Theme parks break attendance numbers with the promise of “stepping inside” a film’s world. Pop-up “experiences” are a regular part of promotional cycles. All this is accepted in the contemporary media environment—but why? What is the appeal of film tourism, and what can its rise tell us about contemporary fandom? Fan Sites explores why and how we experience film and television-related places, and what the growth of this practice means for contemporary fandom. Through four case studies—Game of Thrones tourism in Dubrovnik, Croatia and Northern Ireland, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme parks in Orlando, Florida, fandom of The Prisoner in Portmeirion, Wales, and Friends events in the United Kingdom and United States—this book presents a multifaceted look at the ways place and fandom interact today.

Fan Sites explores the different relationships that fans build with these places of fandom, from the exploratory knowledge-building of Game of Thrones fans on vacation, the appreciative evaluations of Harry Potter fans at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, to the frequent “homecoming” visits of Prisoner fans, who see Portmeirion as a “safe vault” and the home of their fandom. Including engaging accounts of real fans at each location, Fan Sites addresses what the rise of fan tourism and places of fandom might mean for the future of fandom and its relationship with the media industry.
 

The discipline of fan studies is famously undisciplined. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t structured. This is the first comprehensive primer for classroom use that shows students how to do fan studies in practical terms. With contributions from a range of established and emerging scholars, coeditors Paul Booth and Rebecca Williams pull together case studies that demonstrate the wide array of methodologies available to fan studies scholars, such as auto/ethnography, immersion, interviews, online data mining, historiography, and textual analysis. This collection also probes the ethical questions that are unique to fan studies work, such as the use of online fan content for research, interview methods, consent, and privacy.
 

Fandom, Now in Color gathers together seemingly contradictory narratives that intersect at the (in)visibility of race/ism in fandom and fan studies. This collection engages the problem by undertaking the different tactics of decolonization—diversifying methodologies, destabilizing canons of “must-read” scholarship by engaging with multiple disciplines, making whiteness visible but not the default against which all other kinds of racialization must compete, and decentering white fans even in those fandoms where they are the assumed majority. These new narratives concern themselves with a broad swath of media, from cosplay and comics to tabletop roleplay and video games, and fandoms from Jane the Virgin to Japan’s K-pop scene. Fandom, Now in Color asserts that no one answer or approach can sufficiently come to grips with the shifting categories of race, racism, and racial identity.

Contributors: McKenna Boeckner, Angie Fazekas, Monica Flegel, Elizabeth Hornsby, Katherine Anderson Howell, Carina Lapointe, Miranda Ruth Larsen, Judith Leggatt, Jenni Lehtinen, joan miller, Swati Moitra, Samira Nadkarni, Indira Neill Hoch, Sam Pack, Rukmini Pande, Deepa Sivarajan, Al Valentín

This collection is the first to offer a close study of fan generations, which are defined not only by fans’ ages, but by their entry point into a canon or their personal politics. The contributors further the conversation about how generational fandom is influenced by and, in turn, influences technologies, industry practices, and social and political changes. As reboot culture continues, as franchises continue expanding over time, and as new technologies enable easier access to older media, Fandom, the Next Generation offers a necessary investigation into transgenerational fandoms and intergenerational fan relationships.

Contributors:
Maria Alberto, University of Utah
Mélanie Bourdaa, University of Bordeaux Montaigne
Meredith Dabek, Maynooth University
Simone Driessen, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Yektanurşin Duyan, Mardin Artuklu University
Dan Golding, Swinburne University of Technology
Bethan Jones, Aberdale, Wales (UK)
Siobhan Lyons, Sydney, New South Wales (Australia)
L. N. Rosales, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Andrew Scahill, University of Colorado, Denver
Janelle Vermaak, Nelson Mandela University
Cynthia W. Walker, St. Peter’s University
Dawn Walls-Thumma, independent scholar
Neta Yodovich, University of Haifa
 

The production, reception and discussion of fanfiction is a major aspect of contemporary global media. Thus far, however, the genre has been subject to relatively little rigorous qualitative or quantitative study-a problem that Judith M. Fathallah remedies here through close analysis of fanfiction related to Sherlock, Supernatural, and Game of Thrones. Her large-scale study of the sites, reception, and fan rejections of fanfic demonstrate how the genre works to legitimate itself through traditional notions of authorship, even as it deconstructs the author figure and contests traditional discourses of authority. Through a process she identifies as the 'legitimation paradox', Fathallah demonstrates how fanfic hooks into and modifies the discourse of authority, and so opens new spaces for writing that challenges the authority of media professionals.

"To be a fan is to scream alone together." This is the discovery Hannah Ewens makes in Fangirls: how music fandom is at once a journey of self-definition and a conduit for connection and camaraderie; how it is both complicated and empowering; and how now, more than ever, fandoms composed of girls and young queer people create cultures that shape and change an entire industry.

This book is about what it means to be a fangirl.

Speaking to hundreds of fans from the UK, US, Europe, and Japan, Ewens tells the story of music fandom using its own voices, recounting previously untold or glossed-over scenes from modern pop and rock music history. In doing so, she uncovers the importance of fan devotion: how Ariana Grande represents both tragedy and resilience to her followers, or what it means to meet an artist like Lady Gaga in person. From One Directioners, to members of the Beyhive, to the author's own fandom experiences, this book reclaims the "fangirl" label for its young members, celebrating their purpose, their power, and, most of all, their passion for the music they love.

Since her death in 2003, Nina Simone has been the subject of an astonishing number of rereleased, remastered, and remixed albums and compilations as well as biographies, films, viral memes, samples, and soundtracks. In Fantasies of Nina Simone, Jordan Alexander Stein uses an archive of Simone’s performances, images, and writings to examine the space between our collective and individual fantasies about Simone the performer, Civil Rights activist, and icon, and her own fantasies about herself. Stein outlines how Simone gave voice to personal fantasies through the dozens of cover songs that she released of her white male contemporaries such as George Harrison, the Bee Gees, and Bob Dylan. With these covers, Simone explored and claimed the power and perspective that comes with race and gender privilege. Looking at examples from Simone’s four-decade, genre-bending, career—from songbook standards, jazz, and pop to folk, junkanoo, and reggae—and at her work’s many uptakes and afterlives, Stein mobilizes the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy to build a black feminist history with and for this multifaceted performing artist.

This book examines Fanti kinship terminology from a variety of analytic and formal perspectives. Based on work with a broad number of informants, David B. Kronenfeld details and analyzes internal variation in usage within the Fanti community, shows the relationship between terminology and social groups and communicative usage, and relates these findings to major theoretical work on kinship and on the intersections of language, thought, and culture.

The terminological analysis in this study employs a great variety of formal approaches, assesses the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, and covers a wide range of types of usage. This work also performs a systematic, formal analysis of behavior patterns among kin, joining this approach with the analysis of a kinship terminological system. Rather than treating kinship terminology as a special, isolated piece of culture, this study also ties its analysis to more general semantic and cultural theoretical issues. Including computational and comparative studies of kinship terminologies, this volume represents the fullest analysis of any kinship terminological system in the ethnographic record.

Fanvids, or vids, are short videos created in media fandom. Made from television and film sources, they are neither television episodes nor films; they resemble music videos but are non-commercial fanworks that construct creative and critical analyses of existing media. The creators of fanvids-called vidders-are predominantly women, whose vids prompt questions about media historiography and pleasures taken from screen media. Vids remake narratives for an attentive fan audience, who watch with a deep knowledge of the source text(s), or an interest in the vid form itself. Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use draws on four decades of vids, produced on videotape and digitally, to argue that the vid form's creation and reception reveals a mode of engaged spectatorship that counters academic histories of media audiences and technologies. Vids offer an answer to the prevalent questions: What happens to television after it's been aired? How and by whom is it used and shared? Is it still television?

Since its founding in 1886, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University has been collecting, caring for, exhibiting, and researching objects produced by human cultures around the world. This handsomely illustrated, highly portable volume presents a selection of more than 90 objects in honor of the museum’s 150th anniversary in 2016–2017. Dating from Paleolithic times to the present and originating from the Arctic Circle to South Pacific, these selections represent but a fraction of the 1.4 million pieces in the museum’s collections. They range in character from the sacred to the profane, the utilitarian to the highly decorative, the deeply symbolic to the outrageously whimsical.

Chosen by the museum’s curators and staff, the works presented in Far & Near provide a tantalizing glimpse into the wonders of the collections of the Peabody Museum and reflect the skilled artistry of human hands and the endless creativity of the human mind.

Over the past three decades, more than a quarter of a million children have become citizens of the United States through international adoption. Kindergarten teacher Jane Katch recently found herself with three such children in her class: Katya, born in Russia, Jasper, from Cambodia, and Caleb, from Romania. Each child had spent early years in an orphanage, and each had unique educational and emotional needs. How Katch came to recognize and respond to those needs makes up the journey of discovery in this moving and insightful book.

Interspersing vignettes from the classroom and conversations with the children’s parents, Far Away from the Tigers first explores Katch’s misunderstandings and mistakes as she struggles to help the children adjust to school. As Katch learns more about each child’s preadoption past, she gradually realizes that they were deprived of some basic learning experiences and she needs to find ways to fill those gaps. Before Caleb can learn to read or write, he must improve his verbal skills by learning nursery rhymes, stories, and songs. Katya, who came from an overcrowded orphanage, now needs to be the center of attention; before learning how to form real friendships, she first must gain control over more basic functions such as eating and sleeping. And the youngest, Jasper, needs steady encouragement to play with classmates instead of sitting alone practicing his handwriting.

Slowly, through trial and error and by drawing on the deep understanding and intense commitment of the children’s parents, Katch discovers the importance—and joy—of allowing each child time to develop in his or her own way. Beautifully told, wise, and candid, Far Away from the Tigers is a gift for parents, teachers, and anyone who cares for children growing up in a new home.

The Basketmaker presence in southern Utah has traditionally been viewed as peripheral to developments originating in the Four Corners region. Far Western Basketmaker Beginnings offers an entirely new and provocative perspective—that the origins of farming on the northern Colorado Plateau are instead found far to the west along Kanab Creek.

This volume, based on the results of excavations at Jackson Flat Reservoir south of Kanab, examines a litany of firsts: the earliest Archaic pithouses ever found in this region, evidence that maize farmers arrived here a thousand years earlier than previously reported, and the emergence of a complex Basketmaker farming and foraging culture. Specialists in Far Western Puebloan culture, architecture, settlement patterns, subsistence, chronometry, and prehistoric technologies make a compelling case that farming was introduced to the region by San Pedro immigrants, and that the blending of farmers with local foraging groups gave rise to a Basketmaker lifeway by 200 BC. This book marks a giant leap forward in archaeologists’ understanding of the earliest maize farmers north and west of the Colorado River. 
 

In Farm, Joyce Kinkead, Evelyn Funda, and Lynne S. McNeill explore the culture of agriculture through a diverse and multicultural collection of fiction, poetry, essays, art, recipes, and folklore. This reader views farming through a variety of lenses, asking students to consider what farms, farming, and farmers mean, and have meant, to culture in the United States.
 
In the text, readers are guided through the Jeffersonian idealism of the yeoman farmer (“cultivators of the earth are the chosen people of God”) to literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Thoreau’s “The Bean-Field,” Cather’s prairie trilogy, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Carpenter’s Farm City). Contributors provide historical context for the literary texts, such as discussion of sharecropping vs. plantation systems, the rise of agribusiness and chemical farming, and Teddy Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission. Written, visual, and oral texts ask readers to consider the farm in art (Grant Wood), ecology (Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring), children’s and young adult literature (classic children’s books, YA novels, nonfiction, and poetry), advertising (from early boosterism to Chipotle videos), print culture (farmers’ market and victory garden posters from both world wars), folklore (food culture, vintners, and veterinarian practices), popular culture (Farm Aid concerts), and much more. Each reading is supported by activities, exercises, projects, and visual rhetorical elements that further connect students to agriculture and the essential work of farmers.
 

Homosexuality is often seen as a purely urban experience, far removed from rural and small-town life. Farm Boys undermines that cliche by telling the stories of more than three dozen gay men, ranging in age from 24 to 84, who grew up in farm families in the midwestern United States. Whether painful, funny, or matter-of-fact, these plain-spoken accounts will move and educate any reader, gay or not, from farm or city.

     “When I was fifteen, the milkman who came to get our milk was beautiful. This is when I was really getting horny to do something with another guy. I waited every day for him to come. I couldn’t even talk to him, couldn’t think of anything to say. I just stood there, watching him, wondering if he knew why.”—Henry Bauer, Minnesota

     “When I go back home, I feel a real connection with the land—a tremendous feeling, spiritual in a way. It makes me want to go out into a field and take my shoes off and put my feet right on the dirt, establish a real physical connection with that place. I get homesick a lot, but I don’t know if I could ever go back there and live. It’s not the kind of place that would welcome me if I lived openly, the way that I would like to live. I would be shunned.”—Martin Scherz, Nebraska

     “If there is a checklist to see if your kid is queer, I must have hit every one of them—all sorts of big warning signs. I was always interested in a lot of the traditional queen things—clothes, cooking, academics, music, theater. A farm boy listening to show tunes? My parents must have seen it coming.”—Joe Shulka, Wisconsin

     “My favorite show when I was growing up was ‘The Waltons’. The show’s values comforted me, and I identified with John-Boy, the sensitive son who wanted to be a writer. He belonged there on the mountain with his family, yet he sensed that he was different and that he was often misunderstood. Sometimes I still feel like a misfit, even with gay people.”—Connie Sanders, Illinois

     “Agriculture is my life. I like working with farm people, although they don’t really understand me. When I retire I want the word to get out [that I’m gay] to the people I’ve worked with—the dairy producers, the veterinarians, the feed salesmen, the guys at the co-ops. They’re going to be shocked, but their eyes are going to be opened.”—James Heckman, Indiana

In this groundbreaking book, Jessica Martell investigates the relationship between industrial food and the emergence of literary modernisms in Britain and Ireland. By the early twentieth century, the industrialization of the British Empire’s food system had rendered many traditional farming operations, and attendant agrarian ways of life, obsolete. Weaving insights from modernist studies, food studies, and ecocriticism, Farm to Form contends that industrial food made nature “modernist,” a term used as literary scholars understand it—stylistically disorienting, unfamiliar, and artificial but also exhilarating, excessive, and above all, new. Martell draws in part upon archives in the United Kingdom but also presents imperial foodways as an extended rehearsal for the current era of industrial food supremacy. She analyzes how pastoral mode, anachronism, fragmentation, and polyvocal narration reflect the power of the literary arts to reckon with—and to resist—the new “modernist ecologies” of the twentieth century.

Deeply informed by Martell’s extensive knowledge of modern British, Irish, American, and World Literatures, this progressive work positions modernism as central to the study of narratives of resistance against social and environmental degradation. Analyzed works include those of Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, George Russell, and James Joyce.

In light of climate change, fossil fuel supremacy, nutritional dearth, and other pressing food issues, modernist texts bring to life an era of crisis and anxiety similar to our own. In doing so, Martell summons the past as a way to employ the modernist term of “defamiliarizing” the present so that entrenched perceptions can be challenged. Our current food regime is both new and constantly evolving with the first industrial food trades. Studying earlier cultural responses to them invites us to return to persistent problems with new insights and renewed passion.
 

A visual feast of the Midwest's homegrown bounty

In this splendidly illustrated book, food writer and self-described farm groupie Janine MacLachlan embarks on a tour of seasonal markets and farmstands throughout the Midwest, sampling local flavors from Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. She conducts delicious research as she meets farmers, tastes their food, and explores how their businesses thrive in the face of an industrial food supply. She tells the stories of a pair of farmers growing specialty crops on a few acres of northern Michigan for just a few months out of the year, an Ohio cattle farm that has raised heritage beef since 1820, and a Minnesota farmer who tirelessly champions the Jimmy Nardello sweet Italian frying pepper. Along the way, she savors vibrant red carrots, slurpy peaches, vast quantities of specialty cheeses, and some of the tastiest pie to cross anyone's lips.

Informed by debates about eating local, seasonal crops, organic farming, sanitation, and biodiversity, Farmers' Markets of the Heartland tantalizes with special recipes from farm-friendly chefs and dozens of luscious color photographs that will inspire you to harvest the homegrown flavors in your own neighborhood.

The Olmec who anciently inhabited Mexico's southern Gulf Coast organized their once-egalitarian society into chiefdoms during the Formative period (1400 BC to AD 300). This increase in political complexity coincided with the development of village agriculture, which has led scholars to theorize that agricultural surpluses gave aspiring Olmec leaders control over vital resources and thus a power base on which to build authority and exact tribute.

In this book, Amber VanDerwarker conducts the first multidisciplinary analysis of subsistence patterns at two Olmec settlements to offer a fuller understanding of how the development of political complexity was tied to both agricultural practices and environmental factors. She uses plant and animal remains, as well as isotopic data, to trace the intensification of maize agriculture during the Late Formative period. She also examines how volcanic eruptions in the region affected subsistence practices and settlement patterns. Through these multiple sets of data, VanDerwarker presents convincing evidence that Olmec and epi-Olmec lifeways of farming, hunting, and fishing were driven by both political and environmental pressures and that the rise of institutionalized leadership must be understood within the ecological context in which it occurred.

In Europe today, staunchly nationalist parties such as France’s National Front and the Austrian Freedom Party are identified as far-right movements, though supporters seldom embrace that label. More often, “far right” is pejorative, used by liberals to tar these groups with the taint of Fascism, Nazism, and other discredited ideologies. Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg’s critical look at the far right throughout Europe—from the United Kingdom to France, Germany, Poland, Italy, and elsewhere—reveals a prehistory and politics more complex than the stereotypes suggest and warns of the challenges these movements pose to the EU’s liberal-democratic order.

The European far right represents a confluence of many ideologies: nationalism, socialism, anti-Semitism, authoritarianism. In the first half of the twentieth century, the radical far right achieved its apotheosis in the regimes of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. But these movements have evolved significantly since 1945, as Far-Right Politics in Europe makes clear. The 1980s marked a turning point in political fortunes, as national-populist parties began winning seats in European parliaments. Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in the United States, a new wave has unfurled, one that is explicitly anti-immigrant and Islamophobic in outlook.

Though Europe’s far-right parties differ in important respects, they are motivated by a common sense of mission: to save their homelands from what they view as the corrosive effects of multiculturalism and globalization by creating a closed-off, ethnically homogeneous society. Members of these movements are increasingly determined to gain power through legitimate electoral means. In democracies across Europe, they are succeeding.

In 1933, George L. Mosse fled Berlin and settled in the United States, where he went on to become a renowned historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Through rigorous and innovative scholarship, Mosse uncovered the forces that spurred antisemitism, racism, nationalism, and populism. His transformative work was propelled by a desire to know his own persecutors and has been vital to generations of scholars seeking to understand the cultural and intellectual origins and mechanisms of Nazism.
 
This translation makes Emilio Gentile’s groundbreaking study of Mosse’s life and work available to English language readers. A leading authority on fascism, totalitarianism, and Mosse’s legacy, Gentile draws on a wealth of published and unpublished material, including letters, interviews, lecture plans, and marginalia from Mosse’s personal library. Gentile details how the senior scholar eschewed polemics and employed rigorous academic standards to better understand fascism and the “catastrophe of the modern man”—how masculinity transformed into a destructive ideology. As long as wars are waged over political beliefs in popular culture, Mosse’s theories of totalitarianism will remain as relevant as ever.

Across Europe and the world, far right parties have been enjoying greater electoral success than at any time since 1945. Right-wing street movements draw huge supporters and terrorist attacks on Jews and Muslims proliferate. It sometimes seems we are returning to the age of fascism. 

To explain this disturbing trend, David Renton surveys the history of fascism in Europe from its pre-war origins to the present day, examining Marxist responses to fascism in the age of Hitler and Mussolini, the writings of Trotsky and Gramsci and contemporary theorists. Renton theorizes that fascism was driven by the chaotic and unstable balance between reactionary ambitions and the mass character of its support. This approach will arm a new generation of anti-fascists to resist those who seek to re-enact fascism.

Rewritten and revised for the twentieth anniversary of its first publication, Renton's classic book synthesizes the Marxist theory of fascism and updates it for our own times.

'Shanzhai'  from Cantonese slang, refers to the production of fake goods in China, which enjoy an anti-authoritarian-like dissemination across the global market. Starting with mobile phones, now fashion brands are subverted in this way, with many women at the helm of design and production. Fashioning China looks at the women designers simultaneously subverting and reinforcing the nationalist-developmentalist, masculinist and technocratic dream of brands that are 'Made in China'.

Broadening the digital labor debate beyond typical masculine and techno-utopic readings, Sara Liao studies the precarious practices of women trying to create sustainable and creative lives, vividly illustrating a fashion culture that exists online as a significant part of the digital economy.

Drawing on material from interviews, participant observation, archives, policy documents, films and advertisements, Liao takes a multi-disciplinary approach to the topic, charting out the politics of intellectual property rights, globalization, technocracy, patriarchy and nationalism in a non-Western context.

An expansive, grassroots exploration into fat activism.

Charlotte Cooper, a fat activist with over 25 years’ experience, lifts the lid on the previously unexplored social movement of fat activism. Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement allows readers an inside view into the lives and politics of fat people on their own terms. Fat activism, Cooper argues, is not just a response to obesity discourse, but a social movement in its own right. Delving into the movement’s methodology and historical roots, Cooper shows how fat activism is an undeniably feminist and queer phenomenon.
 

Fatal Misconception is the disturbing story of our quest to remake humanity by policing national borders and breeding better people. As the population of the world doubled once, and then again, well-meaning people concluded that only population control could preserve the “quality of life.” This movement eventually spanned the globe and carried out a series of astonishing experiments, from banning Asian immigration to paying poor people to be sterilized.

Supported by affluent countries, foundations, and non-governmental organizations, the population control movement experimented with ways to limit population growth. But it had to contend with the Catholic Church’s ban on contraception and nationalist leaders who warned of “race suicide.” The ensuing struggle caused untold suffering for those caught in the middle—particularly women and children. It culminated in the horrors of sterilization camps in India and the one-child policy in China.

Matthew Connelly offers the first global history of a movement that changed how people regard their children and ultimately the face of humankind. It was the most ambitious social engineering project of the twentieth century, one that continues to alarm the global community. Though promoted as a way to lift people out of poverty—perhaps even to save the earth—family planning became a means to plan other people‘s families.

With its transnational scope and exhaustive research into such archives as Planned Parenthood and the newly opened Vatican Secret Archives, Connelly’s withering critique uncovers the cost inflicted by a humanitarian movement gone terribly awry and urges renewed commitment to the reproductive rights of all people.

Following their first contact in 1519, accounts of Aztecs identifying Spaniards as gods proliferated. But what exactly did the Aztecs mean by a “god” (teotl), and how could human beings become gods or take on godlike properties? This sophisticated, interdisciplinary study analyzes three concepts that are foundational to Aztec religion—teotl (god), teixiptla (localized embodiment of a god), and tlaquimilolli (sacred bundles containing precious objects)—to shed new light on the Aztec understanding of how spiritual beings take on form and agency in the material world.

In The Fate of Earthly Things, Molly Bassett draws on ethnographic fieldwork, linguistic analyses, visual culture, and ritual studies to explore what ritual practices such as human sacrifice and the manufacture of deity embodiments (including humans who became gods), material effigies, and sacred bundles meant to the Aztecs. She analyzes the Aztec belief that wearing the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim during a sacred rite could transform a priest into an embodiment of a god or goddess, as well as how figurines and sacred bundles could become localized embodiments of gods. Without arguing for unbroken continuity between the Aztecs and modern speakers of Nahuatl, Bassett also describes contemporary rituals in which indigenous Mexicans who preserve costumbres (traditions) incorporate totiotzin (gods) made from paper into their daily lives. This research allows us to understand a religious imagination that found life in death and believed that deity embodiments became animate through the ritual binding of blood, skin, and bone.

“Given the current political conditions, these lectures on race, ethnicity, and nation, delivered by Stuart Hall almost a quarter of a century ago, may be even more timely today.”
—Angela Y. Davis

In this defining statement one of the founding figures of cultural studies reflects on the divisive, often deadly consequences of our contemporary politics of race and identity. As he untangles the power relations that permeate categories of race, ethnicity, and nationhood, Stuart Hall shows how old hierarchies of human identity were forcefully broken apart when oppressed groups introduced new meanings to the representation of difference.

Hall challenges us to find more sustainable ways of living with difference, redefining nation, race, and identity.

“Stuart Hall bracingly confronts the persistence of race—and its confounding liberal surrogates, ethnicity and nation…This is a profoundly humane work that…finds room for hope and change.”
—Orlando Patterson

“Stuart Hall’s written words were ardent, discerning, recondite, and provocative, his spoken voice lyrical, euphonious, passionate, at times rhapsodic and he changed the way an entire generation of critics and commentators debated issues of race and cultural difference.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

“Essential reading for those seeking to understand Hall’s tremendous impact on scholars, artists, and filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic.”
—Artforum

Through an intensive clinical study of forty incest victims and numerous interviews with professionals in mental health, child protection, and law enforcement, Judith Herman develops a composite picture of the incestuous family. In a new afterword, Herman offers a lucid and thorough overview of the knowledge that has developed about incest and other forms of sexual abuse since this book was first published.

Reviewing the extensive research literature that demonstrates the validity of incest survivors' sometimes repressed and recovered memories, she convincingly challenges the rhetoric and methods of the backlash movement against incest survivors, and the concerted attempt to deny the events they find the courage to describe.

It has been said that fathers are a biological necessity but a social accident. When Ross Parke first wrote about fathers for the Developing Child series, American culture seemed to adhere strongly to the stereotype of Dad the breadwinner, pacing outside the delivery room and peeking through the nursery window, and Mom the homemaker, warming bottles and changing diapers. Simple—in fact, a bit too simple. In the intervening years the conventional image of the uninvolved father has given way to a new stereotype: the father who takes an active part in rearing his children.

The dramatic technological, economic, and ideological changes in society over the past several decades have reconfigured the nuclear family and redefined the role of fathers. More women now work outside the home; fewer families can depend on an extended network of relatives for help with childcare; more divorced fathers assume or share custody of their children. Fathers have become partners in parenthood, wielding a more direct influence on their children’s development. But, Parke asks, is the new ideal of fathers—participating in childbirth and sharing in the care and feeding of their children—any more accurate than the earlier uninvolved father stereotype?

Social scientists have long ignored fathers, focusing on mothers as the significant figure in infant development. But research is showing that maternal caretaking is not biologically fixed, nor are fathers necessarily restricted to a secondary role in childcare. Turning away from well-worn theories in favor of direct observation, modern studies have revealed a substantial amount about how fathers behave with their children, how this behavior differs from maternal behavior, and how it affects children.

In this new book, Parke considers the father–child relationship within the “family system” and the wider society. Using the “life course” view of fathers that has emerged in recent years, he demonstrates that men enact their fatherhood in a variety of ways in response to their particular social and cultural circumstances. And while it is becoming clear that fathers play an important role in their children’s lives, it is also becoming clear that fathering is good for men.

We've all heard that a father's involvement enriches the lives of children. But how much have we heard about how having a child affects a father's life? As Peter Gray and Kermyt Anderson reveal, fatherhood actually alters a man's sexuality, rewires his brain, and changes his hormonal profile. His very health may suffer—in the short run—and improve in the long. These are just a few aspects of the scientific side of fatherhood explored in this book, which deciphers the findings of myriad studies and makes them accessible to the interested general reader.

Since the mid-1990s Anderson and Gray, themselves fathers of young children, have been studying paternal behavior in places as diverse as Boston, Albuquerque, Cape Town, Kenya, and Jamaica. Their work combines the insights of evolutionary and comparative biology, cross-cultural analysis, and neural physiology to deepen and expand our understanding of fatherhood—from the intense involvement in childcare seen in male hunter-gatherers, to the prodigality of a Genghis Khan leaving millions of descendants, to the anonymous sperm donor in a fertility clinic.

Looking at every kind of fatherhood—being a father in and out of marriage, fathering from a distance, stepfathering, and parenting by gay males—this book presents a uniquely detailed picture of how being a parent fits with men's broader social and work lives, how fatherhood evolved, and how it differs across cultures and through time.

2023 Finalist Best Academic Themed Book, College Level – English, International Latino Book Awards

A contemplative exploration of cultural representations of Mexican American fathers in contemporary media.

As a young girl growing up in Houston, Texas, in the 1980s, Domino Perez spent her free time either devouring books or watching films—and thinking, always thinking, about the media she consumed. The meaningful connections between these media and how we learn form the basis of Perez’s “slow” research approach to race, class, and gender in the borderlands. Part cultural history, part literary criticism, part memoir, Fatherhood in the Borderlands takes an incisive look at the value of creative inquiry while it examines the nuanced portrayal of Mexican American fathers in literature and film.

Perez reveals a shifting tension in the literal and figurative borderlands of popular narratives and shows how form, genre, and subject work to determine the roles Mexican American fathers are allowed to occupy. She also calls our attention to the cultural landscape that has allowed such a racialized representation of Mexican American fathers to continue, unopposed, for so many years. Fatherhood in the Borderlands brings readers right to the intersection of the white cultural mainstream in the United States and Mexican American cultural productions, carefully considering the legibility and illegibility of Brown fathers in contemporary media.

This book looks at fatwa in Indonesia during the period following the fall of President Suharto. It is an in-depth exploration of three fatwa-making agencies-Majelis Ulama Indonesia, Lajnah Bahth al-Masail Nahdlatul Ulama, and Majelis Tarjih Muhammadiyah-all of which are highly influential in shaping religious thought and the lives of Muslims in Indonesia. Rather than look at all the fatwa that have emerged in the period, Pradana Boy ZTF focuses on those that have strong repercussions for intra-community relations and the development of Indonesian Muslims more generally, including fatwa pertaining to sectarianism, pluralism, secularism and liberalism.

A decade of zooarchaeological fieldwork (1992-2001) went into Mary Stiner's pathbreaking analysis of changes in human ecology from the early Mousterian period through the end of Paleolithic cultures in the Levant. Stiner employs a comparative approach to understanding early human behavioral and environmental change, based on a detailed study of fourteen bone assemblages from Hayonim Cave and Meged Rockshelter in Israel's Galilee. Principally anthropological in outlook, Stiner's analysis also integrates chemistry, foraging and population ecology, vertebrate paleontology, and biogeography. Her research focuses first on the formation history, or taphonomy, of bone accumulations, and second on questions about the economic behaviors of early humans, including the early development of human adaptations for hunting large prey and the relative "footprint" of humans in Pleistocene ecosystems of the Levant.

The wetlands of the San Juan Basin in Central Veracruz, Mexico, have been a favored place since the fifth century A.D., when Prehispanic people built an extensive network of canals and raised fields that allowed for almost year-round agriculture. Alfred Siemens' discovery of the remains of this network in the 1970s led him to uncover fifteen centuries of land-use history in the region. This book contains a full record of his findings.

Siemens organizes his history of the San Juan Basin around the question: What relationships exist between Prehispanic agriculture and the production systems of the tropical lowlands in our own time? This focus allows him to chart the changes in human perceptions and uses of the landscape, from the Prehispanic wetland agricultural system to the drained pastures of today's cattle ranches.

Amplified with air oblique photography, maps, and tables, and enriched with data from archaeology and colonial archives, this is an authoritative historical geography of a wetland landscape. Or, in the author's more modest words, "It seems to me that what I have here is a biography of a swamp."

The emergence of Haiti as a sovereign Black nation lit a beacon of hope for Black people throughout the African diaspora. Leslie M. Alexander’s study reveals the untold story of how free and enslaved Black people in the United States defended the young Caribbean nation from forces intent on maintaining slavery and white supremacy. Concentrating on Haiti’s place in the history of Black internationalism, Alexander illuminates the ways Haitian independence influenced Black thought and action in the United States. As she shows, Haiti embodied what whites feared most: Black revolution and Black victory. Thus inspired, Black activists in the United States embraced a common identity with Haiti’s people, forging the idea of a united struggle that merged the destinies of Haiti with their own striving for freedom.

A bold exploration of Black internationalism’s origins, Fear of a Black Republic links the Haitian revolution to the global Black pursuit of liberation, justice, and social equality.

“A gripping panoramic history that pairs ingenious excavation with enlightening explanation to relight the fire of feminist political identity at the very moment when we need it most.”―Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried

This passionate and inspiring book by the New York Times bestselling author of The Hello Girls shows us that the quest for women’s rights is deeply entwined with the founding story of the United States.

When America became a nation, a woman had no legal existence beyond her husband. If he abused her, she couldn’t leave without abandoning her children. Abigail Adams tried to change this, reminding her husband John to “remember the ladies” when he wrote the Constitution. He simply laughed—and women have been fighting for their rights ever since.

Fearless Women tells the story of women who dared to take destiny into their own hands. They were feminists and antifeminists, activists and homemakers, victims of abuse and pathbreaking professionals. Inspired by the nation’s ideals and fueled by an unshakeable sense of right and wrong, they wouldn’t take no for an answer. In time, they carried the country with them.

The first right they won was the right to learn. Later, impassioned teachers like Angelina Grimké and Susan B. Anthony campaigned for the right to speak in public, lobby the government, and own property. Some were passionate abolitionists. Others fought just to protect their own children.

Many of these women devoted their lives to the cause—some are famous—but most pressed their demands far from the spotlight, insisting on their right to vote, sit on a jury, control the timing of their pregnancies, enjoy equal partnerships, or earn a living. At every step, they faced fierce opposition. Elizabeth Cobbs gives voice to fearless women on both sides of the aisle, most of whom considered themselves patriots. Rich and poor, from all backgrounds and regions, they show that the women’s movement has never been an exclusive club.