Mariam Ibraheem was born in a refugee camp in Sudan. Her Muslim father died when she was six, and her mother raised her in the Christian faith. After a traumatic childhood, Mariam became a successful businessperson, married the man she loved, and had a beautiful baby boy.

But one day in 2013, her world was shattered when Sudan authorities insisted she was Muslim because of her father’s background. She had broken the law by marrying a Christian man, and she must abandon both her marriage and her son and adopt Islam. Under intense pressure, Mariam repeatedly refused. Ultimately, a Sharia court sentenced her to 100 lashes—and death by hanging.

Shackled is the stunning true story of a courageous young mother who was willing to face death rather than deny her faith. Mariam Ibraheem took a stand on behalf of all women who are maltreated because of their gender and all people who suffer from religious persecution.

Follow Mariam’s story from life under Islamic law, through imprisonment and childbirth while shackled, to her remarkable escape from death following an international outcry and advocacy that included diplomats, journalists, activists, and even Pope Francis.

South African higher education students have for the years 2015 and 2016 stood up to demand not only a free education but a decolonised, African-focused education. The calls for decolonisation of knowledge are the ultimate call for freedom. Without the decolonisation of knowledge, Africans may feel their liberation is inchoate and their efforts to shed Western dominance all come to naught.

Over the years various African leaders including Steve Biko wrote about the need to decolonise knowledge. The call for decolonisation is largely being equated with the search for an African identity that looks critically at Western hegemony. Biko sought the black people to understand their origins; to understand black history and affirm black identity. These are all embedded in the struggle to decolonise and search for African values and identities.

The contributors in this book treat several but connected themes that define what Africa and the diaspora require for a society devoid of colonialism and ready for a renewed Africa. “The discussions we develop and the philosophies we adopt on Pan Africanism and decolonisation are due to a bigger vision and for many of us the destination is African renaissance”. Everyone has a role to play in realising African renaissance; government, churches, universities, schools, cultural organisations all have a role to play in this endeavour.

MISTRA's publication on Whiteness Afrikaans Afrikaners: Addressing Post-Apartheid Legacies, Privileges and Burdens consists of various thought-provoking contributions made at a roundtable held in 2015 at Constitution Hill as a continuation of MISTRA’s research on nation formation and social cohesion. The publication aims to enhance the understanding of the history of whiteness in all its socio-economic manifestations as well as the architecture of power relations and privileges in democratic South Africa.

The volume comprises of contributions by former president Kgalema Motlanthe, current Deputy Minister of Cogta, Andries Nel, Mary Burton, Christi van der Westhuizen, Lynette Steenveld, Bobby Godsell, Dirk Herman (of Solidarity), Ernst Roets (of Afriforum), Xhanti Payi, Mathatha Tsedu, Pieter Duvenage, Hein Willemse, Nico Koopman, Melissa Steyn, Achille Mbembe and Mathews Phosa.

In the past decade, hundreds of thousands of women from poorer countries have braved treacherous journeys to richer countries to work as poorly paid domestic workers. In From servants to workers, Shireen Ally asks whether the low wages and poor working conditions so characteristic of migrant domestic work can truly be resolved by means of the extension of citizenship rights. Following South Africa's 'miraculous' transition to democracy, more than a million poor black women who had endured a despotic organization of paid domestic work under apartheid became the beneficiaries of one of the world's most impressive and extensive efforts to formalize and modernise paid domestic work through state regulation. Ally explores the political implications of paid domestic work as an intimate form of labour. From Servants to workers integrates sociological insights with the often-heartbreaking life histories of female domestic workers in South Africa and provides rich detail of the streets, homes, and churches of Johannesburg where these women work, live, and socialise.

The most significant nonfiction writings of Zoë Wicomb, one of South Africa’s leading authors and intellectuals, are collected here for the first time in a single volume.

This compilation features critical essays on the works of such prominent South African writers as Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Njabulo Ndebele, and J.M. Coetzee, as well as writings on gender politics, race, identity, visual art, sexuality and a wide range of other cultural and political topics. Also included are a reflection on Nelson Mandela and a revealing interview with Wicomb.

In these essays, written between 1990 and 2013, Wicomb offers insight on her nation’s history, policies, and people. In a world in which nationalist rhetoric is on the rise and diversity and pluralism are the declared enemies of right-wing populist movements, her essays speak powerfully to a wide range of international issues.

George Bizos is one of a distinguished group of human rights lawyers who in the dark days of apartheid sought to uncover the state's role in eliminating its opponents.

Some, like Biko, Timol and Aggett, were arrested and died in detention, while others, like Matthew Goniwe, were abducted and killed. As counsel for the families of the deceased, George Bizos was centrally involved in many of the inquests following these high-profile deaths.

He is thus well placed to tell the story of the great courtroom dramas in which, with devastating skill, he and his colleagues pared away the tissue of lies protecting the security forces and the state functionaries—only to be rewarded with the invariable finding that there was 'no one to blame'.

An unprecedented study of how Christianity reshaped Black South Africans’ ideas about gender, sexuality, marriage, and family during the first half of the twentieth century.

This book demonstrates that the primary affective force in the construction of modern Black intimate life in early twentieth-century South Africa was not the commonly cited influx of migrant workers but rather the spread of Christianity. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African converts developed a new conception of intimate life, one that shaped ideas about sexuality, gender roles, and morality.

Although the reshaping of Black intimacy occurred first among educated Africans who aspired to middle-class status, by the 1950s it included all Black Christians—60 percent of the Black South African population. In turn, certain Black traditions and customs were central to the acceptance of sexual modernity, which gained traction because it included practices such as lobola, in which a bridegroom demonstrates his gratitude by transferring property to his bride’s family. While the ways of understanding intimacy that Christianity informed enjoyed broad appeal because they partially aligned with traditional ways, other individuals were drawn to how the new ideas broke with tradition. In either case, Natasha Erlank argues that what Black South Africans regard today as tradition has been unequivocally altered by Christianity.

In asserting the paramount influence of Christianity on unfolding ideas about family, gender, and marriage in Black South Africa, Erlank challenges social historians who have attributed the key factor to be the migrant labor system. Erlank draws from a wide range of sources, including popular Black literature and the Black press, African church and mission archives, and records of the South African law courts, which she argues have been underutilized in histories of South Africa. The book is sure to attract historians and other scholars interested in the history of African Christianity, African families, sexuality, and the social history of law, especially colonial law.

Once in a while a publisher receives a book submission that makes them sit back in their chair, read out loud what is in front of them and laugh at the pure joy the writing and imagery evoke. This was the case with the first three short stories author Yusuf Daniels submitted to Jacana Media.

They were instantly recognisable. They were funny as hell. The nostalgia, triggered by the mere mention of a sight, sound or smell, instantly transported the reader to a time and place that spoke to Coloured culture and lived experiences on the Cape Flats and surrounding townships. There was something magical about the way Daniels recollected his memories from his childhood in those first three stories, which he had also posted on Facebook, eliciting a slew of likes, shared experiences and feedback from his followers to “write more” and “do you remember, Yussie …”.

Living Coloured (because Black and White were Already Taken) is a compilation of short stories that is an ode to an era all Cape Coloured people will instantly recognise – from the nightclubbing at Space Odyssey and the shenanigans at the Mitchells Plain public swimming pool, to the traditions of delectable food exchanges during Ramadan among Muslims and Christians, alike. This book truly is a tribute to all that the Coloured community holds dear and sings of the spirit which helped them eek out an existence on the dusty flat plains of the Cape.

But as you read story after story, you will also be confronted with the blatant racism that was the Group Areas Act, the legacy of a people removed and dumped in this windswept place that wasn’t of their own making, and the constant forging ahead to make life worthwhile under very harsh political and economic circumstances. The stories will also leave you seething with anger at the sheer brutality of what this community had to endure (and still do), while their black counterparts in the township next door lived even harsher realities.

Norman McFarlane was just out of high school when he was conscripted for national service and sent to Angola.

Like so many other ordinary troopies, he was thrown into the horror, deprivation and banality of war. He recounts his loss of innocence in Angola, the subsequent ‘camps’ and his journey towards confronting his post-traumatic stress disorder.

Told with disarming honesty and humour, he gives voice to a generation of white South African men forced into a grisly, life-defining experience.

Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, this book calls us to rethink political violence and reimagine political community beyond majorities and minorities.

In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe—from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan—the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority.

The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe’s nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence. Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process.

Mamdani rejects the “criminal” solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors—victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries—based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation.

Contemporary scholarly and popular debate over the legacy of racial integration in the United States rests between two positions that are typically seen as irreconcilable. On one side are those who argue that we must pursue racial integration because it is an essential component of racial justice. On the other are those who question the ideal of integration and suggest that its pursuit may damage the very population it was originally intended to liberate. In An Impossible Dream? Sharon A. Stanley shows that much of this apparent disagreement stems from different understandings of the very meaning of integration. In response, she offers a new model of racial integration in the United States that takes seriously the concerns of longstanding skeptics, including black power activists and black nationalists. Stanley reformulates integration to de-emphasize spatial mixing for its own sake and calls instead for an internal, psychic transformation on the part of white Americans and a radical redistribution of power. The goal of her vision is not simply to mix black and white bodies in the same spaces and institutions, but to dismantle white supremacy and create a genuine multiracial democracy. At the same time, however, she argues that achieving this model of integration in the contemporary United States would be extraordinarily challenging, due to the poisonous legacy of Jim Crow and the hidden, self-reinforcing nature of white privilege today. Pursuing integration against a background of persistent racial injustice might well exacerbate black suffering without any guarantee of achieving racial justice or a worthwhile form of integration. Given this challenge, pessimism toward integration is a defensible position. But while the future of integration remains uncertain, its pursuit can neither be prescribed as a moral obligation nor rejected as intrinsically indefensible. In An Impossible Dream? Stanley dissects this vexing moral and political quandary.

In the 1920s and 30s, musicians from Latin America and the Caribbean were flocking to New York, lured by the burgeoning recording studios and lucrative entertainment venues. In the late 1940s and 50s, the big-band mambo dance scene at the famed Palladium Ballroom was the stuff of legend, while modern-day music history was being made as the masters of Afro-Cuban and jazz idiom conspired to create Cubop, the first incarnation of Latin jazz. Then, in the 1960s, as the Latino population came to exceed a million strong, a new generation of New York Latinos, mostly Puerto Ricans born and raised in the city, went on to create the music that came to be called salsa, which continues to enjoy avid popularity around the world. And now, the children of the mambo and salsa generation are contributing to the making of hip hop and reviving ancestral Afro-Caribbean forms like Cuban rumba, Puerto Rican bomba, and Dominican palo. Salsa Rising provides the first full-length historical account of Latin Music in this city guided by close critical attention to issues of tradition and experimentation, authenticity and dilution, and the often clashing roles of cultural communities and the commercial recording industry in the shaping of musical practices and tastes. It is a history not only of the music, the changing styles and practices, the innovators, venues and songs, but also of the music as part of the larger social history, ranging from immigration and urban history, to the formation of communities, to issues of colonialism, race and class as they bear on and are revealed by the trajectory of the music. Author Juan Flores brings a wide range of people in the New York Latin music field into his work, including musicians, producers, arrangers, collectors, journalists, and lay and academic scholars, enriching Salsa Rising with a unique level of engagement with and interest in Latin American communities and musicians themselves.

This is a history not of an Enlightenment but rather the Enlightenment-the rights-oriented, formalist, secularizing, freedom-inspired eighteenth-century movement that defined modern Western law. Its principal protagonists, rather than members of a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, are non-literate, poor, and enslaved litigants who sued their superiors in the royal courts of Spain's American colonies. Despite growing evidence of the Hispanic world's contributions to Enlightenment science, the writing of history, and statecraft, it is conventionally believed to have taken an alternate route to modernity. This book grapples with the contradiction between this legacy and eighteenth-century Spanish Americans' active production of concepts fundamental to modern law. The book is intensely empirical even as it is sly situated within current theoretical debates about imperial geographies of history. The Enlightenment on Trial offers readers new insight into how legal documents were made, fresh interpretations of the intellectual transformations and legal reform policies of the period, and comparative analysis of the volume of civil suits from six regions in Mexico, Peru and Spain. Ordinary litigants in the colonies-far more often than peninsular Spaniards-sued superiors at an accelerating pace in the second half of the eighteenth century. Three types of cases increased even faster than a stunning general rise of civil suits in the colonies: those that slaves, native peasants and women initiated against masters, native leaders and husbands. As they entered court, these litigants advanced a new law-centered culture distinct from the casuistic, justice-oriented legal culture of the early modern period. And they did so at precisely the same time that a few bright minds of Europe enshrined them in print. The conclusion considers why, if this is so, the Spanish empire has remained marginal to the story of the advent of the modern West.

While most research on inequality focuses on impoverished communities, it often ignores how powerful communities and elites monopolize resources at the top of the social hierarchy. In Privilege at Play, Hugo Ceron-Anaya offers an intersectional analysis of Mexican elites to examine the ways affluent groups perpetuate dynamics of domination and subordination. Using ethnographic research conducted inside three exclusive golf clubs and in-depth interviews with upper-middle and upper-class golfers, as well as working-class employees, Ceron-Anaya focuses on the class, racial, and gender dynamics that underpin privilege in contemporary Mexico. His detailed analysis of social life and the organization of physical space further considers how the legacy of imperialism continues to determine practices of exclusion and how social hierarchies are subtlety reproduced through distinctions such as fashion and humor, in addition to the traditional indicators of wealth and class. Adding another dimension to the complex nature of social exclusion, Privilege at Play shows how elite social relations and spaces allow for the resource hoarding and monopolization that helps create and maintain poverty.

In 2005, hurricane Katrina and its aftermath starkly revealed the continued racial polarization of America. Disproportionately impacted by the ravages of the storm, displaced black victims were often characterized by the media as "refugees." The characterization was wrong-headed, and yet deeply revealing. Sanctuary: African Americans and Empire traces the long history of this and related terms, like alien and foreign, a rhetorical shorthand that has shortchanged black America for over 250 years.
In tracing the language and politics that have informed debates about African American citizenship, Sanctuary in effect illustrates the historical paradox of African American subjecthood: while frequently the target of legislation (slave law, the Black Codes, and Jim Crow), blacks seldom benefited from the actions of the state. Blackness helped to define social, cultural, and legal aspects of American citizenship in a manner that excluded black people themselves. They have been treated, rather, as foreigners in their home country. African American civil rights efforts worked to change this. Activists and intellectuals demanded equality, but they were often fighting for something even more fundamental: the recognition that blacks were in fact human beings. As citizenship forced acknowledgement of the humanity of African Americans, it thus became a gateway to both civil and human rights.
Waligora-Davis shows how artists like Langston Hughes underscored the power of language to define political realities, how critics like W.E.B. Du Bois imagined democratic political strategies, and how they and other public figures have used their writing as a forum to challenge the bankruptcy of a social economy in which the value of human life is predicated on race and civil identity.

In the past few decades, and across disparate geographical contexts, states have adopted policies and initiatives aimed at institutionalizing relationships with "their" diasporas. These practices, which range from creating new ministries to granting dual citizenship, are aimed at integrating diasporas as part of a larger "global" nation that is connected to, and has claims on the institutional structures of the home state. Although links, both formal and informal, between diasporas and their presumptive homelands have existed in the past, the recent developments constitute a far more widespread and qualitatively different phenomenon.
In this book, Latha Varadarajan theorizes this novel and largely overlooked trend by introducing the concept of the "domestic abroad." Varadarajan demonstrates that the remapping of the imagined boundaries of the nation, the visible surface of the phenomenon, is intrinsically connected to the political-economic transformation of the state that is typically characterized as "neoliberalism." The domestic abroad must therefore be understood as the product of two simultaneous, on-going processes: the diasporic re-imagining of the nation and the neoliberal restructuring of the state.
The argument unfolds through a historically nuanced study of the production of the domestic abroad in India. The book traces the complex history and explains the political logic of the remarkable transition from the Indian state's guarded indifference toward its diaspora in the period after independence, to its current celebrations of the "global Indian nation." In doing so, The Domestic Abroad reveals the manner in which the boundaries of the nation and the extent of the authority of the state, in India and elsewhere, are dynamically shaped by the development of capitalist social relations on both global and national scales.

Even in the twenty-first century some two-thirds of the world's peoples-the world's social majority-quietly live in non-modern, non-cosmopolitan places. In such places the multitudinous voices of the spirits, deities, and other denizens of the other-than-human world continue to be heard, continue to be loved or feared or both, continue to accompany the human beings in all their activities. In this book, Frederique Apffel-Marglin draws on a lifetime of work with the indigenous peoples of Peru and India to support her argument that the beliefs, values, and practices of such traditional peoples are ''eco-metaphysically true.'' In other words, they recognize that human beings are in communion with other beings in nature that have agency and are kinds of spiritual intelligences, with whom humans can be in relationship and communion. Ritual is the medium for communicating, reciprocating, creating and working with the other-than-humans, who daily remind the humans that the world is not for humans' exclusive use. Apffel-Marglin argues moreover, that when such relationships are appropriately robust, human lifeways are rich, rewarding, and in the contemporary jargon, environmentally sustainable. Her ultimate objective is to ''re-entangle'' humans in nature-she is, in the final analysis, promoting a spirituality and ecology of belonging and connection to nature, and an appreciation of animistic perception and ecologies. Along the way she offers provocative and poignant critiques of many assumptions, including of the ''development'' paradigm as benign (including feminist forms of development advocacy), of the majority of anthropological and other social scientific understandings of indigenous religions, and of common views about peasant and indigenous agronomy. She concludes with a case study of the fair trade movement, illuminating both its shortcomings (how it echoes some of the assumptions in the development paradigms) and its promise as a way to rekindle community between humans as well as between humans and the other-than-human world.

This is a compelling and revealing look at the history of the U.S.-Mexico border as a place, a symbol of cross-cultural melding, and a source of growing anxiety over immigration and national security. The U.S.-Mexico border is far more than a line that separates two countries. A winding path of nearly 2,000 miles from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, it is history, commerce, and culture. In recent years, however, attitudes about border crossings and border issues have hardened as has immigration policy. A source of growing anxiety over illegal immigration, national security, and safety, the border has become a symbol of political cataclysm over immigration law and enforcement, the future of DACA, the increasingly harsh treatment of refugees and others who attempt to cross without authorization, and the future of U.S. policy. This book traces the history of the border and its people, from the creation of the border line to explosive issues surrounding immigration and the future of the United States as a nation of diverse cultures and races. Explores the creation and development of the border in the late 19th century and the growing industrialization of the region in the early 20th century Examines the cross-border violence during the US Civil War and the Mexican Revolution, the increasing racial hostility and deportation policies in the 1930s and 1950s, and cartel violence Provides an unbiased assessment of the advent of the Chicano movement and politics on the border, NAFTA and border economics, and the increasingly hostile political debate over immigration and demands for a wall Provides critical background and contextual information to the events that have led to a turning point in America: How do we as a nation treat those seeking a new life at the border? Shows how the border has brought out feelings of community and acceptance along the border and at the same time birthed nativist and racial stereotypes Supplements political material with relatable information about the lives of cross-border workers and the blending of cultures along the border as they include food, language, and art

Across the world, governments design and implement policies with the explicit goal of promoting social justice. But can such institutions change entrenched social norms? And what effects should we expect from differently designed policies? Francesca R. Jensenius' Social Justice through Inclusion is an empirically rich study of one of the most extensive electoral quota systems in the world: the reserved seats for the Scheduled Castes (SCs, the former "untouchables") in India's legislative assemblies. Combining evidence from quantitative datasets from the period 1969-2012, archival work, and in-depth interviews with politicians, civil servants, and voters across India, the book explores the long-term effects of electoral quotas for the political elite and the general population. It shows that the quota system has played an important role in reducing caste-based discrimination, particularly at the elite level. Interestingly, this is not because the system has led to more group representation - SC politicians working specifically for SC interests - but because it has made possible the creation and empowerment of a new SC elite who have gradually become integrated into mainstream politics. This is a study of India, but the findings and discussions have broader implications. Policies such as quotas are usually supported with arguments about various assumed positive long-term consequences. The nuanced discussions in this book shed light on how electoral quotas for SCs have shaped the incentives for politicians, parties, and voters, and indicate the trade-offs inherent in how such policies of group inclusion are designed.

The racial injustice that continues to plague the United States couldn't be a clearer challenge to the country's idea of itself as a liberal and democratic society, where all citizens have a chance at a decent life. Moreover, it raises deep questions about the adequacy of our political ideas, particularly liberal political theory, to guide us out of the quagmire of inequality. So what does justice demand in response? What must a liberal society do to address the legacies of its past, and how should we aim to reconceive liberalism in order to do so? In this book, Andrew Valls considers two solutions, one posed from the political right and one from the left. From the right is the idea that norms of equal treatment require that race be treated as irrelevant-in other words, that public policy and political institutions be race-blind. From the left is the idea that race-conscious policies are temporary, and are justifiable insofar as they promote diversity. This book takes issue with both of these sets of views, and therefore with the constricted ways in which racial justice is debated in the United States today. Valls argues that liberal theory permits, and in some cases requires, race-conscious policies and institutional arrangements in the pursuit of racial equality. In doing so, he aims to do two things: first, to reorient the terms of racial justice and, secondly, to make liberal theory confront its tendency to ignore race in favor of an underspecified commitment to multiculturalism. He argues that the insistence that race-conscious policies be temporary is harmful to the cause of racial justice, defends black-dominated institutions and communities as a viable alternative to integration, and argues against the tendency to subsume claims for racial justice, particularly as they regard African Americans, under more general arguments for diversity.

The role of race in politics, citizenship, and the state is one of the most perplexing puzzles of modernity. While political thought has been slow to take up this puzzle, Diego von Vacano suggests that the tradition of Latin American and Hispanic political thought, which has long considered the place of mixed-race peoples throughout the Americas, is uniquely well-positioned to provide useful ways of thinking about the connections between race and citizenship. As he argues, debates in the United States about multiracial identity, the possibility of a post-racial world in the aftermath of Barack Obama, and demographic changes owed to the age of mass migration will inevitably have to confront the intellectual tradition related to racial admixture that comes to us from Latin America.
Von Vacano compares the way that race is conceived across the writings of four thinkers, and across four different eras: the Spanish friar Bartolome de Las Casas writing in the context of empire; Simon Bolivar writing during the early republican period; Venezuelan sociologist Laureano Vallenilla Lanz on the role of race in nationalism; and Mexican philosopher Jose Vasconcelos writing on the aesthetic approach to racial identity during the cosmopolitan, post-national period. From this comparative and historical survey, von Vacano develops a concept of race as synthetic, fluid and dynamic -- a concept that will have methodological, historical, and normative value for understanding race in other diverse societies."

A long-awaited history that promises to dramatically change our understanding of race in America, What Comes Naturally traces the origins, spread, and demise of miscegenation laws in the United States - laws that banned interracial marriage and sex, most often between whites and members of other races. Peggy Pascoe demonstrates how these laws were enacted and applied not just in the South but throughout most of the country, in the West, the North, and the Midwest. Beginning in the Reconstruction era, when the term miscegenation first was coined, she traces the creation of a racial hierarchy that bolstered white supremacy and banned the marriage of Whites to Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and American Indians as well as the marriage of Whites to Blacks. She ends not simply with the landmark 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court finally struck down miscegenation laws throughout the country, but looks at the implications of ideas of colorblindness that replaced them. What Comes Naturally is both accessible to the general reader and informative to the specialist, a rare feat for an original work of history based on archival research.

Scholars of language ideology have encouraged us to reflect on and explore where social categories come from, how they have been reproduced, and whether and to what extent they are relevant to everyday interactional practices. Taking up on these issues, this book focuses on how ethnicity has been semiotically constructed, valued, and reproduced in Indonesia since Dutch colonial times, and how this category is drawn upon in everyday talk. In doing so, this book also seeks to engage with scholarship on superdiversity while highlighting some points of engagement with work on ideas about community. The book draws upon a broad range of scholarship on Indonesia, recordings of Indonesian television from the mid-1990s onwards, and recordings of the talk of Indonesian students living in Japan. It is argued that some of the main mechanisms for the reproduction and revaluation of ethnicity and its links with linguistic form include waves of technological innovations that bring people into contact (e.g. changes in transportation infrastructure, introduction of print media, television, radio, the internet, etc.), and the increasing use of one-to-many participation frameworks such as school classrooms and the mass media. In examining the talk of sojourning Indonesians the book goes on to explore how ideologies about ethnicity are used to establish and maintain convivial social relations while in Japan. Maintaining such relationships is not a trivial thing and it is argued that the pursuit of conviviality is an important practice because of its relationship with broader concerns about eking out a living.

MisReading America presents original research on and conversation about reading formations in American communities of color, using the phenomenon of the reading of scriptures-''scripturalizing''-as an analytical wedge. Scriptures here are understood as shorthand for complex social phenomena, practices, and dynamics. The authors take up scripturalizing as a window onto the self-understandings, politics, practices, and orientations of marginalized communities. These communities have in common the context that is the United States, with the challenges it holds for all regarding: pressure to conform to conventional-canonical forms of communication, representation, and embodiment (mimicry); opportunities to speak back to and confront and overturn conventionality (interruptions); and the need to experience ongoing meaningful and complex relationships (reorientation) to the centering politics, practices, and myths that define ''America.''

Mini-set A:History re-issues 10 volumes originally published between 1902 and 1984 and examines the legacy of British control in Persia and the origins of the conflict between Iran & Iraq. For institutional purchases for e-book sets please contact [email protected] (customers in the UK, Europe and Rest of World)