a different time and place without being complicit in their assimilation to categories derived from Western literary traditions. The author’s reading stratgey is based on the texts’ own resistance to modes of analysis that employ such Western canonical terms as novel, lyric, and third-person narrative. Emphasis is also given to the distinctive cultural circles, as well as socio-political and genealogical circumstances that surrounded the emergence of the texts.
Indispensable readings for specialists in literature, cultural studies, and Japanese literature and history, Figures of Resistance will also appeal to general readers interested in the problems and complexities of studying another culture.

This study foregrounds several small, rural hamlets on the treacherous southern edge of the free North in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. LaRoche demonstrates how landscape features such as waterways, iron forges, and caves played a key role in the conduct and effectiveness of the Underground Railroad. Rich in oral histories, maps, memoirs, and archaeological investigations, this examination of the "geography of resistance" tells the new powerful and inspiring story of African Americans ensuring their own liberation in the midst of oppression.

North Americans have reached a socioenvironmental tipping point where social transformation has become necessary to secure a stable and desirable future. As hurricanes destroy coastal areas that once hosted schools and homes, petroleum refineries choke nearby communities and their parks, and pipeline construction threatens water rights for indigenous peoples, communities are left to determine how to best manage and mitigate environmental loss.

In this new collection, a range of contributors—among them researchers, practitioners, organizers, and activists—explore the ways in which people counter or cope with feelings of despair, leverage action for positive change, and formulate pathways to achieve environmental justice goals. These essays pay particular attention to issues of race, class, economic liberalization, and geography; place contemporary environmental struggles in a critical context that emphasizes justice, connection, and reconciliation; and raise important questions about the challenges and responses that concern those pursuing environmental justice.

Contributors include the volume editors, Carol J. Adams, Randall Amster, Jan Inglis, Eileen Delehanty Pearkes, Zoë Roller, and Michael Truscello.