bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Shaffer Kirwin R.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter positions anarchism in Puerto Rico as a unique entity in the movement's history. In Puerto Rico, anarchists expressed their concerns and visions through their own brand of cultural politics, which was directed against Puerto Rican and U.S. colonial rulers in order to promote an antiauthoritarian spirit and countercultural struggle over how the island was being run and the future directions that it should pursue. Alongside this was a consistent anticlericalism against one of the perceived central pillars of cultural authoritarianism in Puerto Rico dating to the days of Spanish rule: the Roman Catholic Church. Moreover, while cultural politics reflected one way that anarchists engaged in debates over Puerto Rico-specific issues, many of these cultural debates were actually linked transnationally.
The Roots of Anarchism and Radical Labor Politics in Puerto Rico, 1870s–1899
Authors: Shaffer Kirwin R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter illustrates the status of organized labor and the Left in Puerto Rico in the final decades of Spanish rule. It focuses on the tradition of artisanal autonomy and resistance, the rise of artisan and worker-based centers to develop class consciousness, and the emergence of the island's first important labor organizations in the 1890s. Central to the story is the arrival of Santiago Iglesias Pantín, a carpenter from Spain who had worked with anarchist groups in Spain and Cuba before fleeing from the latter in late 1896 and joining forces with libertarian socialists to form the first two labor unions and the first two important left-wing newspapers from 1897 to 1899. Iglesias soon rose to lead these organizations, and after the U.S. occupation began in 1898, he traveled to the U.S. mainland to join forces first with Socialists and then the AFL.
Radicals and Reformers
Authors: Shaffer Kirwin R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter illustrates that during the first decade of U.S. rule, anarchists cautiously joined the AFL-linked Federación Libre de Trabajadores (FLT), assuming leadership roles in local unions, publishing in union newspapers, and printing anarchist newspapers through the union presses. From within the union, anarchists criticized the FLT's pro-Americanization project, the rise of republican political institutions and electoral politics on the island, and the union's occasional attempts to engage in elections. These critiques, sometimes published at home and sometimes published in the international anarchist press in Cuba that was then mailed back to Puerto Rico, often found anarchists on the margins of union politics. Moreover, they worked as best as they could with the reformers while continuing to put forth a more radical agenda achieved by direct action, not parliamentary politics.
Mexicans in the United States
Authors: Wood Andrew Grant
Published: May 2017

This chapter relays in broad terms the long history of European American settlement and subsequent Latin American migration—particularly undertaken by Mexicans—to the U.S. Heartland. It gives particular attention to the capitalist-led development during the second half of the nineteenth century as the United States sought to build itself into not only a formidable industrial power but also a world power. It traces the vital role that immigrant workers—and specifically Mexican laborers—have played in this process despite their often being treated as second-class citizens. An appreciation of this history provides one with a clear sense of the neocolonial aspirations of U.S. enterprise—both governmental and commercial—as well as the many contradictory and timeworn Anglo rationalizations that exploit Mexican workers in the United States today.
Betabeleros and the Western Nebraska Sugar Industry
Authors: Anders Tisa M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the newly founded and (soon to be) prosperous city of Scottsbluff in Western Nebraska as the chosen site for the first sugar factory in that region in 1910. Within a decade of its opening, Mexican and Mexican American migrant workers were the main group recruited for the fields. Finding that migrants successfully negotiated a variety of social, cultural, and economic challenges, the chapter considers how migrant workers and their families became part of the growing Scottsbluff community as the sugar industry developed. In addition to a variety of primary source materials, their labor and community-building efforts are brought to life through a series of oral history interviews.
Seeing No Evil
Authors: Smith-Nonini Sandy
Published: May 2017

Labor relations are a paramount consideration in crop agriculture, a labor-intensive industry that is dependent on land. The U.S. government has long regulated the supply of foreign farm labor on behalf of agribusiness, and that role became more critical as the industry restructured itself in the competitive neoliberal climate since the early 1990s. The H2A program, which permits quasi-private labor brokers to import Mexican “guest workers” for seasonal work on U.S. farms, expanded after 1990 into states in the mid-South, which was also experiencing new flows of undocumented immigrants. North Carolina emerged as the state importing the most H2A workers. This chapter draws on the case of the North Carolina Growers Association, the state's large H2A brokerage, to examine the relationship between the neoliberal state and guest workers during the 1990s. It shows that during the 1990s, the North Carolina H2A program morphed into a model of contractual labor relations that represented a case of “government by proxy,” not unlike other public-private partnerships formed in the neoliberal era. In this case, the state delegated responsibility for labor supply manipulation, control of workers, and regulatory oversight directly to private brokers who publicly represented and shared revenue streams with agribusiness growers.
Rooted/Uprooted
Authors: Hallett Miranda Cady
Published: May 2017

This chapter asks what happens when transnational migrant families own homes, plant trees, and establish businesses in small-town America but still lack a viable path to legal residency. Based on extensive fieldwork in small, rural Arkansas communities with Salvadoran transnational migrants, the author explores the contradictory dynamics between a growing identification with local geographies and continuing legal exclusion. Most Salvadoran migrants are caught between categories of national belonging; classified as either “illegal” or “temporary,” they lack rights to political participation either in the United States or in El Salvador. These legal exclusions create a mobile space of exception around the body of the migrant, which facilitate the exploitation of migrants' labor. Legal exclusion also contributes to social exclusion through the contradictory production of both invisibility and hypervisibility. Despite this, transnational migrants continue to put down roots in their new places of settlement.
Immigrant Integration and the Changing Public Discourse
Authors: Kulcsár László J. , Iaroi Albert
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the public discourse around the integration process of immigrant Latino workers in Emporia, Kansas. It employs aggregate statistical analysis, media-content analysis, and key-informant interviews to examine how the public discourse has changed over time. Particular attention is given to the arrival of the Somali refugee workers that subsequently altered the discourse on immigrant-worker integration. Findings show that the community perception of Latin Americans shifted significantly once a culturally and ethnically less similar group arrived in town. The discussion includes the role of local actors in immigrant integration with an emphasis on their main employer, Tyson Foods. Contrary to the general challenges of immigrant integration, revolving largely around unauthorized migrants, in this case the difficulty had to do with integrating legal immigrants who had racial and religious differences from not only the mainstream community but from the dominant minority as well.
Latin American Migrations to the U.S. Heartland
Authors: Carter Scott
Published: May 2017

This chapter offers a descriptive analysis of the demographic presence and economic activity of the Hispanic population in six core Heartland states: Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma; hereafter referred to collectively as the Heartland 6 (HL6). It gives an overall view of the underlying trends in Hispanic demography, productivity, employment, and other relevant socioeconomic variables from 2000–2007. It shows that the HL6 experienced increased rates of growth in its Hispanic population, a trend consistent with evidence reported in the recent “new destinations” literature. At the same time, traditional growth states vis-à-vis Hispanic presence report decreasing trends in their growth rate. This represents a diffusion, or convergence, of Latin American migrations throughout the United States. Economic performance, income distribution, employment, and the age-gender profile are also descriptively presented.
Soldiers
Authors: Bontemps Arna
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the experiences of Illinois Negro soldiers in the Union army that fought in the Civil War. According to George W. Williams, Illinois sent 1,811 soldiers during the Civil War, but Champaign's Union and Gazette states that “of the colored men enlisted in the war, Illinois raised one thousand one hundred and eleven.” The correct number was perhaps an average between the two figures; downstate Quincy alone is said to have raised 903 of these men. Congress was appealed to decide whether or not Negroes were to fight in the conflict; after long months of pro and con debate an act was passed requiring that Negroes be paid ten dollars per month, with three dollars deducted for clothing while white soldiers received thirteen dollars per month in addition to their uniforms. This chapter considers the role of H. O. Wagoner in leading the Negro personnel of Civil War forces in Illinois, as well as questions regarding the Negro's place in military affairs.
Iola
Authors: Bontemps Arna
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses Ida. B. Wells's crusade against Negro lynching and other abuses. Illinois newspapers adhering to the Democratic Party almost invariably treated the Negroes with undisguised hostility, while even the Republican press often subjected them to heavy-handed humor. While attention was centered upon those unfortunate enough to become involved with the police, the most eminent colored people were not immune to ridicule and abuse. This chapter looks at the efforts of Wells, whose reputation as a journalist and crusader against lynching spread after the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, when she collaborated with Frederick Douglass, I. Garland Penn, and Ferdinand L. Barnett on writing a booklet recording the achievements of American Negroes and refuting the false impressions created by most of the newspapers. Wells wrote for various Negro publications under the pseudonym “Iola” and was recognized as the most implacable and effective enemy of mob rule and racial discrimination in general.
The Migrants Keep Coming
Authors: Bontemps Arna
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the Great Migration, when Negroes from the South descended on northern states in search of better opportunities after World War I. As in the 1870s, news of a better land lying to the north began to spread more generally shortly after the outbreak of the first world war. The Chicago Defender, most energetic purveyor of the good tidings, published articles and poems inviting immigrants North. Though the post-war years brought a slackening of the demand for laborers and finally an acute depression, the trend of migration was toward and not away from Illinois, and particularly toward Chicago. This chapter first considers the socioeconomic and political reasons behind the Negroes' exodus to the North after World War I, especially the issue of equal rights and civil rights, before discussing the concerns raised by the migration as it assumed tidal proportions. It also examines the efforts of southern planters and manufacturers to hamper the activities of labor agents sent South to recruit Negro laborers.
Introduction
Authors: Hartnett Stephen John , Novek Eleanor , Wood Jennifer K.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter discusses how the Prison Communication, Activism, Research, and Education Collective (PCARE) attempts to put democracy into practice by merging prison education and activism. While dozens of studies have described what is wrong with America's prison-industrial complex—its embedded racism and sexism, its perpetual violence, its skewed judicial and legislative aspects, and its corresponding media spectacles, among others—the chapter presents real-world answers based on years of pragmatic activism and engaged teaching. It recognizes that the men and women in prisons and jails have left behind them trails of wreckage—they harmed others and caused immeasurable pain. Meanwhile, the victims of violent crime attest that their lives are forever altered. The chapter foregrounds these facts and argues that the only way to end the cycle of violence is by moving past the anger and fear.
Kings, Warriors, Magicians, and Lovers
Authors: Shailor Jonathan
Published: May 2017

This chapter illustrates how theater helps imprisoned men explore new modes of self-actualization. Recognizing that “bad masculinity” drives much of the violence in the American prison culture, it argues that imprisoned performers can draw upon Jungian archetypes, Buddhist meditation techniques, and collaborative theater to help craft new selves free from the habitual violence that lingers within typical male roles. The chapter also examines the Theater of Empowerment, a performance-based course emphasizing personal and social development. The perspective offered in the course incorporates both the feminist critique of a sexist, patriarchal model of manhood, and the Jungian vision of a male identity that evolves toward wholeness, embracing both masculine and feminine characteristics.
Writing Your Way to Freedom
Authors: Coogan David
Published: May 2017

This chapter details how the use of a biography-based writing workshop helps imprisoned authors think about their pasts, reframe their presents, and construct new possible futures. It explores the deeper communication issues that structure narratives of criminality and violence but that also, when addressed truthfully, enable imprisoned men to begin to author new lives. The chapter contextualizes the men's autobiographies within the larger field of prison writing since the 1970s—particularly, the emergent genre of prison autobiography. The discussion is limited to work published by men primarily because the workshops examined here are filled with men. However, the process of crafting new selves via autobiographical writing is not inherently different for men and women any more than it is for black or white prisoners.
Serving Time by Coming Home
Authors: Faris Jeralyn
Published: May 2017

This chapter demonstrates how a reentry court in West Lafayette enables former prisoners to build new lives and stay out of trouble by supporting them with a team of legal specialists, social workers, health and job counselors, and other staff. While reentry is a part of the criminal-justice system and “doing time,” a reentry Problem Solving Court (PSC) is also an effort to reform the prison-industrial society. The chapter studies the deep power structures whereby the reentry court shapes ex-prisoners' experiences and navigation of court boundaries and surveillance as they become both disciplined and agentic in their path to becoming contributing citizens. It argues that the PSC demonstrates Michel Foucault's art of governing by creating a “subtle integration” of coercion and agency via its communicative organization.
“Prisoners Rise, Rise, Rise!”
Authors: Engstrom Craig Lee , Williams Derrick L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter provides a rhetorical analysis of “consciousness-raising hip-hop.” Merging personal stories with an encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary pop culture, it argues that a politically savvy subgenre of hip-hop artists are raising awareness about incarceration in the black community and producing effective strategies for community activism. The hip-hop movement plays an important role in illuminating the problems of the prison-industrial complex by creating spaces of prison protest and modeling sources of community care. The analysis of hip-hop focuses on the artists, music, and (life)styles that promote a type of citizen-orator that is Ciceronian in character. Particular attention is given to those hip-hop artists who fit the definition of “consciousness-raising” by providing hope to prisoners and communities working to transform the U.S. criminal-justice system.
Political Homophobia in Comparative Perspective
Authors: Bosia Michael J. , Weiss Meredith L.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter discusses political homophobia as a state strategy, social movement, and transnational phenomenon, powerful enough to structure the experiences of sexual minorities and expressions of sexuality. It considers political homophobia as purposeful, especially as practiced by state actors; as embedded in the scapegoating of an “other” that drives processes of state building and retrenchment; as the product of transnational influence peddling and alliances; and as integrated into questions of collective identity and the complicated legacies of colonialism. In this analysis, unexpected forms of political homophobia must be examined as typical tools for building an authoritative notion of national collective identity, for mobilizing around a variety of contentious issues and empowered actors, and as a metric of transnational institutional and ideological flows.
Theorizing the Politics of (Homo)Sexualities across Cultures
Authors: Blasius Mark
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on an event in the history of sexuality, more specifically in the history of sexuality as a political issue. In recent years, vastly diverse movements around the politics of sexuality have embraced the notion of “sexual rights.” This concept developed rapidly especially since the UN Conference on Women in Beijing (1995) and in the wake of the global AIDS pandemic. More recently, rights specific to sexual orientation and gender identity have gained prominence, for instance with a 2011 Human Rights Council resolution on sexual orientation and gender identity, and a report to the UN General Assembly that analyzed in a preliminary way the universal human rights of LGBT persons. Issuance of this report and the resolution that commissioned it together signify a historical event in the politics of sexuality.
An American Foodscape
Authors: Cinotto Simone
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the interrelationships among food, place, and race in Italian Harlem and shows that the Italian immigrant community was also a race-inflected geography of food consumption. During the 1930s, Italian Americans were hit hard by the Depression. Italians were disproportionately represented among the recipients of city and federal subsidies, particularly in Harlem, where the poorest among them lived. However, in those same years, Italian immigrants and their children managed to make East Harlem their home in America through a careful deployment of social, material, and emotional responses. This chapter examines how Italians in Harlem carved distinctive Italian foodscapes into “their” neighborhood that gave the community a secure sense of place. Italian Americans created around them a sensually familiar world filled with the tastes, aromas, and colors of Italian food, provided by “ethnic” restaurants, food stores, and street markets that dotted the neighborhood. In Italian Harlem, the production, commerce, preparation, and consumption of food gave rise to a distinct urban ethnic foodscape and smellscape that shaped social identities.
The Nazi Modernization of Sex: Romance Melodrama
Authors: Heins Laura
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores how Third Reich romance melodramas attempted to form spectator desires to the benefit of Nazi imperialist aims. Nazi romance films positioned Third Reich culture as a liberation from nineteenth-century sexual morality while encouraging female participation in the public sphere in preparation for a war economy. The sexual content of Nazi films was furthermore calculated to exceed that of Hollywood in an attempt to make Nazi rule appear more attractive to German, occupied, and neutral audiences. And contrary to the assumptions that the Nazis attempted to desexualize the cinema, historical evidence shows that the erotic attractions of female performers were explicitly used in order to suppress political critique. Yet the “woman question” continually threatened to interfere with the propaganda minister's instrumentalization of the female body, and Nazi cinema's deployment of the erotic sometimes backfired.
The Creolization of American Culture
Authors: Smith Christopher J.
Published: May 2017

This book examines the artworks, letters, sketchbooks, music collection, and biography of the painter William Sidney Mount (1807–1868) as a lens through which to see the multi-ethnic antebellum world that gave birth to blackface minstrelsy. As a young man living in the multiethnic working-class community of New York's Lower East Side, Mount took part in the black-white musical interchange his paintings depict. An avid musician and tune collector as well as an artist, he was among the first to depict vernacular fiddlers, banjo players, and dancers precisely and sympathetically. His close observations and meticulous renderings provide rich evidence of performance techniques and class-inflected paths of musical apprenticeship that connected white and black practitioners. Looking closely at the bodies and instruments Mount depicts in his paintings as well as other ephemera, the book traces the performance practices of African American and Anglo-European music-and-dance traditions while recovering the sounds of that world. This book uses Mount's depictions of black and white vernacular fiddlers, banjo players, and dancers to open up fresh perspectives on cross-ethnic cultural transference in Northern and urban contexts, showing how rivers, waterfronts, and other sites of interracial interaction shaped musical practices by transporting musical culture from the South to the North and back. The “Africanization” of Anglo-Celtic tunes created minstrelsy's musical “creole synthesis,” a body of melodic and rhythmic vocabularies, repertoires, tunes, and musical techniques that became the foundation of American popular music.
Long Island and the Lower East Side
Authors: Smith Christopher J.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the creolizing maritime cultures of Long Island and Manhattan, two New York islands that directly shaped William Sidney Mount's personal and musical world. It reconstructs the environments that Mount knew and by which he was shaped, as a child and young adult in antebellum America. To this end, the chapter considers how influences from Long Island and Manhattan play out in the life of Mount, in that of his uncle and musical mentor Micah Hawkins, and in Hawkins's 1824 ballad opera The Saw-Mill, or, A Yankee Trick. It begins with a discussion of evidence of blackface minstrelsy's creole synthesis in the antebellum period by describing two festival performances, Pinkster and 'Lection Day, and during the Federalist period. It then assesses the creole synthesis in black Manhattan by focusing on the “African Grove” Theater, along with Mount's first works and new career path following the death of Hawkins. It concludes with a review of Mount's scenic painting Rustic Dance after a Sleigh Ride.
Stepping Back
Authors: Tamura Eileen H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the men with whom Kurihara clashed at Manzanar. These include Tokie Nishimura Slocum, Togo Tanaka, and Karl Yoneda. Like Kurihara, Slocum was a veteran of World War I and a member of the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. As war between Japan and the United States grew imminent, Slocum gained the reputation of being an informer for the FBI and Naval Intelligence. As such, he was thoroughly despised by most Nikkei at Manzanar. Similarly, because of his role as a WRA documentary historian, Togo Tanaka was targeted by Nikkei dissidents as an informer and included him on their death list. On the other hand, Karl Yoneda refused to speak out against DeWitt's removal orders. Yoneda and other Nikkei Communists felt that they had no choice but to “accept the racist U.S. dictum” of incarceration “over Hitler's ovens and Japan's military rapists of Nanking.”
Renunciation
Authors: Tamura Eileen H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter recounts how President Franklin Roosevelt signed Public Law (PL) 405 on July 1, 1944, which amended the Nationality Act of 1940 to allow U.S. citizens living in the United States to renounce their citizenship during wartime. Although not stated explicitly, the law was aimed at dissident Nisei. As Manzanar Project Director Ralph Merritt remarked of the statute, “This is the first time in the history of a civilized nation that a government has permitted a citizen, during a state of war, to renounce his citizenship.” Officials had several motives for favoring such a law. Some sought to have renunciants exchanged for U.S. citizens detained in Japan. Indeed, the chairman of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee, Samuel Dickstein, suggested that the law's provisions be publicized in the camps, to be followed by notices “calling for volunteers to go to Japan in trade for Americans.”
The Centennial City
Authors: Warfield Patrick
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses John Philip Sousa's move from Washington to Philadelphia to prove himself as a violinist, arranger, and composer. Following his tours with Nobles, he “decided to go to Philadelphia and see the Centennial. It was a big event in the life of any young American and I believe the first event of its kind that the country had ever had.” It was in the Centennial City that Sousa earned his stripes writing songs and stage works, and it was also in Philadelphia that he began to plot a return to the capital. By the time he left Philadelphia in 1880, Sousa had orchestrated several complete operettas.
Legends of the Sprawl
Authors: Westfahl Gary
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines three of William Gibson's novels: Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. In Neuromancer, Gibson moved into new territory cautiously, employing a familiar setting—his Sprawl—while essentially combining the plots of two earlier stories. As in “Johnny Mnemonic,” Case would undertake a physical journey through a threatening underworld to obtain crucial information; he would also travel through cyberspace to hack into a protected database. Drawing upon science fiction traditions, Gibson also introduced two significant novelties. Count Zero also features a young computer cowboy, Bobby Newmark, who adventures in both the Sprawl and cyberspace. However, while Newmark's alias Count Zero provides the novel's title, he would be only one of its three protagonists, and perhaps the least important one, as Gibson interweaves his narrative with the stories of two other, very different characters. Mona Lisa Overdrive relies heavily on characters from previous novels.
Different Engines
Authors: Westfahl Gary
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines William Gibson's The Difference Engine, a collaboration with Bruce Sterling, as well as his screenplays, poetry, song lyrics, and nonfiction. Sterling used an irresistibly marketable concept for The Difference Engine: a novel by what he could describe as the two leading cyberpunk authors that would appealingly blend three popular subgenres of science fiction—cyberpunk, alternate history, and “steampunk” literature. Despite the prominence of cyberspace in his Sprawl trilogy, Gibson claimed that he has “never really been very interested in computers themselves.” This chapter first offers a reading of The Difference Engine before discussing Gibson's screenplays written for Hollywood in the late 1980s, including one for a proposed Alien 3 film and another for the film version of Johnny Mnemonic. It also considers Gibson's poems such as “The Beloved: Voices for Three Heads,” his ventures into writing song lyrics, and the approach he used in some of his later nonfiction works: looking at the real world in terms of science fiction, conveying that we indeed live in a science fiction world.
Two Bronzeville Autobiographies
Authors: Schlabach Elizabeth Schroeder
Published: May 2017

This chapter turns to the rise and fame of Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks through the genre of autobiography. Wright's Black Boy (American Hunger) and Gwendolyn Brooks' Report From Part One indicate these authors' awareness of spatial realities and how they transformed the city of fact into the city of feeling, into their writing. The chapter details the dialogue between Wright's and Brooks' fiction and their urban surroundings as residents and then as prize-winning authors. Through various literary and sociological projects, Wright and Brooks initiated an investigation of place, coherency, and consciousness in Chicago's flats, alleyways, blocks, and one-room kitchenette apartments.
Post-Oppositional Resistance?
Authors: Keating AnaLouise
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter calls attention to the limitations of oppositional politics in initiating change, particularly due to the underlying binary systems on which oppositional epistemologies and practices are generally based. At the same time this chapter advocates for a post-oppositional resistance as an alternative to conventional oppositional thinking and scholarship. These alternatives are described as “threshold theories” to underscore their nonbinary, liminal, potentially transformative status. Threshold theories facilitate and enact movements “betwixt and between” divergent worlds, enabling us to establish fresh connections among distinct (and sometimes contradictory) perspectives, realities, peoples, theories, texts, and/or worldviews. Finally, this chapter looks at Gloria Anzaldúa's theories and practice of nepantleras and nepantla to consider some of the forms that these nonoppositional threshold theories can take.
Writing and Rewriting Labor’s Narrative
Authors: Lichtenstein Nelson
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents the author'a account of how he reframed his understanding of the structures and social impulses that create the consciousness of the working-class as well its antagonists. At Berkeley in the early 1970s he was convinced that neither the law, religion, ethnicity, nor even race were as important as the work experience itself in shaping the consciousness of industrial unionists, whose sit-down strikes and wildcat strikes seemed to emerge directly out of a revolt against hierarchy and authority on the shop floor itself. However, he has come to the conclusion that the relationship of an individual to his or her work life is of less immediate importance than that person's capacity to identify with and then expound a set of ideas and aspirations that may or may not run parallel to what an outside observer might seem to think met the person's objective interests.
Supply-Chain Tourist; or, How Globalization Has Transformed the Labor Question
Authors: Lichtenstein Nelson
Published: May 2017

This chapter, which yanks the reader from mid-twentieth-century Detroit to early twenty-first-century Guangdong Province, recounts the author's discovery that the labor question can have many different configurations, especially when some of the most important and characteristic enterprises of our day are the big-box retailers, whose employee rolls and annual revenues now far outrank those of the largest manufacturing companies. It appears that the essence of the twenty-first-century labor question no longer resides at the point of production in a struggle between workers and the owners of the factories in which they labor. Instead, the site of value production is found at every link along a set of global supply chains, in which the manufacturer and the warehouse operator, the ports and the shipping companies, as well as the retailers and their branded vendors jockey for power and profit. In this disaggregated system, legal ownership of the forces of production has been divorced from operational control, making accountability for labor conditions diffuse and knowledge of the actual producers far from transparent.
Did 1968 Change History?
Authors: Lichtenstein Nelson
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers a defining moment of the year 1968, when a generation of radicals entertained what even at the time seemed to be utopian hopes and postures in the streets of Paris, Berlin, New York, and Mexico City. It was a New Left, which saw itself as distinct from both the Communists or Socialists, as well as being a left that stood against the mere social democratic reformism of many of the parties that had been in or near power in North America and Europe. It is argued that when it came to the economy, New Leftists of that era thought capitalism was entirely too stable, a claustrophobic economic system that functioned with machine-like precision. If they wanted to overthrow that system, it was not because capitalism faced an imminent crisis, or even because it did not produce for the majority of the population, but because the existing economic order was such a sturdy, inhumane iron cage. And this was their greatest ideological failure, because it would be the right and not the left that would prove most successful in taking advantage of the radical shifts in the nature of world capitalism that were about to come.
Dialectical Relationships
Authors: McKillen Elizabeth
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the themes of collaboration and resistance during the period of U.S. belligerency. It first considers the controversy over the Root diplomatic mission, led by American Federation of Labor (AFL) Vice President James Duncan, that visited Russia in the wake of the March revolution that overthrew the Czar. It then discusses the debate over the collaborationist strategies of AFL and the prowar Socialists throughout World War I, along with the antiwar culture of the Industrial Workers of the World and its decision to continue strike and organizing activities despite government pleas for patriotic unity. It also explores the Socialist Party's anticonscription and antiwar activities as well as the AFL's collaboration with the Wilson administration in promoting its war policies both at home and abroad.
Making the World Safe for Workers?
Authors: McKillen Elizabeth
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the role of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Woodrow Wilson in the creation of the International Labor Organization (ILO) as an affiliate to the League of Nations at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. It begins with a discussion of the Bern conference in Switzerland and AFL President Samuel Gompers's travel to Paris to chair the Commission on International Labor Legislation that established ILO and framed a bill of labor rights for the Versailles Peace Treaty. The chapter then considers the conflict between Europe and the United States over the labor provisions of the peace treaty and the ILO, along with the opposition coming from labor groups and left-leaning diaspora political coalitions. It also analyzes Gompers's campaign in defense of the entire Versailles “package,” including his proposed labor conventions involving the AFL, the Pan American Federation of Labor, and the International Federation of Trade Unions. Finally, it describes Wilson's support for ILO and its labor provisions as part of his efforts to incorporate respectable labor into international governance.
Flutes, Sexuality, and Love Magic
Authors: Olsen Dale A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter deals with one of the most common issues in world flutelore—love. Many of the flute tales found in the world have to do with sexuality and magical love powers used by men to attract and woo a woman. The chapter includes several stories and discusses the following topics: flute sound as magic for wooing the opposite sex; the irresistible magical charm of the flute from the point of view of charmed women; flute sound as individual recognition of and by the opposite sex; flutes for remembering the opposite sex; flutes that attract wild female nymphs; and the sexual power of flutes.
Socioreligious Status of Flute Musicians
Authors: Olsen Dale A.
Published: May 2017

The previous twelve chapters of this book show that in many parts of the world, flutes are not for sissies, and flutists are not sissies; more often, in fact, flutes and flutists are magical, noble, powerful, godlike, and even supernatural entities, as many of the folktales have revealed. This chapter specifically looks at the socioreligious status of flutists in a global context, according to ethnology and mythology. It begins by considering the status of certain musical instruments and musicians in European-derived cultures, about which European-derived individuals seem to claim certain knowledge, although much of it is stereotypical. It then moves on to discuss topics such as flutists as noblemen; flutists as sacrificial victims; and flutists as low-class humans.
Introduction
Authors: Stearns Peter N.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter discusses societies that have deliberately undertaken a program of demilitarization, with deep consequences in public and political culture as well as statecraft. The developments have occurred in decades dominated by the arms races of the Cold War and the assumption of most governments that the logics of success and security called for more weapons. Exploring the history of explicit demilitarization raises two related issues, both of which provide context for future studies. First, demilitarization as a term can be validly applied to a number of patterns of change—there is no heroic single definition. Second, while contemporary demilitarization has some distinctive features, it links with and builds on earlier historical precedents of several types.
Moscow Bound
Authors: Horne Gerald
Published: May 2017

This chapter studies Patterson's journey to Moscow. On November 14, 1927, Patterson was issued a U.S. passport and journeyed across the Atlantic for Moscow. His mission, as he put it, was to matriculate at the “University of Toiling People of the Far East,” whose student body was peppered with Chinese and Indians but also included Africans from throughout the world. “I was determined to have a complete house cleaning as regards capitalist thought and ideas,” said Patterson, and in this he succeeded. In 1928, he was to be found at an important gathering of the Communist International where cogitation on the critical Negro Question was a preoccupation and emerging was a logical corollary of the conflation of the problems of Africans, be they in North America or Africa itself—the so-called Black Belt thesis, or the idea that U.S. Negroes were entitled to self-determination, up to and including construction of a Negro republic in Dixie.
Christian Faith and the Protestant Principle
Authors: Yadlapati Madhuri M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter takes a closer look at three figures whose discussions of faith are among the most influential in twentieth-century Christian theology. Two, Paul Tillich and Karl Barth, are twentieth-century Christian theologians and one, Søren Kierkegaard, is a nineteenth-century philosopher, but all three determine directions taken by existentialist Christian theology in the late twentieth century. All three figures happen to be Protestant, not simply by denominational identification, but more importantly, each is guided by the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone to emphasize the priority of God's saving grace over any human works and human understanding. All three adhere to the Protestant Principle (an individual's right and responsibility to radically question and reinterpret questions of faith), albeit in different ways.
Resisting the Reification of Religion
Authors: Yadlapati Madhuri M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter turns to the responsibility to resist dogmatism and examines doubt as an active project of the spiritual life. It first briefly surveys some prominent modern thinkers who criticize religious dogmatism on behalf of what is a spiritual calling of humanist freedom, including Sam Harris's atheistic criticism of religious dogmatism, Friedrich Nietzsche's insight into the “death of God,” Karl Marx's suspicion of religion, and John Robinson's proposal to abandon theistic Christianity. The chapter then examines the teachings of Christian mystics regarding the explicit path of unknowing or unlearning required on the spiritual journey. Finally, the chapter turns to Buddhist teachings on emptiness to see how self-transcendence requires the active limitation and undoing of self-knowledge.
Faith and Hope for the Twenty-First Century
Authors: Yadlapati Madhuri M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents a fragmentary vignette of contemporary conversation in American Christian theological culture. The figures discussed here represent three rather different contemporary possibilities of how a twenty-first-century postmodern Christian faith might look. What unites all three is a rejection of the simplistic oppositions between faith and doubt, and between religion and the secular. They all take religion quite seriously: Jürgen Moltmann and Raimon Panikkar are prominent Christian theologians; Panikkar was a Roman Catholic priest; John Caputo is an American philosopher and theologian whose work deconstructs the boundaries between philosophy and theology. They illustrate some of the requirements that religious faith must embrace if it is to be genuinely sustainable in today's world and not languish as a nostalgic relic that stubbornly relies on certitude.
Dwelling in Uncertainty
Authors: Yadlapati Madhuri M.
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter presents further thoughts on the polarization between religious fundamentalism and atheistic dogmatism and argues that, instead of dwelling on this polarized climate and retreating into the security of such dogmatic certitudes, we face ever-growing opportunities to dwell in the uncomfortable space of uncertainty and to learn from others what we do not know or see because of our respective complacency. It returns to the topics discussed in earlier chapters in illustrating the dangers between the two sides, both of which are similarly dogmatic restrictions of what is allowed or valid as means of inquiry or criteria for discussion and judgment.
Questioning Media Identity in the Digital Age
Authors: Duffy Brooke Erin
Published: May 2017

This book explores the notions of remaking and remodeling the magazine by focusing on how women's magazines are evolving from objects into brands in the digital age, along with its implications for both producers and consumers of content. It considers how “traditional” media industries are transforming in a digital era of media, and more specifically, how producers are confronting vexing questions about the identity of the women's magazine. The book highlights three identity constructions: organizational identity, professional identity, and gender identity. It also discusses the implications for how, when, and where media producers work; how the cross-platform and interactive logics of production challenge the traditional categories of readers and audiences; and what is at stake for the content that gets distributed in various media forms. It shows that, in light of the boundary shifts associated with media convergence, magazine producers are ostensibly compelled to (re)define their industries, their roles, their audiences, and their products. The goal of this book is to initiate debates about the shape-shifting nature of creative labor.
Off the Page
Authors: Duffy Brooke Erin
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the explicit conventions and implicit assumptions of magazine producers about medium-specific content. It first considers the complexities of media convergence before discussing the tension between medium-specific cultures and the rhetoric of cross-platform branding in women's magazines, leading to theoretical and conceptual questions about medium identity. It then describes how producers' working patterns and assumptions vary across different media (web, magazine, and iPad) in three significant ways: the importance of the editorial voice, quality standards for editorial content, and expectations about the extent of advertiser influence on content. It also highlights the distinctions between print and online; tablet devices, for example, are being positioned as a tool that can elide medium-specific challenges while also serving as a test bed for advertising/editorial relations within digital environments. The chapter suggests that magazine content does not appear to easily flow off the printed page, but goes through many crosscurrents.
Introduction
Authors: Brown Ruth Nicole
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter presents an overview of what Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) is and is not about, its major themes, and the contributions it makes to envisioning Black girlhood critically among and with Black girls. SOLHOT is a particular methodology of creating spaces to practice and enact a visionary Black girlhood. Whether the vision is simply stated as the celebration of Black girlhood in all of its complexity, or even revised and elongated, SOLHOT as utopia, SOLHOT as dismal failure, and SOLHOT as mostly everything in between is about foregrounding complexity in collective and creative work with Black girls and women.
Tiara
Authors: Brown Ruth Nicole
Published: May 2017

This chapter features a scene from a play entitled Endangered Black Girls (EBG), based on the lived experiences of Black girls the author has worked with in an after-school program (not SOLHOT) and has learned about through news stories. Theorizing the process of writing and performing EBG on through to subsequent productions made possible only because of the show's original cast, this chapter illustrates how creative means of expression make it possible to fully capture the complexities of Black girlhood and that attending to the complexities of Black girlhood is necessary to affirm Black girls' daily lives. Importantly, performances of EBG generated new ideas for ways Black women and girls could be present with each other, and the play was a primary catalyst for suggesting and co-organizing Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) as transformative collective and creative work.
More than Sass or Silence
Authors: Brown Ruth Nicole
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents a soundtrack of Black girls' expressive culture as ethnographically documented in SOLHOT in the form of original music. To think through the more dominant categorizations of how Black girls are heard, as both sassy and silent, this chapter samples Andrea Smith's (2006) “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing” to offer a new frame called “The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood.” Music made from conversations in SOLHOT is used to emphasize how three logics of the creative potential framework, including volume/oppression, swagg/surveillance, and booty/capitalism, amplifies Black girls' critical thought to document the often overlooked creative process of Black girl music making, demonstrate how hip-hop feminist sensibilities inform girls' studies, and, most importantly, move those who do Black girl organizing toward a wider repertoire of actions and conversations that affirm differences among Black girls and differently sounding Black girl knowledge.