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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Ethnic studies
Ma?berot Immanuel is a collection of twenty-eight chapters in
Hebrew of rhymed prose and poetry written by the poet and amateur
philosopher Immanuel of Rome during an era of rapid political
change in late medieval Italy. The final chapter, Mah?beret
Ha-Tofet Ve-ha-'Eden (A Tale of Heaven and Hell), like Dante's
Commedia, depicts Immanuel's visits to hell and heaven. Bridging
Worlds focuses on the interrelation of Immanuel's belletristic work
and biblical exegesis to advance a comprehensive and original
reading of this final chapter. By reading Immanuel's philosophical
commentaries and literary works together, Dana Fishkin demonstrates
that Immanuel's narrative made complex philosophical ideas about
the soul's quest for immortality accessible to an educated
populace. Throughout this work, she explains the many ways
Mah?beret Ha-Tofet Ve-ha-'Eden serves as a site of cultural
negotiation and translation. Bridging Worlds broadens our
understanding of the tensions inherent in the world of late
medieval Jewish people who were deeply enmeshed in Italian culture
and literature, negotiating two cultures whose values may have
overlapped but also sometimes clashed. Fishkin puts forth a
valuable and refreshing perspective alongside previously unknown
sources to breathe new life into this extremely rich and culturally
valuable medieval work.
Robert Knight's book examines how the 60,000 strong Slovene
community in the Austrian borderland province of Carinthia
continued to suffer in the wake of Nazism's fall. It explores how
and why Nazi values continued to be influential in a post-Nazi era
in postwar Central Europe and provides valuable insights into the
Cold War as a point of interaction of local, national and
international politics. Though Austria was re-established in 1945
as Hitler's 'first victim', many Austrians continued to share
principles which had underpinned the Third Reich. Long treated as
both inferior and threatening prior to the rise of Hitler and then
persecuted during his time in power, the Slovenes of Carinthia were
prevented from equality of schooling by local Nazis in the years
that followed World War Two, behavior that was tolerated in Vienna
and largely ignored by the rest of the world. Slavs in Post-Nazi
Austria uses this vital case study to discuss wider issues relating
to the stubborn legacy of Nazism in postwar Europe and to instill a
deeper understanding of the interplay between collective and
individual (liberal) rights in Central Europe. This is a
fascinating study for anyone interested in knowing more about the
disturbing imprint that Nazism left in some parts of Europe in the
postwar years.
This book explores the Afro-diasporic experiences of African
skilled migrants in Australia. It explores research participants'
experiences of migration and how these experiences inform their
lives and the lives of their family. It provides theory-based
arguments examining how mainstream immigration attitudes in
Australia impact upon Black African migrants through the mediums of
mediatised moral panics about Black criminality and acts of
everyday racism that construct and enforce their 'strangerhood'.
The book presents theoretical writing on alternate African
diasporic experiences and identities and the changing nature of
such identities. The qualitative study employed semi-structured
interviews to investigate multiple aspects of the migrant
experience including employment, parenting, family dynamics and
overall sense of belonging. This book advances our understanding of
the resilience exercised by skilled Black African migrants as they
adjust to a new life in Australia, with particular implications for
social work, public health and community development practices.
In this ethnography of Navajo (Dine) popular music culture,
Kristina M. Jacobsen examines questions of Indigenous identity and
performance by focusing on the surprising and vibrant Navajo
country music scene. Through multiple first-person accounts,
Jacobsen illuminates country music's connections to the Indigenous
politics of language and belonging, examining through the lens of
music both the politics of difference and many internal
distinctions Dine make among themselves and their fellow Navajo
citizens. As the second largest tribe in the United States, the
Navajo have often been portrayed as a singular and monolithic
entity. Using her experience as a singer, lap steel player, and
Navajo language learner, Jacobsen challenges this notion, showing
the ways Navajos distinguish themselves from one another through
musical taste, linguistic abilities, geographic location, physical
appearance, degree of Navajo or Indian blood, and class
affiliations. By linking cultural anthropology to ethnomusicology,
linguistic anthropology, and critical Indigenous studies, Jacobsen
shows how Navajo poetics and politics offer important insights into
the politics of Indigeneity in Native North America, highlighting
the complex ways that identities are negotiated in multiple, often
contradictory, spheres.
The disastrous Buffalo Creek Treaty of 1838 called for the Senecas'
removal to Kansas (then part of the Indian Territory). From this
low point, the Seneca Nation of Indians, which today occupies three
reservations in western New York, sought to rebound. Beginning with
events leading to the Seneca Revolution in 1848, which transformed
the nation's government from a council of chiefs to an elected
system, Laurence M. Hauptman traces Seneca history through the New
Deal. Based on the author's nearly fifty years of archival
research, interviews, and applied work, Coming Full Circle shows
that Seneca leaders in these years learned valuable lessons and
adapted to change, thereby preparing the nation to meet the
challenges it would face in the post-World War II era, including
major land loss and threats of termination. Instead of emphasizing
American Indian decline, Hauptman stresses that the Senecas were
actors in their own history and demonstrated cultural and political
resilience. Both Native belief, in the form of the Good Message of
Handsome Lake, and Christianity were major forces in Seneca life;
women continued to play important social and economic roles despite
the demise of clan matrons' right to nominate the chiefs; and
Senecas became involved in national and international competition
in long-distance running and in lacrosse. The Seneca Nation also
achieved noteworthy political successes in this period. The Senecas
resisted allotment, and thus saved their reservations from breakup
and sale. They recruited powerful allies, including attorneys,
congressmen, journalists, and religious leaders. They saved their
Oil Spring Reservation, winning a U.S. Supreme Court case against
New York State on the issue of taxation and won remuneration in
their Kansas Claims case. These efforts laid the groundwork for the
Senecas' postwar endeavor to seek compensation before the Indian
Claims Commission and pursuit of a series of land claims and tax
lawsuits against New York State.
What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the
killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into
a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people
defiantly flooded into the nation's streets, demanding an end to
police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black
people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests
appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence.
Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in
America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors-and any
attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with
the recent past. Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many
Americans consider the decades since the civil rights movement in
the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness
and equality. Hinton's sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether
different history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in
1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart
the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary
consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical
corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope
applied to events that can only be properly understood as
rebellions-explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and
violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions
that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a
post-Jim Crow United States no longer holds. Black rebellion,
America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to
poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police
violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the "War on
Crime," sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black
neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality,
residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered
local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Hinton
draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden geography
of violence in smaller American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to
Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California. The central lesson from
these eruptions-that police violence invariably leads to community
violence-continues to escape policymakers, who respond by further
criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying
socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded policing
and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans today.
Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation's enduring
strife, America on Fire is also a warning: rebellions will surely
continue unless police are no longer called on to manage the
consequences of dismal conditions beyond their control, and until
an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice
and equality.
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