Books Books Press imprint: 2592 books
Now Is the Time!
Detroit Black Politics and Grassroots Activism
Language: English
Release Date: September 25, 2009
In Now Is the Time! Todd C. Shaw delves into the political strategies of post–Civil Rights Movement African American activists in Detroit, Michigan, to discover the conditions for effective social activism. Analyzing a wide range of grassroots community-housing initiatives intended to revitalize...
The Apartment Plot
Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975
Language: English
Release Date: November 11, 2010
Rethinking the significance of films including Pillow Talk, Rear Window, and The Seven Year Itch, Pamela Robertson Wojcik examines the popularity of the “apartment plot,” her term for stories in which the apartment functions as a central narrative device. From the baby boom years into the 1970s,...
The Body Multiple
Ontology in Medical Practice
Language: English
Release Date: January 17, 2003
The Body Multiple is an extraordinary ethnography of an ordinary disease. Drawing on fieldwork in a Dutch university hospital, Annemarie Mol looks at the day-to-day diagnosis and treatment of atherosclerosis. A patient information leaflet might describe atherosclerosis as the gradual obstruction of...
Transnational America
Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms
Language: English
Release Date: June 28, 2005
In Transnational America, Inderpal Grewal examines how the circulation of people, goods, social movements, and rights discourses during the 1990s created transnational subjects shaped by a global American culture. Rather than simply frame the United States as an imperialist nation-state that imposes...
Suffering for Territory
Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe
Language: English
Release Date: September 12, 2005
Since 2000, black squatters have forcibly occupied white farms across Zimbabwe, reigniting questions of racialized dispossession, land rights, and legacies of liberation. Donald S. Moore probes these contentious politics by analyzing fierce disputes over territory, sovereignty, and subjection in the...
Trading Roles
Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí
Language: English
Release Date: May 17, 2005
Located in the heart of the Andes, Potosí was arguably the most important urban center in the Western Hemisphere during the colonial era. It was internationally famous for its abundant silver mines and regionally infamous for its labor draft. Set in this context of opulence and oppression associated...
Empire's Garden
Assam and the Making of India
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2011
In the mid-nineteenth century the British created a landscape of tea plantations in the northeastern Indian region of Assam. The tea industry filled imperial coffers and gave the colonial state a chance to transform a jungle-laden frontier into a cultivated system of plantations. Claiming that local...
Sounding the Modern Woman
The Songstress in Chinese Cinema
Language: English
Release Date: May 29, 2015
From the beginning of the sound cinema era, singing actresses captivated Chinese audiences. In Sounding the Modern Woman, Jean Ma shows how their rise to stardom attests to the changing roles of women in urban modernity and the complex symbiosis between the film and music industries. The songstress—whether...
Heart X-rays
A Modern Epic Poem
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2018
A contemporary epic poem that ranges across landscapes and voices, with appearances by Banksy, Pussy Riot, hip-hop, the down and out, the up and coming, heartbreak and joybreak, while exploring the mystery we call the human heart. If indeed poetry can offer an RX, a prescription to the bloody joyful...
Rotten States?
Corruption, Post-Communism, and Neoliberalism
Language: English
Release Date: June 8, 2006
Official corruption has become increasingly prevalent around the world since the early 1990s. The situation appears to be particularly acute in the post-communist states. Corruption—be it real or perceived—is a major problem with concrete implications, including a lowered likelihood of foreign...
by
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2012
This study incorporates three important themes into the study of presidential selection:
What are the international implications of how the Unites States chooses its presidents? How does the process affect other nations? Does it enhance or diminish the ability of the United States to deal effectively...
Afro-Atlantic Flight
Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic
Language: English
Release Date: March 2, 2017
In Afro-Atlantic Flight Michelle D. Commander traces how post-civil rights Black American artists, intellectuals, and travelers envision literal and figurative flight back to Africa as a means by which to heal the dispossession caused by the slave trade. Through ethnographic, historical, literary,...
by Linda Williams
Language: English
Release Date: August 8, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: August 8, 2014
Many television critics, legions of fans, even the president of the United States, have cited The Wire as the best television series ever. In this sophisticated examination of the HBO serial drama that aired from 2002 until 2008, Linda Williams, a leading film scholar and authority on the interplay...
Makeover TV
Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity
Language: English
Release Date: November 20, 2009
In 2004, roughly 25 makeover-themed reality shows aired on U.S. television. By 2009, there were more than 250, from What Not to Wear and The Biggest Loser to Dog Whisperer and Pimp My Ride. In Makeover TV, Brenda R. Weber argues that whether depicting transformations of bodies, trucks, finances, relationships,...