The presence of women and African Americans not simply as viewers, but also as televangelists and station owners in their own right has dramatically changed the face of American religious broadcasting in recent decades. Colored Television looks at the influence of these ministries beyond the United States, where complex gospels of prosperity and gospels of sexual redemption mutually inform one another while offering hopeful yet socially contested narratives of personal uplift. As an ethnography, Colored Television illuminates the phenomenal international success of American TV preachers like T.D. Jakes, Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer, and Juanita Bynum. Focusing particularly on Jamaica and the Caribbean, it also explores why the genre has resonated so powerfully around the world. Investigating the roles of producers, consumers, and distributors, Marla Frederick takes a unique look at the ministries, the communities they enter, and the global markets of competition that buffer them.

Winner of the 2007 SANA Book Award

Complete List of Authors:
Dorothy Holland, Donald M. Nonini, Catherine Lutz, Lesley Bartlett, Marla Frederick-McGlathery, Thaddeus C. Guldbrandsen, and Enrique G. Murillo, Jr.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Preface.

aLocal Democracy Under Siege argues persuasively that American democracy is at a pivotal moment where the forces of exclusion and the ideology of market rule contest with new forms of political activism and engaged citizenship. Readers will see many of the same issues that North Carolina faces in their own communities and will take away new perspectives on power, race, class, and activism from this cogent and timely analysis.a
--Louise Lamphere, Past President of the American Anthropological Association

aProduces new insights into the amakeovera of local governmenta--"Choice"

aDebates about democracy often get stuck at the national scale. But the capacity for ordinary people to shape the conditions of their lives through politics and public speech is often greatest at the local level. This important book opens up anthropological perspectives on how this happens. It situates the challenges of local politics amid the constraints of neoliberalism, but also reports on the creative solutions different communities have developed to the distinctive problems they face.a
--Craig Calhoun, President, Social Science Research Council

aThis book opens up the crucial questions of what democracy means in the U.S. today and the ways in which everyday Americans struggle to make themselves heard. Conceptually, methodologically, and theoretically this book realizes the potential for anthropological analysis as a way tounderstand the dangers of increasing inequality in the contemporary U.S. It is a major contribution.a
--Ida Susser, author of "Norman Street: Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood"

"A luminous work about everyday citizens that should free up local democratic energies across the land!"
--Aihwa Ong, author of "Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty"

"This unique study provides a vital enquiry into the troubled times of local democracy and poses critical questions about its future in the USA."
--John Clarke, author of "Changing Welfare, Changing States"

aNicely illustrate the problems that plaue local democracya
--"Political Science Quaterly"

What is the state of democracy at the turn of the 21st century? To answer this question, seven scholars lived for a year in five North Carolina communities. They observed public meetings of all sorts, had informal and formal interviews with people, and listened as people conversed with each other at bus stops and barber shops, soccer games and workplaces. Their collaborative ethnography allows us to understand how diverse members of a community-not just the elite-think about and experience "politics" in ways that include much more than merely voting.

This book illustrates how the social and economic changes of the last three decades have made some new routes to active democratic participation possible while making others more difficult. Local Democracy Under Siege suggests how we can account for the current limitations of U.S. democracy and how remedies can be created that ensure more meaningful participation by a greater range of people.

Complete List of Authors (pictured)
FromLeft to Right, bottom row: Enrique Murillo, Jr., Thaddeus Guldbrandsen, Marla Frederick-McGlathery.
Top row: Dorothy Holland, Catherine Lutz, Lesley Bartlett, and Don Nonini.

Continuing his project of critical analysis of the scriptural formation of culture, Vincent L. Wimbush has gathered in this book essays by scholars of various backgrounds and orientations that focus in different registers on the theme of masquerade as the “play-element” in modern culture. Masquerade functions as window onto the mimetic performances, dynamics, arrangements, psycho-logics, and politics (“scripturalizing”) by which the “made-up” becomes fixed or realities or (“scripturalization”). Modern-world racialization (and its attendant explosions into racialisms and racisms) as the hyper-scripturalization of difference in human flesh (registered in psycho-social relations as a type of “scripture”) is argued in this book to be one of the most consequential examples and reflections of masquerade and thereby one of the primary impetuses behind and determinants of the shape of the realities of modernities. The open window onto these realities is facilitated by touchstone references to—not exhaustive treatment of—a now famous eighteenth-century life story, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789). This story told by a complexly positioned Black-fleshed self-acknowledged ex-slave/“stranger” is itself a “mask-ing” that throws light on the predominantly white Anglophone world as masking (as scriptural formation). Equiano/Vassa’s story as masking helps makes a compelling case for analyzing through Black flesh the ongoing shaping of the modern and the perduring mixed when not also devastating consequences.

The presence of women and African Americans not simply as viewers, but also as televangelists and station owners in their own right has dramatically changed the face of American religious broadcasting in recent decades. Colored Television looks at the influence of these ministries beyond the United States, where complex gospels of prosperity and gospels of sexual redemption mutually inform one another while offering hopeful yet socially contested narratives of personal uplift. As an ethnography, Colored Television illuminates the phenomenal international success of American TV preachers like T.D. Jakes, Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer, and Juanita Bynum. Focusing particularly on Jamaica and the Caribbean, it also explores why the genre has resonated so powerfully around the world. Investigating the roles of producers, consumers, and distributors, Marla Frederick takes a unique look at the ministries, the communities they enter, and the global markets of competition that buffer them.

To be a black woman of faith in the American South is to understand and experience spirituality in a particular way. How this understanding expresses itself in everyday practices of faith is the subject of "Between Sundays", an innovative work that takes readers beyond common misconceptions and narrow assumptions about black religion and into the actual complexities of African American women's spiritual lives. Gracefully combining narrative, interviews, and analysis, this book explores the personal, political, and spiritual commitments of a group of Baptist women whose experiences have been informed by the realities of life in a rural, southern community. In these lives, 'spirituality' emerges as a space for creative agency, of vital importance to the ways in which these women interpret, inform, and reshape their social conditions - conditions often characterized by limited access to job opportunities, health care, and equitable schooling. In the words of these women, and in Marla F. Frederick's deft analysis, we see how spirituality - expressed as gratitude, empathy, or righteous discontent - operates as a transformative power in women's interactions with others, and in their own more intimate renegotiations of self.

Winner of the 2007 SANA Book Award

Complete List of Authors:
Dorothy Holland, Donald M. Nonini, Catherine Lutz, Lesley Bartlett, Marla Frederick-McGlathery, Thaddeus C. Guldbrandsen, and Enrique G. Murillo, Jr.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Preface.

aLocal Democracy Under Siege argues persuasively that American democracy is at a pivotal moment where the forces of exclusion and the ideology of market rule contest with new forms of political activism and engaged citizenship. Readers will see many of the same issues that North Carolina faces in their own communities and will take away new perspectives on power, race, class, and activism from this cogent and timely analysis.a
--Louise Lamphere, Past President of the American Anthropological Association

aProduces new insights into the amakeovera of local governmenta--"Choice"

aDebates about democracy often get stuck at the national scale. But the capacity for ordinary people to shape the conditions of their lives through politics and public speech is often greatest at the local level. This important book opens up anthropological perspectives on how this happens. It situates the challenges of local politics amid the constraints of neoliberalism, but also reports on the creative solutions different communities have developed to the distinctive problems they face.a
--Craig Calhoun, President, Social Science Research Council

aThis book opens up the crucial questions of what democracy means in the U.S. today and the ways in which everyday Americans struggle to make themselves heard. Conceptually, methodologically, and theoretically this book realizes the potential for anthropological analysis as a way tounderstand the dangers of increasing inequality in the contemporary U.S. It is a major contribution.a
--Ida Susser, author of "Norman Street: Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood"

"A luminous work about everyday citizens that should free up local democratic energies across the land!"
--Aihwa Ong, author of "Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty"

"This unique study provides a vital enquiry into the troubled times of local democracy and poses critical questions about its future in the USA."
--John Clarke, author of "Changing Welfare, Changing States"

aNicely illustrate the problems that plaue local democracya
--"Political Science Quaterly"

What is the state of democracy at the turn of the 21st century? To answer this question, seven scholars lived for a year in five North Carolina communities. They observed public meetings of all sorts, had informal and formal interviews with people, and listened as people conversed with each other at bus stops and barber shops, soccer games and workplaces. Their collaborative ethnography allows us to understand how diverse members of a community-not just the elite-think about and experience "politics" in ways that include much more than merely voting.

This book illustrates how the social and economic changes of the last three decades have made some new routes to active democratic participation possible while making others more difficult. Local Democracy Under Siege suggests how we can account for the current limitations of U.S. democracy and how remedies can be created that ensure more meaningful participation by a greater range of people.

Complete List of Authors (pictured)
FromLeft to Right, bottom row: Enrique Murillo, Jr., Thaddeus Guldbrandsen, Marla Frederick-McGlathery.
Top row: Dorothy Holland, Catherine Lutz, Lesley Bartlett, and Don Nonini.