As the time-honored framework of sacred history was gradually outdated, American historians at that time turned to individual facts as possible evidence for a new generalization, and tried different “scientific” theories to give coherency to their writings. History writing was in its transitional phase, shifting from religion to science, deduction to induction, and static to dynamic worldview.
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American History in Transition
From Religion to Science
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Yoshinari Yamaguchi
As the time-honored framework of sacred history was gradually outdated, American historians at that time turned to individual facts as possible evidence for a new generalization, and tried different “scientific” theories to give coherency to their writings. History writing was in its transitional phase, shifting from religion to science, deduction to induction, and static to dynamic worldview.
Knowledge of the Pragmatici
Legal and Moral Theological Literature and the Formation of Early Modern Ibero-America
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Edited by Thomas Duve and Otto Danwerth
The eleven chapters of this book explore the circulation and the uses of pragmatic normative texts in the Iberian peninsula, in New Spain, Peru, New Granada and Brazil. The book reveals the functions and intellectual achievements of pragmatic literature, which condensed normative knowledge, drawing on medieval scholarly practices of ‘epitomisation’, and links the genre with early modern legal culture.
Contributors are: Manuela Bragagnolo, Agustín Casagrande, Otto Danwerth, Thomas Duve, José Luis Egío, Renzo Honores, Gustavo César Machado Cabral, Pilar Mejía, Christoph H. F. Meyer, Osvaldo Moutin, and David Rex Galindo.
Reading(s) / Across / Borders
Studies in Anglophone Borders Criticism
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Edited by Ciaran Ross
Global Healing
Literature, Advocacy, Care
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Karen Laura Thornber
The three parts of this book discuss writings from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania that implore societies to shatter the devastating social stigmas which prevent billions from accessing effective care; to increase the availability of quality person-focused healthcare; and to prioritize partnerships that facilitate healing and enable wellbeing for both patients and loved ones.
Thornber’s Global Healing remaps the contours of comparative literature, world literature, the medical humanities, and the health humanities.
Empirical Form and Religious Function
Apparition Narratives of the Early English Enlightenment
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Michael Dopffel
Drawing on both well-established and previously unknown narrative sources, Michael Dopffel here offers a fundamental reappraisal of one of the defining literary genres of the 17th and 18th century. Intricately connected to the evolving discourses of natural philosophy, Protestant religion and popular literature, the narratives portrayed in this work form a hybrid genre whose interpretations and literary functions retain the ambiguity of the apparitions. Simultaneously an empirically approachable phenomena and a religious experience, witnesses and writers translated the spiritual characteristics of apparitions into distinct literary forms, profoundly shaping modern conceptions of ghosts, whether factual or fictional, ever since.
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Ryan R. Gladwin
Denver’s Chinatown 1875-1900
Gone But Not Forgotten
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Jingyi Song
Filipino American Transnational Activism
Diasporic Politics among the Second Generation
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Edited by Robyn M. Rodriguez
The Citizenship Experiment
Contesting the Limits of Civic Equality and Participation in the Age of Revolutions
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René Koekkoek
Beyond the Legacy of the Missionaries and East Indians
The Impact of the Presbyterian Church in the Caribbean
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Jerome Teelucksingh
Global Southeast Asian Diasporas
Memory, Movement, and Modernities across Hemispheres
Edited by Richard Chu, Augusto F. Espiritu and Mariam Lam
Richard T. Chu, University of Massachusetts
Augusto F. Espiritu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Mariam Lam, University of California, Riverside
For some time now, studies on Southeast Asians have often situated the experiences of these peoples within the territorial boundaries of their countries and within the regional framework of Southeast Asia. Geographically fixed to the Philippines, Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia, Brunei, East Timor, and Singapore, Southeast Asia emerges, as critical area studies underscore, as a site marked by multivalent politics, histories, and cultures. The processes of globalization, neoliberalism, and war have unmoored such fixities in the Eastern as much as in the Western Hemispheres, causing tectonic shifts in the constructions of memory, massive population movements and migrations, and ever new projects and worldings responding to various regimes of the “modern.” Whereas Southeast Asian studies may remain regionally focused, Southeast Asian American studies must increase its focus on the understudied complex, transnational flows and manifold expressions of the Southeast Asian diasporic experience.
Attendant to the rise of the Southeast Asian diasporas, Global Southeast Asian Diasporas (SEAD) provides a peer-reviewed forum for studies that specifically investigate the histories and experiences of Southeast Asian diasporic subjects across hemispheres. We especially invite studies that critically focus on the Southeast Asian experience from a transnational, comparative, and international perspective. SEAD welcomes submissions from a wide array of disciplinary fields (including history, sociology, political science, cultural studies, literary studies, and anthropology, among others) that innovatively interrogate themes such as refugees, political asylum, gender/sexuality, colonialism, globalization, empire, nation/nationalism, ethnicity, and transnationalism.
Manuscripts should be at least 90,000 words in length (including footnotes and bibliography). Manuscripts may also include illustrations, tables, and other visual material. The editors will consider proposals for original monographs, edited collections, translations, and critical primary source editions.
Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals and/or full manuscripts by email to the publisher Chunyan Shu.
Beirut to Carnival City
Reading Rawi Hage
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Edited by Krzysztof Majer
Contributors: F. Elizabeth Dahab, André Forget, Kyle Gamble, Syrine Hout, Ewa Macura-Nnamdi, Krzysztof Majer, Lisa Marchi, Judit Molnár, Alex Ramon, Rita Sakr, Dima Samaha, Madeleine Thien, Ewa Urbaniak-Rybicka
El éxodo español de 1939
Una topología cultural del exilio
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Mónica Jato
Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Jato contends that the experience of space in exile is relational, and that the staging posts described in each chapter have no meaning unless they are interconnected as integral parts of a cultural topology.
En El éxodo español de 1939: Una topología cultural del exilio Mónica Jato da cuenta de las variadas estrategias culturales empleadas por los refugiados republicanos españoles para adaptarse a las condiciones de sus nuevos entornos con el fin de transformarlos en lugares habitables. El libro indaga así la centralidad del concepto de lugar en la reconstrucción del hogar perdido y lo hace a través de sus diferentes etapas: en los campos de internamiento franceses, en los barcos rumbo a América y durante el asentamiento en tierras mexicanas.
La experiencia del exilio es abordada aquí desde una perspectiva interdisciplinaria que pone de manifiesto el aspecto relacional de estas pausas espaciales cuya interconexión define esta particular topología cultural.
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Edited by Patricia Vilches
Latin America has endured multiple spatial transformations, which contributors analyze from the perspective of the urban, the rural, the market, and the political body. The essays collected here signal how spatial processes constantly shape societal interactions and illuminate the complex relationships between humans and space, emphasizing the role of spatiality in our actions and perceptions.
Contributors: Gail A. Bulman, Ana María Burdach Rudloff, James Craine, Angela N. DeLutis-Eichenberger, Carolina Di Próspero, Gustavo Fares, Jennifer Hayward, Silvia Hirsch, Edward Jackiewicz, Magdalena Maiz-Peña, Lucía Melgar, Silvia Nagy-Zekmi, Luis H. Peña, Jorge Saavedra Utman, Rosa Tapia, Juan de Dios Torralbo Caballero, Tera Trujillo, Patricia Vilches, and Gareth Wood.
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Carlos Eduardo Martins
The real test of theory is its adequacy as an instrument of understanding contemporary reality. The TMD has been enriched and renewed from this work of Carlos Eduardo Martins. It considers capitalism from the perspective of anti-capitalism, dependence from the standpoint of emancipation and reality through a vision for its revolutionary transformation.
Emir Sader - CLACSO General Secretary (2006-2012)
This book is a revised edition of a work first published in 2011 as Globalização, dependência e neoliberalismo na América Latina by Boitempo Editorial, São Paulo, Brazil.
La teoría marxista de la dependencia (TMD) logró articular la inserción de las sociedades periféricas en el mercado internacional con los procesos de acumulación de capital de cada país. Se ha convertido en una teoría esencial para la comprensión de nuestras sociedades. Desde que Ruy Mauro Marini expuso sus fundamentos, muchas transformaciones ocurrieron en el capitalismo global y en nuestras sociedades, poniendo el desafío de actualización en condiciones más complejas
La prueba real de la teoría es su adecuación como instrumento de comprensión de la realidad contemporánea. La TMD sale enriquecida y renovada de esta obra de Carlos Eduardo Martins dedicada a pensar el capitalismo bajo la perspectiva del anticapitalismo, la dependencia en la óptica de la emancipación y la realidad en la perspectiva de su transformación revolucionaria.
Emir Sader - Secretario General CLACSO (2006-2012)
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Daniela Spenser
Daniela Spenser's is the first biography of Lombardo Toledano based on his extensive private papers, on primary sources from European, Mexican and American archives, and on personal interviews. Her even-keeled portrayal of the man counters previous hagiographies and/or vilifications.
New Light on the Old Colony
Plymouth, the Dutch Context of Toleration, and Patterns of Pilgrim Commemoration
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Jeremy Bangs
Thorough research revises the story of colonists and of the people they displaced. Bangs’ book is required reading for the history of New England, Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts Natives, the Mennonite contribution to religious toleration in Europe and New England, and the history of commemoration, from paintings and pageants to living history and internet memes. If Pilgrims were radical, so is this book.
Power and Impotence
A History of South America under Progressivism (1998–2016)
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Fabio Luis Barbosa dos Santos
Originally published in Portuguese as Uma história da onda progressista sul-americana (1998-2016) by Elefante, São Paulo, 2018.
Fabio Luis Barbosa dos Santos mergulha na história da América do Sul para compreender a ascensão e queda dos chamados ‘governos progressistas’. Na esteira de mobilizações contra o neoliberalismo nos anos 1990, a maioria dos países da região elegeu presidentes identificados com a mudança. Contudo, menos de vinte anos depois da vitória de Hugo Chávez, essa onda chega ao fim. Os tempos de Lula agora são de Bolsonaro. O que aconteceu? Apoiado em extensa bibliografia e centenas de entrevistas, o autor aborda cada país, inclusive os que não elegeram progressistas, além de Cuba. O enfoque nacional é enriquecido por uma análise das tentativas de integração regional, oferecendo uma detalhada e necessária história recente do subcontinente.
United States in a World in Crisis
The Geopolitics of Precarious Work and Super-Exploitation
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Adrián Sotelo Valencia
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Steve J. Shone
Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina
Contesting Neo-Liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestión
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Marcelo Vieta
Christopher Aldous
This article scrutinizes the controversy surrounding the resumption of Japanese Antarctic whaling from 1946, focusing on the negotiations and concessions that underline the nature of the Allied Occupation as an international undertaking. Britain, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand objected to Japanese pelagic whaling, chiefly on the grounds of its past record of wasteful and inefficient operations. Their opposition forced the Natural Resources Section of General Headquarters, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, to increase the number of Allied inspectors on board the two Japanese whaling factories from one to two, and to respond carefully to the criticisms they made of the conduct of Japanese whaling. U.S. sensitivity to international censure caused the Occupation to encourage the factory vessels to prioritize oil yields over meat and blubber for domestic consumption. Moreover, General Douglas MacArthur, the U.S. Occupation commander, summarily rejected a proposal to increase the number of Japanese fleets from two to three in 1947. With its preponderance of power, the United States successfully promoted Japanese Antarctic whaling, but a tendency to focus only on outcomes obscures the lengthy and difficult processes that enabled Japanese whaling expeditions to take place on an annual basis from late 1946.
Jeffrey Crean
In the decade following its founding in 1955, the men who led the foreign policy lobby the Committee of One Million Against the Admission of Communist China to the United Nations faced little concerted opposition to their attempts at preventing even the most minor alterations in the U.S. policy of both isolating and containing Communist China. But beginning with the Fulbright Hearings on China in March 1966, the trend of informed opinion moved sharply against them, as liberal Democrats became newly emboldened and moderates in both parties switched sides, inverting the bipartisan consensus against change the Committee relied upon. The 1968 election of former Vice President Richard M. Nixon, who had served alongside Committee hero John Foster Dulles, seemed to offer them newfound hope. But when the “New Nixon” proved unreceptive to the entreaties of his one-time allies, the Committee mounted a furious public relations campaign to rally belatedly the right-wing base and influence public opinion. Its failure illustrated both the limits of power of American conservatives over U.S. foreign policy while détente was ascendant, and the discontinuity in priorities between the Old Right from which the Committee emerged and the New Right that left it behind.
Carl A. Gabrielson
After seventy years, U.S. bases in Japan continue to inspire ambivalence, resentment, resistance, and even fear for many Japanese people. To improve the public image of the U.S. armed forces, base administrators create training materials designed to promote cultural awareness, prevent troops’ crimes, and discourage bad behavior. But how does the organization whose purpose is to violently oppose foreign threats to U.S. interests conceive of cultural understanding and sensitivity? Taking as a case study the materials that U.S. Marine Corps bases in Japan produce to instruct newcomers, this article argues that such materials tend to equip base personnel preemptively with strategies for erasing, coopting, and dismissing local anti-base perspectives. Specifically, these materials depict Japanese people as friendly supporters of the military, as irrational and brainwashed puppets of anti-military political forces, or simply as decorative pieces of the cultural backdrop. It concludes that the cultural education materials the U.S. Marine Corps produces at its bases in Japan not only help marines to feel that they have or deserve the support of the Japanese people in carrying out the U.S. military agenda abroad, but that they also promote a sense of cultural superiority that fosters the very behaviors that cultural training materials are meant to prevent.
Falu Bakrania
Extending the archive of South Asian American visual culture to the kinds that community activists use in public spaces expands our understanding of how such cultures contest dominant discourses of home. In this article, I examine how the uses of theatre, photography, and clothing by the San Francisco Bay Area-based “Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour,” and the anti-domestic violence exhibit I Dare to Air created by Maitri, generate particular affective relationships to public and private space. These relationships in turn produce resistant knowledges of “home” that challenge the racist logics of the Trump administration and the violent logics of a rising Indian American capitalist class. The work of community activists thus demands that we invigorate space as an analytic through which we theorize the import of South Asian American visual culture.
Alison J. Miller
The paintings of Gajin Fujita (b. 1972) express the urban Asian diasporic experience in vivid images filled with historic and contemporary cultural references. Creating an amalgamation of contemporary sports figures, hip-hop culture, historic Japanese painting conventions, street art, and the visual language of Edo Japan (1600–1868), Fujita reflects his diverse experiences as a citizen of twenty-first century Los Angeles in his paintings. This article introduces the artist and provides a nuanced examination of his works vis-à-vis an understanding of the larger issues addressed in both Edo artistic practice and contemporary street art culture. By specifying the agents of power and performance in Fujita’s works, a greater understanding of the hybrid world of his colourful graphic paintings can be found.
Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken
John W. Pulis and Alena Clark
Richard Price and Christopher D.E. Willoughby
Abstract
In 1857, Harvard professor and anatomist Jeffries Wyman traveled to Suriname to collect specimens for his museum at Harvard (later the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, founded in 1866 and curated by Wyman). Though his main interest concerned amphibians, he had a secondary interest in ethnology and, apparently, a desire to demonstrate current theories of racial “degeneration” among the African-descended population, particularly the “Bush Negroes.” This research note presents a letter he wrote his sister from Suriname, excerpts from his field diary, and sketches he made while visiting the Saamaka and Saa Kiiki Ndyuka. Wyman’s brief account of his visit suggests that Saamakas’ attitudes toward outside visitors (whether scientists, missionaries, or government officials) remained remarkable stable, from the time of the 1762 peace treaty until the Suriname civil war of the 1980s.
An Intolerance of Idleness
British Disaster “Relief” in the Caribbean 1831–1907
Oscar Webber
Abstract
Despite the fact that disasters, usually induced by hurricanes, were a near-annual experience in the nineteenth-century British-controlled Caribbean, the immediate response of white elites (plantation owners and colonial officers) to these events has remained largely underexamined. This article fills that lacuna by examining the concerns that, across the long nineteenth century, informed British responses to some of the most devastating nature-induced disasters in this period. Though the damages wrought by these events always necessitated some form of humanitarian relief, across the period 1831–1907 the survival of labor regimes and the plantation economy always remained the paramount concern of British officials. White elites viewed their minority control over colonies in the region as contingent on their ability to make African-Caribbean people labor for them. Consequently, because disasters so often destroyed plantations and other sites of labor, colonial responses to disaster were primarily informed by a desire to coerce the African-Caribbean population back to work. Reflecting a preoccupation with “idleness” that was mirrored in domestic poor relief and disaster relief throughout the British Empire, white elites often attempted to withhold needed foodstuffs and materials for rebuilding from the African-Caribbean population until they re-engaged in labor for the colonial state. This article, through showing that a preoccupation with idleness remained central to colonial disaster response, reveals an underexamined continuity between the eras of slavery and emancipation.
Nalini Mohabir
This article focuses on the kala pani (dark waters) as a deathscape particular to indentured labourers and their descendants. Following a historical discussion of representations of the kala pani, the author turns to contemporary artists Maya Mackrandilal and Andil Gosine to explore how their artistic engagements are rerouting the flows of the kala pani away from discourses of caste stigma or the finality of (social) death to a reckoning of past and future time for those living in the diasporic space of North America.
Kreyòl anba Duvalier, 1957–1986
A Circuitous Solution to the Creole Problem?
Matthew Robertshaw
Abstract
The Duvalier presidencies were a devastating chapter in the history of Haiti. There is, however, one aspect of Haitian society that went through unexpected progress in the midst of these despotic regimes. Haitian Creole has long been excluded from formal and written contexts, despite being the only language common to all Haitians. The debate over whether Creole should be used in formal contexts for the sake of the country’s development and democratization began in earnest at the start of the twentieth century but was far from being resolved when François Duvalier came to power in 1957. Surprisingly, perceptions of Creole changed drastically during the Duvalier era, so that by the time Jean-Claude Duvalier fell from power in 1986 the status of Creole had improved markedly, so much that it had become typical for Haitians to use the language, along with French, in virtually all contexts.
Marsha Pearce
Although a notion of creolization is used as a lens through which dynamic processes of exchange in the Caribbean are explored, Caribbean Creole culture and identity are, more often than not, understood in terms of a mix of expressions derived from Africa and Europe. This framing of Creole culture marginalizes the Asian diaspora in the Caribbean. People of Asian ancestry are positioned at a sensory threshold, a barely perceptible space. This article considers how that space is challenged and reconfigured in art production, with a specific focus on the visual art practice of Trinidadian artist Susan Dayal, who is of Chinese and Indian ancestry. It deploys the Quaysay, or junction space, as an aesthetic metaphor—a notion appropriated from the iconic Trinidadian artist Carlisle Chang (1921–2001), who grew up at a crossroads called the Croisée (written as “Quaysay” by Chang) in the town of San Juan, Trinidad and Tobago.
Alpesh Kantilal Patel
Jacqueline Laguardia Martinez
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Ryan Leano
Cultural workers have a vital role in making social change accessible to marginalized communities, through whatever art form. People may not connect with a theory-dense book on social change, but they will instantly connect to a song, a poem, or a visual art piece concerning social change. Art has the capacity to connect people, and the art cultural workers produce is passionately rooted in peoples’ struggles and hopes. It also gives relevance to marginalized communities’ struggles in ways that are accessible to them because they can identify with the stories and gives their struggles a voice.
Cultural workers view themselves as being deliberate in creating culture as an act of resistance to neocolonialism and imperialism, and much of the stories they tell though their creative work are not revealed in literature, society, and mainstream media. The concept of “cultural workers” is also to deconstruct the myth of artists working in isolation from the community. Cultural workers are not just artists, but more importantly are community organizers who are of and with the communities they work with.
One of the objectives for writing this chapter is to show how cultural work brings political consciousness to marginalized populations who do not have access to education, in other words, how cultural workers become educators of marginalized communities beyond the limitations of the classroom. Another objective is to show how cultural work is a tool for social change in the National Democratic Movement of the Philippines, a social movement that goes beyond the borders of the Philippines.
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Joy Sales
Abstract
“Bayan Ko (my people/country),” focuses on the Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP), the first national revolutionary mass organization of Filipinos in the United States that was directly linked to the Philippine left. With the onset of the Marcos dictatorship, Filipinos and their allies articulated a diasporic vision that linked homeland and domestic politics, the positionality of Filipinos in the homeland and in the diaspora, and the diaspora’s responsibility in supporting movements in the homeland. Sales documents how young activists in KDP became politicized through understanding their lived experiences as post-colonial subjects of U.S. empire, and how activists transformed this newfound consciousness into action by promoting the National Democratic Movement in the Filipino community. Through various efforts, such as their involvement in the Pilipino People’s Far West Convention, the Political Prisoners Program, and their ties to the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, KDP represented an important experiment of integrating overseas Filipinos into leftist movements in the homeland and testing radical transnationalism in the Filipino American community. Sales argues that KDP strived to make local/homeland politics legible and possible for the Filipino community.