bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Dismantling the “At Risk” Discourse
Authors: Ray Ranita
Published: May 2018

This chapter briefly revisits the structure/agency dilemma before turning to a call to rethink the “at risk” framing of inner-city youth—as potential parents, drug users and dealers, gang members, and perpetrators of violence—that often shapes both public policies and the experiences of the youth. It then frames how to think about service jobs and also provides policy recommendations focusing on what can be done at the local level to facilitate young people’s transition to college and their retention once they are there, arguing for a need to provide sustained support in the face of persistent marginalization.
Multiplying the South
Authors: Hunter Marcus Anthony , Robinson Zandria F.
Published: May 2018

This chapter draws heavily on the life and observations of James Baldwin. Detailing Baldwin's analysis of Charlotte, Atlanta, and Harlem, this chapter builds on his insights to emphasize the multiplicity and omnipresence of the South in black American life. This chapter also dispels the idea that the “North” and “South” share such dramatic differences regarding anti-blackness and white supremacy.
Super Lou’s Chitlin’ Circuit
Authors: Hunter Marcus Anthony , Robinson Zandria F.
Published: May 2018

This chapter begins using an intimate moment from a 1966 concert by musician Lou Rawls. Detailing the shared experiences and connections across black communities, this chapter uses Rawls’s insight to outline the six major regions of the South. This chapter completes the geographic and political sensibilities that help form the Black Map and the various regions therein. It concludes with an overview of the three-part treatment of “chocolate cities”.
The Blacker the Village, the Sweeter the Juice
Authors: Hunter Marcus Anthony , Robinson Zandria F.
Published: May 2018

Using the life and times of pioneering antilynching activist and sociologist Ida B. Wells, this chapter begins the exploration of chocolate cities as black villages. One of the defining attributes, the village illustrates how a critical mass of black people living, working, and striving alongside one another creates ripples that affect the politics and movement of black people near and far.
Making Negrotown
Authors: Hunter Marcus Anthony , Robinson Zandria F.
Published: May 2018

This chapter uses two key examples to complete the discussion of the village feature of chocolate cities. First, the life and time of great migrant Arthur Lee Robinson demonstrates the importance of place, rivers, and familial black enclaves throughout the United States. Second, the sketch "Negro Town" from the Key & Peele show illustrates the role of black imagination and density and communal space matter in black citymaking and placemaking.
The House That Jane Built
Authors: Hunter Marcus Anthony , Robinson Zandria F.
Published: May 2018

The first of three chapters on the power of chocolate cities, this chapter centers the life, activism, and pioneering efforts of abolitionist and black woman lawyer Mary Ann Shadd Cary. Exploring her migrations above and below the Canadian border, the authors highlight her sophisticated and politically informed racial geography of the United States. Detailing the movement of black people throughout the domestic diaspora, this chapter illustrates the how gender, place, race, and power collided in the lives of black people before and after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Leaving on a Jet Plane
Authors: Hunter Marcus Anthony , Robinson Zandria F.
Published: May 2018

The last of three chapters on the power of chocolate cities, this chapter centers the lives, activism, and pioneering efforts of Mos Def (a.k.a. Yasiin Bey) and W. E. B. Du Bois. Exploring their lives, legal setbacks, and push against global imperialism and racial oppression, the authors highlight their sophisticated and politically informed racial geography of the United States. Detailing the movement of black people throughout the domestic diaspora and into and throughout Africa, this chapter illustrates the how place, race, peace politics, and power collide in the lives of black people here, there, and everywhere around the globe.
Seeing like a Chocolate City
Authors: Hunter Marcus Anthony , Robinson Zandria F.
Published: May 2018

This concluding chapter revisits the book's major themes and arguments. Using a variety of examples drawn from local, state, and international political episodes, the chapter extends the book’s focus, turning especially toward the global implications of its findings and arguments. Using the frame of chocolate cities, the chapter invokes the global possibilities of seeing the world through the eyes of black people everywhere.
Toward a Global History of Sexual Science: Movements, Networks, and Deployments
Authors: Fuechtner Veronika , Haynes Douglas E. , Jones Ryan M.
Published: May 2018

This book examines the various circuits, nodes, and modes that enabled sexual scientific knowledge to spread worldwide. It shows how various actors such as Sueo Iwaya, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Swami Shivananda engaged with sexual science through their writings, as well as sexual science's relationship to modernity. The book suggests that European sexual science was constituted on the basis of conceptions of Others considered outside of “modernity” and that actors outside of Europe contributed to a globalizing sexual science through “unruly appropriations” of the field's emergent ideas. It also discusses the ways that ideas of sexual science circulated multidirectionally through travel, intellectual exchange, and internationally produced and disseminated publications. Essays written by historians, historians of science, anthropologists, and humanities scholars cover topics ranging from male homosexuality and female prostitution to the secularization of Christian marriage, popular sexology in early postwar Japan, the science of sexual difference, and female orgasm.
Global Modernity and Sexual Science
Authors: Ben Pablo
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines how the social history of urbanization influenced the emergence of sexual science by focusing on the case of male homosexuality and female prostitution during the period 1850–1950. It first considers the notions of sexual chaos and order that emerged within nineteenth-century anthropology and how they were related to urbanization, with an emphasis on the case of Buenos Aires. It then discusses some aspects of the global history of transportation and urbanization and how it affected prostitution and homosexuality in different parts of the world. It also explores the simultaneous emergence and similarity of the so-called cities of sin and how they became incubators of a sexual science in which the evolution or devolution of human society was debated in sexual terms and described as a fact of daily life. The chapter suggests that “civilization encourages prostitution” as the sexual drive is increasingly put under control.
Monogamy’s Nature
Authors: Willey Angela
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines how monogamy was imagined as a facet of human nature, and thus for a secularization of Christian marriage, by reading the works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis. In particular, it analyzes narratives that emerge about monogamy in Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis and Ellis's Sex in Relation to Society, volume 6 of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Both Krafft-Ebing and Ellis claimed that monogamy marked the superiority of European societies—either because it was rooted in Christianity or because it was “natural.” Using the specter of Islam, Krafft-Ebing operationalizes monogamy as the distinguishing feature between the subjects of sexual science for whom sexual normality (and pathology) are even possible from the always already degenerate. For Ellis, the meaning of monogamy is not Christian religious doctrine enshrined in law. The chapter also considers sexuality in relation to discourses of evolutionism in sexology.
Mexican Sexology and Male Homosexuality
Authors: Jones Ryan M.
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines the development of Mexican sexual science and its relationship to homosexuality during the period 1860–1957 by focusing on the murder trial of a merchant named Margarito. It first considers the sexological, criminological, and ideological genealogies that Margarito's case and similar cases brought to the fore before discussing sex reassignment surgery as a supposed “cure” for homosexuality and as a “solution” that demonstrated both the body's importance and the preeminence of modern science in restructuring that body to fit national aims and cultural sensibilities. It also describes the inherent eclecticism of Mexican sexology as a deliberate praxis that gave rise to a specific form of knowledge useful in disciplining sexual deviance. The chapter suggests that Margarito's case was a key example of the “Freudianization” and “Lombrosianization” of Mexican sexology as local jurists drew upon sexual science to selectively appeal to assumed universals.
The Science of Sexual Difference
Authors: Suzuki Michiko
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines theories of male–female difference and female identity in Japan by focusing on the intersection of sexology and feminism in the country during the early twentieth century. In particular, it shows how sexologist Ogura Seizaburō and feminist Hiratsuka Raichō drew upon European conceptions of sexual difference, especially those developed by Havelock Ellis, to proffer new ideas about female characteristics and sexuality. The chapter also offers a fresh perspective on Ogura's contribution to the development of early feminism in Japan and considers how he and Hiratsuka strategically used sexology for their own purposes. It argues that while theories of sexual difference have more often supported a maternalist ideology, their use also served other purposes, such as the prioritizing of sex over racial difference.
Time for Sex
Authors: Pande Ishita
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines attempts to standardize, internalize, and globalize sexual temporality—captured in the conceptualization of the body as clock—in the sexological advice offered to men and women in India in the early twentieth century. It first describes the constitution of “Hindu erotica” during the period and how these English translations gave rise to a set of foundational texts that would become the basis of global/Hindu sexology while filling them up with clock time. It then considers the ways that these texts attached life cycles to the chronological ordering of time by recasting brahmacharya—a prescription for a stage of life devoted to celibacy and learning—as an age-stratified organization of sexual behavior and a schema for sex education. By using the example of bodily temporality, the chapter addresses questions of sexuality and space in relation to globalization and transnational capitalism, colonialism and development.
Latin Eugenics and Sexual Knowledge in Italy, Spain, and Argentina
Authors: Beccalossi Chiara
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores how a specific kind of sexology emerged and spread worldwide during the interwar period. Focusing on Italy, Spain, and Argentina, it shows how southern Europe and Latin America developed an active exchange of sexual knowledge. It first considers the strong internationalism of sexology and eugenics before discussing the views of a small sample of Latin eugenicists on sexuality in its relation to male homosexuality. It then describes how a Latin circuit that originated in Italy enabled the movement of shared scientific traditions such as biotypology, Lamarckianism, and criminal anthropology among medical communities associated with Latin eugenics. It also examines how criminal anthropology stood at the beginning of a particular “Latin” version of sexual science that incorporated insights from southern European endocrinology and eugenics, and thus could ultimately be put into the service of fascist Italy—for example, by the Italian scientist and eugenicist Nicola Pende.
Hurt
Authors: Boeri Miriam
Published: May 2018

Hurt: Chronicles of the Drug War Generation weaves engaging first-person accounts of baby boomer drug users, including the account of the author’s own brother, a heroin addict. The compelling stories are set in their historical context, from the cultural influence of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n' roll to the contemporary discourse that pegs drug addiction as a disease punished by incarceration. Boeri writes with penetrating insight and conscientious attention to the intersectionality of race, gender, and class as she analyzes the impact of an increasingly punitive War on Drugs on a hurting generation. The chapters narrate the life course of men and women who continued to use cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamine after age thirty-five. They were supposed to stop drug use as they assumed adult roles in life—as the generation before them had—but the War on Drugs led to mass imprisonment of drug users, changing the social landscape of aging. As one former inmate hauntingly said, America’s drug policy left scars that may rival those of the slavery and genocide in America’s past. The findings call for new responses to drug use problems and strategies that go beyond coerced treatment programs and rehabilitation initiatives focused primarily on changing the person. Linking tales from the field with sociological perspectives, Boeri presents an exposé as disturbing as a dystopian dream, warning that future generations will have an even harder time maturing out of drug use if the War on Drugs is not stopped and social recovery efforts begun. The book ends with an appendix that details how the research was conducted, the data collected and analyzed, and the results were drawn. It describes the ethnographic methods, fieldwork, participant-recruitment strategies, and the innovative mixed method approach—a combination of data science techniques with qualitative data collection. It includes a description of the data visualization images used to illustrate each participant’s life and drug trajectory in graphic simplicity. This appendix offers insight into how to conduct careful quality control at each phase of data collection, team coding of the qualitative data, and why Boeri selected the stories to include in this book.
Introduction
Authors: Boeri Miriam
Published: May 2018

This chapter introduces readers to the narrative style used throughout the book with a glimpse of Ted, a baby boomer who used drugs and alcohol to address his pain. It also introduces the “maturing out” theory of drug use, which predicted that most people who used drugs would stop by age thirty-five. The generation born between 1945 and 1964, the baby boomers, did not follow previous patterns of maturing out of drugs. Instead, older adults who actively used illegal drugs increased in numbers and rates. Examining the historical and social context is critical for a comprehensive understanding of the causes of this phenomenon. Boeri uses engaging stories and thick descriptions to provide insight on socioeconomic influences that produced the War on Drugs and mass incarceration of drug users. This chapter includes Boeri’s standpoint position and a brief description of the methodology she used in her ethnographic study of older drug users, from which the stories in this book are drawn. It ends with a short description of the book’s organization and how the chapters are woven into a tapestry that depicts a suffering population in a devastated landscape.
The Life Course of Baby Boomers
Authors: Boeri Miriam
Published: May 2018

Life course theory focuses attention on the impact of history, timing, and important transitions in life trajectories. In this chapter, the life course analysis of boomer drug users reveals that drug trajectories were not developmental. Instead, they were discontinuous, interrupted phases dependent on social context and situations that changed over time. The chapter provides a closer inspection of the turning points into and out of drug use phases to better understand the causes of problematic drug use and what resources are needed to control it. In contrast to law enforcement and treatment professionals, who view problematic drug use as a lack of self-control, research finds that informal social control mechanisms are more important for maintaining or regaining control over drug use. Life course theory predicts that missing critical transitions in life, such as graduating from high school, leads to fewer informal social controls. The stories in this chapter reveal the negative impact of juvenile incarceration, which did not help anyone become drug free, but instead plunged youths into a criminal culture and broke their social bonds to mainstream social networks and access to informal social control mechanisms.
The Racial Landscape of the Drug War
Authors: Boeri Miriam
Published: May 2018

This chapter provides insider accounts of how the War on Drugs impacted people of color. The racial disparities of the incarcerated population increased as working-class African American communities became impoverished ghettos. Constant police surveillance of minority neighborhoods and invasive oversight by detached judges and probation officers humiliated those entrapped by law enforcement and too poor to afford honest legal protection. Jammie speaks for those with less strength of character when she tells the judge, “How can you sit up there in suburbia and tell me how to live my life as a black woman in the ghetto?” As punitive responses to drug use became more severe, particularly for crack cocaine, extended families were engulfed in overwhelming debt as the criminal justice system demanded the accused pay for their own court, probation, and legal fees, and former prisoners were required to pay for their time behind bars and parole services. Older black baby boomers who remembered the hope of the Civil Rights Movement despaired of societal change as they sought solace in drugs. Racism through the “New Jim Crow” remained a lurking barrier to achieving the dream.
Introduction
Authors: Padoongpatt Mark
Published: May 2018

The introduction lays out the main arguments, central claims, agenda, and goals of the book. It makes a case for studying food, identity, and community in relation to race rather than simply as an expression of culture. It identifies key historical forces and significant turning points to structure the narrative arc of the story of food in the making of Thai American identity and community in Los Angeles from the end of World War II to the present. This narrative is woven into a discussion of the relevant scholarship on Asian American foodways, the U.S. empire in Asia and the Pacific, and the rise of Los Angeles as a global city to establish a basis for the book and how it extends and challenges existing studies on racial formation in the late twentieth-century United States. The introduction ends with a detailed description of archives and methodology and brief chapter summaries.
“One Night in Bangkok”
Authors: Padoongpatt Mark
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores the blossoming of America's fascination with Thai cuisine during the Cold War. The informal postwar U.S. empire in Thailand vacillated between "hard" and "soft" power, consisting of state-sponsored dictatorships, militarization, modernization projects, and cultural diplomacy. The chapter traces how this neocolonial relationship established circuits of exchange between the two countries, making it possible for thousands of ordinary Americans (non-state actors) to go to Thailand and participate in U.S. global expansion through culinary tourism. Many, especially white women, treated Thai foodways as a window into Thai history and culture and into the psyche of the Thai people. The chapter argues that these culinary tourists constructed an idealized image of Thailand and a neocolonial Thai subject by writing "Siamese" cookbooks and teaching cooking classes to suburban homemakers back in Los Angeles, whetting Americans' appetite for an exotic Other’s cuisine.
Too Hot to Handle?
Authors: Padoongpatt Mark
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores the Thai restaurant boom in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s to show how Thais grappled with U.S. racial, gender, and class structures through the food-service industry. The boom, coupled with new patterns of discretionary spending, turned Thai restaurants into culinary contact zones where sensory experiences reestablished racial boundaries and sustained racial thinking and practices. To distinguish Thai food from other Asian cuisines, Thai restaurateurs—along with white food critics—used race, ethnicity, and nation to produce novelty and product differentiation in the marketing of Thai cuisine. In explaining to the American public how Thais were unique from other Asians based on what they cooked and ate, they relied on taste and smell to construct Thais as an exotic non-white Other. The chapter also discusses how Thai restaurants reinforced, created, and masked gender and class divisions within the community through labor practices behind the kitchen door.
“More Than a Place of Worship”
Authors: Padoongpatt Mark
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines food festivals at the Wat Thai of Los Angeles, the first and largest Thai Buddhist temple in the nation, which was established in 1979, as a window on the relationship between food, race, and place in the suburbs during the 1980s. It charts Thai American suburbanization in the East San Fernando Valley near Wat Thai and traces the history of the temple, including how it evolved into a community space that became popular for its weekend food festivals. The festivals, which attracted thousands of visitors, fostered a public-oriented Thai American suburban culture that was a claim for a "right to the global city." The festivals, however, sparked complaints from a group of nearby residents, who used zoning laws to try to shut them down. The chapter contends that the residents who opposed the festivals articulated a liberal multiculturalism to maintain the white spatial imaginary of the neighborhood.
Thailand’s “77th Province”
Authors: Padoongpatt Mark
Published: May 2018

Chapter 5 explores "Thai Town" in East Hollywood (established in 1999) to highlight the role of culinary tourism in Thai American struggles for a right to the global city. It charts the history of Thai Town's development as a product of Thai community leaders, specifically the Thai Community Development Center, and Los Angeles city officials’ attempt to parlay Thai cuisine's popularity into political visibility, civic engagement, social justice activism, and urban redevelopment. While playing on cuisine-driven multiculturalism allowed Thais to use food, specifically culinary tourism, to root identity and community in a physical place, the chapter argues that heritage commodification in Thai Town also constricted a right to the global city, because it was geared toward a neoliberal vision of multiculturalism that sought to highlight the position of Los Angeles in the global capitalist economy. The chapter also includes a discussion of the 1995 El Monte slave-labor case.
Conclusion
Authors: Padoongpatt Mark
Published: May 2018

The conclusion explains the author's reasons for writing the book, including autobiographical material, and how the author came to the topic. It details the book's scholarly contributions and interventions into dominant narratives of postwar U.S. empire, race in America, post-1965 immigration, and metropolitan history. It ends with a discussion of the larger goals of the book and the insights it can provide into issues related to food, identity, and community in the United States today, including cultural appropriation, cultural food colonialism, and cuisine-driven multiculturalism.
Britain’s Empire of Camps
Authors: Forth Aidan
Published: May 2018

During colonial states of emergency officials collected distressed and potentially dangerous populations and concentrated them in purpose-built camps. Camps were rational responses to contingent disasters (hunger, disease and war) but they also emerged from more basic rationales oriented around the care and control of diseased, destitute and otherwise dangerous bodies. Existing scholarship treats camps as straightforward, epiphenomenal products of distinct crises and fails to make structural connections between related episodes of encampment or trace the trans-imperial pathways that connected different camp regimes in concrete ways. Britain’s repeated resort to mass extrajudicial confinement indicates that the rights prescribed by Victorian liberalism did not apply to subjects considered illiberal, uncivilized or incapable of self-government. Although camps drew from practices and principles honed in metropolitan Britain, they were a primarily imperial development.
Concentrating the “Dangerous Classes”
Authors: Forth Aidan
Published: May 2018

Britain assembled the foundations of its empire of camps over the course of the nineteenth century. The institutions of mass industrial society—workhouses, prisons, and factories—affirmed concentration and confinement as normative methods to discipline the vagrant and criminal poor. The military institutionalized army camps and POW camps as disciplinary technologies and disseminated them across the empire. Criminal tribe settlements in India experimented with measures of spatial and social control later used in the context of wartime counterinsurgency. Their proponents imagined such settlements to be measures of social quarantine that would protect society from the dangerous classes while curing and reforming those detained. Medical and military metaphors provided a powerful language that would frame the development of future camps across Britain’s late-Victorian empire.
Camps Go Global
Authors: Forth Aidan
Published: May 2018

Britain’s empire of camps set a template for military detention during World War I and World War II as well as for humanitarian management throughout the twentieth century. British concentration camps must be distinguished from Nazi concentration camps, which were exceptional instruments of terror and genocide. But apart from their propaganda value for rival regimes, British camps foreshadowed practices of racial hygiene and the pre-emptive extrajudicial mass detention of social outsiders in modern authoritarian polities. British camps also anticipated wartime civilian internment and the development of modern refugee camps, which echo the familiar dynamics of coercion and care that first framed the development of camps under the auspices of liberal empire.
Textual Enchantment and Interdiscursive Labor
Authors: Lemon Alaina
Published: May 2018

Creativity always requires some level of collective engagement, be it over a shared terrain or around a single point that can be approached from many perspectives. The anglophone world’s denial of collectivity in creativity remains an artifact of anxieties over agency and will that predated the Cold War, during which theories of grammars and structures were classified as antihumanist. Russian theatrical pedagogy, by contrast, has long fused the aims both to create fresh art and to create contact across time and space with values of intertextual enchantment and collective creativity. So did the early Soviet theorists of semiotics and communication—people who took their cues from artists, artists who theorized the makings of multiple perspectives, but who came to influence American social and semiotic theory much later.
Intuition and Rupture
Authors: Lemon Alaina
Published: May 2018

Interaction frames—the conventions that tell us to look at the stage, to focus in the passport booth—serve as technologies for intuition. Frames work this way because they are both imaginary and material at the same time as they fix or nudge, as Bateson remarked, our ideologies and practices for reading signs at all. Broken frames serve just as well or better. In fact, it is people’s capacity to break frames or layer competing ones that sets many questions for intuition in motion. Artists and then social theorists have called this process estrangement. But we cannot rest with mapping frames like intersecting circles, we need still to probe the tropes by which people differently recognize a frame—or anything—as broken or fragmented. The bits of ruin interpreted as signs of working-class evil in the United States, for instance, were badges of ingenuity and survival in post-WWII Russia. This chapter explores the local and geopolitical forces that torque perceptions and readings of conflict and rupture and that enchant dreams of wholeness. Contact does not become an issue for intuition to solve until some space of rupture or distance is made meaningful (or even imagined). Meanwhile, theatrical and psychic training in flexible framing separates phatic experts from the rest.
Rumba Emissaries
Authors: Vazquez Alexandra T.
Published: May 2018

This chapter focuses on Cuban stage and film star Ninón Sevilla, and one of the most beloved icons of Cuban popular music Beny Moré. Sevilla helps revive all those venues shared between Cuban and Mexican performers, between Mexico City and Havana before, during, and after the world wars. The movement between these cities was not linear, nor did it follow a predictable path. It was more a dynamic intersection that held Los Angeles as part of its junction. Moré recorded some of the most important mambos with the mambo genre's “King,” Dámaso Pérez Prado. Although his reputation on the island was always formidable, it was only after Moré spent almost a decade in Mexico as its rising star that he became a celebrity in and for Cuba.
Doing the Samba on Sunset Boulevard
Authors: Clark Walter Aaron
Published: May 2018

This chapter focuses on Latin American singer and actress Carmen Miranda, who helped create an all-purpose, homogeneous image of Latin Americans, their culture, and especially their music. Hollywood used Miranda as a do-all prop in dramatic settings as diverse as New York, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Havana, and Mexico. The resulting conflation of costumes, instruments, musical genres, and languages is highly entertaining on one level but pernicious and (at the time) politically counterproductive on another. The partial coverage by US news media of events in South America left a gap that is “often filled by fictional representations in motion pictures and television shows. Film, in particular, has played a major role in shaping modern America's consciousness of Latin America.”
Musical Anthropology
Authors: Reyes-Whittaker Gabriel
Published: May 2018

This chapter presents the author's conversation with composer, violinist, and musical anthropologist Elisabeth Waldo, which took place October 17, 2015, at her home, the Rancho Cordillera del Norte, in Northridge. The author suggests that Waldo's work, differed from other works that were classified under the label “exotica” in that she went deeper into the archaeological and anthropological aspects of the music rather than simply making the music sound exotic in a general sense. As the author investigated her music further, he realized that she took this approach on many of her other records as well, all while showing off her symphonic abilities as well as her skills on the violin.
Staging the Dance of Coalition with Versa-Style and CONTRA-TIEMPO
Authors: García Cindy
Published: May 2018

This chapter puts race in a transnational context in the Americas, expanding their framework to the context of dance, music, and performance. It addresses the ways that two Latina-originated dance companies in Los Angeles stage coalition from the placeless realm of the undercommons. Ana Maria Alvarez's CONTRA-TIEMPO Urban Latin Dance Theater and Miss Funk Jackie Lopez's hip-hop and house-based Versa-Style theorize the complex dance and musical migrations that underscore their experiences and visions of latinidad in coalition. Both companies have a foundational connection to dances of the African diaspora. Using choreographic analysis of dance and performance studies as well as interviews with the choreographers, the chapter examines the coalitional dimensions of their works. At the heart of this work is the question “In this contemporary moment of Black Lives Matter, how do these Los Angeles-based companies cultivate alternatives to racialized violence”?
Introduction
Authors: Brooks Shelley Alden
Published: May 2018

For seventy miles along California’s central coast stretches an exceptional landscape known as Big Sur. Looming mountains, precipitous cliffs, deep canyons, towering redwoods, abundant wildlife, and an expansive ocean are all defining features of this prized coastline. Big Sur’s timeless landscape compelled California legislators to cater to the growing auto-tourist demand of the 1920s by penetrating the isolated Big Sur with the Carmel–San Simeon Highway, later known as Highway 1. For over seventy-five years, this ribbon of road, etched into the Santa Lucia Mountains, has delivered millions of admirers to the dramatic Big Sur coastline. They seek contact with a landscape that possesses qualities similar to those of a national park, but they also come to Big Sur because it has long been a cultural symbol of California and the West, a place rife with meaning in contemporary society. Big Sur’s pioneering preservation model—developed by residents and local and state officials—is key to its mystique. Big Sur occupies a hybrid space somewhere between American ideals of development and wilderness. It is a space that challenges the way most Americans think of nature, its relationship to people, and what, in fact, makes it “wild.”
Big Sur: Utopia, U.S.A.?
Authors: Brooks Shelley Alden
Published: May 2018

The West that emerged in the postwar era—a rapidly growing, suburban, industrialized, consumer-oriented region—shaped American culture, and this culture became the foil against which Henry Miller and many others imagined Big Sur. Big Sur sat perched at the literal—and, increasingly, at the figurative—edge of the United States, and its cultural significance grew as the state continued to flourish. Chapter 3 examines the efforts from inside and out to paint Big Sur as a place apart but also as a hyper-representation of California complete with an exceptional landscape, a relatively young and flexible culture, a compelling lifestyle, and a place of perceived personal freedom. Ironically, this freedom and flexibility thrived within the zoning parameters established by Monterey County. A growing number of the diverse inhabitants of Big Sur, including the beatniks—drawn by Jack Kerouac—the artists, the professionals, and the upper-class residents, all shared at least one quality: they possessed social privilege and could use this capital to work with county officials to protect their haven from becoming one more commercialized coastal strip.
Defining the Value of California’s Coastline
Authors: Brooks Shelley Alden
Published: May 2018

Chapter 7 argues that in the 1980s, as California dealt with the financial impact of Proposition 13, and the federal government called for reduced-cost preservation as a growing number of Americans rejected federal land acquisition, Big Sur became a successful test case for a new preservation model that relied upon private and public partnerships and novel conservation methods. The impetus behind the Coastal Act represented the growing sense among Californians that their coastline was a public commons. This 1,100-mile band of prized California landscape therefore became a flash point for hashing out shifting ideas about the role and responsibility of the government and private citizens to protect the coast, public access, and property rights. This chapter examines the work of the California Coastal Commission, the California State Coastal Conservancy, Monterey County officials, and Big Sur residents to protect the region’s natural and cultural resources. Embedded in Big Sur’s state-mandated Local Coastal Program was a form of preservation wrought by the political and economic possibilities of the late twentieth century, premised upon the cultural significance of this coastline as a last best place.
Into the Forest
Authors: Pike Sarah M.
Published: May 2018

Tree-sits and similar actions are simultaneously rites of passage and rites of protest as activists’ deepening commitments to other species are shaped by love and feelings of kinship in the context of forest activism. Activists create protests as spaces apart, as the larger-than-human world becomes more real to them and the human society they were born into becomes more distant. In these spaces, they seek to decolonize and rewild what has been domesticated and colonized. Their vision is one of a feral future in which the wild takes over cities and suburbs, as well as their own bodies and souls, reversing the destructive movement of a doomed civilization.
“Liberation’s Crusade Has Begun”
Authors: Pike Sarah M.
Published: May 2018

Chapter Five explores the interweaving of music, Hindu religious beliefs, and activism motivated by rage in the context of hardcore punk rock. In this chapter, I describe the unlikely convergence of hardcore punk rock, Krishna Consciousness, and animal rights in youth subcultural spaces in order to understand how the aural and spiritual worlds created by some bands shaped the emergence of radical animal rights. At times these music scenes nurtured the idea of other species as sacred beings and sparked outrage at their use and abuse by humans. Bands made fans into activists who brought the intensity of hardcore to direct actions in forests, at animal testing labs and mink farms, and against hunting and factory farming.
Introduction
Authors: Fuller-Seeley Kathryn H.
Published: May 2018

Jack Benny was the most successful of radio’s comedians. In 23 years of weekly broadcasts, Benny indelibly shaped American humor through this powerful mass medium, and became one of the most influential entertainers of the 20th century. The ultimate master of comic timing, Jack Benny was also a canny entrepreneur, becoming one of the pioneering “showrunner” producer/writer/performers. His modern style of radio humor (informal monologues and easy repartee with comic assistants like the famed Rochester character played by Eddie Anderson and wife Mary Livingstone) created the situation comedy. In this career study, we learn how Jack Benny found ingenious ways to sell his sponsors products in commercials listeners loved, and how he dealt with challenges of race relations, gender ideals, creating comedy and thriving in rapidly changing American media.
“What Are You Laughing at, Mary?”
Authors: Fuller-Seeley Kathryn H.
Published: May 2018

Reluctant, young Sadye Marks becomes drawn into vaudeville and radio performance through marriage to Jack Benny. The character created for her by Harry Conn, Mary Livingstone, becomes a popular and unique character in American entertainment. As Jack’s sometimes-secretary and chief heckler, Mary criticizes men with remarkable freedom, yet also retains her independence and attractiveness, much like Hollywood heroines of the 1930s, and yet Mary never has to get married in the final reel. Mary Livingstone had great cultural impact, and star status, in the 1930s as a comic “Unruly Woman.” After World War II, however, Mary’s inhibitions drew her away from the microphone, and her delightfully tart tongue was heard less frequently. With a fascinating affinity for a feminist viewpoint, female characters in the Benny show narrative universe were tough and usually prevailed over the men.
Rochester and the Revenge of Uncle Tom in the 1940s and 1950s
Authors: Fuller-Seeley Kathryn H.
Published: May 2018

Hugely popular on radio and in film playing Rochester in the early 1940s, Eddie Anderson’s celebrity and career were at a peak in the World War II years, when in film, and in government-created publicity, he was a spokesman for black opportunity that was non-threatening across the white political spectrum. Race riots, conservative white backlash, and growth of assertive black critics rooting out “Uncle Tom” accommodation to white dominance, threatened Anderson’s career. Even Benny and his writers could occasionally unthinkingly forget to move ahead, as a recycled old script about Rochester’s minstrel-type ways raised outraged cries from the black press in 1950. Anderson became even more central to Benny’s program in the 1950s with Mary Livingstone’s retirement, as Rochester was dismissed by many as passé, but on the other hand, closer than ever to Jack as an interracial “Odd Couple” of housemates.
The Commercial Imperative
Authors: Fuller-Seeley Kathryn H.
Published: May 2018

Jack Benny ingeniously intertwined the advertising messages of his sponsors into his radio comedy narratives. Although early sponsors like Canada Dry were affronted by the sly, cynical attitude Benny’s joking commercials assailed the product with. Critics and the public and acclaimed the way Benny and his writers, and longtime announcer Don Wilson, brought humor and pleasure to the business of selling products. Sponsors were thrilled with the sales results. The advertising industry found Benny the best salesman they ever found. After his association with Jell-O (that pulled a failing product to great profits), Benny met the challenge of working with an infamous sponsor, American Tobacco, whose harsh ad tactics spawned a barrage of critical complaints. With creative skill, Benny and his writers devised absurdist tactics, the crazy songs of the Sportsmen Quartet and nonsense phrases, which pleased the sponsor yet delighted critics and listeners.
Jack Benny’s Turn Towards Television
Authors: Fuller-Seeley Kathryn H.
Published: May 2018

The new medium of television was to cause Jack Benny much consternation in how to best adapt his iconic radio program after 18 years to the new visual medium. Benny fretted and delayed his entry into New York City-based TV broadcasting until October 1950, meantime remaining radio’s top comic. But industrial pressures to switch networks (in Benny’s momentous move to CBS) and move to television, while trimming radio production budgets, and chasing audiences flocking to TV, pressed Benny to act. Benny struggled against critical expectations, and critical disdain, to find a way to merge the best of his radio narrative to TV’s visual demands. After 18 months of excoriation, critics discovered that Benny was utilizing his silent exasperated looks toward the camera and studio audience to communicate with the TV viewers. The critics pronounced Benny a marvelous TV comic. His program did change significantly in the new medium, but remained a popular favorite.
Conclusion
Authors: Fuller-Seeley Kathryn H.
Published: May 2018

Jack Benny accomplished major achievements in 23 years on the radio. Adapting his performance from vaudeville, he brought the progenitor of stand-up comedy to the new broadcast form through the position of the master of ceremonies, and he and Harry Conn invented the situation comedy format, which was dependent for laughs on humor stemming from characters and dialogue, not stand alone laughs. Benny incorporated advertising messages into his humorous narrative more successfully than any other performer. And he was instrumental in making radio the nation’s most powerful mass medium, all while depicting the character of “The Fall Guy” or schmo, a Yiddish character thoroughly assimilated into American culture. Benny was indelibly tied to the best features of his radio career and persona as he maneuvered the upheavals of American entertainment culture in the 1960s and early 1970s. The genius of Jack Benny’s radio humor is increasingly spread today through new media - websites sharing 750+ Benny broadcasts, satellite radio and podcast programs, and digitization of entertainment trade journals and archival sources.
Missing Persons
Authors: Balberg Mira
Published: May 2018

The first chapter aims to reconstruct the rabbinic paradigm of sacrifice as a religious practice, and to examine how the rabbis understand the workings and value of the sacrificial process. Its point of departure is the biblical model of sacrifice, which is an interactive model in essence. In contrast, the chapter argues, the rabbis reconfigure the sacrificial process in a distinctly and emphatically non-interactive model by underplaying both the giver and receiver in the process. This chapter focuses on the role of the offerer (or “owner”) in rabbinic sacrificial legislation, arguing that the rabbis significantly restrict the function and agency of individual offerers within the sacrificial process, both in terms of physical participation and in terms of mental impact, and thereby create a model of sacrifice that is explicitly non-personal and non-communicative.
Introduction
Authors: Blecher Joel
Published: May 2018

This chapter invites the reader in with an anecdote from a contemporary hadith commentary session with Na’im al-Irqsusi in Damascus, prior to the revolution that became a civil war. It then offers an overview of the hadith commentary tradition from the classical period to the present, with special attention to the interpretation of Sahih al-Bukhari, one of the most renowned compilations of hadith. Combining methods from social theorists and philosophers—in particular Bourdieu, MacIntyre, and Asad—the chapter then poses the problem animating the project of this book and discusses how it will contribute to ongoing conversations in a number of fields, including hadith studies, commentary studies, social theory, and intellectual history.
The Inner World of the Interpretive Tradition
Authors: Blecher Joel
Published: May 2018

In this chapter readers delve deeper into the inner world of commentary and fine-grained commentarial reasoning, while keeping in mind the complex social and historical milieu of late Umayyad Andalusia, in which the Maliki legal orthodoxy sought to maintain dominance amid the fragmenting caliphate in Cordoba, the nascent Zahiri opposition, and the rapid growth of traditionism throughout Andalusia and North Africa. In the case of discretionary punishment (ta’zir), which the Maliki orthodoxy in Andalusia had firmly established as unrestricted, this chapter explores how Maliki judges like al-Muhallab (d. 1044) and Ibn Battal (d. 1057) reconciled a cluster of hadith that claimed to restrict discretionary punishment to ten lashes. In doing so, this chapter tracks the how debates evolved from an approach that dismissed the “ten lashes” hadith in favor of the orthodoxy’s unrestricted discretion to an approach that conceded to traditionalists that the “ten lashes” hadith was authoritative but, contra Zahiri critics, corralled its meaning in favor of broad judicial discretion.
For Sultans, Students, and Scholars
Authors: Blecher Joel
Published: May 2018

In Mamluk Cairo, the practice of hadith commentary came to be encyclopedic works composed as serial performances in the presence of students, patrons, and rivals that spanned several months and sometimes several decades. For students, commentators needed to prove their mastery of multiple disciplines, as well as display their pious devotion to preserving the legacy of the Prophet by aspiring to an endless commentary. While any mention of patrons was absent from the Andalusian commentarial context, patrons are praised by name in the text of some Mamluk-era hadith commentaries. In one rare case, a global political dispute between a commentator’s two patrons over a ritualized practice—dressing the Kaʿba—became fodder for commentaries. Since major hadith commentators of the Mamluk era sometimes held powerful political positions—Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani (d. 1449) and Badr al-Din al-‘Aynī (d. 1451) were chief justices for their respective legal schools—rivalries were sparked, in part, by competition over material and social goods. But a closer examination shows that the maintenance of intellectual integrity and other interpretive aims was also at stake in these rivalries. In this way, the commentarial predicament in the Mamluk era was one in which social and intellectual stakes were thickly intertwined.