Offering suggestions to correct the dehumanization of African American children, this book explains how to ensure that African American boys grow up to be strong, committed, and responsible African American men.

Using an intersectional approach, Marriage, Divorce, and Distress in Northeast Brazil explores rural, working-class, black Brazilian women's perceptions and experiences of courtship, marriage and divorce. In this book, women's narratives of marriage dissolution demonstrate the ways in which changing gender roles and marriage expectations associated with modernization and globalization influence the intimate lives and the health and well being of women in Northeast Brazil. Melanie A. Medeiros explores the women's rich stories of desire, love, respect, suffering, strength, and transformation.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Turkey relentlessly persecuted any form of Kurdish dissent. This led to the radicalisation of an increasing number of Kurds, the rise of the Kurdish national movement and the PKK's insurgency against Turkey. Political activism by the Kurds or around Kurdish-related political demands continues to be viewed with deep suspicions by Turkey's political establishment and severely restricted. Despite this, the pro-Kurdish democratic movement has emerged, providing Kurds with a channel to represent themselves and articulate their demands. This book is timely contribution to the debate on the Kurds' political representation in Turkey, tracing the different forms it has taken since 1950. The book highlights how the transformations in Kurdish society have affected the types of actors involved in politics and the avenues, organisations and networks Kurds use to challenge the state. Based on survey data obtained from over 350 individuals, this is the first book to provide an in-depth analysis of Kurdish attitudes from across different segments of Kurdish society, including the elite, the business and professional classes, women and youth activists. It is an intimate portrait of how Kurds today are dealing with the challenges and difficulties of political representation.

Focusing on relationships between Jewish American authors and Jewish authors elsewhere in America, Europe, and Israel, this book explores the phenomenon of authorial affiliation: the ways in which writers intentionally highlight and perform their connections with other writers. Starting with Philip Roth as an entry point and recurring example, David Hadar reveals a larger network of authors involved in formations of Jewish American literary identity, including among others Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Nicole Krauss, and Nathan Englander. He also shows how Israeli writers such as Sayed Kashua perform their own identities through connections to Jewish Americans. Whether by incorporating other writers into fictional work as characters, interviewing them, publishing critical essays about them, or invoking them in paratext or publicity, writers use a variety of methods to forge public personas, craft their own identities as artists, and infuse their art with meaningful cultural associations. Hadar's analysis deepens our understanding of Jewish American and Israeli literature, positioning them in decentered relation with one another as well as with European writing. The result is a thought-provoking challenge to the concept of homeland that recasts each of these literary traditions as diasporic and questions the oft-assumed centrality of Hebrew and Yiddish to global Jewish literature. In the process, Hadar offers an approach to studying authorial identity-building relevant beyond the field of Jewish literature.

Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles interrogates Blackness and illustrates how it has been used as a basis to oppress, dismiss and exclude Blacks from societies and institutions in Europe, North America and South America. Employing uncharted analytical categories that tackle intriguing themes about borderless non-racial African ancestry, "traveling" identities and post-blackness, the essays provide new lenses for viewing the "Black" struggle worldwide. This approach directs the contributors' focus to understudied locations and protagonists. In the volume, Charleston, South Carolina is more prominent than Little Rock Arkansas in the struggle to desegregate schools; Chicago occupies the space usually reserved for Atlanta or other southern city "bulwarks" of the civil rights movement; diverse Africans in France and Afro-descended Chileans illustrate the many facets of negotiating belonging, long articulated by examples from the Greensboro Woolworth counter sit-in or the Montgomery Bus Boycott; unknown men in the British empire, who inverted dying confessions meant to vilify their blackness, demonstrate new dimensions in the story about race and religion, often told by examples of fiery clergy of the Black Church; and the theatres and studios of dramatists and visual artists replace the Mall in Washington DC as the stage for the performance of identities and activism.

Keith Hatschek tells the story of three determined artists: Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Iola Brubeck and the stand they took against segregation by writing and performing a jazz musical titled The Real Ambassadors. First conceived by the Brubecks in 1956, the musical's journey to the stage for its 1962 premiere tracks extraordinary twists and turns across the backdrop of the civil rights movement. A variety of colorful characters, from Broadway impresarios to gang-connected managers, surface in the compelling storyline. During the Cold War, the US State Department enlisted some of America's greatest musicians to serve as jazz ambassadors, touring the world to trumpet a so-called "free society." Honored as celebrities abroad, the jazz ambassadors, who were overwhelmingly African Americans, returned home to racial discrimination and deferred dreams. The Brubecks used this double standard as the central message for the musical, deploying humor and pathos to share perspectives on American values. On September 23, 1962, The Real Ambassadors's stunning debut moved a packed arena at the Monterey Jazz Festival to laughter, joy, and tears. Although critics unanimously hailed the performance, it sadly became a footnote in cast members' bios. The enormous cost of reassembling the star-studded cast made the creation impossible to stage and tour. However, The Real Ambassadors: Dave and Iola Brubeck and Louis Armstrong Challenge Segregation caps this jazz story by detailing how the show was triumphantly revived in 2014 by Jazz at Lincoln Center. This reaffirmed the musical's place as an integral part of America's jazz history and served as an important reminder of how artists' voices are a powerful force for social change.

This book explores queer identity in Morocco through the work of author and LGBT activist Abdellah Taia, who defied the country's anti-homosexuality laws by publicly coming out in 2006. Engaging postcolonial, queer and literary theory, Tina Dransfeldt Christensen examines Taia's art and activism in the context of the wider debates around sexuality in Morocco. Placing key novels such as Salvation Army and Infidels in dialogue with Moroccan writers including Driss Chraibi and Abdelkebir Khatibi, she shows how Taia draws upon a long tradition of politically committed art in Morocco to subvert traditional notions of heteronormativity. By giving space to silenced or otherwise marginalised voices, she shows how his writings offer a powerful critique of discourses of class, authenticity, culture and nationality in Morocco and North Africa.