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Conflicts about space and access to resources have shaped queer histories from at least 1965 to the present. As spaces associated with middle-class homosexuality enter mainstream urbanity in the United States, cultural assimilation increasingly erases insurgent aspects of these social movements. This gentrification itself leads to queer displacement. Combining urban history, architectural critique, and queer and trans theories, Queering Urbanism traces these phenomena through the history of a network of sites in the San Francisco Bay Area. Within that urban landscape, Stathis G. Yeros investigates how queer people appropriated existing spaces, how they expressed their distinct identities through aesthetic forms, and why they mobilized the language of citizenship to shape place and secure space. Here the legacies of LGBTQ+ rights activism meet contemporary debates about the right to housing and urban life.
“It is challenging to find a book that gives not just an account of a specific place and people but a theory of how queer space works, how it becomes queer. This is that book.” — ROBERT SELF, author of American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland
“This is a timely work that offers insight into a pressing problem not just for San Francisco but for our understanding of cities themselves.” — SUSAN STRYKER, author of Transgender History and codirector of Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria
“This lively and illuminating book provides a new and needed history of San Francisco since the 1960s, tracing how LGBTQ people remade public and private spaces while contesting the bounds of normative citizenship. Moving from SROs to renovated Victorians, lesbian bars to community land grants, Yeros revives vital questions about how queer and trans communities remake the cities they call home.” — STEPHEN VIDER, author of The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II
Stathis G. Yeros is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Florida.
In Ritual Boundaries, Joseph E. Sanzo transforms our understanding of how early Christians experienced religion in lived practice through the study of magical objects, such as amulets and grimoires. Against the prevailing view of late antiquity as a time when only so-called elites were interested in religious and ritual differentiation, the evidence presented here reveals that the desire to distinguish between religious and ritual insiders and outsiders cut across diverse social strata. Sanzo’s examination of the magical also offers unique insight into early biblical reception, exposing a textual world in which scriptural reading was multisensory and multitraditional. As they addressed sickness, demonic struggle, and interpersonal conflicts, Mediterranean people thus acted in ways that challenge our conceptual boundaries between Christians and non-Christians; elites and non-elites; and words, materials, and images. Sanzo helps us rethink how early Christians imagined similarity and difference among texts, traditions, groups, and rituals as they went about their daily lives.
“Joseph Sanzo refutes the current view of Christians living amicably alongside their non-Christian neighbors, forcing us to completely rethink how we approach religion in late antiquity. A truly revolutionary book!” — JAN N. BREMMER, author of Maidens, Magic and Martyrs in Early Christianity
“Ritual Boundaries is a deeply stimulating work and a poignant exercise in the reading of objects. This book takes up familiar words and images and reveals the remarkable—and surprising—lives ‘lived’ in ancient Egyptian Christian practice.” — DYLAN M. BURNS, author of Apocalypse of the Alien God: Platonism and the Exile of Sethian Gnosticism
JOSEPH E. SANZO is Associate Professor of History of Religions at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and author of Scriptural Incipits on Amulets from Late Antique Egypt: Text, Typology, and Theory.
Indonesia is the world’s second-largest cigarette market: two out of three men smoke, and clove-laced tobacco cigarettes called kretek make up 95 percent of the market. Each year, more than 250,000 Indonesians die of tobacco-related diseases. To account for the staggering success of this lethal industry, Kretek Capitalism examines how kretek manufacturers have adopted global tobacco technologies and enlisted Indonesians to labor on their behalf in fields and factories, at retail outlets and social gatherings, and online. The book charts how Sampoerna, a Philip Morris subsidiary, uses contracts, competitions, and gender, age, and class hierarchies to extract labor from workers, influencers, artists, students, retailers, and consumers. Critically engaging nationalist claims about the commodity’s cultural heritage and the jobs it supports, Marina Welker shows how global capitalism has transformed both kretek and the labor required to make and promote it.
“Thoughtful and provocative, this is a superb book that will be widely read, especially by those who are looking for an antidote to current popular support of kretek.”—Abidin Kusno, author of Jakarta: The City of a Thousand Dimensions
“A magnificent book! Kretek Capitalism is destined to become a classic of both medical anthropology and public health scholarship.”—Robert Proctor, author of Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition
“Marina Welker argues that ubiquitous Indonesian representations of kretek as an authentic, small-scale industry in fact rest on a toxic addiction that is as cultural as it is chemical. A brilliant, beautiful, and disturbing book.”—Carla Jones, Professor of Anthropology, University of Colorado Boulder
“Detailed, attentive, and careful, Kretek Capitalism is easily the most granular, informative, and textured ethnography of labor in the tobacco industry.”—Peter Benson, author of Tobacco Capitalism and Stuck Moving
Marina Welker is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University and author of Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia.
When was the last time you participated in an election for an online group chat or sat on a jury for a dispute about a controversial post? Platforms nudge users to tolerate nearly all-powerful admins, moderators, and “benevolent dictators for life.” In Governable Spaces, Nathan Schneider argues that the internet has been plagued by a phenomenon he calls “implicit feudalism”: a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms. The consequences have spread far beyond online spaces themselves. Feudal defaults train us to give up on our communities’ democratic potential, inclining us to be more tolerant of autocratic tech CEOs and authoritarian politicians. But online spaces could be sites of a creative, radical, and democratic renaissance. Schneider shows how the internet can learn from governance legacies of the past to become a more democratic medium, responsive and inventive unlike anything that has come before.
“A prescient analysis of how we create democratic spaces for engagement in the age of polarization. Governable Spaces is new, impeccably researched, and imaginative.” — Zizi Papacharissi, Professor of Communication and Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago
“This visionary book points a way to scrapping capitalist realism for community control over our digital spaces. Nathan Schneider generously brings together disparate wisdom from abolitionists, Black feminists, and cooperative software engineers to spark our own imaginations and experiments.” — Lilly Irani, author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India
“From feminist theory to blockchain governance, this dizzying array of topics pulls readers out of their comfort zone and forces a novel look at very old questions.” — Ethan Zuckerman, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Communication, and Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Nathan Schneider is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Economies Design Lab and the master’s program in Media and Public Engagement.
In this archivally informed work, Jennifer S. Clark explores the multiple ways in which the feminist priorities of the 1970s were strengthened by women who labored in the American television industry. Carefully synthesizing an array of interviews and primary sources—from television network memos to programming schedules, production notes to executive meeting agendas—Clark tells the story of how women organized in the workplace to form collectives, affect production labor, and develop reform‑oriented policies and philosophies that reshaped television behind the screen. She urges us to consider how interventions, often at localized levels, can collectively shift the dynamics of media workplaces and the cultural products created therein.
“A terrific model of feminist media historiography. Jennifer Clark expands our understanding of 1970s American television, the women’s liberation movement, and the deep connections among gender, labor, and activism while innovating new strategies to examine the media industries.” — Elana Levine, author of Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History
“A massively important and enlightening contribution to the field, offering a nuanced treatment of industry cooperation and compromise. Clark uses rare archival findings and a wide range of cultural objects and case studies to generate fresh, bold conclusions around second-wave feminism and American television.” — Annie Berke, author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television
Jennifer S. Clark is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University.
Muddy Thinking in the Mississippi River Delta uses the story of mud to answer a deceptively simple question: How can a place uniquely vulnerable to sea level rise be one of the nation’s most promiscuous producers and consumers of fossil fuels? Organized around New Orleans and South Louisiana as a case study, this book examines how the unruly Mississippi River and its muddy delta shaped the people, culture, and governance of the region. It proposes a framework of “muddy thinking” to gum the wheels of extractive capitalism and pollution that have brought us to the precipice of planetary collapse. Muddy Thinking calls upon our dirty, shared histories to address urgent questions of mutual survival and care in a rapidly changing world.
“Ned Randolph urges us to pivot our attention to the profound complexity (and deep historicity) of mud. This is a brilliant book, ingeniously conceived, deftly argued, and beautifully written.” — Patrick Anderson, author of Autobiography of a Disease
“Muddy Thinking in the Mississippi River Delta describes looping patterns of multivalent extractivism, while witnessing and calling forth righteous resistance, tender coexistence, and hope amid the messy petro-delta-apocalyptic.” — Rebecca Snedeker, coauthor of Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas
“Randolph’s embrace of muddy alternatives to the capitalist and technopolitical vectors of the Anthropocene exemplifies beautifully how Energy Humanities can stay with the troubles of these times.” — Dominic Boyer, author of No More Fossils
“Mud is Randolph’s point of departure for understanding the region’s past and future—a vehicle of disruption and constraint, certainly, but also, in Randolph’s deft reading, the very condition of possibility for sustaining life amid ecological ruin.” — Valerie Hartouni, Professor Emerita, UC San Diego
NED RANDOLPH holds a PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego. He lives in New Orleans, where he teaches, consults, and writes about environmental and social issues facing the Gulf South.
In Ways of Seeking, Emily Drumsta traces the influence of detective fiction on the twentieth-century Arabic novel. Theorizing a “poetics of investigation,” she shows how these novels, far from staging awe-inspiring feats of logical deduction, mock the truth-seeking practices on which modern exercises of colonial and national power are often premised. Their narratives return to the archives of Arabic folklore, Islamic piety, and mysticism to explore less coercive ways of knowing, seeing, and seeking. Drumsta argues that scholars of the Middle East neglect the literary at their peril, overlooking key critiques of colonialism from the intellectuals who shaped and responded through fiction to the transformations of modernity. This book ultimately tells a different story about the novelʼs place in the constellation of Arab modernism, modeling an innovative method of open-ended inquiry based on the literary texts themselves.
“A beautiful bahth that sheds a new light on Arabic detective fiction in the twentieth century. Emily Drumstaʼs original approach makes us rethink genres and epistemologies, juridical and metaphysical quests, and the role of literature in bringing them together.” — TAREK EL-ARISS, James Wright Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College
“Drumstaʼs perceptive consideration of detection in modern Arabic fiction will stimulate readers to consider anew the centrality of the detective figure for writers and intellectuals in the grip of a rapacious and erratic modernization. Starting from the details of the Arabic context, this study ultimately provokes the problem of knowledge itself.” — HOSAM ABOUL-ELA, author of Domestications: American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens
EMILY DRUMSTA is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She is editor and translator of Revolt Against the Sun: Selected Poetry of Nazik al-Malaʼika.
Golden Ages is an ethnographic study of young singers in the contemporary Brooklyn Hasidic community who base their aesthetic explorations of the culturally intimate space of prayer on the gramophone-era cantorial golden age. Jeremiah Lockwood proposes a view of their work as a nonconforming social practice that calls upon the sounds and structures of Jewish sacred musical heritage to disrupt the aesthetics and power hierarchies of their conservative community, defying institutional authority and pushing at normative boundaries of sacred and secular. Beyond its role as a desirable art form, golden age cantorial music offers aspiring Hasidic singers a form of Jewish cultural productivity in which artistic excellence, maverick outsider status, and sacred authority are aligned.
“In Golden Ages, Jeremiah Lockwood opens a window into the closed circle of Orthodox cantors seeking personal fulfillment and communal connection through a sometimes tense revival of classic cantorial recordings. His deep involvement with his collaborators enriches a study that has implications beyond Jewish life to broader issues of contemporary American spiritual expression and the ethnomusicology of religion.” — Mark Slobin, author of Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate
“Lockwood has an unparalleled ear for the intermingled dynamics of loss, creativity, and continuity. His special domain is Jews and their music, but his study speaks clearly to larger processes of cultural rescue and their limits.” — Jonathan Boyarin, author of Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side
Jeremiah Lockwood is an independent scholar and a musician.
Higher Powers draws on four years of collaborative fieldwork carried out with Ugandans working to reconstruct their lives after attempting to leave behind problematic alcohol use. Given the relatively recent introduction of biomedical ideas of alcoholism and addiction in Uganda, most of these people have used other therapeutic resources, including herbal aversion therapies, engagements with balubaale spirits, and forms of deliverance and spiritual warfare practiced in Pentecostal churches. While these methods are at times severe, they contain within them understandings of the self and practices of sociality that point away from models of addiction as a chronic relapsing brain disease and towards the possibility of release. Higher Powers offers a reconceptualization of addiction and recovery that may prove relevant well beyond Uganda.
“Higher Powers brings into view novel social technologies to treat addiction. China Scherz, George Mpanga, and Sarah Namirembe’s captivating narrative offers insights that translate well beyond Uganda, as overdoses and toxic drug markets ravage disrupted communities across the globe.” — Helena Hansen, author of Addicted to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries
“A brilliant, innovative, and significant contribution. Through evocative ethnographic writing and profound theorizing, the authors illuminate a rich and nuanced assemblage of overlapping worlds that come to life on the pages as one reads. This unique and compelling work will deeply resonate within anthropology and far beyond.” — Lauren Coyle Rosen, author of Fires of Gold: Law, Spirit, and Sacrificial Labor in Ghana
“Carefully observed and lucidly theorized, Higher Powers is an engaging ethnography of alcohol, alcoholism, and recovery in Uganda that offers a detailed portrayal of distinctive ways of thinking about and acting on addiction.” — Jacob Doherty, author of Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala’s Infrastructures of Disposability
China Scherz is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia and author of Having People, Having Heart. George Mpanga and Sarah Namirembe are independent researchers living in Kampala, Uganda.
Contemporary film and television production is extraordinarily mobile. Filming large-scale studio productions in Atlanta, Budapest, London, Prague, or Australia’s Gold Coast makes Hollywood jobs available to people and places far removed from Southern California—but it also requires individuals to uproot their lives as they travel around the world in pursuit of work. Drawing on interviews with a global contingent of film and television workers, Kevin Sanson weaves an analysis of the sheer scale and complexity of mobile production into a compelling account of the impact that mobility has had on job functions, working conditions, and personal lives. Mobile Hollywood captures how an expanded geography of production not only intensifies the often-invisible pressures that production workers now face but also stretches the parameters of screen-media labor far beyond craftwork and creativity.
“Engagingly written and sharply observed, Kevin Sanson’s latest book—firmly grounded in the experiences of film workers themselves—is an invaluable contribution to the field.” — JADE L. MILLER, author of Nollywood Central: The Nigerian Videofilm Industry
“Every course in global media, media industries, and production studies should adopt this book.” — TIMOTHY HAVENS, author of Black Television Travels: African American Media around the Globe
“Persuasively encourages a major rethinking of how we understand the dynamics of transnational film and television production.” — PAUL MCDONALD, coeditor of Hollywood and the Law
Kevin Sanson is Professor of Media Studies at Queensland University of Technology and a coeditor of Voices of Labor: Creativity, Craft, and Conflict in Global Hollywood and Precarious Creativity: Global Media, Local Labor. He is a cofounder and the editor of the academic journal Media Industries.
Cancer Intersections is an ethnographic analysis of the complex and paradoxical efforts to access neoliberal, market-based oncological treatments in Colombia, a country where all patients are legally guaranteed access to medical services, including high-cost oncology treatments. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the city of Cali, Camilo Sanz explores the deep entanglements between medical, legal, and policy practices that share a common goal of treating and curing cancer but are hindered by bureaucratic procedures, pernicious financial interests, and class politics. Cancer Intersections shows how the interplay of these hurdles dictates the rhythm at which patients access treatment and how even in resource-rich settings, patients suffer because of market imperatives that shape how cancer treatments unfold. Through careful and measured ethnography, Sanz unveils how a neoliberal universal health care regime delays access to care for those reliant on public assistance, which means that some patients will start expensive treatments only after they are unlikely to change the course of the disease.
Between 1919 and 1961, pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong established an enduring legacy that encompassed cinema, theater, radio, and American television. Born in Los Angeles, yet with her US citizenship scrutinized due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Wong—a defiant misfit—innovated nuanced performances to subvert the racism and sexism that beset her life and career. In this critical study of Wong’s cross-media and transnational career, Yiman Wang marshals extraordinary archival research and a multifocal approach to illuminate a lifelong labor of performance. Viewing Wong as a performer and worker, not just a star, To Be an Actress adopts a feminist decolonial perspective to speculatively meet her as an interlocutor while inviting a reconsideration of racialized, gendered, and migratory labor as the bedrock of the entertainment industries.
Feminist Cyberlaw reimagines the field of cyberlaw through a feminist lens. Essays crafted for this volume by emerging and established scholars and practitioners explore how gender, race, sexuality, disability, class, and the intersections of these identities affect cyberspace and the laws that govern it. This vibrant and visionary volume promises to build a movement of scholars whose work charts a near future where cyberlaw is informed by feminism.
Meg Leta Jones is the Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor in the Communication, Culture, and Technology program at Georgetown University. She is the author of Ctrl+Z: The Right to Be Forgotten and The Character of Consent: The History of Cookies and Future of Technology Policy.
Amanda Levendowski is Associate Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Intellectual Property and Information Policy Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center. She is also the founder of the Cyberspace and Technology (CAT) Lab.
Almost Futures looks to the people who pay the heaviest price for progress throughout war and capitalist globalization—particularly Vietnamese citizens and refugees—for glimpses of ways to exist at the end of our future's promise. In order to learn from the lives destroyed (and lived) amid our inheritance of modern humanism and its uses of time, Almost Futures asks us to recognize new spectrums of feeling: the poetic, in the grief of protesters dispossessed by land speculation; the allegorical, in assembly line workers' laughter and sorrow; the iterant and intimate, in the visual witnessing of revolutionary and state killing; the haunting, in refugee writing on the death of their nation; and the irreconcilable, in refugees' inhabitation of history.
One of the most hotly debated issues in contemporary Muslim ethics is the status of women in Islamic law. While Muslim conservatives argue that gender-differentiated legal rulings reflect complementary gender roles, Muslim feminists argue that Islamic law has subordinated women and is thus in need of reform. The shared assumption on both sides, however, is that gender fundamentally shapes an individual's legal status. Beyond the Binary explores an expansive cross section of topics in ninth- to twelfth-century Hanafi legal thought—from sexual crimes to consent to marriage—to show that early Muslim jurists imagined a world built not on a binary distinction between male and female but on multiple intersecting hierarchies of gender, age, enslavement, lineage, class, and other social roles. Saadia Yacoob offers a restorative reading of Islamic law, arguing that its intersectional and relational understanding of legal personhood offers a productive space for Muslim feminists to move beyond critique and instead to think with and through the Islamic legal tradition.
African cities are under construction. Beyond the urban redevelopment schemes and large-scale infrastructure projects reconfiguring central city skylines, the majority of urban residents are putting their resources into finding land and building homes on the city edges. As the first book-length analysis of Africa’s suburban middle-class, The Suburban Frontier examines how self-built housing on the urban periphery has become central to middle-class formation and urban transformation in contemporary Tanzania. Drawing on original qualitative and ethnographic field research in the city of Dar es Salaam, Claire Mercer writes a detailed exposition of how the "suburban frontier" has become the place where Africa’s middle classes are shaped. This book offers a new lens on the African middle classes, making significant contributions to the study of urban social change in Africa and urbanization in the Global South.
What happens after colonial industries have run their course—after the factory closes and the fields go fallow? Set in the cinchona plantations of India’s Darjeeling Hills, Quinine’s Remains chronicles the history and aftermaths of quinine. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria’s only remedy until the twentieth-century advent of synthetic drugs, and it was vital to the British Empire. Today, the cinchona plantations—and the roughly fifty thousand people who call them home—remain. Their futures, however, are unclear. The Indian government has threatened to privatize or shut down this seemingly obsolete and crumbling industry, but the plantation community, led by strident trade unions, has successfully resisted. Overgrown cinchona fields and shuttered quinine factories may appear the stuff of postcolonial and postindustrial ruination, but quinine’s remains are not dead. Rather, they have become the site of urgent efforts to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. Quinine's Remains offers a vivid historical and ethnographic portrait of what it means to forge life after empire.
In the late fifth century, a nameless girl was born at the edge of the Chinese empire. By the time of her death, she had transformed herself into Empress Dowager Ling, one of the most powerful politicians of her age and one of the first of many Buddhist women to wield incredible influence in dynastic East Asia. In this book, Stephanie Balkwill documents the Empress Dowager’s rise to power and life on the throne against the broader social world of imperial China under the rule of the Northern Wei dynasty, a foreign people from Inner Asia who built their capital deep in the Chinese heartland.
Building on largely untapped Buddhist materials, Balkwill shows that the life and rule of the Empress Dowager is a much larger story of the reinvention of religious, ethnic, and gender norms in a rapidly changing, multicultural society. The Women Who Ruled China recovers the voices of those left out of the mainstream historical record and, through the life of the Empress Dowager, paints a compelling portrait of medieval Chinese society reinventing itself under her leadership.
In recent decades, many members of the public have come to see processed food as a problem that needs to be solved by eating "real" food and reforming the food system. But for many food industry professionals, the problem is not processed food or the food system itself, but misperceptions and irrational fears caused by the public's lack of scientific understanding. In her highly original book, Charlotte Biltekoff explores the role that science and scientific authority play in food industry responses to consumer concerns about what we eat and how it is made. As Biltekoff documents, industry efforts to correct public misperceptions through science-based education have consistently misunderstood the public's concerns, which she argues are an expression of politics. This has entrenched "food scientism" in public discourse and seeded a form of antipolitics, with broad consequences. Real Food, Real Facts offers lessons that extend well beyond food choice and will appeal to readers interested in how everyday people come to accept or reject scientific authority in matters of personal health and well-being.
In the 1990s, India's mediascape saw the efflorescence of edgy soft-porn films in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. In Rated A, Darshana Sreedhar Mini examines the local and transnational influences that shaped Malayalam soft-porn cinema—such as vernacular pulp fiction, illustrated erotic tales, and American exploitation cinema—and maps the genre's circulation among blue-collar workers of the Indian diaspora in the Middle East, where pirated versions circulate alongside low-budget Bangladeshi films and Pakistani mujra dance films as South Asian pornography. Through a mix of archival and ethnographic research, Mini also explores the soft-porn industry's utilization of gendered labor and trust-based arrangements, as well as how actresses and production personnel negotiate their social lives when marked by their involvement with a taboo form. By locating the tense negotiations between sexuality, import policy, and censorship in contemporary India, this study offers a model for understanding film genres outside of screen space, emphasizing that they constitute not just industrial formations but entire fields of social relations and gendered imaginaries.
For more than four decades, socially disadvantaged Israeli Mizrahim—descendants of Jews from Middle Eastern communities—have continuously supported right-wing political parties. Sociologists, NGOs, and left-wing politicians tend to view Mizrahim as acting against their own interests, but Nissim Mizrachi locates the problem within the limitations of the liberal grammar by which their behavior is read. In Beyond Suspicion, Mizrachi turns the direction of inquiry on itself, contrasting liberal grammar—which values autonomy, equality, and universal reason and morality—with the grammar of Mizrahi rootedness, in which the self is experienced through a web of relational commitments, temporal ties, and codes of collective identity. Recognizing rootedness as a fundamental need for belonging is necessary to understand both scholarly and political rifts in Israel and throughout the world.
Making Sense explores the experiential, ethical, and intellectual stakes of living in, and thinking with, worlds wherein language cannot be taken for granted. In Nepal, many deaf signers use Nepali Sign Language (NSL), a young, conventional signed language. The majority of deaf Nepalis, however, use what NSL signers call natural sign. Natural sign involves conventional and improvisatory signs, many of which recruit semiotic relations immanent in the social and material world. These features make conversation in natural sign both possible and precarious. Sense-making in natural sign depends on signers’ skillful use of resources and on addressees’ willingness to engage. Natural sign reveals the labor of sense-making that in more conventional language is carried by shared grammar. Ultimately, this highly original book shows that emergent language is an ethical endeavor, challenging readers to consider what it means, and what it takes, to understand and to be understood.
This book follows the production, transnational circulation, and reception of the highest grossing film in the history of Soviet exhibition, the 1971 Mexican romance "Yesenia." The film adaptation of a telenovela based on a wildly popular graphic novel set during the Second Franco-Mexican War became a surprise hit in the USSR, selling more than ninety million tickets in the first year of its Soviet release alone. Drawing on years of archival research, renowned film scholar Masha Salazkina takes "Yesenia"’s unprecedented popularity as an entry point into a wide-ranging exploration of the cultures of Mexico and the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and the ways in which popular culture circulated globally. Paying particular attention to the shifting landscape of sexual politics, Romancing Yesenia argues for the enduring importance and ideological ambiguities of melodramatic forms in global popular media.
For years the Catholic Church, Catholic Charities, and the Haitian Multi-Service Center in Boston have helped Haitian refugees and immigrants attain economic independence, health, security, and citizenship in the United States. In Life at the Center, Erica Caple James traces this aid work and discovers at its heart a fundamental paradox, arising from what she calls "corporate Catholicism": social assistance produces and reproduces structural inequalities between providers and recipients, which can deepen aid recipients' dependence and lead to resistance to organized benevolence. James documents how institutional financial deficits harmed clients and providers, yet also how modes of philanthropy that previously caused harm can be redeployed to repair damage and rebuild "charitable brands." The culmination of over a decade of advocacy and research on behalf of the Haitians of Boston, this groundbreaking work exposes how Catholic corporations strengthened—but also eroded—Haitians' civic power.
