by Timothy J. McMillan The following essay originally appeared in Silence, Screen and Spectacle: Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information. This book is now available in paperback. In 2001, I began teaching a first-year seminar titled “Defining Blackness.” My journey with that class and its descendants is intertwined with my relationship with the memorial landscape, concrete […]
The following is a post by Naohiko Omata, author of The Myth of Self-Reliance: Economic Lives Inside a Liberian Refugee Camp. Promotion of ‘self-reliance’ for refugees has occupied a central seat in the policy arena of the international refugee regime in recent years. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) broadly defines self-reliance as ‘the social […]
What is Eurocentrism? What is an Athens-to-Washington discourse of world history? And how does the continent of Africa fit into this worldview? Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity came about as a way for us to find answers to these questions and light Africa’s situation within the ‘zone of non-being.’ Below, Dr. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni explains […]
“John Quincy Adams warned Americans not to search abroad for monsters to destroy, yet such figures have frequently habituated the discourses of U.S. foreign policy,” offers a succinct summation of newly published U.S. Foreign Policy and the Other. Following, editors Michael Patrick Cullinane and David Ryan use Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick as a cautionary […]
The following is a guest blog post written by Michael G. Cornelius, author of the article Sexuality, Interruption, and Nancy Drew, which appeared in Volume 8, Number 2 of the journal Girlhood Studies. It’s admittedly an odd thing, to be a Nancy Drew scholar. Strictly speaking, “Nancy Drew Scholar” is not the official […]
Covering a period from the late eighteenth century to today, Urban Violence in the Middle East explores the phenomenon of urban violence in order to unveil general developments and historical specificities in a variety of Middle Eastern contexts. Below, contributors to the volume tell about their personal relationship as historians to present echoes of their […]
After World War II, France embarked on a project of modernization, which included the development of the modern mass home. At Home in Postwar France identifies the “right to comfort” as an invention of the postwar period and suggests that the modern mass home played a vital role in shaping new expectations for well-being and […]
From Virtue to Vice: Negotiating Anorexia is the result of creative and academic collaboration between Penny Van Esterik and Richard A. O’Connor. In the following post, Van Esterik reflects on the collaboration of this pair—Van Esterik, an expert on breastfeeding, and O’Connor, an anthropologist who watched someone close suffer with anorexia—and how their book was […]
Hans Steinmüller’s Communities of Complicity: Everyday Ethics in Rural China is now available in paperback. The ethnography explores the moral uncertainties experienced by the people of the village of Zhongba in Central China as they navigate and balance the expectations of capitalism and their traditional culture. The author offers a reflection on his fieldwork in […]
Author Emma Kowal explores the “good” that well-meaning White Australians are doing for Indigenous Australians. This path to help is charted in Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia, a recently published book that asks the question: How can one help without harming? Following, Kowal explains the origins and reception of her work […]