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.

Tokyo Life, New York Dreams is a bicultural study focusing on Japanese immigrants in New York and the ideas they had about what they would find there. It is one of the first works to consider Japanese immigration to the East Coast, where immigrants were of a different class and social background from the laborers who came to the West Coast and Hawaii. Beginning with a portrait of immigrants' lives in New York City, Mitziko Sawada returns to Tokyo to examine the pre-immigration experience in depth, using rich sources of popular Japanese literature to trace the origins of immigrant perceptions of the U.S. Along with discussions of economics and politics in Tokyo, Sawada explores the prevalent images, ideologies, social myths, and attitudes of late Meiji and Early Taisho Japan. Her lively narrative draws on guide books, magazines, success literature, and popular novels to illuminate the formation of ideas about work, class, gender relations, and freedom in American society. This study analyzes the Japanese construction of a mythic America, perceived as a homogeneous and exotic "other." This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

My Kill Adore Him is a collection of poems from Andres Montoya Poetry Prize-winner Paul Martinez Pompa. With a unique, independent voice, Martinez Pompa interrogates masculinity, race, language, consumerism, and cultural identity in poems that honor los olvidados, the forgotten ones, who range from the usual suspects brutalized by police to factory workers poisoned by their environment, from the victim of a homophobic beating in the boys' bathroom to the body of Juan Doe at the Cook County Coroner's Office. Some of the poems rely on somber, at times brutal, imagery to articulate a political stance while others use sarcasm and irony to deconstruct political stances themselves.

In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about the Talented Tenth in an influential essay of the same name. The concept exalted college-educated Blacks who Du Bois believed could provide the race with the guidance it needed to surmount slavery, segregation, and oppression in America. Although Du Bois eventually reassessed this idea, the rhetoric of the Talented Tenth resonated, still holding sway over a hundred years later. In Rethinking Racial Uplift: Rhetorics of Black Unity and Disunity in the Obama Era, author Nigel I. Malcolm asserts that in the post-civil rights era, racial uplift has been redefined not as Black public intellectuals lifting the masses but as individuals securing advantage for themselves and their children. Malcolm examines six best-selling books published during Obama's presidency-including Randall Kennedy's Sellout, Bill Cosby's and Alvin Poussaint's Come on People, and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me-and critically analyzes their rhetorics on Black unity, disunity, and the so-called "postracial" era. Based on these writings and the work of political and social scientists, Malcolm shows that a large, often-ignored, percentage of Blacks no longer see their fate as connected with that of other African Americans. While many Black intellectuals and activists seek to provide a justification for Black solidarity, not all agree. In Rethinking Racial Uplift, Malcolm takes contemporary Black public intellectual discourse seriously and shows that disunity among Blacks, a previously ignored topic, is worth exploring.

An intimate portrait of the postwar lives of Korean children and women Korean children and women are the forgotten population of a forgotten war. Yet during and after the Korean War, they were central to the projection of US military, cultural, and political dominance. Framed by War examines how the Korean orphan, GI baby, adoptee, birth mother, prostitute, and bride emerged at the heart of empire. Strained embodiments of war, they brought Americans into Korea and Koreans into America in ways that defined, and at times defied, US empire in the Pacific. What unfolded in Korea set the stage for US postwar power in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. American destruction and humanitarianism, violence and care played out upon the bodies of Korean children and women. Framed by War traces the arc of intimate relations that served as these foundations. To suture a fragmented past, Susie Woo looks to US and South Korean government documents and military correspondence; US aid organization records; Korean orphanage registers; US and South Korean newspapers and magazines; and photographs, interviews, films, and performances. Integrating history with visual and cultural analysis, Woo chronicles how Americans went from knowing very little about Koreans to making them family, and how Korean children and women who did not choose war found ways to navigate its aftermath in South Korea, the United States, and spaces in between.

Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran investigates how the cultural translation of cinema has been shaped by the physical translation of its ephemera. Kaveh Askari examines film circulation and its effect on Iranian film culture in the period before foreign studios established official distribution channels and Iran became a notable site of world cinema. This transcultural history draws on cross-archival comparison of films, distributor memos, licensing contracts, advertising schemes, and audio recordings. Askari meticulously tracks the fragile and sometimes forgotten material of film as it circulated through the Middle East into Iran and shows how this material was rerouted, reengineered, and reimagined in the process.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.

Perhaps the brevity of short fiction accounts for the relatively scant attention devoted to it by scholars, who have historically concentrated on longer prose narratives. The Geographies of African American Short Fiction seeks to fill this gap by analyzing the ways African American short story writers plotted a diverse range of characters across multiple locations-small towns, a famous metropolis, city sidewalks, a rural wooded area, apartment buildings, a pond, a general store, a prison, and more. In the process, these writers highlighted the extents to which places and spaces shaped or situated racial representations. Presenting African American short story writers as cultural cartographers, author Kenton Rambsy documents the variety of geographical references within their short stories to show how these authors make cultural spaces integral to their artwork and inscribe their stories with layered and resonant social histories. The history of these short stories also documents the circulation of compositions across dozens of literary collections for nearly a century. Anthology editors solidified the significance of a core group of short story authors including James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Charles Chesnutt, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright. Using quantitative information and an extensive literary dataset, The Geographies of African American Short Fiction explores how editorial practices shaped the canon of African American short fiction.

In Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877-1932, author Mark A. Johnson examines three notable cases of Black participation in the spectacles of politics: the 1885-1898 local-option prohibition contests of Atlanta and Macon, Georgia; the United Confederate Veterans conflict with the Musicians' Union prior to the 1903 UCV Reunion in New Orleans; and the 1909 Memphis mayoral election featuring Edward Hull Crump and W. C. Handy. Through these case studies, Johnson explains how white politicians and Black performers wielded and manipulated racist stereotypes and Lost Cause mythology to achieve their respective goals. Ultimately, Johnson portrays the vibrant, exuberant political culture of the New South and the roles played by both Black and white southerners. During the nadir of race relations in the United States South from 1877 to 1932, African Americans faced segregation, disfranchisement, and lynching. Among many forms of resistance, African Americans used their musical and theatrical talents to challenge white supremacy, attain economic opportunity, and transcend segregation. In Rough Tactics, Johnson argues that African Americans, especially performers, retooled negative stereotypes and segregation laws to their advantage. From 1877 to 1932, African Americans spoke at public rallies, generated enthusiasm with music, linked party politics to the memory of the Civil War, honored favorable candidates, and openly humiliated their opposition.

How do the people of a village that is both Chinese and Christian reconcile the contradictions between their religious and ethnic identities? This ethnographic study explores the construction and changing meanings of ethnic identity in Hong Kong. Established at the turn of the century by Hakka Christians who sought to escape hardships and discrimination in China, Shung Him Tong was constructed as an "ideal" Chinese and Christian village. The Hakka Christians translate "traditional" Chinese beliefs-such as ancestral worship and death rituals-that are incompatible with their Christian ideals into secular form, providing a crucial link with the past and with a Chinese identity. Despite accusations to the contrary, these villagers maintain that while they are Christian, they are still Chinese. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.